AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn) : I am delighted to stand and take a call in support of the Regulatory Improvement Bill. I begin by commending the Minister for Regulatory Reform, Rodney Hide, for his commitment—in bringing this bill to the House—to reducing red tape for businesses. Anyone who has worked with and around businesses or has been in business, and certainly anyone who has spent time canvassing businesses as part of his or her job as a member of this House, will understand that a lot of the red tape and compliance that businesses struggle with, and that really holds them back, are often not found in the primary Acts that this House passes. More often they come about in regulation. Although this House often has its mind on bigger and seemingly more important issues, if we really want to make steps in allowing business to get ahead, we have to do what the Minister has done and is doing through this bill, and that is look at our regulatory system and ask ourselves where improvements can be made.

This National-led Government is committed to helping business through these tough times, because we recognise that business will lead New Zealand out of the recession. Because of that, barriers to growth, and things that are going to stop our businesses moving ahead and continuing to grow and develop, need to be addressed and, where possible, removed. I suggest that removing unnecessary barriers, red tape, and compliance costs is a little bit like the journey of a thousand miles: the only way to tackle it is one step at a time. That is really what this bill does. Each change on its own is not large, and each change on its own is not going to change the platform on which business in this country is done, but when we combine them we get the beginning of real progress in the area. I also say on this point that even though the changes that this bill makes—and there are 22 of them—will not put shock waves through the business press and the mainstream media, I suggest that the people who are affected by them will find them a real, important, and significant improvement to the systems that they operate under.

I understand that the regulatory improvement process is to be an annual process and that each year we will see a bill of this sort used as a sensible way to address regulatory hurdles that are unnecessary, ambiguous, and uncalled for. The amendments can be combined into a single omnibus bill to make the most of this House’s time. As the bill progresses and we get to the Committee of the whole House stage, the bill can, of course, be broken into a number of separate amending bills as appropriate.

In this bill, as I said, there are 22 separate legislative changes. In this 2009 collection the changes before us arise in the main from the Quality Regulation Review that was carried out over 15 months through 2006 and 2007. The changes fundamentally address regulatory duplication, gaps, and inconsistencies. They aim to produce more sensible outcomes, and at reduced cost to business. Having worked as a lawyer—as I have said in this House before—I mention that there is nothing more frustrating than a regulatory system that is not clear, that has duplications, and that produces inconsistent results. I certainly support anything that goes towards clearing up some of that confusion.

I will now focus on just a couple of the changes. I will start by looking at the amendments to the Fisheries Act 1996. I have not spent much time working in this area, but when we read through what the legislation does, we see that it is a good example of why this sort of bill is necessary. This part of the bill makes changes to ensure that the catch balancing regime works fairly, efficiently, and effectively. I will outline the issue here as I understand it. When commercial fishers are balancing their annual catch entitlements—which are, obviously, part of the quota management system—at the end of the fishing year, they have to balance that actual catch with their annual catch entitlement. That seems simple enough, but there is a problem in that the annual catch entitlement register closes off 15 days after the fishing year ends, yet the balancing between the actual catch and that annual catch entitlement occurs some 20 days after year end. In most situations that works perfectly well, but what has happened from time to time is that after the annual catch entitlement register has closed for the year, administrative errors have been identified where transfers that have been lodged have not been processed. Fishers then find themselves in a situation where their catch is not balanced by their annual catch entitlement register.

That may not sound like a big deal to any of us, but when it happens a debt is generated, and if the fisher does not pay that debt, he or she risks having his or her fishing permit suspended. That permit is the fisher’s livelihood, and if we are going to jeopardise fishers’ livelihoods, we need to ensure that the basis for doing so is fundamental and robust. In this case, as I have said, there have certainly been situations where, because of administrative errors, transfers to that system have not been progressed and the deadline has passed—there is no entitlement in the Act to address that. So to put it simply, these amendments will allow for requests to be made to the chief executive for catch balancing relief, and for the annual catch entitlement transfer to be recognised even though that 15-day close-off period after the fishing year has ended, and even though that balance would otherwise be fixed.

