The parliamentary processes behind the missing submissions story

Parliament belatedly agreed unanimously to allow all submissions on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill to be added to the parliamentary record.

This followed a week or so of political fighting after the governing party-controlled Justice Committee reportedly opted to end considerations and send the bill back to the House before its deadline, with many of the more than 300,000 submissions still unconsidered.

On Thursday, the ACT representative on the committee, Todd Stephenson sought leave to move a motion without notice or debate: "That the Justice Committee be authorised to table and release or return submissions on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, as if the bill were still before the committee, after it has reported the bill to the House."

The (necessarily unanimous) permission was given for the vote, which was agreed by all parties.

A Q&A on the processes behind this story

This is one of two news stories out of Parliament this week that, while political, make more sense with a little background on how Parliament works.

RNZ's The House sat down with the Clerk of the House of Representatives, David Wilson for that process understanding. David Wilson runs Parliament's Secretariat - the Office of the Clerk, and quite literally wrote the book on how New Zealand's Parliament works.

Question: What is the normal process when public submissions are sent in on a bill?

David Wilson: When a committee calls for submissions on a bill, it's staff of the Office of the Clerk, who provide secretaries to all of the committees, who receive those submissions and process them.

And what processing them means is checking them for a few things - to make sure they comply with Parliament's rules, and, if a committee's set any particular rules or requirements about submissions, to check those as well. They'll also look to just make sure the submission is relevant to the thing that it's supposed to be about - they're not always.

Then they make them available to their committee's members (the MPs), and flag to the committee any submissions that might need a decision made - so if it's not relevant or if it doesn't follow those rules, to send it back, or to ask for it to be changed, and returned.

Most of them are made electronically - more than 95 percent. Paper ones are scanned and then they are made available online.

At some point the relevant ministry tends to get involved and do some analysis on those because your staff is actually not that large. I mean, there's no way that the two or three staff who are the secretariat for a committee could go through hundreds of thousands of submissions. So the ministry is brought in, right?

David Wilson: Yeah, so ministries or departments who have worked on developing the policy behind a bill are almost always asked to then give advice to the select committee on the bill; because they know about it and they know how it works and what it's intended to do. And they're in a good position to analyse any submissions made on the bill for how they might fit in, or propose changes. So they do that.

Normally, those stages happen one, then the other. So, my staff receive all the submissions, they check them for those things that I've mentioned and then they go to the committee and to officials so that officials can give advice on them.

That isn't the case where there is a vast number of submissions, more than the staff can process in that time. So, many of those steps could happen simultaneously.

Note: Where the process is overwhelmed, the submissions may continue to be processed by committee staff, analysed by the ministry, and available to the MPs simultaneously. Not doing so would mean the committee might need to wait months to have everything processed and analysed before its deliberations could begin. In a case like this one, where there were more than 300,000 submissions, that ultimately meant that the processing and analysis was still underway when the committee voted to finish its work and report the bill back to the House, with a report on the committee's hearings, opinions and recommendations.

This week, the House voted to allow the Justice Committee to continue processing submissions even after its report returns to the House. How will that work and who will do that?

David Wilson: That's right. So, [normally] when a committee reports a bill to the House, it's finished with it. It can't make any more decisions about the bill.

Any correspondence or papers it receives about the bill - it can't deal with as part of that bill anymore - it doesn't have it. Committees can only do work given to them by the House (about bills), and once they give [one] back, they're finished with it.

So the resolution the House has made is that, even though, in the case of the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, there are still a lot of submissions to deal with and there still will be even once the report has been presented to the House; the Justice Committee can continue to deal with them as if it still had the bill. So it can make decisions about whether they're relevant, whether to return them, whether to keep them and make them part of the record - which is, I expect, what would happen with the vast majority of them.

It also means that when my office publishes all of those submissions online, they will be part of the record of the bill. So that in the future, when people want to see all of the submissions on the bill, they will all be in one place and they will all be collected together under that bill.

Because, otherwise, even if they were published, they would be in some sort of weird addendum of 'other stuff'?

David Wilson: That's right. And that's not great and it's not logical, or easy for people to find it that way, even though it does follow Parliament's rules.

So, the outcome of this would be that those extra submissions won't be part of the report on the bill that went back to the House, but they will be part of the record of what the committee received?

David Wilson: They'd be part of the record and also part of the analysis that the ministry officials did on the bill.

The vast number of submissions on this bill is unprecedented isn't it? Every time the submissions record has been broken, it seems to double.

David Wilson: It is. The previous record was 107,000. Now it's about 330,000. Before [that] it was something like 36,000, and before that it was about 20,000, which all, at the time, seemed like large numbers.

And it's not like you've suddenly got ten times as many people to deal with them.

David Wilson: The same committee secretariats are usually three people. In the case of the Justice Committee it's four people, because it's a committee with a big legislative workload anyway. But we've allocated about another dozen staff from across the office and temporary staff that were hired to help work on that. And that's, you know, 10-15 percent of our workforce, so it's quite a substantial number of people involved.

*RNZ's The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament's Office of the Clerk.