Finlayson ChristopherHon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (National): Mr Assistant Speaker can I being by congratulating you on your assumption as an Assistant Speaker. You always made a wonderful contribution to Treaty bills and I hope the fact that you are now in the Chair doesn't prevent your continuing to do that. Can I also congratulate the Minister of Internal Affairs on becoming the Minister. Mr Eagle from Rongotai and I have a very special interest in the internal affairs portfolio because it involves the Chatham Islands and I expect that he and I will be beating a path to the Minister's door on behalf of the Chatham Islanders because there's much to be done over there. I also congratulate the Minister on an excellent speech tonight in contradistinction to the rather confused gibberish that lasted for only seven minutes that we had from her leader this afternoon. It really was a rather peculiar performance even by his standards.I congratulate the Government Administration Committee on dealing with this technical legislation. In a sense this bill is not unlike the Statutes Amendment Bill that we dealt with at length just in the last few minutes but the Government Administration Committee chaired by the now chief Government whip has very carefully gone through this legislation. I don't think in this second reading speech I need traverse unnecessarily much of what the Minister has said in her comprehensive speech. It is a very important piece of legislation. There is unanimity across the House on this issue of ensuring that New Zealanders should be able to interact with the Government digitally so far as is possible and that is why there are quite a number of pieces of legislation that this omnibus bill is going to amend in order to achieve that aim of improved digital interaction.The Minister has spoken in detail and so I won't repeat her about the amendments to allow certain services offered by Births Deaths and Marriages to be completed without the necessity for statutory declarations and also some proposals to remove some restrictions on the use of photographs and those provisions seem to be eminently sensible. I was particularly interested in the amendments that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment has proposed. These relate to requirements for individuals to appear before Government agencies in certain proceedings and also allowing certain types of notices to be provided electronically. I won't go through every amendment to the legislation referred to in Part 3 but simply sir refer the House to Subpart 1 which deals with amendments to the Commerce Act and that provides the flavour of what follows in the other consequential amendments. Section 98 of the Commerce Act provides that the Commerce Commission has the power to require a person to supply information or documents in evidence and there are two amendments that will be made to section 98. The first is that someone can appear before the commission either through an audio link or an audiovisual link. I was surprised when I read that that it hadn't been done years ago because that seems to make a lot of sense.The other point that is of importance relates for example to section 102 of the Commerce Act amended in clause 45 and that is dealing with the issue of emailing people. In other words one can either deliver a notice to the person who is going to be summonsed under section 98 of the Commerce Act or email it to them and then there are some requirements set out in the bill that deal with how the onus of proof on whether the document was emailed and whether it was received is dealt with. So these are all very sensible amendments to bring the legislation into the 21st century.As I said I could go through the other subparts but that would seem to be a waste of time. I was interested to hear in the previous debate the earnest challenges from some of the new MPs on the other side that we should all stand up and fill the Chamber with our eloquence and be sort of like Wagner operas—sounds good but they do go on and on and on. I prefer the approach of cutting to the chase saying what needs to be said in as succinct a manner as possible. That has always been my style and I commend it to members of the Government. Dr Webb would benefit greatly from that because in my experience as a lecturer he tended towards the Wagnerian opera style.The only other point that I would make relates to the issue in Part 4 which is the issue of enabling electronic licenses and electronic voting to be conducted for some reason by fish and game organisations. Look that all again sounds incredibly sensible. Let Fish & Game electronically vote—but not as often as they like; only vote once—in accordance with the requirements of section 26Z of the Conservation Act. I would say this to the Minister of Conservation. One of the things I was interested in when I was Attorney-General was revising statutes to get rid of hideous sections like section 26ZZH" or whatever and indeed we began this little jihad some years ago with bringing together a revision of all the legislation relating to contract and commercial law. I want to place on record and congratulate parliamentary counsel who recently won a supreme plain English award for the way in which that legislation has been revised. I would certainly hope that the Conservation Act could be revised at some stage in the future because that kind of way of setting out sections is rather cumbersome indeed.So they're really the only points I want to make. As I say my preference is not to witter on like Mr Peters did this afternoon in a vague and incoherent manner but to really cut to the chase say what needs to be said and commend the bill to the House."