Dunne Peter: Regulatory Responsibility Bill — First Reading 
Dunne Peter: Regulatory Responsibility Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:640;Page:10310] 
Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future) 
: 
 I want to begin by congratulating Mr Hide on bringing the Regulatory Responsibility Bill to the House and to say that we will certainly be supporting it enthusiastically. Only he could make the extraordinary achievement of representing a deregulatory party that brings a bill to the House to regulate responsibility and of getting the support of virtually all parties in the House. It is a considerable achievement. 
But seriously it is an important bill. I feel a little embarrassed standing here speaking in favour of it when I have a bill before the House at the moment that is 2700 pages long—the Income Tax Bill—because I am sure that Mr Hide would say that there is a lot of unnecessary regulation in that. But actually as he well knows it is a rewrite of the legislation in plain language. This bill is important and I hope it receives more than a cursory consideration by a select committee because some of the provisions it contains particularly in clause 6 are relevant not just to the way in which entities of Government behave but to the way in which we make law in this country. 
I want to draw attention to a couple of the provisions in clause 6(3). One of the things we do in this country—and we have been known for it for years—is legislate whenever we are in doubt. We pass a law to make something legal or illegal as the case may be but we are not so rapid when it comes to deciding whether the use-by date of that law has been reached. I welcome the provision in this bill that the regulatory responsibility statement needs to indicate whether there is actually a continuing need for the Act or regulation that is under consideration and if so to identify the purposes and the reasons why such a need is there. That is something we could regularly take on board and apply to all legislation in this country. 
As I say we pass a lot of laws but we do not repeal very much of that legislation subsequently. Nor do we do much in terms of actually assessing what the national interest is when it comes to the passage of legislation. The Minister will get up and make a speech saying why a bill is needed and the select committee will be advised by officials as to why Government policy is being implemented but we do not have a more thorough analysis of the national interest than that. It is ironic that we now have a more thorough national interest analysis for foreign treaties that we enter into than we do for legislation passed by this Parliament. So I think that if some of those principles could be considered as part of the normal Government legislative ebb and flow that would be a positive step forward. It would also be a positive step forward to look at setting out the agency that will actually be responsible for the administration of the Act or the regulation as the case may be. Again we tend to make the assumption that this department or that department will have a general responsibility for administration but in the normal course of events we are not particularly good at sheeting home where that responsibility lies. 
I suspect that beyond the particular provisions of the bill if it survives to make its way into law its real impact will be attitudinal. Its real impact will be on bureaucrats and on Ministers in terms of making them consider whether a law or a regulation is actually required to give effect to a particular policy choice and whether a law or a regulation ought to be retained once that policy choice has been either implemented or exhausted. I suspect that is as much what Mr Hide is driving at as the need to have less legislation passed by Parliament each year. I think he is also looking at whether in fact we need to be going down as we invariably do the legislative route on just about every occasion. 
There are good cases made for legislation at particular times but I think that too often we adopt that as the way forward because it is the safe way forward. That then becomes the bureaucratic way forward and what it then tends to do is create a climate and a culture around it that sees some very good ideas being perverted by the way in which they are interpreted. I will give the House one example. It is one I have some personal interest in because I was responsible for its early preparation—that is the Privacy Act. The notion of protecting people’s privacy is a very good one but I have to say that the bureaucracy that has grown up around it is in many cases farcical irrelevant and far beyond what was intended by the original legislation. I think that had something like this bill been in place at the time that that legislation was passed then first a number of those attitudes would have been curbed and secondly maybe the legislation itself would have been much tighter in the way in which it was drafted. 
I welcome the introduction of this bill but I hope that it does more than just go to a select committee get cursorily considered there then be discharged by the House at a later date. I think this is important. The bill deserves to pass and I congratulate Mr Hide on bringing it to our attention.