McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Speaker. Firstly—because I'm sure it's the first time I've had the opportunity to speak in this House since you've been elevated to the Throne—I wanted to congratulate you on that. And I will say I want to hope you're getting on well with your blue pen; I have a red one and I hope you'll be completely neutral when it comes to the speech I'm about to make.I wanted to start tonight with a few comments about Glen Bennett's speech because I didn't think there was a word he said that I can't agree with interestingly. Because what he talked about—and what he meant to talk about—really related to the fact that we need in this Parliament to create stuff that people can understand. And there's two challenges with that and Glen raised both of them.One is the fact that in our education system—or somewhere in our system—we are letting people down. So consequently through our electorate offices we've all seen a large number of the very people that Glen Bennett was talking about who come into our office who you don't know whether they can read or write or not and who often can't. So when you get them to fill out a consent form to get you to go and see Minister Little and ask him a couple of questions you don't know whether you need to fill it out for them or they can fill it out themselves. And that's a serious challenge for us.That though I don't think really relates to this bill. I think the issue that I have with this bill is not that it's not a good principle; I think everybody needs to be able to understand what we're trying to tell them and one of the challenges we have in politics of course is that we don't get our message out there very clearly. So from that perspective I think Glen Bennett was absolutely right. A lot of what we need to get people to understand we need to put it in language that they can understand.I think our argument with this bill is that there probably was a different way of doing that. But having said that I want to get on and talk about what I thought was an extraordinary job that Rachel Boyack did of shepherding this bill through the select committee. She didn't have a lot of help from the other side of the House but none the less she did an awful lot of work—a lot of work. I've never seen I don't think in my time—other than perhaps with the euthanasia bill or one or two of those big ones—a member who has done as much work as she did to get this bill into some sort of order to come back to the House and I'll talk about some of those issues later.So I think that Rachel Boyack did a very good job and irrespective of whether you agree with the bill or not—as I think Glen Bennett again said—this is a members' day and members can do what they like in this place within reason provided the Speaker lets them and if they can get those bills through the House that's their prerogative and good luck to them.So I think from that perspective we've got to respect the fact that members bring things to the House in good faith. I think ironically this bill was in the name of Michael Wood at one stage before. And it's quite interesting that he's putting the Fair Pay Agreements Bill through the House at the moment. This bill of course will create quite a few more people that might be eligible for a fair pay agreement. But none the less that's how it will work. You know you could end up with 40 or 50 of them in this thing that would qualify of course for a fair pay agreement.But you know I think it is interesting that some of these bills sit on the ballot for years—for a long long time—they come out and they might not be relevant when they come out of the ballot. But Rachel did do a lot of work to make sure that she got this bill into some sort of I guess order that will no doubt pass tonight.The other interesting factor about this bill is that there's a number of definitions in it that I think are really quite interesting. We had to almost go to the point of defining plain language". Now that is extraordinarily complicated.Again if I go back to Glen Bennett's speech plain language to you and plain language to me—being Irish and Scottish—will be different. Those sort of things are different for different people. So to get a standard for the commissioner—whose job it is to actively set the standard in this bill—is going to be very very difficult and very complicated. So I don't think it's an easy thing to do.I go back to Glen Bennett again because he spent quite a bit of time talking about lawyers. Well I've had a great deal of difficulty in my life understanding what lawyers are talking about. And of course they write almost every piece of legislation that comes and goes from this House. So really that's the profession we should be getting at with respect to trying to create what this bill terms as "plain language" which I'd term perhaps as more something that everyone can understand. Because in fact we need to create that environment.The other interesting thing about this bill is it doesn't deal with any other languages. Of course in New Zealand we have two other official languages and numerous—as we've shown in the Parliament this week with the number of different prayers we've had—other languages used frequently in New Zealand. All of this bill relates effectively to the English language and the way it's written. Because of course most of the other languages that evolve and are used in New Zealand come from the written English language. That's just how you translate them that'll be the interesting piece.So the bill had the job of first of all defining "plain language". But then it had to define a "relevant document". Because effectively this bill applies to what's termed "relevant documents" which are documents from reporting agencies public entities and Crown agencies basically. So those are the only people affected by this bill. This bill doesn't spread its wings right across New Zealand; it spreads its wings primarily through the Government agencies and the Crown agencies associated with them. But none the less that does create quite a lot of extra jobs. And depending on how they interpret the bill—and of course that's the challenge we have in New Zealand if you go right back to the Resource Management Act when it was first implemented it's the interpretation of the Act that's caused the problem not the Act itself at the time. So a lot of this happens through this House where we put a bill—in good faith I guess—in place. The interpretation of it then hugely complicates it and we end up with something quite different than we anticipated might happen in the course of that bill going through the House. I think from that perspective the commentary that goes with the bill is hugely important to getting a result at the other end.One of the other things we do—and it's come up in the course of a select committee discussion today—is we set a bill in place and we leave it to the ministries or the people behind the wall to set the regulations. And then we've got no idea when we've passed the bill what those regulations are going to look like. In my view that's something that really needs to change in our lawmaking processes. Because people submit in good faith but they submit in good faith not knowing what's going to come out the other end.This bill itself had quite a number of submissions in favour of it; it had a few submissions equally as strongly opposed to it. But the submissions that were in favour of it were really in favour of I guess writing things in a sense as Glen Bennett said that people could understand—didn't necessarily need a police force to I don't think enforce that. I think it just needed an acceptance amongst our agencies that they should write things and put things in a manner that—again to quote Glen Bennett; he's not a lawyer he's just an average person—an average person could understand and we don't always achieve that.The other things we defined in this bill were effectively the job of the commissioner. And that again is quite a complicated one because we tried to define what the commissioner needed to do as he set what he interpreted—or she interpreted—as "plain language". Quite a complicated issue. So it's really quite interesting just defining the issues in this bill.Then the reporting process is also quite interesting because the reporting agency must report annually to the commissioner on how the agency is complying with the bill. The commissioner must then report to the Minister who in turn reports to the House. So it's actually not as simple a process as people might believe it is.So the bill has created a whole lot of reporting requirements for ministries and Crown agencies that will inevitably cost money and I think that's the issue that we take with the bill primarily: not the fact that we don't want things to be written in plain language that everyone can understand not the fact that we don't want to have a system that makes life easier for all of those people but the fact this is quite a complicated way of going about what probably could have been achieved in another way.The other irony of this bill is that the Act does not comply a legal right or impose legal obligation on any person that's enforceable in a court of law. So if one of our ministries for example decide they're not going to do it I don't really think there's any way of enforcing it. So it effectively becomes a goodwill issue and I think I've never seen that before in legislation—it might well be there but I don't think I've ever seen it before. It's a bit of irony in the fact that it's virtually unenforceable certainly unenforceable from a court of law perspective.So that pretty much covers our position on it. We did submit a different view on the bill for most of the reasons I outlined in my speech. But I have to reiterate the fact that we're not all opposed to plain language in our written documents that we use. I'd encourage it in fact.Also as I'll say again thank you to the select committee that put this through but also thank you to Rachel Boyack—whether we agree with the bill or not—for the work she did to get to where she got to because she did do a lot of work on it. So thank you Mr Speaker. Thank you for letting my red pen go. See you later."