van Velden BrookeBROOKE VAN VELDEN (Deputy Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to be a member of the Standing Orders Committee with other members across the House. It's a committee where politics actually goes out of the window and where we examine the House's rules and practices and we look into how laws are made and how the Government is held to account.Before I go on I'd like to take the opportunity to pay my respects to the family colleagues and acquaintances of David McGee the former Clerk of this House and the author of Parliamentary Practice in New Zealand as we recently heard of his passing. I know his work and the work of our current Clerk David Wilson has given many members here including myself great context for the Standing Orders and the Speakers' rulings.I'd like to also thank the many people who submitted to the Standing Orders Committee for this review for 2023. It was very wide ranging and it led to long and fulsome discussions over many months. It was also quite thrilling for some of us who are interested in the Standing Orders to see media even attend some of our submissions process. And I'm sure we'd invite media and other members of this House to also take an increased interest in the Standing Orders.So what are a couple of the small changes that we've made? Firstly we are simplifying a lot of the language within the Standing Orders. I hope that the Speaker and the next Chair will allow a period of understanding as a lot of the calls that end and start debate will be changing. For example that the question be now put" is ending and we will now be saying "that debate on this question now close" and the word "forthwith" may no more be mentioned in this House but instead we'll be saying the word "immediately". So there will be hopefully a grace period of understanding.I note that the sitting hours for many members here—they'll be happy that dinner breaks are now increasing to 7.30 instead of 7 p.m. And we will be having two extra weeks of scrutiny of the Estimates of the Government.One area that I'm happy to see changed was for members' bills: allowing a member's bill that has been stuck halfway through its first reading to continue on before the second and third readings of members' bills take precedence. Because I remember back in the day when we were working on end of life choice Darroch Ball had a member's bill that got stuck for about 18 months I think halfway through a reading and he never really got the opportunity to come back for quite a long time. It is a bit of a pity that that bill can't actually go to select committee because it's still waiting for another bill to come back through the House. So I think that's a very sensible change.Another really sensible change is about entrenchment provisions—that we don't allow the committee of the whole House to pass a clause with an entrenchment provision without that entrenchment provision being seen and scrutinised by a select committee and having submissions open to members of the public. That should never have happened in our recent example in this House.There were a few areas where ACT would have liked to see changes but we didn't have the consensus of the full committee. One was the removal of the title "Leader of the Opposition." I think this title is outdated and I know an increasing number of people and members of the public have believed that David Seymour here is the Leader of the Opposition. I don't believe it is actually right that under MMP where we have multiple parties in Opposition there is an official "Leader of the Opposition" because people vote for different leaders of different political parties and they see those political parties as quite separate. We'd also have been in favour of reducing the number of sitting weeks and increasing the number of hours that we have per sitting week so that we can reduce our emissions—as a party and as a Parliament. We'd also have liked to see the select committees be led by Opposition to increase the scrutiny function of laws as they are going through select committee because the Standing Orders Committee did note that scrutiny is not always optimal when we have scrutiny of Government legislation.But we could go on for a very long time talking about the Standing Orders review but I certainly hope that the Clerk and the Clerk's Office staff have a wonderful rest after this enormous amount of work."