Hipkins ChrisParts 1 to 9 Schedules 1 to 6 and clauses 1 and 2Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Those who have taken the time to read the Legislation Bill—and I suspect there won't be a huge number of members who have done so—will actually know that this is quite a significant piece of legislation but it's one that I don't expect is going to receive a huge amount of scrutiny in the House and I suspect the debate will be relatively short. In effect the Legislation Bill sets out how we make the laws of the country and if you look at the objectives or the purpose of the legislation in clause 3 Purpose of this Act" it states that the legislation "states principles and rules about the interpretation of legislation:". That's a relatively significant thing in the context of what we do. We spend an awful lot of time debating individual enactments and actually it's the Legislation Act that sets out the parameters in which all other laws are made. So it is quite significant although like I said it doesn't seem to engender a lot of excitement amongst members across the House. But what I think is really important about this is—there are two things which I do think are worthy of note. The first is that the bill allows for legislation to be simpler shorter and more consistent. I think one of the things that Parliament has been doing over the last 20 to 30 years is work quite hard to make legislation far more accessible to write things into plain English so that you don't have to be a learned scholar of the law in order to understand what the law says. I think that the provisions in this bill continue down that road and I think that's a very welcome development. But actually the thing that's probably most significant about this bill is the changes it makes around secondary legislation. There is a lot of secondary legislation and that is legislation that isn't subject to the same level of debate and scrutiny that a regular bill going through the House would be subject to and we've seen I think in recent times—again looking back over the last 20 or 30 years—that the Parliament has enabled through provisions in primary legislation for more and more secondary legislation to be created delegating legislation-making power to the executive effectively. And there is a lot less scrutiny of that.So what this bill does among other things is it starts the process of consolidating all of that legislation so that it all becomes publicly available. That might seem bureaucratic but actually if you want people to follow the laws of the land if you want the law to be accessible to be transparent then actually bringing it all together in one place so that one who wishes to follow the law can actually find it is a relatively significant thing. The bill does that over a period of time recognising that that's a significant undertaking. But in the future—again like I said this is not something that I think is going to excite the House at the moment—I hope people will reflect on the fact that it has actually been a significant improvement to the lawmaking process of the country; one that has made the laws of the land much more accessible. I do hope that in time the Parliament—and perhaps through the Standing Orders review we will do this—will consider how we scrutinise secondary legislation.One of the things that has been a bit of an eye-opener to me as a Minister is the extent to which one can govern the country without recourse back to the legislative process at all. And in fact increasingly the laws of the land enable the executive to get on and govern the country without having to come back to Parliament. I'm not convinced that that's always a welcome development. So I think the scrutiny of secondary legislation is something that the House needs to turn its attention to a little bit more in the future. The provisions in this bill will certainly support that process but they in themselves will not be sufficient.So like I said I'm probably one of the one of the few people in the House that's interested in this bill. I do think it is a significant piece of legislation and I would encourage members to pay attention to the lawmaking process as much as they do to the laws that are being created."