Parliament’s Clerk has been working on making it possible for the House to continue meeting without MPs missing despite them being stuck at home by Omicron. The plan involves some MPs participating in debates or Question Time remotely.
I can almost hear you say ‘whoopie-doo, the rest of us have been doing that for ages’.
Actually, so have MPs. Select Committees have been meeting online since the initial outbreak. Even the Cabinet is now meeting virtually to prevent them all being struck down simultaneously.
The Foreign Affairs select committee getting a briefing on Kabul on Monday, and outnumbering those in the Debating Chamber Photo: VNP / Parliament
Choosing agreement
Video conferencing the Debating Chamber is much harder. There are so many more rules, so much more tradition, getting a hybrid event on live TV, and the hardest thing - getting agreement between the political parties.
The Government doesn’t actually need their approval to make it happen, but Chris Hipkins says they want it regardless.
“When you’re doing like this which does have quite a significant bearing on the way Parliament operates you want to get as close to consensus as you can, so we’ve been working with the other parties to see what we can do, how much additional assurance other parties might need so that they feel confidant in supporting the change.”
Usefully, we’ve been able to learn from other parliaments. New Zealand’s outlandishly successful efforts at delaying Covid’s spread have allowed us to stay in the flesh while other parliaments were forced to experiment with virtual.
“We have been fortunate that for most of the last two years, our Parliament has been able to sit relatively normally, albeit with some additional public health measures like social distancing and so on. But we now are entering a phase where, with more cases in the community, we can't necessarily take that for granted.”
On Thursday the House unanimously agreed to a sessional order that makes a hybrid virtual debating chamber possible here as well.
A sessional order is an agreement for a temporary rule change - until the next election. Sometimes this is because the change is only needed short term, but sometimes sessional orders are a trial-run for rules that get adopted permanently. Sometimes once something is practically demonstrated everyone comes to see its usefulness.
Modelling responsible workplace practices
In the debate on the sessional order Chris Hipkins indicated that he thought Parliament had some way to go on taking sickness seriously and allowing proper care.
“I arrived in the New Zealand Parliament at a time when attendance at the House was paramount above all else. I can recall instances where party whips would require people who were quite unwell to come into the parliamentary complex, sometimes to sleep on the couch in their office, in order to make up the numbers. I hope that we are reaching an era where we can be a little bit more sensible about some of those things. Sometimes the best thing for people to do when they are unwell—most of the time, in fact—is for them to stay home and get better rather than exposing others to whatever ailment it is that they have.”
Jan Logie in the House (file photo) Photo: ©VNP / Phil Smith
The Green Party's musterer Jan Logie spoke on the new rules. It was plain she had taken little convincing of the proposal in the Business Committee where this agreement has been hammered out over many months.
“I feel as if I've been howling into the hot wind of the Business Committee for far too many months on this topic to want to take up more time than is necessary speaking on this motion. So just let me say, finally—finally—we are catching up and putting the measures in place for us to be able to model responsible workplace practices for the rest of the country.”
So, job done then and virtual chamber here we go. Actually, no it’s not quite as easy as that. Rather than just immediately allowing a hybrid debating chamber this agreement only allows for one to be allowed - when and if required.
Retaining a veto
It also restricts who can decide it should happen, with that decision being narrowed down to coming only from the cross-party Business Committee. It operates on the principle of ‘near unanimity’ and so either of the larger parties in Parliament have an effective veto. The Clerk of the House outlines what that means in practice.
“Near unanimity… means that if either of the larger parties wouldn’t agree to something you couldn’t possibly get there. The other possibility though is if a lot of smaller parties don’t agree it’s hard to imagine the Speaker seeing that you’ve reached near-unanimity either. And one of the things the Speaker’s got to think about in considering whether you’ve got near unanimity is whether something would be oppressive to smaller parties.”
The Business Committee is surprisingly effective but it has taken them months to grind out this particular deal.
It is apparent that National would only agree to proposals where they had a veto on implementation and there was not an alternative path whereby a decision from the Speaker could by-pass that. It was the National Party that blocked Parliament from going partially online in 2021.
If that veto became oppressive the Government could drop the consensus approach and pass an alternative sessional order through the House with a simple majority.
National Party Deputy Shadow Leader of the House Michael Woodhouse also spoke on the sessional order.
