Dalziel Lianne: Regulatory Reform Bill Regulatory Reform (Repeals) Bill — Second Readings 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Regulatory Reform Bill Regulatory Reform (Repeals) Bill — Second Readings 
[Sitting date: 20 March 2012. Volume:678;Page:1136. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I am happy to rise and speak to the second readings of the Regulatory Reform Bill in conjunction with the Regulatory Reform (Repeals) Bill. I thought it was interesting that the Minister for Regulatory Reform commented that in fact it was the Business Committee that had agreed to the cognate bill process as if it were something that had been his jolly good idea. But I would like to refer to the commentary from the Commerce Committee and share this part of it with you. It says: “We recommend that Standing Orders be amended to allow more efficient and quicker progress of legislation through the House. 
We also recommend that the Regulatory Reform Bill and Regulatory Reform (Repeals) Bill be treated as cognate bills for their second and third readings and that in respect of the Regulatory Reform (Repeals) Bill the committee of the whole House stage be dispensed with.” 
I was the chair of the select committee that put forward that proposal. My deputy chair Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga is in the House this evening and I hope he is going to take a call and back me up on this. 
Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga 
: Hurry up. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: No I have got quite a lot to say actually. Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga was my deputy chair at the time and I know that he will back me up on that because we were actually quite disappointed with the advice that we received as to why these two bills had been introduced to the House as two separate bills with two separate first readings. The way that we could see things proceeding was their coming back to the House and our then dealing with them as two separate bills again. There would have been a lot of wasted time. It almost felt as if Mr Rodney Hide knew that he was not going to be returning to this place and had to have two speeches in those dying days of the previous Government. 
But I just want to make the point about why we were disappointed that the two bills were not introduced under the same Standing Order. It does actually back up the point that my colleague Clayton Cosgrove made about the repeals bill being a complete and utter waste of time. I mean it does not do anything that does not already not happen under the existing law because all of the legislation that it repeals has been repealed or is spent because it has been replaced. I do not even know whether people realise what is being repealed in the Regulatory Reform (Repeals) Bill. I thought I would share just a couple of them. How about this. Do you remember the Economic Stabilisation Act? Well this bill repeals the Economic Stabilisation Act Repeal Act 1987. Do you remember business development boards? Do you remember those? Do you remember who got rid of them? Max Bradford—remember that? Yep well guess what the Government is repealing here? It is repealing the Business Development Boards Act Repeal Act. So the bill repeals all of these pieces of legislation that simply do not exist; therefore to suggest that it is adding any particular value is not correct. 
But it does come back to this point of why the two bills were not introduced as one bill. The advice that had been given to the Minister for Regulatory Reform at the time—and the select committee to be frank did not agree with this advice but this is what the Minister had been told—was that because the Regulatory Reform Bill aimed to reduce compliance costs and the regulatory burden on business the bill was introduced under Standing Order 259(a) which allowed the introduction of an omnibus bill to amend more than one Act if the amendments deal with an interrelated topic that can be regarded as implementing a single broad policy. The Regulatory Reform (Repeals) Bill on the other hand would repeal 31 Acts that no longer have any effect or are out of date which means that they did not fit within the context of reducing compliance costs or the regulatory burden on business. That was why they could not be introduced as a single piece of legislation. Well I think that is a nonsense. If that is how the Standing Orders are being interpreted then I think the solution is that the Standing Orders do need to change. So I am pleased that we were able to recommend a sensible way forward: for the two pieces of legislation to be dealt with as cognate bills for the remaining stages. 
One thing I do want to say to the Minister for Regulatory Reform is that just because the portfolio the Minister has is “Regulatory Reform” was no reason to change the name of this type of bill. My colleague Clayton Cosgrove pointed out that when we were in Government as part of the Quality Regulation Review process we decided that there had to be a mechanism for amending multiple statutes that did not fit within the Statutes Amendment Bill criteria which are very strict. There has to be total agreement and nothing controversial—nothing even slightly controversial—in the context of a Statutes Amendment Bill. But we needed something that gradually made improvements to the various regulatory frameworks that exist. That is not a reform process; it is a gradual improvement process. That is why we called the bill that we first introduced under this provision the Regulatory Improvement Bill. I think Rodney Hide when he was the Minister for Regulatory Reform decided that anything in his name should be called a regulatory reform bill but it is a nonsense to suggest that this repeals bill is a reform. We have heard from the Hon Clayton Cosgrove a very good reason why you would not describe this bill as representing any form of regulatory reform in the true sense of that word. 
The whole idea of making incremental improvements to regulatory frameworks within a single bill is actually a very positive one and it is one that was promoted from this side of the House. That is why I find really unfortunate what this Minister for Regulatory Reform is saying. I remember his welcoming me to this House back in 1990 by telling me to get out from under the rock that I had crawled under or words to similar effect and now I feel equally hurt at the suggestion that we did nothing to improve the regulatory framework for business because in fact we focused an enormous amount of attention on getting that framework right and this process was one of the outcomes of that Quality Regulation Review. It was called the Regulatory Improvement Bill because it was designed to make incremental improvements to regulatory frameworks. 
I think the Minister—and it was not this Minister; it was not John Banks who discovered this problem; it was his predecessor Rodney Hide—discovered exactly the same problem that I discovered which is that it is very hard to wrench these particular measures out of their individual departments and bring them into an omnibus bill. I cannot emphasise to this House enough how important it is to actually send the message out to the departments to let them go. Let them go bring them to the Minister for Regulatory Reform and enable these pieces of legislation to be more substantive than this. I mean this legislation is pretty much on a par with the first Regulatory Improvement Bill which I introduced as Minister and I think we could do better than this in the future. But in order to get that level of change there has to be total agreement across Cabinet that an individual— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair. 
Debate interrupted.