McKelvie Ian: Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
McKelvie Ian: Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 11 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5076. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitikei) 
: 
 You can tell from the discussion in this House the extraordinarily I guess controversial and competent discussions we have in the Regulations Review Committee from time to time under our esteemed leader who gets through on a bad day in 15 minutes. None the less it is a— 
Hon Lianne Dalziel 
: Shh! Shh! Don’t tell the whips that. 
IAN McKELVIE 
: It takes quite a lot longer than that to get through the real business of the House though. 
Hon Lianne Dalziel 
: Are you mad? Don’t tell the whips. 
IAN McKELVIE 
: No no quite clearly the Opposition does not understand the intelligence of our whips for a start. 
 It is a great pleasure for me to take a call on the Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill at the first reading. The legislation may seem a little spurious to some but it is one of those tools this Parliament uses to ensure that democracy proceeds in New Zealand in a smooth and proper manner. 
I want to take a little bit of time—unlike I guess the members of the Opposition—to talk about the reason for these levies and charges that are imposed here and to talk about the relevance of one or two of them particularly under the Animal Products Act which looks at charging for inspection around hourly rates and vet inspections of animal exports. It particularly relates in this case to our equine industry. The equine industry in New Zealand is about a $160 million export industry. Every one of these 3500-odd horses that leave the country is inspected under this very piece of legislation so I think it is very relevant to some parts of our industry. When you look at things like navel oranges or kiwifruit navel oranges particularly in respect of Gisborne are a very important export. The Bay of Plenty of course has its kiwifruit. Both of these provide levies back to their parent bodies which help to develop further the agricultural industry in New Zealand. 
Of course we get on to the Foundation for Arable Research which deals with almost all of the seed industry in New Zealand in one form or another. I say for the benefit of Lianne Dalziel that she might not have eaten maize silage but maize silage really is the ruminant variety of muesli and often they add a little bit of cream or whatever to it. It is certainly a very valuable part of what we do in New Zealand agriculture. 
The other thing that particularly appealed to me was that this piece of legislation deals with pensions and I am just hoping that they will last a little longer. I was intrigued to see that it proposes a 1.77 percent increase to pensions and I am figuring that in 5 years’ time when I get to that stage it will have gone up by about another 9 percent which I am quite looking forward to. So for me this is a very relevant piece of legislation. 
I am not qualified to enter the debate as to whether or not we should be discussing this in the House or whether there are much better ways to do it. I suspect there are much better ways of dealing with this stuff but none the less some of the bits and pieces that are picked up in this legislation are very important not only from a revenue perspective for the Government but from a revenue perspective for all of those organisations that collect levies and fees to enable them to operate to carry out their research and to further develop our agricultural industry. So I have no problem commending this piece of legislation to the House and I look forward to the intense discussion we will have with the Regulations Review Committee on this issue. I commend this to the House and wish it well as it goes through.