The reading room at Parliament's library. Photo: VNP / Daniela Maoate-Cox
When MPs stand up in the House and rattle off a string of facts and figures, it can sound like they've spent hours digging through data themselves - and sometimes, they really have. More often though, their staff have helped prepare them for the debate, often with support from the Parliamentary Library.
To shed some light on the often unseen source of many of those facts and figures that are shared in Parliament, earlier this year, The House chatted with some of the people who work for the library, and spoiler, they're not all librarians.
Considered the most elegant (and most haunted) of the three structures on the Parliamentary precinct, the Parliamentary Library is a 160-year-old institution that provides crucial research and collection services that support MPs, their staff, government departments, and the public (by appointment), on average receiving over 7000 requests per year.
The library is split into two teams: research and collections.
Brent McIntryre is the manager of the latter. As you can likely infer from the name his team is responsible for the purchase and curation of items for the library, including the management of subscriptions pertaining to a wide array of paywalled publications, academic articles, and monographs.
"We've got about 110,000 items in our physical collection," McIntyre said.
"That [collection] goes back to when we were a gentleman's library in the 1850s and 60s. At that time we had things like poetry and fiction, which we don't have anymore - we rely on the public libraries to provide a lot of that material. But now we've got a really rich collection of politics, legal materials, but also all the other things that members are interested in, [such as] environment. education, health, and a lot of government literature going back to the 70s, 60s as well."
The other half of the library is its research team, who provide research for MPs, their staff, the two Parliamentary agencies (Parliamentary Service, and the Office of the Clerk), the Parliamentary Counsel Office, and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.
Nicole Cottrell, who manages the research team, said the scope for that research is pretty wide-ranging.
"Our mantra is 'ask us anything', and members and their staff do. We might provide background research for a member's bill that they're working on. We might provide facts and figures for notes for a speech in the House or a speech they're giving in a local community. We provide background information for select committee inquiries."
Each of the parties at Parliament of course have their own research units that assist their MPs in making it sound like they know what they're talking about.
Those units often rely on the Parliamentary library's research service to do this. As one would expect, the uptake of the research service is particularly high around Budget time, and during the passing of controversial or esoteric bits of legislation.
Cottrell mentioned that requests for information or research can come with a variety of deadlines, ranging from a couple of weeks to 10 minutes before a debate.
As of 2019, each of Parliament's subject select committees each have a researcher attached to them.
"The idea is they're a conduit between the select committee and our research team to bring back any requests that come through," Cottrell said.
"In comparison to government departments, we offer an impartial research service, that's one of our big selling points. We also work to our customers' deadlines, so we can turn around things much faster than some of the bigger departments can. I think in the 2023-24 financial year, we answered about 55 requests from select committees."
So what kind of people do this research?
Perhaps surprisingly, the team of 30 has few people with traditional librarian backgrounds.
Cottrell said as a general rule of thumb, the team recruits generalists, but there are still subject areas like history, economics, science, and so on that each researcher may especially have expertise in.
Take Caitlin Church for example.
Church is a data advisor within the research team, meaning she works on a number of requests that ask for data analysis, data visualisation, and other data components across all sorts of subject areas.
"Data can be anything," she said.
"Yes, we predominantly think of numbers, but how we present that information to our clients is really what is important."
MPs often rely on Church and others in her team to get up to speed on pieces of legislation about to go through the House, and prepare themselves for the first reading debate.
"The debate pack is a product that the library produces. It collates all available information on a bill," Church said.
"We create these debate packs when a bill is introduced and when it's going in for its second reading. We put together all the background information that's available, so that is regulatory impact statements, any discussion documents, department statements.
"We also put together the commentary on the bill, whether that's legal commentary, stakeholder commentary, ministerial statements, political party statements, whatever's available on the bill at the time, we will put that into a pack that's given to the MPs and their staff."
Upon receiving a request, the library's researchers follow a set of guidelines which includes a list of recommended sources for information, such as official documents, academic journals and other resources.
"That all gets collated by a researcher and then gets reviewed by someone else in the team before it gets sent out to the MP and all of their stuff," Church said.
To listen to The House's interview with three members of Parliament's Library team, click the link near the top of the page.
RNZ's The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament's Office of the Clerk.
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