Curran Clare: Standards and Accreditation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Standards and Accreditation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 04 November 2014. Volume:701;Page:493. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South):I would like to offer my congratulations to Melissa Lee as the new chair of the Commerce Committee. Let us hope that the standards on the Commerce Committee remain high. I think that Clayton Cosgrove’s contribution in the House today has set the standard for discussion on bills that go before that committee—that august committee where there is much intelligent conversation.Kris Faafoi: August.CLARE CURRAN: August—and I do hope that that continues. I just want to quickly give the House a little bit of a history lesson around the Standards and Accreditation Bill because it appears in the way it has been couched today by the Government that it somehow miraculously came out of a review that happened in 2012 initiated by the Government. Well that is not the case. This is actually legislation that stems back to the previous Labour Government and a review that was undertaken then by the then Minister of Commerce the Hon Lianne Dalziel. If I recall having sat on the Commerce Committee with her for the first 3 years in Opposition she was extremely passionate about standards about the importance of standards and about the lack of action that was happening in this Government around the modernisation of standards and the governance of standards.Thankfully we are now at the point of having gone through a review. That review in 2012 just by the way actually attracted 115 submissions. I can say they were quite intense submissions having had a chance to go through them all and if that is any indication of the importance that this issue is given by the community then I think that what we are going to see in the select committee is a replication of that.I would like to echo my colleague Clayton Cosgrove’s view that pushing this bill through without the proper scrutiny would be a big mistake. The standards underpinning any industry activity in our country need to be standards that are robust. Therefore the body that creates those standards maintains them and keeps a watchful eye on them needs to be a body that has the respect trust integrity and also resources required to ensure that it actually does the job.That brings me to my questions. It pretty much appears that the option that is being pushed by the Government to move the standards body function to within the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment is actually driven by cost cutting—a desire to actually reduce the costs of running a standards body. If that is the case then I have got a problem with that. We are supporting this bill’s referral to a select committee but that will be one of the issues we will be keeping a very close eye on. We will be listening to what the industry says because of those 115 submissions on that review the vast majority were very concerned about moving the standards function to within the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and creating a standards officer or whatever the term being used is—a standards statutory officer role within the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. My question is whether that is adequate. Is that actually going to do the job and is there going to be the strength and the weight behind that function within the ministry to actually maintain that job?These are some of the things the submitters said. They did not think that pushing the function within the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment would achieve the necessary independence. They said that independence could not be achieved under this model that there was the possibility of capture by well-resourced and influential stakeholders that the New Zealand Standards Approval Board could not be fully impartial when both assessing standards and approving standards development organisations to develop standards and that statutory independence is not possible if members of the standards board are appointed by the Government. I think that there has been some taking account of those views in the response by the ministry and in the legislation we see before us but I am not sure that that is enough.The second point is linked to that. It is around cost. Even the regulatory impact statement itself says on its first page: “The advice we have received suggested that overall costs of Standards development can be reduced by moving the function into a larger organisation.” What that suggests and what I fear is that that is the main reason for doing it—that it is actually being driven not by common sense or by wanting to improve the service but by the desire to cut costs. If that is the case and if we are talking about environmental standards and building standards these things are pretty important because they underpin the way that we operate and they underpin the trust we have in our industries in the way they are carried out.The third point that I would like to make—the third issue—is in regard to the amendment of the Copyright Act which is a pretty significant part. It is not covered very greatly in the legislation that is before us or by the words of the Minister today but it is obviously of enough significance to have its own regulatory impact statement produced by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment which I have to say does give me some concern because the proposed new organisation’s home is going to be within the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. So I will put that on the record as a concern in the first place. It would seem to me that the regulatory impact statement could have been produced independently through an audit by Treasury or something in order to actually provide some true independence.An issue that was raised around what is proposed is that the bill is amending section 27 of the Copyright Act 1994 as stated in the explanatory note “to maintain existing copyright protections for standards. This amendment is important to protect intellectual property owned by third parties (including international parties) and … to remove uncertainty in the application of copyright or Crown copyright in New Zealand Standards … as a result of moving the standards development function into a Ministry.”That all sounds on the surface perfectly reasonable. The concerns that were raised by the Standards Council around this potential move were that copyright in standards is a key issue and that discussions have focused on international intellectual property and royalty arrangements and the need to honour obligations and enforcement in copyright. It does appear as if the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment has gone to some lengths to try to work out what those issues are and how they can be addressed and to propose an option that provides copyright protection similar to the current standards and legislative certainty to eliminate risk of standards becoming freely available.My concern though—and it is what I will be raising in the committee and I will be hoping and am pretty sure that there will submitters on this—is whether it is not time that we looked at this a bit differently. Is it not time that we stopped looking at this from within a prism of solely protection and looked at the availability and opening up of copyright and open standards? It was Labour’s policy going into the election to take standards seriously and to take a modern approach to this with the aim of moving towards genuine openness and transparency in Government—which this Government says it is doing but in practice I have got grave concerns it is not—where thoroughly documented open standards are made publicly available at no cost.This is not new. It follows the UK Government’s definition of open standards. I think it is something that we need to have a conversation about in the select committee. If we are to be a truly modern Government and if we are doing a lot of stuff electronically online there are questions about how open these standards should be and we need to go back to some parts of the first-principles discussion around copyright protection.So I think there are some significant issues that we need to put on the table for the select committee. Some of these issues around copyright were raised in the submissions to the review that led to this legislation. I just hope that the Minister and the officials are listening. Thank you.