Third Readings

I move, That the Companies Amendment Bill, the Conservation Amendment Bill, the Designs Amendment Bill, the Fisheries Amendment Bill, the Gas Amendment Bill, the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Amendment Bill, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (Restructuring) Amendment Bill, the Reserves Amendment Bill, and the Weights and Measures Amendment Bill be now read a third time. Once again I thank the Hon Lianne Dalziel, who I feel I have not acknowledged enough and has not been sufficiently acknowledged through this process.

Until the Committee of the whole House stage, these amendments were progressed through the Regulatory Improvement Bill, an omnibus bill. The amendments to the following Acts were identified during the Quality Regulation Review, which was undertaken by the previous Government in 2006 and 2007. Taken together, these nine bills will improve the regulatory framework and reduce the compliance burden on business. I consider bills such as this a good use of the House’s time, as considering small regulatory amendments through an omnibus bill is an efficient approach to removing minor legislative niggles. Again, we have the Hon Lianne Dalziel to thank for that.

These nine bills will result in the following changes. The changes to the Companies Act will reduce compliance costs and align the obligations for companies to appoint an auditor with the recent changes to the Financial Reporting Act. The amendments to the Conservation Act will reduce the costs and administrative burden on all parties involved in concessions and provisions, ensuring an efficient and contestable process occurs, as well as assisting a wide range of businesses operating on public conservation land.

The changes to the Designs Act will also ensure greater efficiency, as well as effectiveness, by allowing for the restoration of lapsed design registrations and abandoned design applications in circumstances where the lapse occurred as a result of an unintended failure to pay the renewal fee or to make the necessary application. The amendment to the Fisheries Act provides a common-sense solution to deal with situations whereby commercial fishers have inadvertently incurred deemed-value debts. The chief executive of the Ministry of Fisheries can now consider requests from commercial fishers for catch balancing relief, provided that set criteria are met. The amendment to the Gas Act clarifies the regulations and rules recommended under the Act, including gas used as feedstock. This means all industry participants will be treated fairly.

The amendments to the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act ensure that the policy intent of the Act can be more efficiently and effectively achieved with the minimum necessary compliance costs. The amendments to this Act cover a range of different issues. They are to improve the functioning of the Environmental Risk Management Authority, for example by enhancing the ability to delegate routine decision-making; to reduce barriers to innovation by getting the balance right between the benefits of public participation and the associated costs and benefits; to improve the operation of test certification for high-risk, hazardous substances, for example so that businesses can continue to operate with conditional test certificates while completing the full regulatory requirements; to bring increased clarity to hazardous substances and new organisms compliance and enforcement by improving alignment with other legislation; and to keep the hazardous substances and new organisms regulations and other instruments up to date by allowing amendments and updates to material incorporated by reference, to take effect by notification to the Gazette by the Minister or the authority.

The amendment to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (Restructuring) Act removes unnecessary duplication in the penalty regime applicable under the Act for non-payment of cost recovery levies. The provisions of the Fisheries Act 1996 alone are sufficient to ensure that statutory debts are paid. By amending the Reserves Act to enable 10-year licences to be granted for specified purposes over reserves that are vested in local administering bodies we are removing administrative complexity and additional costs surrounding the issuing of licences under the Act.

Finally, the Weights and Measures Act amendment removes regulatory confusion surrounding the supply of liquefied petroleum gas in gaseous form through pipes for industry consumers and regulators by removing it from the ambit of this Act. This means that in the future it will be regulated only under the Gas Act. The Government has asked all public sector agencies to take a systematic and ongoing approach to ensuring that the existing stock of regulation is free of regulatory duplications, of gaps, of administrative errors, and of inconsistencies between pieces of legislation. Therefore, as part of the Government’s commitment to an ongoing regulatory reform agenda, I intend to regularly bring omnibus bills before the House to remove small regulatory issues that are burdening New Zealand businesses.

Before finishing, I would like to thank the House and the select committee for their work. Once again, if I have not sufficiently acknowledged the Hon Lianne Dalziel, I would like to do that again. She and I have worked together on improving Parliament’s approach to regulation, and I have always had a good working relationship with her. I greatly admired the work she did in this area as Minister. I would also like to thank the officials across a wide number of departments who have worked on this project, and for the advice they have given Parliament here today on these issues. I commend the bills to the House.

I would like to acknowledge the Minister for Regulatory Reform, the Hon Rodney Hide—New Zealand’s first Minister for Regulatory Reform—and to thank him for—

💬 Hon Rodney Hide: Best one so far.

Yes, definitely the best one so far, and I know I can say that without anyone being able to challenge it at all. I thank him for the generosity of his comments with respect to the work that I did in this area. He will find out, I am sure, what a thankless task it is sometimes, with one’s colleagues, to be pushing the mantra on regulatory reform and regulatory improvement. I will come to the language of his new legislation in a minute.

