Sio Hon Aupito WilliamLEGISLATION BILLSecond ReadingHon AUPITO WILLIAM SIO (Associate Minister of Justice) on behalf of the Attorney-General: I move That the Legislation Bill be now read a second time. This bill was introduced in June 2017 and had its first reading in December that year. The bill rewrites and replaces the Legislation Act 2012 to bring together the law relating to legislation and to ensure that New Zealand's law is easy to find use and understand. Under our stewardship this Government has now improved this bill significantly. It will for the first time in New Zealand law identify clearly what is secondary legislation and therefore what this House's oversight is through the disallowance process. It will provide for improved access to that legislation. It'll absorb the Interpretation Act of 1999 with a small number of technical improvements. It will enact legislative disclosure requirements to make key information about the development and content of new legislation available to support legislative scrutiny. It re-enacts with minor changes the current Legislation Act.Secondary legislation is a new term in the Legislation Bill for all legislation made under lawmaking powers delegated by Parliament or under the royal prerogative. There are thousands of these instruments called by different names—for example regulations rules orders or notices. They are made by Ministers officials and a wide variety of agencies within Government and are often technical in nature. Examples include the food standards transport rules and health and safety regulations. The secondary legislation that is drafted by the Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO) is easy to identify and is published on the New Zealand Legislation website along with Acts of Parliament. However secondary legislation is drafted by over a hundred other agencies. It's often not easy to identify as legislation and is published in a wide variety of other places. This impedes Parliament's ability to supervise the exercise of powers it has delegated as well as New Zealanders' ability to identify the law that applies to them.This problem was highlighted by the Regulations Review Committee in 2014. That committee described the difficulties it faces in identifying instruments for it to review known as disallowable instruments. That category includes any instrument that has a significant legislative effect as defined in the Legislation Act of 2012—a test that doesn't always have a black and white legal answer—creating uncertainty about what instruments are legislation and what the House can disallow. This bill resolves the problem by simply defining secondary legislation to be any instrument that is stated by an Act to be secondary legislation. In the near future a bill of amendments a secondary legislation bill will be introduced to add those statements to all the Acts that delegate lawmaking powers. By defining unambiguously what constitutes secondary legislation" in New Zealand this legislation and its companion secondary legislation bill will provide a solid foundation for the first time for the management of secondary legislation and its oversight by this House.The key exception at this stage is that secondary legislation made by local authorities is out of scope of these changes and while there is scope to improve the framework for local authority lawmaking that would be a substantial exercise in its own right. The Government has therefore decided to defer further work in this area to allow reforms of this bill to be delivered within a reasonable time.The Government has released a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) for the Legislation Bill today. The changes made by the SOP will allow the Legislation Bill and its companion bill to come into force very shortly after they are enacted but preserving existing publication requirements for the time being.The sheer scale of the exercise of republishing all existing secondary legislation means that the work will necessarily be staged. The effect of the SOP is to deliver immediately the benefit of defining what is secondary legislation while the PCO and agencies continue to prepare for the changes to their publication systems. When those preparations are complete the provisions of the bill that require agencies to lodge secondary legislation for publication on the legislation website will be brought into force. As mentioned earlier a key pre-condition for implementing the bill is to define which instruments made under Acts of Parliament are secondary legislation. As I also mentioned earlier the PCO is drafting a companion bill the secondary legislation bill that will amend each provision that enables secondary legislation to be made to expressly state that instruments made under it are secondary legislation. This is a substantial job. The aim is to produce the bill in November.Returning to this bill this was referred to the Justice Committee for consideration in December 2017. The committee received some very helpful submissions to the bill from interested groups and individuals. The committee completed a thorough examination of the bill and reported the bill back to the House on 1 June last year. It recommended that the bill be passed with some further improvements and clarifying amendments and I want to thank the committee for that work.Many of the committee's recommended changes are technical in nature to clarify the meaning of the scope of provisions. However some changes are more substantive and are designed to better implement the bill's purpose. The main improvement I would particularly like to highlight is a new list duty that will apply before the duty to publish secondary legislation in full on the New Zealand Legislation website. This is a duty for makers of secondary legislation to provide the PCO with information about all of the secondary legislation made by them including the title administering agency where it's published and any other information required by regulations. From this information a complete list of secondary information will be compiled and published on the New Zealand Legislation website. This will bring forward the achievement of one of the key benefits of the project establishing for the first time what secondary legislation exists. There will be a new regulation-making power to set a date on which any secondary legislation would be revoked if it's not on the list ensuring that the list is definitive. The committee also suggested changes to the way exemptions from the lodgement and publication requirements of the bill will work. The bill as introduced provided for three methods of exemption from full publication. This will be reduced to two reflecting the two cases in which exemption from publication is warranted. The powerful regulations to exempt some secondary legislation from the publication requirements will be removed from the bill. As introduced the bill required the PCO to publish consolidations of any secondary legislation that is amended because it may take some time for agencies to be able to prepare and lodge consolidations of their legislation. The committee recommended that the requirement to publish consolidations be restricted to secondary legislation drafted by the PCO and other cases will be dealt with by regulations. Facing the requirement for consolidation will help speed up the full publication of agency-drafted secondary legislation on the New Zealand Legislation website.The bill also relocates the general rules and principles of the Interpretation Act 1999. This was a Law Commission recommendation. These rules and principles help to communicate the law clearly to people so they can easily use and understand the law. The committee recommended some useful improvements to these interpretation rules. These include clarifying the provision setting out when time periods in legislation start and end. Also in recognition that Parliament may pass a revision bill with any amendments it chooses the committee recommended better reflecting this in the reinterpretation provision about when revision Acts change the affected law. Another key aspect of the bill is the legislator requirement to prepare disclosure statements for Government-initiated legislation. This is done administratively at present but legislation for this bill will contribute to delivering on this Government's commitment to open Government through supporting more informed parliamentary and public scrutiny of legislation. This together with the recognition of PCO's legislative stewardship role will contribute to enhancing the quality of legislation. In conclusion I thank the committee for its careful and thorough work on some important reforms and some very technical legal and transitional issues. I want to acknowledge Minister David Parker for him picking this work that started under the previous Government but by significantly improving it under the stewardship of this Government. Thank you."