Photo: VNP / Daniela Maoate-Cox
Parliament's week is traditionally timetabled across three days, but its shape seems to be getting pushed at its boundaries, with select committees bearing the brunt.
The usual shape begins on a Tuesday morning when MPs arrive from far-flung electorates and homes to meet as party groups (caucus meetings). On Tuesday afternoon and evening the House sits, as it also sits on Wednesday, and on Thursday when it rises at 6 p.m. to end the week.
Wednesday and Thursday mornings are set aside for Select Committee meetings. Half of the subject committees meet each day, since-with New Zealand's paucity of MPs-many sit on two committees. So each committee meets just once a week, 30 weeks a year.
That's the traditional shape. In recent years those committees are being squeezed out and forced into the margins by a range of factors. This has been happening for a while but it seems to have increased this parliamentary term. Committees are increasingly meeting on Mondays and across non-sitting weeks, times when MPs are supposed to be on their home patches, in touch with their communities and remembering the names of their children.
Here are factors squeezing the committees and changing the shape of Parliament.
More legislation
The sheer amount of legislation being considered and passed is making MPs' committee jobs ever harder. As of 31 July, this Parliament has seen 142 bills introduced and that is not close to the end. Early election notwithstanding, we are only 1.5 years into a nearly three year term.
At the current rate, this 54th Parliament will easily see the most bills introduced since John Key's first term, when the 49th parliament managed 231. The number of bills introduced to recent Parliaments was: 138 (50th parliament), 156 (51st), 194 (52nd), and 191 (53rd). That is a lot of legislation, and a lot of committee work.
Shortened committee times
An ameliorating factor has been the number of bills skipping committee entirely by being passed under urgency. So far this term, 30 bills have avoided any select committee consideration. That is more than each of the previous five parliaments, which across their full terms had (in order): 27, 11, 16, 18, and 29 bills skip committee.
The government has also been shortening the amount of time Select Committees have to consider a bill, ask for public and expert feedback on it, and redraft it. This rushed process is putting pressure on committees.
The default time committees are given is six months, but it can be longer or shorter. This term the government is tending to opt for four months and a day or so - the shortest time allowed for without the deadline needing to be debated in the House.
So far this Parliament, more than half the bills referred to committee (53%) have been given shortened report-back times. The number was also high last parliament (43%) but not as high.
Even without the other factors, committees are trying to fit six months work into a shorter time, and sometimes that time is a very brief time indeed.
Under a submission tsunami Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
Ballooning feedback
On Monday this week the Governance and Administration Committee met all day (not a normal committee or parliamentary day), to hear public submissions on the Online Casino Gambling Bill. It has attracted thousands of submissions, many from community or charitable groups that receive funding under current gambling law and could lose that under the new regime of internet gambling.
The day was illustrative of the trend towards increased public feedback on legislation. Public engagement with select committees has ballooned in recent years in response to bills that are either contentious or that catch the public imagination.
This term there may be more contentious bills. There are certainly many bills receiving high volumes of public feedback, including the massive new record of 295,670 written submissions on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, 90 percent of which were opposed.
Even a few hundred submitters is a significant workload. Committees that want to hear as many submitters as possible sometimes split their committee into two, and frequently expand their meeting times beyond the normal days.
Urgency and Extra sittings steal committee time
Fitting it all in is made much harder by the next factor - the huge wave of legislation (and therefore debating time), that is stealing committee mornings. When the government takes urgency or schedules extra sittings, those are mornings that committees can't meet - unless they were given special permission by the House in advance, for specific legislation, at the time of their first reading.
Both urgency and extra sittings have happened a lot this Parliament. With more than a year to go, the current parliament has so far added 368 hours of extra sittings or urgency. That's more than any of the previous four Parliaments had in their full terms.
By way of comparison, the first John Key government took 405 extra hours, the 50th parliament took 237 extra hours, the 51st - 194 extra hours, the 52nd - 223 extra hours, the 53rd - 346 extra hours.
Extra sittings or a morning extension under urgency happen most weeks. This week's extra morning is on Thursday. They alternate (Wednesday one week and Thursday the next), which shares the lost time between committees, but it also means that every committee loses up to half their usual working hours.
The irony is that all the extra debating time is pumping further bills towards committees, while taking away the time to consider those bills.
Photo: VNP / Daniela Maoate-Cox
It's easier to do homework
Another committee meeting on Monday this week was the Education and Workforce Committee which, despite the extra workload, shorter deadlines and reduced meeting times, has decided to undertake an inquiry into how to address online digital harm toward young people. That inquiry is unrelated to current legislation.
This is commendable. Inquiries are a traditional role for committees and a way that cross-party consensus and discovery can influence the legislative agenda, but committees seldom seem to find the time in recent parliaments.
To make this inquiry possible, the Education Committee organised hearings outside the typical Parliamentary week. Doing this has become more possible because the rules (and technology) now allow committees and submitters to teleconference.
The ease of teleconferencing has become another factor in the committees' burgeoning schedules and these spilling beyond their traditional limits. MPs can spend sitting weeks in committee and now also spend the remaining weeks in committee too, blurring the boundaries between their work at Parliament, their work for their constituents, and their family life as well.
Inquiries are a good thing, and congratulations to Katie Nimon's Education Committee for hunting for solutions to an intractable problem, but inquiries used to be more common, and more possible without cramming them in around the edges.
If there are solutions to this crunch, they might be something to offer to the next review of Parliament's rules - the Standing Orders Review, which takes place before each election. But the likely strongest drivers for the issues are not a function of parliament's rules, but of its politics and structure; they are the vast amounts of legislation that governments want passed, the public's increased engagement with that legislation, and the small number of MPs available to do the very necessary grunt work.
*The statistics referenced in this article result from research by the Parliamentary Library. Counts for the current term are for the period up to July 31st 2025). During the two August sitting weeks since then, five more bills were introduced, and seven were referred to a select committee. Of those seven, two received short committee deadlines, while five were given the full six months.
*RNZ's The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament's Office of the Clerk. Enjoy our articles or podcast at RNZ.
