As MPs count down to the election, Parliament’s mood changes. The Opposition’s House leader Michael Woodhouse predicts “more anger, frivolity, perhaps less discipline”. The “perhaps” seems generous.
The current Parliament ends well before we vote for the members of the next one. Parliament will adjourn on 31 August before dissolving officially on 8 September. We are now in the fifth to last week of Parliament. You might even call it the propreantepenultimate week of Parliament.
That kind of silliness is at the very gentle end of the shift in mood that happens inside the House as a Parliament nears its end. The impending election tends to raise MPs' tempers as well as their energy.
National MP Michael Woodhouse Photo: ©VNP / Phil Smith
Cry Havoc...
Woodhouse agrees that the mood is changing.
“There is certainly a different frisson, if you like, in the debating chamber, during Question Time and during debates, particularly when there is not broad support for the legislation.”
He notes that the typically hands-off Speaker, Adrian Rurawhe, is having to get more involved than he usually would, to respond to the added noise and activity.
But Woodhouse says that the “anger, frivolity, perhaps less discipline” are not “a conscious tactical decision”. No one is working to rark up the party caucuses in their metaphorical dressing-rooms prior to them meeting in the House.
Instead, the change in mood is just a natural result of the count-down, as the election nears and MPs’ mind-sets move from the work-a-day business of governing and governance to a more aggressive hustings-oriented outlook.
Minor party differentiation
Woodhouse sees one change that is definitely tactical and purposeful.
“Minor parties, whether they're in opposition or in support of the government, want to unhook themselves from the major parties that they perhaps have associated with. They've got to differentiate themselves... and so you get a clear separation on principle, and that manifests itself in the house in a number of ways.”
I asked him whether the opposition parties are more likely to oppose things for the sake of it at this point in the electoral cycle. He denies that National takes that approach, but notes that where they do oppose things they will do so more stridently.
It doesn’t always look quite that evenhanded. From the outside it increasingly appears that if the Government says that today is Wednesday, opposition MPs will insist it must be Thursday.
Oppositions don’t oppose as much as you might think
This is actually different from the usual way of things when National (though less often ACT) agrees with more government legislation than the public would presume.
“It's not unusual,” says Woodhouse, “for more than half of Government legislation to be supported by the lead opposition party, the National Party. We might not agree with every aspect of the reform, but if you're broadly supportive of the direction, then it will get support.”
But that way of operating seems less likely as the election nears.
Woodhouse says that there will be less support, but mostly because of which bills are being debated in the next few weeks. The Three Waters legislation and RMA reforms are up for debate. They are complex bills and their committee stages will be hard fought because National, Woodhouse says, “are stridently opposed to those".
"And so the next few weeks, will include I think, a pretty rowdy sort of opposition to that to those pieces of legislation. But I don't think that's because we are coming into the election campaign.”
