O'Rourke DenisDENIS O'ROURKE (NZ First): New Zealand First supported this bill at the first reading on the basis that it is a statutes amendment bill that makes minor amendments to the several Acts that are set out in it. As part of the process that we took with this bill we referred the entire bill to all of our caucus members and asked them to study it to see which areas of the bill related to their portfolios. They looked at it they studied whether there were any issues that we needed to particularly take notice of and the feedback on it was that there were no such issues that we were satisfied with all of the amendments in the bill and that there was therefore no reason for us to object to anything in it. So I indicated at that stage that we would be voting for it on the basis that it was as it was at that stage. I have now also looked as we all have at the report of the Government Administration Committee which has made a number of relatively minor but actually quite important amendments which New Zealand First is also happy to support. Actually two of them are really only amendments and they are the ones to the Employment Relations Act that amend a new part. The issue there is that the correction would ensure that employees are able to correctly pursue a personal grievance where their employer has not provided the employee with either notice of a cancelled shift or compensation if notice is not given as per the employment agreement. So we have no difficulty with supporting that. That is a genuine and well-thought-out amendment that the committee has made to the bill. Similarly we support the amendment that the committee has made to the Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act 1988 which amends one of the clauses relating to the witnessing of donor signatures. I remember as a lawyer doing many many of these and it is a standard certificate but the committee has said that it believes that adequate protection would be achieved by adopting the same formulation as in the legislation. It has recommended replacing the words does not constitute a conflict of interest." with the words "does not constitute more than a negligible risk of a conflict of interest." That is actually much more reasonable as a certificate because how could anyone—lawyer or not—give an absolute certification that no conflict of interest would arise? So "not more than negligible" is much more reasonable. For that reason again New Zealand First sees that as a genuine amendment to the bill and one that we can support. The other two recommendations of the committee were to divide off into separate bills the amendments relating to the Victims' Orders Against Violent Offenders Act 2014 and the one relating to the Charities Act 2005. We agree with the committee that those are amendments that should not be in this bill. We take its advice and agree with it on that. That leads me to move on to the two Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) that would add further amendments to the bill by adding two members' bills to it. We in New Zealand First will definitely not support either of those SOPs. This is an abuse of the statutes amendment bill procedure. They are not genuine amendments that were considered or were part of the original bill. This is not the right way to go about getting members' bills through the House. We consider that to be an abuse of procedure. It should not be happening. We will not support it on that basis alone but there are of course other good reasons for not doing so. Nuk Korako's bill is admittedly an extremely minor bill—in fact so minor that it almost reaches vanishing point—concerning lost property at airports. It is now proposed by Mr Faafoi in Supplementary Order Paper 191 that it go into this bill. Well this is a serious statutes amendment bill and it should not be there. We will not support it for that reason. Similarly we have Matt Doocey's bill—also desperately unnoticeable in content—which is now proposed by David Seymour to go into this bill presumably as a means of getting rid of it. Well that again is actually an abuse of the procedure and it should not be happening. In both cases the members should have an opportunity to speak to their bills. They should in fact turn up and explain to this House why they have moved those as members' bills why it is so important that the provisions in them should take up the time of this House and why it is such good legislation that we should all vote for it. We think they should do that. We want to hear what they have to say. We want to hear that justification. We do not want to see it buried in this Statutes Amendment Bill as just a nice quiet way of getting rid of it or sweeping it almost under the carpet. So we will not have that. We will not have that. We want to have the debate. We want to hear what they are all about. We want to know why we should vote for or against them. Lastly we think that by allowing this sort of thing to happen we will be setting a very bad precedent one that we do not want to see happening again. For those reasons there is no possible way New Zealand First will vote in favour of either of those two SOPs. Otherwise we have no difficulty whatsoever with the process that has been adopted for this Statutes Amendment Bill or with the recommendations of the Government Administration Committee which we also support. So that is our position and it is one that we are going to stick to. It is the only one we believe that is credible and proper as a way to deal with this particular bill. We will be voting for the bill but against the two SOPs for those reasons."