When I left Wellington yesterday, it was Tuesday. Today it is still Tuesday, because the House is in urgency. This basically means the House starts at 9:00, instead of at 14:00, and keeps sitting until the designated business is completed (though for archaic reasons they still don't sit on a Sunday). And they have a lot to get through - all the way down to number 18 on the Order Paper, totalling at least 50 hours of debate under normal circumstances. In fact, it's unlikely to take that long, as the very purpose of urgency is to tire out the MPs and not give them time to write speeches, but they'll still be in urgency at least until the end of the week.
Most of the bills are technical, so this is simply just punishment for MPs wasting the House's time on trivia during the rest of the year (someone should remind them of that every time they drag out Question Time, filibuster a committee stage, or demand an urgent debate on the weekly scandal: "you will be paying for this in urgency later"). But there are some policy bills in there (notably the Employment Relations (Breaks and Infant Feeding) Amendment, Biofuels, Affordable Housing and Walking Access Bills), which the government wants to get through before the election because it might not have the chance to afterwards. They have at least excluded the most controversial legislation - the ETS - but I still don't like this. Urgency should be invoked when business is actually urgent, not simply for convenience and tactical purposes. And if the government can't complete its legislative programme before the election, tough.
