Dalziel Lianne: Regulatory Standards Bill — First Reading 
Dalziel Lianne: Regulatory Standards Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:673;Page:19753] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I have been waiting for the opportunity that the Regulatory Standards Bill represents to express my significant level of disappointment at the Government agreeing to allow this bill to go to a select committee for the sake of political expediency. That is all we will get from the Government on this bill. I do not doubt the bona fides of the Minister of Local Government who is introducing this bill. He has stated his position on the record more than once. The history of this legislation goes back to the time when I was Minister of Commerce and he was a member introducing a member’s bill on regulatory responsibility. I admire the fact that he has consistently argued for the same result that this bill represents. 
The Government I think should be a little bit more upfront in terms of its approach to this bill. We know it will vote for the bill to be referred to a select committee at which point its support for it will end. That will mean that good people out there will make submissions on this bill both deeply opposed to it and vociferously in favour of it. We will hear all of those submissions report the bill back to the House and that will be the end of the matter. I think that is not fair. I do not think it is fair to the House the submitters or the Hon Rodney Hide who has put so much of his personal integrity on the line on this particular bill. I am not as inclined as the Government to waste the time of the House therefore Labour will be opposing this bill at its first reading and its referral to a select committee. 
The reason we oppose this bill is the principle that we do not agree with the content of the bill. The bill contains the original flaw that stymied the original member’s bill when it was introduced to the House a few years ago. That original flaw is that it allows the courts into the lawmaking process itself. The Minister can say as much as he likes that the sovereignty of Parliament is protected but we know the courts and we know that if we allow them to make declarations as to consistency they will be entering into the legislative arena and they are not equipped to do so. 
Enabling people to go to court for a statement of non-compliance will hold up the implementation of Government policy. National says that is good. What would have happened to the 100 days of action if the rules that are contained within this legislation had been set in concrete at that point? It would not have been 100 days of action. We know how many days of action it would have been. In fact it would have been 100 days of inaction followed by many more days of inaction followed finally by days of action as proper regulatory impact analysis after regulatory impact analysis was undertaken. I have not gone back to do a count of the bills passed in those first 100 days of this Parliament but not many had regulatory impact statements of any quality attached to them at that particular time. 
Moana Mackey 
: But they said they would. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: No the Government did not have them attached. National was elected on a platform and that is what politics is about. National was elected on a platform stating that it would do certain things and there was no way that it would introduce regulatory impact statements in order to back up those changes. So it is OK to have regulatory impact analysis as we end a parliamentary term but heck no way would we have regulatory impact analysis when we are starting our term with 100 days of action! 
People are assuming that it will all be one-sided about who will go to court and create this period of uncertainty. Do members think the union movement would have gone to court over the 90-day bill? Absolutely it would have gone to court. 
As the Minister who spearheaded the Quality Regulation Review I am disappointed that the Government is fixated with form over substance. That is what this bill is. We do not need a law to tell us to follow guidelines that already exist in this country. We just need Ministers who are compelled and absolutely determined to undertake all of their work in accordance with those guidelines and principles. We need Ministers who understand why the processes are important and who require their departments to stand up to the very high standards that they set for themselves. 
I think the National Party should be ashamed of itself. Based on the principles of the Regulatory Standards Bill the bill itself would fail to meet the test of responsible regulatory management. Who said that? Do members think an extreme left-winger said that? It was not. It was George Tanner who was New Zealand’s top statutory draftsman. He was the Chief Parliamentary Counsel here in Parliament. He states that “The Bill uses open-textured language” that will lead to uncertainty of meaning. According to him the bill “attempts to define good law-making by reference to a set of simple principles: in doing so it obscures the complexities inherent in them and creates the same lack of clarity and uncertainty that it seeks to prevent.” Brian Fallow stated that the principles are abstract constitutionally unorthodox and substantively unsound. 
When I launched the Quality Regulation Review which addressed regulatory barriers to business growth I knew we had to have a stronger mechanism in place to make sure that the regulatory impact analysis was being undertaken. I was not able to deliver that from the Ministry of Economic Development’s regulatory impact assessment unit. I could not do that so I met with Michael Cullen. He was the Minister of Finance and we agreed that we would put the oversight for regulatory impact analysis into the heart of Government: Treasury. That is where we shifted it to and that is where it stays. I believe that is where it has always belonged enabling departments to step up to the plate as far as regulatory impact analysis goes. 
We made sure that regulations that were being proposed were necessary and efficient and we required all our departments to really come to grips with problem identification. That is one thing that the regulatory impact statement that accompanies this bill does not do. It does not even have a proper problem definition. How on earth does one fix a problem if one has not identified the problem? 
In terms of setting out the options I want the House to know that Treasury which we have now entrusted to undertake this role does not believe that this option—a bill—is the best option for New Zealand. Are we just doing this for a figurehead reason? Treasury believes that legislation “has a status profile and educative effect that equivalent administrative measures or Standing Orders can’t quite match. But it is also more formal less adaptable to varying circumstances harder to fix or amend in response to problems or changing needs and brings with it the potential involvement of the courts with sometimes unpredictable results.” 
Treasury’s statement continues: “For promoting legislative quality there are limits to what we can expect from a legislative initiative. It is very hard to use legislation to target the quality of policy development and legislative review because the quality of these processes is not readily observed or verifiable by outsiders. It can only encourage behavioural change but the pressures incentives and biases acting on Ministers and officials that lead to poor legislation are strong. Unless it somehow catalyses a new behavioural norm the gains in legislative quality will probably be modest. … The big question marks are really the risk of unintended outcomes and the ability to manage costs if benefits turn out to be far less than hoped. These are the reasons we do not recommend adopting Option 1—the Taskforce’s proposed Bill.” and the modified version we have here today. “The likely approach and effect of court involvement is impossible to predict and we think the interpretive direction creates a particular risk of unintended outcomes.” 
This bill does precisely the opposite of what it states it intends to do and that is why the Labour Opposition will not be supporting the first reading and referral of this bill.