Legislation Bill

on behalf of the Attorney-General: I move, That the Legislation Bill be now read a second time.

This bill was introduced in June 2017 and had its first reading in December that year. The bill rewrites and replaces the Legislation Act 2012 to bring together the law relating to legislation and to ensure that New Zealand’s law is easy to find, use, and understand. Under our stewardship, this Government has now improved this bill significantly. It will, for the first time in New Zealand law, identify clearly what is secondary legislation and therefore what this House’s oversight is through the disallowance process. It will provide for improved access to that legislation. It’ll absorb the Interpretation Act of 1999 with a small number of technical improvements. It will enact legislative disclosure requirements to make key information about the development and content of new legislation available to support legislative scrutiny. It re-enacts with minor changes the current Legislation Act.

Secondary legislation is a new term in the Legislation Bill for all legislation made under lawmaking powers delegated by Parliament or under the royal prerogative. There are thousands of these instruments, called by different names—for example, regulations, rules, orders, or notices. They are made by Ministers, officials, and a wide variety of agencies within Government and are often technical in nature. Examples include the food standards, transport rules, and health and safety regulations.

The secondary legislation that is drafted by the Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO) is easy to identify and is published on the New Zealand Legislation website along with Acts of Parliament. However, secondary legislation is drafted by over a hundred other agencies. It’s often not easy to identify as legislation and is published in a wide variety of other places. This impedes Parliament’s ability to supervise the exercise of powers it has delegated as well as New Zealanders’ ability to identify the law that applies to them.

This problem was highlighted by the Regulations Review Committee in 2014. That committee described the difficulties it faces in identifying instruments for it to review, known as disallowable instruments. That category includes any instrument that has a significant legislative effect as defined in the Legislation Act of 2012—a test that doesn’t always have a black and white legal answer—creating uncertainty about what instruments are legislation and what the House can disallow. This bill resolves the problem by simply defining secondary legislation to be any instrument that is stated by an Act to be secondary legislation.

In the near future, a bill of amendments, a secondary legislation bill, will be introduced to add those statements to all the Acts that delegate lawmaking powers. By defining unambiguously what constitutes “secondary legislation” in New Zealand, this legislation and its companion secondary legislation bill will provide a solid foundation for the first time for the management of secondary legislation and its oversight by this House.

The key exception at this stage is that secondary legislation made by local authorities is out of scope of these changes, and while there is scope to improve the framework for local authority lawmaking, that would be a substantial exercise in its own right. The Government has therefore decided to defer further work in this area to allow reforms of this bill to be delivered within a reasonable time.

The Government has released a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) for the Legislation Bill today. The changes made by the SOP will allow the Legislation Bill and its companion bill to come into force very shortly after they are enacted but preserving existing publication requirements for the time being.

The sheer scale of the exercise of republishing all existing secondary legislation means that the work will necessarily be staged. The effect of the SOP is to deliver immediately the benefit of defining what is secondary legislation, while the PCO and agencies continue to prepare for the changes to their publication systems. When those preparations are complete, the provisions of the bill that require agencies to lodge secondary legislation for publication on the legislation website will be brought into force.

As mentioned earlier, a key pre-condition for implementing the bill is to define which instruments made under Acts of Parliament are secondary legislation. As I also mentioned earlier, the PCO is drafting a companion bill, the secondary legislation bill, that will amend each provision that enables secondary legislation to be made to expressly state that instruments made under it are secondary legislation. This is a substantial job. The aim is to produce the bill in November.

Returning to this bill, this was referred to the Justice Committee for consideration in December 2017. The committee received some very helpful submissions to the bill from interested groups and individuals. The committee completed a thorough examination of the bill and reported the bill back to the House on 1 June last year. It recommended that the bill be passed with some further improvements and clarifying amendments, and I want to thank the committee for that work.

