Urgency should be used sparingly
Afew months ago, I wrote a column aimed at all of us who aren’t elected officials, making the point that democracy does not stop with elections. I pointed out that there are plenty of opportunities to get involved in the democratic process between elections if you want to have an influence on the issues that matter to you. Events in the last few weeks suggest the folks who won elections need reminding of that fact as well. Both at the local and central government level, we’ve seen elected officials treat democratic engagement like it’s mostly just a bit of a pain.
On the local government front, we saw the saga of the Reading Cinemas deal in Wellington drift along mostly confidentially for months. While, as Councillor Tim Brown said, a few weeks of confidentiality for initial negotiations may have made sense, the extended period of secrecy just created mistrust (belated credit to the entire council for eventually realising that last week).
A couple of hours up State Highway 2, we saw some Carterton councillors outraged that the Ombudsman had written a report recommending that council workshops be open to the public by default. He did not recommend complete open slather. Not the public peering over the shoulder of every minute of every day. Just a recommendation that if council deliberation, whether at a workshop, a committee, or a full council meeting, was going to be secret, the council needed to have a good reason to justify that.
In response to the (pretty modest and reasonable) suggestion that generally secrecy isn’t great in a democracy, one councillor is reported as dismissing it as “one man’s opinion” and another suggested the Ombudsman “might have a God complex” (the rest of the council, to its credit, seemed considerably more relaxed about the recommendations).
Meanwhile, in Parliament, we’ve had the new government proceed to enact its agenda at pace, with urgency used for multiple very important law changes. Urgency in this case meant that normal debate is rushed through, and there is no chance for select committees to take public submissions and recommend changes to the Bills. This meant that things like the repeal of Three Waters and the smokefree laws were rushed through, with little scrutiny, pretty much word for word the same as when introduced by the government.
Even when laws are referred to select committee, some have had ridiculously short times for consideration. The bill to bring back pseudoephedrine, for example, initially had two working days for the public to make submission, later extended to a week by the chair of the committee. And the committee itself only has two weeks to consider the submissions, advice, and write a report making recommendations for any changes.
You might ask what the problem is with all this. The final votes councils take on almost everything are public. The government was elected on the basis of doing all the things I just mentioned. Why can’t we just let them get on with it?
There are both principled and pragmatic answers to that. From a principled perspective, we simply don’t operate elected dictatorships. You don’t win an election and then rule by decree. Open government and careful deliberation are a core part of the way our system works. Government owes it to us to justify their decisions to us, and both urgency and secrecy get in the way of that.
More pragmatically, letting the public see what’s happening can increase trust in government, and allowing submissions really can result in errors being corrected. Poor drafting of the statute, unintended consequences that hadn’t been spotted, tweaking the scope of provisions, all of these can be – and are! – fixed up at the select committee stage. In skipping that stage, government risks passing poor quality laws.
I’m not saying urgency or confidentiality is never justified, but these should very much be exceptions. If there isn’t a justification for extreme urgency it shouldn’t be used. When the “smokefree generation” law wouldn’t have kicked in until 2027, when even with a rushed process pseudoephedrine won’t be on the shelves until next year, when legislation to replace Three Waters won’t be introduced until mid-year, it’s hard to see what justifications exist here.
Government, whether it’s central government or local, is allowed to govern. They were elected, they get to decide what laws should be made, and how the place they’re in charge of should be run. That’s the way representative democracy works. But they also govern for us. And that means the process by which they make their decisions matters.
Unless there is a genuine, burning case for urgency or confidentiality, we get to see what’s happening and we get to have our say. Anything else is simply antidemocratic. Elections aren’t the end of the story.