Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): For the second time this afternoon the New Zealand First Party has decided to be churlish I have got to say and vote against a bill that its members actually acknowledge is a good bill—including in particular that last case. For reasons best known only to their caucus or perhaps to Winston Peters they have decided to vote against it.That was a wholly hopeless contribution from Mr O'Rourke and it is actually a bit distressing. Mr O'Rourke is a member of the Justice and Electoral Committee and most of the time makes very worthwhile contributions on the committee including on some quite tricky matters—including might I say on some technical matters. His objection to the bill we are debating was that it is a technical bill. His conclusion from that was that it should therefore be a Government bill—except the House is perfectly capable of dealing with technical bills before it that are members' bills just as select committees are.The process that this bill has gone through in the name of my good colleague Sarah Dowie and some of our other colleagues before that is no different from any other process that a Government bill would go through. It is drafted. It goes to a select committee. There is expert advice provided by groups like the Law Society and legal experts and we also have the benefit of the Ministry of Justice officials to provide advice. The argument that because it is a technical bill it should therefore be a Government bill makes no sense whatsoever.Members opposite often complain on members' days about bills in the names of Government backbenchers. It seems to me that their basic argument is that the Government backbench should have no members' bills because it takes time away from in their words legitimate bills that they propose. It takes time away from legitimate bills like the Child Poverty Reduction and Eradication Bill in the name of Jacinda Ardern which is literally a 6-clause bill that just sets up an agency to set targets—that is literally all it does; or the gay adoption bill in Jacinda Ardern's name that proposed the Law Commission write a bill for her which the Parliament then had to unconstitutionally adopt at first reading; or Iain Lees-Galloway's trite and simplistic and symbolic bill around the thresholds. I think members really cry crocodile tears here when they turn up and say that Government backbenchers are not entitled to members' bills.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Can we just come back to this bill. It is interesting but come back to this bill.CHRIS BISHOP: I take your point Mr Assistant Speaker. I was just responding to some of the silly remarks made by Mr O'Rourke.This is a good bill and actually members of the Government are entitled to propose bills that are useful. They are entitled to propose simple bills that make important reforms. The bill we were debating just before this one a bill in my name makes a substantive contribution to free speech. A bill that I previously advanced will help to raise organ donation rates in New Zealand. There are lots of other examples of good Government backbench bills that have come before the House.Carmel Sepuloni: What does this bill do?CHRIS BISHOP: I am getting to that Miss Sepuloni. What I want to talk about is firstly what this bill does and secondly why it is important and why it is a good bill. When we are dealing with tort—and I acknowledge what the previous speaker said about thinking it was some sort of French pastry. But tort is actually derived from the French word for wrong and it relates basically to private disputes between persons. It is a bit complicated in New Zealand because of the existence of the Accident Compensation Act and our long history of no-fault insurance for accidents but we do still have the law of tort in New Zealand for negligence nuisance defamation things like that. Defamation has been in the news a bit recently for reasons that members from both parties will know about. That is also a tort. A lot of people think it is some sort of criminal wrongdoing but it is a civil remedy and is in fact a tort.The rules regarding how you deal with cross-border torts—when a company does something to another individual in another country or vice-versa—can be very tricky. Basically when you are dealing with that the courts in countries deal with three different issues. They decide whether or not the New Zealand courts can hear the case they choose what law to apply and then they apply the chosen substantive law. This very useful bill is concerned with the second of those issues—choosing what law to apply. What the bill does basically as Mr David Parker mentioned previously is codify as a general rule of New Zealand law that the law applicable to a tort will be the law of the jurisdiction in which the events constituting the alleged tort took place. So if a New Zealander or a New Zealand company is subject to a tort in say Australia the law that will apply in that particular case is the law of Australia—the tort law relating to Australia.There are differences in the common law between different countries and so it is very important that we figure out what law will apply. It will be where the tort actually took place. What the bill does is abolish what is called the double actionability rule which allows a New Zealand court