A former Prime Minister has warned MPs they face a daunting challenge to maintain public confidence in the Parliament system in the age of disinformation.
A former prime minister has warned MPs they face a daunting challenge to maintain public confidence in the Parliament system in the age of disinformation.
Sir Geoffrey Palmer, a leading constitutional expert, also says MPs are under-resourced and too few, adding to a sense that the mechanisms for holding government to account are inadequate.
He says MPs are making laws in much the same way that they were in the 1860s, but now the job of a member has become much more complex - so too has the legislation they are faced with developing.
Chris Hipkins talks to The House about some of the issues Sir Geoffrey Palmer discussed with the Standing Orders Committee.
Sir Geoffrey was appearing before the Standing Orders Committee which has begun its regular review of Parliament's rules, where he expanded on ideas discussed in his formal submission, including how to address what he and others see as a decline in legislative scrutiny and scrutiny of the executive.
"You need more MPs if you're going to hold the Government to account," he told the committee, suggesting that 150 Members of Parliament would be preferable to the current 120, especially given that around a quarter of the MPs are preoccupied as part of the executive.
In a difficult lawmaking environment, where MPs have to tackle legislation on complex issues like climate change, Sir Geoffrey identified a need for the sort of high powered expertise and analytical rigour that is not readily available.
"You can't be amateur MPs anymore. The complexity of the modern world does not permit it. If we're going to keep New Zealand up to where it has to be in the future, we're going to have to do much better in this Parliament than we've been doing. And that's not to denigrate your efforts. But you haven't got the resources, you haven't got the numbers, you haven't got the time. And all of those things are very, very important if you're going to do the job properly."
'The ordeals you're going to go through'
MPs acknowledged the ongoing challenge of maintaining the confidence of the public in Parliament. But Sir Geoffrey noted that the Covid-19 pandemic had damaged that confidence by hurting the country's sense of social cohesion.
"And you saw out on the Parliament what happens when that happens, people go down conspiracy rabbit holes. The biggest problem the political system faces is disinformation, you only have to look at what's been happening in the United States."…