Barclay Todd: Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBarclay Todd: Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee[Sitting date: 19 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2468. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]TODD BARCLAY (National—Clutha-Southland): It is a shame and I did not want to interrupt the member because I was having a really entertaining time listening to the fascinating segments of the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) that she was choosing to canvass. It was great. I particularly enjoyed the aspects around Antarctica. I did not realise that you could not reintroduce Shetland ponies into Antarctica once you had removed them. I did not realise they even existed there in the first place actually but you never know. I have never been there. I am close to Antarctica.Tim Macindoe: You must be the member for Antarctica.TODD BARCLAY: No—well I am pretty close. Actually Sarah Dowie might be. Who is the MP? Do we have an MP for Antarctica?I just wanted to talk a little bit about something not quite as exciting as ponies in Antarctica but about the Official Information Act and about some of the clauses that have been included in the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) with regard to not only the Official Information Act 1982 but also the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act. Having had a little bit of experience in Ministers’ offices working on Official Information Act requests it is interesting to see it from the other side around how sometimes the requests can change a number of times and a slight change in an Official Information Act request can change the scope completely and can also create a whole lot more work than may be initially foreseeable. With some of the more conjoint work streams that the Government is implementing across the social sector as well if you put in an Official Information Act request regarding vulnerable children to the office of the Minister for Social Development you might be getting information collected across a wide range of various Ministers which includes a lot of time and also includes a lot of resource. All that information does not necessarily have to come from head office either. There are a number of regional offices around the country that have information sought from them as well.So that is specifically regarding clause 74 of the bill. This Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) clarifies that if a request for official information is amended after consultation with the requester the revised request is to be treated as a new request for the purposes of the 20-day limit. It also states that the revised request also replaces the original request for that purpose provided that an agency will not receive the benefit from this provision unless it has made a demonstrable effort to clarify the request within 7 working days. I think that is a reasonable request given particularly the administrative tasks that take place upon the receipt of an Official Information Act request. They are usually done within the first couple of days purely from a logging and allocating perspective anyway.So I think making that clearer for the Official Information Act will certainly help all parties involved and will also bring that in line for the local government side of things. I think it is becoming increasingly more important given the nature of activities that local government bodies are undertaking that are being filtered down by central government and it helps to enable them to be more aligned and have a more consistent approach to treating Official Information Act requests.Tim Macindoe: It’s an important consideration.TODD BARCLAY: It was quite an important consideration—it was indeed I say to the senior whip. Thank you for pointing that out. It was fascinating.I also just wanted to touch on another positive aspect of the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) with regard to the Official Information Act and that is clause 73 of the bill where we are clarifying that a partial transfer of an Official Information Act request is permitted. I suppose that is general practice already in a lot of cases and it probably has been treated that way for quite some time but it always helps to tidy up the legislation to ensure that it is up to date and of relevance.I suppose it goes back to the purpose of the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) and statutes amendment bills in general which provide an opportunity for the Government to tidy up smaller pieces of legislation across a wide range of pieces of legislation to bring them up to date and to make them more efficient. The previous member—or it might have been a Green member maybe—was talking about the huge amount of legislation that has been implemented over the last few years and I think that is a sign of a hard-working effective Government. I have to say there was a lot of legislation that needed amending after the 9 previous years of Labour so it has been a busy Government implementing a lot of legislation.Hon Ruth Dyson: Name two bills—name two.TODD BARCLAY: There are a number of pieces of legislation. There are a number of pieces of legislation that are happening particularly in the space where the member actually worked as a Minister. We were talking about the Antarctica Act. We are talking about conservation. It was great during the campaign actually. We hosted you down in Balclutha. It was a very positive influence on the farmers down there.Hon Ruth Dyson: Name one bill that corrected a Labour mistake.TODD BARCLAY: It is all right we will just carry on. Moving on to the Official Information Act which we were talking about before. It is quite fascinating. We need to clarify—