The coalition government has been rushing bills through all parliamentary stages at once at a higher rate than the previous Labour government, according to Parliamentary Library data provided to RNZ. In the first 940 days of the current Parliament, 17.4 percent of bills sent for Royal Assent — the formal step where a bill becomes law — passed without going to a select committee for public scrutiny. Over the equivalent 940-day period, the Labour government passed 15.5 percent of bills the same way.

The data, covering the period to 2 July 2025, also showed the total number of bill stages passed under urgency has risen, while the number of bills passed into law has stayed steady at just under 200 across the past few terms. Urgency is a parliamentary tool that lets the House push legislation through faster than normal, sometimes skipping the select committee stage entirely — the step where MPs examine a bill in detail and the public can make submissions.

The findings put the current Parliament's use of urgency at levels not seen since 2008. Under New Zealand's Standing Orders — the rulebook for how Parliament operates — a bill dealt with under urgency may be introduced and passed through all its stages without going to a select committee, though the 2023 rules still require a bill to be read three times by order of the House.

Former Labour Prime Minister and Attorney-General Sir Geoffrey Palmer said the coalition government's use of urgency was not about coping with large volumes of legislation but about avoiding the scrutiny of select committees, a claim the government rejected. Palmer said governments of all stripes had used urgency, but not on this scale, and that its use had been normalised by degrees until it became "an instrument of convenience rather than of necessity."

In an RNZ interview, Palmer said the normal checks and balances were stripped out when laws were made at pace, and that urgency had become the default mechanism for dealing with legislation. In a Newsroom commentary, he described the overuse of urgency as "drastic," saying legislation was passed too quickly with not 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 pointed to overworked and under-resourced select committees as a related issue, noting the government received hundreds of thousands of submissions for the Treaty Principles Bill and people were given about five minutes to be heard.

Chris Finlayson, Attorney-General in the John Key government, said the data pointed to a need for Parliament to consider extending House sitting hours given the complexity and volume of legislation. The House can already sit into a subsequent sitting day under urgency, including under extraordinary urgency or when a bill under urgency is subject to many votes on amendments following a closure motion — a procedural move to cut off debate and force votes.

Shadow Leader of the House Kieran McAnulty said National criticised Labour's use of urgency during the pandemic but then quickly surpassed those figures once in government. The previous Labour government used urgency to pass several laws, including the bill enabling the Covid-19 traffic light system and workforce vaccination mandates. McAnulty said discomfort with the high use of urgency is reflected in submissions to Parliament's Standing Orders Committee, which will consider rules for the next Parliament before the November election.

The New Zealand Law Society's submission to the Review of Standing Orders 2026 stated that the use of urgency can limit Parliamentary and public scrutiny of legislation and prevent meaningful public consultation on proposed reforms. Transparency International New Zealand made a similar argument in a June 2026 report titled "Time to Raise the Bar: The Case for a Positive Test for Urgency in New Zealand Parliament."

The broader question the data raises is whether the safeguards around urgency are adequate. The select committee stage exists to allow public input and detailed, clause-by-clause examination of legislation; when bills skip that stage, the public's ability to influence law is curtailed. The Standing Orders Committee's review, with submissions from the Law Society, Transparency International and others, provides the mechanism for any tightening of the rules before the next Parliament sits. Whether that review produces substantive change or incremental adjustment will shape how future governments use urgency and how much scrutiny bills receive before they become law.