Simpson Scott; Salesa JennyHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Madam Chair. Look I want to support the comments of my friend and colleague Simeon Brown. I think he has very aptly and correctly given to the committee of the whole House a far better more definitive proposed title for this piece of legislation than the Minister's suggested title. But that's not really the point that I want to make. The point I want to make here relates to commencement and that is that if members of the public and members of the Government look at clause 2 the commencement clause it says in subclause (1) sections 22 to 24 of this Act are deemed to have come into force on 1 July 2021". Now I think today is 16 February 2022 so what we are effectively doing with this piece of legislation is giving effect to retrospectivity of subsidies on vehicles that have already been paid out before the legislation was passed and enacted in this House.Now the Minister is of an age and a generation that won't recall the very key common law case that was taken in relation to a former Prime Minister—Muldoon—who by fiat and declaration back in the early days of his administration—he'd won the landslide election in 1975—he just said "Well look people who are paying into the Labour Party's superannuation scheme can stop making payments because I've decreed it I've issued a fiat I've issued a press statement and that's what they can do." And then there was a very prominent piece of case law that followed from that—Fitzgerald v Muldoon—which ruled in the court in the judicial system of New Zealand that that was actually illegal that it was only the Parliament of New Zealand that can make decisions of the sort that the then Prime Minister Muldoon sought to do.So why is that important to this legislation? Well there are very similar parallels. This is a Government that is increasingly day by day acting like former Prime Minister Muldoon in almost every respect particularly in relation to the economy. But here we have—by governmental fiat by proclamation from the Beehive which is something that this Government likes to do at every possible opportunity. They've just said "Well we're going to put the subsidy component of this legislation into effect well before and in advance of the legislation itself having passed through the Parliament of New Zealand. Now that's just not good policy it's not good legislation and I think it is fundamentally wrong.Why did they want to do it? They wanted to get some runs on the board. So the Minister announced with a degree of fanfare that people who were buying cars—eligible for taxpayer subsidy as a result of this piece of legislation—could start receiving the money the free money the money that was being provided by the State from 1 July but the actual legislation giving effect to that payment has yet to be passed by this Parliament.That is a constitutional abomination really and I would have thought that—notwithstanding their desire as a Government to emulate in every possible way the worst aspects of Robert Muldoon and his administration particularly towards the end of that administration. Here they are adopting exactly the same kind of modus operandi that got him into trouble. It is potentially possible I would imagine with the passing of this legislation that some bright-spark law student somewhere may want to dig out the judgment relating to Fitzgerald v Muldoon and think to themselves "Well actually there are very similar parallels here". And perhaps a case could be brought in the judiciary to test out the legitimacy of this Government actually by fiat by regulation by proclamation saying "Oh well we're going to start paying out before the legislation is passed and we'll worry about the detail we'll worry about the mere passing of legislation in the Parliament of New Zealand—that's a mere detail—CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! The member's time is up."