Heaven because for most of its sitting time Parliament was talking about planning law, a subject near and dear to the Dunedin Labour MP’s heart.
But hell because the focus of her attention was the Fast Track Approvals Bill, a piece of legislation she and her fellow opposition MPs are vehemently opposed to.
It started on the fast track Bill late Tuesday afternoon and by morning tea time on Thursday they were still on it.
It was then that MPs, no doubt with some relief, moved on to the committee stages of the Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill . . . although it was no relief at all for Chris Bishop, who having sat through two days of wrangling as Minister of Infrastructure was immediately back at the committee desk with his housing minister’s hat on.
But that is getting far too far ahead of ourselves given that, by my count, Ms Brooking had taken 25 calls on the fast track Bill beforehand, which is some achievement in both parliamentary endurance and the use of a fine-tooth comb to find nuances to debate.
The Opposition had been determined to go slow on the fast track: dozens of amendment papers had been tabled and the Speaker’s Office told to make sure there was plenty of coffee on hand: it was going to be a long couple of days.
The pressure seemed to tell on Mr Bishop, whose initial offerings in the committee stages were feisty and pugnacious.
By Tuesday evening he had the thousand yard stare on of a man who knew of what drudgery he would be doing the following day, and the day after that.
No such lack of enthusiasm from Ms Brooking though, who kept up an earnest prosecution of a law which as an environmentalist she emotionally opposes, and which as a lawyer she intellectually opposes for the processes devised by the government.
She had to tread a fine line here because — as Mr Bishop was keen to regularly point out — the government’s Bill is very much based on the Covid-19 fast track legislation Ms Brooking voted for in the last term of Parliament.
But, as Ms Brooking regularly riposted, that law had the safeguard of the RMA, diverse environmental regulations and the possibility of additional scrutiny by local government, among other institutions and organisations, whereas the government’s proposals do not.
Which, of course, Mr Bishop would argue, was entirely the point of them.
But, nonetheless, Ms Brooking said with ominous certainty "we are also very interested in going through every clause of this Bill."
And go through them she did: to give a flavour of the exchanges, Brooking: "there's a ‘must’ here — at new clause 24M"; Bishop "Oh, ‘m’ or ‘n’; Brooking: "It's ‘m’—‘m’ for Mickey Mouse". Chairperson: "M for mother." Brooking: "I prefer Mickey Mouse, but there we go."
Or, this zinger from Ms Brooking: " I'm now moving to clause 4A—so still in Part 1. I remind the Minister than when we were discussing the Bill last night, I did think he wanted to take up the opportunity to discuss his changes in his Amendment Paper about the interpretation clause, clause 4. The same goes for clause 4A, because there are some changes in his Amendment Paper — Amendment Paper 238; it's a big one — to clause 4A as well."
Which might sound obscure but the devil in law changes is entirely in the detail.
Clause 4A, "Meaning of ineligible activity" cites a number of activities that are excluded from applying for the fast tracking process.
As Ms Brooking said, "an activity has to be very bad and very inconsistent with the plan made by the council, made with the community, for it to be prohibited. So overruling it is a fundamental affront to all those processes."
The clause also affected an activity inconsistent with a water conservation order and an application for an activity that is substantially the same as one previously declined.
Mr Bishop was unrepentant: "the Bill is designed to facilitate projects with significant regional or national benefits. So, very deliberately, the government has gone for a wide scope to enable a broad range of activities . . . but that's not to say that those things that the member mentioned aren't important, and our expectation is that they will be taken into account during the panel process."
Overall, this was a civilised and reasoned debate between reasonable people, and even though it was a filibuster — at least in this small’ish section of it — it served a greater purpose than simply wasting time.
