Wednesday, 14 October 2015

WEDNESDAY, 14 OCTOBER 2015

WEDNESDAY, 14 OCTOBER 2015

Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

Prayers.

Oral Questions

Questions to Ministers

Government Financial Position—Return to Surplus, Tax Rates, and Vulnerable Children

1. CHRIS BISHOP (National) to the Minister of Finance: Does he stand by his statement that the Government’s top fiscal priority is “returning to surplus this year and maintaining surpluses in the future”?

Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): As I said in an answer to a similar question yesterday from Labour’s finance spokesman, yes, it does remain one of the Government’s top priorities. And as I said yesterday, in the sense of an economy, it does not matter that much whether there is a small surplus or a small deficit—it is the fact that Government finances are headed, broadly, in the right direction.

Chris Bishop: What reports has he received confirming that the Government has achieved its target of reaching fiscal surplus this year?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: I have seen the recently released financial statements of the Government of New Zealand for 30 June 2015, which I know all members read. Those statements confirm that the Government posted a surplus of $414 million in 2014, which means that the Government met the target it set in 2011, despite some scepticism. I want to acknowledge the efforts of my parliamentary colleagues, and also the tens of thousands of public servants who, through the last 7 years, have produced better public services for the same or less money.

Grant Robertson: Is it correct that the financial statements that he has just referred to include an underspend in the health budget of $52 million, an underspend in the education budget of $235 million, an underspend of $96 million in the law and order budget, an underspend of $304 million in the transport and communications budget, and an underspend of $97 million in the housing and community development budget?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: Can I thank the member for his generous acknowledgment of the achievements of New Zealand’s public services. I know that as the spokesman for overspends, he finds underspends deeply offensive.

Chris Bishop: How does the surplus in 2014-15 compare with fiscal forecasts inherited by the National-led Government when it took office in 2008?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: The update of the 2008 Budget forecast a decade of deficits. The 2008 Budget forecast a small deficit, which turned out to be over $3.5 billion. If the spending track had continued, we would have had Government net debt blowing out to 60 percent of GDP. That was partly a result of the fact that under the previous Labour Government, from 2003 to 2008 Government spending increased by 50 percent, at the rate of almost $3 billion per year. For the past 7 years, it has averaged just around $600 million extra per year.

Grant Robertson: Is it correct that the last time there was 3 percent growth, which was under a Labour Government, there was a surplus of $7 billion and unemployment was under 4 percent, compared with this small surplus of just over $400 million and unemployment reaching 6 percent?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: I am happy for the member to campaign on the fiscal record of the previous Labour Government, because the three elections since showed three times what the New Zealand public thought of that fiscal record.

Grant Robertson: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I asked the Minister whether the statement I made comparing those two figures was correct. I did not get an answer to that question.

Mr SPEAKER: I got an answer that satisfied me. I was very tempted to rule the question out because it was such a long question. I was very generous to the member. The question has been addressed.

Darroch Ball: Is making cancer sufferers pay for a monthly doctor’s certificate to confirm that they still have cancer one of his strategies to save money in order to get to surplus?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: I am not aware of that particular process, but I can tell the member that alongside many other strategies, one of the strategies to save money is precisely to address the long-term health and mental health needs of the 70,000 people who are on a benefit and who, under previous Governments, did not enjoy the active interest of a Government that wants to get them out of that situation and become more productive members of the community. Under our social investment approach, that is what we will be doing.

Rt Hon John Key: What previous reports has the Minister seen on the prospects of the Government achieving its surplus target this year?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: Actually, I can refer to one report from earlier this year, where a member of the House got up and said that the failure of the Government to reach a surplus was one of the biggest political deceptions in a lifetime. Actually, I think the biggest political deception was that Grant Robertson did not tell Andrew Little that it was just the forecast. Actually, the real result has come out today. It is a surplus, and it does not quite rate up there with the Watergate scandal.

Rt Hon John Key: Now that the Government is back in surplus, can I have more money for my cycleways?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: Well—[Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! I am interested in the answer.

Hon BILL ENGLISH: Like other Ministers, the Prime Minister is prone to exaggerate the benefits of the particular project and bid for more money than he actually expects to get. And because that is what he usually does, I usually say no.

Fletcher Tabuteau: What impact will an additional $160 billion to $200 billion of direct foreign investment by 2025, announced by Mr Joyce today, have upon the current account deficit?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: Because that investment would come only because it is productive investment that can generate a return in excess of the cost of capital, it would be positive for the current account.

Julie Anne Genter: Does the surplus of $414 million announced today mean that his Government could have ensured that every hungry child had a school lunch, giving them their best chance at a good education?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: Mr Speaker, it was a bit hard to hear. I am not sure—

Mr SPEAKER: Could I ask the member to repeat the question for the benefit of the Minister.

Julie Anne Genter: Does this year’s surplus of $414 million mean that his Government could have ensured that every hungry child had a school lunch, giving them their best chance at a good education?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: As the member will know, the surplus has arisen after the decision made by the Government to increase benefit levels, for the first time in 43 years, by $25 a week for families with children, starting on 1 April 2016. We hope that it will contribute towards achieving the kinds of things that the member has mentioned. Can I also acknowledge a more sensible question than that of the Labour finance spokesperson.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! That last part is just completely unnecessary and will create disorder. Further—[Interruption] Order! I certainly do not need the assistance I am being offered from my left-hand side.

Julie Anne Genter: Could the Government have afforded an additional $11 million this year to ensure that every hungry child in New Zealand got a school lunch in addition to raising benefits?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: A Government can, of course, afford any particular decision at the margin if it thinks that it is a worthwhile and effective decision. We just do not happen to believe that the school lunch programme that the member is advocating would achieve what she says or that it is the best way to achieve it.

Julie Anne Genter: Did cutting taxes in 2010 from 38 percent to 33 percent for those earning over $70,000 a year have a positive or a negative impact on the Government’s ability to return to surplus?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: I believe that it had a positive impact, not only on our ability to achieve surplus but also on income equality across the range of incomes. Tax revenue as a proportion of GDP has risen since that time, and people on higher incomes are paying a higher proportion of the tax take than they used to. So, yes, I think that the tax package was well worthwhile and positive for the Government’s accounts.

Julie Anne Genter: Does he have specific evidence that the tax cuts for top income earners did result in more people working, a greater tax take, and greater equality in the distribution of incomes in New Zealand?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: Yes, there is evidence for those propositions. You can actually see what proportion of the tax take is paid by different income groups—that is measurable. With regard to equity, I believe that the efficiency gains from the tax changes mean that we collected more revenue, and that has enabled us to make decisions like the $25 a week for New Zealand’s lowest-income families.

