There was an uproar recent over a petition open for signatures at Parliament.
The petition request was seen as implicitly racist. It being on Parliament’s website (among hundreds of e-petitions) was interpreted as support, agreement, encouragement even.
So, does hosting a petition infer legitimacy? It’s an interesting question, and a very new problem. It also requires a little background.
A few of the petitions currently open for signatures at the Parliament website. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
A little background
A petition is a request from the public to the House of Representatives to carry out a specific action.
They used to be collected on paper and given to an MP to formally present. This can still be done, but it is now more usual to create a petition on the Parliament site, which is also where you go to sign them.
But initiating a petition is not the same as petitioning Parliament. You still have to get an MP to agree to table your finished petition for you. Many petitions are never tabled.
Is hosting a petition supporting it?
No. The dozens of petitions on the Parliament website across a vast range of topics. Have a browse - you may think some reasonable, others may strike you as utterly bonkers. Not everyone will agree which are which.
Some are diametrically opposed. While one wants concealed weapons, another would ban all weapons. While one would ban firework sales, another would expand them.
It’s hard to see hosting petitions as supporting them if the pleas cancel each other out. Either Parliament hosting petitions signifies nothing or Parliament really can’t make it’s mind up.
Strictly speaking Parliament never supports or rejects any petition. Parliament doesn’t support anything without a vote, and petitions never get voted on. If tabled they get considered by a select committee, but Parliament as a whole never gets to gauge its opinion on a petition unless one prompts a bill to be written (which has happened).
Gay rights petition organiser Wiremu Demchick started a petition asking for pardons for prosecuted gay men. His petition sparked a formal apology and a law enabling pardons. Photo: RNZ / Alexander Robertson
What if a petition is offensive?
There are rules about petitions:
-
A petition must be a last resort (after all other formal remedies have been exhausted).
-
A petition “must be respectful and moderate in its language.”
The rules don’t deal with appropriate subject matter. While this may seem strange, I can imagine a few possible reasons for it.
-
Parliament has no limits on what it can discuss or address, so limits on what it can be asked to consider might be seen as an impingement on this.
-
The people that organise e-petitions are not MPs, they are clerks from the House’s secretariat. MPs may not want clerks deciding what the public can ask them. Certainly the clerks can’t make up new rules.
-
The petition rules haven’t changed since e-petitions were introduced last year, so this is still something of a settling-in period.
-
Possibly no-one has proposed a petition so offensive in the last year that a new rule was deemed necessary.
-
Hate-speech style rules are not easy to write and can cause unexpected harm. Once, rules to outlaw obscene petitions would have banned requests to legalise same sex relationships.
Many of the petitions initiated will be offensive to somebody, but are the strongly held beliefs of someone else. Recent petitions include a plea to ban all religion, to outlaw all private possession of firearms, to stop all mental health treatment, to reintroduce the death penalty, to ban homosexuality, to allow three person civil partnerships, to permit entrapment by the police, and to legalise consensual adult incest.
Which of those would you ban and how would you write the rule to do so?
Not all petitions are offensive or trivial. The most famous petition in New Zealand is also one of the largest - for women's suffrage. Another one that also (narrowly) became law. Of course some people at the time thought the idea of women voting was obscene. Photo: VNP / Daniela Maoate-Cox
So are there no safeguards?
There is one very big one. Initiating a petition achieves nothing. It carries no more weight than ranting in the Youtube comments.
It’s not initiating a petition that counts, it’s presenting it.
As far as the House of Representatives is concerned a petition doesn’t exist until its creator finds an MP willing to present it to the House. They don’t have to support it, or defend it, but they will be associated with it.
No wise MP would agree to table anything they believed was offensive. So a petition that is particularly bizarre, offensive is likely to wither on the vine. It would never reach Parliament, would never be tabled, and never discussed
That doesn’t rule out every petition that might be interpreted as racist, bigoted or offensive though. But roughly speaking we shouldn’t expect tabled petitions to fall far beyond the level of prejudice held by MPs.
And MPs, for better or worse are a representative sample of all of us. So their views will also be a subset of the views of the wider community.
Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
No holds barred
There is another thing to keep in mind when thinking about this.
There are few rules about what MPs can say and discuss in the House. They have something called privilege - which includes a legal right to say almost anything without fear of prosecution.
So Parliament has special licence to debate, to speak its mind honestly and without fear. And in doing so MPs are able to display their better angels (and reveal their worst).
Petitions are one place we get an opportunity to feed into that debate, and reveal the same about ourselves.
