Parliament’s year in numbers

Source: Radio New Zealand

Analysis – The 2025 Parliamentary year has ended and it was a monster.

In MPs’ final hurrah-the adjournment debate-David Seymour announced “this government has passed more legislation in the first two years of its three than any MMP Parliament has passed in its whole three years.”

Previous to this 54th Parliament, experts have said New Zealand passed too many laws; heaven knows what those folk would think now.

Parliament is breaking records both for bills passed and for a lack of careful process.

Here are a few numbers from this completed year and this parliament (so far). Where possible the current numbers are compared to previous years or parliaments.

The fun stuff

The vast throughput has chemical drivers and consolations. In his own summary of the year, the Speaker Gerry Brownlee revealed that the Beehive’s in-house cafeteria, Copperfields, sold “60,000 hot drinks-mainly coffee”.

Chris Bishop responded “I think I’ve taken quite a few thousand”, and Nicola Willis piped up, “half of them were for me”.

In a depressant mirror to the Beehive’s stimulants, the in-house bar has moved from the Beehive to Parliament House. It is now further away from the Ministers causing the workload and closer to the backbenchers suffering under it.

The golden throat lozenge awards

Working with Hansard data for the whole Parliament (up until mid-October 2025), I have squeezed out some very rough numbers to find who has done all the talking.

These numbers are for House debates but not question time. Note though: Hansard’s data is not well structured for careful statistical torture, so take the results with a pinch of numerical salt.

The easy winner of the Golden Throat Lozenge Award (for time on their feet) is Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan who spoke 396 times, uttering roughly 194,000 words.

He won the gong despite joining this parliament a few months late (arriving in March 2024 after the sad death of Efeso Collins). Xu-Nan’s tactical pleonism explains the following from Parliament final day:

Xu-Nan: “Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s actually not that common that I get two speeches back to back-what a treat!”. Speaker: “Well, why don’t you give us a treat and make it short.”

He didn’t.

Gerry Brownlee spoke twice more than Xu-Nan (398 times), but presiding officers are brief. Opposition MPs use their full 10 minutes every call if at all possible.

The top ten MPs for words spoken are all from the opposition (see below).

Government backbenchers say very little to defend their own bills (to save time), while opposition are wordy to slow things down (and give bills the fullest possible consideration), especially when bills skip select committees or are being considered under urgency.

MPs at the ‘vow of silence’ end of the list are mostly from National.

Other than recent arrivals the most taciturn were Melissa Lee (just 15 speeches) and Shane Reti (20). Both offered between 6000-7000 words.

The quietest opposition MPs are 13 and 15 places from the bottom. They were Adrian Rurawhe (25 speeches for nearly 14,000 words) and Jenny Salesa (30 speeches for a little over 12,281 words).

Major party leaders spend little time in the House, other than from question time and set-piece debates like the budget.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon managed just 18 speeches, but some were very long so his total words spoken (c. 27,000) raises him to 78th of 123 MPs. Labour leader Chris Hipkins beats him with 47 speeches for 38,000 words.

Minor leaders appear more often. David Seymour made 68 calls for 64,000 words, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer 87 for 62,000, Chloe Swarbrick 82 or 54,000, Winston Peters 47 for 36,00 and Rawiri Waititi 48 for 31,000 words.

Green co-leader Marama Davidson is not included, as multiple MPs named Davidson muddy the waters.

The most loquacious of the government ministers was Chris Bishop (208 speeches and 86,000 words). He has had a number of complex bills spend lengthy periods in the Committee of the Whole, and is a minister happy to answer questions and engage in that stage of deliberation.

Party speaking time

The largest parties get more allocated speaking slots, but only the opposition make full use of theirs.

As noted, the opposition also speak a lot during the unallocated Committee of the Whole stage. Whole days can go by when government backbenchers offer nothing except repeating “I move that debate on this question now close”, which is parliamentese for ‘please stop already’.

Public engagement

Gerry Brownlee reports: “73,000 people went through Parliament in tours this year-quite a large number. If you include visitors who came here for various meetings, that number goes up to 122,000. When you think about the number of people visiting here, it means that, I think, we have a strong democracy, and we’ve got to make sure that this place remains as open as it possibly can.”

The public have been visiting electronically as well.

The bills under debate have attracted an avalanche of public feedback that stretched Parliament’s secretariat until the poor clerks drowned in e-paper. Committees even found it necessary to restrict the extent of some of their reports back to the House (a core function).

It has been suggested to me that the quality of ministerial officials’ advice to committees (and presumably also to government) has degraded with so many different legislative plans for departments to consider.

Clerk of the House of Representatives David Wilson told the Standing Orders Committee, “Two Parliament ago there were 95,000 submissions which we thought was a lot. Now there are over 600,000 in this one.”

The most written submissions for this Parliament (or any Parliament) was the massive new record of 295,670 written submissions on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill.

Legislative process and urgency

The table below outlines the process of non-budgetary government bills over six parliaments (most recent on the left). Each parliament’s figures are truncated at a matching point in the Parliament’s progress. None are for a full three years.

The current government has introduced far more bills and skipped more select committees than any of the previous five.

The bills that did go through committees had their committee consideration time curtailed more than in any parliament except during John Key’s first government.

For more granular detail on the use of urgency by stage, the chart below is data from The Newsroom’s journalist Marc Daalder. In this case, numbers for previous parliaments are truncated to match the same number of calendar days as the current term has taken.

The 2025 sitting year included 87 sitting days and two weeks of full-time committee scrutiny of government in lieu of the House sitting.

Of the 87 sitting days, 13 did not start afresh, but were just continuations of the previous day. The 87 days broke down to:

Oversight of government

One of any parliament’s core roles is keeping a check on the government that is a subset of itself. This is possible because, constitutionally, governments are subservient to parliaments, though governments often try to eschew this relationship.

Oversight happens in various ways in the House and committees. Most are hard to measure, except the asking of formal questions of ministers.

Oral questions can be a key tool, but when ministers are allowed by Speakers to avoid answering questions they lose all potency, and written questions (which are harder to ignore) gain importance.

See this article for a more detailed, recent look at numbers around Select Committee workloads.

Thanks to The Office of the Clerk, Hansard and Marc Daalder for data.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand