Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4)

I move, That the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) be now read a first time. It is my intention, when this debate has concluded, to recommend to the House that the bill be referred to the Government Administration Committee. As the House is aware, a Statutes Amendment Bill is a useful annual vehicle for making technical and non-controversial amendments to a number of Acts. It allows minor amendments to be made that would not usually receive sufficient priority to be progressed. This is achieved with the support of all parties in the Parliament.

This bill, as introduced, amends 20 Acts administered in eight different departments, and the proposed amendments include: an amendment to the Conservation Act to set out approval process for the transfer or release of aquatic life into fresh water; an amendment to the Maritime Transport Act to clarify the civil liability of certain persons in relation to the pollution of the marine environment; an amendment to the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act to change the name of the Residual Health Management Unit to the Crown Health Financing Agency; and an amendment to the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act to correct an omission in that Act that did not revoke the reserve status of a settlement site.

I have received objection to the amendments to the Motor Vehicle Sales Act, and, accordingly, the clauses under Part 12 will be struck out from the bill in due course. I commend this bill to the House.

National supports the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4). This is an omnibus bill to effect non-controversial amendments. As the Minister has identified, the bill has 20 parts, and there are two schedules. As has been mentioned, National does not support Part 12, which deals with the Motor Vehicle Sales Act. The reason for that is that this Act came into effect last year, and our view is that it was a comprehensive piece of legislation and it should have been got right the first time. We are not in a position to support that part, and the Minister identified that. The rest of it we are certainly comfortable with, but that is one part we do not support.

Although a Statutes Amendment Bill is non-controversial, there must be very close scrutiny of what the amendments are, and constraints must be in place—otherwise we will find legislation slipping through. If we look at Standing Orders 259 to 262, we see that the omnibus bills are specifically identified. I just want to identify what they are, because it is important that we realise that there is a provision in the Standing Orders to allow that to happen. There are finance bills—and this is in Standing Order 261—or confirmation bills. We have local legislation bills that contain provisions affecting particular localities. We have a Māori Purposes Bill (No 2), and the fourth one is the Reserves and Other Lands Disposal Bill, and the fifth is the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) that consists entirely of amendments to Acts, and this House is debating that bill today.

Some of those amendments beg the question why the Government is involved in so many pieces of legislation. One of them, for example, is the Fire Service Act. The Fire Service does not receive any Government funding at all. It is funded by levies on insurance policies, and not one dollar of Government money goes to the service. The racing industry is similarly placed. Briefly, I want to identify what some of those Acts cover. I will not go through them all, because I am sure other speakers will be talking especially about legislation of a legal nature: Part 2, “Conservation Act 1987”, deals with the transfer or release of live aquatic life into fresh water, which is subject to the prior approval of the Minister of Conservation. Before seeking approval an applicant must advertise for submissions, and the amendment provides for 20 working days for the receipt of submissions. That part is fairly straightforward, and we certainly have no problems with it.

In relation to Part 3, “Electoral Act 1993”, members will be aware that an inquiry is going on at the moment into the last election. While this part is important and should go through, there may well be changes later on to the whole Electoral Act, and this part will become redundant. However, currently the Electoral Act concerns the list of candidates that political parties submit to the Chief Electoral Officer, and he or she must be provided with the written consent of each candidate named on the list. That is pretty straightforward, and we have no difficulty with that.

Part 4, “Evidence Act 1908”, is really a legal matter, and I am sure members who are lawyers will be looking at that part, because it is definitely in their field. I will not elaborate on that further, but I would certainly like to hear what the lawyers have to say.

I mentioned the Fire Service Act of 1975, and the point I made earlier was that here we have legislation in which the Government has no financial involvement. What section 3 of the Act does is to establish the New Zealand Fire Service under the control of the New Zealand Fire Service Commission. That amendment is interesting in that the office within the New Zealand Fire Service was abolished in 1990, so it is redundant. Here we are 13 years later amending that Act, and it is a wonder that that has not been picked up before now.

Part 5 also deals with the rural fire management code and national rural fire officers. We are not talking about the 8,500 volunteers in our communities. The Rural Fire Authority has about 300 paid members, and this part clarifies part of their involvement. It also updates the national commander’s powers, with power of entry to assess a building’s evacuation scheme. Part 6, “Forest and Rural Fires Act 1977”, relates to fire safety margins, and there are 9 clauses to be amended in this part. They are fairly significant, but under Part 6 the amendments will be fairly straightforward.

Part 7, “Geneva Conventions Act 1958”, goes way back, and once again I am sure that the lawyers will be giving this part and what it allows great scrutiny. This amendment removes reference to the death sentence. We have not had the death sentence for many years, and the principal Act will be amended by this statute.

Part 9, “Land Transfer Act 1952”, contains 16 clauses that amend sections of the principal Act, and if members look at them closely, they will see that they are mainly of a technical nature.

Part 10, “Maritime Transport Act 1994”, relates to civil liability for pollution of the marine environment caused by ship owners, owners of marine structures, and persons in charge of marine operations. A number of other clauses relate to that as well. Part 11, “Medicines Act 1981” is another amendment. I have said that we will not support Part 12, “Motor Vehicle Sales Act 2003”. Part 13, “National Parks Act 1980” is another amendment.

The Minister mentioned the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act in his opening remarks, and the principal Act will be amended to change the name of the Residual Health Management Unit to the Crown Health Financing Agency.

The Minister also mentioned the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act. I mentioned the Racing Act earlier on. The Radiocommunications Act, the Reserves Act, the Telecommunications Act, and the Trade in Endangered Species Act will all be amended, as well.

All in all, there are a considerable number of amendments for the Government Administration Committee, of which I am a member, to consider, and we will scrutinise them more closely. National is happy to support all those parts, except for Part 12, which I identified earlier as the part we cannot support.

New Zealand First supports this legislation. I am surprised that any member is speaking to the bill at all. Previous practice used to be that the bill would just go straight through. I just make that comment. I thank the Government for corresponding with New Zealand First. We have rejected some matters that are not included in the bill, and we support its progress.

I rise for the ACT party to welcome the introduction of the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4). This omnibus bill contains a whole lot of minor technical tidy-ups, and the Minister in charge of the bill has been in touch with each party in order to get its comments on it. There are elements in such a letter that raise the curiosity of some parties or some members who have a particular interest in those elements. Other parts of the bill are not necessarily obvious, or the implications of them were not necessarily obvious when the inquiry letter from the Minister was received. So we are pleased that this bill will go to a select committee. The select committee will, presumably, get a more detailed feel for exactly what is proposed. Sometimes something that appears entirely technical and innocuous on first sight to a person who is not well informed on the detail of a matter suddenly becomes significant when that detail is obtained. There are things in this bill that may be in that category, so I hope the select committee will have a close look at it. I will therefore mention those things in this speech as a way of recording them, so that when the select committee does report back, we would hope there will be a little more explanation of them than now appears in the explanatory note of the bill.

Those matters include the changes to the Fire Service Act, which appear to go further than is usual in a bill like this that contains technical amendments and correction. There seems to be the creation of a new scheme for pre-approved evacuation schemes in buildings. I do not know how many buildings will be relevant buildings for that purpose; it may be that it is a very small number. Maybe the people with such buildings are happy to have to get the national fire commander to approve their evacuation schemes. But I am concerned that that provision should be examined closely by the select committee, in case it is yet another one of those so-called fences at the top of a cliff that create a great deal of bureaucratic expense to deal with what is really a reluctance by the authorities to properly pursue people who fail to take precautions for themselves or for others. It may be easier to get the right degree of compliance not by prescribing a process for everyone, but by making sure that the few people who do not comply with a reasonable law are properly pursued and punished. So I hope that that provision will have some more explanation than it has now. The explanatory note does not state how significant it is.

There is a similar question about the fire safety margins under the proposed amendments to the Forest and Rural Fires Act. I think I recall the Minister’s explanation that the amendments are needed to tidy up an anomaly whereby fire safety margins may be created over private property in a way that is unfair. If so, ACT is, of course, pleased to see those amendments go through. But when I look at the wording, I have to bear it in mind that the approvals from parties to include such provisions in a Statutes Amendment Bill are usually given on the basis of a brief description—or a description in a letter—of what is intended, not the actual words that the bill will contain. So the select committee should take a close look at those amendments, to make sure that the fire margin amendment is a technical amendment, and is not an unintended or a covert means of affecting the use of land by people who are unfortunate enough to be the neighbours of State land that, perhaps, has forests or is otherwise a high-fire-risk property.

There is one provision that is just a minor curiosity. I do not think there is any reason to consider it is hard to understand, and I believe that we will support it. But just in case it is an own goal, I will mention the amendment to the Geneva Conventions Act, which is a funny little tidy-up to remove references to the death sentence. It is explained on the basis that the death penalty was eliminated for all purposes in New Zealand by the Abolition of the Death Penalty Act in 1989. The elimination of something like that for all purposes may not be nearly as permanent as people like to assume. The curious effect of completing the process by taking out the relevant sections of the Geneva Conventions Act may be that if a future Government decided to reinstate the death penalty, it could do so in a way that had less protection for the persons sentenced to death than there is at present. In other words, the Geneva Conventions Act deals with the death penalty because there are death penalties in many countries, and the provisions that are being removed restrict the periods within which people sentenced to death may be executed. It prevents the sentence from being carried out on prisoners of war and protected internees, and it could be that in a way this little bureaucratic tidy-up may some day be an own goal for those of us who are concerned that the Geneva Conventions Act should rightly continue to regulate the death penalty. Maybe it is silly to throw those sections of the Act out simply as a symbolic statement by this Government of its abhorrence of the death penalty. The Government should be very careful that its politically correct, feel-good moves do not rebound to become own goals.

The last thing I want to comment on is the amendments to the Trade in Endangered Species Act of 1989. That Act is a very primitive form of conservation. Essentially, it states that if there are feral species that may be poached for trade, the best way to stop that poaching is to deprive those species of an economic value by making it hard to sell what has been poached. That may have been true in 1989, but today a far better way of making endangered species legislation or protection work would be to give some of those endangered species the kind of commercial value that would encourage people to reproduce them. If species are genuinely endangered, the very best thing that could happen to some of them would be that they would have enough commercial value for people to want to breed them—as, indeed, a couple of Czechs presumably did with the orchids they have just been pinching from our national parks. That is now quite feasible, because of advances in genetic technology. I am sorry if it horrifies the Green Party that anything from genetic technology may be helpful, but it could allow the protection of feral specimens, while identifying DNA-profiled strains of the same species in which it would be perfectly sensible to encourage trade.

I am sorry that the Government is willing to tidy up the Trade in Endangered Species Act by changing section references, inserting omitted words, and correcting a spelling error, but will not spend the legislative time to actually do something to help protected species, by taking advantage of modern technology. In other words, the Government should recognise that a DNA profile could now create an endangered species member that should be tradable, and we should encourage New Zealanders to profit from that. We should encourage the breeding of those species. Kiwi, in particular, may well come into that category, as, perhaps, could the orchids that have caused so much trouble to a couple of Czech academics recently. I know that the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) is not the place to remedy the foolishness of the Trade in Endangered Species Act, but there is an opportunity for the select committee, perhaps, when it looks at the bill to suggest that this kind of minor tidying-up and tinkering ought to be a trigger for the substantive scheme of the Act to be reviewed.

I am pleased to signal United Future’s support for the first reading of the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4).

Bill read a first time, and referred to the Government Administration Committee.