Kuriger Barbara; White Helen; Russell Deborah; Bayly AndrewPart 2 Repeal of this ActCHAIRPERSON (Barbara Kuriger): Members we now come to Part 2. This is the debate on clause 7 Repeal of this Act" and if we can keep the questions to the Minister around repeal of this Act. The question is that Part 2 stand part.HELEN WHITE (Labour—Mt Albert): Thank you. My question for the Minister is this has become a practice it seems in this particular period of your Government to repeal Acts that they have just put in and I would like the Minister to tell me why we would do that. Why would we take away the very record of the fact that we have repealed? So this is a repeal of this Act as I understand it not a repeal of the Act before it. That's done elsewhere; this is a repeal of this Act. So could you just talk to me about why this wording is in this bill? It's a new practice as I understand it—we didn't used to do that.Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour): My question does follow on from my colleague Helen White's question and the first time I came across one of those clauses was in another bill which was being taken through under urgency actually. But it's a self-repeal clause and it would be good to get some explanation as to why we have self-repeal clauses as Helen White asked for.But the particular issue I wanted to focus on is that it's the 28th day after the date on which it comes into force—fine; 28 days after this bill comes into force it gets repealed—but I've seen other lengths of time on other bills that have been put up by the Government. I think some of the other self-repeal clauses have gone out to a year out—that was another one that I was interested in. So it's a genuine question. I'm looking for some consistency around these self-repeal clauses. They are a little new to us. They have been used before but they're being used increasingly frequently. Knowing this Minister I'm sure there's a good reason for it but I'd like to hear as Helen White said the reason for the repeal bill but also why it's 28 days as opposed to a year in some other cases. If we're going to have these consistent self-repeal bills it would be nice to have a little bit of consistency around that too.Hon ANDREW BAYLY (Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing): Well thank you. They were good technical questions. First of all why do a repeal of the repeal bill? Well some members won't be aware of it but this has been a practice for 10 years now. I've just asked for some specific notes on it. Parliamentary Counsel Office practice is that repeal bills that mainly just repeal an Act should include a clause that provides for self-repeal after a suitable time—i.e. after its work's done—or to remove clutter on the legislation website. Now examples of where this has taken place recently are the Taxation Principles Reporting Act Repeal Bill fair pay agreements the New Zealand Productivity Commission—a whole raft of them right? This is sort of standard practice. So you have to bring in the Act to repeal it because otherwise that doesn't work within a legislative sense. The bill is brought in and the 28 days is a standard repeal period actually. The reason why we are doing this so quickly—as I've said in our opening speech in the debate—is that we are very conscious that unless we repeal the Act the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment have a statutory requirement to go ahead and spend the $2 million to $3 million to maybe $5 million but also we want to be clear with industry who are probably going to be spending tens of millions of dollars to actually do that. So we want to give absolute clarity and that's why the bill will come in and then be immediately repealed within 28 days."