Chris Bishop: What particular challenges has the Government faced in getting back to surplus, and how has the Minister managed those challenges?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: I think the two biggest challenges were the global financial crisis and the Christchurch earthquake, and in both cases, the team of Cabinet and caucus and a large number of public servants applied themselves to dealing with some of the more fiscally challenging times that New Zealand has seen in a long time. The good news is that the economy is growing again at a reasonable level and the costs of the Canterbury earthquake have been dealt with in a very effective and responsible manner, particularly under the charge of Minister Brownlee. We can now look ahead to setting different fiscal parameters for managing the Government’s books in better circumstances.

Julie Anne Genter: Would implementing a revenue-neutral carbon tax to put a price on pollution support his goal of maintaining surpluses in the future, cutting taxes, and future-proofing the economy?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: In concept, yes. In fact, when we set the target back in 2011, that was the expectation—that, at $12.50 per tonne, the Government would collect something like a billion dollars of revenue from the emissions trading system put in place to a large extent under the influence of the Greens. As it turned out, the oil price dropped and we collected almost nothing. But as that price rises, the Government will benefit from revenue from that scheme, which would help either to maintain surpluses or to offset other taxes.

Julie Anne Genter: Can he confirm that it is possible to invest in services to ensure that there are no kids going hungry at school, that we are reducing carbon pollution through a meaningful price on carbon, and that the books balance, but that it just has not been National’s priority?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: Yes, it is possible to do those things, and, of course, it is politically arguable which ones you actually concentrate on. With regard to children, we have not set ourselves the objective around school lunches; we have gone for other targets that we actually think are a bit more challenging, like reducing the number of assaults on children and the number of children with rheumatic fever. But the general idea of investing wisely and achieving a clear impact is one that is at the heart of the Government’s management of Government expenditure.

Grant Robertson: Is it correct that the underspend of $235 million in the education budget includes funding that was to be directed towards special education, meaning that the most vulnerable children in our system have been ripped off by this Government?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: If the member did his homework, he would know that there is a difference between an underspend and a rip off. Underspends arise when the money has been allocated—actually, in this case, to special education. For various reasons across the $70 billion, they just have not got to spending it yet. So it is not a rip-off, and the member should study the system a bit more so that he knows the difference.

Australia—Detention and Deportation of New Zealand Citizens

2. MARAMA FOX (Co-Leader—Māori Party) to the Prime Minister: Is he concerned about the alleged human rights abuses being perpetrated on detainees in offshore processing centres in Australia; if so, what does he intend to do to seek assurances from Malcolm Turnbull that the human rights of New Zealanders who are currently detained on Christmas Island are maintained and upheld?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): If the member is referring to New Zealanders being held in immigration detention centres of which Christmas Island is one, yes, I do intend to raise this with Mr Turnbull later this week. I can assure the member that if any New Zealander alleges that human rights abuses are taking place against them in an Australian detention centre, they should raise those issues with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and consular staff will look into it.

Marama Fox: Given that Australia has just passed legislation that effectively gags all staff, including medical personnel, from talking to the media about the conditions inside those offshore processing centres, what assurances can the Prime Minister give whānau of New Zealand citizens that their family members are free from harm and abuse?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: An absolute assurance that if they take those matters up with Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade staff, then consular assistance will be provided.

Marama Fox: Will the Prime Minister apply pressure to Malcolm Turnbull and the Australian Government to ensure that New Zealand detainees are freed to their homes, as per the conditions of their parole, which have previously been determined by the Australian courts, to await their possible deportation there?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I have already made it publicly clear that I do not think sending New Zealanders to detention centres is our preferred option, although I will say it is a very longstanding practice of Australia to send people there. The issue here is that because of the policy change announced late last year, there is a great many more of them.

Hon Nanaia Mahuta: Does he believe that New Zealand citizens who have served their sentences being held in detention on Christmas Island, having their visas removed, and reportedly being treated badly reinforces the special relationship between Australia and New Zealand, or did Tony Abbott simply ignore his representation on the matter?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I do not have all of those details, but, as I have said, it is a matter for anyone to raise that matter with Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade staff, and it will be looked at. There is also a system in place in Australia to investigate any complaints.

Social Development, Minister—Cancer Patients and Korowai Manaaki Youth Justice Facility

3. ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Does he have confidence in the Minister for Social Development?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): The Minister, amongst other things, is taking legislation through the House to raise benefits in real terms for the first time in 43 years. She is overseeing a major overhaul of Child, Youth and Family to ensure it delivers the best results for vulnerable children, and under her watch the number of sole parents on a benefit is now the lowest since 1988 and 42,000 fewer children are living in benefit-dependent households compared with only 3 years ago. So, yes, I have every confidence in the Minister for Social Development.

Andrew Little: How does he think someone with cancer feels when they are repeatedly asked what they are doing to find work, and repeatedly have to pay for medical certificates to get the benefit they are entitled to?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Firstly, we recognise that people with conditions like cancer are going through very difficult times and often cannot work, which is why they are able to go on a benefit. It has always been the case that a medical certificate has been required, and, in fact, earlier this year, actually, we made it more straightforward for medical staff—doctors—to lodge directly electronic medical certificates with Work and Income.

Andrew Little: Does he agree with the Minister that the Government cannot give cancer patients special treatment because there would be “other groups of people that would come forward and say, ‘we need special consideration too’.”?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: The point the member was making was that if somebody is claiming this particular benefit, then it has been a longstanding practice for everybody in that position, actually, to provide a medical certificate.

Andrew Little: Would it be such a tragedy if no New Zealander with a chronic or terminal illness had to continually fill out forms and pay for medical certificates to get the help that they deserve?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: The member does not understand the system. If someone has terminal cancer, then they are not on this particular benefit and they are not required to get a—

Hon Members: They are.

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: No, they are not required.

Andrew Little: Are he and his Government so heartless that when people are going through one of the most difficult times in their lives, all it can do is put barriers in the way of their getting the help they deserve?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I just reject that proposition.

Andrew Little: Does he accept that all New Zealanders can see he is prepared to respond to difficult issues affecting vulnerable people only once it hits the media?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: No, it has been a longstanding practice to require medical certificates.

Andrew Little: Why does he not stick up for New Zealanders, just for once, and treat people who have cancer with dignity?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: This Government does.

Darroch Ball: Does he have confidence that the Minister is addressing serious allegations of unsafe practices at the South Auckland Child, Youth and Family - run youth justice facility Korowai Manaaki?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I simply do not have the details of that. The member would need to refer that to the Minister.

Darroch Ball: How can he have confidence in the Minister when she states in answer to a written question that “the ministry is investigating the allegations regarding Korowai Manaaki, and any concerns are being addressed”, yet my attempt to table a document in the House detailing those allegations was blocked and there has been no further communication from the Minister to me about those allegations she purports to already be addressing?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Firstly, I have absolute confidence that the Minister stands by her words and follows her actions. If the member really feels strongly about the allegations he is making, he should feel free to walk outside those doors and say them. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Question—[Interruption] Order! [Interruption] Order! When I call for order I expect that, and certainly not a continued barrage, then, from one New Zealand First member of Parliament.

