Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. I am pleased to take what will be a short call on the Statutes Amendment Bill. Just looking through the bill I looked at Part 7 where there is a change to the Conservation Act. I guess that illustrates the nature of the changes that are in this bill because there are just two clauses there. They amend section 38 of the Conservation Act which itself is in the miscellaneous part of the principal Act and clause 26 is entitled (Hunting etc)" which I am not sure is the best drafting. But what this amendment is doing is ensuring that—in section 38 it is about the issue of hunting permits. You cannot go hunting on public conservation land unless you have a hunting permit issued by the Director-General of Conservation subject to public safety and other requirements. It is an offence under the principal Act to not comply with the conditions of the hunting permit. What the bill does here is ensure that if you are using a trap on conservation land to go hunting you need to have a hunting permit and you need to comply with the Act because previously the principal Act listed nets poison snares and hunting weapons but it did not mention traps. So what the bill does is it inserts "trap" and adds it to the list of killing mechanisms that you need a permit for. I guess I am making a point similar to others' that when the Statutes Amendment Bill is making small technical changes like that then it should also be making the changes that a lot of National Government backbenchers have dreamt up in terms of members bills'—the ones like Nuk Korako's which is the advertising of lost luggage from airports and the one developed by Waitaki MP Jacqui Dean which is typical of the National Government and its attitude to local government telling local government what to do by requiring local authorities to promote a customer focus in the way they provide public services and the way in which they undertake their regulatory responsibilities. Local authorities know about being customer-focused but it highlights the distrust with which this Government treats councils that it sees fit to have a National member require that in a member's bill. All those sorts of bills could be included in the Statutes Amendment Bill instead of clogging up the time that we have on members' days to debate what could be if they were being lodged by Opposition parties quite substantial changes to law and policy.The Statutes Amendment Bill should be dealing with a number of the matters that National backbenchers have in their members' bills because it is really an abuse of the parliamentary process to deny us the time to debate genuine measures that would advance policy and legislation. I guess that is typical of this Government in terms of the way in which it patronises select committees denies the select committees the chance to actually debate substantive changes to legislation has officials debating that with the Ministers instead and then has select committees acting as a mere cipher on controversial legislation—again similarly with these members' bills. But given that Parliament costs around $42000 an hour for the time that we spend debating legislation I will conclude by commending this bill to the House."