Robertson Grant: Statutes Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Robertson Grant: Statutes Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 29 June 2010. Volume:664;Page:12285. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) 
: 
 It is great to have the opportunity to speak freely on the Statutes Amendment Bill which was considered by the Government Administration Committee in a collegial manner some time ago now. [ 
Interruption 
] Well we thought we should just to see how it went. It was certainly an interesting exercise. We did not have a great number of submissions that came to the committee although we did have one or two. 
In this first contribution I want to make a couple of general remarks about Statutes Amendment bills and how they come before the House. I did raise this in my second reading speech but I think it is worth repeating now as we start to go through the bill part by part. Statutes Amendment bills have been around for many years and Mr McGee’s fantastic book tells us that they were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s and again in the early 1990s. But they have been in abeyance for some years. Traditionally they have contained and I am quoting here “non-controversial amendments such as corrections of drafting errors” and the practice has developed that if anyone objects to a clause in the Committee stage then it will be thrown out. 
There has been an assumption that the bills largely deal with corrections that need to be made to update laws where dates get out of synchronisation and omissions of a technical nature. Concerns were raised in the process of this bill that several parts were in fact somewhat more than that and were pushing the boundaries beyond omissions or corrections and moving more into the nature of shifts in policy. They may not be major shifts in policy and they may not be earth-shattering changes that will cause New Zealanders when they wake up and read the newspaper tomorrow morning to wonder why on earth Parliament made them but they are shifts in policy. They are not simply omissions or corrections. I think it is worth our dwelling on that for a time just to make sure that we are clear and aware for future Statutes Amendment bills that given the process for putting them through the House we cannot afford for them to include policy changes at all because they do not undergo the policy development process and the scrutiny that we would expect of policy changes. 
I highlight two examples that the committee dealt with. The first was one that did attract a public submission. It is in Part 9 which is a change to the Conservation Act 1987. The particular change is to extend liability to people who are either the owners or in charge of dogs that attack seriously injure or kill protected wildlife in a controlled dog area or an open dog area. This bill extends liability so that it is an either/or situation—either the owner or the person in charge of the dog. The committee received a submission from a lawyer Graeme Edgeler who is known to many people in the House as somebody who looks closely at the legislation that goes through this Parliament. 
Charles Chauvel 
: Needs to get out more. 
GRANT ROBERTSON 
: Mr Edgeler is indeed somebody who as my colleague noted is very focused on Parliament and perhaps might benefit from being in the wild whether with a dog or not. But in his submission Mr Edgeler stated that he believed that the amendment was not appropriate for inclusion in a Statutes Amendment Bill because it does not merely involve the correction of an error or oversight in the Conservation Act; it involves extending serious criminal liability—up to a year’s imprisonment—to a class of persons whose actions were not previously subject to criminal sanction. The point that Mr Edgeler goes on to make is that it is not that he does not necessarily agree with change but that this process is not one that we would normally see occurring in a Statutes Amendment Bill. 
The Labour Party shared similar concerns that the bill seemed to be extending the scope of the offence rather than correcting an error. The committee discussed it and although we decided that the change was reasonable it was a good one and we could support it we were still concerned that widening offences and creating greater liability is an example of a change that deserves close scrutiny. We can accept the point that is being made here—that the Conservation Act is inconsistent with the National Parks Act—and we can see that the change would not create the potential for people to be charged in two ways because the word “or” is included meaning the owner of the dog or the person in charge of the dog. We understand the technical detail here but it is a change and it is an example of a Statutes Amendment Bill being used to slightly push out the boundaries. We want to put in a note of caution that that is perhaps not where we should be heading with our Statutes Amendment bills. We need to keep them simple and largely technical because in that way they can flow through the House quickly and address the particular technical concerns we have without being bogged down in a policy process. 
The other example that I will mention in that regard is in Part 4 of the Statutes Amendment Bill which changes the Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Act. This is an interesting change because it amends section 9(2) of the Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Act which states the circumstances in which only one parent needs to register somebody’s birth. Currently the Act allows for that to take place where among other things one of the parents is unavailable with the definition of “unavailable” being “dead unknown missing of unsound mind or unable to act by virtue of a medical condition”. The concern was that that is a very narrow definition of being unavailable and if a parent is genuinely unavailable in the ordinary sense of the word—that is he or she is not there—it was not covered by the definition currently in the legislation. 
The change being made in clause 25 will insert into section 9(2) of the Act: “(ba) it is not reasonably practicable to obtain the other parent’s signature because—(i) he or she is overseas; and (ii) he or she cannot be contacted within a period of time that is reasonable in the circumstances;”. 
Once again that is an eminently sensible idea and one that reflects the reality of people’s daily lives. Sometimes people will be unavailable. They will leave the country they will not have a forwarding address and they cannot be contacted. But that is a change in policy in many senses. It is a change that says we are now accepting that the policy will not be that a parent had to be of unsound mind dead or completely missing but just that he or she could not be contacted. It is a sensible change but one that it is necessary and important to debate. The committee did do that and that clause has returned to the House as part of the bill. 
We have a couple of examples here where a Statutes Amendment Bill is extending itself a little beyond what we have traditionally seen as being the role of Statutes Amendment bills. 
The Labour Party will be supporting the inclusion of both of those clauses within this bill but I think it is important to recognise that this kind of change in these kinds of bills is prescribed for a reason: because they are not always open to the level of scrutiny that they would be if they went through the normal policy process with all the consultation with the public that we traditionally associate with policy change. The Government Administration Committee took its responsibilities seriously in this regard. We called for submissions which some people felt was unnecessary but I think those two examples highlight why sometimes it becomes necessary to do that. 
I also note that this bill was a collation of 2 years’ worth of Statutes Amendment bills and that sometimes made it difficult because there were so many clauses. Obviously there were practical reasons for that but I think that having separate bills each year is good because it limits the range of the different clauses and makes them easier to keep up with. 
In closing this call I note that the process of each party being able to object was retained and that was useful. We worked through our differences. It is important that the statutes amendment process continues to allow individual members to object within the Committee of the whole House process and allow parties to be consulted in advance of the bill coming forward. I congratulate the Associate Minister of Justice on having led that process because he led it well but I would highlight those two examples of areas in which I think we are moving to policy changes and away from purely technical changes or rectifying omissions. I think the House needs to bear that in mind for future reference.