Sir Geoffrey Palmer resigned as New Zealand’s Prime Minister 33 years ago but never stopped working.
As an MP he was significantly responsible for modernising both Parliament and government, but he still ponders tweaks to improve New Zealand politics and democracy.
These days he does that thinking, not from the Beehive’s top floor, but from his office across the road in New Zealand’s (arguably) top law school.
Sir Geoffrey Palmer in his office at the Victoria University of Wellington Law School. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
From here he watches what works well, and what fails. He still publishes at a high tempo, demonstrating that eight decades haven’t diminished his energy, intellect or passion.
As any other citizen can, Sir Geoffrey appeared late last year to make a submission to Parliament’s Standing Orders Committee when it met to consider changing Parliament’s rules. Palmer’s suggestions were bold. Bolder than were likely to be taken up. He was looking for changes that would insulate Parliament from new and urgent threats.
I was fascinated, and asked if we could meet so that I could hear more about what he would do, if he ran the circus.
Perils to democracy
Palmer sees a number of threats that have “weakened the prospects for democracy”, and he can see that we can’t take democracy’s continuance for granted.
“Rot and decay can easily set in… you only have to look at places like Hungary… there are many more dictatorships than there used to be. Populism is very rampant, and populism really stems from authoritarianism, and authoritarian populism is a sort of dangerous competitor to democracy these days. The international research shows that democracy is not nearly as fashionable as it was.”
Democracy is very fragile, he says. “It’s fragile, because democratic societies operate on openness. They operate on free speech, and that allows their opponents to use it against them.”
“The development of social media has made the conduct of democratic government greatly more difficult.” There are “many diverse voices, but enormous confusion, and a great tendency towards conspiracy theories. None of those things are helpful if you're going to have a stable democracy.”
He points to the disasters of Trump and Brexit and the current poor state of politics in the UK and US as troubling for us who have often looked to them as role models.
“The lessons you can learn from them at the moment are bad lessons.”
Sir Geoffrey Palmer propounds his ideas for reform to Parliament’s rules group, The Standing Orders Committee (from late 2022). Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
The worst time to govern
Sir Geoffrey returns a few times during our chat to how awful the current epoch is for governing. He’s not wrong, we live in unstable times.
It’s not just that many democracies have failed (Russia), are failing (Hungary); are responding to stress with populism (Italy), or self-inflicted injuries (UK); or actively restricting democracy to tilt the field (Republican USA). Many of the stressors that have amplified these retrograde changes are likely to get worse.
The compounding impacts of climate change alone will likely test democracy beyond anything in our lived experience. That’s not a great backdrop for governing effectively, let alone undertaking reform.
Geoffrey Palmer puts it gently when he says that New Zealand’s “capacity to do big reform seems to be greatly reduced. The problem is this. There are so many issues crowding into the political agenda.”
In very recent history we’ve had international economic shocks, multiple earthquakes, a terrorist attack, cyclones, Covid and a Russian invasion of democratic Europe. Each of those has created overlapping economic and social shockwaves.
When the harbinger of another potential disruption occurred a while back Grant Robertson responded with a weary ‘not again’.
Covid, says Geoffrey Palmer “had an enormous effect on the system of government.”
And what made it worse was that the “pandemic produced a loss of social cohesion… That social cohesion has to be recovered, or you get dangers to your democratic future. And that really comes down to the central democratic institution in New Zealand, which is Parliament.”
A protestor during the final conflagration that ended the occupation of Parliament's grounds. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
Colossus needs more MPs watching it
One of Sir Geoffrey’s chief contentions is that Parliament is too small and weak to keep an effective watch on the Government.
“The Parliament in New Zealand is rather a strange beast, because it has 120 members. It has no upper house. We live in a country with few ‘checks and balances’. The result of that is that the Government dominates the Parliament, like a colossus.”
The problem, says Sir Geoffrey, is too few MPs.
Of the current 120 MPs, a quarter (28) are the Executive that needs to be watched. And once you also remove the Speaker's team, the backbench MPs that belong to governing parties, and the opposition MPs focused on party admin and leadership, you are left with about 45 MPs charged with the bulk of governance over the 28 ministers, the thousands of government officials across dozens of departments, and billions in spending.
