As the nation’s ultimate debaters, parliamentarians unsurprisingly, are focused on contest, one-upmanship, and often just getting a word in. Given the often quarrelsome environment, parliament operates very carefully, and its rules have to be especially even-handed.
You can see how crucial they are to maintaining order every day during Question Time, as they are pushed to their limits. To prevent more unnecessary squabbling than there already is, Question Time relies on rosters to organise who gets to speak when - so do debates. A bit like a student flat’s cleaning roster, though this one tends to actually work most of the time.
Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
During Question Time on Wednesday, instead of being the guiding schedule for interrogation, the roster suddenly became the subject of it.
During a series of questions to the Prime Minister from Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi, an MP popped up with a supplementary question. It came from the very back corner of the chamber - from a corner sometimes referred to as ‘the naughty seat.’ Specifically, it came from the very recently independent MP Darlene Tana.
Following Tana’s seemingly routine exchange, Winston Peters popped up, as he tends to do, with a point of order. Peters queried Tana’s question entitlement. “If somebody's been away from this House for 110 days, how did they get back into the cycle of being entitled to a question that passed, in the way that Darleen Tana just did?”, to which the Speaker quipped back, “Well, that is the way in which Parliament operates. There's nothing unusual here. There is a process and there is a roster.”
Brownlee suggested Peters ask his party whip to explain it to him. It seemed Peters wasn’t alone in his confusion. Leader of the House and National MP Chris Bishop got up to give his two cents. “It is a bit odd that very soon after [Darleen Tana’s] expulsion [from the Greens] she's entitled to two supplementary questions almost immediately. I think it does strike many of us as slightly strange.”
Gerry Brownlee was not gentle.
“I'll tell you what strikes me as strange: it strikes me as particularly peculiar and very odd that the Leader of the House, who is a major player in the Business Committee, does not remember that the Business Committee approved the roster that gives [Darleen Tana] these questions.
Parliament’s traffic controllers
The Business Committee is a cross- party assembly of senior MPs. The Speaker chairs it and the Leader and Shadow Leader of the House, and the senior whips (or musterer, and matarau in the case of the Greens and Te Pāti Māori) all attend.
National Party MP Gerry Brownlee in Select Committee Photo: Phil Smith
It debates and deliberates a range of aspects of parliamentary business, including Parliament’s speaking rosters. Not who speaks for each party, (that is done by each party’s whips), but which party gets how many slots and in what order. These rosters, like so many of parliament's administrative procedures, are arranged meticulously, in order to ensure absolute proportional fairness.
So last week, when Darleen Tana was declared independent for Parliamentary purposes, the Business committee accordingly released a new determination, with new rosters.
If you don’t have anything to do this weekend, or you need a proportional rostering template for your 123 person flat, you can read them at the bottom of this page of determinations.
The rosters are as long as they need to be to achieve perfect fairness, so the latest roster for primary oral questions runs for 93 days - which is more days than there are in the sitting year. Of the 1,116 questions in that roster, Darlene Tana would be allocated 12, and as the Speaker noted, two supplementary questions per week - it’s all proportional.
In speaking to Winston Peters’ point of order, Chris Bishop had noted that those 12 questions and two supplementaries are questions the Greens no longer get; which is probably one of the reasons the Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Act (a.k.a the waka- jumping Bill) uses the phrase “distort the proportionality” of Parliament.
