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The House: Parliamentary Agency Resources Under Pressure
Parliament risks being overwhelmed by an increase in public engagement on bills, Clerk of the House David Wilson told MPs this week.
Wilson, along with Speaker Gerry Brownlee and Parliamentary Service Chief Executive Rafael Gonzalez Montero, joined the Governance and Administration Committee on Wednesday. The event was part two-albeit a month late-of the Estimates hearing for the Office of the Clerk and the Parliamentary Service.
Brownlee is not a cabinet minister, but even so, he is the minister responsible (as Speaker) for Parliament's agencies, the Office of the Clerk (OOC), and the Parliamentary Service (PS). He oversees the PS but the OOC is independent.
Much of Wednesday's hearing was focused on a perceived strain on the OOC's staff and resources. The source of that strain has apparently come from the increase of three things: the increased use of urgency, the number of public submissions on bills, and the amount of scrutiny by select committees.
Such technical, behind-the-scenes parliamentary issues are dry but crucial to the effective oversight and transparency of government, and to participation in the law-making process. Both are sacrosanct to a functioning democracy.
Wilson said the Office of the Clerk currently has the resources to cope with the aggregate demand for its services. His concern though, is being able to cope with a potential "new norm" of having unprecedented submissions on bills, which he said they would "really struggle to deal with".
"We can deal with one or two bills that attract a huge amount of public interest [but] we couldn't deal with those simultaneously, though, with current resources," Wilson said.
So would such a shift mean that some public submissions will not be able to be processed because the Office of the Clerk wouldn't have the capacity?
There is potential mitigation on the horizon in the form of the Parliament Bill, which is currently waiting for its second reading.
While not a silver-bullet, the law change would enable Wilson to make a case directly to Parliament for sufficient resourcing to deal with the increased scale of submissions, and not rely on the discretion of the Minister of Finance.
Double the scrutiny, half the resource
The current session of Parliament changed how select committees scrutinised Government spending and performance. This included the introduction of two dedicated scrutiny weeks a year (one for Estimates and one for Annual Review), longer hearings and cross examinations, and more for committees to report.
All that extra scrutiny increases labour and time costs. Green MP Ricardo Menéndez March expressed concern about whether Parliament has the resources to do justice to the new arrangements.
"The feedback we have received [is] that there's a genuine trade-off that happens with increased scrutiny and ability to produce substantive reports," he said.
Wilson said it's a matter of priorities.
"More so than previously, there is the need to weigh up where the energy and attention of the committee and therefore the staff are going to focus... If you're doubling the amount of time spent on scrutiny, there's not double the amount of resource to support that," he said.
Other than hoping for respite from the Parliament Bill's new funding mechanism, MPs could also propose changes to Parliament's rules and processes in the Standing Orders Review, which happens at the end of each Parliamentary term. That would be expected to occur in 2026.
Brownlee, who chairs the Standing Orders Committee, suggested this as a method for countering the increased strain on Parliament's staff and resources. He told MPs on Wednesday the trend is that there are more submissions on all bills at the moment than there has been in the past.
"I think it's for the Standing Orders Committee of Parliament to make some decisions around that, so if you've got some ideas, then feed them in," Brownlee said.
*RNZ's The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament's Office of the Clerk.
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