Secondary Legislation Confirmation Bill

I move, That the Secondary Legislation Confirmation Bill be now read a second time.

This bill is an auspicious bill in the sense that it signals the beginning of the end of every parliamentary sitting year. And what can I say? Bring it on. Every year, we have to pass this bill to confirm legislation that would otherwise be revoked if not confirmed by Parliament. Can I just say, as I introduce the bill and make some brief remarks, we should probably do something about that. It’s always struck me as slightly strange that every year, at the tail-end of the parliamentary year, we have to come together at 3.05 p.m. on a Wednesday before Christmas, where everyone’s looking forward to the end of the year, and pass a piece of legislation just to confirm things. Anyway, it is what it is.

This relates to legislation made between 1 July 2023 and 30 June this year. It relates to seven Acts: the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Act 1997, the Commodity Levies Act, the Customs and Excise Act, the Food Act, the Superannuation and Retirement Income Act 2001, the Social Security Act 2018, and the Tariff Act 1988—seven Acts. We have to confirm the commodity levies for kiwifruit, as well as those for mussels, oysters, and salmon. We may as well rename the bill the “Great Christmas Dinner Act 2025”. Sounds like a great meal—mussels, oysters, and salmon.

💬 Hon Kieran McAnulty: God, that was worse than the sausages joke.

Ha, ha! Can I thank the Regulations Review Committee, and I see the chair is in the House, the Hon David Parker. I started my parliamentary career on the Regulations Review Committee. Maybe, sometime in the long distant future, I will complete my career on the Regulations Review Committee in a perfect piece of symmetry, by no means implying—“by no means implying”, he says, accidentally realising what he’s done—that the Hon David Parker’s career is coming to a circular end. It is a very good committee—underrated. I understand they went through the legislation from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the Ministry for Primary Industries, the Ministry of Social Development, and Customs, and I want to thank the committee for their work.

I hope this won’t take up too much of the House’s time. It is, as they say, a relatively pro forma piece of legislation, and maybe one day in the future, we’ll change the law so we don’t have to do it. But that day is not now. We have to do it, otherwise these things will be extinct. I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

The Labour Party will be supporting this bill. This bill does perform an important function. There are levies that are imposed by regulation, some of which are in the nature of taxation. It is the remit of Parliament to impose those sorts of costs upon society, and, therefore, the regulations which bring them forward have to be confirmed by year end, otherwise they lapse. It doesn’t take a lot of parliamentary time, it doesn’t take a lot of select committee time, but it is an important check on the ability of the executive to increase the costs on society, the most important of which, probably most years, is adjusting the excise and excise duties, the equivalent duties, on alcoholic beverages and tobacco products. That should be done every year so that they keep pace with inflation and don’t decline in real terms. None the less, it should be confirmed by Parliament because it is in the nature of a tax. All of these instruments should be confirmed, which is why we’re supporting the legislation.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. In this case, we are not supporting this bill and made our concerns noted in the first reading. We do take the point that traditionally these bills have been relatively technical and non-controversial; we don’t think that this is the case, actually. We do think that the Government has used secondary legislation to update some things but also to advance a political agenda due to its inclusion of reduced excise for heated tobacco products in this bill, and we think that’s actually not the way to go. This has been well canvassed. Our communities have long had issues with the fact that the Government is doing this, particularly when we’re already seeing that in the bigger scheme and bigger picture of things, the health of our communities is being undermined and that public health overall, when it comes to issues around smoking, is being undermined. We don’t think that this is the way to go.

I also want to note the social security changes, particularly the changes that mean that benefits will now be changed to an index with the Consumers Price Index (CPI). That, actually, is also problematic because when we start adjusting things to CPI when it comes to benefits and relationship to the economic forecast that we have right now, those things will lead to lower increases to income support rather than if we adjusted those to wages, or whichever was higher, which is actually the Green Party’s preference when it comes to how we deal with some of these adjustments.

On the whole, like I said, while we acknowledge that, overall, a lot of these changes are necessary and technical in nature, there are components to this bill that we just simply cannot get behind. And, therefore, the Green Party won’t be commending this bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

This bill is set down for third reading immediately.

Third Reading