This morning, those NZers who’d arranged time off work and paid their way to Wellington so they could make submissions to Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Select Committee must have been disappointed to find that the meeting was cancelled as inquorate.

They were presumably unaware that the three National MPs (David Carter, Andrew Bailey and Andrew Falloon) standing in the corridor with them outside the committee room were in the corridor for the specific purpose of making the meeting inquorate and thus wasting the submitters’ time, effort and money.  I’ve tried to understand just how amoral and lacking in both integrity and basic human empathy you would have to be to stand there among those submitters knowing how you were shafting them, but can’t.

That said, it doesn’t surprise me that Carter, the worst Speaker of the NZ House of Representatives in my 40 years of adult memory, would stoop so low as to instigate something like this.  To get an idea of his level of personal integrity, think back to his defence as Speaker of John Key accusing the Opposition of supporting rapists, which involved him ejecting from the Chamber all the female MPs who rose to object on the grounds that they were themselves victims of rape or sexual abuse.  If there’s been a lower point in NZ parliaments of the last few decades I’m unaware of it.

Carter tried to claim he was making some kind of political stand against Labour MPs’ laziness:

Carter said National had “watched the tardiness of MPs on this select committee for all of last year”. 

“They are not treating the select committee process with respect, they don’t do their paperwork or reading before they get to the select committee and National is saying it’s not good enough.” 

He said National was sick of carrying the committee, and Government MPs were not treating it seriously.

So, effectively the submitters had their time, effort and money wasted because Carter had a fit of pique. MPs who’d endured his time as Speaker would certainly be familiar with that.