Dalziel Lianne: Regulatory Improvement Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Regulatory Improvement Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
[Sitting date: 30 March 2010. Volume:661;Page:10152. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I rise to speak in the second reading of the Regulatory Improvement Bill and it certainly gives me a great sense of satisfaction to do so. As the Attorney-General on behalf of the Minister for Regulatory Reform pointed out I was the instigator of this approach to regulatory improvement in New Zealand through the Quality Regulation Review. The review looked at how New Zealand regulates how Parliament regulates and essentially what improvements could be made in the way we regulate to ensure that business was not facing unnecessary compliance costs. It was also to ensure that our frameworks were kept up to date modern and relevant and that they were risk-related. 
I experienced the frustration of the hundreds of businesspeople whom I spoke to from one end of the country to the other. They expressed to me the sense of an overwhelming burden of regulation that was not matched by any comparable benefit that they could see. Business was saying to me that if there are going to be rules that govern our obligations—and business accepts that regulation is an important part of the business environment for confidence and all sorts of other reasons such as health and safety to name two—they have to be risk-related. We have to look at what the risk is of this thing going wrong and what the benefits are that apply to the particular regulatory framework that is adopted. That very quickly said to me that we could have two sets of rules without offending the principle that one law should fit all. One size does not fit all when we put on our clothes so I do not see why one-size-fits-all should apply to regulatory frameworks. In some instances the risks are so minimal that to make the requirements of a larger entity apply to a smaller entity simply would not be acceptable. To take another line if one is fundraising from the general public obviously the regulatory obligations—the rules—will be much tighter than if one is just operating or borrowing from the bank where the reporting requirements will be negotiated between oneself and the bank. 
There are reasons why regulatory frameworks should be fit for purpose at all stages of the regime and that fitness for purpose may require different rules to be applied at different times. I think this Parliament has got a little bit gun-shy of the phrase “regulation”. Regulation is just rules. Driving down the left-hand side of the road is a regulation. It is a rule of the road. It is part of the road code. If we did not have that rule I would like to think that everyone would drive down the left-hand side of the road but it could be pretty Wild West out there if we did not have that rule in place. Certainly I learnt that businesses accept the need for rules but they ask the Government that the rules are kept relevant and are proportionate to the risk that their business poses in the particular situation. I agree with them. 
The other problem I found when I went out and talked to hundreds of small businesses was that we ended up with a situation where the regulator will not tell people how to comply with the rule. That was the second-biggest complaint I had. An individual employer would ring up the Occupational Safety and Health Service and ask whether something was within the rules of health and safety and the employer would be told: “I am sorry but we cannot tell you whether that is within the rules but if you breach the rules we will be down there to serve you with a notice to tell you that you have breached the rules.” Well I do not think that is good enough. I never thought it was good enough when I was a Minister. I think it is really important that we have the mechanism available to us as a Parliament to fix these things as they come up. 
The third thing I found out was that small businesses in particular have had an absolute gutsful of talking to the Government over and over again. Because we are all politicians we think of the Department of Labour the Ministry of Justice the Department for Courts the Inland Revenue Department the Occupational Safety and Health Service and the Accident Compensation Corporation. All that the business people see is the Government. They ask why the Government is continually asking them for the same information over and over again. During the course of this review I came up with one of those 10-second sound bite phrases that politicians love to create but I thought that it absolutely encapsulated what businesses were telling me. It was: why cannot the many arms of Government extend a single hand to business? That is a really important question for this Parliament. 
I hope that members on both sides of the House Government and Opposition would agree entirely that that should be our focus in terms of bringing down the weight of regulatory reform. I think that the only way that we can do that is through e-commerce—the ability for businesses to speak to the Government once and then for the Government to spread that information across its many arms. That is so easy to do now that we have the business reporting language. I note that in the next few weeks a guest speaker is coming here from the Netherlands which has the world leaders on business reporting language. I will attend that event and I am sure that others in this House will as well. That to me is the solution for so many small businesses’ complaints about the nature of reporting to the Government. 
The final thing that I was told did not come from businesses but from the departments. What came back from the departments when we raised issues with them was that none of the issues raised were big enough to warrant their going to their Minister and asking for a bill on the Order Paper. They could not get up a bill to deal with this issue because it was not small enough for a Statutes Amendment Bill and it did not quite fit a Business Law Reform Bill. There was no mechanism for dealing with these little issues from different departments. The departments asked whether there was a way of getting these things dealt with in parliamentary time in a reasonable way without having to deal with them bill by bill. 
Members can imagine in this case what this Regulatory Improvement Bill contains and this is the first of the regulatory improvement bills. It has amendments to the Companies Act the Conservation Act the Designs Act the Fisheries Act the Gas Act the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (Restructuring) Act the Reserves Act and the Weights and Measures Act. As a Parliament if we had to take up a first reading a second reading the Committee stage and a third reading of a bill for every single one of those amendments then we would be spending a lot of time making relatively small fixes. 
My desire was to see the development of a Regulatory Improvement Bill where the theme of the omnibus bill—which the Minister just spoke of—would be an amendment to deal with an interrelated topic that can be regarded as implementing a single broad policy. It was finally accepted by the then Clerk of the House that that was a single thread that could be accepted as that interrelated topic and that was the improvement to regulatory frameworks. I had been to the Standing Orders Committee and had made the case to have the list of types of omnibus bills that can be introduced amended so that it included the Regulatory Improvement Bill along with the Business Committee’s agreement to the Business Law Reform Bill’s introduction as an omnibus bill. I wanted to have this written into the list as one of the bills that could be proceeded with as an omnibus bill as of right and I would still like to see that happen. 
I am pleased that it has been accepted in this case but it has to be agreed to by the Business Committee in order to be introduced as an omnibus bill. I think that we could do better than that. We could write it into the Standing Orders directly and say that the theme of regulatory improvement is something that the entire Parliament—members on both sides of the House—is committed to. We could agree to do this every year. This would be so much easier. We could send out messages to departments every year to say that this is their chance to make it better for businesses through better regulation. I have heard the Government of the day say: “Better regulation fewer regulations”. This is the best way of achieving that where we do not have the departmental commitment on the small stuff. They are now sweating the big stuff which is where their focus has to be. I commend this bill to the House and I also commend making a subsequent change to the Standing Orders.