Charities Amendment Bill

I move, That the Charities Amendment Bill be now read a second time. The Charities Amendment Bill makes a small number of technical amendments to the Charities Act 2005. It was divided from the current Statutes Amendment Bill to give the public a further opportunity to make submissions. I would like to thank the members of the Government Administration Committee for their work on this bill. The committee received 32 written submissions and heard six oral submissions. The committee recommended one amendment not proceed and the insertion of one additional amendment. Although the bill only makes a small number of changes to the Charities Act, they are important for reinforcing the public’s trust and confidence in the system.

I would like to take a little bit of time to outline the changes in the bill. Clause 11 adds tax evasion and similar offences under section 143B of the Tax Administration Act 1994 to the list of offences that disqualify someone from being an officer of a registered charity. These offences are similar to other financial-related disqualifying offences already provided for in the Act. This amendment will provide additional assurance that unsuitable persons are not able to obtain control over a charity’s finances. It goes without saying that financial prudence is an important aspect of public trust and confidence in charities.

Clause 12 introduces a 20-working-day time frame for an entity to respond to a notice to provide more information in relation to its registration application. If an adequate response is not received within this time, the application will simply be treated as withdrawn. Twenty working days is a standard time frame for responding to administrative requests; it appears in 175 separate Acts of Parliament. The clause also provides for extensions of time, which can be granted by the chief executive. Currently, the Department of Internal Affairs must go through the process of formally declining an incomplete application where the entity has simply failed to respond to a request for further information, and that happened 180 times in the 2015-16 financial year. Quite apart from the time and cost this adds to the application process, a formal notice that an application has been declined carries substantial reputational risk for the entity concerned. The amendment will not change the process for handling registration applications, which includes an obligation to observe the rules of natural justice. Departmental officials advised the committee that the application process is and will remain an iterative process. I am happy to repeat that assurance here in the House tonight. I would also note that this does apply only to the application process; it is not a licence for the department to request, at any point in time, information from an entity within 20 days.

New clause 12A has been inserted, at the committee’s recommendation, to correct a 2012 drafting error. It replaces the words “chief executive” in section 60(3) of the principal Act with “Board”. Section 60 sets out the High Court’s ability to make interim orders against the statutory decision maker pending determination of an appeal. For section 60(3), which cross-references section 55, the statutory decision maker is the Charities Registration Board. The chief executive of the Department of Internal Affairs provides administrative and secretariat support to the board but does not have any statutory decision-making authority. This amendment does not have any impact on the charities’ ability to seek justice; it is merely providing clarity to the High Court when making those interim orders.

As I have outlined, this bill makes three small but important technical changes that will improve the coherence of the Charities Act 2005. It will provide greater clarity around the registration application process and contribute to public trust and confidence in charities by strengthening protections against the risk of financial mismanagement.

In conclusion, again I would like to thank the committee for its careful consideration of the bill. I look forward to hearing the contributions of other members, and I commend the bill to the House.

Firstly, can I commend the Government Administration Committee and the work that it has done in ensuring that Part 3 of the Statutes Amendment Bill was able to be examined on its own, after some significant issues were raised by the community sector. In that regard, I also must commend Hui E! Community Aotearoa for its ability to read through those particular provisions in the Statutes Amendment Bill and flag with the committee that there were some issues that the wider community would be really concerned about. It actually sought to have the ability to submit on that process. I just want to defer to my colleague the Hon Ruth Dyson in that, as I go through my contribution on this piece of legislation, there are some technical parts to this that I might not get exactly right. I hope that she will take the opportunity to ensure that I do actually have this correct.

The Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector, Jo Goodhew, was right in her comments about ensuring that the community and the charitable sector actually has some trust and confidence in the Charities Registration Board. I think that sits at the heart of why we are here today and why we are discussing this particular piece of legislation, because it was a Court of Appeal decision that kind of started the conversation about the ability of certain charities to have the right to appeal decisions. That further provided the opportunity to have some examination of the particular relevant clauses in this bill. I am going to use the departmental report as my reference in my contribution today.

I do want to start with the case on appeal, which was regarding whether the Foundation for Anti-Aging Research and the Foundation for Reversal of Solid State Hypothermia were eligible to register as charities. Why I start there is that this kind of sits at the heart of a lot of the discussion: the ability to register as a charity and, therefore, the ability to be deregistered by the Charities Registration Board once you have registration. This, along with other examples, was cited as one of those cases where the Charities Registration Board would take a particular view about what constituted a charity.

