This week MPs had a special debate about the report of the Regulations Review Committee on Covid-19 Secondary Legislation.
This week MPs had a special debate about the report of the Regulations Review Committee on Covid-19 Secondary Legislation.
This specialist committee, which is always chaired by an Opposition MP, plays an important role as a constitutional safeguard and a mechanism for providing checks and balance on the executive.
Part 2 of today's edition of The House looks at salient points from that special debate on the committee's report, while Part 1 examines further evidence from the chamber that MPs are getting ever more contrarian as the election looms.
During the special debate, a committee member, Eugenie Sage of the Greens, gave this useful description of the Regulations Review Committee's function:
"In terms of lawmaking, it scrutinises the powers in bills that are proposed to be given to the executive to make secondary legislation," she explained.
"So what's secondary legislation? Law that is made by someone other than Parliament under a power that Parliament has given. It could be regulations, orders, rules, notices, and it's often of the detail of implementation of legislation."
The Government's Leader of the House, Grant Robertson, also gave us this useful explainer of the role of the Regulations Review Committee at the start of the week.
Drafting
During the emergency phase of Covid-19, the Regulations Review Committee was particularly busy doing its job looking at each regulatory change - there were many of them. They also compiled a report looking at that whole Covid period, trying to see what can be learnt from that period for how to deal with emergency situations, pandemics and so on, via a regulatory lens.
Generally, the committee found that there have been appropriate safeguards for the making of Covid-19 secondary legislation.
However the committee chair, Judith Collins of the National Party, said one of the big takeaways of this review was how poorly some government ministries and departments took the role of drafting good secondary legislation.
"Now I understand, and we can all acknowledge, that the Ministry of Health was under an extreme amount of stress, that they were dealing with a situation that they had not seen before, and that they were rushing," she said…