Huo Raymond: Regulatory Improvement Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Huo Raymond: Regulatory Improvement Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
[Sitting date: 30 March 2010. Volume:661;Page:10187. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
RAYMOND HUO (Labour) 
: 
 I rise to support the Regulatory Improvement Bill and I endorse the comments made by my learned colleagues who spoke earlier. 
When we look at the bill and its contents in this Committee stage I would like to acknowledge the current Minister for Regulatory Reform the Hon Rodney Hide who is responsible for this bill and I thank him for carrying on with the good work initiated by the Hon Lianne Dalziel. I acknowledge the two Supplementary Order Papers dividing the bill into the nine separate bills. 
I had the pleasure of sitting on the Commerce Committee with its wonderful chair the Hon Lianne Dalziel deliberating on some of the main provisions. I take this opportunity to thank all the submitters the businesses and the membership organisations that contributed their time energy and ideas to this bill. 
The New Zealand Institute of Patent Attorneys made a very good submission—a very helpful submission should I say—particularly in relation to the Designs Act 1953. The bill provides for the restoration of lapsed copyright in registered designs in circumstances where the lapse was the result of neglect to pay the renewal fee or to make the necessary application. The Commerce Committee under its wonderful chair the Hon Lianne Dalziel recommended that in addition to allowing the restoration of lapsed copyright in registered designs the bill should allow the restoration of lapsed copyright in design applications. The committee also recommended that the bill should give specific authorisation for the commissioner to publish bibliographic details of design applications. 
In its submission the New Zealand Institute of Patent Attorneys said that it agreed with the intent of the bill to provide restoration of lapsed design registrations and that it also believed that the bill should be amended to provide for restoration of pending design applications that had lapsed. Looking at the bill itself I say as I said earlier that to some extent the bill is more important than the content. 
The bill was introduced initially by the Hon Lianne Dalziel in response to the Quality Regulation Review. The final report was released on 5 September 2008 after a 15-month review. The Quality Regulation Review addressed regulatory barriers to business growth. It was a broad review that looked at anomalies inconsistency and duplication across the Government’s regulatory framework. As well as correcting errors the review aimed to develop ways of ensuring that new rules were efficient from a business perspective. The review established that when businesses deal with the Government they do not see discrete agencies such as the Inland Revenue Department the Accident Compensation Corporation or the Department of Labour’s Occupational Safety and Health Service they see a single entity—namely the Government. Accordingly businesses were frustrated by having to provide the same information over and over and over again to different agencies. 
Labour looked at the regulatory framework and at how new regulations are made from a business perspective. As well as this bill being introduced the regulatory impact analysis regime was strengthened to ensure that future regulation properly identified the problem and looked at potential options for resolving it. Thank you.