Legislation Bill

Thank you for the opportunity to address the Committee stage of the Legislation Bill. As of course we are all aware, the Legislation Bill is designed to modernise and improve the law relating to the publication, availability, reprinting, revision, and official versions of legislation, bringing them together in a single piece of legislation. So that is an excellent move in respect of this particular piece of legislation, and that is something that we all support in this House—in fact, we welcome it. I think that it is an important advance in the way that we are able to bring together the legislation into the one single format.

This bill was introduced to Parliament on 25 June 2010, and normally I would make some reflection as to the time that it has taken to return to the House in the Committee stage. I think Mr Chairman would know that normally I would be somewhat critical of such a delay, but I am not critical of the delay in this particular instance because I believe that the legislation is so important.

In many respects it is not the sort of legislation that, as my husband might use the phrase, smokes your tyres. He always uses that expression. Something that is particularly exciting is something that smokes your tyres. This does not normally smoke the tyres of anyone I know, but the truth is that it is really important legislation and it is worth taking the time in order to put the effort in and in order to make it really worthwhile. So a lot of people who are tuning in to their crystal sets tonight will be thinking that this is a very technical and a very dull bill, but I can assure those people who are listening tonight that this is anything but, certainly for this side of the House and for certain members on both sides of the House. For a lot of members of the House this will be a technical and dull bill, but those of us who have been here for some time will know that it is a really important part of making sure that our legislation speaks to our modern environment, rather than reflecting that which has come before.

There are elements around this particular law, though, that I do think are worth reflecting on as we deal with the Legislation Bill in the Committee stage. I really would like the Attorney-General to speak to a particular issue that I want to put on the table, and it relates to a former Leader of the House and Attorney-General, Sir Michael Cullen, who believed very strongly that the Parliamentary Counsel Office should report to the Leader of the House, as opposed to the Attorney-General. I personally think that he was on the right track with that, and I really would like the Attorney-General to respond to that because it was a comment made by a former Attorney-General.

The reason I support it is that, in fact, the Leader of the House controls the agenda of the House, controls the Order Paper, and looks after the legislative programme. I remember, as a former Minister, having to negotiate quite a hard bargain from time to time to get bills that I wanted on that programme. Often the point at which it was held back was when the Parliamentary Counsel Office was not able to prioritise that work. Therefore, rather than having the Attorney-General being the Minister responsible for parliamentary counsel, it actually made good sense to have the Leader of the House with that particular role. Actually, the more that we debated this issue—because we did have quite a long discussion about this when we were in Government—and the more we had the discussion around the different roles that were brought to bear in this regard, there was not a vote, as it were, that sat with the role of Leader of the House, and it made good sense for the Parliamentary Counsel Office to be the basis for a vote to be allocated.

I will give you an example of where that particularly worked. I want to go back perhaps more than 10 years now, back to the last time when the sale of liquor legislation was before the House with any sorts of substantive amendments. Of course, in those days all parties operated under a conscience vote. As a result of a number of different amendments that were going to be moved during the Committee stage of the sale of liquor amendment legislation that we had in front of us at that time, the Attorney-General was asked to make provision for parliamentary counsel to be available to private members—to individual members—to assist in the drafting of amendments. The reason that this occurred was to ensure that under a conscience vote scenario, if legislation was to be amended by way of a Supplementary Order Paper by a member, at least it would be drafted in a form that would work. Again, that really reflected back to me.

I am trying to remember who the Minister was at the time. I know that Tony Ryall was the Minister of Justice when the legislation went through, but I cannot recall whether it was still Doug Graham in those days who was the Attorney-General. But whoever it was, they did make the Parliamentary Counsel Office available for the amendments that were going through. It did strike me at the time that it would actually go a lot better with the role of Leader of the House.

In terms of the good order of the House around the question—particularly in conscience vote areas, and I know that there are fewer of those today—it did seem to me that it made a lot of sense for that to occur. So I really would appreciate the Attorney-General actually responding to that issue. I know that Sir Michael Cullen would have felt—well, I think he would appreciate the fact that the House was considering this particular issue in the context of the Legislation Bill in front of us tonight. So I do ask the Attorney-General whether he would respond to that particular question. I do actually think that it has a lot of merit.

