Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill (No 2)

on behalf of the Leader of the House: I move, That the Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill (No 2) be now read a second time. This legislation comes before the House each year. This year it confirms or validates 50 orders and regulations made under, I am advised, 10 different Acts. Parliament must confirm all of these orders and regulations, otherwise they will lapse.

The orders and regulations themselves cover a variety of areas, including animals products, civil aviation passenger levies, tariff rates, meat and grape levies, excise and excise-equivalent duties on tobacco and alcohol products, gambling levies, road-user charges, and increases in various benefits, allowances, and war pensions. The bill was referred to the Regulations Review Committee on 13 October this year, and I am grateful for the committee’s prompt and thorough analysis of it. Following some correspondence with the relevant Government agencies, the committee has recommended that the bill be passed without amendment. This bill is routine legislation; the Regulations Review Committee has raised no issues with it. I commend the bill to the House.

As we have heard from the Deputy Leader of the House, these subordinate legislation bills are routine bills. They come before the House every year to confirm and validate items of subordinate legislation. The point I want to make and the reason I am taking a call in what I anticipate will not be a contentious debate—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: You never know; I’ve got a copy of the bill.

—subject to any comments Mr Mallard may want to offer later in the debate—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: See that bit about the Chief Justice in it?

Now, now, we will leave her out of the debate, please. The important point to make arises out of what the Minister said about select committee scrutiny. It is true that the Regulations Review Committee had the Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill (No 2) referred to it and that we reported the bill back without any recommendations for amendment, but the language we used in reporting back was carefully chosen. We said: “We asked the eight Government agencies responsible for administering the subordinate legislation to be confirmed and validated by the bill to explain why confirmation or validation was warranted. After considering their responses, we found no reason why confirmation and validation of the regulations and orders contained in the bill should not occur.”

The reason why we put it that way is that these are all very technical measures. The matters that are dealt with in them are important in many ways. There are rates of excise and excise-equivalent duties on tobacco products, a civil aviation order relating to the domestic passenger levy payable by airline operators, increases in benefits under the Social Security Act and the New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income Act 2001, orders relating to road user charges, orders implementing free-trade agreements—in one case, the Malaysia - New Zealand Free Trade Agreement—levies imposed under the Biosecurity Act, and some matters relating to fees under the Animal Products Act being dealt with.

There are matters that are dealt with in the legislation that are no doubt important to a wide range of people in the community. The point we made in reporting it back the way we did was that it is very difficult to give this sort of legislation the scrutiny that members in the House might think a select committee should give to technical, detailed legislation. In order to give it proper scrutiny and to have satisfied ourselves that all the things the departments assured us that this legislation would do are being done, we would have had to spend a lot more time and probably engaged an expert adviser to look at each of the measures that are dealt with in the bill. The select committee chose not to take that approach. The Regulations Review Committee has never taken that approach, and it did not differ from that on this occasion.

My point is that we have seen enough examples of the House passing legislation, then having to go back and fix up things. There have to be better ways to deal with routine legislation. There is a proposal in the Legislation Bill that revisions, re-enactments, or simple machinery provisions can be certified to be such, and then go off to a parallel committee and not be subject to the three readings and Committee stage procedure. The process for confirmation and validation bills probably needs to be rethought. The bills probably need to have some sort of procedure attached to them, where the House deals with them in a similar way, and where that particular committee has an adviser available to it to provide sign-off on the validation and confirmation exercise so that Parliament can be assured that it is not making mistakes.

The point to make is that the House today is reliant on the committee’s recommendation that the bill be passed. The committee itself is reliant on the departments having acted, as they no doubt have, in good faith and with care to make sure that the confirmations and validations that are contained in this legislation are actually necessary and do what the explanatory note says they do. The detailed technical scrutiny as to whether the measures have, in fact, done those things was not conducted by the Regulations Review Committee. It has never been conducted by that committee. If it were, the committee would not have time to scrutinise the regulations that, as we know, are required to be looked at every week. In the future either it needs to go off to a select committee—I cannot think which one it would go to—or it needs to go to some other body that this House might choose to create, and obviously there are opportunities coming up to have a think about procedures and other bodies.

As I said, the Legislation Bill will be coming back to the House at some point, and I think it would be useful if the Deputy Leader of the House, in his capacity as the Minister of Justice, were to perhaps have a think about this issue and to reflect on it with officials and one or two of his colleagues. Certainly, members on this side, such as my colleague the shadow Minister of Justice and I, would be very happy to have a discussion as well about what the possibilities might be. I am sure the shadow Leader of the House would be prepared to join in that conversation.

The fundamental point is that scrutiny is one of the important jobs of this Chamber. Some scrutiny of this bill has occurred; it has been the same scrutiny that has occurred in the past. But I am not sure that this is the most satisfactory procedure by which to deal with these bills. I wanted to make the point in this combined second and third reading speech that maybe it is time to look at doing it a different way.

Bill read a second time.

Third Reading