New Zealand's Parliament has one of the weakest urgency regimes in the democratic world. This mechanism is being used too often, to fast-track legislation, bypassing or minimising both citizen participation and time for proper scrutiny at Select Committees.
A simple positive test - requiring governments to demonstrate genuine justification before invoking urgency - would be one step towards greater accountability.
What is not legitimate is using urgency as a default legislative strategy — treating a parliamentary majority as a substitute for deliberation, or rushing complex legislation through simply because a government can
What the Numbers Show
The NZ Politics Tracker, which generates data directly from the Parliament website, provides an illuminating and deeply concerning record of urgency use across recent parliaments).
No party in government is innocent, and the current parliament's ratio of more than half of all bills being rushed through under urgency conditions represents an extraordinary departure from the norm of deliberative lawmaking.
The landmark study What's the Hurry? Urgency in the New Zealand Legislative Process 1987–2010, identified several categories of genuine justification for use of urgency, such as natural disasters and pandemics; correcting errors; external deadlines and preventing market harm where advance knowledge of legislation might generate speculative behaviour. But it also showed that urgency use has been rising across the long run, irrespective of emergency situations, with a worrying trend to use urgency to “avoid select committee scrutiny of legislation."
The Problem with the Status Quo
Governments use urgency because they can, and they face inadequate political costs for doing so. New Zealand's Standing Orders currently impose no substantive requirements on governments invoking urgency. They only require that a minister move for urgency stating the reasons for it, followed by a simple vote. The Speaker has no role in assessing whether urgency is justified.
This is unusual by international standards. Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom all have mechanisms — whether through upper houses, longer parliamentary terms, more robust committee systems, or stricter procedural rules — that make use of urgency harder.
New Zealand lacks an upper house. Our parliamentary term is three years, which creates end-of-term legislative pressure. Our Select Committee system, while valuable, is under-resourced and easily bypassed. These structural features make the absence of urgency constraints particularly acute.
Experts have been calling for change
The Human Rights Commission (Te Kāhui Tika Tangata) has raised sustained concerns about the impact of urgency and fast-tracking on human rights protections. When bills are not sent to Select Committee, there is no systematic examination of whether proposed legislation is consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 or the Human Rights Act 1993.
Further concerns on the general impact of using urgency have been expressed by the Standing Orders Committee in 2023, by the Attorney General in her letter to Ministers in March 2025, by the Office of the Clerk in 2025 and by The Law Society in its Sept 2025 submission on the review of Standing Orders:
“The use of urgency can limit Parliamentary and public scrutiny of legislation, and prevent meaningful public consultation on proposed reforms (particularly where it is used to truncate or skip the select committee process). It can also obstruct the public’s understanding of why certain legislation was introduced and passed, and reduce transparency and accountability within the legislative process. This limits both democratic engagement with the issues, and the democratic legitimacy of bills passed. “
The Case for a Positive Test
Sir Geoffrey Palmer has argued that Standing Orders should incorporate clear criteria for determining when urgency is justified, with a meaningful assessment of whether those criteria have been met.
A workable positive test in our constitutional context, that is in use elsewhere or has been recommended by experts, might include:
A stated reason that falls within recognised categories: genuine emergency, market certainty, error correction, external deadline, or explicit electoral mandate for a specific reform. Mere legislative preference is not sufficient.
A proportionality assessment: Is the degree of urgency applied — in particular, whether the select committee stage is to be bypassed — proportionate to the genuine need? Removing public participation requires a higher threshold than merely extending sitting hours.
A human rights attestation: Where urgency would bypass or truncate select committee consideration, the government should be required to confirm that the bill has received adequate rights-scrutiny through other means.
Opposition notification: Where urgency is not related to genuine emergency, reasonable notice to opposition parties should be required. Surprise urgency — called late on a sitting day to prevent opposition preparation — is among the most corrosive practices.
A Speaker's gatekeeping role (at minimum) for the most serious category: bills that would bypass the select committee entirely. The Speaker should withhold approval for urgency that eliminates select committee consideration, unless the government demonstrates genuine necessity.
A Symptom of a Deeper Problem
The urgency debate is ultimately about what kind of democracy New Zealand wants to be. We have a unicameral parliament with short terms, first-past-the-post-era habits persisting into the MMP era, and no constitutional brake on parliamentary sovereignty beyond political culture and public opinion.
That makes parliamentary culture critical. The fact that the current parliament is processing more than half its bills under urgency - and that this is broadly accepted as normal - represents a problem that formal rules alone cannot fully repair.
A positive test would not solve every problem. It would not prevent a determined government majority from passing legislation it wanted to pass. But it would require that government to state, publicly and on the record, why the normal processes of democracy should be suspended in this particular case — and it would create a meaningful political cost for inadequate answers. That accountability, modest as it sounds, is exactly what New Zealand's legislative process currently lacks.