I want to mention just one other example of when this particular issue came to light, and that was when I was part of a select committee that was looking at constitutional arrangements. Again, this dates back a number of years. I think it was just prior to 2005—it might have been 2004 or 2005. I was involved in a small select committee that was established for the purpose of looking at constitutional arrangements, and I recall that Peter Dunne, I think, was the chair of that particular committee. We traversed a whole range of different issues around constitutional matters, including this whole question of whether a vote should apply to the Leader of the House, and whether there were grounds for particular support around some of the constitutional issues that would arise in terms of the House, and the roles of private members arose on that occasion as well. So even though it is not obviously a part of this bill in the sense that it was not a proposition that the Government did pick up, I would actually appreciate having the Attorney-General on record in response to that particular issue because it is an important one.

The point that I really wanted to make was how important these sorts of legislative measures are. There is a lot of serious work that goes on behind the scenes to modernise the rules around legislation. I think that for legislation to be accessible and available to people generally, we do have to have a serious look at these kinds of legislative improvements from time to time.

The select committee looked at the regulations disallowance changes proposed in the bill, as well—the provisions in the bill that separate the publication and the disallowance of delegated legislation in the broad definition of “disallowable instrument”. That is designed to ensure that there will be parliamentary oversight of the use of delegated powers by the executive and to make it more difficult to avoid disallowance. I also agree with that. I think it is very important that we are able to hold the executive to account, which is the proper process of the Regulations Review Committee and parliamentary process in general.

I want to make a couple of points about Part 1 of the Legislation Bill. The purposes of the bill are set out in clause 3. The first is that the new Act should bring together the main provisions of New Zealand legislation relating to the drafting, publication, and reprinting of legislation, and the disallowance of instruments. The other purposes include providing for electronic and printed copies of Acts and legislative instruments to be published, to provide for official versions of Acts and legislative instruments to be published in electronic form—at the moment the only authoritative form is the written form—and to facilitate the production of up-to-date reprints that are modernised and made consistent with current drafting practice concerning their mode of expression, style, and format.

The next purpose is a very significant one, because it relates to accessibility. This is a principle that the Regulations Review Committee has stressed the importance of a number of times. The bill expressly sets out to make New Zealand statute law more accessible, more readable, and easier to understand. It sets out to do so by means of facilitating a progressive and systematic revision of the New Zealand statute book so that statute law is rationalised and arranged more logically, inconsistencies and overlaps will be removed, obsolete and redundant provisions will be repealed, and expression, style, and format will be more modernised and made more consistent. Another important purpose of the legislation is to enable certain kinds of subordinate legislation to incorporate material by reference in reliance on the statute, subject to compliance with consultation and other requirements.

Members will know that the phenomenon of the incorporation of material, by reference, into our law is an increasingly common phenomenon, particularly as we adopt international legal standards. It is not uncommon for legislation these days to refer, for example, to Treaty provisions that are extraneous to the statute itself, and which are not necessarily even scheduled to the statute as used to be the practice. There is often a reference in the schedule to where the provisions of the Treaty can be found. So it is important that we are clear about how material incorporated by reference into the laws of the land is able to be found by the reader, so that the reader may ascertain on any occasion what the law of the land is.

Finally, the legislation will replace an Act of Parliament that is many, many years old—the Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act 1920. It will replace it with modern legislation that continues the Parliamentary Counsel Office, but as a separate statutory office that facilitates the drafting and publishing of high-quality legislation. Those are all purposes with which the Opposition wishes to associate itself. Listeners to the debate might be wondering why this set of aims is necessary and what is wrong with the status quo. Perhaps what they might like to think about is the way in which statutes are published and accessible at the moment. When they are published, Acts of Parliament are ordered chronologically, which means that the user looking for an Act on a particular topic is likely to have trouble knowing exactly where to look for it, unless they have an index, or unless they are searching on the internet for electronic copies of the legislation.

The law on any one particular topic could be scattered through an entire range of Acts. All of the content of an Act may not be indicated by its title. Provisions about certain matters can be located in all sorts of unlikely or unexpected Acts, unless the reader or the searcher has a degree of legal training and knows, because of that training, where to look. Sometimes it might be quite a surprise to find particular provisions where they are actually located.

Amending Acts sometimes contain substantive provisions that stand separately from the Act being amended, and these can be easily missed when searching for provisions on a particular subject. Obviously, some Acts are old, drafted in archaic language that is difficult to understand, or drafted in a style that because it is not compatible with contemporary usage is just not accessible to the reader today.

