Sio William: Land Transport (Speed Limits Validation and Other Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSio William: Land Transport (Speed Limits Validation and Other Matters) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 21 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5144. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Su’a WILLIAM SIO (Labour—Māngere):I am happy to take a short call on this bill. I agree with my colleagues that in a general sense we support the legislation despite the fact that most of us in this Chamber will feel that it is undesirable to be supporting retrospective legislation. Notwithstanding our reluctance about it the reality is based on the information that is available to us that we cannot be irresponsible and that we have to move forward in terms of passing this piece of legislation.I then want to congratulate and acknowledge Kāpiti Coast District Council for coming forward on this because I think that if it were not for its courage in stepping forward and identifying that maybe a mistake had been made we would not have been made aware of this. I then want to say to the Minister of Transport given the fact that this is another concern of many of us in this Chamber—the fact that in urgent legislation we sort of sidetrack the ability of the select committee to call on members of the public to have an input into legislation—by and large all of us agree that that unique process that we have involving the select committee enables good quality legislation to be passed. Therefore I hope the Minister does not mind because I think it is important that we spend a bit of time looking through the departmental disclosure statement as well as the regulatory impact statement.For my benefit it is noted that on 27 May the council advised the police and I would be interested to know blow by blow what exactly happened. I am sort wondering whether if this was an urgent situation and it was notified to the police at the end of May of this year we could not have brought this forward or is where we find ourselves now debating this close to the end of July simply because of the events that took place?Secondly I note also that although the bill in its second part validates related amendments in the regulatory impact statement it makes reference to legislation going back to 1974 but yet in Part 2 the bill does not refer to validating the legislation that also gave rise to it. I quote from the regulatory impact statement on page 3 where it says: “Subsequently by 2007 uncertainty had arisen concerning the extent to which territorial authorities could make use of the provisions of LGA02 to create speed limits. Recent research has revealed judicial decisions that cast doubt on the use of the Local Government Act 1974 provisions to set a speed limit.” I am not a lawyer so I am simply asking: if the matter goes back to legislation from 1974 and Part 2 which validates related amendments and legislation does not contain any reference to 1974 are we covering our t’s and i’s or not? That is simply the question I would like to ask.As I said because we are in urgency and because we are not going through the select committee process which gives us the benefit of ensuring that we have the benefit of contributions from the wider community and from Local Government New Zealand as well it would be nice for us to spend a bit of time trying to ensure that we are not coming back here in a month’s time or a year’s time again going over and validating what we failed to validate this time around. So I am hopeful that the Minister is able to respond to those questions.