Many of the committee’s recommended changes are technical in nature to clarify the meaning of the scope of provisions. However, some changes are more substantive and are designed to better implement the bill’s purpose. The main improvement I would particularly like to highlight is a new list duty that will apply before the duty to publish secondary legislation in full on the New Zealand Legislation website. This is a duty for makers of secondary legislation to provide the PCO with information about all of the secondary legislation made by them, including the title, administering agency, where it’s published, and any other information required by regulations. From this information, a complete list of secondary information will be compiled and published on the New Zealand Legislation website. This will bring forward the achievement of one of the key benefits of the project, establishing for the first time what secondary legislation exists. There will be a new regulation-making power to set a date on which any secondary legislation would be revoked if it’s not on the list, ensuring that the list is definitive.

The committee also suggested changes to the way exemptions from the lodgement and publication requirements of the bill will work. The bill as introduced provided for three methods of exemption from full publication. This will be reduced to two, reflecting the two cases in which exemption from publication is warranted. The powerful regulations to exempt some secondary legislation from the publication requirements will be removed from the bill. As introduced, the bill required the PCO to publish consolidations of any secondary legislation that is amended, because it may take some time for agencies to be able to prepare and lodge consolidations of their legislation. The committee recommended that the requirement to publish consolidations be restricted to secondary legislation drafted by the PCO, and other cases will be dealt with by regulations. Facing the requirement for consolidation will help speed up the full publication of agency-drafted secondary legislation on the New Zealand Legislation website.

The bill also relocates the general rules and principles of the Interpretation Act 1999. This was a Law Commission recommendation. These rules and principles help to communicate the law clearly to people so they can easily use and understand the law. The committee recommended some useful improvements to these interpretation rules. These include clarifying the provision setting out when time periods in legislation start and end. Also, in recognition that Parliament may pass a revision bill with any amendments it chooses, the committee recommended better reflecting this in the reinterpretation provision about when revision Acts change the affected law.

Another key aspect of the bill is the legislator requirement to prepare disclosure statements for Government-initiated legislation. This is done administratively at present, but legislation for this bill will contribute to delivering on this Government’s commitment to open Government through supporting more informed parliamentary and public scrutiny of legislation. This, together with the recognition of PCO’s legislative stewardship role, will contribute to enhancing the quality of legislation.

In conclusion, I thank the committee for its careful and thorough work on some important reforms and some very technical legal and transitional issues. I want to acknowledge Minister David Parker for him picking this work, that started under the previous Government, but by significantly improving it under the stewardship of this Government. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. Before I respond to that memorable and electrifying speech by the Associate Minister of Justice, made on behalf of the Attorney-General, in the second reading of what is yet another excellent bill that was instigated and drafted by the previous National-led Government, I wondered if I might just seek the indulgence of the House for a moment in order to enable me to acknowledge the very sad death last week of one of the Waikato region’s finest sons, Lance Coombes of Ngāhinapōuri.

Lance’s funeral service at the Claudelands Event Centre in Hamilton yesterday afternoon was attended by nearly 1,000 people. I had the privilege of delivering one of the tributes to a man who was highly regarded, deeply loved, and a very humble but generous contributor to our community. Numerous good causes and local projects have benefited from Lance’s strong support over many years and he will be deeply missed. I am confident that all who knew Lance would join me in extending our deepest sympathy to his lovely wife, Dulcie, and their family. I have lost a very dear friend to whom I owe so much. God bless you, Lance. May you rest in peace. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

As the shadow Attorney-General, I’m pleased to confirm that the National Party will, of course, be continuing to support this bill at its second reading. The Legislation Bill was, as I mentioned, drafted by the previous National Government following a considerable body of work that was undertaken by the Hon Chris Finlayson and his officials when he was Attorney-General. I am grateful that the current Attorney-General, the Hon David Parker, has picked it up and is continuing to move it through the House, albeit at a slightly glacial pace, because it was last before the House some 18 months ago.

I’m grateful that the Associate Minister of Justice did acknowledge the work of the previous Government but I thought he could have been a little bit more effusive in his praise of the work that was undertaken. As he noted, the bill updates and replaces the Legislation Act of 2012, in order to implement publication and other reforms relating to the production of high-quality legislation that may be easily accessed, easily comprehended, and will be user-friendly. It also updates and re-enacts the Interpretation Act of 1999.

