Woods Megan: Legislation Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Woods Megan: Legislation Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 16 October 2012. Volume:684;Page:5869. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram) 
: 
 I am very happy to take a call on the Legislation Bill. Many of my colleagues have already spoken at length on this bill and what it seeks to do. And they spoke very well. We heard from Lianne Dalziel who got up and told us that although this was not a very exciting piece of legislation and was not legislation that would smoke your tyres it was indeed very important legislation that needs good consideration by this House. 
Then we heard Charles Chauvel in a much more tempered way call this bill good technical remedial legislation—he did not go down the “smoke your tyres” route. And then Phil Goff called it technical and dull and said that he was going to be the only non-legal to take a call on it—well I join you in taking a call on this bill. In fact Charles Chauvel and I decided that you got the gold star for finding politics in this bill. 
In all seriousness this is an incredibly important piece of legislation. As colleagues have set out what it is doing is both modernising and improving the law relating to the publication availability reprinting revision and official versions of legislation. At its core what this bill is about is making the laws that we make in this House accessible to the people whom we make those laws for. I think that is an incredibly important piece of work. 
This bill was very carefully considered at the Regulations Review Committee under the excellent chairmanship of Charles Chauvel. It is important that it had such a thorough examination at the select committee because it deals with important constitutional matters as previous speakers have talked about. What this bill does is provide unelected officials greater power to change the words agreed to by this Parliament in terms of the law of New Zealand. These provisions are carefully constructed to ensure that the powers are limited only to obvious errors. This should be the case; we need to make sure that we have tight controls around this when we have unelected officials making changes to what we enact in this Chamber and the laws that we make here. 
In terms of clause 3 “Purposes” what we see is that there is a very great purpose in this bill. The provisions giving the Parliamentary Counsel Office the power to correct errors are sensible. In fact they not only are sensible but will also be of great assistance to this Parliament. However any time that we propose to transfer this power as I said we must make sure that that transfer is wise. I think that this legislation has achieved this. 
The bill also establishes the very important practice of revision bills which will be overseen by the Attorney-General. This will provide for the revision of the wording the numbering the title etc. of Acts of Parliament. The aim of these bills will be to simplify New Zealand’s legislation and make it easier to access and understand by embarking on a 3-yearly programme of systematic revision. 
I note that in the regulatory impact statement the Chief Parliamentary Counsel has considered the cost of what this revision will be. He says that it is not possible to quantify with any precision the cost associated with a statutory programme of revision because it will depend on the size and nature of that programme. A programme of 3 or 4 revision bills per year would approximate to around $220000 per annum of additional cost to the Parliamentary Counsel Office but $220000 is a small price to pay to make the laws that we make more accessible to people. 
Many members have spelt out the status quo and what is wrong with it. Acts of Parliament are ordered currently in terms of chronology. That means it is hard for ordinary members of the public who are looking for an Act on a particular topic to know where exactly to look for it because things are scattered all over the place. We need to consolidate this and bring this together. 
All the content of an Act might not be indicated by its title. There are laws and provisions contained in Acts with titles that would never lead you to suspect that that is what you are looking for. Amending Acts sometimes contain substantive provisions that stand separately from the Act being amended and these can be missed when people search for the provisions on a particular subject. So when the Parliamentary Counsel Office publishes law it has an express function relating to the presentation and accessibility of public Acts. When formulating policy Government departments do not always treat accessibility of statute law as a key priority. When they are putting together policy and putting together legislation whether or not people can access it and find it easily is not their key concern. 
My colleague Phil Goff talked about the Law Commission saying that it was going to save a lot in terms of time and money making this process much simpler for it. The Law Commission has gone back to some very clear research on the values of plain drafting of legislation. Several pieces of research have found that untidiness and obscurity in statute law are likely to add to the costs of providing legal advice about rights and obligations to Government businesses and the public generally. 
So what we have here in this legislation is not only an ability to make law more accessible to the public of New Zealand more generally but also an ability to make it more accessible to the Government when it goes about its business and to New Zealand businesses when they are going about their everyday work and running their businesses. Anything that seeks to modernise bring together and make what we do here in making laws for New Zealanders more accessible is something that we are happy to commend to the House. Thank you.