In the discussion on this particular bill at the select committee, even though it was slightly out of scope of the bill, it actually formed an important part of the discussion, because sitting at the heart of appeals by charities to the High Court is their ability to remain registered. Those are the reasons that charities actually seek support from the High Court: because they have been deregistered by the Charities Registration Board. The Court of Appeal decision involving a particular submitter to the committee cited an interpretation of sections 59 and 61 of the Act, and the consequences of amending section 59 to include appeals against the decision of the chief executive—charities’ ability to complain to the Office of the Ombudsmen.

Further to that, in the departmental report the Department of Internal Affairs notes that the court’s observation reinforces its advice about the proposed amendment to section 61 to remove the words “or the chief executive”, which was going to correct that drafting error, but it does not remove charities’ right of appeal, as one of the submitters stated that it did. But at the heart of this is the level of trust within the sector that that was actually going to be the case.

There is an amount of discussion in the sector about charities’ ability to appeal any decision that the Charities Registration Board makes and about the high threshold that is required by having to take a case to the High Court. We have heard the examples that were given, such as by the National Council of Women of New Zealand, where the test in those cases was whether providing services specifically for women and around gender equality, for example, was actually charitable purpose. If we had had the ability to have a review of charitable purpose, as was promised when the legislation—the original legislation—was first enacted, then perhaps that level of trust in the community and charitable sector would be such that we would not necessarily be at this point where we are having to take Part 3 out of the Statutes Amendment Bill to examine it separately to provide some opportunity for the sector comment and to have that faith restored, which is exactly what we are doing.

Further to that, there was a real sense that the charitable sector would actually be impacted by not only decisions made by the board but decisions made by the chief executive. During our discussion the department was very clear in its response to say that there are no statutory decisions that are made by the chief executive. However, members of the charitable sector—specifically the submitters to the committee—were concerned enough about that that they wanted to ensure that the words “or the chief executive” were removed from section 61.

What actually happened, in the end, was that the decision was made by Labour and the Greens to say that section 61 in its entirety should be removed, and that would provide certainty to the sector that those decisions around the chief executive decisions would not go on to impact them. That was, in fact, done. So, for Labour, the discussion was around restoring some faith and some trust back into the process for charities. There has been some damage done in that relationship between the charitable sector and the Charities Registration Board, and this is seen as an opportunity to actually have that conversation to start restoring that relationship.

Just in conclusion, I want to say that if we had had the review that we were promised when the Charities Commission was devolved, when charity services came on board and the Charities Registration Board took over the process of registering and also deregistering charities, we probably would not be needing to discuss this. I am very grateful that Hui E! Community Aotearoa was vigilant enough with the Statutes Amendment Bill to signal that there was a problem and that it wanted to have the opportunity to provide comment on the legislation, and, therefore, actually provided an opportunity for other charities to make that comment. We are supportive of the work of the committee and hopeful that at the Committee stage we will be able to examine these clauses further. Thank you.

E Te Mana Whakawā Tuarua, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou katoa, e ngā mema o Te Whare Pāremata. In addressing this Charities Amendment Bill, I will use slightly fewer words and somewhat less time in this House than the member, Poto Williams, who just resumed her seat, because it is a very simple and brief piece of legislation.

The bill does three simple things: it provides that a person cannot be an officer of a charitable entity if they have been convicted of tax evasion or a similar offence. I think this is a very sensible measure to prevent corruption in the charity sector. It also provides that an application for registration as a charitable entity will be treated as withdrawn if the applicant does not respond to requests for information within 18 months—again, a very pragmatic, sensible measure that is designed to stop the cluttering up of the registration process. But, unfortunately, the bill does not address a 2012 drafting error, as was originally intended, which removes the words “chief executive” from section 61(1)(a) of the Charities Act 2005. This is unfortunate.

This bill started life as part of the Statutes Amendment Bill introduced by my colleague the Hon Simon Bridges in his role as Associate Minister of Justice, and because it is the child bill of a Statutes Amendment Bill it does require unanimity, not simply majority support.

We certainly listened very carefully and very intently to what the submitters said. There were seven submitters we heard from in person, out of the 33 who offered submissions, including submissions from Hui E! Community Aotearoa and others and from a notable lawyer in the charity sector. I listened—and I know the National Party members on the committee listened—very, very closely to what they were submitting. We had a difference of opinion. We did not agree with everything they were saying.