It’s interesting that both of those measures are bills of less than two decades in age—in fact, the Legislation Bill is less than one decade. It just shows how rapidly evolving both the law is and also the technology and the requirements on all of us to ensure that we respond rapidly to changing times, conditions, and expectations of legal practitioners and to all who rely upon the effective and fair application of our laws. It’s very important that we, as parliamentarians, do all we can to produce an accessible and up-to-date statute book, to afford clear and transparent public access to the law. This bill will make it easier to find and access secondary legislation by requiring it to be published on the New Zealand Legislation website alongside Acts of Parliament, creating a single, official public source for New Zealand legislation.

I’m very conscious that, because this is a very dry measure—I don’t think there will be many of them, but it may be for those who will be listening outside the House to this particular debate—if I perhaps just give one practical example, which the committee has worked on and which I have no doubt will be discussed in greater detail, assuming this bill passes its second reading when it returns for its committee stage debate, and that is the recommendation of the select committee to produce an exemption for council-controlled organisations. It relates to Auckland. The committee is recommending amending clauses 75 and 113 to extend the exemptions that apply to secondary legislation made by local authorities to those made by council-controlled organisations.

Those amendments would exempt this legislation from the obligations to lodge and publish the legislation under this bill and to present the legislation to the House of Representatives, unless the empowering provision expressly requires it. It would avoid anomalies, if that particular recommendation is adopted, such as those that currently require traffic bylaws made by Auckland Transport under section 22AB of the Land Transport Act 1998 to be published on the New Zealand Legislation website and presented to the House, whereas traffic bylaws made by Auckland Council under the same provision would not be. I’m sure that that is an anomaly that has just arisen over time as more and more local and central government legislation comes into existence, and it’s right that we should acknowledge that anomaly and do something to fix it.

Customarily, the second reading debates focus on submissions that have been received on the bill and the select committees deliberations. However, I’m at a disadvantage because I was not a member of the committee. I wasn’t in my current role until a few months ago so I wasn’t able to hear the submissions that were received and to work with the committee on it. In fact, I note that there have been many changes to the committee’s composition in recent times and it seems that almost every member of the House will get a turn on the Justice Committee during this Parliament. The current chair of the committee is another one who is new to the committee in recent times.

I can, however, report that the committee received eight submissions from interested groups and individuals and heard oral evidence from two of those submitters. I thank those who made those submissions and I’ll leave it to subsequent speakers to report on their recommendations and the committee’s response. But I want to assure the submitters that they have been heard and the committee has made several suggestions for amendments and additions to the bill in response. I’ve just covered one of those by way of example. That is good process and no doubt the Minister will also respond to those suggestions further in the next debate. So I’ll just say in conclusion that the bill enjoys widespread support. The low number of submissions indicates that it reflects good work and sensible initiatives, and I anticipate that we will consider some of its key features in more detail when it moves on to its part-by-part examination in the committee of the whole House. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare, e Te Mana Whakawā.

The previous speaker gave me an excellent segue into this by pointing out that there has indeed been a large turnover of the Justice Committee, a select committee in which I am one of only two survivors from the original appointment, a Justice Committee that’s sat more than any other committee last year. It went through the End of Life Choice Bill, and this was one of the pieces of legislation that we did consider. I’m hoping at the end of this term there’ll maybe be some handing out of awards for longevity—not just age but for stamina. I think that those of us who have survived—myself and my colleague Ginny Andersen—are certainly deserving of recognition.

This was one of the first bills that we did consider. Of course, when one comes to the House here, even though many of us have had a background where we’ve required an understanding of legislation, we are relatively limited. As an eye-opening exercise, this was actually very much a bill where certainly I personally got an understanding of just how complex government is and can be, and that, in fact, everything we do as a country, everyone out there listening—the thousands who’ll be listening to this this afternoon will know that virtually every time they step out the house or every time they do business, somewhere there is a piece of legislation or regulation behind what it is they do.

