Dalziel Lianne: Third Readings — 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Third Readings — 
[Sitting date: 30 March 2010. Volume:661;Page:10192. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I would like to acknowledge the Minister for Regulatory Reform the Hon Rodney Hide—New Zealand’s first Minister for Regulatory Reform—and to thank him for— 
Hon Rodney Hide 
: Best one so far. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: Yes definitely the best one so far and I know I can say that without anyone being able to challenge it at all. I thank him for the generosity of his comments with respect to the work that I did in this area. He will find out I am sure what a thankless task it is sometimes with one’s colleagues to be pushing the mantra on regulatory reform and regulatory improvement. I will come to the language of his new legislation in a minute. 
First of all I thought I would acknowledge what happened in the Committee stage of the debate on the Regulatory Improvement Bill. I felt that there was good humour particularly in the competition for references to my name. I thought that the overall winner was absolutely David Parker. He bolted in with over 20 references to my name in a 5-minute speech whereas Ms Clare Curran managed only 13 references in a 10-minute speech. Definitely David Parker was the overall winner of the competition. But what I particularly liked about David Parker’s contribution was that he deliberately mispronounced my name as “Dal-zeal” in order to emphasise the zeal I brought to the role of Minister of Commerce with responsibility for regulatory issues. What I wanted to say though is that the good humour reflected the response of the Committee of the whole House and I thought that boded very well for business. 
On both sides of the House we are prepared to talk about quality regulation and what that might mean for business for sustainable business practices and also for productivity as others have mentioned. Although I respect the Greens’ position on the issue that they raised it was not the principle of the legislation that the Greens were raising. It was the issue of whether one of the aspects of the bill should have been included in legislation of this nature and I respect that. We have a different view on the actual facts of the matter but with regard to the reason for raising it it was not the overall principle of regulatory improvement legislation. 
Again because of the good humour around the issue I do not want anyone to think for a minute that this legislation was the only outcome of the Quality Regulation Review. It was only one tiny little outcome of the Quality Regulation Review which had a lot of other outcomes but I will not go into them because it might be considered to be outside the scope of this particular debate. However it was an important part of the Quality Regulation Review. That review was a multifaceted review that asked officials and business to engage with each other in a very direct way. I was part of that as well. As I have said to the House I travelled around the country and engaged with business in a wide range of areas. I put on record my thanks to the chambers of commerce and to the economic development agencies around the country that actually facilitated those meetings. They brought to meet me business people with specific issues on their minds. So it was not just a complaint-fest about what was wrong with regulation and how much red tape they were exposed to. I think it was really a problem-solving exercise on a greater scale than most we have done in this country. But it was a small thing—the small businesses telling us how those small things irritated the hell out them and how just a little bit of effort around those small things would be a big relief to business so they could get on with the job. 
I will not repeat all the things I said in the second reading but I say that this legislation really does not realise my wildest dreams. I do not want anyone to think for a minute that I think that this legislation is good enough. It is the first set of legislation but it should have been a blockbuster. It should not have amended only nine Acts; it should have amended 29 39 69 89 or 99 Acts. That really hammered home to me how hard it is for any Government to change things that are relatively small when one looks at the big picture when it is trying to deal with the parliamentary processes that are in place. They are there for good reason but they act as a barrier to progress when there are small technical amendments to be made. This Parliament has been good enough over the years to develop the concept of the Statutes Amendment Bill but as everyone knows if one party disagrees with any one of those amendments then that one has to go. It is a very good way of getting rid of the technical changes that need to be made but anyone can disagree. Nothing can be controversial there can really be no debate about it; it is just a straightforward change to a whole lot of different statutes. And that is good—that is a great process. 
The Business Law Reform Bill is approved by the Business Committee on an annual basis or when it is required to be introduced but as people will have seen through this debate not all of those elements could be identified as business law reform. I still would like this legislation to be written as one of the types of bills that are accepted by this House as an omnibus bill. Departments should be not just invited but required to send through these small items to another department to take over the work and fix the problem. 
I tell members that I became the Associate Minister of Justice so that I could get a change made for the wine industry with respect to the Sale of Liquor Act. I could not as Minister of Commerce running the Quality Regulation Review make the tiny change needed to fix a mistake that had been made when the Winemakers Act was repealed in the 1989 changes to the Sale of Liquor Act. I think Rodney Hide will find out as he delves into regulation that the biggest barrier to getting that kind of change through Parliament is the reaction of departments. The second biggest barrier is the time that the Minister has to put into it. Giving it up to another department that has responsibility for tidying up some of these smaller regulatory matters I think would be a good thing. 
I put on the record my thanks to all of the departmental officials who came to the Commerce Committee but when I saw that cast of thousands I just about felt like banging my head against a brick wall! That was the whole reason that these sorts of changes get held up. I do not know how many there were in the room at one time but at some point they certainly outnumbered the members of the committee and all of our officials. 
It really emphasised the problem for me which is that we have to get into a position where we can trust our own departments to work a lot more collaboratively and take up some of the responsibility for these things. 
The final point I make is on the question of regulatory improvement versus regulatory reform. The health reforms of the 1990s ruined that word “reform” for me. I thought that the word “reform” meant to make something better or to look at something in a new way that would lead to an advancement of the situation. The health reforms of the 1990s absolutely ruined that word for me and that is why I do not use the word “reform”. I use the word “improvement” because members would be surprised at the number of people who will argue reform when in fact what they are proposing is not an improvement to the situation from a business perspective. Even I was surprised at the push-back on some of the very sensible suggestions that I took up on behalf of business. I will not list those suggestions here because they will be in Labour Party policy next time and the push-back will not be tolerated when we are next in Government. 
It is not always about the regulation as it appears in the legislation; it is often about how it is implemented on the ground by the regulators—and that is another story. This is an ongoing story and I will be happy to support future regulatory improvement bills even if they are called regulatory reform bills because that process is good for Parliament and for business.