by Russel Norman
A while ago, I posted about this government’s use of urgency to force legislation through parliament. The problem with urgency is that it often means that laws don’t receive the kind of scrutiny they should. So it means you get laws with mistakes and laws that do bad things without ever giving the people a chance to influence them.
To be fair, sometimes urgency is just extending the sitting time of parliament just to get through a backlog but using normal processes. Nonetheless, the amount of time parliament spends in urgency can give some indication of how much the governing parties are trying to subvert the usual checks and balances of parliament.
In the previous post I looked at this parliament compared to the last one, in tems of the amount of time spent under urgency. Some of those commenting asked if I could post the figures for earlier parliaments also. I asked the library to have a go and this is what they came up with (below).
What is shows is that so far this current parliament had gone into urgency more than under the Labour dominated parliaments of 1999-2008. However, I should note that Labour often pushed the Greens to support urgency during the period 1999 – 2008 but we refused on most occasions. But during the period 2002-2005 United Future were happy to oblige with urgency and you can see it in the figures below where Labour used urgency almost as much as National is using it currently.
It’s worth noting that these figures hide the detail. Using urgency to push the Hobbit law through all it’s stages without select cttee scrutiny in the space of 2 days is different to extending parliament’s hours to consider a bill that had otherwise normal select cttee consideration, but this distinction is blurred in these stats.
| Urgency hours 41st to 48th Parliament (2 Nov 2010) | ||||||||
| In the House | Committee of the whole | Total | % of total time | |||||
| 49th Parliament (8 Dec 2008 to 2 Nov 2010) | Sitting hours | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | % of total time |
| Normal | 683 | 54 | 150 | 28 | 834 | 22 | 72.90% | |
| Urgency | 170 | 6 | 140 | 32 | 310 | 38 | 27.10% | |
| Total | 854 | 0 | 291 | 0 | 1145 | 0 | ||
| 48th Parliament (7 Nov 2005 to 3 Oct 2008) | Sitting hours | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | % of total time |
| Normal | 1081 | 55 | 272 | 54 | 1354 | 49 | 90.10% | |
| Urgency | 99 | 27 | 49 | 15 | 148 | 42 | 9.90% | |
| Total | 1181 | 22 | 322 | 9 | 1503 | 31 | ||
| 47th Parliament (26 Aug 2002 to 11 Aug 2005) | Sitting hours | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | % of total time |
| Normal | 1069 | 13 | 346 | 49 | 1416 | 2 | 78.62% | |
| Urgency | 174 | 55 | 210 | 4 | 384 | 59 | 21.38% | |
| Total | 1244 | 8 | 556 | 53 | 1801 | 1 | ||
| 46th Parliament (20 Dec 1999 to 18 Jun 2002) | Sitting hours | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | % of total time |
| Normal | 960 | 14 | 317 | 10 | 1277 | 24 | 86.90% | |
| Urgency | 78 | 54 | 113 | 40 | 192 | 34 | 13.10% | |
| Total | 1039 | 8 | 430 | 50 | 1469 | 58 | ||
| 45th Parliament (12 Dec 1996 to 18 Oct 1999) | Sitting hours | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | % of total time |
| Normal | 977 | 56 | 294 | 14 | 1272 | 10 | 71.75% | |
| Urgency | 320 | 225 | 56 | 545 | 56 | 30.79% | ||
| Total | 1297 | 56 | 475 | 10 | 1773 | 6 | ||
| 44th Parliament (21 Dec 1993 to 6 Sep 1996) | Sitting hours | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | % of total time |
| Normal | 982 | 41 | 239 | 53 | 1222 | 34 | 90.78% | |
| Urgency | 60 | 48 | 63 | 22 | 124 | 10 | 9.22% | |
| Total | 1043 | 29 | 303 | 15 | 1346 | 44 | ||
| 43rd Parliament (22 Jan 1991 to 30 Sep 1993) | Sitting hours | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | % of total time |
| Normal | 1452 | 69.74% | ||||||
| Urgency | 630 | 4 | 30.26% | |||||
| Total | 2082 | 4 | ||||||
| 42nd Parliament (16 Sep 1987 to 6 Sep 1990) | Sitting hours | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | % of total time |
| Normal | 1500 | 40 | 68.62% | |||||
| Urgency | 686 | 10 | 31.38% | |||||
| Total | 2186 | 50 | ||||||
| 41st Parliament (15 Aug 1984 to 21 Jul 1987) | Sitting hours | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | Hours | Minutes | % of total time |
| Normal | 1750 | 50 | 79.65% | |||||
| Urgency | 447 | 23 | 20.35% | |||||
| Total | 2198 | 13 | ||||||
| Sources: Journals of the House and Office of the Clerk | ||||||||
Published in Justice & Democracy by Russel Norman on Sun, November 14th, 2010
Tags: Russel Norman, urgency
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on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Although given the small sample size, its interesting to see that MMP hasn’t really changed how much urgency was used. Of particular interest is that the fractious 44th Parliament actually spent less of its time in urgency than any other! The change to MMP doesn’t really seem to have effected stability at all.
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Although the highly instable (after 1998) 45th Parliament spent nearly a third of its time under urgency.
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I guess the most telling element should be the percentage of bills were passed under urgency.
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The problem with urgency is that it often means that laws don’t receive the kind of scrutiny they should.
Russel,
That’s true, but even when bills go through the select committee process they don’t get the kind of scrutiny they should either. Take for example Paul Quinns disqualification of prisoner legislation (which did the opposite after coming out of select committee), and the Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment bill ( which was substantially rewitten in select committee and now has to have SOPs to fix these amendments to prevent a substandard bill being passed.
The committee of the Whole in some cases is, to some degree, the parliamentary scrutiny – of bills fixed up by SOPs. And the public, generally, does not have a say on a bill that comes out of select committee.
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Thanks Russel – chart version of the library info here; http://dimpost.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/urgency.png
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