Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): It's an absolute privilege to be speaking in the first reading of the Legislation Bill. This bill rewrites the Legislation Act 2012 and also absorbs the Interpretation Act 1999. One of the main aims is to improve access to the law by ensuring that all of New Zealand's secondary legislation is available in one place: the New Zealand Legislation website.Secondary legislation is made by Ministers officials and Government and non-Government agencies under powers delegated by Acts of Parliament. That includes things like food standards transport rules and health and safety regulations and apparently there are over a hundred agencies that are empowered to make secondary legislation with some of them publishing it on their websites and others gazetting it. So it's really really hard to track down where all of this legislation is and what's currently in force.I think we've heard a lot about the Government Inquiry into the Whey Protein Concentrate Contamination Incident which people have referred to already and what that found was that a piece of contaminated pipe ended up contaminating huge volumes of whey protein concentrate. When the inquiry had a look into it they found that there were just heaps and heaps of different Government regulations. They were spread across a whole lot of Acts and instruments—regulations—and it took up about 12000 pages which was like three metres of shelf space. So people were really struggling when they were submitting talking about how they couldn't access and navigate the legislation and it was a complete nightmare"—to quote somebody.As we've already heard the chair of the inquiry said they couldn't find all of the secondary legislation that applied to the dairy sector and there was no way of figuring out if they'd found it all or not. Yet the problem is that in industry in our various sectors we're actually required to comply with all of the regulations and the problem is you can't plead ignorance as an excuse for not complying. So this bill will make it much much easier for people working in different industries to identify all of the relevant regulations that apply and that they have to comply with.The other thing that this bill will do is it should produce significant productivity gains across different industries and across New Zealand as a whole because all of that awful task of tracking down all those various regulations will get done once and done well by the Parliamentary Counsel Office. What that means is that people working in different sectors and businesses don't have to bother with assigning all of their staff to that particular task.The other thing for us as members of the Regulations Review Committee is that it's going to make it a lot easier for us to identify the whole breadth of all that secondary legislation that would benefit from us taking a look at it. That could be quite extensive because the Parliamentary Counsel Office has identified that there are potentially over 5000 provisions that empower people to make secondary legislation. For us that would be a formidable task if we've got to track down all of that and then have a look at it to make sure that it's up to scratch.So we've got a real issue that needs to be sorted. Therefore I commend this bill to the House. Thank you."