And only a portion of those MPs arrive with the necessary skill, care or determination to effectively carry out that task.
It’s not a fair fight. Journalists used to provide some backstop, but media are so weakened they now often rely on political parties and disinformation-riddled social media to feed them dirt and stories.
“The difficulty,” says Palmer “is that the Westminster system of government is based on a very clear theory: that the Executive Government (the ministers and the public servants) are accountable to the Parliament. But they can't be accountable …if there aren't enough members to do the work.”
“The MPs in New Zealand are drastically overworked. They do not have enough time to do all the work that is on [Parliament’s list of legislation to debate], far less than to look closely at the [budget] appropriations, which are enormous sums of money these days. And they have …to be considered quite rapidly. Nobody could do that job effectively, even if they were completely free to work on it, and do nothing else.”
Geoffrey Palmer would increase the number of MPs to (at least) 150. I have asked MPs about increasing the number of MPs and they generally agree it is necessary, but fear a public backlash.
Parliament is meant to wrap around the Executive but in reality the Beehive over-matches it. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
Sir Geoffrey would also streamline government somewhat, by reducing the number of ministers and portfolios. “I would cap it at 20.” He thinks a smaller cabinet would be more efficient.
“Cabinet”, he says “is an instrument of coordination. That is what it is for. And you can't coordinate if there's so much diverse activity going on all around the place… and the departments tend to be siloed… Some of the departments have to look after seven or eight portfolios.”
Stronger committees
Geoffrey Palmer would not bring back the upper house which was disestablished by the National Party in the 1950s. He believes select committees are more effective than an upper house and should be resourced and strengthened.
“What you should do is to have much better select committee procedures, much more support to the select committees to ask the questions that need to be asked. They need to have more access to experts than they get. And they need to hold the Government to account more rigorously.”
When he began in Parliament, ministers were members of the select committees tasked with keeping them accountable (which is bonkers). Sir Geoffrey did away with that when he reformed the select committee system as Leader of the House in the 1980s. But he thinks that committees are still under-powered and ministers’ officials still have too much sway.
“It worked quite well to begin with, but it has degraded… The departments have a monopoly on the advice [given to select committees] for the most part. And [departments are] part of the executive. The executive is so big and so powerful.”
His answers to this problem include bigger committees (possible because of the greater number of MPs); more dedicated membership and expertise (again possible with more MPs); and more resourcing for Parliament.
He would also run extended public hearings and inquiries inside the Legislative Council Chamber (the empty upper house debating chamber). That would allow combined committees to tackle major issues and legislation and attract more public attention.
In an example of what Palmer suggests; here, very unusually, two select committees hold a combined hearing in the Council Chamber during the previous Parliament. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
Then there is the sheer amount of legislation.
“[Parliament] is too small to do the work that it has to do in a modern democracy. You need as much law as a much bigger country.”
Geoffrey Palmer also says the committee system has also been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work. He doesn’t blame the MPs. There is simply too much work, not enough people and, recently, too many disasters.
“No one has had to deal with as much as that ever before.”
Palmer's vision of an empowered Parliament also includes giving Parliament more cash to buy expertise and advice.
“There is some capacity to get independent advice, but not enough. There's no resources, the resources all go to the Executive. The Executive is enormous because of it.”
For example, if a select committee wants advice on how to best handle a highly technical piece of legislation it is reviewing, the cheapest and easiest advice they can get is from… the staff of the minister whose bill they are reviewing; experts that developed the policy and the bill. But independent advice means paying outside experts, and Parliament is pretty poor.
Rethinking the mechanisms
Sir Geoffrey says it’s time we re-imagined how law is even passed.
“The pattern in New Zealand for changing the law hasn't changed much since the 1860s. You have three readings and the committee stage.”
He also wants it to be less peek-a-boo.
“The Government introduces a bill, no one knows what's going to be in the bill until it is introduced. It’s designed in secret by the Executive Government. And then when it's found to have troubles, you have to amend it later. It would be far better if you worked out the detail in advance.”
Geoffrey Palmer created the Law Commission (which advises government on legislating), and later served as its president.
