Goldsmith Paul: Standards and Accreditation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoldsmith Paul: Standards and Accreditation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 July 2015. Volume:706;Page:5025. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): An extraordinary contribution from the previous member there Dr David Clark. It has been an interesting debate.I think it might be helpful just to go back and just outline the rationale for the changes proposed by this legislation. If we go back to 2012 the standards and conformance infrastructure review identified that the Standards Council as it was was not financially sustainable over the medium to longer term that the development of standards was not as responsive as it could have been to the needs of firms regulators and consumers and that there was much potential to strengthen the contribution of standards to the Government’s desired outcome in the areas particularly around innovation productivity international trade and safety. So officials considered and the Government was persuaded that three underlining problems were constraining the existing model.They were first tensions existing between the Standards Council’s statutory function of developing standards and promoting standards and standardisation throughout the economy—the difference between being a focused service-delivery organisation and an advocacy organisation. The second area was the distance from Government inherent in a Crown entity model making it difficult for the Standards Council to maintain its relevance visibility and credibility within other parts of the Government. We saw that other parts of the Government were not using the standards to quite the extent that they could have. Also finally there were difficulties of a small stand-alone organisation with a limited client base to achieve the flexibility and the scalability required in a dynamic environment. So those were the things that we were dealing with or concerned about leading into the legislation.We have heard a lot of talk from some members around whether the new proposals would be sufficiently independent and absolutely they will be independent. The New Zealand Standards Executive and the Standards Approval Board are required to act independently under this new legislation when undertaking their functions. The board will indeed make decisions based on transparent criteria outlined in the bill and the balanced standards development committees comprising experts from relevant sectors are required to be used to develop the actual standards. So you still retain the experts from industry to help develop standards but the New Zealand standards system will continue to operate in accordance with international expectations and directives from the International Organization for Standardization and from the International Electrotechnical Commission.So I do not have any doubts at all. If you look around the world there are all sorts of arrangements. Some countries have their standards systems developed within a Government agency and some are stand-alone so I think there is a lot of overblown talk about New Zealand being completely out of sync. There are lots of different ways that this is done and this way the idea is to have the New Zealand Standards Executive operating within the Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment.Will the new arrangements be financially sustainable? Well absolutely. The bill strengthens the current cost-recovery model for standards by providing a fee-setting and cost-recovery framework for the standards and I think that is very important. The bill provides for the full life-cycle costing of standards including the development the approval the maintenance and the access to standards. So the New Zealand Standards Executive and those commissioning the standards can negotiate a balance between upfront development and approval costs and ongoing access and maintenance costs. So that is the core of what this bill is about—trying to establish a more financially sustainable system. On that basis I think it makes absolutely good sense. Thank you.