Simpson Scott: Third Readings —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSimpson Scott: Third Readings —[Sitting date: 24 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2509. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): We are 155 for 3 Mr Deputy Speaker. I understand that members of the public who are listening to this debate on the third and final reading of the legislation arising from the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) this afternoon will probably be only those members of the public who are unable for one reason or another to find themselves in front of a television or listening to an alternative radio station. I notice that the House is full and ready to go for this concluding debate! It is somewhat surprising and interesting that I find myself speaking in this debate as one who has not sat on the Government Administration Committee which considered the bill and its various component parts.I listened intently to earlier debate from members across the House and was particularly interested in the commentary of my colleague Brett Hudson in his attempt to understand the term “omnibus”. It put me in mind—I am not wanting to deviate too much from the bill—of my long-ago legal studies when of course those students who studied legal system and legal practice and all those important matters will well know that the “man on the Clapham omnibus” is of course the standard reference in legal terms for reasonableness. It is a term that goes back to a time when horse-drawn and long vehicles for passenger conveyance were regular. Clapham I am told was a sort of nondescript London suburb where a reasonably well-educated person who might be the hypothetical reasonable man—they were probably less concerned about gender equality in those days—would be a traveller on the Clapham omnibus. So it seems appropriate and somehow relevant that this long vehicle of a bill should in fact reflect the nature of an omnibus being a long vehicle. The component parts of the original bill are indeed long but they are important none the less.One of the things that always fascinates me as a chair of a select committee and as a member of this House is that the level of detail we are required to be conscious of as legislators is sometimes overwhelming. There can be occasions when the sheer size of the legislation we are confronted with is so daunting and detailed in its manner and style that it is very difficult to get every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed. This legislation attempts to resolve some of the issues that occur from time to time when an “i” is not dotted and a “t” is not crossed. I am particularly mindful of the time when I was chairing the Justice and Electoral Committee in the last Parliament and we were considering the Judicature Modernisation Bill a bill of 1200 pages. My heart went out to the Parliamentary Counsel Office staff who were responsible for drafting that legislation. I simply do not know how they were able to keep to terms on the detail of each particular clause and the wording of it. It seems to me to be particularly concerning.The senior whip has just handed me a note Mr Deputy Speaker. We are 162 for 3 after 33 overs and it is the drinks break. So Parliament’s audience will probably increase while the drinks break is on.I want to turn to several of the measures in the legislation. Although they are as we have already heard from numerous speakers across the House not controversial they are none the less important. They raise detail issues that we as legislators do have to consider and from time to time do need to make amendments to. This process is a neat and efficient way of doing that in terms of the efficiency of this Parliament and the efficiency of the way we create law and make provision sometimes for things that some people would think were quite mundane ordinary and unspectacular in their nature. The reality is that of course that is not the case. Often these sometimes apparently small matters are in fact very significant albeit to a small or narrow range of people.I was particularly interested in the select committee’s recommendations regarding legal professional privilege. This is an area that is I think sometimes overlooked by members of the public but it is of course a very important area. So the committee came back and recommended the removal of clauses that would have amended the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act of 1987 and the Official Information Act of 1982 as those amendments would have included a definition of legal privilege from the Evidence Act dating back to 2006. But this definition may have been able to be interpreted to restrict professional privilege to circumstances where proceedings were in train or contemplated and that was simply not the intention of the amendments. So the committee—wisely I think—made a decision on that and that has been included in the amended legislation before us today.There are a number of quite fascinating pieces of statute that are being addressed by the original bill. I want to refer with the goodwill of the House to several of them. I particularly want to refer to the Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Act 1995. Part 4 and clause 15 of the bill will make a change that allows for the Registrar-General to require persons lodging a statutory declaration for a change of name to provide evidence of their identity and other information necessary to process the application. Why is this important? It is actually very important for the person who is seeking to change their name that their information is accepted and taken as pivotal to the application for a change. Until now my understanding is that that may not necessarily have been the case and there may have been a number of unreasonable barriers placed in front of people who wanted to make a change of that nature and who for one reason or another were precluded from doing so.Similarly in Part 8 of the bill in clause 23 there is to be an amendment to the Friendly Societies and Credit Unions Act of 1982 and this is a provision that will repeal the requirement for the Registrar of Friendly Societies and Credit Unions to prepare an annual report. On the face of it you would say it is perfectly reasonable for the Registrar of Friendly Societies and Credit Unions to prepare an annual report and that that report should appropriately and properly be presented to Parliament. However what has happened since the original legislation was passed by this House back in 1982 is that the report that has been required until now to be provided annually is no longer of any value at all because credit unions and insurers are now prudentially supervised by no less a body than the Reserve Bank itself. It is no longer appropriate even though it seemed sensible and appropriate and good legislation at the time way back in 1982 for an annual report to be presented to the House that is no longer current or relevant.Another area and just a final one that I would like to highlight before my time expires is in Part 12 of the bill which relates to the Land Transport Act of 1998 clause 34 where consequential amendments were overlooked when that Act was amended to allow the use of vacutainers in the collection of blood specimens in matters relating to blood-alcohol assessments and blood-alcohol driving offences. The use of vacutainers is relatively new technology and it is one that was simply by omission and non-conspiratorial error just simply omitted from the original bill. This Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) is a good example of how a small but important detail such as that can in fact be relatively easily remedied by this Parliament in an efficient and sensible way. Other speakers who have been participating in this debate have I think neatly and appropriately summed up the whole purpose and common sense of this vehicle for making a wide range of minor but significant and important changes to legislation. I commend the legislation to the House.