The coalition government has been passing laws in a hurry more often than the previous Labour government, according to data from the Parliamentary Library given to RNZ. In the first 940 days of the current Parliament, 17.4 percent of bills that became law skipped the select committee stage — the step where a group of MPs examines a bill closely and the public gets to have a say. Over the same length of time, Labour did this with 15.5 percent of its bills.

Urgency is a tool that lets Parliament work faster than usual. Sometimes that means a bill goes through all its steps in one go, without stopping for the select committee stage. The data, covering the period up to 2 July 2025, showed the overall use of urgency has gone up, while the total number of laws passed has stayed about the same — just under 200 per term.

The findings put the current Parliament's use of urgency at levels not seen since 2008.

Former Labour Prime Minister and Attorney-General Sir Geoffrey Palmer said the coalition was using urgency to avoid select committee scrutiny, not because there was too much legislation to get through. The government rejected that claim. Palmer said governments of all stripes had used urgency, but not like this. He said it had been normalised bit by bit until it became "an instrument of convenience rather than of necessity."

In an RNZ interview, Palmer said the usual checks and balances disappear when laws are made in a hurry. In a Newsroom commentary, he called the overuse of urgency "drastic" and said legislation was being passed too quickly without enough scrutiny.

Palmer said "impatience is a very bad thing for lawmaking because legislation can be got wrong, and it has to be done in a solemn and serious way." He also said select committees are overworked and under-resourced, pointing out that the government received hundreds of thousands of submissions for the Treaty Principles Bill and people were given about five minutes to speak.

Chris Finlayson, who was Attorney-General under Prime Minister John Key, said Parliament should look at sitting longer hours to deal with the volume and complexity of legislation. The House can already sit past its normal hours under urgency, including in special cases where there are many votes on changes to a bill.

Shadow Leader of the House Kieran McAnulty said National criticised Labour for using urgency during the pandemic, but then surpassed those numbers once in government. Labour had used urgency to pass laws including the Covid-19 traffic light system and vaccination mandates. McAnulty said concern about the high use of urgency is showing up in submissions to Parliament's Standing Orders Committee, which is reviewing the rules before the November election.

The New Zealand Law Society told that review that urgency can limit both parliamentary and public scrutiny of laws and stop people from having a meaningful say on proposed changes. Transparency International New Zealand said much the same thing in a June 2026 report called "Time to Raise the Bar: The Case for a Positive Test for Urgency in New Zealand Parliament."

The bigger question is whether the rules around urgency are strong enough. The select committee stage is where the public gets to weigh in and where MPs go through a bill line by line. When bills skip that step, people lose their chance to influence the law before it passes. The Standing Orders Committee's review, with input from the Law Society, Transparency International and others, is the way any rules could be tightened before the next Parliament. Whether that review leads to real change or just small tweaks will shape how future governments use urgency — and how much scrutiny laws get before they take effect.