Genter Julie Anne: Legislation Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Genter Julie Anne: Legislation Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 29 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4954. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. I am very pleased to take a very short call on the second reading of the Legislation Bill which the Green Party will be supporting. We supported it at the first reading to the Regulations Review Committee but unfortunately I did not have the honour or pleasure to be on the committee. In fact I do not believe there was a single Green member on the committee so we were not able to watch its progression through the select committee as closely as we would have liked to. 
What the bill is effectively seeking to do is very reasonable and I think it is very important to be able to have regular revision of legislation and to make sure it is able to be made available to be reprinted to be corrected and above all to be accessible because really one tenet I think of a functioning democracy is that what happens at the level of the elected representatives needs to be transparent clear and accessible to the people of New Zealand. One of the four key charter principles of the Green Party is appropriate decision-making and we really cannot have appropriate decision-making if we do not have transparency and the ability of the general public to understand what legislation means for them and to interpret it quite easily. 
The changes that take effect in the form of the revision bills I think will clearly lay out the purpose of revision. They need to be certified by several experts including the president of the Law Commission and the Chief Parliamentary Counsel. Though it remains for the Standing Orders Committee to decide the specific process we are satisfied that it would be impossible for a revision bill to pass without parliamentary scrutiny. That is really important and is I am happy to say not at all in line with other bills that we have seen pass way too quickly through this House that have given far too much power to the executive in the ability to make regulations and make changes to the law through Orders in Council without parliamentary scrutiny and that is very very problematic. It is a real pattern I think of this Government to try to bypass parliamentary scrutiny and bypass the wider debate that leads to better legislation. I am happy to say that this bill does not do that and that it does not continue in that pattern of taking away power from Parliament from the people and giving it to the executive. 
Keeping legislation modern and accessible is fundamentally important as I have said to our democracy. The law should be something that everyone can engage with. The ability to revise old legislation to make it clear and understandable fulfils the duty that we have to make laws that everyone can comprehend. We also support the bill’s provision that official versions of legislation are able to be made available electronically online. That is extremely useful and I think it encourages us to make better laws having them available to be perused criticised and open to public scrutiny online. This bill is a very small step but the Green Party is very very happy to support it as we do believe that it will shed more light on the activity of Parliament and is a way to make New Zealand more democratic. Thank you.