So we have—and I think this is a good example of the work that this bill does—the removal of an unexpected and unfair consequence of a simple administrative error. This is not about the mischief this law addresses; this is not the mischief that the original Act was designed to catch. This issue does not threaten the sustainability of a catch of various species; it is simply an unexpected consequence of administrative oversight. To allow for a simple process for that problem to be addressed when it turns up is the sort of streamlining and removal of unnecessary barriers that I wholeheartedly endorse. Importantly, I note that that change, in particular, has been endorsed and supported by both the New Zealand Seafood Industry Council and Commercial Fisheries Services Ltd.

I just briefly highlight some other examples. I highlight these examples because they go back to the point I raised earlier, which is the necessity of tidying up duplication between two pieces of legislation. As I have said before, when one is acting to advise clients on their legal obligations, a situation where two unrelated pieces of legislation deal with the same area is, depending on how one looks at it, either a lawyer’s nightmare or a lawyer’s goldmine. This is because the potential for inconsistency is rife. Often the pieces of legislation have not been considered properly together when each one was put in place, which leaves clients and New Zealand businesses absolutely at a loss as to how they are to properly address their obligations.

The first example that I will look at also relates to the fishing industry. It is the amendment proposed by this bill to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (Restructuring) Act 1995. The bill would revoke section 18 of that Act. Section 18 of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (Restructuring) Act imposes a compulsory 10 percent penalty that has to be paid on any unpaid debts under the Act. I have no issue with that. It is appropriate that if a debt is unpaid, there should be a penalty. But the issue here, which through this bill the Minister has correctly identified and is working to fix, is that these matters are also penalised under the Fisheries Act. In effect, we have a double-dipping regime where for one breach clients can be penalised twice under two separate regimes. That is simply inappropriate and unfair; it is unnecessary duplication. Under the Regulatory Improvement Bill, section 18 of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (Restructuring) Act 1995 is revoked entirely. The penalties regime applicable under the Fisheries Act will apply, and fishers will not have to address a double-penalty regime.

The second issue I want to touch on in closing is the change to the Weights and Measures Act 1987, which has a similar effect in that the change addresses the fact that two separate legislative provisions currently apply to the supply of LPG in gaseous form. Those provisions are in the Weights and Measures Act and the Gas Act 1992. Once again, when two pieces of legislation address similar provisions, we will get inconsistent results and we will get confusion. I certainly applaud the work of this bill in tidying that confusion up, in this case by removing confusion from the Weights and Measures Act.

In closing, I once more commend the Minister for his work in looking at the small details. The House often forgets them and does not have time to deal with them, but they are of massive importance to the business community. Combined, the amendments go a long way towards fixing up unnecessary red tape and compliance in this country. I support the bill, and I commend it to the House.

CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) : I rise to say a few words on the Regulatory Improvement Bill. I would like to start by sharing with the House my perspective as the chair of the Regulations Review Committee—and we have just heard from Amy Adams, the deputy chair, a very able speech, if I may say that respectfully. I will cite the experience of the committee, because it provides very important accountability from this House and this Parliament back to the community as far as sub-delegated legislation is concerned. Indeed, many of the principles that we on the committee look for in our work are reflected in the bill; for example, the Regulations Review Committee recently had cause to express some real concern about whether, when a regulation incorporates, say, a New Zealand standard by reference, that standard is sufficiently accessible to citizens for it to be said to have been satisfactorily incorporated into the law, or whether we ought to recommend that the standard be contained in the delegated legislation itself so that people can have free and easy access to it. It is interesting to see that this legislation does something very similar on a point of sub-delegated legislation—a point to which I will return.

I turn now to the analogy between the work of the Regulations Review Committee on delegated legislation, and the work of this House now with this first—hopefully, it will be annual—Regulatory Improvement Bill. It is a similar way of engendering accountability—in this case, back to the business community by and large—in respect of primary legislation, which is something that this House really has not thought about a lot. Parliaments overseas have, for example, looked at the question of whether all legislation should have sunset clauses built into it. That way, we can make sure that legislation that sits on the statute book for many years does not simply get out of date. After all, it has the effect of the law of the land, yet there is no mechanism that we as legislators have to make sure that the law of the land is refreshed and always remains relevant. This bill I see as a first step in that direction, and it is a very welcome step, in the same way as the reforms put in place by that great reforming Attorney-General and Leader of the House, the Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey Palmer, spearheaded the way for a proper regime of accountability in respect of delegated legislation, one of the fruits of which is the Regulations Review Committee—which, as I have said, I have the honour to chair.

