Chauvel Charles: Legislation Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Chauvel Charles: Legislation Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 16 October 2012. Volume:684;Page:5865. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 I want to make a couple of points about Part 1 of the Legislation Bill. The purposes of the bill are set out in clause 3. The first is that the new Act should bring together the main provisions of New Zealand legislation relating to the drafting publication and reprinting of legislation and the disallowance of instruments. The other purposes include providing for electronic and printed copies of Acts and legislative instruments to be published to provide for official versions of Acts and legislative instruments to be published in electronic form—at the moment the only authoritative form is the written form—and to facilitate the production of up-to-date reprints that are modernised and made consistent with current drafting practice concerning their mode of expression style and format. 
The next purpose is a very significant one because it relates to accessibility. This is a principle that the Regulations Review Committee has stressed the importance of a number of times. The bill expressly sets out to make New Zealand statute law more accessible more readable and easier to understand. It sets out to do so by means of facilitating a progressive and systematic revision of the New Zealand statute book so that statute law is rationalised and arranged more logically inconsistencies and overlaps will be removed obsolete and redundant provisions will be repealed and expression style and format will be more modernised and made more consistent. Another important purpose of the legislation is to enable certain kinds of subordinate legislation to incorporate material by reference in reliance on the statute subject to compliance with consultation and other requirements. 
Members will know that the phenomenon of the incorporation of material by reference into our law is an increasingly common phenomenon particularly as we adopt international legal standards. It is not uncommon for legislation these days to refer for example to Treaty provisions that are extraneous to the statute itself and which are not necessarily even scheduled to the statute as used to be the practice. There is often a reference in the schedule to where the provisions of the Treaty can be found. So it is important that we are clear about how material incorporated by reference into the laws of the land is able to be found by the reader so that the reader may ascertain on any occasion what the law of the land is. 
Finally the legislation will replace an Act of Parliament that is many many years old—the Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act 1920. It will replace it with modern legislation that continues the Parliamentary Counsel Office but as a separate statutory office that facilitates the drafting and publishing of high-quality legislation. Those are all purposes with which the Opposition wishes to associate itself. Listeners to the debate might be wondering why this set of aims is necessary and what is wrong with the status quo. Perhaps what they might like to think about is the way in which statutes are published and accessible at the moment. When they are published Acts of Parliament are ordered chronologically which means that the user looking for an Act on a particular topic is likely to have trouble knowing exactly where to look for it unless they have an index or unless they are searching on the internet for electronic copies of the legislation. 
The law on any one particular topic could be scattered through an entire range of Acts. All of the content of an Act may not be indicated by its title. Provisions about certain matters can be located in all sorts of unlikely or unexpected Acts unless the reader or the searcher has a degree of legal training and knows because of that training where to look. Sometimes it might be quite a surprise to find particular provisions where they are actually located. 
Amending Acts sometimes contain substantive provisions that stand separately from the Act being amended and these can be easily missed when searching for provisions on a particular subject. Obviously some Acts are old drafted in archaic language that is difficult to understand or drafted in a style that because it is not compatible with contemporary usage is just not accessible to the reader today. 
Acts can be amended several times before they are replaced and this can mean that there are inconsistencies in drafting style between the original and the inserted provisions in the same Act. In addition redundant and obsolete provisions can remain in force and although the Parliamentary Counsel Office is responsible for publishing Acts of Parliament it does not have an express function relating to the presentation or accessibility of public Acts. When formulating policy Government departments do not always treat accessibility of statute law as a priority. 
So I am hopeful given the aims of the legislation that those are some of the problems that we currently face in accessing our statute law that will be remedied by this bill. Certainly that was the hope that was expressed by a number of submitters to the Regulations Review Committee and the committee has done its best to ensure that in reporting a draft of the bill back to the House the principles that I have listed will be preserved as we enact the legislation. 
Just a word about the background to the bill. The bill will implement the majority of the legislative recommendations made in two Law Commission reports: first  
Presentation of New Zealand Statute Law 
 dating back to October 2008 NZLC R104 and  
Review of the Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act 1920 
 from May 2009 NZLC R107. Many of the problems that I listed earlier are identified in those reports and the bill is an attempt to address a number of them. 
The Minister has tabled I see a 27-page Supplementary Order Paper and it would be I think helpful to know while we have had a chance to read Supplementary Order Paper 127 at least cursorily whether the Supplementary Order Paper makes any substantive changes to the aims of the legislation and the purposes of the bill. Obviously it would be helpful if that were the case for him to address any of those changes so that the Committee is clear as to what we are doing as far as recommendations that might differ from the reported-back version from the Regulations Review Committee are concerned. 
Perhaps also just a word here about the legislative history. The bill was considered by the Regulations Review Committee of the previous Parliament. The deputy chair from the committee is present in the Chamber. There was I think at one point a proposal from the Attorney-General that this legislation should be combined with the Regulatory Standards Bill and apparently that does explain some of the delay in bringing the legislation back to the House. I think the Attorney-General would agree that it was considered not proper to combine this legislation with the regulatory standards legislation given that the latter bill does not have wide support across the Parliament whereas as my understanding is concerned this Legislation Bill does have that support. So it has been decided to now bring this bill forward in its current form back from the select committee with the reasonably substantial Supplementary Order Paper that I mentioned. If my understanding is correct if the Minister in the chair can confirm that then certainly that is a move and an approach that the Opposition would support. 
This legislation is good technical remedial legislation. It would not have been appropriate to combine it with legislation that advances a particularly partisan agenda from the ACT Party as the Regulatory Standards Bill is intended to do. With those few words of introduction on Part 1 I certainly look forward to and anticipate the rest of the debate with interest.