Shaw James: Standards and Accreditation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: Standards and Accreditation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 19 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3412. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Green): I rise to speak on the Standards and Accreditation Bill. I would like to start by commending the previous speaker Brett Hudson for the passion with which he spoke to this topic. Some of the previous speakers have mentioned the spirit of cooperation with which Commerce Committee undertook its work on the Standards and Accreditation Bill. I found that the process has been collaborative and thoughtful and I particularly want to commend the people who made submissions for the quality of their submissions because they were intelligent well-thought-out and very well-informed. They were very very useful to the work that we were doing as we were considering the bill.The Green Party supported the bill through the first stage to the select committee. We are broadly supportive of the intention of the bill. However we do have some concerns about it which at this point have not been addressed sufficiently so we will not be supporting the bill through the next stage unless those concerns can be addressed. There are three concerns. First of all does it solve the financial sustainability problem? Does it actually do the job that it was designed to do? The second concern is about the perception of independence. The third concern is about the trend of scooping up statutory bodies into the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment which the previous speaker just referred to.In relation to the first one does it do the job that it was designed to do? We know that the current system of standards design and processing actually is not financially sustainable over the long term and there are significant bottlenecks in getting through the work programme that needs to be undertaken to get New Zealand’s standards completed. However we are unconvinced that the bill as it is currently designed actually enables that process to be any more or significantly more financially sustainable over the long term or to be able to expand the programme of work significantly.When I was in the United Kingdom I was involved in a couple of standards processes with the British Standards Institute one of which was around ethical fashion—fair trade fashion—and the second of which was around smart-metering. As some of the submitters said it kind of takes the amount of time to make a standard that it takes. You know it is a process that has a beginning a middle and an end and you cannot really compress that a great deal. So the only way that you can get through many standards at once is by having parallel processing—to actually be handling a number of different standards and having a lot of different processes at the same time. A number of different submitters actually pointed to this and said that they could not see how this new system that was being designed was going to enable a great deal more work to get done in terms of the parallel processing of different standards.The second concern that we have is about the perception of independence. I accept the points that the Government has been making about the independent board and the number of checks and balances that have been built into the system as it is designed so that it does have that independence from the ministry and Ministers. The problem here is actually one of perception. A number of people have referred tonight to the submission from Standards Australia which actually said in its submission over the phone to us that if we put this system in place it could not see how it would be able to continue to cooperate with us on future standards. Given that we have such a huge level of integration with Australia and with other bodies around the world particularly the UK and European jurisdictions it is really concerning that if they perceive that our standards body is not independent they will actually withdraw cooperation from us. One of the earlier speakers tonight talked about the extent to which standards underpin our trade our consumer guarantees and so on. It is sort of part of the system of global trade that we are obviously so heavily integrated into. That is a concern that also has not yet been met.The third one which is sort of a more general concern is that this Government does have a kind of habit of scooping up independent bodies and putting them into the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment in particular. That is a sort of a trend that has concerned us. Over the last several years there have been a number of bills that we have spoken on about that and this bill kind of continues that trend as well. That is more of a general concern.We are actually open to supporting the bill but we do want really those first two sets of concerns addressed. The first is whether we can see how this actually enables a great deal more financial sustainability and whether we can we see how it really enables a significant increase in parallel processing of different standards at the same time. Does the bill actually do the job that it is designed to do? Does it fix that problem? And the second is the perception of independence. We did raise that in the select committee. My own concern with that is that essentially we were kind of told: “Well don’t worry about it. It is an independent body; it is not really a valid concern.” But I think that if it is a concern of some really significant stakeholders both inside the country and in terms of our trading partner countries then it kind of does not matter what our opinion is about it; it matters what their opinions and perceptions are. That to me has not yet been resolved. I felt that the response that we got was too sort of blasé about that.But if the Government can help us to overcome really those two primary concerns—firstly about the financial sustainability and whether it achieves the purpose and secondly this one about the perception of independence—then we would be open to changing our vote and voting for the bill in its final stages. So we will be looking for some Supplementary Order Papers from the Government in the Committee stage of the bill. Thank you.