A whole week dedicated to putting Budget 2025 spending under the microscope means a whole lot of bickering.

Welcome to another edition of scrutiny week. Although our government is always supposed to be acting democratically or whatever, this relatively new process gives parliament’s select committees the chance to put recent spending in Budget 2025 under a microscope, and really scrutinise where we put billions of dollars every year.

The scrutiny job is really on the opposition MPs, who are allowed an arena outside of question time and regular committee hearings to debate with a minister (and ministry officials). For government ministers fronting the scrutiny, it can be an exercise in dancing around questions, playing with patsies from colleagues or casting their minds back to 2017-2023 – perhaps the name “bickering week” might be a more apt title.

There are heated back and forths, the odd revelation, and then the revolving doors of scrutiny spit out another minister. The Spinoff was there to witness at least some of these great moments on Monday and Tuesday.

Social development

Louise Upston appeared only slightly frazzled as she headed into the social services and community committee on Monday afternoon. She was joined by social housing minister Tama Potaka for the first 15 minutes of the hearing, and Labour MP Kieran McAnulty wasted no time trying to bait Potaka into tying rising homelessness to the government’s recent changes to emergency housing gateways. No politician would willingly admit that, so Potaka didn’t.

Instead, the minister played into semantics. “If you are talking about rough sleeping, [the census] also observes that the amount of rough sleeping between 2017 and 2023 increased,” Potaka said.

Later, Labour MP Ginny Andersen questioned Upston on the rise of people on the jobseeker’s benefit, and the minister leaned on a political debate classic: “That’s what we inherited 18 months ago, that’s what we are dealing with.” It was a line Upston came back to later, when Andersen pressed her on rising unemployment. “I accept the conditions that we have inherited,” Upston told her. And again: “We are dealing with the circumstances that we inherited.”

“Oh, come on,” Labour’s Willie Jackson muttered. “You can’t keep blaming us.”

Disability support

There was one revelation from Upston when she spoke as disabilities minister on Monday afternoon: that the Accessibility for New Zealanders Bill – which sought to improve systemic accessibility barriers for the disabled community – has been withdrawn, and that the minister will “not focus on legislation in this term, but instead focus on practical terms”. 

These practical terms are the five areas of education, employment, health, housing and justice identified in the New Zealand Disability Strategy, and Upston promised a fully fledged version of that strategy, focused on these pillars, would be launched later this year.

Regulation

The finance and expenditure committee’s Labour reps – Duncan Webb, Deborah Russell and Megan Woods – came into Tuesday morning’s session with a bone to pick. Musings on the “gradual eroding of our pioneering spirit” in regulation minister David Seymour’s opening remarks made Russell mutter “for fuck’s sake” and scoff with her colleagues, and the Act leader made sure to end his speech with “thank you to those who listened politely”.

Suggestions from Webb that supposed ties between Seymour and the agriculture sector had impacted the regulatory reviews process led the acting prime minister (that’s Seymour while Christopher Luxon is overseas) to claim that he was “the most urban MP in New Zealand”. “My main interaction with the dairy industry is with what we call a flat white, and when I go and visit farm animals – it’s usually sheep in Cornwall Park.”

There was a stumble when Seymour confused Green MP Francisco Hernandez with his colleague Lawrence Xu-Nan (“you’re both studious and articulate”). Then on the topic of flour dust standards, after Webb asserted the minister was “making shit up” by fudging numbers, Seymour had a different perspective: “Well, I think you could argue that it’s something that is not precise.” And on comments from Webb that the Act Party had been working too closely with “lobby group” The New Zealand Initiative, Seymour replied “actually, they’re a thinktank”.

It was a tense morning in Bowen House, but Seymour took it in his stride. “We’re going to make a great video on the behaviour of Labour Party MPs,” he warned, “and I think people are gonna decide ‘we don’t want to make them the government next year’.”

Te Tari Whakatau

It was much more well-mannered in select committee room six, the Māori affairs room. Treaty negotiations minister Paul Goldsmith ummed, mmmed and ahhed his way through questions about job losses and Treaty commitments, but it was Te Tari Whakatau deputy chief executive Tui Marsh who had the most illuminating answer of the morning.

When Ginny Andersen asked whether the ministry was finding it “hard to attract Māori” workers given “a number of decisions and positions your government is taking”, Marsh said there was “no doubt” that it was a factor. “The current environment and the mahi itself is challenging, [as well as] being Māori in that mahi [Treaty settlements],” Marsh said. “There are challenges in the way of thinking, there are challenges in the mahi that you have to do with your people.”

On the lighter side, towards the end of the hearing, Goldsmith gave his pitch for a better Northland: “a decent road, and making progress on the Ngāpuhi settlements”.

Racing

Racing minister Winston Peters largely discussed greyhound racing in the governance and administration committee on Tuesday afternoon. On the issue of racing infrastructure and rationalisation, Peters lamented the upkeep of some tracks around the country, and suggested that some local racing bodies should fire their boards and replace them with women. Why? Because “women understand that it’s all entertainment, that is the number one objective now”, Peters explained.

And asked about hurdles in the racing industry, Peters replied: “they’re all in parliament”. 

Foreign affairs

Select committee room five was a crowded house on Tuesday afternoon –  a small delegation from the Solomon Islands arrived behind foreign affairs minister Peters. He told newly minted Labour MP Vanushi Walters (who recently returned to parliament after David Parker’s departure) that the problem with foreign affairs was that plenty of people had ideas on what should happen, instead of looking at what has happened, after she asked whether Aotearoa might join South Africa in forming a genocide case against Israel.

It was a no to Walters, who frowned throughout the hearing, and when Greens MP Steve Abel suggested recognising Palestine could be a “tool for peace”, Peters responded that “this would be an acceptance of a state of affairs which does not exist”. But, “it’s not my perception that matters”.

Asked whether Aotearoa would strengthen its ties with China (as the prime minister is currently there), Peters encouraged the committee to “think like the Chinese … [some people have] never read Chairman Mao’s books, you don’t survive all those thousands of years because you’re not a clever people. 

“The fact that some of us left there 5,000 years ago – or, two in this room, at least [referring to himself and committee member Peeni Henare] – is neither here nor there, although some people called me a commie when I first said that in 1996.”