Mapp Wayne: Civil Aviation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Mapp Wayne: Civil Aviation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:615;Page:11453] 
Dr WAYNE MAPP (National—North Shore) 
: 
 It is intriguing is it not that we have this rather odd situation of debating the parts and then going back to clause 1 the title? I must confess I am not sure whether that is one of the wisest of all possible amendments to the Standing Orders because generally speaking it is better to have the beginning at the beginning and the end at the end—not the other way round. Maybe that is an issue the Standing Orders Committee might revisit. 
The bill is called the Civil Aviation Amendment Bill and one of the problems with titles like that is it does not describe what is really happening in the bill. As has been indicated in the preceding debate we are really presiding over quite a major change to our legislation—in particular the establishment of the single aviation market. So I suggest to the Minister that in future rather than simply calling this bill the Civil Aviation Amendment Bill it would be more appropriate to call it the “Civil Aviation (Single Trans-Tasman Market) Amendment Bill”. 
I am not suggesting that we need to put an amendment into the bill for that purpose but it is not as if it is a minor amendment. I can understand the issues about unruly passengers and about domestic carriages in the schedules. Those sorts of things have traditionally been expected in an amendment bill of this nature. 
 The single market is really a major economic instrument and would make a major change to the economies of the two nations. We all know that the aviation sector is significant in the two economies—in the order of 2 to 3 percent of the gross domestic product of each economy—and one would think that an integration of the two markets to in essence a single market ought to be acknowledged by specific legislation and indicated in the title itself. The Minister might say that that is not strictly necessary but I remind him of the Trans-Tasman Mutual Recognition Act which was drafted in such a fashion as to draw the attention of the nation specifically to the significance of the changes and submissions were sought along those lines. 
On the face of it the Civil Aviation Amendment Bill seems innocuous but it creates this major economic change. In essence there are two parts to this bill. There are clauses that we would customarily expect to see in civil aviation Acts in respect of the operation of airlines—about unruly passengers about the powers of the captain and crew about safety and so forth. 
That is not really the intent however of this bill. The bill is intended to put in place a major economic change not a safety change—and in many ways it has been dressed up through the device of amending legislation as a safety issue. Many of the provisions relate to safety rather than to the single market and I can see that Mr Peck is concerned about the balance of these things— 
Hon David Carter 
: He is certainly more concerned about the balance than he is about school closures in his own patch. 
Dr WAYNE MAPP 
: That is certainly true and I would have thought that someone who is cognisant of economic impacts including those in his own community would want to see legislation named appropriately so that it draws the attention of the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens in New Zealand who want real direction from this Government. 
They want to know for instance whether this Government plans to match the living standards of Australia. What structures does it have in place to integrate the economies of the two nations to achieve that? Calling this legislation the Civil Aviation Amendment Bill is not sufficient.