This is an omnibus bill consisting entirely of minor, technical, and non-controversial amendments to a range of Acts, introduced under Standing Order 266(1)(f). It was enacted as the Statutes Amendment Act 2025.
Parliament advanced this bill under urgency (committee of whole house, third reading) — moving it through faster than usual, with less time than normal for public submissions.
This is an omnibus “Statutes Amendment Bill” — a special kind of tidy-up legislation that bundles together many small, technical, and non-controversial corrections to a wide range of existing Acts in one package. It makes minor fixes such as correcting cross-references, drafting errors, outdated terminology, and inconsistencies across the statute book. It touches the many separate laws it amends but is not intended to change any substantive policy or the practical rights of ordinary people.
These bills are prepared under a special parliamentary rule (Standing Order 266) that allows only changes that are genuinely minor, technical, and uncontroversial; any provision an MP objects to must be dropped. Because each change is a stand-alone correction to a named Act, the bill works as routine legislative housekeeping rather than reform. The argument for is efficiency — batching trivial fixes avoids clogging the House with dozens of separate bills. The counter-safeguard is that packaging changes together can reduce scrutiny, which is exactly why the rules let any single member strike out a clause they consider contentious.
See the Parliament.nz ↗ site for the full bill.