Business Growth Agenda—Investment

4. JAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany) to the Minister for Economic Development: What is the Government doing to encourage investment and growth in the New Zealand economy?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Economic Development): This morning I released the updated chapter of the building investment work stream of the Government’s Business Growth Agenda. Attracting high-quality business investment into all parts of New Zealand is critical to strengthening our growth rate and lifting productivity, and it is an essential ingredient for building an innovative and connected economy. The investment chapter has a range of projects to ensure that New Zealand has the right conditions to encourage more business investment, and builds on recent work to ensure New Zealand has robust financial market regulation to support domestic capital growth and investor confidence. Although capital inputs into our tradable sectors have grown around 2.5 percent for the last couple of years, we need to lift that to around 4 to 5 percent per year to achieve the level of export growth we are targeting in the Business Growth Agenda.

Jami-Lee Ross: What work is under way to encourage more investment in New Zealand?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The building investment report sets out eight new projects alongside 23 that are currently under way and the 36 that have been completed since 2012. One of the Government’s priorities is, of course, to rebuild the Government’s balance sheet, which we are achieving under the excellent fiscal stewardship of our Minister of Finance. We are working very hard to encourage more investment in all parts of New Zealand through the roll-out of the new Investment Attraction Strategy, the details of which were announced today, and regional investment profiles. We are increasing international linkages to encourage more foreign investment through agreements like the Korean free-trade agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Jami-Lee Ross: What else is the Government doing to encourage more investment, jobs, and growth in the New Zealand economy?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Just last week, alongside Amy Adams and Paul Goldsmith, we released the building innovation Business Growth Agenda chapter, outlining the Government’s strategy for developing New Zealand into a hub for high-value, knowledge-intensive businesses. That included an ambitious new target of peak rural broadband speeds of at least 50 megabits per second by 2025, with 99 percent of New Zealanders able to access broadband at that speed, with the remaining 1 percent able to access up to 10 megabits per second, up from dial-up or non-existent speeds when we came into office. Last month Tim Groser and I released the building exports chapter of the Business Growth Agenda, the Government’s strategy for strengthening trade relationships with all our key trading partners. Of course, that one included as an initiative the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which has now been signed. The building exports report positions this Government, like other National and, indeed, Labour Governments before it, as unashamedly supportive of free trade.

David Seymour: Would it not be cheaper, quicker, and easier to simply stop chilling the confidence of foreign investment with arbitrary decisions at the end of the Overseas Investment Office process such as that applied to the Lochinver Station sale?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I think the member will find, if he looks into it, that he is incorrect.

David Seymour: Supplementary question.

Mr SPEAKER: No, the member has had two supplementary questions this week.

Trans-Pacific Partnership—Pharmac

5. Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour) to the Minister of Health: Does he stand by all his statements relating to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): Yes, in particular my statement that Labour needs to decide whether it supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership or not and that Annette King should apologise for her scaremongering that people would die because of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—absolutely outrageous.

Hon Annette King: Supplementary question—

Hon Member: Say sorry.

Hon Annette King: The only people who need to apologise sit over there.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The interjections were certainly not helpful. I invite the member to continue her line of questions.

Hon Annette King: Will Pharmac under the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement be required to allow the pharmaceutical industry to use evergreening patents—secondary patents held by the owner of the original patent—which extend monopoly periods for medicines?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: All I can say is that there will be no change to our policy settings and therefore no increased costs.

Hon Annette King: Mr Speaker, I did not hear it.

Mr SPEAKER: I am going to invite the member to ask the question again, and then I am going to ask quite strongly that the interjection level from the left-hand side quieten considerably so that we can all hear the answer.

Hon Annette King: Will Pharmac under the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement be required to allow the pharmaceutical industry to use evergreening patents—secondary patents held by the owner of the original patent—which extend monopoly periods for medicines?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: What I can say is that there will be no necessity for a change to our policy setting and therefore no necessity to extend the patent period. So we do not need to change any policy settings and there will be no increased costs.

Hon Annette King: Has he been told what data protection means under the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement; if so, what impact will such a mechanism have on a generic manufacturer of pharmaceuticals?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Yes, I have been told what it means; and the impact will not mean that we have to make any change to our policy settings, because the 20-year patent protection period remains in place and there will be no extension to that protection period. So there will not be any change in the ability of New Zealanders to access generic medications. So all your scaremongering comes to nothing.

Hon Annette King: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I asked what the mechanism did to the generic manufacturers of pharmaceuticals—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member did not. She asked two questions. The first question was whether he had been told what data protection means, and that was answered immediately.

Hon Annette King: What analysis of the financial impact of data protection mechanisms to be used to deliver comparable outcomes under the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement has been undertaken?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: There has been extensive financial analysis by experts in the field. The key point is that we do not need to make any change to our policy settings, and there will be no incurred costs. So the member going around saying that costs would increase by a billion dollars is completely untrue.

Hon Annette King: Point of order, Mr Speaker. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! To Dr Megan Woods I say that a point of order has been called. That means she will remain silent.

Hon Annette King: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. You will know that that was an incredibly straight question about what analysis there had been on the financial impact. He went straight into attacking me personally.

Mr SPEAKER: No, he did not. He went immediately to answer the question and said there had been extensive analysis, using the words “financial analysis”, and then went on with an additional answer to the question that was certainly unhelpful, but the question was addressed.

Hon Annette King: Supplementary question—[Interruption] Oh, come on. Give him a hand. Will the Government commit to an independent health impact assessment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement to be made available before the agreement is signed?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: There is going to be an overall national interest assessment, so that will incorporate those factors.

Trans-Pacific Partnership—Pharmac

6. SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki) to the Minister of Health: What impact will the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement have on New Zealand’s public health system?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement preserves New Zealand’s public health system, in particular, the fundamentals of the Pharmac model. Pharmac will incur very minor additional costs relating to transparency provisions. As promised, the public will still pay no more than $5 per subsidised prescription item. Furthermore, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement will significantly boost New Zealand’s export-dependent economy to the tune of $2.7 billion a year by 2030, allowing future Governments greater choices about investment and social services such as health care.

Simon O’Connor: What reports has the Minister seen about the costs imposed on New Zealand’s health care system as a result of the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I am advised that the costs to Pharmac from the Trans-Pacific Partnership are very minor, with extra transparency costs amounting to around $4.5 million in one-off costs and $2.2 million per year in ongoing operating costs out of the nearly $16 billion health budget. I have seen other reports claiming that the cost to New Zealand’s budget from the Trans-Pacific Partnership would be $1 billion, and that people would die waiting for access to medicines. New Zealanders will be relieved that these scaremongering claims from the Labour Party are totally without foundation.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! That answer has gone quite far enough.

Simon O’Connor: What was the context for the “constructive ambiguity” quote in relation to Pharmac and the Trans-Pacific Partnership referred to by the Opposition in question time yesterday?

Mr SPEAKER: I will allow that question but I will be listening—[Interruption] Order! I will allow the question but I will be listening very carefully, and if it is an attempt to attack the Opposition the Minister can expect to be sat down.

