Statutes Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Statutes Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Thank you. I move, That the Statutes Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Governance and Administration Committee to consider the bill.

It is important our legislation continues to remain accurate, fit for purpose, and reflective of the policy intent. We all have a responsibility to be stewards of our systems and legislation. Regularly progressing these types of bills is one way we can ensure we continue to prioritise and maintain the quality of our legislation.

Statutes amendment bills make minor, technical, and non-controversial amendments to several Acts. This allows amendments to be made that would not usually be given sufficient priority. Amendments are progressed through the support of all parties in Parliament. This bill comprises of 96 proposals that will amend 42 Acts administered by 14 different Government agencies. Many of the amendments in this bill correct drafting errors, such as incorrect wording or references. For example, the proposed amendment to the Crown Entities Act 2004 will replace the outdated term “Minister of State Services” with “Minister for the Public Service”, or replacing the reference to the State Sector Act 1988 with the Public Service Act 2020 to refer to the current Act.

Other changes make technical amendments to provide clarity or better reflect the intention of the legislation. For example, a proposed amendment to the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act 2003 will clarify that lenders are not required to keep records for applications from borrowers that are declined or withdrawn, to remove an unnecessary compliance burden.

Some amendments make non-controversial improvements to how legislation works in practice. Another example: one of the proposed amendments to the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 will extend the time frame for submitting prescribed transaction reports, or PTRs, from 10 days to 20 days. This will improve the quality of those PTRs that are submitted to the Financial Intelligence Unit. Another example is the proposed amendment to the Radiocommunications Act 1989, which will include that an infringement notice may be sent to a person’s electronic address if the person does not have a known place of residence, to reflect developments in digital technologies.

This bill also provides an opportunity to address outdated language, such as that used in the Criminal Records (Clean Slate) Act 2004. The description of certain people as “subnormal”, “idiot”, and “imbecile”, specified in historic specified offences, will be removed.

Even though I’ve only covered a few amendments from this bill, these examples demonstrate the value of statutes amendment bills as a way of advancing minor but important changes. While all the parties in Parliament have indicated their support for the amendments proposed in the bill, I look forward to hearing the select committee’s views on these matters as well as any views of the public. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you. I rise in support of this bill on behalf of the Labour Party. This is a really interesting tradition that has come up—that these bills are collaborated on—and it’s a good thing for the New Zealand public that that happens.

This is going to go to the Governance and Administration Committee, and I urge the public to make sure that they do look through the list of the bills affected. There’s a lot of bills that will be affected by this that may be of interest to the public. For example, there are quite substantial changes to the Privacy Act, and while we think we’ve got it right—and that’s why it’s before the committee with a support level that is unusual—that doesn’t mean that we necessarily have. It may be that things come up for the public—they are working with these Acts and they see things that they don’t think are right.

One of the wonderful things about the New Zealand process is that we have select committees that truly do listen to the public. I’ve been in situations on select committees in the last term where things turned and changed on the basis of what we were told by either experts in the field of that particular law who said, “You’d think this might be a good idea, but it’s not” or actually just general comments from members of the public who made the same kind of contribution. I think that’s one of the wonderful things about our system, and I see this as an opportunity to do that.

Some of the little changes here are things that we probably need to be ashamed were ever in our laws—words that were used that were just inappropriate—and we have come a long way, and it’s good to see those things being swept up and changed. These are often seen as housekeeping bills, and that’s one way of looking at them, but that does not mean that some of the things within these bills are not significant. It’s really important that the public look at these things and second-guess us on it. I invite the public to do that. I am very pleased to see this go to the Governance and Administration Committee, who are a very thorough, hard-working committee and will listen to all the submissions. Thank you. I commend the bill to the House.

On behalf of the Greens, we support this bill. As others have noted, this is a bill that had consultation from all parties and the tradition is to bring it forward. While knowing that parties don’t have any major issues with the contents of this bill, I do think it’s interesting to examine the language around “minor, technical, and non-controversial”, because that is actually relatively subjective.

What may be deemed non-controversial for us may not be for others. I think how I would interpret the non-controversial kind of aspect of this is that it has had agreement amongst all parties, but it is important to note, as others have, that some of the language that we’re changing, some of it was controversial, and it is a good thing that we’re modernising pieces of legislation to ensure that not only do they reflect the modern times but that we look at errors that would have meant that the legislation was not doing what it had intended to, or would have been written in ways that were not accurate. Interestingly enough, I note that changes in the Criminal Records (Clean Slate) Act 2004 contain words that the previous speaker Helen White noted were out of touch and would not have been used nowadays—words that would have been used, actually, by senior figures of Government earlier today in question time.

