Labour MP, Grant Robinson blogs on the continued use of urgency in Parliament (with a nice pun as the blog title) to ram through laws without following due process:

http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2009/10/21/a-state-of-urgency/

Parliament is now in urgency. That would be the fifth Parliamentary week in a row that we have gone into urgency.Perhaps its time to rename urgency as normalcy if this is the approach National is going to take. In all seriousness, while there is a place for urgency, and (before the right begin to howl) all governments have used it, this is getting beyond a joke.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the complex the hearings on the Emissions Trading Bill are taking place from 9am to 9pm each day, with some submitters given only a few hours notice of needing to submit and then being given a very short time to state their cases. It appears from media reports that National even tried to get the committee to agree to having all 184 people who wanted to submit in public put through in one day.

The excessive use of urgency and the rushed select committee processes should be of concern to all New Zealanders.  Apart from being anti-democratic, they open the door for bad and poorly considered law. There will necessarily be simple drafting errors but more than that Select Committees are either not getting a say or not getting enough time to properly scruitinise the Bills.

Earlier this year National put through the bill creating national standards for literacy and numeracy without a select committee process. In other words without giving parents, teachers, experts in the field the chance to have a say. Inevitably Anne Tolley has now had to delay the whole process to try to deal with issues that have come up since the Bill was passed. These could have been dealt with in a Committee.

This is completely unacceptable for a Government. Urgency has its place. When laws need to be passed urgently. Not as a political tool to stifle debate or the views from the government. I forgot to note in my earlier blog that the Benzodiazepine Ban was also passed under urgency in addition to inserted at the last possible moment. Tea Party time anyone?

Tags: Labour Party, Politics

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 9:25 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.