Subordinate Legislation Confirmation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSubordinate Legislation Confirmation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 July 2015. Volume:706;Page:5077. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Subordinate Legislation Confirmation BillFirst ReadingHon SIMON BRIDGES (Deputy Leader of the House)on behalf of theLeader of the House: I move That the Subordinate Legislation Confirmation Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Regulations Review Committee to consider the bill. Confirmation and validation bills are routine and technical and come before the House every year to confirm or confirm and validate subordinate legislation through an Act of Parliament. Confirmation to prevent lapse is a requirement of the empowering Acts under which the various orders or regulations have been made. Bills of this kind are not very glamorous but they are important bills none the less.The role played by the House in confirming or validating the various items and the scrutiny provided by the Regulations Review Committee provide a layer of protection in the regulation-making process. Should the House decide to withhold its approval for a particular regulation or order contained in the bill that regulation or order will lapse.Part 1 relates to a total of 22 items of delegated legislation. It confirms 20 items and validates and confirms two items. Part 2 of the bill rationalises the terms and operation of all existing confirmation and validation provisions currently in more than 35 Acts by replacing them with one set of standard provisions in the Legislation Act 2012. Simplifying and standardising the terms and operation of the scattered and unhelpful varying confirmation and validation provisions will benefit all departments that administer Acts containing confirmation and validation provisions. A rationalised process will also make the preparation and enactment of every annual confirming bill a simpler process.Standing Order 325 provides for a streamlined enactment process for confirmation and validation bills. There is no amendment or debate for the first reading and following the bill’s second reading the bill proceeds if no amendment in Committee is required immediately to its third reading with no amendment or debate.Because of the rationalising provisions contained in Part 2 this year’s bill is not eligible for that simplified process. However the bill is structured so that if the Regulations Review Committee so chooses the bill can be divided into the Subordinate Legislation Confirmation and Validation Bill which would be enacted by the end of the year in accordance with the process and time line for confirmation and validation bills.In the legislation confirmable instruments would be progressed when the House considers appropriate. The bill traditionally receives cross-party support. All of the orders and regulations in this year’s bill are of a technical character. The 22 orders or regulations listed in the bill have been made under 10 different Acts and I do not propose to go through those. I do commend this bill to the House.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn):I rise to take a brief call in support of the Subordinate Legislation Confirmation Bill. Labour will be supporting the bill and the Minister’s comments that this is a routine part of the House’s work. I support this bill as chair of the bipartisan Regulations Review Committee and in so doing wish to affirm the role of that committee and of the various processes which the public so seldom see that contribute to the orderly working of this House and our democracy. The Subordinate Legislation Confirmation Bill plays a role in examining regulations and their associated regulation-making powers to confirm or confirm and validate subordinate legislation—in this case in nine Acts that will lapse unless confirmed or confirmed and validated. That is in Part 1 of the bill. It also replaces all existing confirmation provisions in the Legislation Act 2012 with standard provisions and that is in Part 2 of the bill.There is I would note a matter before the Regulations Review Committee that goes to the nomenclature that is being used pursuant to the Legislation Act 2012 of which there is a diverse range to describe different technical categories of instruments such as disallowable and non-disallowable instruments. This bill introduces a new term that is called “confirmable instruments”. I wish just to put on record the fact that the committee is working in a bipartisan way with the Parliamentary Counsel Office and the Attorney-General to undertake a review of this nomenclature with a view to it being standardised and further streamlined and for the development of a mandatory reporting and registration system so that all Crown agencies and entities have a streamlined easy-to-read easy-to-find set of indicators of regulations and other forms of subordinate legislation. That is an ongoing process with which we are engaged and I mention it simply to say that it is one of those other cross-party below-the-radar useful pieces of work that the public so seldom see but they can have some confidence that it is occurring in a reasonable and bipartisan manner.The next steps from here are that the House and the Regulations Review Committee will see this bill off to its various subject select committees. The nine Acts that are referred to within the clauses of this bill will be separately considered by the relevant committees. They will satisfy themselves as to the basis for the confirmations—or confirmation and validations as the case may be—and then they will report back. It would be unusual for a bill that has got this far through the Cabinet process to contain matters that are either controversial or technically problematic. It would be our expectation that we would be able to report back to the House in a timely fashion that these measures should proceed. Labour supports this bill and as I say this is part of the unseen process that goes to ensuring that our democracy is healthy and our legislative processes robust. Thank you very much.ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua):It is a pleasure to be talking on this bill. As a member of the Regulations Review Committee along with my colleague who has just finished speaking David Cunliffe this is an exciting bill. Many of you do not think that but I do actually. And although it is a small bill it is important. It is even unusual in that support for it comes from the cross benches.What the bill really is about is validating and confirming Acts bills and regulations. Such orders need to be considered because whilst they are technical in many parts of them it is absolutely essential that we deal with these issues before they are revoked or simply go out of existence. Therefore what this does is it actually deals with the confirmation and validation of certain Acts.But before just going on and talking a little bit about the bill before us today I want to take the opportunity to talk about the role of the Regulations Review Committee because not many people understand its role. We have five key areas of interest. First of all we have the opportunity to examine all regulations. Secondly we examine regulation-making powers in bills and from time to time we speak to various select committees about that issue. We do investigate complaints about the operation of regulations; in fact we have done some. We conduct inquiries into matters relating to regulations. And fifthly we consider any draft regulations referred to by Ministers of the Crown and we report back on them. [Interruption] I am