I will say a few words about the Quality Regulation Review, because that will set this legislation in context. The Quality Regulation Review came out of the previous Prime Minister’s statement in the House back in February 2006. In her statement the Rt Hon Helen Clark said: “We will also be taking a fresh look at regulatory frameworks. Feedback from business suggests that higher-quality regulation would lead to more growth and investment, and we want to engage with business on how to achieve that.” That is another point that I think is important to make. This legislation is important, as the previous speaker said, in that it tidies up bits and pieces of legislation that have presented a problem from a compliance or duplication point of view but have not warranted legislation in their own right. It is important that this Parliament looks at that sort of legislation and tidies it up. That sort of exercise will lead to greater confidence in our ability to foster the sort of growth climate we need in this country to make sure we have the kind of equitable society that we want to see in New Zealand.

But the point about the content of the bill is only half the matter; the other point is the process that led to it. It was a meaningful consultation process. If this type of legislation is to become an annual feature of the business of this House, we must not lose sight of the need to consult. We must continue to consult the businesses and the other stakeholders who are affected by legislation, and we must make sure that we are not simply imposing further problems on them by legislating for problems that we see exist. We have to make it a two-way street: to ask the businesses what the problems are, go through a meaningful consultation exercise, and then make sure that we respond in a proper and proportional way.

The beauty of the Quality Regulation Review is that that was exactly the exercise that the then Minister of Commerce, the Hon Lianne Dalziel, undertook. The review took over 15 months to complete, and involved a wide range of Government agencies as well as more than 200 businesses. The final report identified a number of issues that required the sorts of amendments to legislation that we now see in this omnibus bill. If we look at this legislation, we see that it covers quite a remarkable range of activity, but all of it is aimed at the same objectives, and they are to improve the regulatory frameworks and to reduce the compliance burden on business.

Before I talk about some of the specific examples in the legislation, I want to make this point. A visitor from Mars arriving in New Zealand just before the election might have presumed from the sorts of speeches being made during the election campaign that New Zealand was not a very prosperous, stable, or fair place to live. I think that one of the unfortunate features of New Zealand politics is that there seems to be a temptation on the part of whoever happens to be in Opposition—but certainly not the honourable members on this side of the House, of course—to run the country down, to say that the economy is in a mess, New Zealand is a terrible place to live, and we have to claw our way back up the rankings somehow. It would be useful, I think—again, to set the legislation in context—for members to recall that New Zealand does not start from a zero base in this area. It is easy to do business in New Zealand. To set up a business, for example, we are second to Singapore in the World Bank’s rankings. [Interruption] I think Mr Tremain would concede that the World Bank knows a bit about how easy it is to set up a business in the various countries in which it operates. We are No. 2. So let us not lose sight of the fact that we are doing pretty well in at least one of these important areas. Another important area is the amount of transparency that exists in New Zealand. We are up there with the Nordic countries—I think we are second to Finland—as far as our complete lack of corruption in public life is concerned.

Hon Rodney Hide: That’s because Labour’s gone.

CHARLES CHAUVEL: Mr Hide is quite right; that is the legacy of 9 years of Labour in office. It is something we can be very proud of, because that lack of corruption is something that other countries and businesses overseas would absolutely die for.

I said I would speak on some of the details of the bill, and I will move to the incorporation by reference point, which I touched on earlier. It is a well-known principle of the law that in order for people to be able to comply with the law that this Parliament makes, including regulations made under legislation, the law should be well known to people and accessible. One of the important things this legislation does is address an important incorporation by reference point when we have the standards, requirements, or recommended practices of national as well as international organisations. This change will resolve some potential issues that have arisen from the current wording of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act. The current provisions make it difficult to refer to the preferred standards of an organisation such as the British Standards Institution, because it might be considered a national organisation of the UK rather than a properly recognised and reputable international organisation. This creates unnecessary confusion and obstacles to the incorporation in New Zealand regulations of high-quality standards developed by such organisations. That situation will be addressed by this bill.

