Talk:Stan Whitehead

End of his tenure as Speaker

When User:Kiwichris made his very good edit expanding this article a few weeks ago, there was one thing that I was a bit unsure about - the news article saying that Whitehead was still legally Speaker when he died, which is the basis for showing his tenure ending then. This contradicts the Speaker article which uses the dissolution date of the 37th Parliament. I've just reverted an edit to the article that denoted Whitehead as dying in office, which is obviously incompatible with the dissolution date, and that brought the matter to mind again.

The list in the Speaker article isn't actually well referenced, but I would guess that it's based on Wilson's Parliamentary Record, which I really wish I had to hand (as is often the case with these matters). After some digging through old legislation and Hansard, I'm not much clearer on what the cited article's statement could be based on. Since the passage of the Constitution Act in 1986 there's been an explicit statement in legislation that the Speaker remains in office after the dissolution, which is reflected in changes that I made to the dates in the list of Speakers a while back, but I can't find anything that suggests this was the case earlier.

I've also delved into the archives of the NZ Gazette to see what references there were to a Speaker in the notifications of other vacancies in the large gaps that used to happen between a general election and the opening of Parliament. The instance closest in time to this one is that of the Marlborough electorate in 1969-70. The Speaker in the previous Parliament (Roy Jack) had been re-elected as an MP, and his party was continuing in government, so he could be expected to chosen as Speaker again when the new Parliament assembled. Nevertheless, the Governor-General gave the notification of vacancy, in what seems to have been the standard form used where there was no Speaker. The same applies with the Hurunui vacancy of early 1961 (where the previous Speaker had been returned to Parliament, but the government had changed), and the multiple vacancies of early 1967 (where the previous Speaker had retired from Parliament). In short, there's no suggestion that the previous Speaker would give the notification in these circumstances, and hence no suggestion that they legally remained in office after the dissolution.

Not having seen the article that Kiwichris used, I don't know precisely how it explains the situation for filling the vacancy after Whitehead's death, but I can't find anything to suggest that he was still Speaker when he died. Assuming that Wilson does give the dissolution date for the end of his tenure, I would suggest that on balance this article should go with that. MW691 (talk) 10:52, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Not sure how useful it will be for you, but the full quote from the Dominion article is:

“ To call a by-election after the death of the Speaker, the Governor-General acts as Speaker to gazette a notice of the vacancy as soon as possible after the Speaker's death−in this case, probably Monday. Once the vacancy has been gazetted, the Governor-General directs the Clerk of the Writs (the secretary of Internal Affairs, Sir Patrick O'Dea) to issue a further writ for a by-election. The clerk must issue the writ 'as soon as reasonably practicable' − normally within 21 days, but with a possible extension of another 21 days at the direction of the executive council, in unusual circumstances. ”

The law around this may have changed over time which may explain differences prior/since. Kiwichris (talk) 11:43, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, it is helpful to see that. I've no doubt that such a process would apply in the event of the death of a sitting Speaker (as happened a couple of years later with Roy Jack). But it doesn't make it any clearer that Whitehead was in fact the legal Speaker when he died - or to put it another way, that if any other MP had died, he would have been the one giving the notice, rather than the Governor-General. As I mentioned above, in the similar circumstances of 1970 the G-G took the action even though there was a previous Speaker available. I did consider the possibility of a law change in the years between that vacancy and this one, so I've checked all the Electoral Amendment Acts passed between 1970 and 1975 on nzlii.org, and I can't find any trace of that happening.

I'm interested in how exactly the Dominion refers to Whitehead. I see in the references for this page that the title of the article on his funeral has "former Speaker." Obviously once he was dead he was definitely not the current Speaker, but how was he described at the point of death - was it something like "the Speaker has died..."?

This whole thing makes me wish even more that Wilson's book was available online, to check its dates and also whether it says anything about when a Speaker's tenure ends. Hopefully I'll be able to access it again soon. MW691 (talk) 11:25, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

To add even more words to this matter, I've accidentally stumbled upon an interesting remark by Geoffrey Palmer in 1985, during the introduction of the Parliamentary Service Bill (which was part of his reforms placing the Speaker in charge of the whole running of Parliament, as opposed to just presiding over sittings of the House). He said "...there are already provisions in the Legislature Act as a result of a decision in the Court of Appeal some years ago that the Speaker continues in office" in response to Jim McLay querying how a sitting Speaker could remain chair of the proposed Parliamentary Service Commission until the opening of a new Parliament in the event that they had been defeated at the election (as had happened to Speaker Harrison the previous year). Court of Appeal decisions are archived on nzlii.org, but I've failed to find any trace of this one, or any reference to it elsewhere. I also can't find a period appropriate version of the old Legislature Act - after the original text from 1908, there's nothing until 2007, by which time it had been almost entirely repealed except for the sections on parliamentary privilege.

In searching for references to the Speaker in the acts database, I did find that it was set in law all the way back to 1867, and repeated in subsequent acts up to 1979, that for the purposes of remuneration the Speaker and the Chairman of Committees were defined as continuing in office until the first meeting of the next Parliament. But the fact that it was specified in that sense would suggest that it wasn't the case in other senses. This doesn't get any clearer, I'm afraid. MW691 (talk) 17:37, 2 July 2021 (UTC)