Cullen Michael: Standing Orders 
Cullen Michael: Standing Orders 
[Volume:650;Page:18841] 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Leader of the House) 
: 
 It is with great pleasure that I move  
That the amendments to the Standing Orders set out in the First Appendix of the report of the Standing Orders Committee entitled  
Review of Standing Orders 
 presented on 27 August 2008 be adopted and take effect from the day after the dissolution or expiration of the present Parliament. 
 This process today completes the standard triennial review of the Standing Orders. The amendments in this year’s recommendations are largely a collection of technical amendments tidying up clarifying and ensuring consistency in the existing Standing Orders. In that context they are a tribute to the work done in the 1996 review which was probably the most massive and far-reaching set of changes to the Standing Orders ever made in the history of this Parliament. Those changes were made to prepare the House for an MMP environment. They have stood the test of time remarkably well and nearly all changes since then have been relatively minor in nature. 
I will dwell briefly on two or three issues. The first issue is that my good colleague Mr Ross Robertson has of course been a strong proponent of a code of ethics for parliamentarians. A number of members of Parliament particularly those in the National Party but also I must say myself and some others are somewhat less enthusiastic about that proposal basically on the ground that the Standing Orders themselves should be providing the fundamental rules of behaviour in the House and behaviour by members of Parliament in that context. If the Standing Orders are defective then they should be changed and if members are looking for stricter interpretation and enforcement then that is a matter to take up with the presiding officers. It is not a matter for some other code of conduct. Indeed I have some reservations about having two separate sets of documents in that particular case. 
The second issue is that the Standing Orders Committee has recommended the introduction of a simultaneous interpretation service and we looked in some depth at how that would be translated into the broadcasting of the House recognising that there will actually be difficulties. Simultaneous interpretation within the House is relatively simple but broadcasting in terms of simultaneous interpretation is technically almost impossible particularly in relation to television broadcasting. One of the issues which is very simple and practical concerns where a simultaneous translation booth would be placed in the House because to cope with the number of MPs under MMP the House is already dreadfully stretched in terms of capacity and people have difficulty moving around within the House. 
The third and I think most important change suggested—a very good change and one the Prime Minister has urged upon me on a number of occasions—concerns the debate on the Prime Minister’s statement which is a rather sterile debate at least from the perspective of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has to read out a speech that has been prepared and circulated and it has to be read word for word. That makes for a very strange start to the year as opposed to the new procedure that is suggested which I think will be much better whereby the Prime Minister’s statement—a statement if one likes of the Government’s priorities—is circulated well in advance a motion is moved and the Prime Minister speaks to the motion followed by the Leader of the Opposition the other leaders and so on in turn around the House. I think that will give a much more characteristic flavour of the nature of debate. 
We looked at the same concept in relation to the Budget. Budgets are much more difficult. The very nature of the Budget is that the documentation is complex and highly detailed and the speech probably will have to continue to be read by the Minister of Finance. I can assure the House that it is a quite difficult and somewhat tedious business to read a 45-minute speech absolutely word for word particularly for somebody who is as exceptionally prone to ad libbing as I am. To actually be constrained to read all one’s own words which one has read many many times before begins to pall on the reader if not on anybody else at the moment of delivery. Inevitably that traditional format has to be followed in the Budget debate but it does not need to be followed in the debate on the Prime Minister’s statement. 
One final point I would like to raise is that the committee has made some recommendations that are not in relation to actual changes to the Standing Orders but are recommendations to members—and I hope members will take these seriously—and one of those is about the tabling of documents. It is an absurdity that members in this House rise to table questions answers to written questions parliamentary papers  
Hansard 
 bills newspaper articles that are published in New Zealand and other documents many of which have already been tabled in any case or are in the lobbies and most of the others are relatively reasonably well available. 
The Standing Orders Committee is keen to discourage that practice. I think it wastes time and over the last 20 years the changes to the Standing Orders have been very good at removing time-wasting in Parliament. This practice wastes time and brings us into disrepute. Occasionally I have had to deny leave even to some of my own colleagues who insist on trying to table a newspaper report because I take the view that those things should not be sought to be tabled. 
The tabling mechanism was designed to be used for somewhat more serious purposes than that in practice. I do not know why people think there is some magnificent achievement in having tabled an answer to a written question. I can assure members after 27 years in this place that history has never been changed by somebody tabling an answer to a written question or—and I say this with some trepidation given the media’s ability to get their own back—tabling an article from the  
Dominion Post  
or the  
New Zealand Herald  
that has already been published. 
With those few comments I commend the report to the House. I thank all the members of the Standing Orders Committee—I think I have been on every Standing Orders Committee except one since I have been in this Parliament—for as always the assiduous and very very largely non-partisan way in which they approach their work.