Prosser Richard: Reserves and Other Lands Disposal Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeProsser Richard: Reserves and Other Lands Disposal Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6767. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): I am pleased—actually relieved—to be standing to take a call on behalf of New Zealand First my final call in the debate on this bill. I am relieved because at the end of this process a bit like the pulling of a tooth it will at long last be over—sort of. In fact it will not really be over at all because as I have said throughout the various stages of this bill we are destined to revisit it again almost immediately. We are destined or doomed if you prefer to do that because as others have said this is a bill of a type that does come before this House with rather regular monotony.This House has passed in fact no fewer than 66 bills bearing the name “Reserves and Other Lands Disposal Bill”—that is 66 based on my count from the listings available on the New Zealand Legislation website. They date back to 1926 and the latest one to go through that I have been able to find was the Reserves and Other Lands Disposal Act 2003. And if we add to those Acts the Acts from this House bearing the title “Reserves and Other Lands Disposal and Public Bodies Empowering Act” then there are another 19 pieces of legislation of the very same type in the statutes of this country and they date back to 1901. That was 6 years before New Zealand even became a country before we gained self-government—6 years prior to becoming a country we were already disposing of reserves. So we have had a total of 85 bills of this type in the annals of this Parliament going back 114 years at an average of roughly one every year and 4 months.So we are in fact overdue for another one. In fact if it were not for the fact that this particular bill has languished on the back-burner of the Government’s priority stove for 6 years—two entire terms of Parliament—we might in fact be due for another two. That was my point in the second reading and again during the Committee of the whole House: this bill is now so outdated and so much of what it started out with is now so superseded and irrelevant that I genuinely believe that it should be scrapped in its entirety or sent back to select committee where a fresh set of eyes can go over it. Then it can be brought back to the House in a form that can include all the new cases that will inevitably have popped to the surface since the initiation of this bill 6 years ago.During the Committee of the whole House I did note that of this bill’s original 17 items and 58 original clauses something like 11 of those items and 21 of the clauses have now been dealt with or superseded or amended or done away with altogether by other legislation in the 7 years since this bill was drafted. There will be more. There will be more that have not been noted there will be more that come to the surface and there will be others that will need to be included in the next bill which as I say will have to immediately follow this one through the House.We will pass this bill obviously. The House has indicated that and the Government obviously has the numbers so we are going to pass this bill—it is going to happen. I have registered my disappointment and my party’s disappointment about that in the sense that Government members themselves have admitted that there are people out there whose lives have been affected and continue to be affected by the matters that this bill seeks to address and the fact that they have had to wait so long for some sort of redress is frankly unacceptable.I do not intend to take up any more than is absolutely necessary of the valuable time of the House in revisiting yet again everything that is wrong with that part of the process. I have said time and again that Government members do have the option of either scrapping this bill or sending it back to the select committee for a complete overhaul. We know that they will do neither. We also know that we will be back here debating yet another one of these in some ways banal pieces of legislation which will be the 87th after this one since 1901 possibly before the year is out but certainly before the term of this Parliament is out. For that reason New Zealand First does not support this bill. We believe that is the only sane position that any party can take on it. Thank you.