Street Maryan: Regulatory Reform Bill Regulatory Reform (Repeals) Bill — Second Readings 
Street Maryan: Regulatory Reform Bill Regulatory Reform (Repeals) Bill — Second Readings 
[Volume:678;Page:1343] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I do not consider myself to be a very old person but I must say I am beset with a feeling of déjà vu as I get up to speak to this Regulatory Reform Bill and Regulatory Reform (Repeals) Bill. I feel the need to reflect a little bit on history not simply because it was this day in 1940 when Michael Joseph Savage died in office or this day in 1984 when the trades hall in Wellington was bombed and Ernie Abbott was killed. It is not for those reasons although they are worth getting in  
Hansard 
 but it is because when I first came into Parliament and I was as new to this House as Maggie Barry opposite and her colleagues are now I was on the Commerce Committee and the Minister of Commerce was Lianne Dalziel. She engaged in a Quality Regulation Review. She was also the Minister for Small Business and she engaged in a very comprehensive regulation review process which I got to know about fairly intimately being on the Commerce Committee. It was an excellent process and really engaged with the business community in a way it had not been engaged with for a long time to see what kind of regulation could be disposed of and dispensed with and what was useful for business in order for it to function adequately and safely in a suitably regulated environment.  
I just want to pay a tribute to Lianne Dalziel for that work and to say that although it has taken this Government 3 and a bit years to get to the point of bringing this omnibus legislation forward for all its hype and bluster about being anti - red tape really the credit for this initiative lies back with Lianne Dalziel.  
However in the form that the Regulatory Reform (Repeals) Bill now appears in front of the House it is not so much a regulatory reform bill as an omnibus legislation repeal bill because largely what it does is to repeal a whole lot of Acts. Yes some of them should go and as we heard from the New Zealand First speaker Andrew Williams earlier things like the District Railways Purchasing Act 1885 should probably have gone some time ago. But one of them that also takes my attention here is the Economic Stabilisation Act Repeal Act 1987. A bit of history again: I remember the Labour Government in 1987 repealing the Economic Stabilisation Act. Here is a little contemporary irony: that was the Act that was used in 1951 to deal with the waterfront lockout. In that period—and prior to that there was a version of it for the Second World War—the Economic Stabilisation Act gave the Government huge huge powers which we have seen since only in the extraordinary legislation around Christchurch. So there is a little bit of history there going back to the Second World War and later events in 1951 when the waterfront workers were being punished and forbidden to organise—and lo and behold here we are in 2012 and there is a bit of a port dispute on in Auckland in case the members opposite had not noticed.  
However history is a good teacher or ought to be and this legislation although it cannot do the things that National and the ACT Party would have us believe it would do—that is rid business of strangling red tape and bureaucracy—it is still none the less worth passing 3 and a bit years late. It is still worth passing to get some pieces of legislation that are no longer relevant off our statute book and for that reason I support the legislation.