Photo: VNP/Louis Collins
The government's plan for Parliament's final full week of the year moves 12 different proposed laws through 32 stages of parliamentary approval.
Included in the plan is fixing an error made by tired government MPs during the previous long week of urgency, when they voted for an opposition amendment and, even when prompted, failed to notice the error. This week's urgency revealed another, bigger error caused presumably by too much haste and not enough care.
Judging by submissions and responses in Parliament's rules committee, governments' use of urgency may be losing favour. Vanushi Walters noted in debate on House on Thursday that the House has spent 30.4 percent of this Parliament sitting under urgency, compared to 15.7 percent of the previous Parliament. The previous Parliament used a fair bit of urgency. This Parliament has almost doubled that. Fast Track Legislation is not just the name of a bill.
Speed can be useful, and can be necessary, but it increases the likelihood of errors. On Thursday the House saw significant evidence of this when they debated the wide-ranging Crimes Amendment Bill, from the Minister of Justice, Paul Goldsmith.
His opening speech in the debate can't have been fun. First he alerted MPs to his intention to give extra instructions to the Select Committee who would look at the bill (more on that below). Then he began listing the things included in the bill but ran out of steam when he reached items he apparently expected, but that were not there.
"This bill is a wide-ranging one. It amends the Crimes Act to ensure criminals face longer penalties for coward punches, attacking first responders, retail crime, human trafficking, and - uhm - further retail crime."
His problem-some of the broad range of measures promoted as highlights of the bill had been omitted. They had also been listed in his answers during Question Time. Presumably, at some point someone asked where those much-praised law-changes could be found - and the government discovered they were missing.
This was not a misplaced comma or an omitted clause. It was an entire chunk of the legislation, a level of failure that is both extraordinary and embarrassing for the government.
The minister was forced to ask the Select Committee to consider adding the missing items to a bill that was only made public on Tuesday.
A 'hotchpotch' of a bill hides an error
Other than unseemly haste, another reason for the screw-up may be the bill's jumble of disconnected provisions. All were crime-related, but for a muddle of different categories of crime.
This government has been very busy on crime and punishment. Bills considered so far this Parliament included 22 related to crime, or punishment for crime. A couple of those were Members bills - one of these was rolled into this new Crimes Amendment Bill. Most of those crime-related bills have been more focused. Not this one.
Labour's Ginny Andersen began her response to the bill saying "in all my years working on justice policy as a public servant, as an adviser, [never] have I ever seen such a hotchpotch of different measures all jammed into one bill." She imagined Paul Goldsmith being told by the Prime Minister that he was behind on his "deliverables" and as a response "sweeping his desk of all the work he was meant to do over the course of the year and putting it into one bill."
The bill changes the rules around citizen's arrest, and around property defences (both static and mobile property). It changes offences and penalties around human trafficking, migrant smuggling, and slavery. It creates new offences for assaults on first responders or corrections officers. There are also new offences for punching someone in the head or neck if they don't see it coming. There is even an offence that the bill describes as theft undertaken in an "offensive, threatening, insulting, or disorderly manner."
Once the missing measures are added in, it will be possible to give summary fines to shoplifters. Although, as Lawrence Xu-Nan pointed out, those missing provisions don't relate to the Crimes Act that this bill amends, but instead to the Summary Offences Act.
The jumble of provisions meant there was also a jumble of debate. Opposition MPs could all find things they loved about the bill, and things they were appalled at. The most popular changes related to human trafficking and slavery offences. The least popular were for citizen's arrest, and the subsequent holding of arrestees.
According to Labour's spokesperson on the subject, Ginny Andersen, it is not only the opposition who find these measures problematic.
"Officials, both from the Ministry of Justice and from Police, have warned the government that this is a dangerous piece of legislation. They say, in advice, that it would escalate low-level theft into more violent situations and potentially endanger the lives of those people who were the business owners. It even suggests, in some of the police advice that we received, that there will be a situation-if a business owner had detained and restrained an alleged offender, and if they were there for a period of time, that business owner might even be able to be charged with kidnapping if they were held in certain ways."
On the government side most MPs gave very short speeches indeed, mostly about being hard on crime or focusing on victims. Rima Nakhle, for example, defended the use of urgency on a bill, parts of which won't come into effect until six months after it passes into law.
"What saddens me to my core", said Nakhle, "is that we're having philosophical conversations across the House about the use of urgency. There is urgency for victims, and that's the reason why this bill is what it is, and that's the reason why we're talking about it in urgency: because, to us, the rights of victims and protecting them is absolutely urgent. I commend this bill to the House."
That was her entire speech, the shortest of a short bunch. The entire first reading debate on the bill took well under an hour.
Once the first reading debate was complete, the responsible minister, Goldsmith returned to seek permission for the Select Committee to consider his amendments to the bill. Amendments to correct the missing provisions, which required a further debate. Oddly, given that the purpose of a first reading is to consider whether the content of a bill is worth considering, MPs were not allowed to debate the content that would be added, only whether the committee should consider adding it.
Opposition MPs were not kind about the missing content.
"Look, this is a disgrace." said Kieran McAnulty. "They should not have had to rush things through urgency. If they weren't so focused on getting things through so quickly, I reckon they wouldn't have made this mistake."
*RNZ's The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament's Office of the Clerk. Enjoy our articles or podcast at RNZ.
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