'Kangaroo' used on reform opponents

(ANSA) - Rome, July 30 - Voting on Premier Matteo Renzi's Constitutional reform bill resumed Wednesday after the Senate OK'd the use of the so-called "kangaroo rule" to speed up work on some 7,800 amendments filed by opponents of the bill.
    "They will run out of time, but we won't run out of patience," the premier tweeted in thanks to his MPs.
    The kangaroo rule, which says that the outcome of voting on one amendment automatically counts for all similar amendments, was used late on Tuesday on an amendment submitted by the opposition Left Ecology Freedom (SEL) party, knocking 1,400 similar amendments off the Senate to-do list.
    SEL has filed 6,000 amendments in a bid to obstruct passage of the bill, which it says the government is not open to debating.
    While the word 'kangaroo' is not written in any Senate rulebook, it is in common usage and has given rise to other related terms such as 'kangarooed' and 'unkangarooable'.
    MPs from the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, which has tabled 200 amendments to Renzi's bill, 'voiced' their discontent in the shape of a stuffed kangaroo, which Speaker Pietro Grasso immediately ordered removed.
    "Stuffed animals are not allowed," Grasso reprimanded them.
    The Senate then proceeded to vote down a proposal to keep the Upper House the way it is, and an opposite one suggesting it should be removed entirely. While opponents and supporters of his reform duked it out on the Senate floor, Premier Matteo Renzi reiterated that his bill must pass at all costs. "This is the right time, no matter what the cost," Renzi said. "These reforms are not the whim of an authoritarian premier," Renzi said.
    "They are the only way to get Italy out of the conservatism, the quagmire, the stagnation that are in danger of taking over the mind as well the economy. I'm not leaving the future to those who are resigned (to defeat)". Renzi's reform bill aims to overhaul Italy's slow, costly political machinery by reducing the number of Senators and transforming the Upper House into an assembly of regional officials with limited lawmaking powers.
    Senators have been ordered to work this week from 9am through midnight, seven days a week and with speaking time limits, in order to complete a first reading of the reform bill before parliament's summer recess next month.