First of all, I thought I would acknowledge what happened in the Committee stage of the debate on the Regulatory Improvement Bill. I felt that there was good humour, particularly in the competition for references to my name. I thought that the overall winner was absolutely David Parker. He bolted in with over 20 references to my name in a 5-minute speech, whereas Ms Clare Curran managed only 13 references in a 10-minute speech. Definitely David Parker was the overall winner of the competition. But what I particularly liked about David Parker’s contribution was that he deliberately mispronounced my name as “Dal-zeal”, in order to emphasise the zeal I brought to the role of Minister of Commerce with responsibility for regulatory issues. What I wanted to say, though, is that the good humour reflected the response of the Committee of the whole House, and I thought that boded very well for business.

On both sides of the House we are prepared to talk about quality regulation and what that might mean for business, for sustainable business practices, and also for productivity, as others have mentioned. Although I respect the Greens’ position on the issue that they raised, it was not the principle of the legislation that the Greens were raising. It was the issue of whether one of the aspects of the bill should have been included in legislation of this nature, and I respect that. We have a different view on the actual facts of the matter, but with regard to the reason for raising it, it was not the overall principle of regulatory improvement legislation.

Again, because of the good humour around the issue, I do not want anyone to think for a minute that this legislation was the only outcome of the Quality Regulation Review. It was only one tiny little outcome of the Quality Regulation Review, which had a lot of other outcomes, but I will not go into them because it might be considered to be outside the scope of this particular debate. However, it was an important part of the Quality Regulation Review. That review was a multifaceted review that asked officials and business to engage with each other in a very direct way. I was part of that, as well. As I have said to the House, I travelled around the country and engaged with business in a wide range of areas. I put on record my thanks to the chambers of commerce and to the economic development agencies around the country that actually facilitated those meetings. They brought to meet me business people with specific issues on their minds. So it was not just a complaint-fest about what was wrong with regulation and how much red tape they were exposed to. I think it was really a problem-solving exercise on a greater scale than most we have done in this country. But it was a small thing—the small businesses telling us how those small things irritated the hell out them, and how just a little bit of effort around those small things would be a big relief to business, so they could get on with the job.

I will not repeat all the things I said in the second reading, but I say that this legislation really does not realise my wildest dreams. I do not want anyone to think for a minute that I think that this legislation is good enough. It is the first set of legislation, but it should have been a blockbuster. It should not have amended only nine Acts; it should have amended 29, 39, 69, 89, or 99 Acts. That really hammered home to me how hard it is for any Government to change things that are relatively small, when one looks at the big picture, when it is trying to deal with the parliamentary processes that are in place. They are there for good reason, but they act as a barrier to progress when there are small technical amendments to be made. This Parliament has been good enough over the years to develop the concept of the Statutes Amendment Bill, but as everyone knows, if one party disagrees with any one of those amendments, then that one has to go. It is a very good way of getting rid of the technical changes that need to be made, but anyone can disagree. Nothing can be controversial, there can really be no debate about it; it is just a straightforward change to a whole lot of different statutes. And that is good—that is a great process.

The Business Law Reform Bill is approved by the Business Committee on an annual basis, or when it is required to be introduced, but as people will have seen through this debate, not all of those elements could be identified as business law reform. I still would like this legislation to be written as one of the types of bills that are accepted by this House as an omnibus bill. Departments should be not just invited but required to send through these small items to another department to take over the work and fix the problem.

I tell members that I became the Associate Minister of Justice so that I could get a change made for the wine industry with respect to the Sale of Liquor Act. I could not, as Minister of Commerce running the Quality Regulation Review, make the tiny change needed to fix a mistake that had been made when the Winemakers Act was repealed in the 1989 changes to the Sale of Liquor Act. I think Rodney Hide will find out as he delves into regulation that the biggest barrier to getting that kind of change through Parliament is the reaction of departments. The second biggest barrier is the time that the Minister has to put into it. Giving it up to another department that has responsibility for tidying up some of these smaller regulatory matters, I think, would be a good thing.

I put on the record my thanks to all of the departmental officials who came to the Commerce Committee, but when I saw that cast of thousands I just about felt like banging my head against a brick wall! That was the whole reason that these sorts of changes get held up. I do not know how many there were in the room at one time, but at some point they certainly outnumbered the members of the committee and all of our officials.

It really emphasised the problem for me, which is that we have to get into a position where we can trust our own departments to work a lot more collaboratively and take up some of the responsibility for these things.

The final point I make is on the question of regulatory improvement versus regulatory reform. The health reforms of the 1990s ruined that word “reform” for me. I thought that the word “reform” meant to make something better, or to look at something in a new way that would lead to an advancement of the situation. The health reforms of the 1990s absolutely ruined that word for me, and that is why I do not use the word “reform”. I use the word “improvement”, because members would be surprised at the number of people who will argue reform when in fact what they are proposing is not an improvement to the situation from a business perspective. Even I was surprised at the push-back on some of the very sensible suggestions that I took up on behalf of business. I will not list those suggestions here, because they will be in Labour Party policy next time, and the push-back will not be tolerated when we are next in Government.

