Mad at the wrong people

Select committees are for considering evidence, not a public feelings journal

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Duncan Webb’s comments about the Treaty Principles Bill select committee process reflect a sentimental misunderstanding of what that process is actually for. His complaint that some submissions. “including pictures drawn by kids”, won’t be entered into the official parliamentary record is deeply seriousness and doesn’t belong in a serious conversation about legislative procedure.

Select committees are not public scrapbooks. They are not there to preserve every feeling, every drawing, or every slogan - no matter how often repeated. The role is to scrutinise legislation and gather evidence to inform Parliament’s decisions as it makes the decision. They are not polling stations, and they are certainly not meant to be flooded with hundreds of thousands of documents - including a lot of AI slop - as a tactic to bog things down.

Copy-paste campaigns, bots and form-letter templates can produce content at scale and that might make for a good headline, but it’s not aimed at actually improving the law. When a committee is trying to weigh serious questions, it doesn’t help to be buried under thousands of submissions that repeat the same idea or that contribute little more than vague sentiment.

Politicians can and perhaps should consider overall public sentiment, but the way campaigners should attempt to demonstrate that is through the circulation and presentation of a petition.

If Duncan Webb is genuinely upset that some of these submissions weren’t processed, he should be directing his frustration at those who tried to weaponise the submission process into a procedural filibuster. Flooding the zone with noise to slow the committee down and force delays is the problem here. If anything, it’s because of that abuse that the committee was forced to triage what it could reasonably consider.

The mention of children’s drawings is especially telling. It’s not cute—it’s patronising. No one doubts that families care about public issues. But Parliament is not a fridge door. Even if we grant that a crayon drawing by a six-year-old is heartfelt and not a parental contrivance, it is not evidence. It’s a political prop.

There is nothing “appalling” about a select committee choosing not to waste its limited time reading tens of thousands of submissions that add nothing new. And there’s nothing wrong with declining into the permanent record submissions that were not considered.

The committee’s job is to consider material that helps MPs understand the implications of a bill. That means weighing expert input, considered arguments and perspectives that add insight.

The record of a select committee is not meant to be an archive of public sentiment. It exists to document the inputs that actually informed the committee’s deliberations. Entering material after the fact, when the work is already done, is pointless. As I say, the process is not about creating a scrap book of the political history of a matter.

The government has done the right thing. It allowed time for public submissions, it reviewed what it reasonably could, and it avoided being drowned in orchestrated repetition. And to the extent anything crucial was missed, people ought to be mad at the people and groups who encouraged flooding the committee with junk: duplicated text, AI slop and performative outrage. If serious voices were lost in the noise, blame the noise—not the people doing the work.

The response of the government to Webb should be this: grow up. Adults don’t expect Parliament to function like a message board or a memory book. Adults understand that lawmaking is hard, often thankless work that requires focus, discipline and discernment. If we want a serious Parliament, we need to act like serious people.