The Mt Albert by-election and Melissa Lee's serial blunders will soon be forgotten, so will Christine Rankin if she does as she's been told and keeps her head down.

The media's attention will move on and those issues, which have dominated coverage for the last two weeks, will give way to others.

But there is one that isn't going to go away and it has the potential to give the Government more grief than anything else between now and the 2011 general election.

Changing Auckland's local government structure has only just begun, and already it has hit some problems. If it ends in tears the Government will have a lot of disaffected residents on its hands in the city which contains about a third of the country's voters.

When the Royal Commission's recommendations were released they seemed to make sense and were broadly welcomed.

Auckland obviously has too many councils and trying to get them all to agree to anything has hindered the city's development for decades.

And so the Government developed a mantra which said "just about everyone" wanted a single council.

If just about everyone wants that, where's the problem?

The devil, as usual, was in the detail.

And the Government fiddled about with the detail, proposing local boards to work with the "super council" and dumping the recommendation for Maori representation.

Existing councils, seeing their authority was going to be stripped, began complaining about how their ratepayers would lose out and much of their good work, like swimming pools and other resources, could be endangered.

The Maori Party was instantly alienated and had a lot to say about it.

The Government, which is gaining a reputation for moving fast, did just that.

A transition bill was put through Parliament under urgency and another, which sets up the council itself, was given its first reading.

A special select committee was set up to deal with the second bill, which the Government says will meet all the complaints -- mainly from the Labour Party -- about lack of consultation.

While Prime Minister John Key's "do it now" attitude to getting things done is like a blast of fresh air through the Beehive, it means the Government is also in danger of gaining a reputation for leaping ahead without being quite sure where it's going to land.

It does have a time problem with Auckland because everything has to be set in concrete before the 2010 local government elections. If it isn't the new structure would have to wait until 2013, unless there some arrangement for Auckland to have its own elections.

The Government doesn't want to go into the 2011 general election with Auckland's future still not finally decided, but if more haste does turn into less speed it could end up seeking re-election amid a messy outcome and a lot of unhappy voters.

So far, not all its decisions have been good ones.

Proposing John Carter as chair of the special select committee wasn't a good one.

Having a minister as chair of a select committee, albeit a junior one outside cabinet, is contrary to the way the system works.

Ministers don't sit on select committees and they certainly don't chair them.

This one may be special but Carter hold the portfolio of associate minister of local government.

Darren Hughes, Labour's shadow leader of the House, says it's an abuse of the process.

"It's bad enough that there are seven government MPs on the select committee and just four opposition MPs," says Hughes.

He isn't entirely accurate -- there are five National MPs, three Labour and one each from ACT, The Maori Party and the Greens.

Hughes has added ACT and the Maori Party to National and lumped them all into "government MPs".

That's fair enough for ACT but the Maori Party isn't going to be a rubber stamp for legislation it opposes on the emotive issue of Maori representation.

Carter's comments about how well he understands the legislation because he was in the loop from the start and helped develop it hasn't aided the Government presentation of a neutral process for scrutinising it and hearing public submissions on it.

However neutral Carter is, and on his record there's no reason to believe he won't be, the perception is going to persist that the Government has loaded the committee in its favour.

The circumstances surrounding the Auckland legislation has given Labour a big boost.

Badly in need of gaining attention, its filibuster on the transition bill worked wonders. It managed to keep Parliament sitting for the best part of three days, all the time complaining about the Government's refusal to hold a referendum on the proposals.

The way it did it may have seemed ridiculous, with thousands of silly amendments which were all voted down, but Labour was inside the rules and was using them for maximum exposure.

The next stage will be the most hazardous. The committee will hear many submitters with strong cases for changing the legislation. When it reports to Parliament it will have to do so in a way that can't be called an abuse of its mandate.