Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well thank you Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in support of this Secondary Legislation Bill. I think it's an excellent initiative that the Government is passing. You'll notice I didn't say it's an excellent initiative of the Government. It actually originates from the Regulations Review Committee in 2014 and we take some credit for the direction that Governments and Parliament have taken on regulatory reform over the past 15 years because it has been an ACT Party objective over that period to have a regulatory reform Minister and to have an emphasis on improving the quality of lawmaking in regulation.It matters because Government can basically do three types of activity: it can own it can spend and it can regulate the property that it either doesn't own or hasn't taxed off the rest of the country. We have pretty good oversight for Government ownership. We monitor and often get very disappointing results I have to say for the returns on businesses and assets that Government owns. Government is a terrible owner of assets but at least we're fairly good at reporting on it and we know where Government is falling short. We have one of the best regimes in the world for oversight of Government expenditure. Thanks to Ruth Richardson and the Fiscal Responsibility Act now part of the Public Finance Act we have good oversight of how much Government is spending. Some of us would say that it's too much but nevertheless we have good fiscal rules and one of the implications of that is that we have a very strong political bias against Governments that run deficits because of the transparency.So that's ownership and expenditure. But when it comes to Government regulating everyone else's property and making rules about what you and I can do with our property—and that property liberals should remember includes our own body and our minds and thoughts—we have almost no useful oversight or transparency in the impacts and costs of Government regulation. In fact when it comes to the content of this bill secondary regulation we haven't even been able to properly classify what secondary regulations are. They've grown like Topsy into a cornucopia of different instruments that people may be required to follow but can anyone find in one place where the laws actually are? Hopeless. There are so many of them that this Secondary Legislation Bill runs to over 317 pages. That's how many laws have to be amended so we can have consistent regulation and that's not the regulations that are being amended. What this bill does is change the way that Ministers of Government can make regulations under other laws. That's what you've got in 317 pages.That is just an indication of the laws that allow other laws to be made that have to be reformed in order to get regulations made consistently under different laws. If anyone finds that difficult to follow just think about so many people in our community who have to face up to those laws and regulations in their everyday life. When you talk to New Zealanders about what it is they love and what it is they hate about their job or other projects they get involved with they'll almost invariably tell you that they love the purpose of what they're doing but what gets them is the need to constantly follow laws and regulations.You talk to teachers. They'll say I came here because I want to help kids but I spend half my time following instruments and regulations."—often made by the Ministry of Education the Minister or indeed this Parliament. You talk to financial advisers. They'll say "We love what we do but we spend so much of our time trying to get permission to do work prove that we've done work show that we've done work in a way that complies with the rules. We don't actually have the time to do what we really wanted to do which was help people manage their financial assets to get wealthier." Then we come to the construction industry—a very relevant industry when we have a shortage of housing. As we heard at question time the Government doesn't even know how many houses might be built according to their policies. We actually have a situation in this country where one of the major reasons we have a shortage of housing is that people take more time to get permission to build homes than it takes them to be able to build them. That's why we have a shortage of housing at its essence.So this bill is both a partial solution in simplifying what a regulation is and where somebody can find one and that's highly commendable but it's also an insight into how great the problem of excessive laws and regulation is for New Zealand. What this bill tells us is that while it's a good start we need to continue relentlessly improving the way that we make laws as much as the laws themselves. I would put it that what we currently have the regulatory impact statements that are supposed to restrain this kind of lawmaking—regulatory impact statements on templates designed by a certain former under-secretary to the Minister for Regulatory Reform in the 51st Parliament which I won't mention—are very good statements but they're not being followed.This Government in its first hundred days said "We don't have to follow the regulatory impact analysis regime because it's our first 100 days." Well with the trainer wheels on is probably the time it's most important for Governments to do regulatory impact analysis. Ayesha Verrall was asking "Can that be true?" The first 100 days of this Government not this Parliament—2017. The fact is that this Government when it came to the COVID period when high-stakes decisions were being made said "Oh we're spending $52 billion that Parliament's just given us but we don't have to do regulatory impact analysis."You know the problem with the Government's lawmaking is that when it really counts they just exempt themselves from having to follow regulatory impact analysis. One of the most important things that this Parliament could do is pass a regulatory standards bill as a commitment to New Zealanders that instead of letting laws and regulations grow like Topsy we're actually going to follow regulatory impact analysis. That means that when this Parliament makes a law it's going to ask and answer the question "What is this law for? What are the costs and benefits of the law or regulation? Who pays the costs and receives the benefits? Are there other laws or regulations that already solve the same problem? Does this impinge on common law principles? Does it impair people's property rights?" If we started asking those questions we probably wouldn't have made so many laws or regulations in the first place.Here's another thing this Parliament could do to be a more sober lawmaker: it could actually have select committees that by default are majority Opposition members. We saw this on the Epidemic Response Committee. We saw what happens when the chair and the majority of members are from the Opposition to the executive that is proposing Government action or a law. What we saw was harder questioning more witnesses hostile to the Government's direction and more agendas set for the committee that were hostile to the Government's direction and people loved it—not just because they were under house arrest for five weeks and had little else to watch but because it actually made select committees useful and interesting.The final thing we could do if we had a real regulatory standards bill and a real commitment to asking the right questions before making laws and if we had independent select committees that actually scrutinised the executive properly the way the Epidemic Response Committee did is have a four-year term and actually make laws in a sober way with time to duly consider them. There's far too much rushed lawmaking in this place and it leads to this cornucopia of rushed laws and regulations that grow like Topsy and that tie up people's time—asking permission to do work proving work has been done or just not doing things at all because they're not allowed. We could actually have a country where people can get up in the morning and make a difference in their own lives and the lives of those they care about and spend more time making tomorrow better than today and less time following laws that the Government passed wantonly yesterday. That's why this small step is worth commending to the House. Thank you Madam Speaker."