However, few Bills have proven more polarising than the Regulatory Standards Bill, which passed its second reading earlier this week. It is now deeply entangled in its committee stages.
If you are its sponsor, Minister for Regulation and Act New Zealand party leader David Seymour, this is a crucial piece of legislation which would ultimately allow New Zealanders "to live longer, happier, healthier and wealthier lives".
However, if you are Dunedin Green list MP Francisco Hernandez (who has, amusingly, taken to calling himself "New Zealand’s third-largest party’s 14th-highest ranked MP"), it was anything but.
"I would describe this Bill as a wet fart of a dying government that’s run out of ideas, that’s incompetent of doing what everyday New Zealanders want."
Quite the image there.
Readers may recall that the Bill generated much controversy before its first readings. That ire manifested itself with 159,000 submissions to the finance and expenditure select committee, which opted to split into two subcommittees to hear as many of them as it felt it could.
"To the rest of my colleagues across the House: if you want to tax someone, if you want to take or impair their property, if you want to restrict their livelihood, well, you can still do it, but you’ll face tough questions about the impact that those actions have on people’s property rights, their freedom and the compliance of your proposal with the rule of law. It does this by introducing principles of responsible regulation into primary legislation, with a focus on good lawmaking processes and the effect of lawmaking on existing interests and liberties."
So, if passed, what would the Bill actually do? It would create a set of "principles of responsible regulation" that all primary and secondary legislation would be expected to comply with; to enforce that, it would set up an independent Regulatory Standards Board to examine the consistency of legislation with the principles.
On the surface the principles look above reproach: the rule of law; liberties; the taking of property; taxes, fees and levies; the role of courts and good law-making.
But it is what has been left out which has caused the controversy. Consideration of the environment for one; the lack of any reference to the Treaty of Waitangi for another.
Opponents also ask, not unreasonably, if this was not what parliamentary drafters were already doing anyway? And if they didn’t, wasn’t fixing it what select committees and the committee stage of Bills are for?
That, Mr Seymour said, mattered not, for the public were about to receive another layer of protection atop to ensure Parliament passed good laws.
"If we’re asking New Zealanders to comply with regulations in everyday life, then it’s only reasonable to ensure that they’re clear, consistent and meet a certain standard. When they do not meet that standard, the public rightfully expects lawmakers to be transparent about that fact."
However, Hernandez was adamant that the Bill blinkered rather than boosted transparency.
"This Bill has actually followed the opposite of the process of good lawmaking. From the abuse of urgency that this government has undertaken in various legislation such as the pay equity Bill, to cutting off the number of oral submissions, this Bill actually gives the opposite of how you would do good lawmaking in this country," he said.
He then got propositional, saying that the first thing the Green Party would do in government was to repeal the Bill.
"The second is that we will abolish the Ministry for Regulation and end the libertarian industrial bureaucracy complex that this government has entrenched in their current lawmaking. We will end the shoddiness of poor decision-making and the number of abuses of urgency that this Bill has created."
Labour Dunedin MP Rachel Brooking also weighed in, caustically noting that the last time she had spoken on a Bill promulgated by Seymour (the late and unlamented by many Treaty Principles Bill) it had been to vote it down.
"This Bill will be repealed. This Bill is vain. This Bill is ideological in a very negative way," she declaimed, making the same point as her Green colleague but in a more savoury way.
While lauding, with faint praise, the Bill’s intention to support the executive’s accountability to Parliament as being "wonderful and glorious," she swiftly went on to argue that in fact it was anything but.
"Of course, the criteria are David Seymour’s criteria. They are not Rachel Brooking’s criteria, and they are not many other people’s criteria.
"I am amazed that both National and New Zealand First seem to have been so bamboozled by this that they have laid down and agreed to David Seymour’s libertarian criteria to be used in an expensive process that will cost us all time and money and not result in better lawmaking and not, importantly, result in more power of the Parliament over the executive.
"If they were Rachel Brooking rights, they would include ones about our Treaty arrangements — of course, one of our most important constitutional documents — but, no, they’re not there. They would, of course, include something about the environment and, maybe, the principle of polluter pays — that’s something that should appeal to libertarians — but, no, that’s not in this Bill either."
Brooking also noted the existence of the Legislation Design and Advisory Committee — "I say this with admiration, some truly independent law nerds" — whose role was to look at legislation and say whether or not it will work and how it could be improved. Sound familiar?
However, despite the opprobrium of the two Dunedin MPs, the law-making process — or, to quote Brooking, "a disgraceful and stupid way to make legislation, whatever you think of the policy" — continues to drag on.