Acts can be amended several times before they are replaced, and this can mean that there are inconsistencies in drafting style between the original and the inserted provisions in the same Act. In addition, redundant and obsolete provisions can remain in force, and although the Parliamentary Counsel Office is responsible for publishing Acts of Parliament, it does not have an express function relating to the presentation or accessibility of public Acts. When formulating policy, Government departments do not always treat accessibility of statute law as a priority.

So I am hopeful, given the aims of the legislation, that those are some of the problems that we currently face in accessing our statute law that will be remedied by this bill. Certainly, that was the hope that was expressed by a number of submitters to the Regulations Review Committee, and the committee has done its best to ensure that in reporting a draft of the bill back to the House, the principles that I have listed will be preserved as we enact the legislation.

Just a word about the background to the bill. The bill will implement the majority of the legislative recommendations made in two Law Commission reports: first, Presentation of New Zealand Statute Law, dating back to October 2008, NZLC R104, and Review of the Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act 1920, from May 2009, NZLC R107. Many of the problems that I listed earlier are identified in those reports, and the bill is an attempt to address a number of them.

The Minister has tabled, I see, a 27-page Supplementary Order Paper, and it would be, I think, helpful to know, while we have had a chance to read Supplementary Order Paper 127, at least cursorily, whether the Supplementary Order Paper makes any substantive changes to the aims of the legislation and the purposes of the bill. Obviously it would be helpful, if that were the case, for him to address any of those changes, so that the Committee is clear as to what we are doing as far as recommendations that might differ from the reported-back version from the Regulations Review Committee are concerned.

Perhaps also just a word here about the legislative history. The bill was considered by the Regulations Review Committee of the previous Parliament. The deputy chair from the committee is present in the Chamber. There was, I think, at one point a proposal from the Attorney-General that this legislation should be combined with the Regulatory Standards Bill, and apparently that does explain some of the delay in bringing the legislation back to the House. I think the Attorney-General would agree that it was considered not proper to combine this legislation with the regulatory standards legislation, given that the latter bill does not have wide support across the Parliament, whereas, as my understanding is concerned, this Legislation Bill does have that support. So it has been decided to now bring this bill forward in its current form, back from the select committee, with the reasonably substantial Supplementary Order Paper that I mentioned. If my understanding is correct, if the Minister in the chair can confirm that, then certainly that is a move and an approach that the Opposition would support.

This legislation is good technical remedial legislation. It would not have been appropriate to combine it with legislation that advances a particularly partisan agenda from the ACT Party, as the Regulatory Standards Bill is intended to do. With those few words of introduction on Part 1, I certainly look forward to and anticipate the rest of the debate with interest.

This is an important piece of legislation and a very worthy piece of legislation. In equal amounts it is very technical and very dull, which probably explains why all the speakers tonight on this bill, the Legislation Bill, with my exception, will be lawyers. They thrive on this sort of thing. Labour will be supporting it. It looks like a common-sense bill and certainly not before its time when you consider that one of the pieces of legislation that the bill replaces is the Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act 1920. Well, that was 92 years ago. That was a different age, and it is really quite remarkable that a piece of legislation could have survived this length of time, albeit with amendment but in its original form. Because the legislation has been there for 92 years, I guess it is understandable that this legislation has sat around since the Regulations Review Committee heard submissions on it about 2½ years ago. So it is not the sort of legislation that the Government has given any particular priority to, notwithstanding its worthy nature. In fact, I see the closing date for submissions was 23 September 2010. Almost exactly 2 years later, the Minister brings to the House an extensive Supplementary Order Paper, which runs into 23 pages. Because this bill is about drafting and printing, one wonders why the Supplementary Order Paper has come in and those technical changes were necessitated so long after the submissions were received and the select committee looked at it. Maybe the Attorney-General can give an explanation for that.

Essentially, what this bill does is to modernise and improve the law relating to the publication, availability, reprinting, revision, and official versions of legislation, and it brings them together in one piece of legislation. Well, I think that is an important first point. It replaces three pieces of legislation: the 1920 Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act, which I have mentioned, and two pieces of legislation from 1989, the Acts and Regulations Publication Act and the Regulations (Disallowance) Act. So it is always good that in the myriad tomes of statutes we can try to consolidate down legislation into one piece. In fact, the first purpose of the bill under Part 1 is set out “to bring together in this Act the main provisions of New Zealand legislation that relate to the drafting, publication, and reprinting of legislation, and the disallowing of instruments:”. So that is certainly something to be said in its favour.

