MPs probably had better things to do, and some said so, but party pride was at stake in Parliament at the weekend as it sat to midnight on Friday and was due to sit not far short of that tonight.With 11 bills to deal with, and some of them far from urgent
MPs probably had better things to do, and some said so, but party pride was at stake in Parliament at the weekend as it sat to midnight on Friday and was due to sit not far short of that tonight.
With 11 bills to deal with, and some of them far from urgent, sessions didn't need to be that tedious but there was no way Labour was going to let the Government get away with an egregious insult.
Leader of the House Gerry Brownlee fired them up on Thursday, when Labour MPs questioned his list of bills and he quipped that they seemed to be shy of "a bit of hard yakka" before going off on their eight-week summer recess.
This caused indignant outrage. Mr Brownlee was accused of pious hypocrisy, bad faith, an utter inability to manage Parliament and a ghastly approach to cross-party co-operation.
He responded by personally delivering to the press gallery the entire record of urgency called by the previous Labour government.
Labour's next challenge was to keep it going for two days from 9am to midnight, and its MPs started picking apart bills which would otherwise get far less attention.
A tax bill was good for most of Friday and the Government stirred up a row by inserting 70 pages of amendments.
This was "flagrant abuse of the parliamentary process" and Revenue Minister Peter Dunne was accused of arrogance and incompetence.
Banning cigarette displays in shops didn't present much of an opportunity, because everyone agreed it was the right thing to do.
Beefing up biosecurity laws wasn't a problem for anyone except the Greens, who think free trade agreements are bad news because they mean an influx of goods from countries with hardly any rules about disease-ridden pests.
An obscure customs and excise item didn't give opposition MPs a lot of scope but there were rich pickings in one which merges the National Library and Archives New Zealand with the Department of Internal Affairs, and an education bill which Labour had serious problems with.
A last-minute deal cut that short when the Government said it would meet Labour's main concern and Parliament was spared coming back under urgency at 9am on Monday.
Personal abuse was surprisingly limited, given that long hours usually mean short tempers. Tau Henare didn't seem to be particularly offended when Trevor Mallard called him a chocolate-covered banana, although he did twitter back that Mr Mallard was "a racist pig". There was no way he would have got away with that in the debating chamber, and he knew it.
