Parliament tussled through another long week of urgency, and more besides. The House weekend edition has a stormy debate on ferries, five new bills for comment, and submissions on restoring Samoan citizenship rights.
Parliament's week began with an urgent (i.e. unplanned) debate into the recent stranding of an Interislander ferry (and the demise of the ferry replacement contract). You can read and listen to our report on that debate debate here.
The debate was unusually and (sometimes unintentionally) entertaining. The best accidental fun arose from ACT MP Cameron Luxton's complaint that there are not nearly enough back-office public servants - quite the opposite to ACT's usual line. He even backed that claim up with numbers.
The debate quality was raised by the Speaker's use of a new rule that meant MPs had an extra hour of preparation for their speeches.
Listen to the weekend edition of The House
New bills wanting feedback
Once Parliament's week began in earnest, ten different bills were debated under urgency through one or more stages. Two bills were debated from start to finish: the Transport (Clean Vehicle Standard) Amendment Bill, and the Forests (Log Traders and Forestry Advisers Repeal) Amendment Bill.
Five new bills received only first readings during the urgency. All of them will now be opened up for public feedback. The new bills would: remove agriculture from the carbon trading, bring back charter schools, bring back three strikes sentencing, allow overseas investors to buy land for housing developments, and repeal the recently passed regulatory framework for medicines, alt health products and medical devices.
For more details on all those bills read the story here.
Returning Samoan citizenship rights
While the House spent the week debating under urgency, the Governance and Administration Committee found moments around the extended sittings to hear submissions on a member's bill about Samoan citizenship.
The Restoring Citizenship Removed By Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 Bill is in the name of Green MP Teanau Tuiono. It seeks to correct what all parties seem to agree is an historical wrong - committed by the Muldoon government in 1982.
In 1982, Robert Muldoon's National government passed a bill expressly to ignore and outflank a finding of the Privy Council (then New Zealand's highest court). The Privy Council had ruled that a generation of Samoans, born when Samoa was under New Zealand control, were in fact New Zealand citizens (Falema'i Lesa v Attorney General NZ).
The 1982 law stripped them of that right. There are only an estimated 5,000 of that generation still alive. They were born between early 1924 and the end of 1948…