{"id":555053,"date":"2026-08-01T18:39:31","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T18:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/555053\/"},"modified":"2026-08-01T18:39:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T18:39:31","slug":"mps-riff-on-their-pick-of-parliaments-petitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/555053\/","title":{"rendered":"MPs riff on their pick of Parliament’s petitions"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Parliament has received 689 petitions<\/a>, as of the end of July. That’s nearly nine each sitting week. For those MPs who spoke in a Special Debate on those petitions there were a lot of topics to choose from.<\/p>\n

Special Debates – a recent innovation – are sporadic extra debates, with topics pre-agreed between the parties, covering important committee reports, local issues, and topics of joint concern. In May, for example, there was a debate over online harm to young people.<\/p>\n

This week’s hour of debate<\/a> showed what topics have recently caught the eye of MPs.<\/p>\n

Debating pet petitions<\/p>\n

The House <\/p>\n

Greg O’Connor (Labour: \u014ch\u0101riu) chairs the specialist Petitions Committee<\/a> (which manages all and considers many petitions). He called petitions “a very important part of our democracy.” Across the House, Jenny Marcroft (NZ First) said, “democracy is not a spectator sport.”<\/p>\n

Comparing our petitions approach to Australia’s, O’Connor said “they largely don’t hear from their citizens. They deal with the petitions on their merits, and they’re very much lost in the system.”<\/p>\n

O’Connor said his committee looks at petitions from “outside the political sphere, outside our parties and caucus sphere, and to see just what it is that the petitioner really wants. What is the policy issue …that we can address, and then respond to [the petitioner], perhaps send it off to the relevant minister, and certainly back to Parliament, and get a response where one is called for.”<\/p>\n

As an example of giving every petition due consideration O’Connor talked about dealing with a petition to outlaw chemtrails<\/a> – a US conspiracy theory from the late 1990s that that condensing water vapour trails from aircraft (contrails<\/a>) are chemicals sprayed to subdue populations (or similar).<\/p>\n

The Issues they chose<\/p>\n

Among the issues chosen, Greg Fleming (National: Maungakiekie) focused on the Petitions Committee’s recommendations<\/a> to the government on gambling advertising. He said his too-young-to-legally-gamble son reports that half of the adverts on his YouTube feed are for Betcha – “TAB’s sports betting app, targeting 18-29 year olds”.<\/p>\n

“The reality is that gambling no longer waits for adults to seek it out. Increasingly, it seeks out our young people. It arrives through sport, through gaming, through social media, through the phone and a teenager’s pocket. Advertising is the thread that stitches gambling into all of those parts of a young person’s life, until it simply feels normal. It’s not good.”<\/p>\n

Fleming committed to continue pushing on this issue. He was taken to task by Ingrid Leary (Labour: Taieri) for not having voted against online gambling licence legislation from his own government.<\/p>\n

Leary’s own focus was a petition calling for mental health counselling services to be standard in primary and intermediate schools.<\/p>\n

“Many children have to navigate huge life challenges. For example, abuse, bullying, grief at young ages, and cannot afford the counselling, and support they need. …And the crisis that the petitioner mentions is getting worse, and the children involved are getting younger and younger, particularly in our suicide statistics. We are seeing children [attempting suicide] in New Zealand as young as 12.”<\/p>\n

Celia Wade Brown (Green) focused on calls for fireworks bans, about which there have been numerous petitions for some years. She said the Petitions Committee had considered three different petitions to ban private firework sales.<\/p>\n

“We heard from Fire and Emergency New Zealand, we heard from the Ministry for the Environment, we heard from the SPCA. We were persuaded that the harm to animals, the danger to private property, the nuisance and unpredictability, was just not worth that freedom. I thought we came to a really well argued conclusion. And I am deeply disappointed that this government chose not to<\/a> pursue this recommendation.”<\/p>\n

Cameron Luxton (ACT) focused on the problem of medical staff ignoring advanced care directives despite the Bill of Rights including the right to reject medical treatment.<\/p>\n

“There isn’t a standardised template. There isn’t one agency, one group that oversees this.<\/p>\n

There isn’t a legislative framework describing how end of life, advanced care directives should be managed, handled, and carried through.”<\/p>\n

Luxton noted that finding the correct balance between personal choice and medical judgement is difficult, but that the petitioner had brought a “very important issue that most of us might not have to think about until a loved one or we require it.”<\/p>\n

National’s Dan Bidois (National: Northcote) picked a topic that allowed him to promote a government promise to review legislation around dangerous dogs. The Petitions Committee had considered three different petitions around dog attacks and controls. It suggested a review, but did not recommend<\/a> increasing penalties. Bidois appeared to suggest National wants increased penalties (which could make a review appear slightly pre-determined).<\/p>\n

“Kiwis should feel safe in their community,” Bidois said. “We are concerned for the amount of serious dog attacks in this country, and that dog owners need to be held accountable for their dogs.”<\/p>\n

Phil Twyford (Labour: Te Atut\u016b) chose a petitioner who wanted New Zealand to fulfil its obligations under the 1951 UN genocide convention<\/a>, with actions that included potential sanctions against Israel for a genocide against Gaza.<\/p>\n

“[That] would have amounted to the kind of principled and ethical response that most New Zealanders wanted. But no, not this government, who, by its muted response to the genocide, and also by not extending diplomatic recognition to Palestine, even when Canada, the UK and Australia, did, made New Zealand an outlier among the liberal, the Western liberal democracies we normally line up with.”<\/p>\n

New Zealand First MP Jenny Marcroft chose a petition that allowed her to talk about her Member’s Bill<\/a> to specify legal definitions for two genders. That bill is currently before the Social Services Committee and has received more than 40,000 public submissions. Around 1500 submitters have asked to give evidence in person.<\/p>\n

“To anchor in law biological sex,” Marcroft said, “as a real and meaningful category, because replacing the historic meaning of woman (adult human female), with a new definition based on internal feelings, has seen the term woman begin to lose its political, legal, and moral weight. And the concern is that if that continues, the carefully constructed manipulation of the language, while borrowing the historical force of the word woman, will see the erasure of women as a political class.”<\/p>\n

Many speeches had at least one eye on a constituency or voting bloc. Some electorate MPs included a local aspect as well, but none were as hyper-local as Scott Simpson (National: Coromandel). Simpson focused on a wire barrier erected on a State Highway intersection in his electorate. Built during the night by his own government’s Transport Agency (and by his account), after a promise to stop. He finished with a call echoing from the Brandenburg Gate in 1987.<\/p>\n

“Without wanting to overstate the case, and in the vein of former American President Ronald Reagan, when he was referencing the Berlin Wall, I say to the board of NZTA, ‘Take Down Your Fence’!”<\/p>\n

*RNZ’s The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament’s Office of the Clerk. Enjoy our articles<\/a> or podcast<\/a> at RNZ.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This Parliament has received 689 petitions, as of the end of July. That’s nearly nine each sitting week.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":555054,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-555053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}