I suppose, like many of these things, the understanding comes in the breach. What really brought things to a head—and we heard about this at this committee—was when we well remembered the Government inquiry into the whey protein concentrate incident, better known as the botulism scare, when those doing the inquiry, Miriam Dean QC, went looking for the legislation under which we do operate, under which New Zealand exports its whey protein in its journey from cow through to consumer. When they went looking for the secondary legislation, the regulations under which all these activities are carried out, quite frankly, they couldn’t find them. What they found was there was no central point we could go to have a look to see what legislation, what regulations, were considered, should have been considered, or may have even been breached in, again, the journey from cow to consumer. That really did highlight just how much of what we do as a country, how much of what people out there who are carrying on business—simply, there is no one who really oversees the whole lot.

That was when the decision was made, and that’s why this Legislation Bill was indeed born, to ensure that we can understand that. Again, looking at the exemptions again gives a better understanding.

There will be a couple of significant exemptions which are in the bill, one of which will be around the need to publicly disclose around the pharmaceutical schedule. Obviously, there’s going to be changes, particularly operating under the pharmaceutical schedule—listing things that are going to be changing all the time: it doesn’t make sense to be listing many of those things.

So that’s one exemption, but one of the more important ones, of course, is where there are those rare instances where the instruments in question contain information that cannot be publicly disclosed. For various reasons—one might have thought it’s just because of secrecy, but it’s not; there are various reasons. Market sensitive, such as takeover notices—again, with these things, surprisingly to me, there are all regulations under which these are done. They are secondary legislation. Or things that relate to the defence or security of New Zealand, the international relations of New Zealand, and security and intelligence matters—again, common sense. There are parts of doing business which, obviously, have to operate outside the gaze of those who may benefit in some ways—to the detriment of New Zealand, to the detriment of any company—by finding these things.

So it’s again quite an informative piece of legislation for someone like me. My knowledge of the Crimes Act and other criminal Acts was reasonably intense; it also was a great education to understand just the complexity of the legislation which allows our country to operate. This bill certainly outlines that, and I have no hesitation recommending it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on this, the second reading of the Legislation Bill. I want to acknowledge the previous speaker, Greg O’Connor. As a past detective, he seems confident that he knew a lot about the Crimes Act and the Summary Offences Act, but the best thing—the best thing about his speech—is that he’s supporting a great piece of National Party Government legislation. That’s great. I want to acknowledge him for that.

It is a very good bill. It’s a bill that will make it easier to find and access secondary legislation by requiring that it is published on the New Zealand Legislation website alongside the Acts of Parliament, creating a single official public source for New Zealand legislation. I think often legislation and legal speak can sometimes feel like a foreign language to people that aren’t always engaged in the process, and so to make it easier to actually find the information and access that is a very good idea. It’s a very good bill, and I recommend this bill to the House. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

For fear of raising the ire of my leader, the Rt Hon Winston Peters, I will say that we vote for this bill, but then, I presume, it was initially brought to the House by the Hon Chris Finlayson, someone who I personally have a great deal of time for. But, unwisely, he in the past crossed swords with my rangatira sitting over here, so the less said about the Hon Chris Finlayson in that context the better for him and the better for me.

The bill deserves our support. It takes us to the heart of what we empower in this House. At a principal level, we pass primary legislation, and then we enable, via the passage of primary legislation, for the Crown, via the Minister, to pass regulations through the Executive Council.

A former Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Palmer, described that as a recipe for making far too much legislation that enjoyed too little scrutiny and added to the dead-weight effect of unwise regulation upon the functioning of the economy. So if there is a way via such a piece of legislation—and, in all seriousness, I certainly do support it—of ensuring that we’ve got visibility and ease of access to this subsidiary legislation, then that is positive in terms of how we discharge our duties in the Whare Pāremata.

There is an area, it would appear, that will not enjoy—thankfully, on my part—the scrutiny of parliamentarians, and that is what councils get up to with by-laws pertaining to vermin, rodents, roads, dogs, and other such matter—and indeed waste. We will leave that with local government—and it’s an amazing set of circumstances that have come to pass, with new people coming into local government. I look forward, as the champion of the provinces, to working effectively with them and spreading good cheer and fiscal love where appropriate.

