Belich CamillaCAMILLA BELICH (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's not really a pleasure to take a call on this move but I appreciate the opportunity to outline my opposition to the motion put up by the Minister in relation to this bill.I wanted to cover a few procedural aspects of this bill which I don't think have been covered by previous speakers.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): I will just note there's been some speakers on this—we're not debating the substantive bill. I think the previous speaker Megan Woods very skilfully ensured it was about timing and I'll be looking for the same skill set by subsequent speakers.CAMILLA BELICH: I don't pretend to have the same skill set as the previous speaker but I'll do my best to raise some valid points in relation to this incredibly short nine-day select committee process that has been proposed by the Minister.Now select committee processes are something that I think the entire Parliament is proud of. It's something that is notable when people visit other jurisdictions or when they come and visit our Parliament they often come and visit select committees. The reason for that is because of how important the select committee is in taking and listening to the views of everyday New Zealanders and providing those views to decision makers to legislators and then seeing those changes and issues either adopted or addressed or reflected in the subsequent pieces of legislation. So I don't think this is a trifling matter. It is fundamentally important to the design of our democracy to have a meaningful select committee process and that is even more important because of the fact that we do have a single House; we don't have an Upper House which is taking the opportunity to scrutinise the legislation once it's passed and that gives in my view more constitutional significance and importance to the select committee process.This nine-day proposal that has been put forward by the Minister would mean that the report back was on a Thursday which was a non-sitting day. I think this should be mentioned because this also provides issues for not only members who will be on the select committee and doing their due diligence to consider any submissions that may be made during that very short period of time but also my colleague Megan Woods spoke about the officials and it's also important to remember that parliamentary staff who are part of our select committee do the majority of the work to report back the committee's views. It is an incredibly short period of time nine days and I don't think sufficient to consider what is really taking into account new technology and new pieces of technology within the road-user charges system and trying to adopt those.Often we have changes that are made to legislation—I haven't gone back and done a calculation of it but it is something that I may ask the Parliamentary Library to look into which is the length of time spent at select committee and the shorter select committee processes and the likelihood of amendments coming up in the future and I surmise that if you were to look into that you would undoubtedly find that when legislation is not given its full process then often there will need to be amendments and further House time taken up by fixing errors that are in legislation. So I think that is actually a really significant point to raise.The other point I wanted to raise is on the structure of the legislation and what indeed it seeks to change. Now this is not a simple one-line one-clause bill. It actually has amendments to a primary Act—which is the Road User Charges Act 2012—and then it looks to change secondary legislation and then my reading of this piece of legislation is that it inserts brand new schedules which would require scrutiny. So it's concerning when there are—I don't think there's necessarily a justification when it's a simple repeal bill or if it is on a simple one line that's maybe you know a very easy concept for people to consider. This is a complex piece of legislation that looks at primary legislation secondary legislation and it also inserts new schedules. So those are all important reasons for having a longer select committee process.I note in the Minister's motion he refers to: despite Standing Orders 193 195 and 196." The main Standing Order as I understand in relation to report back which isn't mentioned which I appreciate it's not necessarily required by the motion but the Minister in a way I feel should mention the Standing Order 303 which is the time for a report back. That is set at six months. Now that is obviously a substantially longer time than nine days and would give the committee a significantly longer period of time to look at the legislation. And we know what happens when select committees don't meet the report back times. There's a very very serious process that they have to go through which involves writing to the Business Committee which is the committee that is in charge of this House and putting forward clear reasons as to why they are not likely to meet the report-back date. So that is a very serious procedure that they have to go through and I think that the fact that has to go through the Business Committee justifies our attention at this stage and I'm glad members are taking the opportunity to debate this particular motion because the converse should also be true: if you want a shorter select committee process you should be able to back it up with reasons. I did listen to the Minister's reasons and to be fair I wasn't convinced at the need for this incredibly short report-back time because we're not talking about a report-back time which is half as long three months. As previous members have talked about we're not talking about a month we're not talking about two weeks; we're talking about nine days including non-sitting days. So that is very very significant I think. I'm also aware that other members have ideas about how this might be improved and I haven't had a look at it yet but I do understand my colleague Duncan Webb has tabled an amendment to this motion which he'll be seeking to speak to which undoubtedly will increase the amount of time—I'm looking to my colleague to confirm that: that is correct he's confirmed—that the select committee would be able to look at that. So I think that nine days is too short. We've talked about the staff that it would impact and I wanted to note that we are in a situation an environment where the Government has been looking for cost-cutting measures. We haven't heard that Parliamentary Services is exempt to that. So placing extreme requirements by this House on staff members in that type of environment I think is very concerning. We don't want to be in a position where the report is not of the standard that we would expect and we don't want to be blaming staff members retrospectively for missing a submission or not reporting something as eloquently as we would like when the reality is that this House is placing them in a situation which is untenable for them to be able to complete their job with that incredibly short report-back time.So I think those are all of the procedural elements that I wish to raise on this bill but I would just reiterate that I would urge the Government and Ministers to reconsider a longer report-back time. As members have said we do actually support the content of this bill but we're in a situation where we've had urgency—there is a select committee process here but it's not long enough. I don't think we should start with no select committee and then think "Oh aren't we so happy we've got nine days." We actually should start by looking at the procedure as it's outlined in Standing Orders and the Standing Orders that we always usually look to like Standing Order 303 and working back from there not starting on the basis of no select committee."