Curran Clare: Trade (Safeguard Measures) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Trade (Safeguard Measures) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16537. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South):I must commend my colleague David Shearer over there for his politeness on this bill the Trade (Safeguard Measures) Bill because 6 years is exactly right—that is when this bill first came before Parliament. I guess what the passage of this bill through the House shows us is how long a piece of legislation can get stuck in the Parliament. I think this is the third Minister who has had charge of it. It started off with Simon Power it went through John Banks and now we are up to Craig Foss. I would challenge Minister Foss to get up and give us an exposition on what the bill is about and whether he has actually read it. Nothing personal Mr Foss but the fact is that this bill has taken so long to get through the House through all its stages.In fact I was just looking back through the speeches in the Committee stage when this bill was interrupted which was in 2012. I was reading the speech by our former colleague the Hon Lianne Dalziel. The bill was actually introduced by her in the former Labour Government back whenever it was—2008. The bill was actually introduced by her.It is quite a simple bill—it is quite a simple bill. You have got to ask yourself why and what does it take to actually move a bill like this through the House quickly and get it off the Order Paper. We support it. We all support it—well actually I am not sure whether everyone in the House supports it. But it is no real drama. The question really that has to be asked is how this happened. The other question that has to be asked is how much it has cost. What has the cost been not just through the processes of getting the bill through the House—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We are on Part 2.CLARE CURRAN: We are on Part 2 but I think it is a pretty important question given that we are now in 2014. The last Committee stage reading was in 2012. The bill was introduced in 2009—well its first reading was in 2009. It was actually introduced in 2008. I mean seriously. It is a bit of a joke. It is a historical bill. It is a historical bill and actually you have got to wonder whether it is out of date and whether anyone has actually bothered to read it tonight to work out whether it is still relevant.Let us look at what the bill does in Part 2 because that is what we are discussing. It removes the requirement to establish temporary safeguard authorities. They are not very temporary are they if the Government has taken 6 years to remove that. It also enables the existing expertise of get this the Ministry of Economic Development—well that ministry does not even exist any more.I think you have got to ask yourself whether or not this bill is still relevant. In all seriousness I do ask the Minister to comment on that on whether or not the bill has been looked at for relevance tonight and also whether or not anybody has looked at the cost—whether it is in monetary terms or otherwise—of not enacting this bill in a timely manner. Surely if you are putting a bill through the House that actually removes temporary safeguards then you would be thinking that you would have to do that reasonably quickly and that if you do not there would be some impact. So I would be interested to know just what the impact has been of not moving this bill through all of its stages in the House.We are still in the Committee stage on Part 2 of this bill. I have to ask whether we are really going to get to the third reading this year or whether it is going to be another year or two before we actually get through all the phases of this bill. I think it is a good example of just how long it can take for a piece of legislation to get through the House under this Government.