Assembly.

This is a recurring subject which always gains prominence after a particularly long debate such as the one last Friday on constitutional change.

That debate, which ran for about 22 hours, was one of the longest on record.

Arguments against overnight sittings like last week's, centre on two areas.

One is the desire of Members of Parliament to spend time with their families, which they cannot do if they sit in the House all night and recover all day on Saturday.

The second argument centres on the quality of the debate. MPs, the argument goes, cannot possibly make sense if they rise to speak at 3 or 4 a.m. Nor can the public hear any pearls of wisdom which may emanate from their mouths; the public is asleep, as are many of the MPs, even if they are in their seats.

In the case of Friday's debate, the Opposition asked to have the debate extended over two sessions, with a fixed cut-off time at least for the first night.

There has been some experimentation with this in the past. And at one time, the Throne Speech was debated over two or three sessions. The Budget always has set time periods for each Ministry being debated.

Nonetheless, Government rejected the idea for Friday, and the debate then lasted until shortly before 11 a.m. on Saturday. In a debate concerning landmark legislation which is of great public interest, it would have made sense to spread it out, but the Government is not obliged to do so.

There are risks in spreading debates out. Debates have peculiar rhythms of their own which are broken if they are adjourned. The second problem is that future speakers have a week or more to go away and think up new things to say; more often than not, the second day's debate will then go into the early hours of the morning as well anyway.

The other alternative is to set time limits on speakers. This is already done in Canada and in some other Parliaments and appears to make some sense. It should not apply to lead speakers in a debate, who will often have a vast amount of information to discuss, but there is no reason why a limit of 30 minutes on speakers in the main body of debate could not be set.

There is an old adage that if you cannot say it in 20 minutes, then it is not worth saying. That's a good lesson for life as well as politics.

There are problems with time limits for a whole debate. Shadow Ministers, let alone other interested MPs, have complained ever since the system was put in place about Ministers eating up almost all the debating time allowed with their presentations. That will never change. The Minister will claim he must have the time to fully explain his Ministry's budget. The Shadow Minister will say that it is an attempt to stifle criticism. Both are right.

Still, you cannot make good decisions on much of anything at 2 a.m. Unless a debate is of urgent national importance and decisions are needed immediately, there has to be a better way of conducting the people's business.