Petitions to Parliament don't always result in a change to law or policy as intended, but they can be an effective way of the public getting a message to those in power.
A petition can be an effective way for the public to get the attention of Parliament, and it doesn't necessarily need lots of signatures.
It's not often that a petition to Parliament results in a law change, but changes can occur as a result of MPs considering a petition and digesting submissions on the topic. It's a journey that the petitioner invites MPs and the wider community to join them on, and sometimes it can venture quite far into the territory of Parliamentary process.
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer alongside other MPs holds the Dawn Raids petition after co-petitioners Josiah Tualamali'i (left) and Benji Timu (behind her) presented it on the steps of Parliament, 21 June 2021.
When it was first established as a specialist committee in the last Parliament, the Petitions Committee considered about 430 petitions in that 53rd Parliament. About half of these resulted in a basic report to Parliament by the committee; roughly a quarter were referred to other committees; and about 20 were referred to a government minister for response. Regarding previous Parliaments, in the 52nd Parliament, 240 petitions were reported back by select committees; in the 51st, 144; and in the 50th, 114.
A select few petitions have resulted in a Special Debate by Parliament. The relatively new provision of Special Debates offers MPs the opportunity to speak about other issues that aren't immediately about legislation, relating for instance to some of the areas that committees have been working on and reported back to the House about, things that otherwise wouldn't be debated.
Mobility Parking
Last month a Special Debate was held on a petition that had been presented two years earlier, requesting that Parliament change the law to substantially increase fines for misuse of mobility parking spaces, including on privately-owned land that is used publicly, and urging the government to run an education campaign to desist able-bodied people from misusing mobility parking spaces for public use.
The petitioner, Claire Dale, faced numerous hurdles in getting traction with her petition, from launching on the day of a Covid-19 lockdown, to pandemic disruptions, to trying to present the petition when Parliament grounds were occupied by anti-vaccine mandate protestors. In the end the petition had a few thousand signatures…