I do note that, for example, the amendments to the Heretaunga Tamatea Claims Settlement Act has significant implications for Māori and Te Tiriti. This was actually a change that was proposed by the last Government explicitly as a correction to errors in the implementation of the Heretaunga Tamatea Treaty settlement, to give effect to the Treaty settlement. I do think these are good opportunities for the House to get things right, particularly for historical wrongs.

As others have noted, there are 42 Acts that are being amended as a result of this. They include the Accident Compensation Act, and, if you look alphabetically, it goes all the way down to the Wildlife Act. It just shows the breadth of the bills that are being touched on.

I do note that, for example, there are things in relation to how wages could be recovered and employment agreements. Those things are actually, like, I would not say necessarily minor in terms of the things that we’re updating, and that is important to note.

As the previous speaker noted, I would encourage submitters, despite our kind of reassurance that we treat this as minor and non-controversial, to pay close attention to the bills that are being updated, because sometimes submitters in the past have noted things that we have not gotten right. This would be an opportunity for submitters to just make sure that we are doing due diligence in this process so that the select committee process can be smooth. The Green Party will do our due diligence and engage in the select committee to make sure that we get this process right and that the legislation that we have reflects modern times.

The National Party, like all others in the House, supports this Statutes Amendment Bill. The contents of it have already been canvassed and I don’t seek to repeat that. The Governance and Administration Committee is looking forward to receiving this bill.

If I can just use this through you, Mr Speaker—and I think you’ll probably be the most compliant Speaker for me to allow this—the Restoring Citizenship Removed By Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 Bill second reading that has just gone through and been reported back to the House by the Governance and Administration Committee is set down in this House for 9 a.m. Thursday next week. We look forward to continuing to process that and we look forward to receiving the Governance and Administration Committee—the Statutes Amendment Bill—in due course. Thank you.

Andy Foster, speaking about that committee.

Mr Speaker, this is an exceptionally exciting bill to end the week with! Look, on the turn, this looked like a very routine, vanilla bill—probably is. It’s been described as common sense, as being administrative, as being routine, and as being one of those tidy-up bills. And there’s a bit of modernisation in there as well. New Zealand First values good governance, and it has been interesting, actually, in a couple of select committee conversations, to hear some people say that everything is about politics. Well, not everything is about politics sometimes—I think that portrays a sense of mind—sometimes things are just about common sense and good governance, and that is what this bill is.

It’s an omnibus bill; it covers 42 Acts, and I’m not going to go through 42 Acts. Generally, they’re very minor changes. Actually, it was interesting because—I pity the people who actually have to trawl through existing legislation and find these minor changes that need to be made; I admire them as well for the work they have to do. But there are things in terms of modernisation. We get rid of the requirement to advertise public notices in newspapers, because there are less of them. We remove the references to cheques. We update organisations’ names, which used to be one thing and are now something slightly different. We are also looking here at updating the references to legislation which has been replaced by other legislation, so we get those names right. Actually, interestingly, there are also several pieces which are about fixing mistakes made by this House. That just shows that we’re not perfect here, either. Sometimes, things have got to be fixed, and somebody picks those up, sometimes several years later.

I’m going to be really interested, as part of the Governance and Administration Committee—at least I hope I’m going to be really interested—because it’s going to be fascinating to see what the public makes of this! You never know, there might be some gems in there. There’s a couple of favourites that I just wanted to point out to finish off with. The first one of them is the amendments to the Conservation Act 1987, and I was particularly taken by the addition of a new infringement offence to cover offences related to the taking of indigenous freshwater fish. So, while Freddy the frog might be in danger, Freddy the fish might be in a much better place after this change! I don’t know about Eddy the eel; he might be covered by that as well. The most substantive change is around the Privacy Act. I think it’s interesting to read the comments there, or the changes which are suggested, about access to information held about yourself and access by other people to information about other people, and also the complaints process.

I commend the bill to the House, and I look forward to the Governance and Administration Committee considering this bill and any submissions.

Thank you. It looks like this bill is heading straight to our select committee, the Governance and Administration Committee, so I don’t want to pre-empt what members of the public might want to say. It will be interesting to see some of the comments that come in on some things. I see some changes to Armed Forces Discipline Regulations and, of course, the Armed Forces Discipline Act. In particular, I have to note the changing of “airman” to “aviator” and a bit of history, perhaps, is lost as that change gets brought through into law. It’s all in the aim of modernising the language, just like they changed “crewman” to “loadmaster”—I’m not sure “master” is any less gendered, but that seems to be the way that the world goes—so it’ll be interesting to see what comments there are on that.

