What’s the Hurry?

A book was  launched last night regarding the use of urgency by the New Zealand House of Representatives has already resulted in changes to parliamentary procedure.

What’s the Hurry? Urgency in the NZ Legislative Process 1987-2010 (VUP, Wellington, 2011) is the result of a major research project at Victoria University’s Faculty of Law and was funded by the New Zealand Law Foundation. The Project researchers (Claudia Geiringer, Polly Higbee and Professor Elizabeth McLeay) examined the use of urgency in the New Zealand House of Representatives over a 24-year period – from 1987-2010. 

Questions the Project addressed included: what exactly is urgency and why do politicians use it? How much is it used? What factors constrain its use? In particular, to what extent has MMP had an effect on the use of urgency? Why, if at all, should we be worried about urgency, and in what circumstances? How robust is the regulatory framework that governs the use of urgency? Should it be amended and, if so, how?

In essence, urgency enables the government to extend the sitting hours of the House and to prioritise certain items of business to be conducted within those hours. As such, it is an extremely important tool for governments seeking to progress their legislative agendas. On the other hand, urgency also enables governments to dispense with the various stand-down periods (or breathing spaces) between the different stages of the legislative process and, indeed, to dispense with the select committee stage in its entirety. The use of urgency, therefore, raises issues of considerable significance for the quality and integrity of New Zealand’s lawmaking processes. Urgency motions can be a means to foreshorten democratic deliberation – both amongst parliamentarians and with the wider community.

“The Urgency Project found that, during the 24-year period of the study, urgency was relied on with regularity by governments of all stripes,” says Project researcher, Claudia Geiringer. “But its use was not distributed evenly across various parliaments and governments.” The study showed that the MMP voting system constrained somewhat the extent to which governments could resort to urgency but that two post-MMP governments bucked that trend: the 1996-1999 National-led government and the 2008-2011 National-led government. “For that reason, we reached the conclusion that the current constraints on the use of urgency were inadequate and that amendments to Parliament’s Standing Orders (its self-imposed rules of procedure) were desirable in order to better regulate the use of urgency,” says Geiringer.

Earlier this year, the Project made a submission to Parliament’s Standing Orders Committee, which was conducting its tri-annual review of the Standing Orders. The Committee issued its report in September and made recommendations in line with some of the Project’s suggestions. These recommendations have now been adopted by the House.

In particular, the Standing Orders Committee recommended that the House be able to sit for extended time to pass bills through a single stage, without having to resort to urgency to achieve this. The Urgency Project had suggested that an “extended time” provision of this kind would enable urgency itself to be reserved for situations of genuine urgency in relation to a particular bill. The Project anticipated that this would promote better public and media scrutiny of the use of urgency and, therefore, stronger disincentives against its misuse.

What’s the Hurry?  concludes with an extended analysis of the Standing Orders Committee’s recommendations. The authors welcome the amendments to the Standing Orders but express the view that the changes do not go far enough. In particular, the authors express concern that the regulatory framework fails to constrain effectively the most democratically troubling use of urgency: to bypass the select committee stage of legislative scrutiny.

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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www.vuw.ac.nz/vup