Graham Kennedy: Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGraham Kennedy: Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) — Second Reading[Sitting date: 11 March 2015. Volume:703;Page:2181. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green): I too riseto address the incredibly long debate on the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4). Let me begin with a confession tonight that I am I think less blessed than Brett Hudson. It has not come as an unbridled pleasure to address the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4). Rather it is something akin to a bridled responsibility one that comes from serving House duty on a Wednesday night immediately after dinner. So be it. We can all measure up to our responsibilities. My contribution will be mercifully fleeting for myself and for everybody here tonight.I did not serve on the Government Administration Committee so insights are not automatically flooding in as I search feverishly through the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) with its 33 parts for something intelligible to offer to the House other than to note the interesting comment from the Hon Ruth Dyson that the role of these omnibus bills is essentially to fix up mistakes and that there is a great deal of that to be had. I think she said if I understood her correctly that every bill or a majority of bills need legislative amendment at some stage. That may well be the case. It reminds me of the sign on the back of the van that is going around the streets in Christchurch. It is a plumber’s van and it says: “We’re the guys who fix what your husband just repaired.” I think that is what the Government Administration Committee is expected to be doing most of the time.It does raise the question of whether we could have some alteration to our parliamentary procedure because if in fact we find that the majority of bills that come through the legislative process require amendment within a short space of time we could ask ourselves whether the Committee of the whole House is an adequate vehicle. The Committee stage may be necessary but is it sufficient to act as a filter for all the legislative problems we might be bequeathing?We could perhaps amend the role of the Government Administration Committee so that after bills have gone through the Committee of the whole House they revert to the Government Administration Committee automatically and immediately and the Government Administration Committee could patch up what the Committee of the whole House has not succeeded in doing—or it could happen after the third reading. That was my attempt at post-dinner humour.I will now move on to the really serious part of this contribution and that is to recall the role of quality control—of course it used to belong to the Upper House at least to some extent—in the New Zealand constitution. In our constitutional wisdom we obviously abolished the bicameral structure about 60 years ago. Some people think we have floundered around ever since in our unicameral system churning out the law especially with this current Government in power without any real quality-control mechanism. It would be an interesting study perhaps to find out how many bills have teetered and tottered their way through infancy only to be admitted to a statutes amendment bill within say 5 years of being enacted. I count in the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) four out of 33—one in 2010 and three in 2012.We could really ask ourselves whether there is some better system of ensuring a better filtering mechanism or quality control than we currently have. We in the Green Party are prepared to support this bill in the spirit of close cooperation with the Government and other parties and I accordingly commend it to the House.