Because it is a modernising Act, it also provides, as well as for printed copies of Acts, for there to be electronic copies. The old days when people studied for long hours over dusty books in the law library have been replaced with most people having access to legislation online, and that certainly has been an improvement as well. The bill sets out as a purpose the facilitation of the production of up-to-date reprints that are modernised and consistent with current drafting practice, particularly in terms of expression, style, and format. That is a good thing. What so much of this legislation is about is to try to make Acts of Parliament less impenetrable for the average citizen. I am going to come to the really important part of this legislation and what the Law Commission actually said about that in just one moment.

The bill also sets out as its purpose “to make New Zealand statute law more accessible, readable, and easier to understand by facilitating the progressive and systematic revision of the New Zealand statute book …”. What it tries to do, in that sense, is to rationalise and arrange statute law more logically, and that is praiseworthy; to remove inconsistencies and overlaps, and certainly the legislation will benefit from that; to repeal obsolete and redundant provisions, and if you can make the legislation shorter, again that makes it more comprehensible; and to modernise the expression, style, and format, and make sure it is consistent. I note what the Law Commission said, which is at the heart of this legislation, and this was in its Presentation of New Zealand Statute Law that came out way back in October 2008. I want to quote from it, because I think it is the heart and the soul of the legislation: “The state has an obligation to make law accessible to citizens. People have to obey the law; ignorance of it is no excuse. So they need to be able to find it and understand it. They will not respect the law if they cannot. Moreover, law which is not accessible is expensive in terms of both time and money.” It is notable that this legislation—I mean, it is very hard to find any politics in this legislation—actually comes out of two reports by the Law Commission. I want to acknowledge the work of the Law Commission, because this is the sort of thing that, actually, you would be waiting forever for if it was the Ministry of Justice that was responsible for putting it together. The Law Commission put out first of all the Presentation of New Zealand Statute Law in October 2008, and then a year later the Review of the Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act 1920.

I think it is important to go over what was wrong with the existing law, why we have this very large, new piece of legislation, and why it is necessary. There are a number of things I think we need to take into account. Acts of Parliament are ordered chronologically, which means that the user who is looking for an Act on a particular topic is likely to have trouble in knowing where to look for it. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the law on one topic can be scattered across any one of a number of different Acts. That makes it very hard for somebody who is trying to understand the law in a particular area. We need to address that. All of the content of an Act might not be indicated by its title, which again makes it more difficult for people to find. Sometimes the legal provisions about particular matters are located in very unlikely sounding Acts, and that is a frustration for people trying to follow the law, as well. Amending Acts sometimes contain substantive provisions that are actually separate from the Act that is being amended, and therefore you can miss that when you are looking for the provisions on a particular subject.

A lot of the Acts that we are dealing with—and you have only to walk out into the lobbies and pick up some copies of the statute book to see that—are old, drafted in archaic language that is difficult to understand, and drafted in a style, again, that is not accessible. Acts can be amended several times before being replaced—God knows how many times the Crimes Act has been amended, and it still has not been replaced. One day there will be a Government with the time, or the courage, or the stupidity to take on that particular task. But because of those amendments, it can mean that there are inconsistencies in drafting style between the original and the inserted provisions in the same Act. You are clearly looking at something that appears to be scissors and paste in how it is put together. It lacks coherence, it lacks consistency, it lacks flow, and, again, that is not desirable. Sometimes when the National Party is really desperate and it is looking for a member’s bill, it repeals things that nobody has thought about, nobody cares about, and that have not been seen for many years. The truth is that you get redundant and obsolete provisions that remain in force for a very long time. That is one of the—

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: John Banks.

Sometimes members of Parliament come into that category too, my colleague Lianne Dalziel very—well, I would not say unfairly, I think it is absolutely fair—unkindly suggested that John Banks might be redundant and obsolete. One wonders why he is in the House—a dead man walking. The last point to come back to—

💬 Maggie Barry: People in glass houses.

Yes, people in glass houses. Well, tell us about it. One day, Maggie Barry, somebody will explain why somebody who lies can retain a ministerial portfolio. Can you explain that? Not you, Mr Chairman, but Maggie Barry, if she wants to worry about glass houses.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order!

I know. I will come back to the point. I have been distracted by that unfortunate intervention from that unfortunate member. So what you can see from what I have been saying right up to date—trying to make this non-political, because, essentially, the bill is non-political—is that there are real problems with the status quo and we need to make those changes. If we look at the summary of the provisions, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, which is the key agency here, will be required to publish legislation electronically and in printed form. It will issue official versions of legislation in both forms. This provision is a sensible one. We support it.