Now, the element that I want to finish off on, in terms of this piece of legislation, is: when we are in this House, we rely on the select committee process. We rely on the fact that when a Supplementary Order Paper comes in before the third reading, it’s a transparent process. That is not the case with much of the regulation that is passed, and often Ministers in the past have been enslaved by their officials, acquiescing and agreeing to regulatory changes without fully understanding their impact. I am not one of those Ministers. I rather take the view that before you introduce new subsidiary legislation or regulations, you should be creating a bonfire of old legislation to get rid.

It’s a very sad state of events that the last regime has left the country reeling under reams and reams of red tape, and therein lies the riddle about the last regime: they preached all the virtues of private enterprise, they preached the virtues of economic empowerment, but, under the dead-hand effect of Nick Smith and various other Ministers, they have saddled the economy with the weight of redundant pieces of regulatory detritus. This bill hopefully will enable future Governments and the current Government to shine with some level of sunlight on that level of activity, to enable us to check the excesses of the bureaucracy who continue believing that only by regulation, as opposed to liberating markets, can we get the level of clarity required to support the bill.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the Legislation Bill at this the second reading. I love a good bit of tautology: Legislation Bill—a law about a law. Other speakers have already made points about the purpose of this item that is before us now on the agenda that is the parliamentary Order Paper. I would just emphasise its value as an item that promotes accessibility—laws being easy to find as well as easy to understand and to find one’s way around. So it’s a valuable addition to the law of the land.

Secondary legislation, as it’s known—otherwise known as regulations—is secondary only in that sense, not in terms of its importance to the lives of ordinary New Zealanders in the way that they conduct their personal lives, their business lives, and other dealings. The closer that one gets to one’s life in terms of laws that have effect, the easier they should be to understand—unlike impressionist paintings. So I’ll just leave you with that impression: that it’s a positive move that this piece of legislation will enable New Zealanders to see more clearly the laws that affect them through regulations, in this bill. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise in support of this bill. As others have said, this is a law about the law. But it is incredibly important because, of course, the right to justice encompasses also the right to know the law, and for that to happen and for us to fulfil our obligations as a Government, we have to make sure that the law is knowable and accessible to those outside of this House and to those without legal expertise. So this is a bill that aims to do a little bit of that by bringing together the Legislation Act and the Interpretation Act as well, and it makes sense to say that the mechanism by which law is made and defined should be accessible, together with the mechanisms by which we interpret the law, for ordinary people.

This particular piece of legislation aims to make more knowable to the public the secondary legislation, or regulations, as we have already said, which are laws just as enforceable as primary legislation and much more likely to affect the everyday lives and dealings of New Zealanders and everyone in New Zealand. So it makes sense that we would make access to secondary legislation easier. It surprises me, and probably most of us here, that secondary legislation—though it is so all-encompassing of our lives in New Zealand—wasn’t required to be published online in any way and wasn’t, until now, easily defined in the law, so people weren’t able to easily find out what regulations affected them and where they were and how they were interpreted.

This, in part, brings into law recommendations of the Regulations Review Committee in 2014. I note that the reform is really overdue, so I do commend the move. Although, of course, it is technical, it will have huge implications for the clarity and accessibility of New Zealand law. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s my pleasure to stand in support of this Legislation Bill, which was introduced by the National Government and continued by this coalition Government. This bill improves the access to legislation in New Zealand by providing that all the secondary legislation other than that made by the local authorities must be published on the New Zealand Legislation website. That will ensure that individuals and businesses can access this legislation, which is not all available at one portal. They will have one access point where they can look into these issues. It’s important, because we need to make sure that the businesses and individuals have ease of doing business, and that is the intention of this legislation also. I commend this bill to the House.

This is a split call. I call Clare Curran—five minutes.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’d also like to acknowledge Chris Finlayson and the preparation work that was done in bringing this legislation to the House before the last term of Government. It’s good when everybody in the House is supporting a practical, useful piece of legislation. It is a law about laws, not a law about a law, because it actually applies to every piece of legislation and all the regulations that go with them.

I’ll also just like to comment on the Justice Committee, which—yes—has been through many iterations in the last two years. But can I assure the House that it’s in very good hands, and I acknowledge the chair, Meka Whaitiri, who’s sitting next to me.

