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28 SEPTEMBER 2008
AGENDA
Presented by RAWDON CHRISTIE
RAWDON Since 1984 Margaret Wilson has been a key figure in the New Zealand Labour Party first as a left leading President during the market reforms of the Lange government and then since 1999 as a member of Helen Clark's government. To the surprise of many this highly partisan politician became Speaker three years ago and perhaps predictably the former and future law professor immediately began to apply her analytical mind to the way parliament works. Now she's called for order for the last time and she's soon off to Waikato University and joins me now. Good morning, you started your valedictory speech this week by saying sorry to ruin everyone's fun, so how thankless is the job of speaker?
MARGARET WILSON – Speaker of the House
I think it probably is quite a difficult job, it's the job of all referees where it is extremely important you do have to act impartially, but everyone sees you in a different light, in other words you only act impartially if you agree with them. So somehow over a period of time I think you have to build up some credibility and I like to think that’s what I did.
RAWDON So why did you do the job, you don’t get the opportunity to speak, it's a hard thankless task?
MARGARET I think for me the attraction was that being a constitutional lawyer it seemed to me it would be a really unique opportunity to find out how parliament worked in that context. Of course the irony was much of my time is not spent in the House it's actually spent out of the House on administration and if I'd probably done due diligence on the job I wouldn’t have taken it if I'd realised in fact that much of my time has been about reform of parliamentary service.
RAWDON So what's been your biggest achievement in your eyes?
MARGARET I set myself two goals, one was to make sure parliament was televised from woe to go and hopefully the select committees also, I think that would be extremely important, perhaps moreso than the House, and the second was to make sure that the parliamentary service through its administration became more transparent and accountable and that of course meant members as well.
RAWDON Televising parliament has achieved one thing it's given the general public access to parliament various sort of goings on, particularly question time. Now it's pretty offensive on times to a lot of people is it not, now was it not up to you to make sure that this wasn’t gonna be portrayed in that way?
MARGARET I think at the end of the day the Speaker has very few powers to actually make members do what they don’t want to do, and at the end of the day you can ask them to leave the chamber which I do from time to time, that’s normally so the House can then calm down and we can move on, or you could name a member which is actually really a very serious matter and I think only – I didn’t do that during my term. So at the end of the day it's up to the members so you try with a variety of techniques to be able to ensure that the government - because the people elected the government can get their business done but that most importantly the Opposition also has the right to put its point of view and I think you try to get that balance, sometimes you succeed sometimes you don’t, but most of the time it works.
RAWDON What other powers would you have liked?
MARGARET I think that for instance if you ask someone to leave the chamber they should lose the vote, that would be an enormous incentive. I did suggest this to the Standing Orders Committee when we were looking at the rules and there was surprisingly no great enthusiasm or support for it, but I think the penalty should be real not token.
RAWDON Just one final question on question time as such, how damaging do you think it is that a lot of people form their opinion of parliament based on the televised question time that they may watch?
MARGARET I think it's a good question, I think it's very damaging for what it's worth because it is the only time that members by and large behave like that, occasionally in the general debate it gets a little heated and therefore I think the impression that’s given it's like that all the time whereas of course you know 95% of the time members are working extremely hard, often cooperatively in select committees doing a lot of good work, a lot of the debates that sometimes people don’t watch really do show that we're very fortunate the calibre of members we've got.
RAWDON A tough time as Speaker but your career spans a great deal further back, what's been your toughest time in the last sort of quarter of a century or so?
MARGARET Establishing my Canon Law School without a doubt.
RAWDON But within politics?
MARGARET Oh within politics, oh probably being Party President during the 84-87 period where you were sort of characterised as being if you like the opposition to your own government which was a rather difficult job.
RAWDON Yeah because effectively your principles were challenged by the political party of the time which was the Labour Party?
MARGARET Well part of the Labour Party, that was of course the challenge is that you are the parliamentary party and not all of the parliamentary party agreed and then you had the membership party that supported the parliamentary party and not all of them agreed. I certainly did support change there's no question about that, but I think like all change it had to be mediated in terms of who you represent and the support you got and I think it just went too far and that’s when the members reacted. When the members react that’s when the people react and we saw what happened in 1990.
RAWDON So you have to compromise your own values in order to get anything done?
MARGARET Well I think I've always seen it as role. If you undertake a role then you have a responsibility to fulfil the expectations and requirements in that role, so as party president it wasn’t just what Margaret Wilson thought it was actually what the president had to do and my objective there was to keep the Labour Party as a viable organisation, that was my primary objective throughout that period and I think I managed to succeed.
RAWDON Was there also a sense of having to water down the values of that party in order to achieve anything through the political wing, the parliamentary wing.
MARGARET Well I think what I did – it's an interesting question that because I did worry about that, so I instituted an economic debate within the party that went throughout New Zealand through all the membership so that it's not what I was telling them what to do, then when the members started voting again at conferences etc it was there they were taking the party in a different direction.
RAWDON How hard has it been for you in the last nine years involved in parliament and particularly last three years as Speaker, watching the Labour Party effectively move closer and closer to the centre, to effectively start representing the same values as the Opposition on a lot of fronts?