going to talk about that. Sometimes bills are referred to the Regulations Review Committee and in this instance confirmation and validation bills that might otherwise lapse will seek to be confirmed or validated.I just wanted to explain what confirmation and validation means. In terms of confirmation many statutes empower the making of regulations with immediate effect. However those regulations need to be expressly confirmed by an Act of Parliament within a certain time frame or they cease to have an effect. In general there are four categories of regulations that need to be subject to confirmation: firstly emergency regulations; secondly regulations imposing a financial charge or in the nature of a tax; thirdly regulations amending the empowering Act or another Act; and fourthly regulations dealing with issues of policy under the authority of the broader empowering provision.The second aspect is validation and this goes further than confirmation. Validation can also cure other defects in a piece of legislation or regulation if the manner in which the regulations were made would otherwise have led to the regulations being regarded as invalid. In other words validations can make unlawful regulation lawful. As my colleague previously referred to this piece of legislation actually introduces a new title which is confirmable instruments. This is certainly going to be an issue that the Regulations Review Committee is going to be looking at. It is a new term and confirmable instruments are normally referred to as “DINLIs” as someone just asked about before. DINLIs are in effect delegated instruments that may or may not be legislative instruments.So what we will be doing in the Regulations Review Committee is talking about the use of the term “confirmable instruments” how they apply and whether that is appropriate. There are some very important parts of the bill that deal with that and I cannot wait to have those conversations with my learned colleagues. Therefore on that basis I commend the bill to the House.Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour):I have a rare opportunity to disagree with the last speaker Andrew Bayly. Actually most of these are not disallowable instruments that are not legislative instruments; some of these are regulations. I do agree with the member Andrew Bayly whom I have got a lot of time for that the main categories of these pieces of subordinate legislation needing to be confirmed are things that are emergency regulations or things that impose levies or taxes.If you think about the reason for that it is that things that are generally more important are meant to come before the House. Things that are less important and more administrative are often delegated to arms of Government or indeed sometimes to bodies outside of Government like standard-setting boards and things. They are less important and they are done without scrutiny from Parliament. They have got the ability to put regulations in place. Sometimes things sort of fall a bit in the middle where they are getting close to something that is important enough for you to think “Well that’s the sort of thing that Parliament would do for itself.” but if it is an emergency thing that has to be done immediately rather than through some long legislative process then it is done by way of a regulation which then has to be confirmed within a certain period by Parliament or it lapses.In the case of things that strike levies which sometimes verge on being taxes—given that generally Parliament reserves for itself the right to levy taxes—these things then are done effectively in a way that is conditional upon parliamentary approval through the Subordinate Legislation Confirmation Bill. The most obvious one in this batch that falls if you like into that category is the setting of road-user charges or RUC and those road-user chargers are of course a substitute for excise duty which is a tax. So you can see why Parliament wants to retain some control on the setting of those sorts of levies and that is why they fall within the Subordinate Legislation Confirmation Bill.I am not going to repeat what has been said in respect of some of the non-standard provisions of this Subordinate Legislation Confirmation Bill being the tidying up of the different legislative confirmation rules that apply under different statutes. What has been said on that by other members will suffice. With those comments I support this bill.CHRIS BISHOP (National):As my colleague Andrew Bayly pointed out this is I think the only bill that the Regulations Review Committee considers but it is an important bill. Mr Hipkins has unfortunately left the Chamber and he noted before that—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! You cannot refer to the absence of a member.CHRIS BISHOP: Good point. I acknowledge that Mr Assistant Speaker. Apologies. Mr Hipkins mentioned before that my colleague Andrew Bayly’s speech was so boring. One may say that these issues are somewhat technical but they are actually very important. I think the speech by the Hon David Parker actually elucidated why bills such as these are small and minor and in some ways technical and you may even call them boring but they are really important.The Regulations Review Committee is a real workhorse of the Parliament I have to say. I have to say it is very well chaired by the Hon David Cunliffe and we are very fortunate to have David Parker on the committee. We are really actually making a huge amount of progress across a whole range of issues at the Regulations Review Committee on Thursday mornings. It is very collegial; we work in a very bipartisan fashion. We are also privileged enough to have the Hon Chester Borrows on the committee.I think we are raising the bar in terms of what Regulations Review Committees have done. I acknowledge that the Hon Maryan Street in the previous Parliament did a good job of chairing the committee but we are as my colleague has mentioned taking a look at the vexed issue of disallowable instruments that are not legislative instruments.We are taking a look at the issue of Acts that Parliament has passed but that have not actually been brought into force yet. The House may be surprised to know that there is a whole range of Acts that Parliament has passed some as far ago as the 1980s that are actually not part of our law because they have not been brought into force yet through Order in Council by the Governor-General acting on ministerial instruction. For some of them as my colleague Paul Goldsmith points out there are good reasons but for others there perhaps are not. So we are actually kind of forensically going through that list and thinking well perhaps that situation is not desirable—that Parliament passes an Act that has the support of the majority of Parliament it sits on the statute book or at least provisionally sits on the statue book I guess you could say but it is not actually part of the law of New Zealand. So we are having a look at that.With that minor digression about the important and powerful Regulations Review Committee which I am very pleased to sit on I just want to endorse this bill. Part 2 is the most interesting part of the bill because it rationalises the terms of the existing confirmation validation provisions and as colleagues on the committee have pointed out we will be taking a close look at that. The nomenclature of these provisions is confusing and as Andrew Bayly has pointed out we are taking a good look at that in the select committee. Part 2 of the bill is the one that I think we will be examining most closely. With those brief remarks I commend this bill to the House.Debate interrupted.