Street Maryan: Business Law Reform Bill — First Reading 
Street Maryan: Business Law Reform Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:632;Page:4240] 
MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to speak in support of the Business Law Reform Bill. I just want to take a brief call on it and make a couple of points. The first is that it is an omnibus bill and although my experience in these matters is very slight it seems to me it is a very suitable and efficient use of Parliament’s time to use mechanisms such as an omnibus bill to deal with a number of related amendments to a series of individual Acts. Clearly under the Standing Orders the House is able to deal with all of these points at once and it is sensible to move in that way it seems to me when the changes are all of a piece. 
The Minister in her first reading speech mentioned five Acts that are involved in the application of this omnibus bill. I congratulate the Minister on being able to pull these amendments together in a bill like this rather than dealing with five separate pieces of legislation which would take up an inordinate amount of time and one could wish they would be collapsed into one bill. So I think this is a very good move and is a sensible and an efficient use of Parliament’s time. I hope that this House will move to practise this more often where it is relevant and useful to do so. 
There is no doubt that business law needs to be reformed. We hear constantly about compliance costs from small businesses which do comprise the majority of New Zealand’s businesses even though they do not employ the majority of New Zealand workers. This bill is this Labour-led Government’s response to some of the issues that we hear being raised by the business community particularly around compliance costs. Other mechanisms are also being used at the moment to address issues of compliance and to address other issues of reform in the business sector. The Minister has a number of activities under way at the moment that are well known to this House but probably the one that is most pertinent to the current bill under discussion is the review of financial products and providers. I believe it is undergoing a substantial consultation process and I look forward to the results of that process and to good constructive measures emerging from it that will benefit business in New Zealand. 
A number of the suggestions in this bill have come from business practitioners. Sometimes they have been from business law practitioners; sometimes they have been from enforcement agencies. But they have also been from the business community and that is a testament to the Minister’s work in getting out and talking to businesses around New Zealand. We have been attentive to business needs and have been responsive to the concerns that businesses have raised. 
The previous speaker my colleague Pansy Wong referred to some inherent cynicism that members of this House may have with regard to things that are called technical amendments. I look forward as a member of the Commerce Committee to scrutinising this bill and the submissions that come before the select committee as this bill progresses. The select committee is the place where that scrutiny is to occur and is the place to dispel any inherent or long-held cynicism about such things so we look forward to doing that. 
Amendments are also intended in this bill to clarify law statutes by removing conflicts within and between existing legislation and this bill could in fact be renamed the “Compliance Cost Reduction and Increased Flexibility Bill.” It could be a constructive suggestion arising from the select committee that the bill be renamed to reflect the true purpose and the actual achievement of the bill: compliance cost reduction and flexibility. 
We look forward as a Labour-led Government to implementing these amendments for the sake of better business in New Zealand.