Meager James; Seymour DavidJAMES MEAGER (National—Rangitata): Well Madam Chair thank you for this call. As we all know the committee of the whole House stage is probably the most important stage of the passage of a bill. If we remember our first-year law classes from Otago University it is the stage where you get to interrogate a bill clause by clause line by line comma by comma to make sure that what comes out of this House is the most high-quality clean clearest unambiguous legislation that this House can produce. So it's a real pleasure to be speaking in the committee stage with all of my colleagues across the House and I look forward to everyone's contributions to this debate.Now I have a few questions for the Minister for Regulation—about 31 minutes' worth of questions I reckon. The first question is around the interpretation clause because it's interesting to put an interpretation clause into what is essentially a repeal bill. I think that's possibly because the Minister is a very intelligent clever experienced Minister and he knows that what you want out of legislation is to avoid as much ambiguity and uncertainty as possible. So when we see things like the interpretation clause defining what assets" are it's very important to define these terms to make sure that bills like this aren't open to costly lengthy judicial reviews tied up in the courts if Ministers are making decisions or officials are interpreting the bill in a way which isn't in line with the interpretation. I'm very very interested to know: what was the thinking and the process behind having this interpretation clause?Then of course we've got things such as "employee" which is quite an important interpretive section in this clause. It reads: "employee has the same meaning as in section 10(1) of the Crown Entities Act 2004". Now I haven't had the chance or the opportunity this evening to look up the Crown Entities Act 2004 but that's an indication to me that we might not be talking about your bog-standard sort of run-of-the-mill definition of "employee" that you might run into in Black's Law Dictionary or some sort of legal dictionaries you use but you have to actually go to the Crown Entities Act 2004 to determine what an "employee" means in this instance.Perhaps the Minister can elucidate—which is a word I've recently learnt in the Regulations Review Committee—on why this particular definition was put into this Act. Perhaps it has something to do with the nature of the employees at the Productivity Commission. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that there's going to be a transitional period and we need to understand whether we're treating employees in the Productivity Commission differently or providing them any extra benefits or protections than what we are to employees in other Acts. For example I can imagine that the Employment Contracts Act or other types of employment regulation and legislation may well interpret "employee" in a different way. So I'm very very interested as to why the Minister has put this particular part into the interpretation clause.Finally possibly the most interesting one in this interpretation clause is the end one: "Ministry". Now we'd all sit there and we'd all think that it's obvious what a ministry is. The Hon Duncan Webb has been to a ministry. The Hon Ayesha Verrall—many many members opposite have seen ministries been in ministries or they've in fact run ministries. So it's interesting that we have an interpretation clause which is asking us to actually define what a "Ministry" is. So I'd be very interested to know: what was the thought process behind that? Why did the Minister decide to put this interpretation clause in there?Then just before I end I will be seeking another call because I'm really interested in the self-repealing part of the Act too. So I'll touch on that later.Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation): Well I can inform the member that interpretation sections are normal. They are in every piece of legislation that I've ever seen and probably every piece of legislation that he will ever see. Why for instance was "employee" defined as having "the same meaning as in … the Crown Entities Act"? Well that would be because the Productivity Commission is a Crown entity and so therefore the employees are employees of a Crown entity.Why do we have a definition of "Ministry"? Well I think the concept that the member is—I mean this is the problem with going to Otago: you've got to really spell it out for them. But it's what we'd call shorthand so it's so that we can just use one word to refer to a more complex concept elsewhere in the legislation. It saves paper and that's something that James Shaw no doubt will be enthusiastic about just as much as the member is."