Two other matters that are dear to my heart as Labour’s energy spokesperson are dealt with in the bill. First, the gas governance regime will be amended to allow gas to be used as feedstock. This amendment is intended to create certainty that the governance regime will cover participants using feedstock gas, and to ensure that industry participants are treated consistently. The current provision in the legislation could be interpreted as exempting feedstock gas from any rules or regulations made under Part 4A of the Gas Act. Part 4A was intended to provide for an effective governance regime for the gas industry. This exclusion was not the intention of the original legislation, and it clearly creates unnecessary confusion and uncertainty.

The last point I will make was touched on by the previous speaker. It is important to align the treatment of liquefied petroleum gas under both the Weights and Measures Act 1987 and the Gas Act 1992. Gas industry consumers will gain greater clarity, and thus reduced compliance costs. That is another example of the excellent measures contained in this bill. Thank you.

Hon TARIANA TURIA (Co-Leader—Māori Party) : Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise to speak on the Regulatory Improvement Bill’s first reading. Winston Churchill and Rodney Hide have something in common, apart from looks, though Rodney is definitely in better shape. It was Churchill who famously said that if there are 10,000 regulations, all respect for the law is destroyed. Almost 80 years later Mr Hide has introduced a bill to do something once and for all to address the duplications, gaps, errors, and inconsistencies that make a mockery of our law. It is great to see the ACT Party going to such steps to implement Māori Party policy.

The Māori Party campaigned before the previous election on a commitment to support the growth and sustainability of small businesses. We committed ourselves to reduce the tax on businesses with a net income of $100,000 or less from 33 percent to 25 percent. We laid it on the line that we wanted to support collective business development strategies that encouraged local and regional self-reliance. But a fundamental principle was woven through all of these policy targets: the understanding that we would review compliance costs, with a view to their minimisation. We appreciate the support of the ACT Party in getting this policy in place with this bill. The bill sets in train some changes that make complete and utter sense.

I know that the member from National who spoke before has already referred to the matter that I am about to raise. The way the law currently works is that commercial fishers are required to balance their catch with the annual catch entitlement as part of the quota management system. They have 20 days after the end of the fishing year to do so. However, the register closes after the 15th day, so what has been happening is that fishers have been incurring a debt in the form of an invoice for that debt. That just does not make sense. If the law says they have 20 days and someone shuts the register on day 15, that is as good a reason as any to change the legislation. The late Dr Martin Luther King once said: “Just as it is the duty of all men to obey just laws, so it is the duty of all men to disobey unjust laws.” I have always heeded that bit of advice pretty seriously myself.

Also affecting fishers are the changes to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (Restructuring) Act. The changes in this bill will revoke the sections that deal with the removal of penalty fees and the ability to deduct costs from the collecting of levies. This change is not to suddenly stop collecting fees, costs, and levies—as much as I am sure that that would be a highly popular move. But the change is a good change anyway, because these costs are already covered by the Fisheries Act 1996, so there is no good reason, in my mind, to repeat them.

There are some other bits and pieces in this bill. The Designs Act will be amended so that when a design registration has lapsed because of the unintentional non-payment of a renewal fee, the design registration can still be restored just by paying that registration fee.

The only area we might need to take a closer look at relates to the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act. Tangata whenua have raised prolonged and consistent concerns around the risks to mātauranga Māori, the ownership of biological resources, the inadequacy of the existing statutory frameworks, and the fundamental significance of protecting article 2 rights to taonga katoa. The bill proposes that the Environmental Risk Management Authority should be able to delegate technical and administrative decision-making powers to its chief executive and other staff. The concern for us is to establish an ethical framework for moving forward, such as that recommended by those who are pursuing the Wai 262 flora and fauna claim. We will be keeping a watch over the select committee process to hear what submitters have to say about the ways in which this bill takes into account the recommendations of Wai 262.

We will therefore take our lead from tangata whenua in subsequent readings of the bill, but for its first reading we are happy to support it. Kia ora.

RAYMOND HUO (Labour) : Winston Churchill would have been very pleased to hear what I am going to say in the next 10 or so minutes.

Hon Simon Power: No, just 10.

