Lees-Galloway Iain: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10280. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): It is a pleasure to be able to take my first call on the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill. I am particularly interested in the commencement clause of this legislation because we are in—I do not know whether it is a unique situation but it is certainly an extremely rare situation to be debating an amendment bill that amends an amendment Act that has not yet come into force. Obviously there are questions about exactly how the commencement arrangements for this bill should work. As some of us are inclined to do I delved intoMcGee to see whether there were any precedents for this situation and I could not find anything. In the little time I had to have a look through it I could not find anything which suggests to me that it is an extremely rare situation for a Minister to get it so badly wrong the first time around that we find ourselves back here amending an Act that has not even been implemented yet.There are a couple of issues that I think are worth having a look at. Yesterday we traversed the issue of a precise commencement date for the bill that we were debating and the need for a bill to have a precise commencement date in it. You ruled Mr Chairperson that say for instance taking it to a select committee was not precise enough to establish exactly what the commencement date would be for a bill. That leaves us in an interesting situation here where this bill as most bills do says that it commences on the day after it receives Royal assent. But exactly when should a bill that is amending an Act that has not yet come into force receive Royal assent? I think that is a fair question. That seems to me to be quite undetermined. It might be possible that the commencement date set out in this bill is out of order. I think it is difficult to determine exactly what the commencement date for this bill ought to be because we are in this highly unusual situation where the principal Act—and I have no doubt that there will be plenty of calls on the principal Act clause—has not actually yet come into force. So I would be interested in your ruling on that Mr Chairperson.Of course there is one possible option and that is for the Governor-General to refuse to give Royal assent. That is an option that has never been used. It would be absolutely unprecedented for the Governor-General to refuse to give Royal assent but it could be an option if the Governor-General looked at what the Government was doing and thought to himself: “Look you’ve got this a bit out of order here. You need to have the principal Act actually in force before you can amend that Act.” Then it would be an option for the Governor-General to consider refusing to give Royal assent. It would be asMcGee says “a remarkable—indeed a unique—event in New Zealand. No bill presented to a Governor or a Governor-General has ever been refused the Royal assent in New Zealand ...”. I wonder whether Simon Bridges’ stuff-up is really the time to be creating precedent in New Zealand. If a Minister who is so inept and so incapable of getting something as simple as this legislation right has made such a huge mistake is that the time for the Governor-General to step in and do something that has never been done before in New Zealand? Maybe it is. I think it probably is not but I think we have ourselves a very difficult situation here where we have no precedent around how you deal with the commencement of a bill that amends an Act that has not yet come into force.We are also debating the title of the bill. Again this title does not tell us very much. It tells us that it is the Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 Amendment Bill.It tells us something—Moana Mackey: You couldn’t make that name up.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: You could not make that name up no. It does tell us something. It tells us that this is a highly unusual situation and that Simon Bridges is an incompetent Minister. But I think that you know we really should have in the bill there the fact that as it says in the general policy statement some areas and omissions in the original Act have been identified. So it should be called the “Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2013 (Simon Bridges’ Eight Errors and Omissions) Amendment Bill”. I think that that would be a title that much more closely reflects what it is that Parliament is having to do here which is essentially to walk around behind Simon Bridges and clean up his messes before the original Act which he passed through Parliament can even come into force.Of course what we know is that this is a bizarre extension of the anti-protesting regulations in international waters. I think there are numerous titles for this bill that could be considered—