Dyson RuthHon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I am delighted to speak on the Statutes Amendment Bill but I regret that I have to start my contribution by correcting my colleague. I totally support his Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 191 which inserts into the Statutes Amendment Bill the Airport Authorities Act 1966 alteration. But the bill that he is trying to get off our Order Paper in order to save the taxpayer thousands and thousands of dollars and Parliament hours and hours of time is not about lost luggage.The airline companies themselves deal with lost luggage. If you are flying Air New Zealand and you arrive in Auckland and they say Welcome to Auckland Mr Faafoi. Your bag is in Invercargill." Air New Zealand will get your bag from Invercargill to Auckland for you because that is what they do when they accept you putting in your bag at check in. This bill—Sarah Dowie: They don't lose it from Invercargill.Hon RUTH DYSON: Yes it is.Sarah Dowie: No they don't. They don't lose it at Invercargill.Hon RUTH DYSON: Oh sorry. Sarah Dowie has just offered to collect your bag from Invercargill airport Mr Faafoi and take it to you. She is a generous young woman.Kris Faafoi: What's it doing in Invercargill?Hon RUTH DYSON: Ha! So the member's bill that is going to waste hours of time which should be in this Statutes Amendment Bill is about lost property. If you leave your comb or your book or your pen at the cafe or somewhere else within the airport that is what this deals with. It is not just insignificant because it deals with lost luggage; it is even more insignificant because it does not even deal with lost luggage.I want to go back the point of statutes amendment bills. It is a very unusual process and one that I think as a Parliament we should really value. The point of a statutes amendment bill is to make changes. It is an omnibus bill because there are a whole lot of Acts that are changed but each change to each different Act has to be minor it has to be technical and it has to be non-controversial. That is the point of a statutes amendment bill. Although Parliament takes a lot of effort particularly at Committee stage to ensure that the details of the bill that we are considering are right; often we get it wrong. A statutes amendment bill gives us the opportunity to correct a drafting error or an inconsistency so that the law reads as it was intended. That is the point of a statutes amendment bill and those are the criteria that it has to meet.As members will have noted in our second reading which I will just briefly refer to some of the provisions in the original legislation did not meet those criteria and we peeled them off as separate bills during the debate. So it is now the opportunity for the Committee of the whole House to go through that same deliberation and make sure that the 26 bills that we are proposing to amend in this Statutes Amendment Bill are indeed correct and that we have got it right.We should not confuse this statutes amendment process with statutes repeal which has quite different criteria. A bill recently went through the House that actually repealed an Act. So statutes repeal actually repeals an entire Act presumably because it is redundant but the criteria seem to be looser than for statutes amendment and I think that is something that the Standing Orders Committee might like to look at. I do not think it is appropriate for example for a statutes repeal bill to be used to take away a piece of legislation because the current Government does not like it.We have got a process for that and in my view it should not be a statutes repeal bill. I refer to the Supplementary Order Paper 191 of Kris Faafoi even though he exaggerated the scope of his SOP and of the member's bill that it seeks to replace. I also want to commend the Supplementary Order Paper 207 of David Seymour. That is not a move that I take very often in debates in this House. David Seymour is actually doing exactly the same thing as Kris Faafoi but on a different bill. He is proposing that nonsense legislation—the time-wasting and money-wasting legislation of Matt Doocey—is replaced by a Supplementary Order Paper. I hope that the member has noticed that yet again twice in one week I am commending something that he has done. This is a bit of a risk to both our reputations but the member David Seymour's Supplementary Order Paper would save the taxpayers a lot of money."