RAYMOND HUO: Just 10 minutes—the member is right.

Mr Churchill was a great statesman and a great historian. Let us look briefly at the historical side of the Regulatory Improvement Bill. I congratulate the Hon Lianne Dalziel, who introduced this bill in September 2008. The Hon Lianne Dalziel made history in September 2008. She introduced a brand new bill that aimed to improve some existing laws and reduce compliance costs for businesses. More important, the bill was introduced as a result of a careful 15-month Quality Regulation Review and reflected consultation between Government agencies and 200 businesses. Therefore, I rise to support this bill both for its content and for the way it was introduced. In that regard, to some extent the bill itself may be more important than the content. The Hon Lianne Dalziel and the Labour-led Government listened to business people and set about implementing their recommendations.

That consultation is particularly relevant today, as we have witnessed in the past weeks in this honourable House the way recommendations can sometimes be ignored and how new plans are rammed through. Every member in this House knows what I am talking about. Yes, I am referring to the so-called super-city and the way these new ideas, new plans, and new agendas are being rammed through.

I come back to the bill. First of all, the way it was introduced set a good example. [Interruption] Secondly, and if members listen carefully they will appreciate this, let us look at the content. This omnibus bill makes amendments to legislation with the objective of improving the regulatory framework and reducing the compliance burden on business. The Regulatory Improvement Bill resulted from the Quality Regulation Review that was completed in September 2008. It addresses issues raised by business, Government agencies, and other stakeholders that require changes to legislation. As the Hon Lianne Dalziel said last week in this House, the Quality Regulation Review came out of the statement made by the previous Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Helen Clark, in the House in February 2006. In her statement, the Rt Hon Helen Clark said: “We will also be taking a fresh look at regulatory frameworks. Feedback from business suggests that higher-quality regulation would lead to more growth and investment, and we want to engage with business on how to achieve that.”

The bill also offers some assistance to me personally. While practising law in Auckland, prior to becoming a member of this House, I was often asked why certain companies with overseas ownership must appoint an auditor under the Companies Act 1993, yet these companies are no longer required to file audited financial statements with the Registrar of Companies under the Financial Reporting Act 1993. I did not have an answer then, but I have an answer now. The bill puts such companies with overseas ownership in the same position as other companies. We may find a similar situation in other legislation, such as the Conservation Act 1987, the Designs Act 1953, the Gas Act 1992, the Fisheries Act 1996, etc. This omnibus Regulatory Improvement Bill aims to fast track a number of legislative changes that are badly needed. The changes cover a diverse range of policy areas and legislation. They are all focused on the same objectives—namely, improving regulatory frameworks and reducing the compliance burden on business. These objectives are the unifying theme of the clauses in the Regulatory Improvement Bill.

The first reading debate on this bill began in this House last Thursday. What surprised me was the level of interjections or noise from the members opposite. This is a business-friendly bill. It is a non-controversial bill. Of course, it was a Labour bill that, according to the Minister responsible, the Hon Rodney Hide, was reinstated for very good reasons. While preparing for my speech, against those interjections or noise, I spotted a line relevant to this bill from a newsletter or press statement—or whatever it was—which my learned friend Charles Chauvel just mentioned. It reads: “New Zealand does not start from a zero base. We rate number two in the world according to the World Bank’s Doing Business survey, second only to Singapore.”

To add more, I also note that in 1999, 161,128 of our people were on the unemployment benefit. In March 2008 the number was 19,034. That is a decline of 88 percent since Labour came into Government in December 1999. New Zealand was the only OECD country to have kept unemployment under 4 percent since late 2004. I note that members opposite appear to have adopted a standard chanting slogan of “Nine long years.” I say to those members that yes, over the last 9 years Labour did what many members said was impossible. We halved Crown debt at the same time as investing in the future of all Kiwis. Thank you very much.

AARON GILMORE (National) : I rise to support the Regulatory Improvement Bill, which has been taken over by the Minister for Regulatory Reform, the Hon Rodney Hide. As other members have said prior to this call, this bill is another big step forward by this Government, which is business-friendly and wants the economy to grow faster.

