Dyson RuthHon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I am delighted to be speaking in the third reading of the Statutes Repeal Bill and I want to commend the member who has just resumed his seat Paul Foster-Bell for his contribution at our select committee consideration of this bill. One would probably assume from hearing the title Statutes Repeal Bill" that it was not going to be a very interesting or exciting bill but actually exactly the opposite was the case with this bill.We started off with a proposal to repeal 132 pieces of legislation that were no longer in use that were out of date surplus to requirement. This was described by the Minister as being—I think the Minister was the Hon Steven Joyce at the time—as the great leap forward in the implementation of the Productivity Commission's recommendations. I have to tell you there is not a single thing in this bill that will improve the productivity of New Zealand—not a single thing—because none of these Acts are in force any more none of them are being used; they are all surplus to requirement. We have spent hours of parliamentary time debating the need to repeal Acts that are no longer used. That is Steven Joyce's idea of a major contribution to improving the productivity of New Zealand.So we started off with 132 Acts to be repealed. Two of those 132 were controversial. Now this is not a statutes amendment bill so the controversy around those two Acts to be repealed was not relevant in the way that it would be in a statutes amendment bill but I want to come back to those two.We got so enthused by this process of repealing things that meant nothing that we added another five so we ended up with 137 Acts. I remember Paul Foster-Bell and I having a little "who was right" on these figures during the Committee stage of the debate and indeed we were both right because we started off with 132 and ended up with 137.The two Acts to be repealed that were controversial are the Sentencing Council Act and the Medicines Amendment Act. Neither of those two was considered appropriate to be included in this legislation because they were not surplus to requirement in the way that the others were. They were Acts that the Government no longer wanted to progress. So the Acts have been passed by Parliament they were in force but they had not been implemented.We had an outstanding submission from Sir Kenneth Keith and I am sure that the Minister of Justice the Hon Amy Adams is well aware of his legal mind and would be inclined on many occasions I would imagine to agree with his view. So Sir Kenneth Keith has been well recognised by New Zealand Governments. He has received an Order of New Zealand he is a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire he is a Queen's Counsel he was a New Zealand judge and he was the first appointment to the International Court of Justice—the first New Zealander. He was a judge in the High Court the Court of Appeal a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and one of the inaugural appointments to the Supreme Court of New Zealand. He has got quite a good record in the law; knows a thing or two about it. He said to our select committee in his submission that it was wrong for us to include the Sentencing Council Act in this bill and I agree with him. Labour agreed with him and the Green Party members on the committee agreed with him. And I do not for the life of me know why the National members who seemed to be nodding their heads all the way through his submission at the committee then got rolled by their Minister who said to leave it in there.The proposal that a Government does not want to proceed with an Act does not mean that it is appropriate to repeal it through a statutes repeal bill. It is of course appropriate for the Government to go to the country by introducing a bill and saying: "We're over this. We don't want this to happen." That is what Governments are elected to do. They are entitled to do that of course. But sneaking it through in a statutes repeal bill is not appropriate. Sir Kenneth Keith was pretty tetchy about it actually and his submission was quite strong. Can I just quote a piece of it that had particular impact for me. He quoted some of the reasons that were noted in the explanatory note of the bill and one of those said: "the Sentencing Council Act 2007 came into force"—and those are important words—"on 1 November 2007 but was not implemented". The explanatory note goes on to say: "Repealing that Act will clarify that the Government will not set up the Sentencing Council in the future and will allow the courts to retain their ability to develop their own sentencing guideline judgments."He described that as "misleading" and said that "The Sentencing Council Act presents a completely different case from that of the Acts not in force. That Act has been in force as part of the law of New Zealand since 2007 … the Executive has suspended its operation" which he described as "an apparent breach of s1 of the Bill of Rights 1688;" and he referred to the Fitzgerald v Muldoon case which many members in this House who are interested in political history will be aware of. He described the refusal to put that into operation and then to include it in a statutes repeal bill as a serious constitutional issue. I actually think that when we have a submission from a person who is of such high-quality legal standing as Sir Kenneth Keith we should take notice of it and you know this does not actually do anything anyway. It does not do anything so why would you thumb your nose at one of the sharpest legal brains—with the exception of course of the Hon Chris Finlayson—that we have in New Zealand? Why would we do that? Well as a Parliament I think it is really disrespectful and unnecessary. The other thing that I found quite gobsmacking was the response to Chris Hipkins' Supplementary Order Paper 315 to include the repeal of the blasphemy legislation in this bill—a perfectly sensible thing to do because everyone in this House agrees it is no longer appropriate to have the blasphemy legislation included on our statute book. David Seymour tried to introduce it. Bill English said: "What a jolly fine idea. We should repeal it but not through that process." We said "What about a statutes repeal bill?" and the Prime Minister seemed to agree with that. But when it came to the crunch when it came to putting his money where his mouth is—or actually putting New Zealanders' money where his mouth is—he could not do it. He voted against the inclusion of the blasphemy legislation repeal despite having said within just days that it was prime legislation for repeal.The other controversial piece of legislation in this repeal legislation was the Medicines Amendment Act. Again this is an Act of Parliament that the Government just does not agree with. It is not that it is surplus to requirement and it is not that it has not been put into force; the Government just does not agree with it and the way to repeal legislation that a Government does not agree with is to introduce repeal legislation standing alone not under a statutes repeal bill.While we support this bill and agree that 137 Acts of Parliament with the exception of those two controversial ones should be repealed this has made Steven Joyce a laughing stock in the business community which took him at his word when he said that he would implement the recommendations of the Productivity Commission a body set up to look at how we can improve New Zealanders' productivity. We lag a long way behind other countries that we should be ahead of in this regard. So Steven Joyce has used this as the one and only response to the recommendations of the Productivity Commission and it will achieve absolutely zero—absolutely nothing—because these are Acts that are no longer used. They are not the barriers to improving productivity that the Productivity Commission was talking about so the Government has squandered hours of parliamentary time to achieve absolutely nothing. It has used this as an opportunity to slide legislation off our statute book because it does not seem to be able to go through a proper process and it has squandered the opportunity to include in this repeal bill the blasphemy legislation despite saying that it no longer had a place on our statute book.This makes absolutely no sense. I think we did a jolly fine job at our select committee but I also know that not one single member of the committee felt that it was the most productive thing we could do."