It was Tuesday at 11.57pm on Wednesday, when exhausted MPs went home for the night (Parliament usually wraps up at 10pm on Wednesdays), and it was still Tuesday at 11.55pm on Thursday when an even more exhausted crop of MPs schlepped it back to their Wellington flats.
If they’re unlucky, it might still be Tuesday on Saturday too.
Parliament has been in urgency since Tuesday, when it passed a bill preventing greyhound trainers from euthanising dogs in response to the Government’s greyhound ban. As is the norm in Parliament when sitting in urgency, the dates on House clocks and in the recorded Hansard do not change.
There was agreement from across the House that the greyhound ban go through under urgency to prevent the mass killing of greyhounds following the ban’s announcement. That agreement broke down as the Government kept the House in urgency to debate a raft of legislation before Christmas, including changes to employment law to deduct pay for partial strikes, the Fast-track bill, a ban on stalking, and the reinstatement of the Three Strikes sentencing regime.
Pre-Christmas urgency is fairly standard — the last Labour Government used it too. Governments like to rush through as much as they can before the summer recess.
Urgency puts the opposition in a bit of a bind. If MPs made short speeches, not using up their allotted times, or didn’t take calls at all, everyone could pack up, go home, see their kids and get some sleep.
You can see the temptation. Resistance is futile — the Government has the numbers to do whatever it wants and all the opposition can do is slow things down — however, simply giving up and going home suggests to voters you don’t really care all that much about stopping the Government from carrying out its agenda.
So MPs stay in the chamber talking down the clock until midnight when they can go home.
They filibuster and filibuster often debating — with practiced earnestness — inane things like a bill’s title in an attempt to wear the other side down. The best the opposition can do is get an exhausted government to make a mistake.
Sometimes this actually happens. Act leader David Seymour succeeded in an effort to nix safe areas from an abortion bill on free speech grounds in 2020. He didn’t have the numbers, but supporters of safe areas were almost literally asleep at the wheel and forgot to call for a personal vote (safe areas were re-inserted in the next Parliament in a slightly different form).
And so MPs filibuster and filibuster and filibuster, often debating things as inane as a bill’s title, each side desperate to catch the other out.
Labour, yesterday, sought to change the title of the Fast-track bill to the “Fast-track Public and Private Benefits Bill”, despite not supporting the law in any way. It’s a clever ruse to take up time, which every party uses.
Senior MPs often make their excuses and leave House duty for their juniors. Urgency is a great opportunity for new MPs to show they’re tuned in. National’s James Meager is keeping an eye on things for his side. Labour’s Arena Williams is cleverly stringing the Government out for Labour.
It gets worse. While MPs don’t need to be in the chamber until their rostered “House duty” begins, they do need to be on the Parliament precinct in order for their votes to count.
It means that barring a couple of breaks, MPs are confined to Parliament, missing out on the four certifiably “good days” Wellington has had since the House went into urgency on Tuesday. For Labour, it’s all been a bit much, by Friday, the party was casting 22 votes, meaning it didn’t have a full caucus of MPs on precinct for whom votes could be cast. According to the party, some MPs had electorate work to attend to and went home.
Pity them all.
Pity a detained Barbara Edmonds, who took to Instagram to post an image of her laptop, precariously perched on a packet of scorched almonds and the latest report from the Helen Clark foundation, showing a livestream of her kids competing in the kī-o-rahi nationals just over the hill in Wainouiomata.
“So what’s a mama MP to do when the head and heart are in two places?!” she said.
Worse still, for the first Christmas in living memory, Parliament is without a bar, thanks to the decision to rip out Pickwicks (better known by it’s internal room number “3.2″) in the interest of squeezing in more ministerial office space. Tiptoeing over the road to the Backbencher would mean MPs’ votes not counting, meaning thirsty MPs have to resort to a pre-Christmas clear out of their office liquor cabinets.
There is the potential for the House to sit during the Press Gallery’s Christmas Party next Wednesday, with MPs ducking in and out of the party as their speaking requirements require. It’ll make for some fascinating Hansard to read the next morning. Perhaps for that reason, most expect some clemency from the Government, allowing the House to rise right before the party starts.
