Simpson Scott; Tolley AnneEXCLUSIVE ECONOMIC ZONE AND CONTINENTAL SHELF (ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS) AMENDMENT BILLFirst ReadingDebate resumed.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. Methinks the Minister who introduced this bill doth protest too much. He was a member of that select committee that I chaired in the last Parliament and at the time he went on and on and on about perceived inadequacies of the bill. The Resource Legislation Amendment Bill was the largest bill considered by the then Local Government and Environment Committee in the last Parliament and it was a very detailed bill. It ran to some 700 clauses it ran to over 250 pages and as the Minister said the departmental report ran to about 450 pages. We heard submissions from interested parties from all around the country. Much of it was very detailed much of it very technical and if the Minister who was so critical in introducing this bill was so clever and so smart as he likes to be—usually the smartest man in the room is how he likes to define himself—why didn't he pick it up? Why didn't he and his smart colleagues pick it up? Well the simple answer is that it was a minor drafting error in a large complicated and technical bill.Really when the Minister introducing the bill criticises this legislation and the need for a slight amendment really what he is doing is criticising the very hard and dedicated professional work of the Parliamentary Counsel Office who did on that bill an extraordinary job—an absolutely extraordinary job. How those folk manage to do the work that they do on such long and complicated pieces of legislation always amazes me. They do a great job on behalf of this Parliament and on behalf of the people of New Zealand. To effectively criticise them in the way that the Minister has I find reprehensible and appalling.This is a very minor technical piece of amendment legislation and indeed actually it really doesn't need to be a bill in its own right. This is something that normally would be amended by way of a statutes amendment bill and there is opportunity for the new Government to do that. But so bereft are they of their legislative agenda and their legislative programme that they appear to be using this very minor technical administrative amendment to correct a mistake—a mistake that was a drafting error: a simple drafting error in a large bill. We know it was a simple drafting error simply because the Cabinet minute indicates that the ministerial policy was set correctly and right and it followed the principle that is well established in the principal Act: that the user pays. So the Cabinet minute—and there were some 400 Cabinet minutes relating to this bill—clearly indicates as it does in the impact summary that has been provided by the Ministry for the Environment (MFE) that the error relates to cost recovery provisions for boards of inquiry appointed under the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act 2012 and that this has resulted in a misalignment between what Cabinet intended when it approved proposals to align the decision making under the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act with the Resource Management Act. So it's a simple matter.Then that asks and begs the question as to why the Government is seeking to use the time—the valuable time—of Parliament and a select committee process to make an amendment of this sort through a full legislative process. Really all it can be is one of two options. The first option is probably that they want to flesh out and fill out somehow an incredibly thin legislative agenda to keep the House busy in some way over the next few months while they find a way to bring effect to their grandiose promises and slogans of their election campaigning to policy fruition. They're all finding that an awful lot more difficult than they first imagined. The process of turning slogans into policy action is incredibly difficult as the new Government is finding out. So that's one option that they have in terms of bringing this legislation to the House.The second one is rather more cynical and I suspect may have something to do with their real agenda. That is that they propose to use this very simple technical amendment legislation to act as some kind of Trojan Horse for bringing to the House some kind of Supplementary Order Paper that will fulfil a wider agenda than we are being told about today. Now I would hope that that's not the case because this is a Government that campaigned on openness and transparency. They haven't delivered on that of course and only six months into it this has been one of the most closeted and deeply hidden Governments that we've had in the history of our Parliament. So we know to be suspicious—we know to be concerned and worried about what they want to do.If we come back to this bill it's a very simple matter. There were five submissions made when MFE went out for discussion with it. All five came back and said that they supported it. So I do wonder what the motive of the Government is in bringing this to the House. We do know that there does need to be a correction and we accept it on this side—it was a technical error and it does need to be corrected. We argue that this is not the best way to do it that this is not the most efficient or effective way to do it but we will support this bill. What's more we will support the Government's intention to bring it quickly to resolution so that the error can be corrected and so that the taxpayer is not going to be put at expense unnecessarily due to a very minor drafting error. It will be probably during the course of this administration—no matter how short it might be—that they will probably bring legislation to the House that does need amendment at some stage too. So there will be a lot of that yet to come in this Government's short tenure I'm sure.To sum up and because we don't want to extend it any longer than is necessary this is a minor technical administrative correction of a drafting error to an incredibly long detailed and complicated principle Act that had many moving parts. On this side of the House we support the bill and I commend it to the House.I seek leave that at the conclusion of first reading the bill proceeds forthwith through all remaining stages without debate and on one vote.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Leave is sought for that. Is there any objection? There is objection.