After three weeks’ recess and 20 months convening over $300 million worth of working groups to help it draft legislation, it turns out the Government has so few Bills in the pipeline it has resorted to filibustering its own programme, Shadow Leader of the House Gerry Brownlee says.

“We’ve arrived back at Parliament from the winter recess to find the Government wants to debate four Bills that have broad support across Parliament at Committee of the Whole House stage.

“National is happy with these four Bills following Select Committee consideration and see no reason for them to be held up.

“But Labour today declined leave for them to be debated expeditiously, meaning they need to be debated part-by-part, and is now filibustering from the get-go.

“Embarrassingly Ministers – who should surely have something better to do – are right now standing up in the House asking questions of the Minister in the chair to prolong debate about legislation everyone agrees on.

“The legislative process could be likened to that of a sausage machine – the end product being new laws.

“This Government is so inept it can’t even get the raw ingredients into the mincer.

“In this Government’s so-called ‘year of delivery’, all it appears to be delivering is timewasting in the House.”

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