Statutes Repeal Bill

on behalf of the Minister for Regulatory Reform: I move, That the Statutes Repeal Bill be now read a second time. This bill repeals or partially repeals 137 Acts that are no longer needed because they no longer have any actual effect or have very limited effect or are designed to achieve regulatory outcomes that are no longer relevant. By helping clear the statute book of some unnecessary legislation, this bill forms part of the commitment made by this Government to improve the regulatory environment in New Zealand, as outlined in the Government’s response to the Productivity Commission report on regulatory institutions and practices. While this bill is only one part of that commitment, it is a part that should be of particular interest to this Parliament because of our role as makers of legislation.

Statutes repeal has not been an area of great focus for New Zealand in the recent past. Indeed, it has been over a century since the last statutes repeal bill was passed back in 1907. However, that does not make this type of bill inconsequential. To quote the United Kingdom Law Commission, which has advanced 19 statute repeal bills since 1965, repealing more than 3,000 Acts: “The purpose of our statute law repeals work is to modernise and simplify the statute book, reduce its size, and save the time of lawyers and others who use it. This in turn helps to avoid unnecessary costs. It also stops people being misled by obsolete laws that masquerade as live law. If an Act still features in the statute book and is referred to in text books, people reasonably enough assume that it must mean something.”

The Acts repealed by this bill vary substantially in their original purpose and span many major events in New Zealand’s history. The oldest Act in the bill is section 4 of the Wellington City Reserves Act of 1871, which is one of five 19th century Acts contained in this bill. The bill also repeals legislation responding to the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake, several pieces of legislation that reconstructed the public sector in the 1980s, and, more recently, legislation that enabled the very successful hosting of the 2011 Rugby World Cup here.

The bill also repeals latent legislation. The term “latent” is used to describe Acts that have been passed but have not yet been brought into force—in other words, laws that are in legal limbo. Since the Government has no intention of bringing those enactments into force, it is desirable to repeal them. This enables administrators, business, and other users to plan and act with certainty as to what is and will be the law, reducing the costs of compliance and doing business in New Zealand.

This bill has been through substantial consultation, which has been useful in both finding additional Acts to repeal and ensuring that no repeals in the bill have unintended consequences. An exposure draft of the bill was released publicly in October 2015, and responses from the public helped the Government more thoroughly consider the bill before its introduction.

The Government Administration Committee, chaired by the Hon Ruth Dyson, finished its review of the bill in March. I thank the committee for its good work. It received only four submissions, but this was not unexpected in view of the earlier public consultation on the exposure draft, when 16 submissions were received. The committee has unanimously recommended that five additional Acts be repealed in the bill. These Acts were identified by submitters to the select committee, which shows the value of public participation in this process.

In particular, I am pleased to see that this bill is of use to Wellington City Council, which had been seeking to repeal the Wellington City Reserves Act of 1872 and one section in the Wellington City Reserves Act of 1871, but was unable to do so through the Wellington Town Belt Act of 2016.

💬 Grant Robertson: What a brilliant piece of legislation that was, too.

I remember that one, because it was a local Act. Having local government as well as central government in keeping the body of legislation up to date and fit for purpose reinforces the usefulness of this exercise.

One submitter expressed concern about the repeal of the Sentencing Council Act of 2007 through a statutes repeal bill, suggesting that it was a serious constitutional matter. However, the select committee received advice that the Sentencing Council Act has no actual effect because the Government has not created the sentencing council, and it decided some time ago that it would repeal this legislation when the appropriate legislative vehicle arose. Whilst a separate repeal bill for the Sentencing Council Act would allow more parliamentary time to be devoted to scrutinising that particular aspect of the bill, it would result in substantially more use of parliamentary resources. It would also further delay its repeal and create more uncertainty for the legal community, and I am sure no one in this House wants to do that. That is why the Government continues to support the repeal of the Sentencing Council Act through this bill.

Some of the members of the select committee raised concerns about the repeal of the latent provisions, as I have already mentioned, of the Medicines Amendment Act 2013 because those provisions have a default commencement date of 1 July 2017. Following Government decisions in respect of the regulation of therapeutic products in New Zealand, it is neither necessary nor desirable to bring the latent provisions of the Medicines Amendment Act 2013 into force. Repealing those provisions in the bill rather than in a stand-alone bill represents a substantial saving of parliamentary resources. The Government will address these issues more thoroughly through a therapeutic products bill that will be released for consultation later this year.

This will not be the last statutes repeal bill. While 137 full or partial repeals represent a substantial achievement, there are over 1,900 Acts in force in New Zealand, including local and private Acts, and more of these will be redundant. We know that over time more Acts will outlive their original purpose and become redundant. My colleague the Attorney-General also regularly reviews latent legislation to see whether it can brought into force or, indeed, repealed. Repealing redundant laws is just one part of the wider work we are doing to improve the quality of law that governs New Zealanders. Regulation is not the highest-profile topic in Government, but it affects all New Zealanders, because otherwise things that are not well done through the House can cause a problem.

