Statutes Amendment Bill

Members, we come now to Part 3. Part 3 is the debate on clauses 13 to 15, “Amendments to Armed Forces Discipline Act 1971”. The question is that Part 3 stand part.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We’re moving on from money laundering to the armed forces, and a relatively old—well, I wouldn’t say old; I wouldn’t want to offend anyone who was born in 1971, but a statute which has been on the books since 1971, which is a reasonable period of time.

I looked at this part, and I was interested in clause 14, which is the operative part of this Part 3. I did look it up to see what the deletion was. The deletion is limiting the Armed Forces Discipline Committee, which is a committee I actually hadn’t heard of before.

I was unsure as to why that was the case, and I’d be interested if the Minister had any insight into: is the Armed Forces Discipline Committee working as it should be? Is there a reason that this section requires, as a minor and consequential change, to be deleted? Obviously, it’s been in place for a significant amount of time.

The second quick question I had in Part 3 was in relation to clause 15, and I did look at this as well: when you look at this particular section, section 117ZA(2)(b), it actually doesn’t really make sense to have “wider” instead of “under”. I wanted to ask the Minister: was this change made in the 2009 changes to the primary legislation, which I understand—I could be wrong—was when section 117ZA was put in place, and is that, in fact, so minor and inconsequential that it was in fact a typographical error? So that’s my question to the Minister on Part 3.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Clause 14 is really just fixing a historical oversight, and it’s removing any inference that the power identified in section 87A(2) rests with the Armed Forces Discipline Committee. In other words, the committee does not have such a power. It’s fixing that. I think that actually might have come about because this bill was first introduced under Labour, and I think it was one of the things that Labour had picked out, so I’m carrying it on because it was picked up. The changing of the word “wider” to “under” is just fixing a grammatical error.

Part 3 agreed to.

Part 4 Amendments to Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021