The House sat under Alert Level 4 today. That’s new and so there were some pretty strict rules, including masked MPs and 5 metre distancing. With two parties entirely absent only 10 MPs were allowed in the chamber at a time; fewer than in some of last week’s select committees, held online to let MPs quiz ministers.
The House isn’t actually doing that much this week - mostly just general business. More of some of it, and less as well.
General business includes Question Time, but today the only parties proffering questions were National and ACT. So just six primary questions - half the usual.
Photo: Pool / ROBERT KITCHIN / STUFF
The House might have been done in under an hour except there was something else on the agenda as well. Ministerial statements.
The expression ‘may you live in interesting times’, is sometimes claimed as an old curse - that’s apocryphal but it would be a creative and possibly a cruel one.
At Parliament, the sign of ‘interesting times’ is maybe the number of ministerial statements given. There are usually just a few a year, recently there have been one or two a month.
Today there were two - back to back. That’s a whole new level of interesting.
The first ministerial statement was from Chris Hipkins on changes to Covid-19 alert levels (them moving to 4), with questions about that from National’s Chris Bishop and David Seymour for ACT.
Photo: Pool / ROBERT KITCHIN / STUFF
The second ministerial statement was from Minister of Defence, Peeni Henare on the Kabul airlift. Judith Collins responded for National, and again David Seymour for ACT. You may have picked up that he was the only ACT MP in the chamber.
Ministerial statements are on matters urgent and important enough that they happen even before the Clerk goes ‘through the mail’ - so to speak (which usually goes first after the prayer).
When the Clerk did finally get to outline the petitions, reports, and papers that the House had received since they last met one thing became quite clear; MPs may not have been meeting in the House for two weeks but judging by the number of reports coming back from Select Committees, they have not been on holiday.
And then finally they got to Question Time.
Photo: Pool / ROBERT KITCHIN / STUFF
There was one other piece of business that arose though.
Some MPs have claimed recently that the Epidemic Response Committee could and should have been meeting for the lock-down, so the House didn’t need to sit. This is wrong, it couldn’t.
Select Committees are created afresh by the House each new Parliament and can only be created by the House. It’s a rule - standing order 185-2 if you’re into that kind of thing.
So, in order for the Epidemic Response Committee to meet (instead of the House), the House would have first needed to meet and have voted to create the thing aimed at preventing it needing to do exactly that. And there’s the rub.
But today, as the House was sitting anyway, ACT leader David Seymour sought leave to do exactly that - vote it into existence on the same basis agreed as last time. It wasn’t immediately clear whether this would mean that Simon Bridges would have been the committee chair - but probably not.
David Seymour didn’t received the leave of the House necessary to have a vote on it. In response, Labour’s Leader of the House, Chris Hipkins sought leave to establish the ‘virtual parliament’ plan that had been presented to the Business Committee.
He was also unsuccessful.
And so, Parliament will meet again tomorrow - but this time - like some sort of regressive dinner - it will be under Alert Level Three.