“I found that the methods at the Law Commission were far better than those of the Executive Government for making laws. First of all, you did research, you wrote an issues paper, you sent it out for consultation, then you took consultation on it, then you decided what the policy was, then you would draft it. And you would put it out. Making law in secret is not a good way to do it.”
Ministers would argue that that method has a lot in common with how modern ministries develop law but with consultation that is typically less open-slather.
An approach tried occasionally is the exposure draft, as David Parker did with early releases of a draft Resource Management bill. It gave him a lot of useful feedback, but it also created an even longer window for political attack.
Geoffrey Palmer’s response to that problem is hopeful at best.
“Well, the problem is the Westminster system is based on adversarial politics, we have to get away from that.”
He points to Scandinavian Parliaments as demonstrating an alternative.
“They have much higher levels of consensus than we manage to secure here, because the adversarial system encourages knockdown, drag-out political fights, that do nothing good for policy.”
Sir Geoffrey Palmer in his office at the Victoria University of Wellington Law School. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
Electoral change
We also discussed wider changes. Geoffrey Palmer does not think small. For starters Palmer would lengthen the electoral cycle, and most, maybe all MPs would agree on this.
“You cannot have general elections every three years and then say that you're going to have an enduring policy on climate change, or an enduring policy on health reforms.”
He would also make voting compulsory, like it is in Australia.
He would make other changes too. He would heavily restrict political funding, in line with recommendations from the Independent Review of the Electoral System.
“It's very easy to corrupt the political system by money. The Independent Review… wants to restrict very, very heavily, campaign contributions to political parties. No individual (they recommend) will be allowed to give more than $30,000 in any electoral cycle. That will be capped. No companies can make contributions, and no other organisations can either. And I think that is entirely a sound protection, but I'm sure it will have trouble getting through.”
He points out that while democracy is crucial, there are lots of ways to do it.
“Democracy is a protean concept. It has many different features. No one single model of democracy exists, there are many varieties.”
This statement is in response to a suggestion I passed on that maybe some issues are too difficult to solve democratically. His response is stern. If a version of democracy isn’t working, reform it, don’t abandon it.
Educating for democracy
I get the sense that Geoffrey Palmer found the 2022 Parliamentary occupation incredibly dispiriting. It wasn’t the mess, or the eventual violence, it was the curated ignorance.
Protestors had a certainty in their beliefs, be they ever so far from reality. In the face of fear, quite ordinary people had sought reassurance and found disinformation. Conversations with them demonstrated that misunderstandings were protected with resilient cognitive dissonance.
He saw it up close. They were camped right downstairs.
“There were tents outside on the lawn out front [of the law school], one outside here had a family with two children in the tent. That event was fueled by conspiracy theory.”
“[The protest showed that] New Zealand is not immune from this. Our sense of cohesion can be damaged as easily as anyone else’s. If you're going to preserve your sense of community and togetherness, you've got to do something about disinformation.”
“You have to teach people to be skeptical about it. It’s one of the things that I am very hot on, and why I wrote Democracy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, a Survival Guide with my granddaughter.”
Photo: THWUP
“You need to teach people …how the existing complex system works, so they can navigate their way around it. There is no instruction in New Zealand schools on civics. There needs to be. It’s just as important as New Zealand history, but there's been a reluctance to do it because people think it's teaching politics. It isn't. It's teaching how governance works, how the decisions are taken, who takes them, who has the power, who doesn't.
“That's information you must have if you're going to survive in a democratic country. And it's also information that you must propagate, if you want your democracy to thrive and flourish.”
When I turn my recorder off we continue chatting through the world’s many ills and the complexity of possible solutions. Sir Geoffrey is quite indefatigable in his mission to vouchsafe democracy.
He is in the right place for it, adding heft to the mission of shaping the next generation. He is not alone in this school’s cast of luminaries either. As I pack up and make my way back down the Law School’s glorious floating wooden staircase and out into the world, Sir Geoffrey is striding off down the corridor for a chat over morning tea with another of his generation’s great legal minds Sir Ken Keith (Privy Council, Supreme Court and International Court of Justice). After all, the staff room Gingernuts aren’t going to eat themselves.
