A Bridges too far for Speaker
National MPs walked out of Parliament yesterday after Speaker Trevor Mallard ordered party leader Simon Bridges to leave during Question Time
Parliament’s Speaker, Trevor Mallard, has an inbuilt bias against National Party leader Simon Bridges and a soft spot for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
That much has been clear since Mallard took the chair just over a year ago. Bridges gets under his skin.
But what is also clear is that Bridges crossed a line in the House yesterday and cannot credibly object to having been thrown out by Mallard.
If the incident forces Mallard to reassess the way he is trying to control the House, it may be a good thing.
It was during questions to the Government about the Karel Sroubek case that Bridges accused Ardern of “ducking and diving”.
Such a description is not unusual in the cut and thrust of politics, and barely raised anybody’s eyebrow — except Mallard’s.
Mallard stood up to object — we don’t know whether he was about to make Bridges withdraw and apologise and put him on a final warning.
But before he could mete out punishment, Bridges said: “Here comes the protection.”
That was the offending phrase and that got him ejected from the House — and for that there can be no objection.
It crossed a line. It can be easily argued that Mallard was too quick to leap to the defence of Ardern after she was accused of ducking and diving — not that she requires any help from Mallard in the chamber.
But for Bridges to accuse the Speaker of protecting the Prime Minister is an unacceptable insult.
Allegations of bias against the Speaker are usually expressed more obliquely through eloquent points of order by Shadow leader of the House Gerry Brownlee.
After Mallard had ordered Bridges out, Brownlee interjected that it must have struck a nerve, and Mallard ordered Brownlee out too, creating a walkout of most MPs except those who had questions to ask.
It was not an isolated incident. National has long objected to Mallard’s practice of taking questions off National as a punishment for a transgression.
He did it on Tuesday when Melissa Lee and Louise Upston sighed during a ruling from Mallard — after first making them stand and apologise.
For as long as that egregious rule is applied, there will be wounded relations between the Speaker and the Opposition because that is the Speaker playing God.
Mallard’s intolerance was on display on Tuesday when he referred to Bridges’ questions as “smart-arse” which is also an appalling lapse by a Speaker to the Leader of the Opposition.
The sadness of Mallard’s speakership is that he had hopes of inserting himself less into Question Time than other Speakers, but he is doing the exact opposite.
On Newshub this week, Winston Peters tried to suggest that Mallard was not behaving like a Labour MP, but it is impossible to take the politics out of the politician.
On a good day, Mallard is the best of Speakers. His stewardship of the House as the Opposition sought answers from the Government over its decision to exempt Te Arai Development from the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill was exemplary. The stakes were high. He bent over backwards to be fair to all. It was the House at its best because Mallard was at his best.
Unfortunately, the good days don’t come often enough.
Police Minister Stuart Nash says police should not have shared information with Immigration NZ about the location of the safe house where Karel Sroubek’s estranged wife was staying.
And Nash said convicted drug smuggler Sroubek had been given enough chances and should be sent packing as an early Christmas present.
“Give me a break, mate. You imported bloody drugs . . . You’ve intimidated people. You’ve been involved with gangs,” Nash told Newstalk ZB yesterday morning.
“We gave you a chance . . . Let him go home. Let him go to some other country . . . Good riddance, never come back.”
Sroubek’s estranged wife has been a central figure in the saga, after she initially signed a letter supporting Sroubek to stay in New Zealand, and later did not take part in the Immigration NZ review that led to Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway issuing a new deportation notice.
Now in a police safe house after allegedly being threatened by Sroubek, she wrote to National MP and justice spokesman Mark Mitchell, giving him permission to speak for her.
Mitchell has questioned why Immigration NZ officials turned up at the safe house to “pressure her” into taking part in the review.
Mitchell said no one should have known where she was except the police, and Immigration NZ turning up without notice amounted to “bullying behaviour from the state”.
Nash agreed only police should know her location.
“There are some people who just need to be kept safe, and there’s no way anyone apart from police should know where that is. I’m a little bit in the dark, to be honest.”
Nash said of Sroubek: “Let’s give him a one-way ticket. It costs us $110,000 to keep this bloke in jail. Let’s give him an early Christmas present and just send him home.”