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: The Minister of Trade provided a briefing to members of Parliament during which he used the phrase “constructive ambiguity”, meaning that the Trans-Pacific Partnership requirements around biologics are framed in such a way that New Zealand meets those requirements. Of course, there is ambiguity around the Labour Party stance on this issue.

Hon Annette King: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Could I ask you to go back and consider the tapes from yesterday when the Minister accused me of making up this quote from the Minister of Trade but used it today in a question to justify an answer?

Mr SPEAKER: I will—[Interruption] Order! No, I do not need any assistance. Well, I do need some assistance here. I need the ceasing of the interjections while I am on my feet. I will go back and have another look, but as I read the transcript from yesterday the Minister did not actually say that the member had made something up. It was not words to that effect, but I will have another look at the transcript from yesterday and certainly I will be reviewing the transcript from today.

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Speaking to the point of order, Mr Speaker.

Mr SPEAKER: No, I have dealt with that matter. If the member has—

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Well, I have got the transcript here. I can solve—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! I do not need that from the member. [Interruption] Order! I am very tempted to ask the Minister to leave this Chamber. It is becoming a bit of a habit of this Minister to continue to create disorder in this House. On this occasion he can stay, but if it happens again my patience for this particular Minister will not last very long, and that is the last warning I will be giving the Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman.

Syria—United Nations Mandate for Intervention

7. Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by his statement, “That’s really a matter for them”, when asked whether he was concerned about any of the United Nations Permanent Five members bombing Syria without a UN mandate?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): Yes. I will not speak for any of the member States involved. They have themselves put forward their own reasons for their actions and the grounds that they are relying on under international law.

Dr Kennedy Graham: Given that nobody is asking the Prime Minister to speak for other States, how can he none the less reconcile his statement with New Zealand’s commitment as a member of the UN Security Council to uphold the United Nations Charter?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Because in relation to the question that the member asked me yesterday and was part of the primary question today, the member States in question do believe they are observing the United Nations Charter.

Dr Kennedy Graham: Is abrogating responsibility on serious issues such as aggression without a UN mandate the kind of leadership he was talking about when campaigning for a seat on the United Nations Security Council?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: We are not, as I said before, and the member needs to listen carefully. Those member States have quite publicly stated that they believe their actions are consistent with the United Nations Charter. The member should know that.

Dr Kennedy Graham: How can the Prime Minister say he is showing leadership in the face of a refugee crisis out of Syria when he will not increase the refugee quota, takes a minimal emergency intake, and when under his watch New Zealand has dropped from 83rd to 90th per capita in terms of refugee intake?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Because we are.

Government Financial Position—Crown Debt

8. GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) to the Minister of Finance: What is the dollar amount of gross and net core Crown debt and by how much have these grown since he became Minister?

Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): When National came into office, net debt was $10 billion and gross debt was $31 billion. In 2014-15 net debt was $61 billion and gross debt was $86 billion. On planet Earth we had the global financial crisis and the Christchurch earthquake. On “Planet Labour” nothing happened.

Grant Robertson: Is it correct that the Government is paying $13 million a day in interest on this debt or, to put it another way, he is paying nearly as much in interest a month as his surplus for the year?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: That may be right. Those numbers, of course, are too high, which is why I was surprised last week when the member was advocating the Government borrow more money to invest in international sharemarkets.

Grant Robertson: Do his Budget documents state that he will not pay down any of this debt until the 2019 financial year?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: That will be updated in the next round of forecasts. It is possible that generating a cash surplus to pay down nominal net debt will actually be a bit of a challenge. I know the member will support every step the Government takes to restrain expenditure so we can reduce that large growth in debt.

Tim Macindoe: What alternative approaches to managing Crown debt has the Minister seen?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: I have seen alternative proposals that would require the Government to expand its borrowing programme—one just the other day was that the Government should borrow around another $12 billion to invest in international sharemarkets, which are particularly volatile, and that proposal came from the member who now says we have got too much debt.

Grant Robertson: Is it correct that his failure to pay down any of his $60 billion debt until 2019 is the reason he will not resume contributions to the Superannuation Fund until 2021?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: That, I think, is a sequence outlined in the Budget—that when the Government has some spare cash it will put it into the Superannuation Fund. The way to bring that forward would be to slash and burn spending. That is not the Government’s intention, but if the member has some more intelligent suggestions than that, we would be happy to listen to them.

Trans-Pacific Partnership—Dairy Industry

9. BARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country) to the Minister for Primary Industries: What reports has he received on how the Trans-Pacific Partnership will benefit New Zealand’s dairy industry?

Hon NATHAN GUY (Minister for Primary Industries): Dairy will have the biggest tariff savings of any sector from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. When fully implemented, the potential savings will be around $102 million per year—roughly 40 percent of the overall gains. New Zealand’s dairy exporters will have preferential access to new quotas in the United States, Japan, Canada, and Mexico, in addition to tariff elimination on a number of products. Although we are disappointed that there was not agreement to eliminate all dairy tariffs, the Trans-Pacific Partnership still gives us better access than we have now.

Barbara Kuriger: Apart from tariff reductions, what other benefits will the Trans-Pacific Partnership deliver to the dairy industry?

Hon NATHAN GUY: Good question. Importantly, the Trans-Pacific Partnership also reduces non-tariff barriers to trade and ensures fair access for New Zealand exporters in Trans-Pacific Partnership countries. It will give our exporters more certainty at the border, with customs, food safety, and biosecurity rules more transparent across the 11 countries. This means fewer delays for goods to clear at the border, more reliability of supply, and fewer compliance costs for our exporters.

Workplace Health and Safety—Risk Categories and Agriculture

10. IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North) to the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety: Was he advised by officials that agriculture was in the highest risk category, and dairy cattle farming in the second highest, when determining which industries should have health and safety representatives; if so, why did he remove them from the list?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment): on behalf of the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety: No. The highest-risk category was coal mining, at 322 fatalities per 100,000 employees. The second highest was forestry, at 77. Fishing and hunting was at 35. Agriculture was at 12 fatalities per 100,000 workers. It is also a bit arbitrary where you draw the line between risk categories, and that is why the Government is currently consulting on the draft regulations.

Iain Lees-Galloway: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. This was a question on notice, and the question asked whether he was advised by officials that agriculture was in the highest-risk category. He has not addressed that question.

Mr SPEAKER: I agree entirely with the member. The best way forward is for me to allow the member two additional supplementary questions. [Interruption] Order! If the Hon Nick Smith wishes to stay to answer the balance of the question, I suggest that he stop criticising me.

Iain Lees-Galloway: Was the Minister advised by Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment officials that agriculture was in the highest-risk category?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: No. The advice from the department, which I have received and have before me, is that the highest-risk category was coal mining. The second-highest risk category was forestry. The third-highest risk category was fishing and hunting. Agriculture was the eighth highest.

