Tisch Lindsay: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Transitional Provisions and Controls) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Tisch Lindsay: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Transitional Provisions and Controls) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:616;Page:11813] 
LINDSAY TISCH (National—Piako) 
: 
 It is always good to follow Dr Smith and Dr Hutchison because they are experts in this field. I want to make a couple of comments as to the process that has gone on because it has concerned National that the genesis of the bill goes back to 2001 yet when we look at the last page of the bill we see that it says its introduction was on 6 November 2003 and the first reading was on 18 November 2003. Then lo and behold submissions were to be called and had to be in by 14 January 2004. Well the chairman of the Education and Science Committee the Hon Brian Donnelly is nodding his head in acknowledgment that that was the case. This is such important legislation but submissions were to be heard in January when everybody was away. Not only that but the report back was to be 3 days after Parliament had resumed. 
Brent Catchpole 
: Disgraceful! 
LINDSAY TISCH 
: Yes disgraceful! On such important legislation one would say the consultative process should be exactly that and we should have a pretty good feel about what people are saying. It is so important that National is going to support it. We are supporting it but we really have to question why we have had such delays. Of course when the Hon Brian Donnelly and the committee asked for an extra 4 weeks and got it we then had the Minister coming and saying: “Oh but it’s going to be costly to business.” Well we had had a bill sitting around since 2001 so we said: “Too bad! We want to get the best out of this legislation. We want to make it work.” 
The intentions of the bill are honourable. When we look at the introduction where it talks about minimising the costs to businesses we see that that is a worthy objective. National has no problem with that. In fact we are the party that is out there saying that the compliance costs and regulatory regimes this Government has put in place need to be curbed back and taken under control. That is one of the positive initiatives where there has been an attempt made to minimise the costs to business. 
As I said the intent of the bill is to minimise the costs to business and to the Government and to reduce barriers to innovation. We are happy with that and prepared to support those objectives because anything that allows for innovation and that allows for the reduction of obstacles to progress are worthy objectives. We will support them. There are too many regulatory controls and this bill rationalises that regulatory approach. 
When I read the legislation and the reports that have been done I see that 80000-odd hazardous substances will come under the control of the new Act and that is significant. Of those 8000 will be transferred and the balance of the remaining 72000—I think Dr Smith said—will come under the new Act by July 2006. 
When we looked at the summary of the strategy that needed to be implemented we saw areas that we want to hold the Government to account on—I want to quote because this does not appear in the bill and will not be in the Act—“We propose that short-term easy gains can be made by two non-regulatory steps: one to make the HASNO controls easier to understand and two to reduce compliance costs for applicants.” Those two non-regulatory steps that are mentioned in the summary of the strategy relate to areas where we will be keeping a very close eye on this Government to make sure they are in fact implemented. 
All in all this is important legislation. We were not happy with the process and way it was handled but we support the bill and will be once again making sure that over the period of time ahead of us that process is expedited and that those two non-regulatory steps I have just mentioned actually come into force. 
Bill read a third time.