The advice that we—certainly, that I—accept from the department was that section 61 of the Charities Act 2005 does not convey any right of appeal in any case. We accepted that advice on our side of the select committee, but unfortunately that piece of the legislation will not proceed because it has not achieved unanimity. I think that is unfortunate, because in my view it was a drafting error and we were just correcting that small error.

I would also like to commend the Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector, the Hon Jo Goodhew, who is working hard to tidy up some of the flaws that exist in the current legislation. The bill, despite losing the section around the chief executive and appeal rights reform, with that tweak there, still has some useful sections dealing with tax evasion and also with the withdrawal of an application if it has not been progressed within 18 months. So it is still a sensible bill. It is just a shame it did not go that little bit further.

I am delighted to speak at this stage of the Charities Amendment Bill, and can I say to the member who has just resumed his seat, Paul Foster-Bell, that I cannot imagine a bill or a Labour speaker less likely to deserve such a nasty little quip from that member. Sometimes you need to rise above that sort of behaviour. Poto Williams does not know how to be offensive to people. She never is. This bill was the subject of, I think, a robust consideration by all members of the Government Administration Committee. For it to come back to this House and get a nasty little jibe like that is, I think, unwarranted. I think the member might want to reprioritise his unpleasant quips for something that is more deserved.

There was only one part in this bill that caused contention and that was amending section 61 of the Charities Act 2005, and, as both members who have just resumed their seats mentioned, this bill was originally part of a statutes amendment bill and was taken out at the select committee because of the objections of the Labour members and the Green members to it being included.

Statutes amendment bills are meant to have just a small number of alterations to any Act. Those alterations are meant to be non-controversial. There should not be anybody getting upset about them. There should be no controversy at all about them. They should not make any policy changes. That way they are entitled to be in a statutes amendment bill. But if one single member of this House disagrees with the inclusion of a provision in a statutes amendment bill, then it does not proceed and that was the situation with this.

However, we agreed that—and I think it was a mark of goodwill towards Minister Goodhew, actually, who had signed this off to go in a statutes amendment bill—instead of just throwing it out, we would progress it as a separate piece of legislation and enable it to proceed. What we did not suspect though was that the Minister would use that as an opportunity to reinsert section 61 back into this bill. It is the very section that caused the controversy, which caused the submitters to come to our committee and say that it was not the policy intention originally and it will take away their right to appeal a decision that they believed they had. So that is why we decided we would remove it from the bill—because that was not meant to be the intention of it.

I think, from Paul Foster-Bell’s contribution just now, that the intention of Minister Jo Goodhew is to put section 61 back into this bill during the Committee stage. I think that would be a really serious breach of the faith that we had in the process and the goodwill that we showed towards the Minister by not just chucking out all this stuff in the first place, which we could have done, given, as I outlined before, the provisions of a statutes amendment bill. We decided not to use our ability to trip the Minister up—tempting though it may be—because that is not the way that parliamentarians should behave.

To go back to the intent of the rest of the bill—because, as I say, that was one section only that caused the controversy—the rest was completely in order and we support it. So a person cannot be an officer of a charitable entity if they have been convicted of tax evasion or a similar offence under the Tax Administration Act 1994. To apply for an application for registration as a charitable entity—that can be treated as withdrawn if the applicant refuses or does not respond to a request for information or another notice from the chief executive. The third point was to correct a 2012 drafting error. So those four clauses of the Charities Amendment Bill originally formed Part 3 of the Statutes Amendment Bill.

Can I just comment on the tone of the submitters we had—all of who were focused around section 61 and in opposition to it. Instead of having the organisations led by Huia E! Community Aotearoa and its lawyer, Sue Barker, coming along to the committee participating in constructive engagement, which is what you normally get with a select committee, it was very clear that those organisations were feeling quite abused and quite battered by their disengagement from the Government. They were not feeling at all as if they had the ear of the Minister or support from the backbenches or any engagement at all—

💬 Hon Jo Goodhew: It was not what they told me yesterday. It was a different story when they talked to me yesterday.

Oh, the Minister has woken up at last. Well, I know what the select committee was told, Minister. You can ask your colleagues and we will see whether they want to be upfront—

💬 Hon Jo Goodhew: I’m just talking about what they told me yesterday.

Well, they might be scared that they will lose yet another contract.

💬 Hon Jo Goodhew: I’m very scary, aren’t I?

Well, let us not go down that path. Let us not go down that path; that would be very tempting. Your colleagues are all tempted to make a contribution here. I think that if they are looking for that spot in Cabinet that is coming available early next year, they would be wise not to comment and not to respond to that question from Minister Jo Goodhew.