Iain Lees-Galloway: I seek leave to table the advice given to the Minister, which demonstrates that agriculture is in the highest-risk category.

Mr SPEAKER: On this particular occasion, I will put the leave. Leave is sought to table that particular document. Is there any objection? There is not. It can be tabled.

Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: I seek the leave of the House to table the advice that was received by the Minister on the categories and the risk ratings applied to them by—

Mr SPEAKER: Can I just clarify whether that is the information that we have just had tabled by Iain Lees-Galloway?

Hon Dr Nick Smith: No, it is very different.

Mr SPEAKER: There is no point in tabling it twice.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Well, I think that is the issue.

Mr SPEAKER: Then I will put the leave as well, and then members will have all the information they need in order to sort it out for themselves. Leave is sought to table the particular documentation presented by the honourable Minister. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.

Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

Iain Lees-Galloway: When his office emailed the principal policy adviser at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, outlining his own criteria for determining high-risk industries, was he aware that he was setting the criteria at exactly the right level to exclude dairy farming?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I cannot state what the Minister was or was not aware of, and I apologise to the member. If you wish to put it to the Minister in writing, I am sure that he will respond when he is present.

Iain Lees-Galloway: Did he read the email from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment dated 17 August 2015 that warned that his proposed regulations would define minigolf, worm farming, and being a TV anchor as high risk but the entire construction industry as low risk; if so, why did he still release the list unamended 2 days later?

Mr SPEAKER: Hon Dr Nick Smith, either of those two supplementary questions.

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I cannot comment on what exact details the Minister had or had not read. What I would note is that the actual consultation risk categories that are currently out and that have been published by the Minister are, in my view, a very sensible allocation of the level of risk and do not include any of the anomalies that the member has referred to.

Iain Lees-Galloway: I seek leave to table an email from the ministry’s policy adviser to the Minister’s office, dated 17 August, which outlined the issues with the regulations that he had set.

Mr SPEAKER: I will put the leave. Leave is sought to table that particular email. Is there any objection? There is none.

Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

Iain Lees-Galloway: Why did he say to the media that he had looked into the groupings of various industries but “not as closely as the media clearly have”, when his officials had looked that closely and specifically warned him that his approach had consequences that may be “unintended”?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The first point I would make is that the regulations are subject to consultation. The regulations that have been put out for consultation do not include any of those anomalies. Those anomalies exist when you analyse the data down to very, very small groups of occupations where there are one or two employers only. Inevitably, the data is not going to be reliable, and you should not base the risk categories on those very small sample sizes; neither has the Minister done so in the regulations that are being consulted on.

Iain Lees-Galloway: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. That was a reasonably straight question—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! No, I listened very carefully to the question: why did he say something to the media when the officials said something else? He said that he thought the regulations were then subject to consultation. That is an answer that addresses the question.

Iain Lees-Galloway: Why did he say to Cabinet that “I don’t believe it is onerous to have health and safety representatives in most cases.” while recommending that if there were to be an exclusion for small businesses, it should apply to businesses with one to five employees rather than the much broader exclusion of 20 workers, which Cabinet ultimately agreed to?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The Minister provided that advice, I am sure, because he wants to provide improvements in health and safety and also wants to be practical for small businesses. Members on this side of the House do not think that for the majority of our farms that employ one or two people, having an election for a health and safety person is actually that practical. What we think is practical is the requirement that the Minister has put in the law, and that is that every employer—small or large, farm or not—has to lift their game around occupational safety and have workers participating in health and safety programmes.

Iain Lees-Galloway: Does this whole episode of ignoring officials’ advice and ignoring the advice of trade unions and business organisations not indicate that this Government has no moral compass and is willing to put people’s lives at risk to suit National’s vested interests?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: No, no, quite to the contrary. I have heard members opposite give lecture after lecture that they actually understand small business. Well, I say to members opposite: if you think that having an election over who might be the health and safety representative in the average farm in New Zealand, where there are two workers, that just shows how impractical those members are in trying to apply better workplace safety laws for this country.

Trans-Pacific Partnership—Release of Information and Regional Development

11. FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First) to the Minister for Economic Development: How would the Trans-Pacific Partnership help regional New Zealand?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Economic Development): I thank the member for his question. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is exciting news for businesses across New Zealand but particularly for those in regional New Zealand. The Trans-Pacific Partnership allows access for New Zealand exporters to up to 800 million potential customers, and covers 40 percent of existing global trade. In the US, the world’s largest economy, and Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, and across the rapidly developing Asia-Pacific region the Trans-Pacific Partnership will benefit all our exporters by opening up fairer access to more markets, whether they are farmers in Hawke’s Bay or Manawatū, wine growers in Central Otago, or manufacturers in Waikato. As a Government we back our farmers, our horticulturalists, our wine growers, and our manufacturers. We are confident that they are equal to the best in the world, and with this agreement they get access to big consumer markets to compete on a more equal footing with local suppliers. And this is exactly the same answer to the same question yesterday.

Fletcher Tabuteau: What happens to the New Zealand regional economy if Trans-Pacific Partnership signatories fail to complete necessary domestic procedures within 2 years after the initial signing?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: If individual countries do not accede to the agreement, then obviously they will not be participating in it, which would be the effect of the status quo as it is now. But I strongly believe that those countries will accede to the agreement because of the obvious benefits that that agreement brings.

Fletcher Tabuteau: I seek leave to table an article dated 13 October—

Mr SPEAKER: The source of the article, please?

Fletcher Tabuteau: —a subscription-only trade journal, so it is not widely accessible—outlining this process, which is completely contrary.

Mr SPEAKER: I will accept the member’s word. Leave is sought to table this particular article. Is there any objection? There is objection.

Fletcher Tabuteau: What happens to the deal, given Mr Groser told Q+A that everyone should wait until the officials from 12 countries can do this Herculean task of getting the text—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! I need a supplementary question. It is not a chance to make a speech. Can the member rephrase the question in line with the Standing Orders and ask it.

Fletcher Tabuteau: If he agrees with this statement, what would be the conclusion if the Spanish or French versions of this agreement contest the English version?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Well—

Hon Paula Bennett: Bonjour.

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: There is quite a tradition of translation, actually, that occurs between languages, as a general rule. So, for example, when I say “Bonjour” to you now, I mean “Hello”—

Hon Tim Groser: Hola.

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: —and “Hola” would be Spanish. You know, there are legions of people whose job it is to translate—

Fletcher Tabuteau: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Is the member going to attempt to raise a point of order?

Fletcher Tabuteau: Yes, that was my point—

Mr SPEAKER: Then I will hear the point of order, but I expect to hear it in silence.

Fletcher Tabuteau: I just wanted an answer to the question.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The difficulty is that I did not understand the question, because it was such a long-winded question. If the member could take some time out to practise asking supplementary questions—[Interruption] Order! I do not want comment from the back half of the House on my right-hand side. I go back through the questions—yesterday, particularly. They are too long winded. The member would do himself a favour if he could sharpen up his supplementary questions so I can assist him to then get an answer that is satisfactory.

