Well done Trevor

From Hansard:

However, at present, there are 172 written questions that have not received a final reply. Many of the replies were due in December, but one was due in May last year. It appears that written questions are not working as they were supposed to as an accountability mechanism, so I intend to award the Opposition 10 additional supplementary questions each day until the end of this sitting block or until all the questions due last year have received their final replies—whichever comes first. I will review the situation again in the next sitting period.

That’s a huge and consequential slap to the Government. Very firm action by the Speaker.

CHRIS HIPKINS (Leader of the House): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Anticipating this issue would come up, my office contacted your office last week to find out how many questions you still had concerns about and was told by your office that you would not supply that information. It’s very difficult for me as the Leader of the House to follow up and ensure that those questions are answered if you will not supply me with that information.
SPEAKER: Just being very directly responsive to the member, I do not regard it as my responsibility to ensure that ministerial offices are well managed. I indicated through my office to the member’s office that there were many Ministers involved—very close to the majority of Ministers involved—and that the warning to get up to date should be a general one rather than directed at the specific individual Ministers.
If Ministers’ record-keeping systems are not good enough to know that they have overdue questions, then I think the Minister responsible for Ministerial Services should do some sort of review of their offices to make them more efficient.

And a big face slap to Chris Hipkins who basically has said that the offices are so dysfunctional they don’t even know which questions are overdue. Considering all questions are online, it should be trivial to find out.

No Right Turn notes:

Ministers playing bullshit games over written questions has been a theme of this government right from the beginning. And they have been repeatedly called up on it by the Speaker. In the process, they make work for themselves and bring parliament and the political process into contempt. But that’s what happens when you have a government of childish, petty control-freaks.

What a very apt description.