WELLINGTON: Under the scrutiny of a black-robed official and before a hushed audience, a decorative cookie tin rattles like a bingo drum. Inside: the future of New Zealand ‘s laws.
The ceremonial lottery at Parliament, where bills are drawn randomly from what’s known as “the biscuit tin” in local parlance, is a way to ensure every New Zealand legislator has the chance to advance a proposed law, no matter how unpopular their bid. When a rare empty slot opens on Parliament’s agenda, the battered metal cookie tin is produced from a glass case and its solemn and silly rite is hastily arranged.
Inside the faded vessel with a peeling label might be an ambitious social initiative considered too risky for partisan support, a sensible but dull measure to tweak a statute, or a lawmaker’s controversial hobby horse that their party wishes they’d stop talking about. The tin doesn’t judge.
A quirky tin becomes a democratic tool
The quaintly patterned container, bought from a Wellington department store by a Parliament staffer in the early 1990s, might seem like a gag but the ritual selection of bills from it is a serious affair. Where decisions governing which bills are debated by legislators in Parliament are often determined by backroom brokering and subject to political gatekeeping, the cookie tin strikes an egalitarian note.
“We ate the biscuits, got some bingo tokens numbered one through to 90, I think, and that is the way that the random numbers are drawn now, rather than any kind of computer system,” said David Wilson, the Clerk of New Zealand’s House of Representatives. “Which has become quite an iconic part of our democracy.”
An unusual public ritual
Most laws that pass through New Zealand’s Parliament need never enter the ballot. They’re part of the government’s legislative agenda, advanced by senior legislators from ruling parties who already know their proposals will succeed by vote.
But on one day each fortnight that Parliament sits, bills drawn from the cookie tin are debated. On Thursday, with spaces for three new bills suddenly available, Wilson presided over a ballot in Parliament’s library.
A small crowd of staffers and lawmakers watched as the clerk’s colleagues tipped numbered bingo tokens representing each bill into the cookie tin with a flourish, shook the vessel, and drew. Spectators could find out by email which bills had won the lottery, Wilson said.
“I just think they quite like the performance of it,” he said.
All lawmakers who aren’t ministers are permitted to enter one bill at a time into the ballot. It’s drawn by someone who isn’t affiliated to a political party including school students or visitors celebrating birthdays.
So-called members’ bills – and ballot or negotiation systems to select which will advance – are a feature of Westminster parliamentary democracies worldwide. But Wilson did not know of another country with such an unusual ceremony.
Tradition replaces overnight scramble
The ritual began pragmatically, a bid to end a practice that wearied officials before. Once, lawmakers would race to the clerk’s office to submit bills when a spot on the agenda became free, sometimes queuing overnight.
It prompted the purchase of the cookie tin and a tradition that blends dry procedural necessity and New Zealand’s cheerful cultural irreverence. Visitors to Parliament can buy mugs and socks printed with the tin’s distinctive blue pattern at the gift shop.
Cookie tin shapes major laws
The lottery has produced some of New Zealand’s most notable modern laws. Bills legalizing marriage equality and voluntary euthanasia were once drawn from the cookie tin and eventually enacted after their sponsors launched sweeping public campaigns to sway the opinions of their peers.
That was the hope of two lawmakers whose measures were selected from the ballot Thursday and who said they would campaign to rally cross-party support.
Arena Williams will seek a law change forcing greater transparency about the fees associated with international money transfers, which she said would especially benefit working people who send money to their families abroad. It was the second of her measures selected from the tin, improbably good luck for a lawmaker of fewer than five years.
Meanwhile, a “delighted” Tim van de Molen, whose law would prohibit the improper use or disposal of military decorations, was celebrating his first cookie tin victory after seven and a half years in Parliament.
“It’s a quirky part of our system that I think is typically Kiwi,” he said. “It’s a pretty basic sort of system, but she’ll be right. It does the job.”
In New Zealand’s Parliament, a battered cookie tin decides which new laws get debated
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In New Zealand’s Parliament, a battered cookie tin decides which new laws get debated
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