Our Government cares about the level of compliance costs of business and it cares about getting rid of some of the red tape that stifles the ability of businesses everywhere to do what they want to do—serve their customers, earn a reasonable return for their shareholders, employ good people, and make our communities the way we want them to be. Communities need things like this bill to make small businesses grow faster. This is a tidy-up bill, and it is hoped that it will become an annual bill to tidy up the regulations that cause problems annually.

This bill has a broad range of amendments, 22 in total, that will wither away some of the red tape that strangles many businesses in New Zealand. Prior to becoming a member of this House I was in business, working for a large US multinational—a US$7 billion business. I was part of the Asian management team. I travelled across 14 different countries and I worked regularly in 11 of them. As some members opposite have said, I found that it is very easy to set up a company in New Zealand. It can be done very quickly—in 24 or 48 hours. The interesting thing is that the ease of doing business, day to day, is quite remarkable relative to some other countries that I operated in—in particular Hong Kong, and Singapore, which is one of the countries mentioned by the previous speaker Raymond Huo. We have seen economies grow at a rate four to five times the rate of New Zealand’s—8 to 10 percent, and even up to 13 and 14 percent. In New Zealand, economic growth has averaged quite a lot lower. One of the reasons for that, as outlined to me by my prior employers, their shareholders, and also by small businesses in the street, is the number of things they have to deal with that they do not really want to deal with—red tape, as they call it. I will talk a little bit about that.

The difference between working in Hong Kong and working in New Zealand is that it takes a little while to set up a company in Hong Kong. Once the company actually gets there, the compliance costs and operating costs are much lower in terms of what has to be done for reporting, relative to what is seen in New Zealand. I will take just one example contained in this bill that would benefit the business I used to run, and I will talk a little bit about that particular change—the change in the Companies Act 1993. That Act has a significant number of compliance costs with it, particularly when compared with other nations that I have worked in and that Mr Chauvel referred to earlier. Yes, it is easy to set up a business in New Zealand relative to some other nations, but it is not necessarily easier to operate those businesses—for smaller companies in particular, especially special-purpose entities, or overseas-owned, rapid-growth entities that are subsidiaries of overseas-owned businesses. I was pleased to see that this bill has changes to a particular Companies Act requirement for overseas businesses.

My last role, before being elected to Parliament, was as the managing director of one of those businesses. We were established to commercialise a revolutionary technology in the area of high-temperature superconductors. This business has the potential, estimated by external entities in Europe, to be a market worth US$20 billion. It is an industry that is being developed right here in Wellington. I was pleased to be the leader of that business, and today it is progressing very well. I was proud to be the leader of that business in its early stages, and today that business continues to expand. At the time of establishment one of the hardest things to do for an early-stage business is to preserve cash flow and management time. Time of management is absolutely critical, and is very hard to value. It is absolutely critical, particularly for companies at their early stages, and even if they are part of a larger overseas operation. It is in the time of the management that procedures can be at their weakest, because the focus is on cash flow, on trying to get revenue, and on trying to get the product to market as fast as possible. So it is wonderful that this bill will allow some changes for businesses like those that I used to manage, to give some degree of leniency in removing that Companies Act requirement if the business has fewer than 50 employees, under $10 million in assets, and under $20 million in revenue. Where such businesses are more than 25 percent owned by overseas operators, or where they themselves are subsidiaries of an overseas incorporated company, they will no longer have to incur the costs and time commitments of undertaking an audit, should they pass a resolution not to do so.

My own experience of auditors has been an interesting one, and I would like to touch a bit on that. I used to work in one of the world’s leading commercial accounting and advisory businesses, and having subsequently become a client of such firms, it has given me some strong understanding of the costs that such firms may put in place for a business, and the effort required for such an audit, and for the preparation of financial statements for a company, even if it is just a subsidiary of a much larger business. I can tell this House that this can amount to tens of thousands of dollars in fees paid to some sort of chartered accountant or audit firm, and thousands of hours of management time. Collectively across New Zealand, I estimate that would amount to millions of dollars of fees that could be shaved off the chartered accountant firms floating around New Zealand. More important, thousands of hours of management time could be saved, which could be used for what firms actually want to do—productive business decision-making, to make New Zealand grow faster. What a wonderful thing that would be. That would help to create wealth for the benefit of New Zealand and get our economy growing at the speed we want it to grow.

