Dalziel Lianne: Regulatory Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Regulatory Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Sitting date: 22 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4689. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I just want to clarify the amount of time that I have to— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy) 
: Four minutes. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: Four minutes? So I have not lost anything as a result of this? OK just checking. I think that before this interruption I was identifying that the Minister of Consumer Affairs himself had spoken with probably a broad-brush approach on the whole regulatory reform repeals element of this legislation which he said gets rid of a whole stack of statutes that are holding business back. They are costing business money and they want to cut through the red tape in order to get things done. Not one single piece of that legislation exists in practice. This is a tidy-up piece of legislation that he is referring to which simply removes things from the books that are printed there in technical fact but have no practical impact at all. So it really is not a very good argument for the Minister to make and I am disappointed actually that he would make those assertions in this Committee because they really do not make any difference to the sum whole of any of the compliance issues that business might face. 
The removal through a repeal Act of legislation might remove some printed words from the statute book but it does not do anything practical to assist the small to medium sized enterprises of this country. I think to get up and say in this Committee that that is what this legislation is all about when in actual fact it does not make any practical difference—I am all for the tidying up of the legislation but I just do not think that the Minister should stand in this Committee on this part of this bill in order to make that point when I do not think it is particularly relevant to this particular part. I also do not think that it is relevant to the debate that we are having. It is not relevant and to assert that small businesses are going to be better off as a result of the changes that this legislation is making is simply an inadequate response from the Government. 
I do not think that the Government has been taking this bill seriously. That it could allow this bill to be introduced in February last year—I mean we have had a general election since then. I was the chair of the Commerce Committee and we treated this seriously. We actually dealt with it relatively quickly. We reported it back to this House in a timely fashion and this is what we are treated with. We are down to August 2012. So the Government does not think that this is very important and then we get these platitudinous speeches in the Committee from—what is the name of the guy from Auckland? 
Rino Tirikatene 
: Sam. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: Sam Lotu-Iiga was saying that this is the best thing since sliced bread and it is a fantastic Government that has been able to deliver it. Yet you just cannot for a minute see that this Government has shown an ounce of interest in this particular matter which actually does verify the fact that this is not a piece of legislation that is going to have a major impact at all. 
That being said I am pleased with the approach. But it is the approach that we developed when we were in Government. We said you need to have a particular format for regulatory upgrades that enable a number of regulatory measures to be dealt with in a single hit rather than dealing with them as individual pieces of legislation. The reason that we went down this track is we knew that Ministers were going to struggle to get their colleagues to agree and that the agricultural compounds amendment bill or whatever it is—the amendment to the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Act 1997—was not going to get the standing it needed.