I am confident that this bill, along with initiatives like the regulatory reform task force and the recently released regulatory reform strategy, will help improve our overall environment and reduce red tape and compliance costs for Kiwis and New Zealand businesses. For the first time, New Zealand has ranked first in the world for doing business, in the World Bank 2017 report, following two second-placings in preceding years, which is well done. The report highlights the good work that Government agencies continue to do through the Business Growth Agenda to reduce the cost of doing business.

Once again, I thank the committee for its careful and thorough work on this bill. The committee’s recommendations have helped increase the total number of repeals in this bill. This has been a valuable exercise in improving and trimming down New Zealand’s body of legislation, making it more up to date, and, overall, more fit for purpose. I commend this bill to the House.

It is always a tremendous privilege to follow one of the great legal and constitutional minds of the National Party when speaking in this House, although I do, on behalf of the Opposition, want to thank the Minister who has just resumed his seat, Nathan Guy. He is the Opposition’s secret weapon in his ability to take 10 minutes to deliver a 5-minute contribution in the debate.

I do think, however, that National has missed an opportunity here. This bill repeals 137 Acts. I think National missed the opportunity there. There are 137 possible members’ bills there, in keeping with its tradition of stuffing the members’ ballot with bills that are irrelevant and relatively inconsequential. There are plenty of other bills that we can recommend for the next statutes repeal bill, and I would start with most of the bills in the ballot in the name of National members of Parliament. I do want to commend the handful of National members of Parliament who have taken the time to draft genuine members’ bills that are actually designed to encourage proper debate.

I think a statutes repeal bill is a very useful exercise, and one that this House should perhaps do a little more often. It is interesting, though, to look at some of the titles of the bills that are repealed here, and I think it is particularly interesting to note that the last time the New Zealand Parliament passed a statutes repeal bill was in 1907 and that that bill itself is being repealed by the current Statutes Repeal Bill that we are passing through the House today.

It is interesting to look at the number of Acts that are being repealed that were themselves repeal Acts. So we have got the Post Office Act Repeal Act of 1987, which is being repealed, the Infants Act Repeal Act of 1989, the National Development Act Repeal Act—all of these Acts repealed other Acts, and yet they remain on the law books. So I think it is well past time that that was tidied up.

I also want to speak in favour of Supplementary Order Paper 315, which I have tabled on this bill and which will be debated in the Committee. It removes blasphemy from our statute book—something that has been well canvassed in the media in recent days. I do want to acknowledge the constitutional purists who have argued that adding such an amendment to the bill after the select committee process is not good practice, but I would like to point out that during the course of the hearings on this bill by the Government Administration Committee there were, indeed, only four submissions, and as a result of those submissions, five additional Acts were added to this bill. Those five additional Acts that were added were themselves not necessarily the subject of the full select committee scrutiny process, so it is not unusual for additional Acts to be added to a repeal bill as it progresses through the House.

I think repealing the laws around blasphemy is certainly well and truly justified. They violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which New Zealand is a part of, they violate our human right to freedom of expression, and repealing them brings us into line with many other countries around the world, including Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Iceland, and France, that have done the same thing. In an open society that reflects diversity and difference, it is well past time that we remove from the books the idea that one can be prosecuted for blasphemy. Tolerance cannot be fostered through prohibition, and yet I think New Zealand is a tolerant society and we have no need for that.

I was somewhat staggered to learn that one can be imprisoned for a year for blasphemy in New Zealand, and I welcome the support of the churches up and down the country for the notion that blasphemy should be removed from our statute book. I think it is very important in terms of our international standing that New Zealand removes this, because we have been very outspoken about the misuse of blasphemy laws in other countries around the world, and I think it somewhat undermines our position when we condemn the actions of other countries for their imposition of such laws when we ourselves have them on our statute book. So I think it is time for us to remove laws around blasphemy.

I want to commend the Government for a good process around the Statutes Repeal Bill. I want to commend my colleague the Hon Ruth Dyson, who chaired the select committee that heard the submissions on this. I have no doubt that the committee applied rigorous scrutiny to this exercise, and as a result, we can be sure that the repeals that we are progressing through the House are justified.

There are two types of bills in this House that do this kind of thing. One is a statutes repeal bill—and this is the first one in over a hundred years—and the other is a statutes amendment bill. The statutes amendment bill has, if you like, a fast-track process through the House and works on the basis of unanimity. I think one of the things that we should consider in the House, if we want to keep our law books up to date, is adding a similar provision to allow statutes repeal bills to follow a similar process to that of statutes amendment bills so that they can be done more frequently, without unduly sucking up parliamentary time. In that spirit, I am going to end my contribution early so that this legislation can be progressed.

I am pleased to make a short contribution to this debate. The Greens support this legislation. It is a useful exercise, as others have commented. I recall that Sir Geoffrey Palmer, speaking to a select committee recently, identified the fact that we have something like 65,000 pages of statute in New Zealand, which is a great deal of law for a relatively small country and a small population.

