Dunne Peter: Business of Select Committees — Appointments 
Dunne Peter: Business of Select Committees — Appointments 
[Volume:622;Page:18015] 
Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future) 
: 
 One of the good things about this debate is the consistency of the ignorance from the member who preceded me. I should tell him that this is not a Green Party idea. The Deputy Prime Minister and others will know that I have been advocating for a constitutional inquiry at reasonably frequent intervals since 1994. 
Rodney Hide 
: Very effectively too. 
Hon PETER DUNNE 
: Absolutely; we now have it. I think it will be a very positive step forward. I want to take some time to deal with some of the issues that have been raised about what is actually intended. That Dr Cullen is a very conservative constitutional monarchist and I am a cautious conservative republican— 
Stephen Franks 
: Irish. 
Hon PETER DUNNE 
: —and proud of that too—are quite irrelevant to the debate. What is relevant is the process that is being followed and the objectives of the exercise. If we look at the terms of reference we see very clearly that contrary to Mr Brownlee’s fears this is a very cautious and very deliberate first step and it may be an only step. Let me go through the process as I see it over a period of time and I will pick up some of the points that Mr Jones made in this regard. 
This select committee inquiry is essentially to bring together all of the elements of the New Zealand constitution as we know them to be or discover them to be; to tease out their relevance their relationships and by implication their effectiveness; then if a process of change is deemed desirable at some future point to determine how that might occur. The committee then will make a report to the Parliament. The Government of the day will consider that report. I would imagine that if it accepts the recommendations we put forward it would then move to establish at a future point something akin to the commission of inquiry that Mr Jones referred to. That might well have very specific terms of reference. I envisage that that process would take some years as it should and that at the point the commission of inquiry reports—and I am relying here on the experience of the royal commission into the electoral system—its recommendations would essentially be just that. 
The Government at that point and who knows what its form might be would have to determine whether it wished to accept those recommendations and how it might proceed to deal with them. It would seem to me that if we were at that stage looking at major constitutional change—and that is a huge if—then the only way realistically to proceed would be by way of endorsement at a binding public referendum. But that is a process—if one even assumes its inevitability—that is likely to take the best part of a decade from here. The steps we are taking by establishing this committee and this review process are very much preliminary groundwork. It does not prejudge an outcome; it does not even presume a specific outcome. It is a stocktake of what we have what we assess its effectiveness by implication to be and if we were to consider change how we might go about it. 
But I think it has one other important element. It seems to me that it will be an inevitable concomitant of this process that we engage in some form of public interaction. Firstly I think it is important that New Zealanders as a whole get a chance to express a view on how they perceive the New Zealand constitution and secondly it is important that the debate that has been lurking around for some time about nationhood about constitutional arrangements and about where we might go with diverse elements like flags national days and all those things that are not covered here or relevant here gets a chance to be aired. I get a sense that New Zealand is at the point where it wants to discuss these issues. 
One of the things that arose from Dr Brash’s Orewa speech earlier this year—if I can be permitted to use some imagery—was a situation akin to the lifting of the lid off Pandora’s box. Everything came out flew around and made a great deal of noise and unsightly presence but there were no solutions as to how either the problems might be resolved or the things put back in the box. It seems to me that what people were actually saying was that yes it is fine to get everything out there and it is fine to know what we perceive our problems to be whether or not we agree with them but we are really much more interested in a way forward. We are really much more interested in what it all means and how we take this country forward and if that means we need to start to talk about our constitutional arrangements their adequacy and whether change is required so be it. 
This is a very deliberate cautious first step. Some have said that it is not the right time. Frankly there is never a right time. But I think that in this country probably since the days of Norman Kirk’s walk across the Waitangi marae in 1973 with the young Maori warrior there has been a bubbling sense of that amorphous thing called New Zealand nationhood and a willingness—increasingly fostered by journalists and others—to start to discuss it. This process is part of capturing that. 
It is also part of doing the necessary review of the adequacy of what we have at the moment in a deliberate and considered way. I get no sense from the considerable amount of correspondence I have had since this matter has been in the public arena that New Zealanders are keen to make rapid unproven change. New Zealanders are certainly keen for a debate and to express a view. It may well be as perhaps the Deputy Prime Minister implied that their views will harden up once there is a change in the monarch in Britain. I do not get any sense that New Zealanders want to take any precipitate steps while Queen Elizabeth is on the throne. The future may be a different story and if one looks at the genes in that family one sees that that future may be a very long way off from being confronted. Most of us will be long into our dotage by the time the Queen shuffles off this mortal coil. So I do not think there is any great need for concern or a hurried response but I think it is an appropriate time to start considering these issues. 
I want to pick up some comments made by Mr Hide—he may have made them tonight but he has certainly made them in correspondence with the Government—about the range of issues that ought to be considered. I know that Mr Franks has expressed similar views as well. I think that some of the matters relating to the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act property rights and associated matters are properly issues that ought to come on to the agenda here. I do not see this as being necessarily exclusive in that regard. 
Mr Brownlee spoke about the Treaty of Waitangi and he seemed to be postulating that it was an either/or situation—we either have a constitutional environment where we take the treaty to be the absolute founding document from which everything flowed or we ignore it altogether. If I heard him correctly I thought that was the message he was proposing. The relevance of the treaty to this exercise is of some importance but I personally do not believe that it is sufficiently relevant that it requires a specific term of reference. It is a feature and a part of the New Zealand constitution but in some sense it is no greater than any other feature. I think that by making it a specific reference we accord it a status that will simply ensure two things: first that it will be given a status that is not warranted; and secondly that the division and the anger about it that Dr Brash referred to earlier and that Mr Brownlee picked up tonight will simply be fuelled. 
I want to make this final point. The committee when it is established will meet to elect its own chair. I am grateful for the indications of support from the Government for my nomination. In the event that it is successful I give this pledge to the House: while my own personal views are well known and I do not shrink from them I will not chair this committee in a way that demonstrates any bias at all. It is important that this be done properly be done impartially and be done fairly because the outcome is one that all of us will have to live with whatever our particular view and that is completely as it should be in a process of this type.