SpeechSIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): Thank you very much—a split call but not necessarily a split personality. I thought that look the Labour Party's doing a wonderful job tonight of symbolically expressing the nature of a statutes amendment bill: short pithy nothing overly controversial nothing of particular depth. So thank you. Thank you very much to the Labour Party. They're doing a fantastic job. I'm a bit more verbose so I'm going to try and fill my five minutes but we'll see—we'll see.I think probably look the first thing is even though in this debate tonight there's been a little bit of mirth this is actually an important part of our parliamentary structure. Some people may be asking at home why we worry about statutes amendment bills. Why are they that important? But look fundamentally the reason is that law relies on accuracy and no matter how hard every member of Parliament works in this Parliament errors come through. It's just inevitable. Well errors are one element of why we have statutes amendment bills. The other is that things change and we had some references tonight to the Customs and Excise Act for example or even nomenclature around the use of police constable" versus a "police employee".Things change and therefore we have to update the laws. For those at home who are wondering "Well why through this mechanism?" and it's possibly been explained by others but look fundamentally it's easier to bring one piece of legislation—I think there's about 41 changes to legislation—to pass it through the House in one go rather than actually trying to have 41 amendment bills. So it's really important to understand that you're not going to easily find a statutes amendment bill with a list of everything that's ever been done per se. What we pass tonight flows on to other pieces of legislation. It updates them.I think it's important for people at home to understand as well: this is by and large pre-agreed across the Parliament. Anything that's deemed particularly controversial is often pushed back—not in every case. But it's actually a courtesy of this Parliament and perhaps an expression to people as well that the Parliament often operates on a non-partisan or a collegial basis. So we get a heads-up from whoever the Government of the day is—always looking forward to the Government of tomorrow. But the Government of today gives us a bit of a hint of what they want to change across portfolios and people like myself or Chris Penk Gerry Brownlee and others will go through and we'll have a look and go "OK. That's fine." And again courtesy to Government: if there are areas that are of particular concern those conversations are had.As I say there's about 41. I haven't counted them all I must confess. In fact we've been provided a lovely summary list which is excellent although it would be lovely to have one more column that numbers them. But it's a list of laws which are being changed. I thought I'd just touch on a couple of them because amongst many claims to work here I look after the customs portfolio. There's actually a few. It's quite exciting. There's customs and excise changes. But the excitement pretty much ends with the words "customs and excise". It's all pretty basic and a lot of it is to do with anti - money laundering and the countering of financing and terrorism.Unfortunately for the people who are going to their bank at the moment and spending most of their life trying to explain why they donate to churches or might buy a chocolate bar on the weekend to their bank it's not going to change any of those requirements unfortunately. It's a little bit more simple and it's just one as I say of nomenclature. Importantly for those who enjoy a drink if you'd been drinking undenatured ethanol under 80 percent for some bizarre reason—I would not recommend this at all at any time but if you're that type of alcoholic who's drinking that type of ethanol—we're now going to hit you with the correct excise tax. As I say I want to be very clear: don't touch the stuff. It's bad. But that's one of the changes that we are having here. [Bell rung] I suspect that's the one-minute bell. We're doing OK towards the five minutes. How tremendous!Oaths and declarations. For monarchists out there the change is not to Her Majesty. We remain loyal to Her Majesty the Queen on this her 70th jubilee and we wish her well. As the corrections spokesperson I'm happy to say that the changes to prisoners' and victims' claims is pretty basic which is pretty good because under this Government they've let most of the prisoners out. And finally again back to those who enjoy a little bit of a tipple there is a further change to the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act. Unfortunately it's not making it any easier to get hold of for those who are desirous of it; it's just around some financial reporting.And that with about 12 seconds to go I believe not only allows me to have spoken to this amendment bill but to have fulfilled my duty to my party and to my whips."