Tolley Anne; Mallard Trevor; Hipkins Chris; Ross Jami-Lee; Bennett DavidSpeaker RecalledThe CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): Mr Speaker the committee has voted to recall you to the Chair. We've had five speeches on the new Part 3 and the Leader of the House has taken a point of order to have the new Part 3 tabled amendments ruled out of order. I'm disturbed by that motion because those tabled amendments have been accepted by the Clerk's Office and have been on the table now since yesterday—they are not new—and we've had five speeches in the debate. I have ruled that those three tabled amendments are in order and that the debate would continue.Mr SPEAKER: Just checking that by new Part 3 you are talking about the one in the name of Jami-Lee Ross you're talking about the—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): And Brett Hudson.Mr SPEAKER: Brett Hudson is the other one and there's a third one which is an amendment to Brett Hudson's one.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): Yes that's correct.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Leader of the House): There are a number of issues here; the most significant of which is the way that the bill is structured. The bill is structured so that all of the principal amendments are contained in Part 1 and all of the subsequent amendments to different Acts are contained in Part 2. The practice of the House previously—I know because I tried when I was in the Opposition—has been that any additional Acts to be amended should be amended in the part of the bill that deals with that. So in the case of other amendments that we put forward in Opposition—different additional parts—previous Chairs of committee have ruled that they should be dealt with in the debate on the part of the bill that deals with that. In this case the committee has already completed its debate on the principal part of the bill Part 1 and on the subsequent amendments which were in Part 2 and therefore it is alien to the structure of the debate to allow the committee to continue to add more and more parts.With regard to the point that the Chair of the committee made about the debate already being under way and already being ongoing in fact the House this very morning has already dealt with that issue. There were a number of amendments tabled yesterday and debated yesterday that have subsequently been ruled out this morning by the Chair of the committee. So it is not unprecedented once a debate on a tabled amendment is under way for it to be subsequently ruled out.JAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany): Mr Speaker thank you. The Minister has quite accurately identified how the bill has been structured. I agree that there would be high precedent value if the decision was made that he's asking for because the Government can choose to structure bills in that way and if it were to continue structuring bills in that way such a ruling from you would have the precedent that there would never be the ability for the committee to consider a new part to a bill because if the argument is that Part 1 will always contain amendments to the principal Act to be amended and that Part 2 will contain amendments to every other Act—if the argument from Mr Hipkins is that you could never have another Act amended by a new Part 3 because it should have been done in Part 2—there'll never be the ability for there to be a new Part 3 in the future.Having said that I have a second point worth considering which is that when the committee was considering the Family Incomes Package some months ago—it was a similar bill dealing with incomes and taxation and it was considered under urgency as well—the committee did have a number of new parts to do with reviews which were accepted and debated. Therefore there is precedent that the committee can do that.My third point is that on advice from the Clerk's Office as we were structuring our tabled amendments and taking up our ability to put forward amendments we were clearly advised that Part 2's amendments that amend other pieces of legislation—Part 2 is written is such a way that those amendments to other pieces of legislation are there to assist with the implementation of a regional fuel tax scheme; the two amendments proposed by myself and Mr Hudson seek to have reviews of the situation with the regional fuel tax—are not to do with implementation of the regional fuel tax; they're to do with how it is reviewed and how it is being implemented. Therefore it is a new issue that should be considered as a new part.Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Leader of the House): I do appreciate the member's frustration and in fact this issue was specifically discussed in the last review of the Standing Orders where a proposal was put forward by the then Opposition that any amendments to different Acts should be separate parts—that the ability to group changes to different Acts should not be allowed to be done in the way that it has been done certainly for the entire time that I have been a member of this House. The Standing Orders Committee rejected that proposal and as a result the ability of those in charge of bills to basically have one part or two parts—as they choose to—remains in place.Therefore what we are doing in this debate is no different to countless other bills that have passed through the House over the last decade that I've been a part of it and in the way the debate has been approached where all of the amendments to other Acts have been contained in a single part Chairs have ruled that additional amendments to other Acts should be tabled and considered as part of that debate and not as part of additional debates. The risk that we run here is that if we continue to allow amendments to be added ad nauseam to any bill the House will never be able to pass any bill. In fact other legislatures around the world do have that difficulty and that of course is one of the things that the House has considered from time to time in the way it structures its debates.Hon DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): I agree with what Jami-Lee Ross has said and I just want to add another point and that is that in the debate on Part 2 of this bill the member from the Government side did not raise any issue at that time fully knowing that there were these amendments coming up in Part 3. A precedent within this House—and I know that you're very keen to see it continue at question time—is that you raise issues at the time they are relevant. If there was going to be an issue that that member felt was relevant Part 2 would have been the time to raise it. Doing it in Part 3 later when we're halfway through the debate is simply not the case of raising an issue at the time when it is relevant.JAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany): Mr Speaker I simply wish to point out that I think the Minister effectively made my point which was that if you were to rule that we cannot have these new Part 3s then there would be precedent value and what the Minister is effectively arguing is that we shouldn't have any amendments inserting new parts if they're going to introduce issues that could in his view have been held in Part 2. He's made my very point. The second thing I wish to say in response to Mr Hipkins is that simply because the Standing Orders Committee did consider something and decided not to act—the fact that a committee decided not to act—is not a change to our Standing Orders and is not something that should be considered in this situation.