Ron Mark: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Any member has a right to raise a point of order, but I just want to be fair to the member that if he is in any way attempting to relitigate where I have just been with a ruling, I will be most upset.

Ron Mark: Trying to assist my colleague and asking for your indulgence, his question started with the word “what”. He went on to quote word for word what a Minister had said—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member is now—[Interruption] Order! The member is relitigating just where we have been. If the member wants to have a look at the Standing Orders, they describe quite clearly that questions are meant to be concise. It does not require the length of quote the member was putting into his question. I can assist the member to get answers to his question when it is simple and concise, but the way it was worded is unsatisfactory and is not in line with the Standing Orders. The fact that it started with the word “what” does not suddenly make it correct. If the member has further supplementary questions, then we can move on. I hope they are going to be in line with the Standing Orders.

Fletcher Tabuteau: Supplementary question—[Interruption]—when these guys are ready. Regional New Zealand needs to know what the Japanese tariff on beef under the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement will be if beef imports into Japan from Trans-Pacific Partnership countries exceed 550,000 tonnes during the first year of implementation.

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Those details will all come through in the finalised text. But I can tell the member that over time the beef tariffs for New Zealand into Japan drop from 38.5 percent to, I think, around 9.5 percent, which by anybody’s measure is a great step forward for beef farmers importing into Japan.

Fletcher Tabuteau: How will regional New Zealand benefit from the Trans-Pacific Partnership if the current account deficit deteriorates even further due to imports far exceeding exports—four to one, for example—as with the ASEAN free-trade agreement?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Aside from the fact that, actually, New Zealand consumers benefit from cheaper imports as well—but let us leave that aside—the important point for the member, perhaps, and the salutary example, would be the China free-trade agreement, which has had one of the bigger impacts on the tradable economy in recent years. Actually, since 2008, I think, the current account deficit, from memory, is about 8.5 percent of GDP. Currently it is around 3.5 percent of GDP, despite the fact that we set up a big China free-trade agreement. So although individual countries will not necessarily have trade balances—either positively or negatively in terms of the exports and imports—on the whole New Zealand greatly benefits from being connected to the world and having the opportunity to sell its products on the world stage. I appreciate that the member does not necessarily agree with that, but that actually is the history and the prospect for regional New Zealand.

Clayton Mitchell: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Could I hear your reading on what length of question is actually a reasonable one, for the future? We have had questions in the past that have been 70-odd words long, when this one that we have just had was only 40 words long. It would just be good to have some—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Members should carefully look at the Standing Orders, particularly Standing Order 380. There is no particular word count as to what length a question or answer will be. I will judge that on each occasion. But I am trying to be of assistance to the member who was asking the supplementary questions. If he tightens them up, I can then assist him in getting answers. When it is a very long-winded question, it gives Ministers a very wide ambit in answering the question, and often a point of order is raised then that the question has not been addressed to the satisfaction of the members. I am trying to assist the members.

Ron Mark: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

Mr SPEAKER: Fresh point of order?

Ron Mark: Thank you—it is fresh, yes. Standing Order 386—[Interruption] In silence, David Bennett—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. Now I will hear what I expect to be the point of order—I know exactly what it will be, but will still listen to it, very, very briefly.

Ron Mark: Standing Order 386, again, as you know, Mr Speaker, refers to the answers being concise. What we had was a perfect example of how an answer can be—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! No, the member will resume his seat. [Interruption] Order! The member needs to listen when I try to assist, particularly New Zealand First members. When you get a long-winded question, it then gives the Minister a far wider ambit in answering it. A question as wide as the member asked—talking about the current account deficit in relation to the Trans-Pacific Partnership—gave the Minister a very wide ambit. As I have mentioned to Mr Mark on more than one occasion, I am the adjudicator. I will decide when the answer has gone on for too long, not Mr Mark. [Interruption] No, I have heard quite enough from the member. [Interruption] Order! Question No. 12, Joanne Hayes.

Trans-Pacific Partnership—Environmental Regulations

12. JOANNE HAYES (National) to the Minister for the Environment: What reports has he received on the environmental components of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and how do these compare with other free-trade agreements entered into by New Zealand?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment): I have received a report by the Ministry for the Environment, and it states that the Trans-Pacific Partnership sets a new benchmark for environmental provisions in trade agreements and goes significantly further than the current eight agreements that New Zealand is party to. The most significant new features cover conservation of flora and fauna; illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing; protection of sharks, seabirds, turtles, and marine mammals; transition to a low-carbon economy; tackling alien invasive species; and also include provisions in liberalising trade in both environmental goods and services.

Joanne Hayes: How will the Trans-Pacific Partnership strengthen environmental regulation across the 12 partner countries, and what other tools does it support to ensure that there are environmental benefits from the agreement?

Mr SPEAKER: The Hon Dr Nick Smith, either of those two supplementary questions.

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: A key difference from previous trade agreements is that this is the first in which the environmental chapter is enforceable and includes dispute settlement processes. This means that if countries are not meeting their obligations around addressing issues like illegal fishing, or conservation of endangered species, or protection of the ozone layer, there is actually an enforcement mechanism that strengthens those environmental components. The second part is that the Trans-Pacific Partnership also puts an obligation on countries to encourage tools like the Marine Stewardship Council and Forest Stewardship Council certification schemes for products like New Zealand’s important fish and forestry exports. That is important for New Zealand and creates opportunities, because we manage both our fish and our forests more sustainably than most—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The answer is very long.

Joanne Hayes: What response has there been from environmental groups to the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The World Wide Fund for Nature has noted that the Trans-Pacific Partnership goes further than any other trade agreement. It says that it is a game-changer in addressing pressures on fisheries, on wildlife, and on forests. The reality is that environmental issues like protecting our forests, oceans, and wildlife actually do require a coordinated international response, and I would encourage opponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership to take note of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s advice and actually support what makes not just economic sense but good environmental sense.

General Debate

General Debate

Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): I move, That the House take note of miscellaneous business. It has been a great week for New Zealand and a terrible week for the Labour Party—because New Zealand got the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a surplus, and the Labour Party got the best advice Grant Robertson could give it. I will tell you why that was bad.

Let us just look at the Trans-Pacific Partnership: 800 million potential customers; 40 percent of total world trade covered by the Trans-Pacific Partnership; and small and medium sized businesses all around New Zealand welcoming the prospect of being able to sell their products into large, wealthy markets where we could not sell them before without the tariffs. So what did Labour members do? Well, they have spent a week trying to work out how to snatch jobs and growth and better incomes from small businesses and regions all around New Zealand. But now it is even more cunning. Now they are working out how to look like they meant to, even if they do not succeed. So now they want to look like they failed to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and actually support it. Only Grant Robertson could have thought of such a stupid, damaging short-term strategy—and that is just the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Let us talk about the surplus—let us talk about the surplus. Well, the most vulnerable New Zealanders know that because the Government’s books are stable they can expect ongoing and increasing support and better public services. That is the best thing about the surplus. You would think that the Labour Party would be happy about that, but what did it do? Under “Genius Grant” it decided to pick the one point on which New Zealanders knew that Labour is absolutely wrong and unreliable; that is, saying that the thing that is wrong with the surplus is that you have got too much debt—because everyone knows that the Labour Party would do a much better job of reducing the debt because what Labour would do is cut expenditure and manage it more tightly than the National Government! That is the one thing that no one in New Zealand believes about the Labour Party.

