Former Speaker Adrian Rurawhe holds aloft a copy of Parliament's rules (The Standing Orders), which codify Parliament's powers in carrying out its role, including scrutinising government. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
A new bill now being considered by a special select committee would remove governments' power to determine funding for Parliament, the body that scrutinises the government's performance.
The Parliament Bill would make numerous other changes, but the key constitutional recommendation is to take decisions about parliamentary funding away from governments and instead give the responsibility to a cross-party group of MPs. This would remove the temptation for a government to underfund scrutiny of its performance, limit opposition resources, or reduce democratic participation.
Parliament and the groups that make it run
We often use the word Parliament to describe a building or an institution, but more accurately the Parliament is the group of MPs we elect to represent us, to provide an executive (government), to scrutinise that government, and debate and approve laws and spending. The building is Parliament House and the institution is the House of Representatives (but 'Parliament' is easier).
The MPs don't make the place function. Parliament has two small organisations that do that - the Parliamentary Service and the Office of the Clerk.
The Parliamentary Service provides services to MPs, such as travel, electorate, staffing and security, as well as maintaining the physical precinct.
The Office of the Clerk runs the House of Representatives itself; they are Parliament's secretariat and administer the House and its many committees. They also look after Parliament's interactions with other parliaments and the public (including Parliament TV, and the funding for the team who made this content).
The funding problem
When Robert Muldoon was prime minister (1975-1984) there was no Parliamentary Service. The prime minister's office more or less controlled parliament and its environment. With this power, Muldoon famously made it difficult for the opposition to obtain even basic stationery and furniture.
The Parliamentary Service was created in part to prevent such inappropriate political influence. The Parliamentary Service is now responsible to the Speaker (who is also Parliament's landlord).
The Office of the Clerk is even more independent and is scrupulously apolitical, which is crucial to being able to offer even-handed advice on the rules and be trusted to fairly administer the legislature.
Former Speaker Adrian Rurawhe agrees that this role can bring it into contention with governments.
"Because they are fully independent, they don't answer to the government or to the speaker, for that matter. They report directly to Parliament. It's not really appropriate, I believe (and many people have said this over a number of years), that they're reliant on the minister of finance to provide or agree to the amount of budget that they get in any particular year."
Currently a government could financially squeeze the Office of the Clerk if they are unhappy with it.
The public might imagine that MPs fund their own services in a luxurious fashion. The opposite is more often the case, with MPs - fearful of being seen to feather their nests - underfunding essential underpinnings of our democracy.
This is not theoretical - both Treasury and successive governments have repeatedly rejected budget proposals from the Office of the Clerk, forcing it to cut services. The most recent draft budget suggested swingeing cuts to both the Office of the Clerk and to the Parliamentary Service before the Speaker managed to blunt the axe.
Green Party musterer Ricardo Menéndez March in a select committee grilling a minister of the previous Labour/Green government. Photo: Phil Smith
Green Party musterer Ricardo Menéndez March says that underfunding Parliament's services is underfunding democracy itself.
"The functions of Parliament and the Office of the Clerk are the conduit between MPs and our communities. The Clerk enables members of the public to participate and give submissions on bills, for example. And so when we under-resource those entities, we also under-resource the mechanisms in which people can participate in a democratic system, effectively giving the government more of a free pass when it comes to how much scrutiny legislation gets."
The proposed solution
Parliament has three other independent groups that work directly for the House and not for governments. They each have the capacity to cause governments headaches and so are funded independently. They are the three officers of Parliament: the parliamentary commissioner for the environment, the ombudsman, and the controller and auditor general.
Their funding is agreed by a cross-party parliamentary committee called the Officers of Parliament Committee, agreed by the House and added to the annual budget without jumping through all the fiscal hoops of Treasury and Cabinet. Their funding is not luxurious, but is ample to perform their tasks freely without fear or favour.
The Parliament Bill uses this approach as a model.
"We have a model of a way to do things, and that's the officers of Parliament," Rurawhe says.
"So we have a committee that deals with the officers of Parliament, and (because they are all fully independent as well), this is just really taking these [other] entities and putting them into the same model."
This might all sound very esoteric, but it is crucial to the effective functioning of our democratic system of responsible government, as Rurawhe points out.
"The scrutiny of the executive by Parliament is one of its main functions, and if it doesn't have the resources to do it, then it can't do it."
RNZ's The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament's Office of the Clerk.