The submitters all said that they felt disengaged, that they were not given any respect from the Government, and that they were treated as if they were a contractual arrangement if they were providing services rather than a genuine partner in trying to progress the issues they care about. The other charities, in addition to Huia E! Community Aotearoa and Sue Barker who made presentations, were really appalled that they had been given no notification at all by either the department or the Minister about the proposed change. It was only through the eagle eye of Huia E! Community Aotearoa during the Statutes Amendment Bill that this was drawn to its attention. It felt cheated. It felt as if further costs were being imposed on it—that its rights, as it interprets the law, were being taken away from it, and it was pretty scathing of the whole process, actually.

I think that all of the members of the committee felt pretty disappointed that those in the charitable and voluntary sector who made those submissions were in that state. We have always regarded ourselves—as New Zealanders—as respecting of volunteers, as respecting of charitable organisations, and as those who ensure that, as you look across the spectrum of people who do stuff in our community, you recognise the paid workers and you recognise the unpaid workers, and the organisations they are part of with the same level of respect. That is certainly no longer the case under this Government.

The other thing that is obvious is that the National members are becoming more and more sensitive to criticism and more and more likely to push back against organisations that raise questions or challenges. I do not think that is a healthy way for a genuine partnership to be maintained. There is a lot of power in a ministerial role, and if that power is not used responsibly, then we will have organisations that are scared to speak up, scared to criticise, and scared to raise concerns because they know that their contracts will be vulnerable. They know that they will be targeted in future through a quiet word from the Minister to the department, and, suddenly, they will be out of work. Suddenly, they will lose their contract.

This should not be the situation. In our country we should not have any organisation that is scared of a Minister and scared to speak up and raise concerns. What sort of democracy is that when we have a situation where people are cowered because of anxiety about ramifications of raising issues? It felt a bit like a war. It felt a bit like the sector was saying these increased costs—the Policing (Cost Recovery) Amendment Bill was one such issue that was raised with us—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! That is not part of the bill.

—as part of the sector feeling overburdened by the current regime.

With this bill, even though the sector supported the other parts, the resentment towards having what they saw as their legal right—and we agreed with them—taken away without any discussion with them, and without any notification caused offence. I will be very disappointed if the National Government does decide to reinsert section 61.

The department told us that there was a serious disagreement about the interpretation. That does not justify a change going into the Statutes Amendment Bill, and the Minister has been around this place long enough to know that. This is not an opportunity to put things on a train that is passing by just because it is convenient. We should be very protective of the ability we have to change things in a statutes amendment bill, as long as it complies with the law.

We support the rest of this bill. I hope we are still able to support it through the next stages of the House—

I am sorry. The member’s time has expired.

It is a pleasure to take a call on this, the Charities Amendment Bill, and can I just acknowledge the Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector for bringing what is a very good piece of legislation to the House. Can I acknowledge the previous speaker, Ruth Dyson, as the chair of the Government Administration Committee.

I think using the term “war” when we are referring to the Charities Amendment Bill might be taking it just a little bit too far, but I do want to just support the comments that the Minister made about the fact that the bill makes three small but important technical changes that will improve the coherence of the Charities Act 2005, which is actually very important, as we heard through the select committee process.

The bill seeks to improve the public’s trust and confidence in charities by further clarifying the legislation, and it seeks to make compliance easier and faster for both charities and the regulator by removing unnecessary processes, whilst maintaining the principles of natural justice. This is very important. It is in line with some commitments that this National-led Government made around reducing red tape and compliance costs.

These are small but important changes that provide greater clarity and also processes that will be familiar to all charities. It will provide greater clarity around the registration application process, and contribute to public trust and confidence in charities by strengthening protections against the risk of financial mismanagement. Like I said, it is a very good bill. Can I commend the Minister and commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

I have got to say that this has been a unique process in my experience in Parliament in terms of dealing with a bill that was just provisions in the statutes amendment process, initially. Hearing submissions in the select committee process actually threw up the fact that there was significant concern and disagreement around these provisions, which we on this side of the House have managed to, I guess, hold off to be able to get the best parts of what was in there into this bill, and save the debate for another day, where the community can participate in it, on the contentious issues.

I do want to just frame this. This is the Charities Amendment Bill that we are talking about, and we are told that this is, you know, small and minor and technical. What is in this bill we agree on and we can support. They are things like ensuring that somebody who has been convicted of tax evasion cannot become an officer of a registered charity, and that does seem pretty sensible. It provides that an application for registration as a charity can be treated as withdrawn if that organisation has not responded to correspondence in 18 months. Again, it seems good to clarify that. But initially the Government intended to put another provision in there that we were told was correcting a drafting error.

