Wood MichaelMICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): It is a pleasure to stand up and speak to the Statutes Repeal Bill. As I read through my papers in preparation for this debate I was reminded of the great year of 1999. As Frank Sinatra sang it was a very good year for some very good reasons. The reason I was reminded of it was that it was my second year at law school and the year that I took public law. Probably as a number of other members of this House might know about the first case that you learn when you study public law is Fitzgerald v Muldoon because it goes right to the heart of what our public law is about; it is such an important and seminal case.Of course that case is raised in the submission of Kenneth Keith one of our most eminent jurors which has been referred to by a number of other speakers albeit perhaps not at the correct point of the debate. What I just wanted to develop off the points made in Mr Keith's submission is that this is actually very very fundamental. This actually goes right back to the 1688 Bill of Rights. We are not just talking about a bit of statute passed by this House; we are talking about something that comes down to us from the Mother of Parliaments from that period in the 17th century when the modern parliamentary system that all current Westminster Parliaments have evolved from was being developed.That Bill of Rights Act says this in section 1: That the pretended power of suspending laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal:". The reason I think it is useful to quote that is that often we think of executive abuse of power or executive overreach as doing something positive something affirmative: going to war without parliamentary authorisation extracting tax from the public without parliamentary authorisation those kinds of things. But what the Bill of Rights makes very clear is that actually Parliament the executive not doing things that it should is also not correct. That is the point that Kenneth Keith makes. It is a point that Fitzgerald v Muldoon makes because in the case of Fitzgerald v Muldoon it was the Prime Minister of the day Robert Muldoon not doing something that had been put in place by this House.That is exactly the case here. That is what Mr Keith says because the Sentencing Council Act was passed by this House in 2007. It went through full parliamentary scrutiny members of the public made submissions speeches were made in this House. It went through three readings. It was put on to the statute book and there it has sat for 9 years but it has not been enacted. We can say well OK it is not something that has done terrible damage to someone but the point is that that bill was enacted with a purpose. As my colleague David Parker started commenting on before and as David Clendon spoke about before that purpose was quite significant; it was about establishing the principle that we should have equality of sentencing across all people in our community and our criminal justice system.Now people may agree or disagree with that and obviously the incoming Government in 2008 disagreed with that; fair cop—that is why we have debates. That is why we put legislation to this Parliament and we hear both sides of it. But that legislation has sat on the books for 9 years and it has not been implemented. Mr Keith is very clear about this. He says: "That refusal to give effect to a statute in force"—this is in paragraph 10 of his submission to the committee—"appears to me to be a serious constitutional matter." It just seems to me that the Government is sweeping that under the rug.I would actually like the Minister in the chair Maggie Barry to answer some questions about this. Is the Government actually going to take up this point—which has been raised by Sir Kenneth Keith OK? We are not talking just about a garden-variety submission; we are talking about something from Sir Kenneth Keith. A question that springs to mind for me is: is there some legal risk in this? Sir Kenneth Keith has said that this is a piece of legislation that should have been enacted. Well if I am someone who has been convicted and sentenced during that period and the Government has not enacted something on the books that it should have have I got some case to come back to that? I do not know the answer to that but I think given the points raised by Sir Kenneth Keith in his submission we should hear from the Government about that.So I support that Supplementary Order Paper 319 which we will no doubt hear more about from David Parker to remove the repeal of the Sentencing Council Act from this legislation. I would urge all members of this Committee who care about due parliamentary process to give serious consideration to that when we move on to the debate later on. Thank you."