I am very happy to take a call on the Legislation Bill. Many of my colleagues have already spoken at length on this bill and what it seeks to do. And they spoke very well. We heard from Lianne Dalziel, who got up and told us that although this was not a very exciting piece of legislation and was not legislation that would smoke your tyres, it was indeed very important legislation that needs good consideration by this House.

Then we heard Charles Chauvel, in a much more tempered way, call this bill good technical remedial legislation—he did not go down the “smoke your tyres” route. And then Phil Goff called it technical and dull, and said that he was going to be the only non-legal to take a call on it—well, I join you in taking a call on this bill. In fact, Charles Chauvel and I decided that you got the gold star for finding politics in this bill.

In all seriousness, this is an incredibly important piece of legislation. As colleagues have set out, what it is doing is both modernising and improving the law relating to the publication, availability, reprinting, revision, and official versions of legislation. At its core what this bill is about is making the laws that we make in this House accessible to the people whom we make those laws for. I think that is an incredibly important piece of work.

This bill was very carefully considered at the Regulations Review Committee under the excellent chairmanship of Charles Chauvel. It is important that it had such a thorough examination at the select committee, because it deals with important constitutional matters, as previous speakers have talked about. What this bill does is provide unelected officials greater power to change the words agreed to by this Parliament in terms of the law of New Zealand. These provisions are carefully constructed to ensure that the powers are limited only to obvious errors. This should be the case; we need to make sure that we have tight controls around this when we have unelected officials making changes to what we enact in this Chamber and the laws that we make here.

In terms of clause 3, “Purposes”, what we see is that there is a very great purpose in this bill. The provisions giving the Parliamentary Counsel Office the power to correct errors are sensible. In fact, they not only are sensible but will also be of great assistance to this Parliament. However, any time that we propose to transfer this power, as I said, we must make sure that that transfer is wise. I think that this legislation has achieved this.

The bill also establishes the very important practice of revision bills, which will be overseen by the Attorney-General. This will provide for the revision of the wording, the numbering, the title, etc. of Acts of Parliament. The aim of these bills will be to simplify New Zealand’s legislation and make it easier to access and understand by embarking on a 3-yearly programme of systematic revision.

I note that in the regulatory impact statement the Chief Parliamentary Counsel has considered the cost of what this revision will be. He says that it is not possible to quantify with any precision the cost associated with a statutory programme of revision because it will depend on the size and nature of that programme. A programme of 3 or 4 revision bills per year would approximate to around $220,000 per annum of additional cost to the Parliamentary Counsel Office, but $220,000 is a small price to pay to make the laws that we make more accessible to people.

Many members have spelt out the status quo and what is wrong with it. Acts of Parliament are ordered currently in terms of chronology. That means it is hard for ordinary members of the public who are looking for an Act on a particular topic to know where exactly to look for it, because things are scattered all over the place. We need to consolidate this and bring this together.

All the content of an Act might not be indicated by its title. There are laws and provisions contained in Acts with titles that would never lead you to suspect that that is what you are looking for. Amending Acts sometimes contain substantive provisions that stand separately from the Act being amended, and these can be missed when people search for the provisions on a particular subject. So when the Parliamentary Counsel Office publishes law, it has an express function relating to the presentation and accessibility of public Acts. When formulating policy Government departments do not always treat accessibility of statute law as a key priority. When they are putting together policy and putting together legislation, whether or not people can access it and find it easily is not their key concern.

My colleague Phil Goff talked about the Law Commission saying that it was going to save a lot in terms of time and money, making this process much simpler for it. The Law Commission has gone back to some very clear research on the values of plain drafting of legislation. Several pieces of research have found that untidiness and obscurity in statute law are likely to add to the costs of providing legal advice about rights and obligations to Government, businesses, and the public generally.

So what we have here in this legislation is not only an ability to make law more accessible to the public of New Zealand more generally but also an ability to make it more accessible to the Government when it goes about its business and to New Zealand businesses when they are going about their everyday work and running their businesses. Anything that seeks to modernise, bring together, and make what we do here in making laws for New Zealanders more accessible is something that we are happy to commend to the House. Thank you.

I move, That the question be now put.

Motion agreed to.

Part 1 agreed to.

Part 2 Law relating to publishing, reprinting, and revising legislation