Curran ClareHon CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Thank you Mr Speaker. I'd also like to acknowledge Chris Finlayson and the preparation work that was done in bringing this legislation to the House before the last term of Government. It's good when everybody in the House is supporting a practical useful piece of legislation. It is a law about laws not a law about a law because it actually applies to every piece of legislation and all the regulations that go with them. I'll also just like to comment on the Justice Committee which—yes—has been through many iterations in the last two years. But can I assure the House that it's in very good hands and I acknowledge the chair Meka Whaitiri who's sitting next to me. This is a bill that is essentially about making it easier to find and access secondary legislation but it is also ensuring that New Zealand's law is easy to find—it's easy to find it's easy to use and is easy to understand. Goodness in 2019 you'd think we would have worked that out but it's really good that we're doing it now. I've actually read some of the submissions and I want to give a shout-out to the Regulations Review Committee which does an awful lot of pointy-headed work. This is one example of where the value of a select committee that scrutinises legislation and undertakes inquiries is actually on display and one of the reasons I want to make that point quite strongly is that that scrutiny and that role of scrutineers is really important. It would be wise for the Hon Nick Smith to actually pay attention to that when he's recently dismissed the role of the Regulations Review Committee in having parliamentary oversight and scrutiny over the referendum questions before next year's elections. That committee has got a hugely important role and in 2014 when that committee was actually being chaired by Maryan Street it undertook an inquiry into the inability to find regulations which has actually brought this bill to the House today. It is one of the reasons why we have got this bill before us today. So I think it's really important that the Regulations Review Committee gets the recognition that it deserves. My other comment that I wanted to say is that this is really about what needs to happen next. Once we've got legislation and regulations in one place there's another step that's taken and that is to turn it into code because if we do that and we actually do truly become transformational—now some steps have been already taken to get that process under way. I'd like to see it sped up and go forward. The multi-agency service innovation work programme in the last couple of years experimented with machine-consumable legislation and over three weeks a multidisciplinary team rewrote two pieces of legislation—I think one of them was the rates rebate law—into a software code. Now what that means—and this is being looked at internationally—is that we've got the ability to do analysis to identify conflict between pieces of legislation and to look for synergies to support decision-making and application processes. The usefulness of codifying legislation is huge—I hope the Clerk's Office is listening—and this is where we need to go next. I heartily support this legislation. There's a lot of work gone into it. I know that we can do better and we can actually become a world leader in this space.