After this week, nine sitting days are left in the life of this Parliament. Parliament’s published 2026 sitting programme sets aside 1, 2 and 3 September, then 15, 16 and 17 September, then 22, 23 and 24 September. After the House rises on the evening of 24 September it does not meet again. Every bill the Government still wants on the statute book has to clear its remaining stages in those nine afternoons, and the queue is long.
The arithmetic became the story of the week. On Monday the Government introduced the Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill, which would require platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Facebook to take reasonable steps to check that users are over 16. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said the same day that it would not even get a first reading. “We’ve got 11 days to go. We’ve got a big legislative agenda. The reality is, we’re not going to get through to first reading,” he told reporters, according to 1News. “We’ll pick this up on the other side of the election.”
The numbers matched the calendar. Counting from the day the Prime Minister spoke, twelve sitting days were left. Leader of the House Louise Upston put the same point in weeks after Labour’s caucus decided on Tuesday to give the bill the votes it needed. “There are just three sitting weeks to go before Parliament rises, so the reality is we are not going to get a first reading in before then,” she said. Education Minister Erica Stanford, who has led the work on the bill for the past year, told RNZ it had been “always the intention” to introduce the legislation in time to progress it before the election “but we’ve just sort of run out of runway, unfortunately”.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins disagreed that the runway had gone. “With Labour’s support, there is no reason for the Government to delay the bill and we expect to see it in through its first reading before the election,” he said. A first reading is only the first of three votes a bill must win, and it commits a party to nothing beyond sending the legislation to a select committee, so the ask was a small one. The Government has not shifted.
One bill is not the whole picture. A survey of the House by LawNews, republished by interest.co.nz, counted 100 bills sitting somewhere in the parliamentary process as at 21 August. Some are a single vote from royal assent. Others have never had a first reading. Asked for a breakdown of what would be prioritised, Upston’s office named only the resource management reforms, saying the Government “continues to progress a reform agenda focused on fixing the basics and building the future for New Zealand” and that those bills “will pass before the election”.
Those reforms do look safe. The Natural Environment Bill had its second reading on 4 August, and the Planning Bill has been travelling alongside it since the pair passed their first readings in December 2025. The Disability Support Services Bill, the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Bill and the Financial Markets Conduct Amendment Bill are also well advanced. LawNews identified the ones in trouble, including the Deepfake Digital Harm and Exploitation Bill, whose select committee is not due to report back until 20 November, and the Copyright (Parody and Satire) Amendment Bill, due back on 1 October. Both dates fall after the House has gone.
What happens then is set out plainly in Parliament’s own Election 2026 timeline. The final adjournment of the House is expected on 24 September. Parliament is dissolved on 1 October, when a proclamation on behalf of the Governor-General is read on the steps of Parliament and the 54th Parliament ends. Writ day follows on 4 October, nomination day on 8 October, advance voting opens on 26 October and polling booths open from 9am to 7pm on 7 November. Of the unfinished business before the House and committees at dissolution, the timeline says, “All this business will lapse, but it can be reinstated by the new Parliament.”
Reinstatement is a real option and it is used, but it needs a vote of the new House, and an incoming government usually arrives with its own legislative programme and its own view of what deserves the time. A bill that has had two years of officials’ work, a select committee inquiry and hundreds of public submissions behind it can still end up back at the start. That is the quiet cost of a crowded final term. Submissions made in good faith by members of the public disappear with the bill they were made on.
None of this is a surprise to anyone who has watched an election year before. The last months of a parliamentary term are always compressed, and ministers always want more room on the Order Paper than the calendar will give them. What is different this time is how public the squeeze has become, with a government bill introduced on a Monday and written off by its own Prime Minister the same afternoon, and an opposition offering votes the Government says it has no time to use.
Voters get their say on 7 November. If you want to see how the parties line up on the policies still stuck in the queue, our voting tool matches your answers against every party contesting the election.
Which of the bills still before Parliament would you most like to see passed before the House rises, and which are you happy to see lapse? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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