Time, not urgency, is New Zealand Parliament’s big issue

Time, not urgency, is Parliament’s real problem. That’s the core argument of my latest piece in Newsroom on parliamentary urgency: https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/12/11/how-parliamentary-urgency-can-be-a-good-thing/

Like most commentators on the NZ Parliament, I criticise the use of urgency to bypass select committee scrutiny. This should be rare and reserved for genuinely urgent situations. Where it happens, there should be automatic post-enactment scrutiny.
But most of the time the House is sitting under urgency, it’s not done to skip select committees at all. Instead, it removes stand-downs between stages and allows extended sitting hours. In the Australian Senate this is called "proceeding without formality" something that happens almost without exception.
The deeper issue is that the NZ Parliament simply doesn’t have enough time for serious legislative scrutiny given the volume of legislation it considers, so urgency gets used as a workaround.
If we want less urgency, we need to do more than just criticise its use. Parliament either needs to sit more, or change its procedures so there is more time for debate. One idea I’ve been suggesting for a while is taking a lesson from the Australian House of Representatives and the UK House of Commons, and allowing committee of the whole debates to run in parallel with the House itself.
The other option is to pass much less legislation. That doesn’t seem to be an option any government, past, present, or in the foreseeable future, has shown much interest in.