Bayly Andrew: Subordinate Legislation Confirmation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBayly Andrew: Subordinate Legislation Confirmation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 July 2015. Volume:706;Page:5078. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua):It is a pleasure to be talking on this bill. As a member of the Regulations Review Committee along with my colleague who has just finished speaking David Cunliffe this is an exciting bill. Many of you do not think that but I do actually. And although it is a small bill it is important. It is even unusual in that support for it comes from the cross benches.What the bill really is about is validating and confirming Acts bills and regulations. Such orders need to be considered because whilst they are technical in many parts of them it is absolutely essential that we deal with these issues before they are revoked or simply go out of existence. Therefore what this does is it actually deals with the confirmation and validation of certain Acts.But before just going on and talking a little bit about the bill before us today I want to take the opportunity to talk about the role of the Regulations Review Committee because not many people understand its role. We have five key areas of interest. First of all we have the opportunity to examine all regulations. Secondly we examine regulation-making powers in bills and from time to time we speak to various select committees about that issue. We do investigate complaints about the operation of regulations; in fact we have done some. We conduct inquiries into matters relating to regulations. And fifthly we consider any draft regulations referred to by Ministers of the Crown and we report back on them. [Interruption] I am going to talk about that. Sometimes bills are referred to the Regulations Review Committee and in this instance confirmation and validation bills that might otherwise lapse will seek to be confirmed or validated.I just wanted to explain what confirmation and validation means. In terms of confirmation many statutes empower the making of regulations with immediate effect. However those regulations need to be expressly confirmed by an Act of Parliament within a certain time frame or they cease to have an effect. In general there are four categories of regulations that need to be subject to confirmation: firstly emergency regulations; secondly regulations imposing a financial charge or in the nature of a tax; thirdly regulations amending the empowering Act or another Act; and fourthly regulations dealing with issues of policy under the authority of the broader empowering provision.The second aspect is validation and this goes further than confirmation. Validation can also cure other defects in a piece of legislation or regulation if the manner in which the regulations were made would otherwise have led to the regulations being regarded as invalid. In other words validations can make unlawful regulation lawful. As my colleague previously referred to this piece of legislation actually introduces a new title which is confirmable instruments. This is certainly going to be an issue that the Regulations Review Committee is going to be looking at. It is a new term and confirmable instruments are normally referred to as “DINLIs” as someone just asked about before. DINLIs are in effect delegated instruments that may or may not be legislative instruments.So what we will be doing in the Regulations Review Committee is talking about the use of the term “confirmable instruments” how they apply and whether that is appropriate. There are some very important parts of the bill that deal with that and I cannot wait to have those conversations with my learned colleagues. Therefore on that basis I commend the bill to the House.