Chauvel Charles: Corrections Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Chauvel Charles: Corrections Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 13 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:7858. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 New Part 3 of the Corrections Amendment Bill is a new part. It is a very small part and it is introduced in order to make amendments to the Smoke-free Environments Act that are consequential on the other amendments in Minister Anne Tolley’s Supplementary Order Paper 171 that the Committee has just agreed to. When we deal with this new part we need to understand that what we are doing is repealing in the Smoke-free Environments Act the definition of “prison” and also changing the definition of “workplace” because of the exclusions that we have just agreed to as a Committee. What I want to do—I hope with the indulgence of the Committee—is just ask the Minister to consider the way in which those previous amendments have been put together. I think from her discussion with me and on a reading of the legislation the debate has not been entirely fair to her. I think she has tried to get the officials to come up with a solution that does not involve retrospectivity—or at least that limits the extent to which retrospective legislation is to be applied in this situation. I think I am right and the Minister is nodding. 
Accepting that she has sought to try to fix up the mess in an as constitutionally appropriate a way as she can I still wonder whether the wording of the legislation is as good as it could be. I said before that I acknowledge that the Minister had consulted me about it and I put that on record again. This debate is the first opportunity I have had to respond and I am trying to do that in good faith. I said before that I was concerned that the mechanism that the substantive legislation uses is to restore the legality of the ban; to declare the regulations and the rules to be treated as if they are part of the Act from the date of the tabling of the Supplementary Order Paper. The way that the Minister is attempting to protect the Crown’s liability is by the provision in the enactment that no proceedings may be brought against the Crown questioning the validity of those rules and regulations.  
 Well I expressed some concerns about that provision earlier and it has just occurred to me that there is another category of proceeding that we might not be dealing with effectively through this legislation. I wonder whether the Minister would consider this situation. Presumably under the ban that was implemented administratively for want of a better way to describe it there were situations where a prisoner was subject to disciplinary proceedings because he or she possessed tobacco which was declared to be contraband and was found to possess it and was then subject to as I say a disciplinary procedure. I wonder what the position would be under this amendment if a prisoner now took proceedings to question the validity of the outcome of that sort of disciplinary proceeding because it seems to me that they would not by those proceedings themselves necessarily be questioning the validity of the rules or regulations; they would be questioning the validity of a penalty imposed on them by legislation or rules that have subsequently been found to be ineffective. So questioning the disciplinary outcome would not necessarily be questioning the validity of the rules and regulations or at least not only questioning the validity of the rules and regulations. I am genuinely keen to see whether the Minister would confer with the officials and perhaps provide some comfort to the Committee on that point. 
Perhaps while that is being done they might want to consider the other issues that were raised earlier—for example a complaint to the Regulations Review Committee. Would that be a proceeding or would it be something else and should we be concerned about that? And what about independent proceedings based on claims under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act for damages or judicial review? So if the Minister would consider those issues I think it would be very helpful.