This is a bill that is, essentially, about making it easier to find and access secondary legislation, but it is also ensuring that New Zealand’s law is easy to find—it’s easy to find, it’s easy to use, and is easy to understand. Goodness, in 2019, you’d think we would have worked that out, but it’s really good that we’re doing it now.

I’ve actually read some of the submissions, and I want to give a shout-out to the Regulations Review Committee, which does an awful lot of pointy-headed work. This is one example of where the value of a select committee that scrutinises legislation and undertakes inquiries is actually on display, and one of the reasons I want to make that point quite strongly is that that scrutiny and that role of scrutineers is really important. It would be wise for the Hon Nick Smith to actually pay attention to that, when he’s recently dismissed the role of the Regulations Review Committee in having parliamentary oversight and scrutiny over the referendum questions before next year’s elections.

That committee has got a hugely important role, and in 2014, when that committee was actually being chaired by Maryan Street, it undertook an inquiry into the inability to find regulations, which has actually brought this bill to the House today. It is one of the reasons why we have got this bill before us today. So I think it’s really important that the Regulations Review Committee gets the recognition that it deserves.

My other comment that I wanted to say is that this is really about what needs to happen next. Once we’ve got legislation and regulations in one place, there’s another step that’s taken, and that is to turn it into code, because if we do that, and we actually do truly become transformational—now, some steps have been already taken to get that process under way. I’d like to see it sped up and go forward.

The multi-agency service innovation work programme in the last couple of years experimented with machine-consumable legislation, and over three weeks, a multidisciplinary team rewrote two pieces of legislation—I think one of them was the rates rebate law—into a software code. Now, what that means—and this is being looked at internationally—is that we’ve got the ability to do analysis, to identify conflict between pieces of legislation, and to look for synergies to support decision-making and application processes. The usefulness of codifying legislation is huge—I hope the Clerk’s Office is listening—and this is where we need to go next.

I heartily support this legislation. There’s a lot of work gone into it. I know that we can do better, and we can actually become a world leader in this space.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I just want to take a short call on this legislation. It’s had full support, and to get that secondary legislation being accessible to New Zealanders, alongside the website, is something that will be to the benefit of those that may be wishing to access that information. So it’s in good accordance with this House that it passes through.

Te Māngai o Te Whare, tēnā koe. Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased to take a call on the Legislation Bill, following that exceptional delivery by David Bennett, that former Minister that just resumed his seat. The Legislation Bill is in its second reading, and as previous contributors to the debate on this bill have said, it is attempting to simplify being able to locate our secondary legislation. I hope it makes it a lot easier to read, and this bill is attempting to do this. As previous members have said, it was introduced under the former Minister Chris Finlayson. I want to acknowledge that. It was introduced in the House on 20 June 2017 and had its first reading on 5 December 2017, and there has been mention of the new members on this Justice Committee. What I wanted to do was not just reiterate what others have contributed, but I actually wanted to talk about those that submitted on this bill, and if you would indulge me—some of it’s quite technical, so I just want to highlight it—I’ll go off cue.

I want to acknowledge the nine—according to the departmental report—submitters to the Regulations Review Committee: the Clerk of the House of Representatives, the New Zealand Law Society, Local Government New Zealand, the Chief Ombudsman, Gregor Alexander Macaulay, Stephen Turkington, Greg Scobie, and Glen Robins. Those individuals and organisations obviously have a passion for legislation in this House, so I want to commend them for taking an interest and submitting.

It’s the amendments that the select committee—or the officials, sorry, having heard all the submitters, that I want to acknowledge. I want to acknowledge the first submission that was under the title “Access Reforms”, and this came from the Clerk of the House when talking about clause 4(1)(e). What they suggested was amending references in clause 4(1)(e). You might rightly ask: so what does that mean—what’s clause 4(1)(e)? Of course, I wanted to know what 4(1)(e) was too. Clause 4(1)(e), as recommended by the Clerk of the House, is to enable Parliament to maintain oversight, to support parliamentary oversight, and to enable the House of Representatives to support the House of Representatives—a simple clause, but all adding to that commitment to making our laws simpler and easier, but more importantly, to access them. I want to acknowledge the Clerk of the House of Representatives.