I am sure we have all taken some amusement from looking at some of the legislation that is being repealed in this Act and considering what was sufficiently important to generations past to pass law about. It begs the question whether, in the future, future generations may look back and wonder at some of the things we have seen fit to pass laws about, and perhaps that is something we might consider as we progress bills through this House.

We support this bill, but with one major reservation, and Minister Nathan Guy did touch on that. It is the repeal of the sentencing council legislation, and we regret that this Government has seen fit to do that, particularly at this time in the electoral cycle. The Sentencing Council Act was passed by a Labour-led Government. We will be returning to that situation after September, at which point the legislation could actually be implemented.

I think that would be important and useful to establish a council. We know that the purpose of the council—according to the legislation, which has never been given effect to—is to promote consistency in sentencing practice, to ensure transparency in sentencing practice, to promote consistency and transparency in Parole Board practice, and, overall, to reinforce and increase public confidence in the justice system. In all of those provisions and all of those elements of the Act’s purpose I think we have seen a weakening. We have seen public concern expressed in recent times about inconsistency in sentences. Overall, I think we have seen a reduced confidence in the justice system.

Towards the end of last year I went to the UK, and one or two other countries, looking at aspects of its justice system and, actually, I had a meeting with the head of the office of the UK sentencing council and got a feel for the value of that operation, that agency, in the UK setting. The UK council has somewhat more authority to direct, rather than guide, than is proposed in our New Zealand legislation, but it has had some considerable success in all of the purposes, which are shared with our Sentencing Council Act, to endeavour to maintain public confidence, not least of all about consistency in our courts. With all due respect to the judiciary, it is, on a day-to-day basis, no doubt difficult to assure that sort of consistency.

It is interesting to see some of the parties that are supporting the repeal of this bill, or speaking in support of it—and I am thinking, particularly, of the Māori Party. When the original Sentencing Council legislation was passed, Sir Pita Sharples, the then leader of the Māori Party, spoke very strongly in support of it, particularly in the sense that he was observing young Māori who were getting very different sentences depending on the geographical location of the courts they were in. The present Attorney-General, the Hon Chris Finlayson, at the time the sentencing council legislation passed, said that he had no objection in principle to the idea of having a sentencing council, albeit he believed the Labour Government had somewhat the wrong model at that time. So it is very unfortunate that this Government is seeing fit to repeal this legislation, rather than to interrogate it and potentially bring it back to the House for amendment, and put in place a model that it could see value in.

We will no doubt return to this point in the Committee stage of the bill. For the moment I will flag that the Greens continue to support the legislation, but we will be looking very hard at the repeal of the Sentencing Council Act when we come to the Committee stage. Thank you.

Parliament, understandably, concentrates on making laws. It is what we are here for, and we make a lot of law—more and more law every month, every year, every term of Parliament. I suspect that New Zealand might have more law per head than any other country in the world—I would not be surprised.

There is a need, sometimes, to have a look at the statute book and just say “Well, do we really need all of that?”. That is what the process is that we have before us now. There is a need to repeal redundant laws simply because they get outdated, and it is just bad practice to leave that law on the statute book. Of course, other law, as we know, never actually gets used and never gets activated or implemented, and we call those latent laws.

I notice that of those that are listed, the Forests Amendment Act, when I read about it—I am not going into the detail, but it is obviously thoroughly outdated. That is the Forests Amendment Act 1996. I am talking about a thoroughly outdated piece of legislation. It needs to be expunged from the statute book.

Another one I noticed was—and this has already been referred to—the Sentencing Council Act 2007, which did come into force on 1 November 2007 but was never implemented. I am very glad that it was not, because it would have set up a sentencing council, and I do not think that having a sentencing council to establish guidelines for sentences is a very good idea at all. That is the job of the courts, and the establishment of a sentencing council would inevitably have led to political interference in the sentencing system. That is not good for the legal system, and it is not good for New Zealand. So I will be very glad to see that latent piece of legislation expunged from the statute book as well.

Having said all that, we do need to take care when reviewing the statute book and deciding to remove some of those latent or redundant pieces of legislation that that is being done properly and that that legislation is no longer needed or is indeed latent. In this case, this bill has been right through the select committee process, so we at New Zealand First are satisfied with the recommendation of the Government Administration Committee that those enactments and the parts of them that have been identified to be repealed should be repealed.

Finally, I do think that Parliament needs to have the discipline of not just making law but also going back and removing and, of course, repealing laws where necessary, and, in another process, consolidating and updating statutes as well. That is another process that this Parliament has put into place, and I think that is very valuable too. As a result of all of these processes, I am pretty confident that New Zealand is going to end up with a cleaner—if I can put it that way—statute book, and one that retains only legislation that is relevant and not redundant, and legislation that is up to date. I hope that will be the result. This will be one good step towards that, so New Zealand First will have no hesitation in supporting the bill.

Bill read a second time.