jurisdiction over torts that occur outside New Zealand but only where a claim would lie under both New Zealand tort law if the act had been done in New Zealand and the civil law of the country where the act was done. It is quite a complicated issue and because it is so complicated it has been subject to a lot of criticism in the academic commentary over the years. This bill does away with it. So that is what the bill does to answer Miss Sepuloni's question from just before.Why is this important? Well it is important for the reasons I have already adverted to a little bit. It is important because increasingly New Zealand companies and New Zealand individuals are travelling we are doing business overseas and there is a lot of multinational commerce that goes on. So New Zealand companies doing business in foreign countries should be interested in this bill. I suspect 99.9 percent of them have no idea that it is going through the Parliament but actually in the unlikely event that they are subject to a tort in an overseas country then they will be impacted by this bill and it will be useful and of importance to them.The other group that will be interested is foreign companies doing business in New Zealand. Again perhaps that is why New Zealand First is voting against the bill—it does not like the whole concept of foreign companies being based in New Zealand and doing work and employing New Zealanders.Hon David Bennett: Are they voting against my bill?CHRIS BISHOP: David Bennett asks whether New Zealand First is are voting against the bill—yes it is. For the second time this afternoon everyone in the Parliament is going to vote for a bill but for reasons basically of spite and churlishness New Zealand First members are going to vote against it. Denis O'Rourke even admitted that they have no objection to the bill and some of his remarks in his speech even complimented aspects of the bill. But for reasons best known only to themselves New Zealand First members have decided to vote against it—very depressing.So that is why the bill is important. Thirdly why is it a good bill? Why is it relevant? Why is it significant? Well the first reason is that it simplifies the law relating to cross-border torts. I do not want to say it makes it massively simpler because this is a very tricky area of the law and it is one that is almost by definition and by necessity a complicated area. But it does make things simpler as I said by getting rid of that double actionability rule. As I said before the academic commentary on this is pretty clear. This proposal to get rid of double actionability is supported by the legal profession and supported by experts in the field.The second reason and this probably the more important reason is that it does bring New Zealand law into line with other countries. There are a number of countries that have already done this. New Zealand is in some ways a bit behind the eight ball when it comes to this issue. Australia has moved to this. Canada and England have moved to this. They have moved to what is known as the place-of-the-wrong" rule—in other words you apply the law of the country where the tort was committed. This bill has been widely welcomed by the legal profession and therefore I think it is something that the House with the exception of New Zealand First will support.There are a number of changes that we made at the select committee. I am a member of the Justice and Electoral Committee and my word we have been a busy committee in the last few months. We have been dealing with the family and whānau violence legislation we have been dealing with Jan Logie's bill to do with domestic violence leave we have been dealing with my bill relating to censorship and I think we have got Mr Foster-Bell's arbitration bill before us as well. We have got a lot of business to get through but we did make time to do this bill—to hear submissions on it and to go through it.We have made some changes to the Crown Proceedings Act sections so clause 4 of the bill states that the Act will bind the Crown. The Crown Proceedings Act is the Act that contains rules relating to the Crown's civil liability and of course it would usually apply to tort proceedings involving the Crown. To remove doubt we have recommended amending clause 4 to make it clear that nothing in the bill would limit or affect the application of the Crown Proceedings Act to any claim in tort by or against the Crown. That is a removal-of-doubt clause. Arguably you could say it is not necessary. We have decided to put it in. I think there was a submission from a submitter—whose name escapes me—suggesting we do that and we have decided to do that.We have made a number of other minor changes to the bill which I am sure my colleagues will be canvassing in their contributions to the House tonight.Hon David Bennett: Tell us about them.CHRIS BISHOP: David Bennett says "Tell us about them." but I am running out of time so I will leave it to my colleagues Todd Muller and Maureen Pugh to make points about the changes the committee has made.This is a good bill. It is going to be supported by all but—basically a majority of the House and I commend it to the House for that reason.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt and I do apologise that I was so engrossed with what the member was saying I forgot the 2- minute bell. But I did learn a lot."