There are a lot of other things that they believe. They believe that Labour is opposed to the environmental benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I think that some New Zealanders would believe that. They believe that Labour was opposed to our tax package in 2010 that actually boosted revenue in a way that enabled us to get to surplus. They believe that Labour was opposed to the welfare reforms that have reduced the welfare bill by upwards of about a billion dollars less than we thought just 5 years ago, but no one in New Zealand believes that the Labour Party cares more about debt and would have, in these circumstances, reduced it more quickly.

The New Zealand economy has had a great week: access to bigger, stronger, richer markets by our more resilient, adaptable, and innovative businesses—that has got to be a plus. In fact, the only people apart from Jane Kelsey who think that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is wrong are the Labour Party members—an apparently middle-of-the-road pro-business party opposing the one thing that business is most united on supporting.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: What will they talk about at the next cocktail party?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: Well, they will talk about what a genius Grant Robertson is—that is what they will talk about.

Maintaining a surplus—of course it is going to be a challenge, but the best thing about the surplus is not so much the number but the management of effective public services at its core. I want to acknowledge again the Ministers of our large-spending portfolios in particular, and the chief executives of our departments, but particularly the front-line public servants who, in the end, carry the weight of the decisions made by Government. They have done a fantastic job and that is why in 2017 they will be voting for National and not Labour.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): The arrogance of it all—it defies the mind. What Mr English failed to mention to this House was that most of those trade gains were on our trajectory anyway. We were going to get there anyway. He is talking about removing trade barriers. What a joke. What an absolute joke. The joke is that if it was just about trade, we would be laughing at the incompetence of certain members on this side of the House and saying what a sad deal. But it is not just about trade, it goes well beyond that. It goes into non-trade issues, and it is those issues—it is those very important issues—that are never spoken about and never get mentioned in the media sound bites. It is just unbelievable and it is arrogant.

This Government—all of those loud members over there—promised New Zealanders that this would be a gold-standard trade deal. Those members said it would absolutely be in the best interests of all New Zealanders. I hate to break it to them, but this is not the case.

Instead, what we have seen, for example, are years of secret discussions behind closed doors, and we have a Minister openly admitting to all New Zealanders that he has yet to see the full text of the trade document. He is about to sign a blank cheque. It just does not make sense. If that is not the height of arrogance, I do not know what is. The public has not been permitted to see it, and yet 480, or 85 percent, of US authors of this trade agreement were senior corporate executives or representatives from industry lobby groups. The Minister of Trade and the Prime Minister have been taken for a ride by big corporates.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Oh! Here we go.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: I think to be fair, Mr Brownlee, I think the Prime Minister wanted to be taken for that ride—he was on the bus from the start, no worries whatsoever. But to be fair to Mr Groser, I do not think that he wanted to be on that bus. I think that Mr Groser was outsmarted by people who had agendas bigger than him. They had agendas bigger than this country, and certainly bigger than individual New Zealanders within it.

And, yet, has anyone noticed today that any dissent and any words suggesting that the world is not flat are to be scoffed at. I can see in Mr Groser’s head now: “These people are the unwashed! The intelligentsia know what they are doing. Trust us.”—he is saying—“Trust us.” Even now, we are expected to trust this Minister—the man who has agreed to sign something he has not seen. He is literally signing a blank cheque on behalf of us all.

I cannot let these backbench members forget the investor-State dispute settlement clause. [Interruption] They scoff, but they seem to forget that it is a secret tribunal run by corporate lawyers with no ability to appeal. Workers, environmentalists, human rights advocates, and even Governments themselves do not get that special privilege, so why do big corporates need it? Top experts from around the world in law and economics are pushing to drop the investor-State dispute settlement provision, and so are other Governments, and New Zealand First is at the charge of that call in this country today.

This Minister has signed a trade deal that is about so much more than just trade. Many of the numbers that we have been given would have come to pass anyway. They are undermining Pharmac, they are undermining homeownership in New Zealand, and they are undermining this nation’s sovereignty. Thank you very much.

Hon TIM GROSER (Minister of Trade): As the country starts a process of sifting through from nonsense to reality—and it will take some time; we have just had an outstanding illustration of encyclopaedic ignorance—I would just like to thank, at this early stage, the many, many New Zealand officials who have gone just about to the ends of the earth to defend New Zealand’s interests. I will mention only two of them: the two chief negotiators who have been advising me since I held the Minister of Trade title. They are two outstanding New Zealanders: Mark Sinclair, our current ambassador in Tokyo, and Dr David Walker. But through them, of course, I want to extend our thanks to the many, many New Zealand officials from numerous agencies—the Ministry of Health, Te Puni Kōkiri, the Attorney-General, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Ministry for Primary Industries, and many others—for their incredible personal dedication to this.

Having said that, it did cost a pretty penny to do it. I do not think we have ever had as many New Zealand officials go to as many meetings. I can tell you, thanks to a question that Dr Russel Norman provided me—I have given him the written answer this morning—we can actually tell the House how much it cost. The figure for 3 years of all travel, accommodation, and airfares was $3,655,163.18.

So the question is: how are we going to pay for this? And the answer is: béchamel sauce is going to pay for this. You see—I just need to get some body language from you, Mr Speaker, because I do not know whether you are—when you are in gay Paris, parlez-vous Franҫais? But—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member needs to be very careful not to bring the Speaker into this debate. My French—

Hon TIM GROSER: Actually, it is white sauce. White sauce is what it is, in English. It is from tariff line HS2103.90.13, and that does not include the big kahunas of mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise. But the beautiful thing about white sauce—which I did not even know we produced, let alone exported, until yesterday, because we did not start this negotiation thinking “We have got to do something for white sauce makers in New Zealand.”—is that in the first year alone the tariff savings on white sauce to one country, Japan, are $3.96 million. They are doing God’s work here in Aotearoa, our white sauce manufacturers, whoever they are.

But, of course, there is a lot more than just: “So is this $4 million for corporate greed?”. Well, hang on a minute—how will we make white sauce? According to my understanding, what you do is you need some flour. If it is farmers in New Zealand producing the flour at the margin, this is going to create—as we expand our white sauce exports to Japan—more jobs and more income. And if it does not produce more jobs, it will be higher productivity. But if it is imported, there will be truck drivers driving more flour to wherever it is that this is made. There will be people inside the factory who have to put it into containers. There will be accountants in Hamilton, or wherever, who will have increased demand for their services. This is how the real economy of New Zealand creates wealth, creates jobs, and creates opportunities for our country.

