SpeechHon TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West): Thank you Madam Speaker. The Hon Dr Nick Smith is absolutely right: our democracy does deserve much better than this. So I too as a member of the Justice Committee rise to oppose as strenuously as I can this outrageous motion that the Minister of Justice has put forward for a truncated select committee process. I hadn't been expecting him to be suggesting it would be quite as soon as 2 June and I've just had a look at the sitting calendar—that is only six sitting weeks of Parliament. The Justice Committee is a very busy committee and there have been occasions recently when we have had to meet on days other than the scheduled Thursday morning. Always we have long meetings usually of at least four hours in duration and that reflects the fact that it is a committee that already has a lot of business. There are some very challenging bills that are before the committee at the moment and that rightly should take precedence as we try to give them serious attention and in particular give serious consideration to the views of the public of New Zealand who want to be heard. I'm talking about matters as to the Sexual Violence Legislation Bill. That is a very important piece of legislation. We need to get it right.Six sitting weeks is simply not enough for the committee to do justice to other business which is just being rammed through for the most spurious of reasons. I listened carefully to the very brief explanation that the Minister of Justice gave a short time ago in attempting to justify why he is wanting to force the House to approve this motion. But what it comes down to quite clearly is that this is a Government that is completely out of control. It has no control over its own legislative agenda. What's the evidence of that? Well for more than two years we have had a Government that consistently filibustered on a whole lot of bills reflecting the fact that when they came to office they hadn't been expecting to be elected they had not done the work in Opposition that they would need to do in order to be able to bring a coherent legislative programme into being from the outset. So they instead filibustered often with senior Ministers many of them in the House night after night dragging out things which had the complete support of all members of this House. And that is relevant because suddenly they realised that they are less than six months out from an election. They have lost control. They know that in six months' time they're going to be evicted from the Beehive—the New Zealand First Party is going to be evicted from Parliament all together and maybe even the Greens—and so they've suddenly realised they'd better get on with it.Well the point that Dr Nick Smith made a moment ago is absolutely valid. This is—Kieran McAnulty: Repetition!Hon TIM MACINDOE: An interesting interjection from Mr McAnulty there. I do hope that he's going to stand up and take a call and explain why he would call out such a silly comment. This is an important motion because it gets to the heart of our democracy and in particular the way this Government is willing to ride roughshod over it so much. I had the privilege of being a member of this House for the entire nine years of the Key-English administration and I listened to many pious speeches being delivered at that point by members of the Opposition—not just the Labour Party but also the Green Party—constantly bemoaning anything that they saw as perhaps a Government wanting to get on with things. Well now here we have them forgetting everything that they used to say and riding roughshod over the rights of the people.So let me remind Mr McAnulty and the others—most of whom now have their heads down—that a very important part of the legislative process is the right of the members of the New Zealand public to make a submission and then perhaps to be heard by the select committee and to have those views considered. Now in six sitting weeks this Government is now telling them: You must get your submission in you must make sure that you turn up for an appointment"—that'll probably have to be rushed because if a lot of people want to be heard they'll suddenly be told they can have only five minutes if that and the whole thing will be an outrage when there's no good reason for it. There is no urgency for this particular legislation. The idea that the Minister of Justice gave that the Electoral Commission needs it to happen so that they can do their work is absolutely contradicted by the fact that it's not the Electoral Commission that is calling for this exercise and it isn't the Electoral Commission who should be—with all due respect to them—dictating the way that Parliament undertakes its very important work. That's for us as a Parliament to decide and it should be a responsibility that all members of Parliament take very seriously.Not just is it an affront to the democratic process but even if these were ordinary times it would be unjustified—but we live in the most extraordinary of times. As we confront the daily reality of all of the changes to our lifestyle to our processes to our ability to hold public meetings and so on as a result of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak we must surely have at the back of our minds the possibility that this House may not be able to continue to meet for the next few months. We do not know at this stage just how many more—I won't call them Draconian because I appreciate that they are significant measures to deal with a crisis—very stringent measures may be dictated with the best of reasons that could force the House not to meet. And so to suggest that a select committee should have such a ludicrously unreasonable short time to consider a bill when we don't even know what the state of the Parliament will be in two or three weeks from now is absolutely unjustified—in fact it's an outrage. I do hope that whoever is going to respond next from the Government side will deal with that point. Will any member of the Government be able to assure us that Parliament is going to continue operating as we usually do in this extraordinary environment that we have at the moment?Now the next point I want to make is that rushed law is invariably bad law and so often where laws are rushed as a select committee process does—Hon Julie Anne Genter: This isn't a new law; it's just undoing something terrible that you guys did.Hon TIM MACINDOE: I can hear chirping from the Hon Julie Anne Genter; I'm afraid I'm not actually aware of what she's trying to say.Matt Doocey: No no one ever is.Hon TIM MACINDOE: Thank you Mr Doocey. But instead of just having a running commentary perhaps she'd pay me the courtesy of allowing me to make my speech and then I'd invite her to stand up and respond as is her right and I would be interested in hearing what she has to say when she takes her call not constantly throughout mine.I was trying to make the point that rushed law is invariably bad law and frequently sees the Parliament—well obviously not this Parliament but the next Parliament—having to either repeal or amend the law because mistakes were made. And in this circumstance where so little time is being allowed for the process that we're being asked to approve tonight I would suggest to you that that would be an almost certain thing to happen. There will be a lot of public interest in this measure and I know that because I'm reflecting on the fact that in my own electorate in Hamilton West those members of the public who have heard that this is being suggested have said to me "Why on earth would the Government want to make that a priority when in fact there are such significant things happening?"—particularly obviously in these extraordinary times as we all deal with the alarming threat of the coronavirus outbreak internationally.So I would imagine from those comments that there will be members of the public who will wish to make a submission who will wish to front up to the committee. Some may well support the bill. We know that that's likely and that's fair enough. Many others will wish to oppose it. The important thing is that we need to allow them the time to do the job properly. We need to allow the select committee members the time to consider those submissions to hear them to reflect on them to discuss with the officials the implications of them to prepare a report that would come back to the House in order to be further debated if it was recommended that the bill should go through.It's worth noting that the Justice Committee is a split committee and therefore it will not be easy for this particular committee to reach agreement on this bill because the party's positions are already very clearly understood. So I would predict that this will take longer not shorter than usual. Six weeks is just an affront to democracy. It simply cannot and should not be done.So to members of the Government who tonight are looking to subvert the democratic process I say this: get a sense of decency and stand up and say "No we will not support this motion." Even if the members of the Government support the bill they should stand up and say "We will allow the full democratic process to be conducted. We won't support trampling on the rights of the citizens to submit or on the democratic process. We won't support trying to put this bill through under urgency when there's no public clamour for it. We will not continue to ride roughshod over the rights of New Zealanders.""