I then want to acknowledge the New Zealand Law Society, who had an amendment around clause 76(1)(a). Of course, we want to know what 76(1)(a) is. The New Zealand Law Society proposed removing the power for regulations made under clause 145 to exempt instruments from the publication requirement, provided that the Chief Parliamentary Counsel can only exempt secondary legislation from the lodgement and publication obligations where the secondary legislation is already made available in some other way, and only to the extent that this is consistent with the principle that the public should be able to access legislation at no or low cost. Again, the New Zealand Law Society adds that all our laws should be publicly accessible, and they go a bit further to say this should be at low to no cost. I want to thank the New Zealand Law Society for their suggested amendment.

Finally, in my short contribution, again from the Clerk of the House, in relation to clauses 114(a) and 118(1)—again, what does this part of the bill do and what is the amendment they suggest? They suggested that we amend the bill to make it clear that any secondary legislation amended or replaced by the House under clause 118(1) is subjected to disallowance despite clauses 114(a).

I want to acknowledge the submitters—these three that I’ve indicated. There was a whole lot of amendments made at the officials’ end, but, of course, these particular submitters—the Law Society, the House of Representatives—have contributed to help shape the bill into what it is presented to the House today. I do want to thank them sincerely for their time and their effort to make our laws more publicly available—the low-cost principle that was introduced there—but also that it was accessible on a website that then everybody can access, and so I commend this bill to the House.

Aligned with the previous speaker addressing the House, I too support this bill to the House, and although I don’t sit on the Justice Committee, I do sit on the Regulations Review Committee. As members of that committee, we are aware of the work that has been undertaken by the Parliamentary Counsel Office and also the Office of the Clerk in terms of amalgamating and bringing together a system where all the legislation and secondary legislation is archived and readily accessible.

As is well known and has been canvassed in the House this afternoon, this bill rewrites and replaces the Legislation Act 2012, implementing publication and other reforms relating to production of high-quality legislation that’s easy to find. So it’s so important, the accessibility of having the legislation in one place and space, particularly for members of the public, who would be seeking to source where particular laws are as is impacting on them. So the access to secondary legislation, the general policy objective of this bill when it does come into law, is to ensure that there is one single place where individuals and businesses can see all of New Zealand’s legislation. A brief call—everybody this afternoon on this bill is aligned, and it is supported.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on this bill. I would like to acknowledge, as the second member of the Justice Committee who was there from the beginning, along with Greg O’Connor, that I had the privilege of listening to the officials’ information and also the submissions that we heard on this piece of legislation. It’s an interesting point to make. I would like to just quickly explain, just in case there’s one or two people sitting at home wondering what we’re all talking about, the difference between primary and secondary legislation, because I think that’s an important distinction to make.

All Acts of Parliament, all things passed by this House, are considered to be primary legislation, but there are many other forms. Some of those are drafted by our Parliamentary Counsel Office, but there are many other regulations and forms of types of law that are not passed by this House, and that is what is known as secondary legislation. Underpinning the importance of what this bill is doing is making sure that access to law is fundamental. Accessing law is so important to having a democratic society, and it goes right to those principles of openness, open government, and also the rule of law.

Often as parliamentarians, we will go and look at the primary legislation, look at the New Zealand Legislation website to find a piece of law that we’re interested in finding out—a particular section or item in there. That cannot be currently done with secondary legislation, as it sits in many different parts of different areas, and so bringing all of those parts together is a huge task. So I take my hat off and commend those officials that are undertaking—and I think Parliamentary Counsel Office have a significant task in front of them—to bring together all of those forms of secondary legislation, and it’s really important that we are able to do that to make sure that people can access pieces of law and can do that whenever they wish to do so.

I won’t continue on for much longer. We’ve had a great discussion on this good piece of legislation that was, indeed, started by the former Minister, Chris Finlayson, under the last Government, and continued. It’s one of those good pieces of legislation that just keeps New Zealand ticking over, and I commend it to the House.

Bill read a second time.