This week's agenda in Parliament illustrates some of the variety of motivations that lie behind prospective laws.
As Parliament begins each new week, we chat through the agenda with the minister who sets it for the Government; the Leader of the House, Chris Hipkins.
This week's Order Paper illustrates that there are a wide variety of possible reasons behind the crafting of new legislation. Sometimes those purposes are obvious, sometimes they are more subtle.
We asked Chris Hipkins to outline the varying purposes and motivations that often lead to legislation. Off the top of his head he ran through a number of them - there are more than you might think.
For a run through some of the other highlights of the legislative week see the article here.
Here are the broad categories that Chris Hipkins outlined as motivations for bills:
An issue arises
"Sometimes issues arise, and the government of the day has to respond to those issues. So the policy will be determined, a bill will be drafted, it'll make its way through the legislative process."
This week's example is the Arms (Licence Holders' Applications for New Licences) Amendment Bill. Chris Hipkins explains the issue that arose and needed fixing:
"So in this case, ...Parliament made a decision back in the 1990s ...to do away with lifetime firearms licences, and move to a 10 year licence. What that means is that everyone whose lifetime licence was unilaterally expired in 1992 comes up for renewal every 10 years in a big block, and that creates a real challenge for the police who have to process those. And it's even more of a challenge for the police to process those now, because of the Royal Commission recommendations about adding more rigour to the firearms licensing process. So this Bill says 'let's be pragmatic about that, let's say that rather than everybody's licence expiring, when it should have, if somebody has applied for a new licence, then the existing licence will remain in place until the new licence application is either declined or it's renewed'.
The tidying, fixing and clarifying administrative bills
"So this is where we just need to keep the statute book up to date from time to time. You know, sometimes policy decisions overlap on top of one another, and the statute book can become a little messy. And so there'll be tidying up legislation all of the time."
But that's not the only kind of admin bill.
"Mistakes get made in the legislative process that (even though it's relatively rigorous), you never pick up everything. And so there'll be points of clarity…