Cunliffe DavidHon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): It is a delight to take a call on this important Statutes Amendment Bill which of course Labour will be supporting. This is part of a long tradition of tidy-up and remedial matters. For folks at home what happens with a statutes amendment bill is that on the second reading we go through it and we satisfy ourselves that there is nothing in here that belongs in a more substantive policy - type bill. Now it has come back from the Government Administration Committee we hear any qualifications and we pass it into law. It saves the House time by grouping a whole bunch of issues that frankly really are not supposed to have a great deal of policy content. They are tidy-ups. They are corrections. That brings me then to a couple of little issues. Firstly can I commend the Deputy Leader of the House for the Commodity Levies Act amendments in Part 5 because it has done the right thing and it has got a sunset clause in it. Levies will be in force for no more than 6 years unless extended. That is really good practice and we are pleased to see that in there from a regulations review point of view. However the next part Part 6 inserts new section 16A into the Community Trusts Act and it is over a page long. It is a process for adjusting the areas of a community trust or indeed merging part or the whole of two community trusts. Community trusts were set up to accommodate the funds of a number of the trustee savings banks. Many of them have hundreds of millions of dollars in them. This is actually a pretty substantive provision. I would welcome a Government speaker just explaining to us—perhaps the Attorney-General might want to take a call or the Minister responsible—how Part 6 inserting new section 16A is not a policy matter. And if it is a policy matter what is it doing in a statutes amendment bill? It was with a little chuckle that I looked at Part 9 which is around the Crown Entities Act because you will recall that this House has had some extensive debates on the merits or demerits of the so-called mixed-ownership model where a State-owned enterprise (SOE) or a Crown entity has part of its shareholding hived off to the private sector for the supposed benefit of scrutiny by analysts but of course it is actually done to enrich a whole lot of middle men in the time-honoured tradition of National. Well this is really interesting because clause 40 in Part 9 which substitutes section 110 actually reinforces one of the most important provisions of the old State-owned enterprise model which is the power of Ministers to give a direction to the Crown entity that they must by law follow. This tidy-up actually writes into law more specifically the obligations of those Crown entities which I assume—and the Minister will correct us if this is otherwise—includes former SOEs now governed under the mixed-ownership model. What an incredible U-turn. It is not one that the Opposition is wholly disappointed to see because we rather think the idea of a ministerial direction power is a useful protection for the public interest but I think it shows that the mixed-ownership model went too far got a little too shoddy and now the Government is backtracking which is probably a good thing. When you go to Part 21 Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act 1988" there are a number of reasonably significant amendments in clause 75—section 94A(4A) and (6A) and over the page new section 95A—around the revocation of enduring powers of attorney. Again I think this pushes the envelope of what you would normally see in a statutes amendment bill. They are matters of policy albeit minor. However we are supporting this bill because although one or two of these things come a little bit close to the Standing Orders line we respect the overall intent of the process which is to save the House time and to save the taxpayer money by grouping up a whole lot of fiddly little amendments into one legislative vehicle. That is what brings me to the topic of denuclearisation and specifically the "de-Nuk Korako-isation" of the Order Paper from things like the "Luggage Handling Advertising Bill" which could have fitted in the Statutes Amendment Bill because frankly it is less substantive than any of the amendments that I have just spent the last 5 minutes reading out. It is much more important to give a ministerial direction power to a State-owned enterprise that could affect hundreds of millions of dollars of public investment than it is to change the advertising method for a lost bag. It is far more substantive to merge two community trusts that hold hundreds of millions of dollars in assets than it is to spend the House's time debating whether a local newspaper notice or an email notification for a lost handbag is the most appropriate way to advertise it. So that is what I mean by denuclearisation of the Order Paper. Frankly we have had enough of nuclear testing. The North Koreans have done some of it this week and that is a bad thing and it is a bad thing to see the Government nuclear testing on the House with the Order Paper with this lost baggage bill. What we are really calling for is a case of "Nuk tuck"—we want to tuck the Nuk bill into this bill to save the House time. Or we could send it to Nuku'alofa or perhaps we could follow the old dictum that "A Nuk in time saves nine". It would be really good to save nine times the time that is going to be spent on Nuk Korako's "Blimmin Waste of Space Bill" and put it in the Statutes Amendment Bill. Of course these things do not happen by accident. The highly paid strategists and spin doctors of the National Government spend hours around the bonfires in the Beehive working out new ways to sucker the public of New Zealand into the proposition that the Government knows what it is doing. That is why it is wasting the House's time with trivial inane pieces of members' legislation like Nuk Korako's bill which does not go unnoticed by the perspicacious personnel of the press gallery. I merit one Vernon Small who observes as follows: "Ridicule has been heaped on list MP Nuk Korako's bill to exempt airports from having to advertise the auction of lost property in their local newspaper." He goes on to say why that is ridiculous and concludes with the following: "It was a tactic advocated by National pollster and blogger David Farrar back in 2012 that has come into its own now National has only a slim majority … it allows National to dilute the odds that a measure drafted by the Opposition or minor party MPs"—sorry chaps those are his words. We do not think of you as minor; we think of you as excellent colleagues in the House pursuing as your leader has said the task of changing the Government and that is a good thing. It allows National to dilute the odds of something real coming out of the ballot paper—real like building State houses taking children out of cars into warm dry homes or making sure that our rental accommodation is fitted within the parameters of the Statutes Amendment Bill. I take your guidance as always Mr Assistant Speaker. New Zealanders are not stupid. As much as National's strategists might think you could fool all of the people all of the time New Zealanders are going to prove the age-old dictum next year that although you may be able to fool all of the people some of the time—possibly for about 7 years—in the end sense catches up and enough of the sum of the people cast their ballot for a change of Government rising up in indignation about the trifling with the House that has been vested upon us by Nuk Korako wasting members' time. It is time to "de - Nuk-learise". This Statutes Amendment Bill is a living breathing example of a railway train that is leaving the station that could have had a couple more carriages on it. The carriages that are on it at the moment include things as important as merging community trusts reinforcing the power of Minsters to direct State-owned enterprises important additions to the powers of corrections officers and police in respect of bail and many other drastically important measures that we are tidying up through this legislation. Why oh why could it have not found room in its heart for Nuk Korako's bill? Think of the hours of House time that members could have spent enjoying themselves in other pursuits knowing the country was safe and that the Order Paper had been "de - Nuk-learised". Thank you."