Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill (No 3)

on behalf of the Leader of the House: I move, That the Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill (No 3) be now read a second time. As foreshadowed in the discussions at the Business Committee and under the changes to the Standing Orders adopted in July this year, the bill’s second reading will—because no amendments were raised for consideration at the Regulations Review Committee—be followed by its third reading without debate. The bill confirms and validates 13 orders or regulations made under eight different Acts. The bill must be enacted by 31 December 2014 to avoid subordinate legislation lapsing—and we would not want that, would we?

Because of the timing of the general election, this year’s bill had to be introduced in May, which was earlier than usual, and I want to thank the Regulations Review Committee for its assistance in ensuring that the bill has been amended to include the Excise and Excise-equivalent Duties Table (Alcoholic Beverages Indexation) Amendment Order 2014, which also requires confirmation and could not be included in the bill at the time it was introduced. In its report the committee commented that the streamlined procedure adopted in the 2014 revision of the Standing Orders will greatly assist in providing more time for the parliamentary scrutiny of confirmation and validation bills.

I look forward to testing the new arrangements with the 2015 confirmation and validation bill, and I commend the bill to the House.

I rise as chair of the Regulations Review Committee, and, in so doing, would like to acknowledge the work of the previous committee and especially the outgoing chair, the Hon Maryan Street. Can I acknowledge the Minister and endorse his comments. The Regulations Review Committee—as you well know, Mr Assistant Speaker, but for the benefit of the public—is a largely bipartisan committee of Parliament, typically chaired by the Opposition, which reaches decisions by consensus. Its role is to act as Parliament’s watchdog on the role of the executive in promulgating subordinate legislation—that is, regulations and disallowable instruments, which are executive orders and instruments promulgated under legislation or laws but do not have the force of law in themselves.

There are a number of times when regulations or the like are made and they have time limits or they have certain clauses that would cause them to cease their effect, which is not bad practice because it is a sunset type of provision. The role of the committee and of this bill brought before the House today is to go through the list of those regulations and see which ones, if any, should not be rolled over—should not be continued. That is Parliament’s opportunity, through the work of the committee and its staff, to ensure that the executive is not inappropriately using its powers.

The need for the committee and the need for this exercise grew out of, would you believe—and as recalled by the outgoing chair last year in this debate—the Rt Hon Rob Muldoon, who imposed a wage and price freeze by regulation, not even by legislation, and then rammed through justifying legislation within a month. And—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: Ha, ha, ha!

I can hear his laughter over the other side of the—

💬 Grant Robertson: He appears to be in the Chamber.

He appears to be in the Chamber, but we cannot refer to that as—

💬 Chris Hipkins: His spirit lives on.

His spirit lives on. So out of that the public has a new safeguard. It is the work of the Regulations Review Committee.

Now to the content of this bill. There are no regulations that the committee felt should not be rolled over, and so there is a clean bill of health contained in this bill, and all of the regulations that would have “sunsetted” have been renewed. As the Minister has noted, there has been a new process—a more streamlined process—introduced this year, truncating the House debate but also seeing the bill introduced a month earlier, as per the previous year. The committee would like to emphasise the importance of that early start and to ask the Attorney-General to ensure that the same thing occurs next year. It was difficult, given the election, for the committee to complete its task on time, and our advice is that it would have been better in terms of the depth of scrutiny if longer had been allowed. But it has been sufficient time to reach a determination on the issues that have been raised in the bill.

In closing, can I just say that the committee is reviewing the way it does its work. Rather than giving consideration to every single deemed instrument or deemed regulation or disallowable instrument, it is likely to focus more on a 80:20 approach, where those that are likely to be non-controversial and not to offend any of the key principles of good legislative practice will not be routinely reviewed, but increased scrutiny will be given to those that are more likely to provide issues that need to be considered. So we are expecting the committee to take a more detailed and focused approach to its work in the coming year. I would like to commend the work of the staff and, again, the outgoing chair, the Hon Maryan Street, in setting up that process. Thank you very much.

The question is that the motion is agreed to.

I was going to speak to that. I did not realise it was going to be truncated to that degree. I have myself down as the No. 6 speaker on this bill.

The Greens support the Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill (No 3)—on a Thursday night it feels like a Friday—but one of the things that stand out for us, of course, is the commodity levies. It is always good to see commodity levies from the productive sectors going into research and industry-good situations. A recent one, of course, is the forest growers levy, a levy funding the work programme that has been set up that is going to do a lot of stuff to help around biosecurity for the industry and also with some of the marketing.

I will just bring up one shortcoming with the system—and it does happen, unfortunately, with a number of levies. The power behind the spend of the levy is consolidated generally with producers with the biggest volume. In the forestry industry it is dominated by overseas interests, and yet the benefit, in theory, out of this should be for all forest owners, and we cannot be quite sure that that will follow. I will be very interested to see how they work it and to make sure that the benefits from the research and the work under the Government industry agreements around biosecurity and the like do follow down that track.

With regard to the different orders in the Commodity Levies Act—there is the blackcurrant, the harvested wood material, the citrus fruit, and some other orders—we are supportive of that going through. I just wanted to put it on the record that some of the issues around that we will need to watch to make sure that the small woodlot owners in New Zealand and others will get the benefit of that levy as much as those big overseas owners that dominant the New Zealand forest industry. Thank you.

New Zealand First wishes to thank the Regulations Review Committee for the good work it has done on this Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill (No 3). New Zealand First has examined the bill and is satisfied that the various pieces of legislation or regulations being confirmed or validated should be agreed to, and we will therefore be voting in favour of the bill.

Bill read a second time.

Third Reading