Robertson Grant: Parliamentary Privilege Bill — In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Parliamentary Privilege Bill — In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 30 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19743. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central):I want to make just a brief contribution to follow up on the excellent words we have heard today in the Committee stage of the Parliamentary Privilege Bill. Before I get into that though I do have to sadly correct my colleague the Hon David Parker. There is a first time for everything and it is today. It is Jandyce v—Hon David Parker: Jarndyce—GRANT ROBERTSON: Jarndyce. Obviously the Attorney-General knew that but being the compassionate man he is he chose not to correct David Parker when he was on his feet. But do let the record show that we have clarified our knowledge of Dickens today and that David Parker told me to say that.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): But how do you spell it?GRANT ROBERTSON: Ha ha! I will leave that to the Hansard officers to work out.I just want to make two or three remarks in the context of this bill bearing in mind that we had a good debate on this in the second reading. The first of those is a general comment about the bill as it returns to the House for its Committee stage. It looks very different and anyone reading through it would see a huge amount of struck-through material and believe that the Privileges Committee members in analysing the bill that came before us were somehow rather appalled or disgusted at what we had and that the bill had required a total and complete rewrite. That is not true. We were in fact incredibly well served by our advisers and officials whom I mentioned by name in my second reading speech.But what we decided as a committee was that it was important that the language that we used in this bill was able to be understood not only by ourselves as parliamentarians for whom the privileges are an important aspect of our work but also by the general public in looking to see what is meant by parliamentary privilege and how it is to be implemented. That required a change in the structure of the bill and we had an excellent submission from the Clerk of the House in that regard and also in some of the terminology. So for anyone who is looking at the large amount of struck-through material in the bill that was returned to the Committee of the whole House they can rest assured that it was about making this a more readable and more coherent bill and one that lays out the privileges of parliamentarians in a way that we hope the general public will be able to understand and appreciate. As I said in my second reading speech on behalf of the non-lawyers on the Privileges Committee—Mr Hipkins Minister Tolley and me—we are very pleased to be able to put that before the Committee in a manner that we think many people will be able to understand; I mean no disrespect to the lawyers who were there.Two other points that I really want to make are particularly around the question of Gow v Leigh and what is the business of Parliament. It is very important that when we consider the business of Parliament what is seen by most members of the public as the business of Parliament is what is happening in here right now on the floor of the House. But the reality of Parliament and indeed of most workplaces is that what you see on the public face of it is very little of what actually goes on within a business. A business that sells widgets has a huge amount of production line design and innovation that goes into it. That is part of that business just as in Parliament part of parliamentary business is what happens immediately before we come to this House and in the preparation for what we do here.We discussed the concept of reasonable preparation—the idea that it is more than just the necessary functioning of this House that constitutes parliamentary business; it is also the idea of reasonable preparation for being here in business that takes place away from the floor. As members of the Committee know I have worked in this building behind the scenes as a staff member in the preparation of question time. I can assure members of the Committee that that is very much parliamentary business. A lot of work goes in. When the Opposition puts down the question: “Does the Prime Minister or Minister stand by all his statements?”—or in my case when I was working in that role it was “by her statements”—there was a lot of work that went on to decide what was in that material. In fact it would be a great relief to those of us who prepared answers for the former Prime Minister in the Labour Government when we picked the right question. If we did not we certainly heard about it. So it is an important part of parliamentary business to recognise the preparatory material. We believe that the court decision in the Attorney-General and Gow v Leigh case was wrong and this goes some way to clarifying what parliamentary business consists of.My colleague David Parker has already talked about Buchanan v Jennings. It is a farcical situation to have a member of Parliament unable to say that they stand by the words that they uttered when they were in the Chamber. We are not giving licence through this bill to MPs to go out and expand upon what they have said. We are merely allowing both members of Parliament—and the media in reporting what members of Parliament have said—to acknowledge that it was said and that a member of Parliament stands by what they have said. In the clauses of the bill that deal with effective repetition it will be clear to everybody who reads them that if you choose to expand upon what you have said in the Chamber as a member of Parliament or if you say it again in detail you will fall foul of parliamentary privilege and indeed of the laws of the land. But that is covered off here.It is not just a protection for MPs; it is a protection for the news media as well and that is important. It has been said that members of Parliament obviously experience—and this is in the commentary—the benefit of parliamentary privilege. That is not the purpose of parliamentary privilege. The purpose of parliamentary privilege is to allow our democracy to operate without fear and without favour towards anyone and my colleague David Parker has talked at some length about that.I just wanted to make those two particular points about this report. I believe that it is a very good piece of work.I believe that the Privileges Committee in this Parliament has dealt with some interesting issues. I want to thank the chair of the committee the Attorney-General Mr Chris Finlayson for his excellent work on this. We as a committee are very aware of the fact that when we are on the Privileges Committee we sit at that nexus—the comity that Kennedy Graham talked about—of being aware of what the courts are doing and aware of what the executive is doing. We have dealt with two serious matters involving the powers of both the courts and the executive in recent times. That shows to me that the Privileges Committee is playing a very significant and important role. That necessary tension between the different branches of our constitutional democracy is important. There is an issue currently at play in Taylor v Attorney-General about the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and I suspect that at some point we may return to debating those matters here and certainly in an upcoming item of business I will mention those two matters.