Its Wednesday - and scheduled to be a Member's Day - and surprise, surprise, the House is in urgency. The "urgent" business? Bills on DNA samples, gangs, a Treaty-settlement related reserve transfer, and technical bills fiddling with the ETS, dairy industry pricing and biosecurity. Most of this is anything but urgent, and could easily be delayed for a pre-holiday rush. But then Gerry Brownlee wouldn't get to feel like he was In Charge...
I've been told that it will be urgency from now until christmas - two whole months. This dwarfs anything Labour did; their pre-holiday rush tended to last a couple of weeks, and dealt mostly with the buildup of technical bills which had to be passed but nobody really cared about. National is using urgency as a matter of course to ram through more contentious, policy-based legislation, and to thwart the normal democratic process of Member's Day. And it is simply grossly abusive of the Parliamentary process.
