Statutes Amendment Bill

I have been waiting for some time to speak at the Committee stage of the Statutes Amendment Bill. In my first contribution I want to draw on two Supplementary Order Papers on this bill that are on the Table: one under my name, Supplementary Order Paper 191, and Supplementary Order Paper 207 in the name of the ACT leader, David Seymour. In essence, those two Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) are offering the ability for the Government to have a “get out of jail free” card, because my SOP looks to insert something in the bill that I think is non-controversial and something that most parties would agree to. It is not a massive departure from policy or a large policy issue that would require the debate in a separate piece of legislation.

Unfortunately for this Committee, the contents of my Supplementary Order Paper are contained in another piece of legislation, a member’s bill in the name of Nuk Korako, a National list MP. It essentially looks to amend the Airport Authorities Act 1966 to allow airport authorities or airports to advertise in mediums other than the newspaper when they want to sell luggage that has been lost or left at airports. Just to clarify, the law does need to be changed, because at the moment the Act as it stands allows airports to advertise the sale of lost luggage that they are now taking responsibility for only by way of a newspaper advertisement.

This change, contained in Mr Korako’s bill and also within SOP 191, would not change the world entirely—I know you should not say that when it is your own SOP—but it would save this House, this Parliament, and the taxpayer a significant amount of money. When Mr Korako had his bill pulled from the ballot he said at the time that it was an issue that had been raised with him, as someone who was a member of Parliament, in and around his daily work engaging with the industry.

At that time I think I had been the spokesperson on tourism for the Opposition for around about 4 or 5 months, and I think I took a pretty aggressive approach to making sure that I was engaging with stakeholders, including Christchurch Airport, the local airport of Mr Korako. But not once was the issue of advertising sales of lost luggage raised with me—not by Christchurch Airport; not by Queenstown Airport; not by Wellington Airport, my local airport; not during the extensive visit to Auckland Airport, both domestic and international, which I had the pleasure of visiting; and not by Air New Zealand, which I spent a complete day with, getting to know the operation. So I think Mr Korako’s assertion that this is a major issue for the likes of airports or airlines is slightly—and I am been slightly diplomatic—wide of the mark.

So in an effort to try to save some time of this Committee, I think this is a perfect opportunity—through the Statutes Amendment Bill—to address the issue, this great gap in our tourism sector that Mr Korako thinks is so important that he thinks it is worthy of a member’s bill in the ballot. My SOP, SOP 191, would essentially do everything that Mr Korako’s bill, which is before the House as a member’s bill, after being pulled from the ballot, would do.

So if an airport found itself overwhelmed with a quantity of luggage that it thought it needed to offload, my SOP would allow Christchurch Airport—to give an example from Mr Korako’s own patch—to advertise in other than the Christchurch Press that it was going to have a sale of lost luggage. It would also allow Christchurch Airport to advertise online and in other modes of communication. I guess that would also open up the option of radio advertising. I am not sure whether Mr Korako has thought about that. It may be that that is something he could raise at the select committee if my SOP does not get through.

I am being a little bit tongue-in-cheek here, but a Statutes Amendment Bill is a great way—it is a way that we are currently using—to tidy up legislation and to make sure that things that are not controversial do not take up the time of this House. I think the fact that this SOP had to be brought to this Committee—there is another SOP in the name of David Seymour, and I am sure he will be down at some stage to talk to it—means the issue should have been included in a Statutes Amendment Bill, which speaks to the point that I believe that the member’s bill ballot process in Parliament is being abused by the Government.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Yep.

It is. For people at home who do not know how the member’s bill ballot operates, it is a little bit like Lotto. Members of this House who are not members of the executive, I understand, get to put a piece of legislation that they feel very passionate about—it could be a local issue—into the ballot. Every so often we have a draw, and if your bill is drawn from the ballot, then it possibly may get debated in this House. I think that process should be used for bills that are worthy of the time of this House.

Quite bluntly, advertising lost luggage by any means other than the newspaper should not take up a first reading, should not take up a select committee process, should not take up a second reading, should not take up a Committee stage, and should not take up third reading time in this House. Mr Korako’s bill will cost taxpayers thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands of dollars, potentially creeping up to $100,000. We have at the moment a situation where services in our country are struggling for funding, yet this Government and that particular member think that this issue is such a big issue it should be debated and go through the complete legislative process in the House. I also think the Government knows it has got it wrong, because Gerry Brownlee at one stage tried to have it pass through all stages in an attempt to save face.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: It didn’t work.

