Shanks Katrina: Legislation Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Shanks Katrina: Legislation Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 29 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4952. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KATRINA SHANKS (National) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to take a call on the second reading of the Legislation Bill today. I also would like to acknowledge the recent passing of Mr Tanner and the work that he did in the Regulations Review Committee and in this Parliament and also on this piece of legislation to get it before Parliament today. This Legislation Bill is about modernising and improving the law relating to the publication availability reprinting revision and official versions of legislation in one single piece of legislation. This contributes towards our regulatory reform in terms of reducing the need for technical remedial legislation as a consequence of the enhanced reprinting powers. This will also improve our access to law through a programme of revision of old statutes. 
So as this bill has come from the select committee and has taken a little while to get here to have its second reading it is good to see that the Attorney-General has been working closely with Charles Chauvel in the Opposition to ensure that we do get agreement on this piece of legislation moving forward. It has had two reports by the Law Commission and recommendations on how to improve this bit of legislation and I know that the select committee worked very hard on it. I would like to acknowledge the role that it as well has played in getting it here today. 
It does replace the Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act 1920 the Acts and Regulations Publication Act 1989 and also the Regulations (Disallowance) Act 1989. It allows for some key changes within this legislation. There will be a 3-yearly programme of systematic revision of these Acts. It will modernise the legislation by providing for the disallowance of subordinate legislation. It allows for the provision of enabling powers and related processes to certain types of subordinate legislation to incorporate material by reference. It also updates aspects of the Statutes Drafting and Compliance Act 1920. These are all quite— 
Charles Chauvel 
: Compilation. 
KATRINA SHANKS 
: Compilation sorry. These matters are all quite technical if you are not within the law. So I think this is a really good piece of legislation which has been worked on hard to bring it to this House. Obviously it is about clear and accessible law being a fundamental part of the rule of law. People need to be able to understand legislation and courts need to be able to interpret legislation quite easily. 
So this is also about a plain English approach. It has not always been the approach taken in Parliament before and our legislation has been quite complex especially some of our old legislation which is quite hard to read. One real shocker comes from the United Kingdom. It is contained in the Banking Act 1979 Appeals Procedure (England and Wales) Regulations 1979. This is what it says which is an example of how complex legislation can get and it is not plain English at all: “Any reference in these regulations to a regulation is a reference to a regulation contained in these regulations.” I do not know what that means. I have read it about 10 times and I am still not quite sure what it means. But it just shows you how complex we can be when we write as legislators. Really we have got to think about who is reading this legislation and make it as easy as we can for people to pick up a bit of legislation and understand it. 
So this represents a significant step in the process of improving and modernising the New Zealand statute book. I commend this legislation to the House.