What's in the urgency motion?

So, what's in the urgency motion? There's no Order Paper, but thanks to email, I have a rough list:

• Taxation (Urgent Measures and Annual Rates) Bill, all stages
• Two procedural motions to reinstate business and set up the ETS review committee
• 90 day bill all stages
• Bail bill all stages
• An education bill on national standards all stages
• A sentencing bill all stages
• Plus anything else they want.

According to the Herald, some of those bills which are to be passed through all stages haven't even been drafted yet. So, MPs will be debating bills they have not seen, and will not be able to give them proper scrutiny. Mistakes will be inevitable - which will no doubt mean more urgency later to fix them.

As I said earlier, this is no way to run a legislature, or a democracy. You have to go back to Douglas and Richardson to see this sort of abuse of the Parliamentary process. And if this is how National intends to run Parliament - as if the change to MMP had never happened, and this was still an FPP elected dictatorship - then I think it is incumbent on the opposition to take a page out of National's book, and make the House utterly unmanageable until the normal Parliamentary and democratic process is restored.

The blitzkrieg then and now

Jane Kelsey, The New Zealand Experiment, p. 43, describing the neo-liberal blitzkrieg under Douglas and Richardson:

The changes were implemented by both governments at a blistering pace. Parliamentary conventions were frequently ignored. The constant use of urgency powers enabled the technopols to force through controversial legislation, and avoid the inconvenience of scrutiny before or by a select committee. Under Labour, this almost became the norm. In the first half of 1989, for example, parliament sat under urgency for a third of the time. Often there were not enough, or sometimes even any, up-to-date copies of the measures available for those taking part in the debate...

New Zealand Herald, reporting on Parliament today: Parliament goes into urgency to pass bills:

The Government put Parliament into urgency tonight so it can pass bills dealing with taxation, employment relations, bail, sentencing and education before the Christmas recess.

From tomorrow it will sit from 9am to midnight until the bills have been put into law.

Some of them are still being drafted and did not have titles when Leader of the House Gerry Brownlee moved the urgency motion.

(Emphasis added in both cases).

And so National returns to type. Undemocratic, autocratic, ramming things through under urgency with no notice, consultation, or public scrutiny. Worse, they seem to have deliberately done it in a way calculated to hide their legislative programme from the public; the Order Paper has no actual business, only the details for the State Opening, and it will not be updated until urgency finishes. So, it was an attempt at springing a complete surprise on Parliament and the public.

This is no way to run a legislature - or a democracy.