Rather than use up the House’s time now going through in infinite detail on these changes, I look forward to members of the public having their say on how much tradition do we want to keep and how much do we need to change with the times. People will have their say, and I commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. Most of us, I guess, come to this House to make transformational change to Aotearoa, but also there are the little bits of housekeeping that have to be done from time to time, and the Statutes Amendment Bill is one of them. Therefore, as has been said across the House, there’s not a lot to say other than to move this quickly through to select committee. On this side of the House, we commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I was having—Pretty excited for the Statutes Amendment Bill on this side of the House. I was having a quick flick through and I saw a couple and I thought, “Gosh, these are pretty straightforward.” Crown Entities Act 2004: replace “Minister of State Services” with the “Minister for the Public Service.” Small, minor tweaks which may not mean much to the general public but are really important to make sure that our legislation in New Zealand is absolutely bang on the money. Employment Relations Act 2000: replace reference to section 28B of the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992—which has been repealed—with section 191 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 in section 233B.

These are just minor tweaks in pieces of legislation. As a member of the Governance and Administration Committee, I’m looking forward to progressing this legislation on behalf of the Government, and I commend it to the House.

[Hon Dr Duncan Webb and Hon David Parker rise to seek call] Bit of aerobics on a late afternoon in the House. I call the Hon Dr Duncan Webb.

There you go—you had two of the greatest legal minds leaping to their feet. What a choice for Mr Speaker!

Look, there’s one thing I want to say about this, and that is around the money-laundering proposals. The Associate Minister of Justice has signalled the loosening of anti - money-laundering and the countering of financing of terrorism rules in a press release that she put out on, I think it was, Sunday. I must say, whilst this, in the Statutes Amendment Bill, looks innocuous, we do have concerns that we want to raise at select committee.

For example, I think one of the changes here in this bill is simply to extend the reporting time for lawyers who have suspicious transactions from three days out to five days—now, sounds reasonable, but we have to be very careful to take an all-of-system view of what’s going on here and make sure that just by inches we don’t see an erosion of our anti - money-laundering framework. We know that 19 roles were disestablished at the Department of Internal Affairs, including front-line staff who were assessing and investigating alleged money-laundering. Those two things in tandem are not a good look.

It’s also worth noting that the Financial Action Task Force, which reported on New Zealand in July this year, found a number of non-compliances with the international requirements around money-laundering. I think we’ve got to approach this with some caution. Certainly, there are people out there who think we’re not pulling our weight on the money-laundering front. Martin Dilly and Fiona Hall have, in fact, said that that the actions of this Government are a “signal to businesses that the public sector is not interested in doing its part to ensure [the] success of [our anti - money-laundering] … regime”.

Let’s just keep a weather eye on this. It may well be that the two minor changes—what appear to be minor changes—are nothing to be alarmed about, but I do want to ask: but why? I mean, I have made Suspicious Transaction Reports: one for a cash transaction where people were paying their legal bill with a wad of cash—fine by me, but then again, who knows where it came from—the other one for a request to send money to Uganda, which was, again, suspicious. When the lights go off, it’s not that hard to go online and let the police unit know that you’ve got concerns. I don’t know why you need to wait an extra two days before you do that. Let’s have that discussion.

The Minister’s also signalled that she may look at examining how we finance anti - money-laundering. The idea that the private sector might participate in how we fund anti - money-laundering frameworks is perplexing to me. What I want to make sure of is that when we come in to look at this, we look not just at this tiny little amendment but how it fits in with the framework of anti - money-laundering and countering the financing of terrorism as a whole. Thank you.

Well, there’s a lot of excitement for this Statutes Amendment Bill here tonight. I’m seeing two members on the other side of the House stand up in such anticipation—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): We all need a bit of exercise!

—who, obviously, want to speak about it. So I’m very pleased to be the last speaker on this first reading of this bill tonight, which is really all about common sense. On this side of the House, we are always about common sense and ensuring that we have good, solid, modern laws in place here. Of course, this bill, as we’ve already heard, is going to modernise and bring a lot of our legislation up to date. As the member opposite rightly pointed out earlier, it’s a bit of a housekeeping bill.

I’m sure the Governance and Administration Committee is going to hear some interesting submissions on this bill and navigate it through, because it certainly impacts quite a few different Acts. There’s 96 proposals which amend 42 Acts administered by 14 Government agencies. It sounds complex, but, obviously, there are lots of little things that need sorting out, as we’ve already heard, with the Crown Entities Act, the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act, the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act, and the Radiocommunications Act, just to name a few. Certainly, in the Real Estate Agents Act, they’re going to replace the term “inconsequential” with “not sufficiently serious to require [disciplinary] action,”. I mean, just that kind of language, obviously, bring us up to date in the modern world, and so this is a very, very good bill.

It certainly is non-controversial. It appears that everyone here in this House does support it because it is common sense. It’s a practical solution. Therefore, I look forward to hearing the second reading and seeing this bill, of course, proceed through the House, and I will commend it to the House. Thank you.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

The question is, That the Statutes Amendment Bill be considered by the Governance and Administration Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Governance and Administration Committee.