It did not work. I am not sure that this is going to work, because I believe also that any member of this House—and maybe I should not tell New Zealand First this—can object to my SOP and then it is off the Table and it will not happen. But I think we should try to save those tens of thousands of dollars and the time of this House, respect the process of a members’ ballot, and not have ballots for that sort of legislation anymore. So we could do away with that in Mr Korako’s case. We can also do away with it in the case of Mr Seymour’s SOP, which, I believe, will streamline the process for a bill under the name of Matthew Doocey.

So I guess the ball is now in the Government’s court and also in New Zealand First’s court if they actually want to save the taxpayer some money. There are two SOPs—two of the three that are now on the Table—that will potentially save a couple of hundred thousand dollars and a lot of time in terms of the processes of select committees, where issues that New Zealanders really care about could be discussed and debated, and we could progress through this Parliament inquiries or legislation that will make a difference to the people of New Zealand.

Advertising the sale of lost luggage is not on anyone else’s radar other than Nuk Korako’s. I want to know from Mr Korako where this issue came from, because I think there would possibly be one or two people—Mr Korako’s executive assistants, who have probably had to wade through quite a bit of research because of this—who are actually concerned about this issue.

I am delighted to speak on the Statutes Amendment Bill, but I regret that I have to start my contribution by correcting my colleague. I totally support his Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 191, which inserts into the Statutes Amendment Bill the Airport Authorities Act 1966 alteration. But the bill that he is trying to get off our Order Paper in order to save the taxpayer thousands and thousands of dollars, and Parliament hours and hours of time, is not about lost luggage.

The airline companies themselves deal with lost luggage. If you are flying Air New Zealand, and you arrive in Auckland and they say “Welcome to Auckland, Mr Faafoi. Your bag is in Invercargill.”, Air New Zealand will get your bag from Invercargill to Auckland for you, because that is what they do when they accept you putting in your bag at check in. This bill—

💬 Sarah Dowie: They don’t lose it from Invercargill.

Yes, it is.

💬 Sarah Dowie: No, they don’t. They don’t lose it at Invercargill.

Oh, sorry. Sarah Dowie has just offered to collect your bag from Invercargill airport, Mr Faafoi, and take it to you. She is a generous young woman.

💬 Kris Faafoi: What’s it doing in Invercargill?

Ha! So the member’s bill that is going to waste hours of time, which should be in this Statutes Amendment Bill, is about lost property. If you leave your comb or your book or your pen at the cafe or somewhere else within the airport, that is what this deals with. It is not just insignificant because it deals with lost luggage; it is even more insignificant because it does not even deal with lost luggage.

I want to go back the point of statutes amendment bills. It is a very unusual process, and one that I think as a Parliament we should really value. The point of a statutes amendment bill is to make changes. It is an omnibus bill because there are a whole lot of Acts that are changed, but each change to each different Act has to be minor, it has to be technical, and it has to be non-controversial. That is the point of a statutes amendment bill. Although Parliament takes a lot of effort, particularly at Committee stage, to ensure that the details of the bill that we are considering are right; often we get it wrong. A statutes amendment bill gives us the opportunity to correct a drafting error or an inconsistency, so that the law reads as it was intended. That is the point of a statutes amendment bill, and those are the criteria that it has to meet.

As members will have noted in our second reading, which I will just briefly refer to, some of the provisions in the original legislation did not meet those criteria, and we peeled them off as separate bills during the debate. So it is now the opportunity for the Committee of the whole House to go through that same deliberation and make sure that the 26 bills that we are proposing to amend in this Statutes Amendment Bill are indeed correct and that we have got it right.

We should not confuse this statutes amendment process with statutes repeal, which has quite different criteria. A bill recently went through the House that actually repealed an Act. So statutes repeal actually repeals an entire Act, presumably because it is redundant, but the criteria seem to be looser than for statutes amendment, and I think that is something that the Standing Orders Committee might like to look at. I do not think it is appropriate, for example, for a statutes repeal bill to be used to take away a piece of legislation because the current Government does not like it.

