Dyson RuthSTATUTES REPEAL BILLIn CommitteeClause 1 TitleHon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): If you look at the name of the bill and the size of it you might think Not much to see here not much of any consequence." but actually this Statutes Repeal Bill which is quite an unusual provision for our Parliament to make takes I think about 132 Acts off the statute book so it repeals about 132 pieces of legislation.Paul Foster-Bell: 137.Hon RUTH DYSON: There are 137. I stand corrected by the deputy chair of our Government Administration Committee. I am relying on his memory which may be a little better than mine. So somewhere between 132 and 137 Acts are repealed by this legislation. All but two were agreed to unanimously by the select committee but two of these provisions were quite contentious—caused us some difficulty.But before I move on to discussing the specifics of those and the concerns that Labour and Greens members had about those two provisions—there may be others that Barry Coates may want to mention but I know those two we were certainly concerned about—I want to just take a step back and ask what the point is of this legislation because actually there was some debate about that as well. There does not seem to be a difficulty if Ministers want to say these Acts are clogging up the statute book—you know "They're causing us a lot of difficulty when we try to find something. Let's have a bit of a spring-clean and a tidy up and let's repeal a whole lot of bills." That is entirely within the mandate of a Minister to do and might be seen as quite a good thing to do by other parties in the Committee. But actually what the bill reports as doing—I think it is in the name of the Hon Steven Joyce so you would never quite know where that might be heading. What the bill says its point is in response to a recommendation by the Productivity Commission to reduce unnecessary legislation. I think that the driver behind this Statutes Repeal Bill and the recommendation of the Productivity Commission are entirely different.I am strongly of the view that if the Productivity Commission was presented with the Statutes Repeal Bill and was asked "Is this what you had in mind when you said that Governments should reduce unnecessary legislation as a key priority?" the Productivity Commission would laugh. I think it would say: "This is not what we had in mind at all. This does not reduce unnecessary legislation. All it does is take off the statute book legislation that is no longer being used." How on earth could this bill increase productivity? What was the driver of the recommendations of the Productivity Commission?I think that Minister Steven Joyce has yet again got it wrong. He has not paid enough attention to the detail of the Productivity Commission's recommendation let alone transferred that into a legislative or policy framework at all. Once again Steven Joyce has missed the mark. He is not attentive to detail; he is attentive only to slogans—he has been getting those right for quite a while until the last few months. But certainly in terms of a grip on legislation he is way off the mark.Can I move now to the two Acts that are repealed by this Statutes Repeal Bill that caused us concern at the select committee and created a lot of debate? One of them is the Medicines Act and the other is the Sentencing Council Act. We got only a few submissions on this bill—not many people considered it of interest—but one of our submissions was of extraordinarily high quality and raised significant constitutional concerns with the Sentencing Council Act repeal. That submission was from Sir Kenneth Keith ONZ KBE QC. I am sure that every member in the House will be familiar with the very fine legal record of Sir Kenneth Keith as a New Zealand judge. He was New Zealand's first appointment to the International Court of Justice in 2005 he served as a judge on both the High Court and Court of Appeal he was a member of the judicial committee of the Privy Council and he was one of the inaugural appointments to the Supreme Court of New Zealand. So he has a very fine legal track record and is very well regarded.Sir Kenneth made his submission—not by any means the first that he has made to a select committee—and he agreed with the point that I have just made about this legislation not being consistent with what the Productivity Commission said and raised that more as a matter of interest than a matter of substance. When it got to the matter of substance in relation to the Sentencing Council Act may I just quote from his submission he said: "the Sentencing Council Act 2007 came into force"—and that is a critical word for people with good legal minds such as the presiding officer—"on 1 November 2007 but was not implemented. Repealing that Act will clarify that the Government will not set up the sentencing council in the future and will allow the courts to retain their ability to develop their own sentencing guideline judgments." That is what the purpose of the bill is. It is quite different from removing from the statute book legislation that no longer has any use and is no longer being implemented.Sir Kenneth was quoting the point of the bill and he said that was misleading. He said "The Sentencing Council Act presents a completely different case from that of the Acts not in force. That Act has been in force as part of the law of New Zealand since 2007. For the past eight years the Executive has suspended its operation" which he described as "an apparent breach of s1 of the Bill of Rights [Act]". He quoted Fitzgerald v Muldoon another case that many members in this House will be familiar with. He said: "That refusal to give effect to a statute in force appears to me to be a serious constitutional matter."Having started with a bill of which all of us thought "Well this has probably not got a lot of contention. These bills are not being used. They are surplus to the requirement of the New Zealand public and certainly the New Zealand Parliament. They could be repealed." we had a man—I would listen to the Hon Chris Finlayson's opinion of course—somebody I would have thought who is regarded as having one of the highest legal minds and the sharpest legal minds in the country saying that this part of this bill was a serious constitutional matter and may be a breach of the Bill of Rights 1688.He went on to say: "I do see the value of repealing those Acts which have not been brought into force. But again to repeat the Sentencing Council Act presents a sharply different case and not just for the constitutional issue I raised above. The Act is in force. Its proposed repeal presents the following question of policy: How is the balance to be struck between promoting greater consistency and predictability in the justice system … through the application of that legislation on the one side and on the other the decisions made by the judges within the sentencing powers conferred on them sometimes helped by guideline judgments given by appeal courts?".So it was actually quite a frustrating situation for us. I think the Government members of the select committee were persuaded actually by Sir Kenneth Keith but for whatever reason they decided to just toe the party line. I think this is the sort of legislation where they could have actually stood up and said no. We—Labour—could have supported the entire remainder of this legislation because although it did not actually achieve anything it certainly did not do any harm. But the medicines legislation with the Government's change in policy with the therapeutic products regime and the sentencing council caused us a lot of concern. Those issues need to be addressed by the Minister. I know that the Minister in the chair the Hon Paul Goldsmith is not the Minister whose name is on the bill but he has got a good mind. Actually I have noticed—and I do not want to do him any harm by praising him—that he takes serious issues seriously when they are raised in the Committee stage of the bill. So I would like him to consider the submission of Sir Kenneth Keith and also the inappropriateness of having the medicines legislation altered in such a way. This is not the appropriate vehicle to use for a deliberate change in Government policy or for the Government deciding not to implement a provision that is in the law and is in force.I guess none of us thought when we started this process that it would be contentious that it might be a matter of debate let alone a matter of such grave concern raised by somebody like Sir Kenneth Keith. I hope the Minister has got the confidence to consider these issues and respond to them."