It is not always about the regulation, as it appears in the legislation; it is often about how it is implemented on the ground by the regulators—and that is another story. This is an ongoing story, and I will be happy to support future regulatory improvement bills, even if they are called regulatory reform bills, because that process is good for Parliament and for business.

I rise to take a short call on the various legislation from the Regulatory Improvement Bill, as the Minister has outlined. I will not get into the regular accolades that have been thrown around in the House, except to say that I have enjoyed working with the chair of the Commerce Committee and I acknowledge the work she did during the period when she was the Minister of Commerce.

I quickly acknowledge the officials. The previous speaker mentioned the number of officials who were at our select committee. The advice those officials provided was by and large sound advice, and they worked together across departments, which is something we would like to see more of not just in the formulation of laws but also in the formulation of policies and regulations.

Much has been said already, and I echo the comments of others. It is good that we can get cross-party support. I acknowledge and respect the divergent views of the Green Party, whose members argued against part of the bill, but I am certain they support the general thrust of what has been debated today. This bill is only a small step, as the Hon Lianne Dalziel has already mentioned. Certainly I would like to see more of this type of legislation in this House; more bills that look at regulation. Regulation is a good thing, as has been stated, but we need to look at the costs of compliance and red tape that businesses have to endure in order to get on with their lot. I support this bill. It has been a joy to work with our fellow committee members. Thank you.

I also rise to make a short contribution in this third reading debate. Let me start by saying that it is pleasing to see the Regulatory Improvement Bill finally pass into law. It has had a rather more than necessary protracted gestation period.

I will make a couple of process points, though, notwithstanding the substantive support for the legislation that members on this side of the House are expressing. First of all, there cannot be justification for dealing with these sorts of matters in urgency. They are minor, and they have been languishing on the Order Paper for a long time. They simply ought to have been dealt with in ordinary parliamentary time, and if this House continues to rush these sorts of measures through under urgency we will continue, I am afraid, to undermine public confidence in our legislative process. That is something that I think all members should reflect on.

The second issue I wanted to deal with by way of a bit of criticism was the way in which the matter was dealt with in the Committee stage. I took the time in the Committee stage to rehearse the three concerns that have been pointed out to the Commerce Committee by the Regulations Review Committee, which I have the privilege to chair. First, there was a commencement issue. Secondly, there was an issue around whether a section to be inserted in the hazardous substances legislation was satisfactory given that it differed from the existing provision but did something relatively similar, and there was no explanation about that. Thirdly, there was an issue around incorporation by reference—an important issue about the public being able to know what the law is.

On the first two issues I think there was a satisfactory resolution. On the commencement issue the Commerce Committee clearly listened to the concerns and dealt with them. On the second issue—the discrepancy in procedures issue—although there was not an express explanation by the Commerce Committee, one of the Ministers who took the chair in the Committee stage, Mr Mapp, sought to explain the matter. Mr Hide did, on the advice of officials, seek to explain that further. But there was really no attempt by the Minister in the chair to address the third issue—the issue of whether the extensive changes to the incorporation by reference procedures were satisfactory. Given the Minister’s expressed passion for good law and appropriate regulation, I would have hoped he would respect the parliamentary process a little more than simply declining to take a call on that issue and make an explanation as to whether he thought the changes were adequate.

This is legislation that is supported by the Labour Party. It is legislation that owes a lot to the efforts of my friend, colleague, and bench mate Lianne Dalziel, and I will join the chorus of praise and support for her as that has obviously become traditional in this debate.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: You could go a bit further.

I could go further, as Ruth Dyson suggests, but canonisation is not within the power of the House, according to the Standing Orders, so we had better just leave it where things sit.

Although I express support for the legislation and a degree of pleasure that this appears to be likely to become an annual exercise, because it is a good thing to do from the point of view of efficiency and good law, it is disappointing to have to express the sadness I have that we are dealing with the matter under urgency on a completely unmerited basis and we did not really get the sort of respectful and careful consideration of the issues that the rhetoric of the Minister would lead us to believe we should have had in the Committee stage.

I begin by sharing the concerns about urgency that Charles Chauvel raised. In particular, I note that Katrina Shanks was the only person from the Government side who attempted to justify urgency, and her explanation for it was entirely woeful.

The Green Party will vote against the changes to the Conservation Act, the Reserves Act, and the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act, but will vote for all the other changes. We support the principle behind the Regulatory Improvement Bill. When this kind of legislation comes before the House in the future, let us ensure that the measures proposed are genuinely uncontroversial. In relation to the changes to the Conservation Act and the Reserves Act, they do not meet the test of addressing duplication, gaps, errors, and consistency between legislation. Therefore, they ought not to have been included in this legislation. In particular, these changes will reduce rather than enhance contestability, will introduce a substantial barrier to entry into a market, and will lead to locking in bad decisions where quality is hard to measure in concessions. The Government’s intent to see the natural world as a set of resources to exploit rather than treasure, and to starve the Department of Conservation of cash, will lead to long-term concession decisions made for revenue and not for conservation values. That is regrettable.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.