On Thursday afternoons in Parliament, after the Speaker and the Clerk of the House have gone through the proverbial mail and read the notices, the first order of business is a brief preview of the next week’s debates.
It’s called the Business Statement and as this one was the last for the year, you’d expect it to be short. No-one expects much to get done during the last two days at the office.
Labour MP and Leader of the House Chris Hipkins Photo: © VNP / Phil Smith
And yet, Chris Hipkins as Leader of the House (the government’s scheduler of legislation) put forward a surprisingly long list. His opposition shadow, Gerry Brownlee pointed out that there were just nine and a half hours of open debating time available. How were 10 bill readings going to fit?
And Chris Hipkins replied that he had high hopes as MPs had just achieved a week’s work on the Tuesday and another week’s worth on Wednesday. He was right. Parliament’s efficiency this week has been prodigious. Here are the numbers.
Each sitting week Parliament has roughly 13 hours of time set aside for debating legislation.
- Tuesday 5 ½ hours
- Wednesday 4 ½ hours
- Thursday 3 hours
On Tuesday evening the House plowed through seven ‘reading’ debates for different bills, completed a committee stage on an eighth bill, and began a committee stage on a ninth.
Each reading debate can last two hours - so seven of them is a potential total of 14 hours, and a committee stages usually takes hours and can take days. So they achieved well more than a week’s work just on Tuesday.
Shadow Leader of the House, National MP Gerry Brownlee Photo: VNP / Daniela Maoate-Cox
On Wednesday there was an extra morning session for Member’s Bills. In just four hours they managed a committee stage (which has no time limit) plus 4 ½ reading debates - also impressive.
On Wednesday evening (4 ½ hours available), they did even better. Four separate bills completed their committee stage. Remember that that stage has no time limit. And yet there was still time left over to complete reading debates on two other bills. Wow. Just wow!
And then, so we know they’re now in overdrive. The first thing MPs did after Question Time on Thursday was complete a committee stage in less than two minutes.
The final tally for Thursday was a committee stage and four readings in three and a bit hours. The readings alone might have taken two days.
Why so fast?
Well, many of the bills being polished off so fast are not contentious and so after a few ‘we all agree on this one too’, and 'we'll take credit too please' speeches they can move along to the next one. But even non-contentious bills often take longer that they have this week.
Possibly MPs have noted that a certain someone who wears Labour colours with bells on might be making a list of the naughty and the nice - and are doing some final week cramming for extra brownie points. Possibly they are just running out of steam.
But one thing is certain, the Leader of the House is probably wise to fill up the stocking with bills for the final two days - it would be embarrassing to run out of things to talk about.
If you ever want to see where MPs are up to and what they have done there's a handy list of each days' progress available on the Parliament website.
