Thomas Coughlan: Demand the Debate campaign is hypocritical, but Judith Collins is onto something

National leader Judith Collins's Demand the Debate campaign is onto something. Photo / Mark Mitchell

OPINION:

Judith Collins' outrage at the lack of debate around a suite of Government policies is a complaint commonly made by people who lose elections - but that doesn't make it invalid.

In fact, Collins has identified an interesting trend in how Labour intends to govern this term, which distinguishes it from last term's coalition government.

Complaints about consultation and due process are common from the Opposition. Labour had its own "Demand the Debate" moment when it railed against the lack of parliamentary debate under the previous National government, of which Collins was a part.

In its first two years in power, the Key government put Parliament into urgency for 331.5 hours, nearly double the time the Clark Labour government sat under urgency in its full first term. It passed 17 laws in that time, without select committee examination. Clark's figure was four or five laws under urgency in each of her three terms.

Parties singing different tunes on due process depending on what side of the debating chamber they happen to be sitting on is no new thing. Former deputy prime minister Michael Cullen's recently published memoir recalls that even Sir Geoffrey Palmer, an arch defender (and sometime architect) of the limited checks and balances in our system wasn't opposed to ramming legislation through Parliament.

"Geoffrey in practice was not always the same as Geoffrey in theory," Cullen wrote, recalling that Palmer once asked Cullen, who was then serving as leader of the house, to pass the first seven bills on the order paper in one day.

There are many strands to Collins' "Demand the Debate" campaign. She's right that the Government's "Clean Car Discount" was not Labour election policy (the Greens campaigned on the discount, but it was not in their co-operation agreement), nor was it election policy to scrap several roads, which Labour likely knew it could not deliver, and nor was it election policy to direct at least some funding from those roads towards the expensive Auckland cycle bridge.

The counterpoint to this is that things like the Clean Car Discount will get some form of debate later in the year, when the Government passes legislation to enact the most contentious part of the policy - the "fee". Likewise, the Government consulted on the principles of the policy in 2019 - only to see it axed by NZ First.

Judith Collins has tapped an interesting vein of how Labour operates. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Would consulting on it once again raise any different objections? Probably not.

More interesting for Collins is the fact she's tapped an interesting vein of how Labour operates free from the strictures of the former Coalition government.

The potential for tension within the Coalition was obvious from the beginning. Parties therefore negotiated what they wanted to get done and laid it out in fairly explicit language in the coalition agreement between Labour and NZ First, and the confidence and supply agreement between Labour and the Greens.

These two documents formed the basis for the Speech from the Throne, which was a laundry list of what the government intended to do that term of Parliament.

Whenever questions arose about government policy on one thing or another, media were always pointed back to one of these three documents, which acted as something of a script for the three parties.

They sometimes departed from their lines - the ban on new offshore oil and gas exploration wasn't in any agreement, and NZ First took an ungenerous interpretation of the Greens' commitment to "begin" work on light rail (work was begun - it was then stopped).

The agreements had an almost constitutional status, binding each of the three parties to a set of policies to be carried out in that term of government. This reflected the fact that the real threat to the government's agenda wasn't from the Opposition in Parliament, it was from the cracks within the parties sitting around the Cabinet table.

This time around, Labour has no such restraint. Its co-operation agreement with the Greens is vague, and the Speech from the Throne was fairly perfunctory.

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Labour feels quite confident making big policy decisions that were not foreshadowed in the Speech or the co-operation agreement. Recently, it's explained these surprise announcements by noting that the Government has this year received advice from the Climate Change Commission on emissions reduction, which means it has to take a harder line on things like transport emissions.

This seems to ignore the fact that climate change not only existed last term, but it was the "nuclear-free moment" of Jacinda Ardern's generation.

The truth is that explanation is a fudge - and Labour is looking for an excuse to implement policies it didn't campaign on.

It's something voters and National should get ready to see a bit more of this term. The Government has outlined things it cares about, housing, climate change, Covid. But it appears that within these policy areas, it's fairly relaxed on whether the policies it's rolling out were put to the electorate or not.