We have got a process for that, and in my view it should not be a statutes repeal bill. I refer to the Supplementary Order Paper 191 of Kris Faafoi, even though he exaggerated the scope of his SOP and of the member’s bill that it seeks to replace. I also want to commend the Supplementary Order Paper 207 of David Seymour. That is not a move that I take very often in debates in this House. David Seymour is actually doing exactly the same thing as Kris Faafoi, but on a different bill. He is proposing that nonsense legislation—the time-wasting and money-wasting legislation of Matt Doocey—is replaced by a Supplementary Order Paper. I hope that the member has noticed that yet again, twice in one week, I am commending something that he has done. This is a bit of a risk to both our reputations, but the member David Seymour’s Supplementary Order Paper would save the taxpayers a lot of money.

I would just like to commend the member Ruth Dyson on her commendation, but I think for both our interests, reputations, and future career prospects, we should try not to make a habit of it.

I would like to speak to a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that I have on the Table in my name. It is Supplementary Order Paper 207, and it is really quite a simple thing. At the heart of it, it amends the Companies Act so that companies are able to send out their annual reports in an electronic format rather than a paper format. It is a very simple thing.

I do actually want to just pay a tribute to Matt Doocey, who has been much maligned for introducing this member’s bill, because he did use the members’ ballot for the purpose it was designed. He is an electorate MP. He had feedback from business people in his electorate, who said: “We have to send out these reports in paper format. The cost is killing us. The environmental impacts are highly negative, when we know that 90 percent of the business—when we do our banking, when we take our orders, when we do our commerce—we do electronically. It is absolutely archaic that the Companies Act requires us to send out a paper format report every year and upon request.” So Matt Doocey was doing the right thing.

But I think—as others have commented—it costs $43,000 an hour to operate this House, on an average cost basis, and it was a very large use of this House’s time and, therefore, taxpayers’ money to make such a minor amendment through the whole member’s bill process. Thankfully, one of the things I can say as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister for Regulatory Reform is that I am very pleased that this Government does, from time to time, have a statutes repeal bill, a statutes amendment bill, and a Regulatory Systems Bill—bills that are designed to clean up the many aspects of the 40 books of statutes that this Parliament has passed in the last 170 years or so, to reform those many aspects where they are an impediment to people going about their lives in an efficient way.

This SOP is not a complex one. If you go through the various sections, it amends the Companies Act. Wherever there is a requirement for a company to send out a paper statement, it is replaced with the option of sending out an electronic statement. It requires a company, in the first instance, to notify a shareholder or somebody who is entitled to receive such a document that they have a choice, and then that person must make an election either to continue receiving paper or to receive their documents in electronic format. If the person fails to make that election, then the company no longer has an obligation to furnish them with a paper statement. If they elect to have electronic statements, then they will receive this correspondence in an electronic format for the rest of their association with that company. That is a very small thing this Government can do, taking up a small amount of the House’s time in order to make it easier for people to go about their business, build their companies, and actually create wealth and opportunity for New Zealanders up and down this country.

I think, Mr Chair, you are probably detecting that I have actually spoken as much as one can speak on this. I am very pleased to see the House considering this SOP, and I hope that all members will consider supporting it. It should be non-controversial. Thank you.

Part 1 agreed to.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 191 in the name of Kris Faafoi to insert new Part 1A be agreed to.

Amendment not agreed to.

Parts 2 to 6 agreed to.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 207 in the name of David Seymour to insert new Part 6A be agreed to.

Amendment agreed to.

Parts 7 to 28 and schedules 1 and 2 agreed to.

Clause 1 agreed to.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 227 in the name of the Hon Simon Bridges to clause 2 be agreed to.

Amendment agreed to.

Clause 2 as amended agreed to.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I seek your leave to withdraw my objection to the earlier amendment, please.

The question on new Part 1A—your objection to that?

💬 Mahesh Bindra: Yes.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): OK. I will seek the leave of the Committee to revert, before I report, to new Part 1A for the purpose of putting that question. Is there any objection to that? There appears to be none.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 191 in the name of Kris Faafoi to insert new Part 1A be agreed to.

Amendment agreed to.

House resumed.

Bill reported with amendment.

Report adopted.

The House adjourned at 11.43 a.m. (Thursday)