Wednesday, 29 November 2023
Business of the house
Standing and sessional orders
Standing and sessional orders
That, as recommended by the Standing Orders Committee’s report on the inclusion of sessional orders and ongoing resolutions in the standing orders, November 2023, this house adopts the proposed amendments to standing and sessional orders as detailed in Appendix A, to come into effect from 1 January 2024.
Deputy Speaker, I thank you, obviously, for all the work that you have done as a member of this committee and in particular for chairing the subcommittee that was tasked with working on points of agreement in terms of sessional orders that could be readily transferred into standing orders. That is what this report delivers for us. Obviously, there is more work to be done, and the Standing Orders Committee will continue to look at perhaps some of the more challenging areas of the sessional orders, where we expect there to be some debate and consultation with other members in the house. But thank you for the role that you play, to the Speaker as well, to all the committee members and to the staff who have helped us to get to this point. I commend it to the house.
James NEWBURY (Brighton) (10:41): Deputy Speaker, I too thank you for your role in the work that we are considering now and also the other members of the committee and the clerks, who did an incredible job. Reforming the standing orders is a hard job. It is a hard job for the Parliament to come together and work out points of agreement. What we are considering now is what you would probably call the very, very non-contentious parts of the sessional orders that can be included in the standing orders – things that all of us recognise as normal parts of our day and the operation of our day and the operation of subsets of our day. What is being included is not controversial in that regard.
I would note just for the record that there is one inclusion, number 18, in relation to the disallowing of pandemic orders and the requirements for a joint sitting. Just on the record I note that this house of course has autonomy in terms of processes to set up that joint sitting, but the Council is yet to do that and set up that process. A number of Council members have noted that that process does not exist in their place in terms of that joint sitting. So though this house has ultimate capacity to set up its own mechanisms to do things, that is lacking in terms of the Council process.
Again I acknowledge the work of all of those involved and do hope that next year we can start looking further at the standing orders in good faith and that we can actually start to work through some of those standing orders in a non-political way. I am a little nervous about it, but I have a genuine hope that we can do that in good faith.
Motion agreed to.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: On indulgence, I also thank the committee and the staff for their work on this, and I believe the Speaker is quite happy with it.