For many early-stage businesses, the window of competitive advantage is narrow, particularly in New Zealand, where we have many global competitors to operate with. That was my experience in the business I used to manage. Additional time, and costs saved early on, in the first few months or years, can be absolutely critical to the success of that business in subsequent years, particularly when the growth flowing through is exponential. The business I used to operate in had a situation where we went from a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue to millions of dollars in revenue in a very short space of time. But if I had had to spend more time and effort dealing with auditors than I really wanted to, the impact of that today would be significant.

Another change in this bill is also an administrative, technical one in nature, and it is one that I commend for being an omnibus measure. We are not just dealing with all these 22 changes of provisions in individual fashion; we are dealing with them in one group. I think that that is a good thing; in itself, it is an example of productivity in this House. Rather than dealing with 22 separate bills, we have one bill dealing with a whole bunch of regulatory changes, which will mean some efficiency gains will come from that process.

I will talk now about one of the other amendments, which would have also impacted on me in my former business career. It was talked about before by a couple of prior speakers, and it concerns the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act. As outlined, the regulatory improvements to that Act are those where many of those small businesses—particularly when they are in start-up type operation—have major problems going through some of the compliance issues for dealing with some of those hazard issues. It can take many, many months—or that was our personal experience when we had a small amount of radioactive material to deal with in one of the things we were trying to create. It took us between 4 and 6 months to get approval. We could not operate any faster; we could not change the situation. Exactly the same process in Australia took 4 days, but in New Zealand the approval took 4 to 6 months. That meant that in that time we could not proceed with the development of our product, and, as a result, that led to loss of revenue and it actually led to the loss of competitive progress for our technology relative to that of our competitors, particularly in Europe. The result of that was that we lost a contract of around US$4.5 million. That is US$4.5 million that was lost to this country because of that particular regulation, which concerned some of the things we dealt with.

Hon Maryan Street: Are you surprised? It was radioactive material.

AARON GILMORE: Yes, radioactive substances are an important sort of example. So we had a situation whereby if we had developed that technology overseas—in this case in America or Australia—we would have had approval in 4 days, but instead it was 4 to 6 months, and that was over US$4 million lost to the New Zealand economy. That is an example of why New Zealand, in the last few years, has been growing at a much lower rate than what we are seeing in China, in other countries in Asia, and in other places around the world. New Zealand has had to settle for second-best, with growth rates of 2 to 3 percent. That is all we have—2 to 3 percent—to pay for the things we want in health, education, pensions, and everything else. I must say that, instead of taking a blatant line that—as in the case I dealt with—just because something is different means that it is wrong and it is bad, we should be thinking of a practical solution and asking what is done overseas in dealing with these products. If we could speed these things up by the changes we have here—like changing the provisions in the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act—it will allow businesses like the ones I used to manage to get their products to market faster, so that they do not have to wait for such a long period of time, and those businesses will be in a position to grow faster, which will help New Zealand to grow faster.

Those are the reasons why these changes to the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act and the Companies Act are such good changes. They are wonderful changes to help our economy grow faster. Thank you very much.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to. Those of that opinion will say Aye; to the contrary, No. The Ayes have it.

Hon RODNEY HIDE (Minister for Regulatory Reform) : I move that the Regulatory Improvement Bill be referred to the Commerce Committee.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to. Those of that opinion will say Aye; to the contrary No. The Ayes have it.

KEITH LOCKE (Green) : I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I forgot that the Green Party wanted to vote against that bill.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, I have already announced the result. If you wish to have your vote counted, then you will have to seek leave. I have already announced the result.

KEITH LOCKE: I am sorry; I forgot to call for a party vote. I seek leave for a party vote.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Leave is sought by the Green Party for the vote to be retaken. Is there any objection to that course of action?

Hon SIMON POWER (Minister of Justice) : I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I apologise to the member but, if the member just indicates what his vote is, surely we should just be able to record it without having to go through the whole process of a party vote.

KEITH LOCKE: I am happy to—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: No. No, we cannot do it that way; we must have a party vote. Leave is sought for the Green Party to have its vote recorded. Is there any objection to that course of action? There is no objection.