Franks Stephen: Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) — First Reading 
Franks Stephen: Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) — First Reading 
[Volume:615;Page:11192] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I rise for the ACT party to welcome the introduction of the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4). This omnibus bill contains a whole lot of minor technical tidy-ups and the Minister in charge of the bill has been in touch with each party in order to get its comments on it. There are elements in such a letter that raise the curiosity of some parties or some members who have a particular interest in those elements. Other parts of the bill are not necessarily obvious or the implications of them were not necessarily obvious when the inquiry letter from the Minister was received. So we are pleased that this bill will go to a select committee. The select committee will presumably get a more detailed feel for exactly what is proposed. Sometimes something that appears entirely technical and innocuous on first sight to a person who is not well informed on the detail of a matter suddenly becomes significant when that detail is obtained. There are things in this bill that may be in that category so I hope the select committee will have a close look at it. I will therefore mention those things in this speech as a way of recording them so that when the select committee does report back we would hope there will be a little more explanation of them than now appears in the explanatory note of the bill. 
Those matters include the changes to the Fire Service Act which appear to go further than is usual in a bill like this that contains technical amendments and correction. There seems to be the creation of a new scheme for pre-approved evacuation schemes in buildings. I do not know how many buildings will be relevant buildings for that purpose; it may be that it is a very small number. Maybe the people with such buildings are happy to have to get the national fire commander to approve their evacuation schemes. But I am concerned that that provision should be examined closely by the select committee in case it is yet another one of those so-called fences at the top of a cliff that create a great deal of bureaucratic expense to deal with what is really a reluctance by the authorities to properly pursue people who fail to take precautions for themselves or for others. It may be easier to get the right degree of compliance not by prescribing a process for everyone but by making sure that the few people who do not comply with a reasonable law are properly pursued and punished. So I hope that that provision will have some more explanation than it has now. The explanatory note does not state how significant it is. 
There is a similar question about the fire safety margins under the proposed amendments to the Forest and Rural Fires Act. I think I recall the Minister’s explanation that the amendments are needed to tidy up an anomaly whereby fire safety margins may be created over private property in a way that is unfair. If so ACT is of course pleased to see those amendments go through. But when I look at the wording I have to bear it in mind that the approvals from parties to include such provisions in a Statutes Amendment Bill are usually given on the basis of a brief description—or a description in a letter—of what is intended not the actual words that the bill will contain. So the select committee should take a close look at those amendments to make sure that the fire margin amendment is a technical amendment and is not an unintended or a covert means of affecting the use of land by people who are unfortunate enough to be the neighbours of State land that perhaps has forests or is otherwise a high-fire-risk property. 
There is one provision that is just a minor curiosity. I do not think there is any reason to consider it is hard to understand and I believe that we will support it. But just in case it is an own goal I will mention the amendment to the Geneva Conventions Act which is a funny little tidy-up to remove references to the death sentence. It is explained on the basis that the death penalty was eliminated for all purposes in New Zealand by the Abolition of the Death Penalty Act in 1989. The elimination of something like that for all purposes may not be nearly as permanent as people like to assume. The curious effect of completing the process by taking out the relevant sections of the Geneva Conventions Act may be that if a future Government decided to reinstate the death penalty it could do so in a way that had less protection for the persons sentenced to death than there is at present. In other words the Geneva Conventions Act deals with the death penalty because there are death penalties in many countries and the provisions that are being removed restrict the periods within which people sentenced to death may be executed. It prevents the sentence from being carried out on prisoners of war and protected internees and it could be that in a way this little bureaucratic tidy-up may some day be an own goal for those of us who are concerned that the Geneva Conventions Act should rightly continue to regulate the death penalty. Maybe it is silly to throw those sections of the Act out simply as a symbolic statement by this Government of its abhorrence of the death penalty. The Government should be very careful that its politically correct feel-good moves do not rebound to become own goals. 
The last thing I want to comment on is the amendments to the Trade in Endangered Species Act of 1989. That Act is a very primitive form of conservation. Essentially it states that if there are feral species that may be poached for trade the best way to stop that poaching is to deprive those species of an economic value by making it hard to sell what has been poached. That may have been true in 1989 but today a far better way of making endangered species legislation or protection work would be to give some of those endangered species the kind of commercial value that would encourage people to reproduce them. If species are genuinely endangered the very best thing that could happen to some of them would be that they would have enough commercial value for people to want to breed them—as indeed a couple of Czechs presumably did with the orchids they have just been pinching from our national parks. That is now quite feasible because of advances in genetic technology. I am sorry if it horrifies the Green Party that anything from genetic technology may be helpful but it could allow the protection of feral specimens while identifying DNA-profiled strains of the same species in which it would be perfectly sensible to encourage trade. 
I am sorry that the Government is willing to tidy up the Trade in Endangered Species Act by changing section references inserting omitted words and correcting a spelling error but will not spend the legislative time to actually do something to help protected species by taking advantage of modern technology. In other words the Government should recognise that a DNA profile could now create an endangered species member that should be tradable and we should encourage New Zealanders to profit from that. We should encourage the breeding of those species. Kiwi in particular may well come into that category as perhaps could the orchids that have caused so much trouble to a couple of Czech academics recently. I know that the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 4) is not the place to remedy the foolishness of the Trade in Endangered Species Act but there is an opportunity for the select committee perhaps when it looks at the bill to suggest that this kind of minor tidying-up and tinkering ought to be a trigger for the substantive scheme of the Act to be reviewed.