Parker David: Parliamentary Privilege Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Parliamentary Privilege Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 22 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19349. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Deputy Leader—Labour):Again can I endorse the Attorney-General’s comments in respect of the Parliamentary Privilege Bill which is probably one of the more important bills that we will pass in this Parliament. It will not be seen by a lot of people to be that but in my opinion it is. Democracy is a very fragile thing. Democracy involves this complex web of societal settings including respect for the rule of law protection of property rights prosperity a fair division of income a fair division of wealth an educated population a healthy population freedom from corruption transparency—all of these ingredients that you have to get right in order to have long-term democracies.There are very few long-term democracies that are unbroken in the world. New Zealand is one of the longest unbroken democracies in the world and indeed most of the long unbroken democracies in the world have their roots in the Westminster model of governance and the separation of powers. If you look around the world there are very very few countries that have our record of 150 years of unbroken democracy. That is the record in New Zealand—over 150 years of unbroken democracy. None of the countries in South America none in Africa and none in Asia have it. There are virtually none in Europe with a couple of exceptions there in respect of you might say Switzerland and you would certainly say the United Kingdom. Then the other exceptions include the likes of Canada Australia New Zealand and the United States. Even the United States democracy in an unbroken sense is not as long as ours because it of course had its Civil War.The length of democracy that we have in some of these countries that are based on the Westminster model has proven to stand those countries in good stead and at the heart of the balance of these different relationships that you need to protect in order to achieve a long and fair democracy lies as one of its principles the balance of power between Parliament and the courts. The elucidation of that relationship—if you want to look at that in a historical context for New Zealand—goes back to the Bill of Rights 1688. At that time there was conflict between the King and Parliament. The King had effectively usurped some of the powers of Parliament. He had overridden some laws without the approval of Parliament and had written some new laws without the approval of Parliament. There was a scrap going on in the UK between these different arms of the country these different powers within the country. I do not pretend to be an expert on these historical issues so I will probably get some of the detail wrong but essentially there was this contest between the powers of Parliament and the powers of the King then there was also the questions of where the power of the court lies in this and what the limit is to the court’s powers. Is it an arm of the King is it an arm of the Parliament or is it a separate arm that should stand alone and where does this intersection of powers exist between Parliament and the court?It was sorted out essentially through the Bill of Rights 1688. Freedom of speech was set out in article 9. It said: “the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.” That is a pretty general statement. Sometimes these statements are actually best left a little bit general because at times there are grey lines that are very very hard to completely codify in a way that answers all possibilities into the future because they cannot all be thought of and circumstances change and if you go down that particular codification route you can actually get yourself into a pickle. In reality if you have an irresponsible Parliament that is going too far then I want the courts to push back against the way that Parliament is acting against the interests of the people. If you get courts that are going too far and they are writing too much law or going too far by effectively entering into the political realm then I want Parliament to push back against the courts.I quite like the generality of the provisions that sit in the Bill of Rights 1688 because it enables that mature sort of pushing backwards and forwards where these two incredibly important spheres of influence within society occasionally push up against each other. When that circumstance arises then we rely upon our traditions to make sure that we do that in a respectful way. If we think the courts have gone too far we respectfully push back a little bit and if they think Parliament has gone a bit far—as they have recently expressed in respect of issues relating to taking voting rights away from prisoners that this Parliament did against the opposition of the Labour Party I have to say but it did none the less—they gently push back the other way. They do it respectfully and this is the principle of comity that the Attorney-General was referring to.That for me is the generality of what we are dealing with. We have a fantastic system in New Zealand. We do not need to codify all of these things. We would be worse off if we did codify everything. Occasionally we still need to push back against the other and then through that respectful process we use to get there we actually get to a decent outcome that we can all live with. We get this balance of interests right which means our democracies endure and we have a peaceful prosperous and happy country. That is essentially what democracy should be trying to achieve. When you go from that to the specifics of this bill the specifics are dealing with what we in Parliament think has been a push a little bit too far by the courts into undermining what we think is the true intent of that freedom of expression set out in article 9 which guarantees “That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.”We think that two recent decisions of the New Zealand courts—namely the decision in Attorney General and Gow v Leigh and the decision in Buchanan v Jennings—in their own ways go a little bit too far. That is what this legislation tries to fix. It does so by choosing at the same time to set that out in statute and codify it in respect of what is absolutely privileged in terms of parliamentary proceedings. Parliaments in the Westminster tradition have been pretty slow to do that because we like the generality of rules but the Australians led the way and they seem to have got to a pretty sensible place. So the way in which we are trying to get back to what we think is the underlying intent in article 9 of the Bill of Rights is by codifying what we think is a parliamentary proceeding that ought to be subject to absolute privilege not for the benefit of members of Parliament but for the benefit of democracy. The legislation that the Attorney-General has brought forward does that.I also again repeat the thanks that I gave in an earlier contribution on a report of the Privileges Committee in respect of in particular the contributions of Debra Angus and I would also add my thanks to the Legislation Advisory Committee in particular David Cochrane’s contribution in respect of that. I think the suggestions they made that we were actually creating a bit of a problem in respect of importing defamation concepts into our parliamentary privileges legislation were wise and that is why in the bill as reported back from the select committee we fixed that in the manner that the Attorney-General has explained.In respect of Buchanan v Jennings the problem with that decision was that it—not in a deliberate way—took advantage of the liberty that Parliament is given in New Zealand and some other jurisdictions for matters that are absolutely privileged in Parliament to be used in court. We do allow that at times but it actually took that a step further and said that allowing that to happen should be seen to be allowing those statements in Parliament to be used to prove defamation in respect of effective repetition outside of Parliament. From our perspective that was the logical error in that decision and so we are trying to reverse that and say that it is a nonsense and it would be seen as being a nonsense by people outside of Parliament to think that a member of Parliament would be defaming—it might be the rich and famous who feel that they have been wrongly treated by a statement in Parliament—by saying nothing more than “I do not resile from what I said in Parliament.”If you say outside of Parliament what you said in Parliament and you actually repeat it of course that is another defamation and you can be sued for it. But not to be able to say “I don’t resile from these comments.” is a nonsense and actually makes politicians look silly which in itself would undermine public confidence in democracy which is what we are trying to achieve here. So I and the Labour Party support the second reading of this bill.