Last week it was revealed that more than $300,000 from the public purse was spent in defamation proceedings after the speaker of the New Zealand parliament, Trevor Mallard, wrongly accused a former parliamentary staffer of being a rapist. On Wednesday Mallard fronted up to parliament’s governance and administration committee and apologised to the house and all New Zealanders for his “mistake”, a word he used three times in the first 90 seconds of the hearing.
Reading from a prepared statement, Mallard acknowledged his mistake was in saying that the allegations against the individual, in the context of the 2019 Francis review into bullying and harassment of staff at parliament, amounted to rape, that his understanding of the definition of rape at that time was incorrect and that the alleged conduct did not amount to rape.
As a piece of political theatre, things do not get much better. The Taxpayers Union placed a large cartoon pig mascot holding a sign saying “Taxpayer Invoice” directly behind Mallard so that it appeared in almost every image of him reading his statement.
But while Mallard appeared nervous, his tone contrite, it was very much an act of self-interest; a tactical performance designed to stop the avalanche of bad publicity surrounding Mallard from spoiling the end to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s stellar year.
As speaker, Mallard has more powers than most members of parliament to be able to “ask” to front up to a parliamentary committee in order to put his apology on record. He needed to muster all the resources at his disposal to prove to Ardern that he could perform a mea culpa like other Labour ministers who have made mistakes before him and, unlike most of them, not lose his job.
After his appearance, there are still many unanswered questions. Mallard claims he realised his error 24 hours after making the claim back in 2019. So why did it take 18 months for him to admit he made a mistake? And where is his recognition of the lack of impulse control that led to him say something he quickly regretted?
As speaker, Mallard is New Zealand’s third most important constitutional office holder after the governorgeneral and the prime minister. It would be hard to imagine Ardern or governor general Patsy Reddy losing their cool so badly in public that they were taken to court for defamation.
Both National and ACT have declared they have lost confidence in the speaker and have called for his resignation as they believe he is no longer fit for the role. The prime minister has brushed off their calls as what opposition parties do and said Mallard still had her confidence as speaker. Ardern acknowledged that Mallard had made a mistake. “But does that change my view that he is the right person for the job? No it doesn’t.” The inference is that Mallard hasn’t committed an abuse of power so serious it warrants his dismissal.
So what level of abuse of power would warrant his dismissal? The list of Labour ministers who have also made “mistakes” in the past two years provides a few clues as to the criteria by which Ardern decides who goes and who stays.
For example, in 2018 Clare Curran accepted she had made a mistake failing to declare meetings in her ministerial diary and for this she was stripped of some of her ministerial portfolios. Later, after failing to answer questions in the house about the use of her personal email account for ministerial business, she resigned from all portfolios. In announcing Curran’s decision, Ardern said the “minister wasn’t meeting expectations in the house this week and had been putting a great deal of pressure on herself.” As speaker, Mallard’s error of judgment is arguably a house breach of greater magnitude than Curran’s. Yet Mallard lives to see another day, while Curran walked the gangplank.
What about Iain Lees-Galloway who earlier this year was dismissed from his immigration and workplace relations portfolios after admitting to the prime minister that he had workplace relations with a former staffer, opening himself up to allegations of improperly using his office? Commenting that she had lost confidence in him, Ardern said: “Politics is a place where we do need to maintain standards, and politicians should pay the price for mistakes.” By any standards, falsely accusing a staff member of rape is as much an improper use of office as having consensual workplace relations with a staffer. And yet Mallard, a man who by his own admission should be beyond reproach as speaker, retains Ardern’s confidence, whereas Lees-Galloway paid the ultimate price.
Then there’s the former health minister, David Clark, who was stripped of his associate finance minister portfolio in April and demoted to the bottom of the government’s cabinet rankings after breaching his own Covid-19 lockdown rules – driving 20km to the beach for a walk with his family when the rest of New Zealand was forbidden to do so. Ardern said New Zealanders expected their ministers to uphold the rules that they themselves had set: “He does need to pay a price. He broke the rules.”
Mallard too appears to have broken the government’s own rules. The cabinet manual requires ministers to, at all times, behave in a way that upholds, and is seen to uphold, the highest ethical standards, which includes exercising a professional approach and good judgement in their interactions with the public and officials, and in all their communications, personal and professional.
In her 2019 review of bullying and harassment in the New Zealand parliamentary workplace, Debbie Francis wrote that parliamentary leaders – both managers and elected leaders – must become the more consistently aspirational role models New Zealanders expect them to be. The longer the prime minister continues to protect a man who has breached the standards other ministers have been sacked for, the longer it will take for Francis’ goals to be achieved.