I have got to say that this is something that I have heard a few times on different pieces of legislation going through this House on what were often quite contentious points and where no evidence was provided by them to back up that analysis of the original intent. In this situation we had the department and the Minister saying: “This is inconsequential; it is really just tidying—don’t worry.” Then we had the community and voluntary sector peak organisation Hui E! Community Aotearoa and its lawyer, Sue Barker, who is generally acknowledged as the person in the country with the most expertise in this area of law, both saying that this change or “correction of a drafting error” would take away rights to appeal a decision—very, very different views. We considered that that was not appropriate to pass through as if those different views did not exist. So we are pleased that that did not happen and that we have this legislation, without that point in it, that we can support. But I would back up the Hon Ruth Dyson’s point that we certainly would not be supporting this if it was put back in at the Committee stage.

Getting beyond the detail of what that provision is and whether or not it is taking away appeal rights, it is really, really important to us in the Greens about negotiating roles in our society. I spent most of my working life working in the charity sector, and we used to talk about the charity sector as the third sector. There was Government; there was business, which also included unions; and there was tangata whenua, the community, and the voluntary sector—roughly, the charity sector. That was not a hierarchy; it was almost like a Venn diagram, but with not much overlapping, around working together to make this society work, with different pieces of knowledge and understanding of what was going on.

There used to be a respect for our experience in the community, and the Government used to listen to us. Obviously, we always wanted it to listen more and do more things, but there used to be a time when we could speak out and say what we thought. Sometimes the Government would agree; sometimes it would not, but there was respect. Well, through this, and what was shown in the select committee process—and what I am hearing pretty much every day out in the community—is that that culture does not exist under this Government. There is not respect for our community sector, our charity sector, shown by this Government. We do have agencies that are not able to speak up, because when they do speak up advocating for the people they are working for, then a few days later, or maybe a few hours later, they might get a phone call from their funders at the ministry saying: “You do know you are not indispensable.”

💬 Hon Jo Goodhew: Just rubbish.

That is not rubbish, Minister. You need to get out more. You need to listen more, Minister. You need to read the reports that tell how many agencies are on the point of collapse because of a lack of funding, because of the short-term funding contracts that you keep on imposing on them so that they are too scared to challenge you. There would be not one person on this side of the House who has not had that conversation on a regular basis with people working to protect the most vulnerable people in our society, who are too scared to contribute to the public debate because of the actions of this Government.

This bill is part of that disrespect, where the Government Ministers go “Oh, we can sneak this through.”, and then do not even tell the agencies that they are looking at making these changes. Not even the peak agencies that they used to have regular meetings with and a relationship of respect—they do not even tell them. So when it comes through in this process and there is absolutely, fundamentally different views on what this provision would mean, it takes the Opposition parties, the Labour Party and the Green Party, to say: “Well, actually, if there is this level of agreement, this should not go through.”

The Government members of the select committee—backed up, I can only assume, by the Minister who brought it to the House—would have let it go through, thinking they were right, because that—

💬 Brett Hudson: We were.

And there we hear it again—they were right. That sums up the arrogance and the bullying power of this Government. It will ram things over, so certain in its own knowledge and so certain in its own rightness, regardless of any other feedback that it might be getting. So we are proud that this bill now no longer includes that provision.

I will start with a bit of good news: we will be supporting this bill.

💬 Hon Members: Hooray!

I thought you would all be absolutely over the moon, including Mr Macindoe, who is sitting there smiling away like a Cheshire cat. I have actually enjoyed the debate this evening. It has been quite robust for something that everybody agrees to, to be fair, but it does make sense to support it—

💬 Tim Macindoe: It’s always a pleasure to listen to you, Clayton.

Oh, I am only just freshening the night up. I have got only about 6 minutes to go before the night is over, so I thought I might try to fill it all up. I have got some very good information. You will really want to hear this, so you should just tune in for a little bit.

The first point of this bill, which makes absolute sense to everybody, is the fact that New Zealand is a very charitable country. We have got so many charities around the country and so many people willing to put their hard-earned money and, more importantly much of the time, their hard-earned time into supporting those charities, because, of course, for all intents and purposes it goes to a good cause, generally for those people in need—generally those people who actually need some help and some support.

