Jones ShaneHon SHANE JONES (Minister of Forestry): For fear of raising the ire of my leader the Rt Hon Winston Peters I will say that we vote for this bill but then I presume it was initially brought to the House by the Hon Chris Finlayson someone who I personally have a great deal of time for. But unwisely he in the past crossed swords with my rangatira sitting over here so the less said about the Hon Chris Finlayson in that context the better for him and the better for me.The bill deserves our support. It takes us to the heart of what we empower in this House. At a principal level we pass primary legislation and then we enable via the passage of primary legislation for the Crown via the Minister to pass regulations through the Executive Council.A former Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer described that as a recipe for making far too much legislation that enjoyed too little scrutiny and added to the dead-weight effect of unwise regulation upon the functioning of the economy. So if there is a way via such a piece of legislation—and in all seriousness I certainly do support it—of ensuring that we've got visibility and ease of access to this subsidiary legislation then that is positive in terms of how we discharge our duties in the Whare Pāremata.There is an area it would appear that will not enjoy—thankfully on my part—the scrutiny of parliamentarians and that is what councils get up to with by-laws pertaining to vermin rodents roads dogs and other such matter—and indeed waste. We will leave that with local government—and it's an amazing set of circumstances that have come to pass with new people coming into local government. I look forward as the champion of the provinces to working effectively with them and spreading good cheer and fiscal love where appropriate.Now the element that I want to finish off on in terms of this piece of legislation is: when we are in this House we rely on the select committee process. We rely on the fact that when a Supplementary Order Paper comes in before the third reading it's a transparent process. That is not the case with much of the regulation that is passed and often Ministers in the past have been enslaved by their officials acquiescing and agreeing to regulatory changes without fully understanding their impact. I am not one of those Ministers. I rather take the view that before you introduce new subsidiary legislation or regulations you should be creating a bonfire of old legislation to get rid. It's a very sad state of events that the last regime has left the country reeling under reams and reams of red tape and therein lies the riddle about the last regime: they preached all the virtues of private enterprise they preached the virtues of economic empowerment but under the dead-hand effect of Nick Smith and various other Ministers they have saddled the economy with the weight of redundant pieces of regulatory detritus. This bill hopefully will enable future Governments and the current Government to shine with some level of sunlight on that level of activity to enable us to check the excesses of the bureaucracy who continue believing that only by regulation as opposed to liberating markets can we get the level of clarity required to support the bill.