Dyson Ruth; Borrows ChesterHon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): As the chair of the Government Administration Committee can I say what a pleasure it is to report this bill back to the House. I think a number of members particularly new ones are under the misapprehension that a Statutes Amendment Bill is quite boring.Kris Faafoi: Oh who said that?Hon RUTH DYSON: Well other than you Mr Faafoi. It is my view that it is not boring and it is actually a really important part of the parliamentary process. What it is meant to do is correct errors in drafting. It is not meant to have any policy changes in it. A Statutes Amendment Bill should not have any policy changes it should not have matters that are so big that they actually could impact on the policy intention indirectly and it should be non-controversial. So it might sound like a boring frame but actually it is a really important part of the process and I want to commend all the members of our select committee because I think we have taken this process very seriously.As Minister Chris Finlayson said—interestingly enough he said he endorsed the recommendations of the committee but he did not admit that we have fixed up quite a few mistakes that he had made in his introduction to the bill. But that is all right. We do not need an admission of mistakes from the Minister because it might be a bit much for us to cope with but I am very pleased that the Minister did note that he endorsed the recommendations. We made a couple of changes in the bill to remove the possibility of further corrections being made in the next statutes amendment bill and we took out two parts—that is one of the most important things that I want to mention. Neither the Victims' Orders Against Violent Offenders Act change nor the Charities Act change were considered by the committee to meet the criteria for statutes amendment. My understanding is that the Victims' Orders Against Violent Offenders Act change is going to be introduced separately so that is good. We were not trying to stop the progress of it; we just did not think it was appropriate for these measures to be included in a statutes amendment bill. The other provision the Charities Act changes is actually the subject of consideration by the select committee right at this very time. So we have separated it off and called for submissions and we have put that part of the Statutes Amendment Bill in as a separate measure. As I said at the beginning the point of statutes amendment is to have omnibus provisions that tidy up things that are in other bills that otherwise would not get the priority of the House. They are not considered important enough but they do need to be fixed. They do need to be corrected. In that vein there are two Supplementary Order Papers that I note have been proposed and I want to highly commend them both. The sound of the crash that you just heard is David Seymour fainting in his office as I commend a Supplementary Order Paper in his name. Kris Faafoi has put forward a Supplementary Order Paper that puts a National member's bill that has been drawn out of the ballot into the proper place which is in a statutes amendment bill. It is a disgraceful tactic which I have never seen before in the House to use the legitimate process of the members' ballot to clog up the process and block other members' bills. We get little enough opportunity as it is—actually we get very little opportunity—to put forward our ideas for legislative change because we are in the Opposition and for members of the National Government to put in ridiculous bills and clog up the process just makes a laughing stock of Parliament but actually much to the amusement of the rest of us it has made a laughing stock of them. I have never heard such ridicule as that which has been directed at the National Government backbench for doing such stupid things. So Kris Faafoi's Supplementary Order Paper 191 puts in the Airport Authorities Act 1966 change so that we have replaced the insertion of suitable advertisements in a newspaper circulating in the district where the airport is situated" with "publicising the sale in what the authority considers to be a fair and reasonable manner". It is an entirely appropriate amendment for a statutes amendment bill and I look forward to hearing probably quite a lengthy debate on that very point in the Committee of the whole House. The other amendment is an equally ludicrous National Government backbench member's bill that again has been drawn from the ballot and Supplementary Order Paper 207 is in the name of David Seymour. It is quite a bit longer so I would have to reflect quite carefully on that about whether it would meet the criteria of a statutes amendment bill. But given that despite its length it says pretty well nothing then it probably is appropriate to go in a statutes amendment bill and I certainly support David Seymour's intention not only in putting it in the right place but in adding further ridicule to that which has already been dished out up and down the country at the National Government backbench. As the Minister indicated when he spoke at the start of the second reading we had only five submissions on this bill which probably indicates that most people are satisfied with it. We heard only two submitters. The Ministry of Justice gave us pretty good advice. I am not sure that our advisers agreed right at the start that some of the proposals were unsuitable for a statutes amendment bill but a further part of the statutes amendment process is that a proposal for deletion for example—as we did of two parts of this bill—does not need a majority vote by the select committee. A statutes amendment bill requires only one single member of Parliament to object and it cannot proceed. Notwithstanding that point our committee worked pretty well I think and reached unanimous decisions on all of these provisions. So 28 different pieces of legislation are altered in this. The two changes that we made to correct the corrections if you like were amendments to the Employment Relations Act 2000 and to the Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act 1988. So having got the bill before us to correct mistakes in previous legislation we discovered a couple more and I want to acknowledge the rigorous assistance that the submitters gave us both the ones who just wrote in and the ones who submitted orally. The process that provides the opportunity for these corrections to be made I do not think should be brushed over lightly. I know that a number of members including Ministers who were responsible for various parts of this bill—when I raised concerns about the appropriateness with them directly they basically said it had been signed off by all parties in the House because that is the consideration that these statutes amendment bills go through before they are introduced in the House and passed on to a select committee. I was a bit disappointed at that initial response because as I said we looked at the proposals within this bill with quite a lot of rigour and we genuinely considered that some of them were not appropriate. I remember about 4 years ago we had a statutes amendment bill at our select committee and we said to the officials "We don't think this is an appropriate bit to go into the legislation. Why did you introduce it?" and they said: "Well we didn't think that this would have a high priority in the House. The Statutes Amendment Bill was a train that was passing and we decided to hitch another wagon on to it." They said that literally. They were not trying to cause any grief or harm. They wanted their proposals put before Parliament and they thought they would get away with doing it by putting it into a statutes amendment bill. Well I do not blame them for that. It must be pretty frustrating particularly when you see the National Government backbench rubbish bills clogging up the system—as we have over recent weeks—and here are good public servants who have got genuine policy issues that the Minister wants to progress and they are keen to progress and they cannot find the legislative spot for it. That is what those rubbish National Government backbench bills actually do—they stop good policy being introduced in this House and debated. What is Parliament for if it is not to progress good issues? We do not always agree with initiatives introduced by the Government members but that is their mandate to do that. They should—or perhaps they have got nothing left to do. Perhaps they think they have sorted all the problems. Last week in the House I heard about eight pieces of legislation that could have been introduced—some of them were amendments from the Green Party some of them were amendments from the Labour Party and they were supported by this side of the House—to address the crisis of homelessness that we have in New Zealand. But no let us not do anything in this Parliament to address that crisis. Let us waste the time of the House with rubbish bills like we have had from the National Government backbench. Unfortunately that is the situation—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member but her time has expired."