The first thing that this bill does is make it an offence for a person who has been charged with tax evasion to be on a charitable trust or to hold a position within a charitable organisation. Of course that makes sense. If you are a tax evader, we certainly do not want you to be operating inside our charitable organisations, although it is quite ironic, then, when we listen to the Minister of Finance when he talks about the clear difference between tax evasion, which, of course, is illegal, and the art of tax avoidance, which is clearly not illegal. It is just completely immoral and it should be made illegal. So it does not address that. It just makes a step forward where if someone has been caught out fudging the system, taking their opportunity to not pay taxes, they are not allowed to be in a charitable organisation. But we are not addressing the bigger picture here. We do absolutely believe that a review is required, and desperately needed, with regard to making sure that these charitable organisations are in fact charitable organisations.

When you look around the world, internationally, I think there is an organisation over in the United States called—oh, something hairy, I have got it written down here—Kids Wish Network, that is right. It has worked out that only 3 cents in the dollar actually go to the charities themselves, and the rest of those 97 cents is taken up in the administration and the exorbitant fees that the organisers and the offices of those organisations are taking in salaries and remunerative—flying first-class. Of course, we all remember earlier on this year when we heard of a very prominent charity that was going out and buying brand-spanking-new $153,000 Mercedes and flying first-class around the world. That goes against the grain of what charities are organised and designed to do, and this is what we need to be spending some time on tidying up.

If we talk about the tax avoidance versus the tax evasion, why do we not spend some time looking at the big multinational companies that turn over tens of billions of dollars? In fact, the top 20 multinational companies operating in New Zealand or out of New Zealand turn over $10 billion, and collectively pay less than $1.8 million in tax—$1.8 million of tax. That is a seriously big problem. This bill is not designed to be contentious, of course—it has got to get full support, as it is a bit of a tidy-up of the Statutes Amendment Bill, but the reality is that we have got some big problems in this country and they need to be addressed very, very promptly.

I am just looking at my time and making sure I do not run out—I would not want to miss anything out. Point No. 2 is giving the ability for these charitable organisations to be struck off within an 18-month period if they do not come with the information that has been requested of them by the Inland Revenue Department and such other entities, and, of course, a very, very small, minor change with regard to a correction of some drafting, which is taking out the words “or the chief executive.” To be honest, it is so small that it does not really require too much time.

I do not want to take up too much of the House’s time this evening—I have got a couple of minutes left, and I would like to, sort of, waffle on, but I will not put people through that hardship. I think the point has been made that tax avoidance and tax evasion is something that needs to be looked at in respect of charities in this country. The people of New Zealand want to see something done. We need a review of this specifically, and I think it would get full support of the House if we did come out, certainly if this Government here took the lead role in that and made that happen. Thank you.

I rise in support of the Charities Amendment Bill in its second reading. It is unfortunate, though, that here we are in the second reading and already we are seeing attempts to revise history, in the description of what happened or did not happen in the select committee process. Our chair, Ruth Dyson—who, I will acknowledge, is normally a very solid, very collegial, and very consensus-driven chair—has made claims about what she saw removed from the Statutes Amendment Bill for further consideration as a separate item by the Government Administration Committee.

I am a permanent member on that committee, and I acknowledge these things: there was a statutes amendment bill in front of the committee; there was not unanimous agreement that all the provisions of that bill should be in a statutes amendment bill; and the provisions that were thought not to warrant that were around the Charities Act 2005. It was agreed that all of the provisions related to the Charities Act 2005 would be pulled out and made into a separate child bill, that all of those provisions would be open to greater public submission—particularly from the submitters who had commented on those areas in the parent bill—and that we would do it as a separate process and work through it.

So the question of whether or not there was a drafting error in respect of the words “or the chief executive” was always a part of the consideration of the child bill. It absolutely was looked at by the select committee, and any inference that it was not is completely not as I recall those proceedings. I commend the bill to the House.

It is a pleasure to speak to the second reading of this Charities Amendment Bill in the dying moments of the evening. There was just an interesting telling of history about the formation of this bill, and it has been mentioned by two colleagues of mine, the Hon Ruth Dyson and Poto Williams. The fact is that this is a piece of legislation that came about from the Statutes Amendment Bill.

There has been quite a bit of debate during this sitting session around the Statutes Amendment Bill—and I will get on to luggage at some point. That piece of legislation, the Statutes Amendment Bill, is designed for non-controversial, non - policy-changing pieces of tidying-up, which are put into a statutes amendment bill and—

I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.