Speaker’s actions under the spotlight

OPINION: Gerald Wall, Peter Tapsell, Margaret Wilson, David Carter, Trevor Mallard . . . over the past 40 years it has been routine to hear grumblings around Parliament about the competence and impartiality of some of those who have been entrusted with the Speaker’s job.

Over that period, probably only Kerry Burke, Jonathan Hunt and Lockwood

Smith have been widely regarded as successes at what is an inherently difficult balancing act.

Part of the difficulty arises because the interpreting of Standing Orders – the Speaker’s main tool for managing parliamentary debate – is more like a piece of performance art than the application of objective rules.

Moreover, testing the referee’s mettle has long been seen to be an acceptable way of gaming the parliamentary process.

As a result, charges of bias and overreach are easy to make. After all, the MP chosen as Speaker had formerly served party interests that – as David Carter conceded when taking up the job – can be hard to set aside entirely. Carter promised to do his best to be impartial. Trevor Mallard would probably claim to share the same aspiration.

Few people, though, would defend some of Mallard’s recent decisions.

His order to play punishingly loud music at the Parliament occupiers, and the issuing of trespass notices (regardless of the future threat the recipients may pose) have done nothing to enhance respect for the Office.

While sensible, the later withdrawal of some of those trespass notices has underlined the original mistake.

Personal lapses aside, there has also been a general escalation in the attacks on the impartiality of the Speaker. In 2015, Stuff reported on how Labour’s Ruth Dyson had become the third opposition MP in as many weeks to be referred to Parliament’s privileges committee for criticising Speaker David Carter.

Dyson’s referral, Stuff noted, came after she had made negative comments on Twitter about Carter’s competence and impartiality. Dyson’s remarks had come after Carter did not make then-PM John Key apologise for accusing Labour of ‘‘backing the rapists’’ and murderers being held in Australian detention centres, before their deportation to New Zealand.

For his part, Mallard has been accused of failing to recognise that Parliament is a hallowed precinct for the exercise of free speech.

Such accusations are not novel, either. In 2013, Carter refused to allow opposition MPs to host within the precinct a gathering to be addressed by a representative from West Papua – apparently because hosting that event would conflict with the Key government’s foreign policy desire to not annoy Indonesia. At the time, Carter’s decision was denounced by leading UK human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson as an infringement of free speech.

Is there anything that might help to improve trust in the Speaker’s role? In Britain, one gesture aimed at fostering a sense of impartiality is that once selected, the Speaker is allowed to run unopposed at subsequent general elections. It is one way of saying the Speaker now belongs to all of Parliament, and not to the party they formerly served.

Only a symbolic gesture, perhaps. Yet much of the trappings that surround the Speaker’s role are symbolic.

Right now, anything that enhances public faith in the Speaker’s role would be welcome.

Few people, though, would defend some of Mallard’s recent decisions.