Wilkinson Kate: Standards and Conformance Bill — In Committee 
Wilkinson Kate: Standards and Conformance Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:634;Page:5397] 
KATE WILKINSON (National) 
: 
 One may be forgiven for giving this bill a somewhat cursory glance and thinking that yes it is combining the functions of two bodies that sounds OK. It is combining the Standards Council and the Testing Laboratory Registration Council and is intended to align the functions of both with international standards. That sounds great it should therefore save some costs. It should be a good bill. However there is a big “but”. 
I divert for a minute to mention something that has not been mentioned in the commentary on the bill. It seems to be international practice these days that only one body in any country has the function of registering certification bodies and that is fine. In New Zealand it is this great thing called theJoint Accreditation System of Australia and New Zealand. Whilst it is possibly not technically within the scope of this bill I do raise the issue of whether New Zealand is losing its sovereignty to this joint body. How answerable is the joint body to New Zealand courts? I would like the Minister in the chair Lianne Dalziel to address that issue because I think it is one that is hugely fundamental to our constitutional law. As an international regulator how many local controls would it need to comply with? Decisions about using world guidelines for standards will not be made by New Zealand at all but by this joint body on which we have two representatives. 
The other question I would like the Minister to answer is how Parliament if it so wanted could actually modify the rules of this joint agency. Does it in fact have the power to do so? I think we are at very real risk of ceding our sovereignty to this joint trans-Tasman agency and I take that as a very very serious constitutional issue. 
Leaving aside that wider issue—because it might be too intellectual for the other side—and coming back to the bill I point out that the popular rhetoric seems to be about reducing compliance costs and making it easier for businesses to do business. So it would seem obvious that some analysis of those consequential compliance costs might have been completed before launching into this bill. What are the fiscal implications of the bill? We are told that the implications of this bill are “just too difficult to assess”. I would have to say that for all the talk and rhetoric about social responsibility this bill has every chance of being yet another irresponsible bill with yet more unintended consequences. There has been no disclosure. 
In fact there is no idea of what the compliance costs resulting from this bill will actually be. The compliance cost statement in relation to the bill even identifies that compliance costs will be incurred because of these two accreditation bodies being reduced to one. But as there may be some confusion in the market because of these changes “It is not possible to quantify the size of the compliance costs.” and we are expected just to accept that. Well I do not think so. 
I said before that this could have been a good bill. It is important that other countries have confidence in our system for the accreditation of those certification bodies. We place a heavy reliance on our trade exports and wishy-washy unreliable and inconsistent standards are certainly to be avoided. But this potentially good bill has been spoilt by the Government sneaking in a couple of new objectives of the Standards Council. 
Just to go back in time I tell members that under the existing Standards Act the primary functions of the council—which are quite sensible—are to develop standards to promote encourage and facilitate the use of standards in New Zealand and to improve the quality of goods or services having regard to economy in their production or supply. We cannot argue with that. They are also to promote standardisation in industry trade or commerce—we cannot argue with that—and to encourage and facilitate industrial development trade or commerce which we cannot argue with either or to promote public or occupational safety health or welfare. That all makes some sense because at the end of the day we must acknowledge the importance of objective standards and standardisation of standards with our trans-Tasman neighbour Australia. Nobody wants to compromise those standards but this bill just had to go that sneaky bit further.