MARGARET Well I think MMP made a fundamental difference in the way in which politics in this country is organised and what the people I think are looking for more is not only representation but participation and therefore you are inevitably when you have to – you have to take on board others points of view, you are going to find you get a compromise. I mean politics after all is the reconciliation of difference, that seems to me to be the essence of what politics is about.
NEVIL Thank you very much Ms Wilson I think you haven’t been able to expand on those views before but I'd like to be a little bit political, you were talking about your advocate of change but in fact what has happened in the last nine years is that on the economic front very little changed but the change was in the constitution area, so I presume you agreed with that general thrust that we should move forward as a country and perhaps is an upper house somewhere going to change the rules of the House?
MARGARET Well taking the last point I don’t see there is any great constituency for an upper house and I think what's happened in New Zealand interestingly is that the select committee system has provided if you like an opportunity that wasn’t there for greater scrutiny of legislation that goes through. It would be an interesting debate what they do. Most of the countries I visit that have upper houses are visibly trying to find ways to dissolve them and there's a constant questioning as to what is actually their role in the whole process of decision making. So I don’t think we are necessarily disadvantaged by not having an upper house.
BEVAN You’ve seen the change during your time of us doing away with the Privy Council, Steve Maharey raised the idea of a republic this week, do you think we'll see a republic in the medium term.
MARGARET Well I think I'm well known for being a supporter of a republic, I don’t see it, however it's for the people to decide it's not seen as a high priority. It'll be interesting for us to see what happens if Australia decides to go in that direction and there seems to be strong bi-partisan support for that agenda again and also what happens to the monarchy in the United Kingdom, and then also how we would have to go about electing a Head of State or appointing a Head of State and therein lies the issue. So I think we're just avoiding the hard issues and they are hard issues, because they're not seen as a priority.
NEVIL Mr Turnbull seems to be soft pedalling that he says it's just not a public issue at all, and so he's more or less put that on the back burner, but do you see any major changes needed in New Zealand over the next five years from a constitutional point of view?
MARGARET No, but I do think we will not be able to move forward until there is probably a greater resolution on the role on the Treaty of Waitangi. The Treaty of Waitangi will in fact preserve the monarchy.
BEVAN Just back on the question time matter, were you disappointed in your Labour colleagues as ministers when some of them took the attitude of making flippant kind of replies during question time, you know this one time when they can be held accountable, and I imagine when you were Minister you probably took that fairly seriously?
MARGARET It's difficult you know, often the answer's reflected the question but people sort of only remember bits of it, I agree with you it is much better to say yes no or maybe and move on and sometimes give more explanation, but as I said in my valedictory question time's not about truth seeking it's about political performance, so if you get a reputation for always being flippant then that’s an assessment on your politics really, so from my point of view yes of course it's disappointing but then the whole process isn't set up in a way that people have an expectation to do so, it's a political contest.
NEVIL This public view that’s based on question time, that sort of thing hasn’t put parliament into good regard, do you think is it a reflection of how difficult it is to manage under the MMP system with lots of noises or is it because people don’t take the censures and other things seriously?
MARGARET I think more of the latter I don’t think MMP makes much difference, most of the smaller parties in fact behave extraordinarily well, if you like the questionable behaviour comes from the main parties and it's like still a first past the post system. My own view is that the whole parliament is set up physically to be adversarial, people sit opposite each other by and large these other two main contestants, if you go to other MMP parliaments they have a totally different configuration where it's actually much more difficult to yell abuse at someone else when you're actually positioned differently physically.
NEVIL So it needs to be redesigned do you think?
MARGARET I think so, and there was an opportunity to do that evidently at the beginning of MMP but that was declined cos we live in an historic building.
NEVIL And we wouldn’t need a code of conduct then?
MARGARET I think you probably eventually the direction is going in some form of code of conduct but the problem with codes of conduct are they're then used politically and you then in themselves don’t actually probably achieve the objectives people would like them to do.
RAWDON Do you think the question time scenario suits MMP or befits MMP, I mean if it's a purely political session of parliament do we get enough MMP in there?
MARGARET Well the system we've got at the moment is based entirely on proportionality and that’s….
RAWDON That’s what I mean so …
MARGARET So they don’t get a lot of opportunity to ask primary questions or supplementaries but there is a market that’s taken place and National gives sometimes its supplementaries to other parties, Labour will give it to others, so it's certainly more of a say than they had without MMP, they weren't there at all, so I think you can say that voice is being heard which wasn’t in the past.
BEVAN Your voice has been heard usually saying one word quite often over the last – while you’ve been Speaker, is that a frustrating process or was there a little tinge of pleasure in being able to call these people to silence and get some order happening?
MARGARET It's never for a minute occurred to me it was pleasurable. I think one is anxious I think more than anything to ensure that people can be heard and I guess the most disappointing thing is the shouting sometimes means people are not heard, and I've said to the members freedom of speech means the freedom to be able to be heard and it's the barracking to ensure that people are silenced in the name of free speech that I found most reprehensible.
RAWDON Advice to your successor?
MARGARET Oh good luck, good luck I'm sure it'll go well.
RAWDON Margaret Wilson thanks very much for joining us this morning.
