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Declarations of ‘no confidence’ in Speaker of the House Trevor Mallard aren’t newsworthy or even constitutionally significant. Labour holds 64/120 seats in the house, excluding the Speaker. In the event that a motion of no confidence in the Speaker is tabled (unlikely, given it takes just one objection to block it), the motion will fail.
What is more significant is what National’s declaration unintentionally tells us about them. Until the announcement of the legal costs caused by Trevor Mallard’s defamatory implication that a parliamentary staffer committed rape, National had confidence in Trevor Mallard as Speaker. They had so much confidence in Mallard that they allowed him to be re-elected to the position unopposed on the assembly of the new Parliament. The knowledge that Mallard’s rape comments, made in May 2019 were defamatory and had destroyed the reputation of the individual concerned was well established long before the size of the bill being paid by taxpayers was released.
Trevor Mallard is an odd choice for Speaker given his colourful history as a Parliamentarian, including incidents such as
- Suggesting a bottle of Heineken be inserted into “uncomfortable places” of International Rugby Board Chairman Vernon Pugh and Australian Rugby boss John O’Neill during a radio interview in 2002. Mallard was the Minister for Sport and Recreation.
- Interjected with allegations that then National Leader Don Brash was having an extramarital affair in the House in 2006.
- Assaulted National MP Tau Henare outside the debating chamber in 2007. It is alleged Mallard was provoked by comments Henare had made regarding a new relationship Mallard had with former world champion rower Brenda Lawson. After a private prosecution was launched by litigant-pest Graham McCready, Mallard pleaded guilty to fighting in a public place and was fined $500
- In 2012, Mallard resold 4 tickets for Homegrown Music Festival on Trade Me for a profit of $246. Mallard was the sponsor of the Major Events Management Act 2007 which specifically banned ticket scalping though Homegrown was not classified as a major event under the law and therefore not subject to legal prohibition of ticket reselling.
National doesn’t lack confidence in Trevor Mallard. The electorally decimated and humiliated party is desperate for a bandwagon to jump on and criticising poor spending of taxpayer money is easy politics.
National says the Speaker is benefiting from a rule change made last year, presented in a manner which makes Mallard appear to be writing the rules himself in his own self-interest.
That isn’t constitutionally possible.
Former National MP and Deputy Speaker Anne Tolley was involved in a discussion about what legal financial support was available to the Speaker and was surprised to discover he did not have the same protections from legal action as a Minister of the Crown. Following advice from Crown Law and the Solicitor-General, Tolley put in place a system of protections similar to that afforded ministers, with the exception being that any financial support would have to be approved by the Deputy Speaker, rather than the Attorney-General.
Tolley says she put the process in place in order to protect all speakers of Parliament. “At some stage National will be in government and they will have a speaker. We’re a much more litigious community these days, so it may well be that National’s speaker gets into trouble.”
I don’t necessarily disagree with that legal protection being available to Members of Parliament conducting parliamentary business. What I despise in this case is the predictable grandstanding and scapegoating they’ve engaged in, despite their own Deputy Speaker initiating and implementing the rule change they’re now criticising.
Diehard supporters of any political party remain willfully blind to the fact that politicians have more in common with each other than they do with their constituents. When one looks at the objective facts, unclouded by the fog of National’s faux-outrage, it takes extreme levels of tribal dogmatism to think that Mallard is the sole villain of this saga.
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