Parliament returned this week after a six-week holiday. It will have a lot to consider this year.  
 
But spare a thought for an important but seemingly forgotten Bill to extend the term of Parliament to four years. Five months have passed since the Justice Committee reported back. The Bill has not moved.  
 
This matters because the Government's stated intent was to hold a referendum on a four-year parliamentary term at this year's election.  
 
The Ministry of Justice told the Select Committee in August that a separate Referendums Framework Bill – enabling legislation that creates the legal mechanism for any referendum – needed to pass by the end of September 2025. An Order in Council would then need to trigger a four-year term referendum by the end of March 2026, allowing time for a public information campaign before the 7 November election. 
 
September came and went, and now it is late January. The March deadline is now less than nine weeks away, and neither bill has had its second reading. They are languishing at 34 and 35 (out of 45) on Parliament’s Order Paper. 
 
The irony is hard to miss. A bill designed to give governments more time to implement policy is being strangled by the very time pressures it was meant to address. 
 
The Select Committee did its job. It fundamentally rewrote the Four-Year Term Bill, stripping out an unnecessarily complex variable-term mechanism and select committee proportionality requirements. What emerged was a clean proposal: a straight four-year term, subject to referendum, with the question put plainly to voters. The Committee even noted the "very small window" for public education if a 2026 referendum were to proceed. 
 
That window has now nearly closed. 
 
If the Government genuinely wanted a referendum this year, it would have prioritised these bills. It has not. Unless it moves with urgency, the referendum will slip to 2029 – assuming a future government chooses to proceed at all. 
 
Why? Coalition dynamics may have stalled it – ACT did not like the Bill as reported back. The appetite for constitutional reform that animated the coalition agreements may have cooled. Or the Government may simply have too many other priorities competing for limited parliamentary time. 
 
My submission for The New Zealand Initiative supported a four-year term. I argued that New Zealand's unusually short three-year term creates real constraints on effective governance, and that voters should have the chance to decide whether change is warranted.  
 
That chance is fast slipping away.