In September 2025, the Law Society made a submission to Parliament’s Standing Orders Select Committee on the Review of Standing Orders 2026. Our submission identified matters affecting the House’s consideration of legislation and raised rule of law concerns.
This week, the Standing Orders Committee has published its final report, and we are pleased to see some recommended amendments touching on matters that we raised.
The Law Society has, over the years, observed increasing deficiencies in Parliament’s legislative processes. We drew our 2025 report Strengthening the rule of law in Aotearoa New Zealand (June 2025) to the Committee’s attention and noted the potential of these deficiencies to weaken the rule of law. We suggested matters which could be addressed through amendments to the Standing Orders, including:
The Standing Orders Committee’s report identifies an issue with the dramatic increase in select committee submissions since 2020. Numbers of submissions are “exceeding members’ capacity to give them meaningful consideration. High volumes of submissions risk drowning out considered and informative submissions.”
The report considers the use of AI by Committee members, staff, and departmental advisers. It gives guidance around the future use of AI to process and analyse public submissions, noting “strong expectations” that:
The Committee has also noted that the use of AI may involve developing principles, potentially along the lines of those proposed by the Law Society. To this end, the Committee has further recommended that the Standing Orders Committee in the next term of Parliament should receive a briefing on the use of AI in summarising submissions.
Select committee processes are also to be guided by a new purpose statement, affirming that the primary purpose of select committee consideration is ensuring that a bill would result in high-quality legislation. “High-quality legislation” means that legislation should be fit for purpose, constitutionally sound, and accessible (ie, easy to find, navigate and understand). Being informed of public views is “another purpose” of the select committee process. The report notes that this may assist in decisions on who will be heard.
A specialist Legislative Scrutiny Committee is to be established, to assist the House to make high-quality legislation. This Committee will undertake “consideration in detail” of some bills in lieu of committee of the whole House. It may also examine bills that are before other select committees and report to them on legislative quality matters.
While the Committee’s amendments do not spell out the detail of how the latter process is intended to work, the report notes that it would follow a similar process to that employed by the Regulations Review Committee in reporting to committees on bills that contain powers to make secondary legislation.
The report notes that expediting the legislative process, particularly through the use of urgency, was a prominent theme in submissions that the Committee received. Submitters were concerned about omitting or limiting select committee consideration.
In response, the Committee recommends that, after a bill is read a first time under urgency, it stands referred to a select committee, unless the member in charge moves that the bill be set down immediately for second reading and “informs the House with some particularity” of the circumstances that warrant omitting select committee consideration.
It further notes that, in recent times, reduced report-back deadlines have become “even more prevalent” and “the reasons behind these shortened report-back dates have not always been clear”.
The Committee reiterates guidelines regarding the time available to make submissions, set out by the Standing Orders Committee in 2017, indicating that a submission period of six weeks should be the standard where possible.
In addition, a member in charge of a bill will be required to inform the House with some particularity of the circumstances that warrant the proposal for a shortened time for the committee’s report of less than six months.
The Regulatory Standards Act 2025 requires the Government to prepare consistency accountability statements for “Government amendments”. The Committee recommends defining “Government amendment” to mean an Amendment Paper that contains an amendment or amendments to a Government bill, and is in the name of a Minister.
The Committee heard from submitters that there should be a formal procedure or required process for identifying and addressing Bill of Rights Act inconsistencies that may arise from amendments to bills made during the legislative process. It notes that it wrote to the Attorney-General to seek his views. Following advice from the Attorney-General that he does not consider changes to the current practices to be “necessary or appropriate”, no changes are recommended.
The report notes that following an initial (December 2024) discussion about the broader role tikanga Māori could have in the proceedings of the House, at this point it is considered that the best way to progress this matter would be for Parliamentary agencies to develop proposals for ways to reflect tikanga in parliamentary practice and bring those proposals to the Standing Orders Committee in the next term of Parliament.
The Law Society’s submission to the Standing Orders Committee noted that the Legislation Amendment Bill (now Act) would broaden the purposes of revision bills and enable them to be used as a mechanism for making substantive legislative changes. The submission identified that the streamlined process in the Standing Orders for considering and passing revision bills may no longer be suitable for revision bills which propose substantive amendments to legislation.
The Law Society therefore welcomes the Standing Orders Committee’s recommendation to refer all revision bills to the proposed Legislative Scrutiny Committee for select committee consideration, and, after their second reading, refer those bills back to the Legislative Scrutiny Committee for consideration in detail.
Read the Law Society’s submission