Parliament’s rules allow governments to add extra sittings once per week, on either a Wednesday or a Thursday morning.
This allows extra legislation to progress without the resort to the rules of urgency; leaving for legislation that is actually urgent.
Currently there are a lot of those extra sittings: last week, this week and for the next wee while to come.
But why now in the bleak midwinter (frosty wind made moan)? And aren’t mornings when Select Committees are supposed to get their work done?
Parliament House and the Beehive wreathed in heavy mist during winter 2019 Photo: © VNP / Phil Smith
Now playing: The clash
Committees can only sit at the same time as the House with special permission. So if there is an extra House sitting most committees get scrapped for the day (or meet for an hour before the House sits and again for an hour again in the lunch break). MPs are apparently incapable of being in two places simultaneously - possibly they’re just not trying hard enough.
Wednesday and Thursday mornings are when select committees meet and do the plethora of things they do (e.g. hearings on legislation, inquiries, petitions, and various kinds of oversight).
Inevitably, extra sittings interfere with all that work.
However, in the ebb-and-flow of legislation there are high and low pressure times for committees. Sometimes there is more demand on the House and relatively less on the committees. Sometimes the Order Paper has oodles of bills just sitting, ready and waiting for a debate.
Financial review hearings
Twice a year Parliament’s dozen specialist subject select committees get drowned in financial review hearings. It happens in the months after the budget is announced, and again when the final accounts come in from a financial year.
During those periods committees are swamped and it would be cruel for the House to steal away mornings from them. It might even look like the Government was interfering with their oversight of it (preventing ministers from having to face committees).
But there are a few months, snuggled in between the Estimates Hearings and Review Hearings when select committees are only typically frantic, rather than crying-out-for-mercy frantic.
An estimates hearing underway at Parliament. Ministers appear before select committees to answer questions on the budget proposal for the next financial year Photo: VNP / Daniela Maoate-Cox
And those months are the perfect time for governments to sneak in a few extra morning sittings of the House, work through some legislative debate and catch up on any backlog of desired law-making.
To pile on the cruelty, these extra sittings also provide more bills to select committees for them to review. We wouldn’t want them running out of work would we?
Why so much fresh legislation now?
Here are a few possible reasons why there is a solid group of fresh new bills ready to debate.
- Traditionally, left-leaning governments tend to be a bit keener to turn new ideas into legislation. This means they need to find more time to get more bills through the House. By contrast conservatively-oriented governments are a tad more cautious about change (it’s in the name).
- Developing and then drafting legislation is actually a very slow process. The genesis of bills getting a first reading now could easily be as far back as the beginning of this Government (about 20 months ago). Or even further. So it’s not surprising to find a new lump of bills coming ready - fresh out of the oven - half way through a term of office.
- Even after a term in office a re-government (with new partners, crises or promises) will typically have fresh things it wants to do, needs to do, or finally can get done. But it takes a while to make them happen (see above).
