The holidays may be coming, but Parliament is winding up for looks likely to be its biggest week of the year.
It is apparently still winter in Wellington, but despite that we can tell that Christmas is coming. There are seasonal clues. For example: hay fever, that fifth horseman of the apocalypse; and the fact that Parliament is running out of sitting weeks for the year.
This week is MPs third to last week in the House. Their final week is usually something of a write off, so after this week there is really only one full week of debate left.
Reading that, you might think that MPs are winding down, and it's nothing but piss-ups and Christmas mince pies from here on out; but you would be very wrong.
Listen to the radio version of this story from The House.
As planned Parliament went into urgency late on Tuesday evening. Now, instead of taking it easy and getting in some early practice for the holidays, the MPs appear to be trying to fit more than two month's of debating into a single week.
That may sound like an exaggeration, but the Motion that Leader of the House Chris Hipkins read out to MPs late on Tuesday (when he asked their permission for urgency to be accorded), was immense.
Urgency motions include a list of the bills that the urgency would cover, so the MPs know what they're agreeing to. This list of the bill names went on and on and on...
Like great comedy, it took the joke to breaking point. And kept going.
The size of a debating Everest
The urgency motion includes 25 different bills progressing through 34 reading debates and 13 committee stages. Unless it runs out of time, or the Government calls time early.
By my rough calculation, even debating at a really good clip (with governing-party MPs saying very little), all those debates would take about 86 hours... out of an available 49.
The 49 hours are available because urgency is a big extension on a week's typical debating time - which is about 13 hours once you ignore Question Time and the general debate. But 49 hours is still not enough.
Unless the opposition collapse in a heap or suffer collective laryngitis, it is inevitable that the MPs will run out of time before they get through the list of bills they set themselves to debate this week.
The Government will have planned it that was. After all it is better to run out of time than to run out of bills.
The time allocated to urgency automatically expires at midnight on Saturday, when carriages turn back into pumpkins and MPs trudge home, exhausted after the ball…