Parliament’s Speaker, Trevor Mallard, has become the subject of intense criticism. It is not just for his false accusation of rape against a Parliamentary staffer or for having the bill for settlement and the associated legal expenses charged to taxpayers. He has also been criticised for the manner in which he attempted to downplay, if not conceal entirely, the transfer to the public purse of the costs he should have paid from his own pocket.
Commentators across the full political spectrum are calling for Mallard’s resignation, and the National and ACT parties have signalled their intention to move a vote of no confidence in the Speaker when Parliament re-assembles next year.
Among the retaliatory actions suggested have been that National and ACT should boycott Question Time in the House until Mallard either steps down or is sacked.
The pressure this will place on Jacinda Ardern to live up to her own oft-repeated admonitions for the application of “kindness” and “transparency”, will test the thickness and permeability of the fairy dust that coats the treatment of her by most of what these days passes for our mainstream news media (or should that be Views media?) — a treatment thankfully not shared by The BFD. But that’s a subject that will tell us mere mortals, in due course, as much about the integrity of said media as the integrity of Mallard, if the latter has any left.
What should be of immediate concern is: who loses from a boycott of Question Time? Certainly not the Ardern Government and her limp-wristed Green buddies. And probably not the Press Gallery which on performance – or lack of it – pays little attention to Oral Questions or to answers/evasions.
The certain losers are we mere mortals who the two opposition parties, National and ACT, are supposed to represent and hold the Executive Government to account. That is a duty and an opportunity which the Opposition has the power to exercise in the place where it counts: in our sovereign lawmaking institution, Parliament.
For me the only question is not whether they should forego that duty as a form of protest against what should be an extraordinary fall from the Speaker’s Chair, but whether, in their first 2017-20 term in opposition, National have been as effective as they could or should be when confronted by a Government marked more by its sins of omission than commission. Also and more pointedly from now on, whether the leadership of Judith Collins will result in crushing this new Labour Government with its rag-tag new MPs and a leader more adept at talking the talk than walking the walk.
I am disappointed that so far, National’s Oral Questions have not hit the Government with any demonstrable force.
There was a prime example in Prime Minister Ardern’s Notice of Motion a few days ago to declare a “climate emergency.” There were two distinct elements to this motion: “Climate” and “emergency”. I pointed out to friends in National that they could avoid being branded “climate deniers” if they ignored climate issues and concentrated on the “emergency” aspect. I gave them factual evidence that shows there is nothing about current climate behaviour that is so far out of the ordinary that it justifies use of the term “emergency”.
While I was happy that National joined Act in voting against this foolish motion, I was aghast that they concentrated on our country’s failure to reduce “emissions” and not one of them queried the lack of grounds for declaring an emergency.
Especially as just the previous day, one of the original global warming scaremongerers, Dr Jim Salinger, emerged as head of a small team of scientists who had calculated that, over the past 150 years, New Zealand’s temperatures had increased by only a measly 0.66 °C. That small rise contrasted with just the previous Saturday in Auckland, when temperatures rose a full 2 °C in the three hours between 9am and noon, three times as much, and no one had noticed or had expressed any alarm.
Since then, there has been confirmation from Dr John Maunder, a giant of climatology in our country with a distinguished international record as President of the World Meteorological Organization’s Commission for Climatology from 1989 to 1997. Over the last 55 years, he has been involved in the ‘weather business’ in various countries including New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the US, Ireland, Switzerland, and the UK. Dr Maunder has been recording monthly temperature figures at Tauranga over many years and has a record going back more than a hundred years. He reports here on the 113 years to November 2020. (Note that the vertical axis is the temperature in °C times 10)
Here is Dr Maunder’s 100-year graph:
As the good doctor himself asks: “What emergency?”
Anyone remotely interested in climate issues should buy Dr Maunder’s latest book, Fifteen Shades of Climate.
But back to the National Party and Oral Questions: Let’s hope that their summer break will restore some steel to the National spines. I hope we can look forward to a Judith Collins-led team crushingly holding this brittle Government to account in a Parliament presided over by a new Speaker who will bring back to that office the integrity, decorum and neutrality it requires.
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