Finlayson Christopher: Statutes Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
Finlayson Christopher: Statutes Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
[Volume:642;Page:12108] 
CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (National) 
: 
 National will support the Statutes Amendment Bill (No 2) and will support its referral to the Government Administration Committee so that the matter can be dealt with as quickly as possible. My friend the junior Opposition whip did interject on the Minister Clayton Cosgrove and ask why it was necessary to have two Statutes Amendment bills and I do not think I heard an answer—or if I did it was not in any way adequate. 
I do not think this is a good way of legislating. Indeed I refer members to an excellent paper which has just been published by the Law Commission called  
Presentation of New Zealand Statute Law 
. It is worth reminding the House when we deal with these sorts of bills that there are certain fundamental principles about legislation and it is necessary to emphasise the importance of access to legislation. As the learned authors of this text say: “It is a fundamental precept of any legal system that the law must be accessible to the public. Ignorance of the law is no excuse because everyone is presumed to know the law.” If I can interpolate there one sees that this is indeed the law if one looks at section 25 of the Crimes Act which states: “The fact that an offender is ignorant of the law is not an excuse for any offence that may be committed by him.”—or her. As the authors of this report go on to say: “That presumption would be insupportable if the law were not available and accessible to all. The state also has an interest in the law’s accessibility. It needs the law to be effective and it cannot be if the public do not know what it is.” 
As the Law Commission also says it is notorious that New Zealand’s statute law is untidy and one of the reasons for that is that we have to pass this kind of legislation— and I am prepared to say that we do so all too frequently. Mistakes are made and slip-ups occur when they should not occur and it comes back to that important issue of accessibility to the law given that the citizen is presumed to know the law and that ignorance of the law is no excuse. 
Indeed the Law Commission report goes further to state that where there are substantive amendments to legislation given that New Zealand’s legislation is amended very frequently it should be necessary to revise the legislation. Well these are not substantive amendments. They are as the Minister said in the nature of minor amendments but that does not mean to say that the principle I have outlined about the need for this place to take greater care in legislating and about how those who advise the legislators need to dot the i’s and cross the t’s does not apply. 
With those comments I turn to this bill. There are a number of reasons why one has a Statutes Amendment bill and they have been outlined by the Minister. The first is to correct minor errors that may have crept in and I refer to Parts 5 and 9 of this bill. A second reason will be to deal with minor changes to ensure consistency with other legislation—for example Parts 4 and 12 of this bill. The third reason will be to make minor improvements that were overlooked when the legislation was being dealt with; I refer members to Part 7. Finally some minor changes may be required consequent upon administrative acts—like for example a name change—and I refer members to Parts 8 and 10 as illustrative of that principle. 
With those general comments in mind I will now make a couple of comments about aspects of the bill. I do not intend to comment on Parts 1 and 2 but I will say something about Part 3 because it does illustrate the point I have been making about the need to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and the tendency of this Parliament to be sloppy. Part 3 deals with an amendment to the Crimes Act 1961. It amends section 35(a) of that Act by removing an outdated reference to an offence punishable by death. As the explanatory note states: “Offences punishable by death were repealed by the Abolition of the Death Penalty Act”—an Act that came into force on Boxing Day 1989. I simply cannot understand why it has taken almost 20 years for the draftsman or some official in the Ministry of Justice to come to the conclusion that section 35(a) needed to be amended. Section 35 “Arrest of persons found committing certain crimes” provides in paragraph (a) that any person—not just a constable but any person—may arrest another person where he or she finds that person “committing any offence against this Act that is punishable by death or for which the maximum punishment is not less than 3 years’ imprisonment.” So it is obvious that that provision should have gone many years ago. 
Part 4 amends the Criminal Investigations (Bodily Samples) Act 1995. The changes there are simply to insert a definition of “video record” that is the same as the definition of “video record” in the Evidence Act 2006. Not too much can be made of that. The Evidence Act was the subject of a lot of work last year and that definition should be standard throughout the statute book. 
I will not dwell on Parts 5 and 6 but a couple of changes have been made in Part 7 that I will dwell on for a minute. The changes are amendments to the Historic Places Act and they are examples of amendments that should have been dealt with last year when we dealt with legislation amending the Act. As far as I can recall we were dealing in particular with the constitution of the Historic Places Trust. Clause 26 proposes to insert after section 43 of that Act a provision dealing with extraordinary vacancies to the board and I suggest that this is the sort of thing we should have dealt with last year. 
Parts 8 9 and 10 are of no great moment—nor are the other parts—so I will not take the time of the House in commenting on them. They are in the category of minor changes or fall into one of the categories I mentioned earlier in the course of this speech. 
But I come back to the fact that I do not think it should be necessary to have two Statutes Amendment bills following on from one another as they have here. I agree with the Law Commission that New Zealand’s statute law is untidy. I think that Statutes Amendment bills should be the exception rather than the rule but at times in this place they seem to be the rule. At the end of the day bearing in mind the obligations on all citizens to know the law—because ignorance of the law is no excuse—it is absolutely essential for legislation to be accessible to the public. When minor amendments such as these are introduced by Statutes Amendment bills that important issue of accessibility to the law can be compromised. With those comments in mind I reiterate that National will support this bill through its first reading and going to the select committee but I certainly hope we do not have another Statutes Amendment bill this year.