“Those alert members will have noticed that the order we are considering today is different from the one that was on the Order Paper for the last few weeks in the sense that it did have a number of ways in which it could be invoked—we have reduced that to one. It used to be a motion in the House, the Speaker in accordance with parts of the motion, and the Business Committee. We have reduced that down to the Business Committee.”
National MP Michael Woodhouse appealing to the Speaker during Question Time Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
Preferring the hurly-burly
Michael Woodhouse is keen that the physical House remains the dominant player.
“My strong view is that this place is an in-present place, a tactile place, somewhere where we do have to debate and duke it out. So what we are passing here as a sessional order is the opportunity for remote participation, not the opportunity for a virtual Parliament, and that's where I differed a little bit in Chris Hipkins' predictions of the future.”
It will certainly be interesting to see the threshold at which the major parties agree it is necessary to invoke this hybrid - online debating chamber. Obviously there is still little enthusiasm in some quarters.
“Having raised [the idea], my own colleagues became rather — not so enthusiastic about it, I could say. And I think there was a context to that also. Remember that we were in level 4 at the time and there was, again, a move to suspend, which we didn't support, and I actually think that, even when we were running this place between 2 and 6 p.m. for about four or five weeks with maximum of about 15 members, it was still better than what was being considered in the alternative as a virtual Parliament which would have had no more than three people here to satisfy the Standing Orders—the Speaker, a Minister, and perhaps one member of the Opposition. I really hope we don't get to that point.”
Of course, from an opposition point of view the shorter, cut-down version of Parliament from the middle of last year was possibly the ideal Parliament; there was still Question Time to grill the Government but much less time for the Government to pass legislation.
The Greens’ Jan Logie had a very different idea of what made Parliament vibrant.
“I do sense I have a different view from [Michael Woodhouse] around …what it takes to be a vibrant Parliament. My prediction is that if we are using these measures, we may see a more on-point and a possibly more civilised question time. While I am not, by any measure, advocating at all for Parliament to go online permanently — kanohi ki te kanohi [face to face] is important — however, I don't think we should overplay the vibrancy of this place, because it's often just bad behaviour and I suspect we may learn some lessons from having some people Zooming into this process that may, I hope, inspire us all to behave better when we all come back together.”
The Clerk of the House of Representatives, David Wilson, manning The Table in the House. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
Getting the practicalities lined up
So, now the MPs have agreed they can (potentially) remote into the debating chamber. But as I noted earlier, with Parliament it’s not as easy as that.
The man whose team will actually make this work is the Clerk of the House David Wilson, and there was much to consider beyond the MP’s arguments over should we do it. Like how it would it would change the parliamentary rules, the technical trickiness of making a hybrid meeting live on TV and radio, and even more importantly - keeping it ‘real’.
“Ensuring that a parliament sitting with members participating remotely is still a legitimate sitting of Parliament.”
So that any laws a hybrid House passes are still acknowledged as laws.
“Although the Courts have generally taken the view that a lack of form in some of those things around passing laws hasn’t negated them, I think we want to put that beyond doubt and we don’t really want the Courts to be involved in decision making about Parliament where that’s possible.”
The hardest thing will possibly be getting the MPs used to being patient. The backbenchers have been doing virtual Select Committees for a couple of years and are well practiced but the party leaders and ministers haven’t been so involved in that.
And action in the House is generally faster, more cut-and-thrust than committees anyway.
David Wilson’s team are the engine behind the committees and are pretty experienced but he acknowledges the difference.
“They tend to be more informal anyway and probably a bit more friendly and collegial than the House can sometimes be.”
He says the key thing will be for the presiding officer (Speaker etc) to slow things down and be patient.
“You kinda want to make sure that the members who are physically present, who already have a bit of an advantage by being visible, don’t take that too far.”
Chatting through how it will work with David Wilson and with some of his staff, it’s pretty obvious they’ve got all the manifold technical and practical possibilities in hand; but as with any system the fail point is not the system, it is the user – i.e. the MPs.
The MPs in the House seemed aware of the embarrassment waiting to happen. Chris Hipkins said:
“No doubt there will be some teething troubles along the way. There might be the odd frozen Zoom call as we've all been used to. I look forward to the first member trying to participate in proceedings with their mute button on—it's only a matter of time before that happens.”
Any odds on who will be the first unlucky MP to filmed gesticulating silently at a muted screen?