I will give you another example: apples to Mexico. We export a rather pathetically small total of apples to Mexico—500 tonnes—and the reason why our exports are very, very small to Mexico has got nothing to do with the quality of New Zealand apples. I do not want to start a diplomatic incident by describing what I think of American apples, but anyone who has ever eaten one will have their own view. The apples from Hawke’s Bay and Nelson are the finest apples in the world, but they have not been able to compete in the Mexican market—a market of 118 million people—because the United States has had a preference, and the United States exports 300,000 tonnes of apples to Mexico. So I do not know what our guys will do, but if we are still exporting only 500 tonnes in 5 years’ time, I will be astonished.

GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): Former Prime Minister of New Zealand, and now our ambassador in Washington, Mike Moore, once said that the problem with Tim Groser is that he did not get enough credit for splitting the atom. I think that with Mr Groser’s approach today we are still looking to know whether or not the $3 million that he says was the cost of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement was just his minibar bill—or was it the whole thing? That is what we want to know from Tim Groser.

Today the National Government and Bill English announced his first surplus—one out of seven. Meat Loaf used to say that two out of three ain’t bad. I am not sure what he would make of one out of seven, but Bill English did it today. At this point in the economic cycle New Zealanders should expect a Government to post a surplus. We are talking about a period of time, covered by these annual accounts, when dairy payouts were over the $8 mark. There is 3 percent growth. The last time we had 3 percent growth in New Zealand, there was a $7 billion surplus and unemployment was under 4 percent. That was under a Labour Government.

Fast forward to a National Government, and we have 3 percent growth, a $441 million surplus—and we will come back to how that has been created—and unemployment nudging up against 6 percent. The question the National Government has to answer is: who is the economy for in this situation? Who is benefiting from this so-called surplus? Is it the 305,000 New Zealand children growing up in poverty? Should they be thrilled today that Bill English has manufactured a surplus by bodgying around with the figures? Is it the 148,000 New Zealanders who are unemployed today? Should they be pleased that Bill English managed to cut a bit of spending here, to not pay out on the earthquake there, and to overcharge ACC by $350 million? Should they be happy about that? It seems to me that what we heard today from the National Party is that the political target of a surplus was more important than what we should as a country be trying to achieve with the economy. Time after time with this National Government it has been about what it thinks it can get away with—what it thinks it can hide from the New Zealand public instead of what it can actually do to use the economy to improve people’s lives, to reduce inequality, and to give opportunities to children who need special education support.

There is an underspend in these accounts that have been released today of $235 million in education. Part of that is the Ministry of Education’s failed experiment to try to force “super-principals” on schools. Another part of it is special education funding that has not been spent, and there is not an electorate member in this House who has not had a visit from a parent whose child has been denied the special education support they need. That is what the Government celebrates today: $50 million - odd underspent in health, underspending in housing, and underspending in law and order. It is making up a surplus while $350 million is overcharged to New Zealand individuals and businesses for their ACC.

This surplus today means Bill English will be able to put his hand up and say: “I got one. I got one out of seven.” Interestingly, he would not commit today to anything more than that. He was asked whether there would be more. In fact, I nearly raised a point of order. I would have stretched your patience, Mr Speaker. I nearly raised a point of order during question No. 1 today—the patsy question—because the second half of it was not answered. He was asked whether there would be surpluses into the future, and the answer he gave in his press conference today was no. He knows that it will not happen, because the New Zealand economy today is in trouble, and it is partly in trouble because of the failure of this Government over 7 years to rebalance the economy. There has been a failure to diversify, to support diversification, to support added value, and to actually do something to create opportunities in our regions, and the failure to do that means that this surplus is a one-off blip. It is not going to be repeated.

Yes, Bill English will be able to say he got one out of seven. He can look back at Michael Cullen and see a surplus year after year after year, and he will never achieve that, because as the Minister of Finance he has not acted to create the economy that can deliver sustainable surpluses. But, in the end, surpluses mean nothing if the economy is not giving opportunity to all New Zealanders and if the economy is not addressing the inequalities that exist. There was outrage when Bill English stood up today and told us that the tax cuts of 2010 somehow or other improved equality in New Zealand. They did not. They widened the gap. It is a pitiful surplus that has been announced today, but the more pitiful thing is that there is no plan in this economy to grow sustainable jobs and reduce inequality.

Hon NATHAN GUY (Minister for Primary Industries): What a disappointing speech that was from Grant Robertson, where he did not even mention anything to do with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He did not mention this Government’s plan of growing jobs in the region, and what he did not even mention, also, was that this is a day of celebration. We should be patting the Minister of Finance on the back and saying “Well done for getting the Government’s books back into surplus.”—$414 million back into surplus. A target that was set right back in 2011 has been achieved today. Of course, Grant Robertson could not even stand up in the House—because he did not have the dignity—to say well done to this side of the House.

What Grant Robertson did not say is what an awful caucus the Labour Party had on Tuesday—what an awful caucus. You know, the big debate it had in there upstairs this week was the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Andrew Little, missing in action all of last week, left it to Annette King. She was out to lunch. She did not even know what she was talking about with trade. Then, of course, we have had other contributions—anyone with an economic bone in the Labour caucus knows that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is huge for the New Zealand economy. I am looking at David Parker. He is there, nodding. He knows how important the Trans-Pacific Partnership is for the New Zealand Government. Then if you think about the person who sits next to him, David Shearer—I was down here a few weeks ago in the last few days of the last sitting when we were debating the Korean free-trade agreement, and David Shearer gave an amazing speech in support of the Korean free-trade agreement. It was a fantastic speech. It was like it was delivered by someone on this side of the House.

So you know why Labour’s caucus this week was so fascinating? It was because anyone with an economic bone in its caucus—and I admit there are not too many of them: David Parker, David Shearer, Phil Goff—even a guy who we do not know much about, Peeni Henare, who is actually an Auckland-based MP—said that Labour is all about free trade. So there you have it. On that side of the House some of those members are out there supporting free trade, but they cannot decide whether to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership, so they are out there confusing the public, saying: “Oh, well, we do not think this is good enough. We should have gotten a better deal on dairy. Oh, well, they should have done more here.”

I will tell you what, here is my prediction this afternoon: Labour will vote for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Damien O’Connor, “Stewie” Nash, David Parker, David Shearer, and Phil Goff will push this through, because they know it is good for regional New Zealand. They know it is good for jobs. They know, ultimately, it is good for the New Zealand economy. We are talking about 800 million people who are potential consumers of New Zealand products. We are talking about over a third of the world’s economy. We are talking about New Zealand pushing hard for 25 years to get free-trade access into the US and Japan, finally achieved. The US is the No. 1 economy, Japan is the third-biggest, Mexico is the 11th—we had to be there. I am delighted that Tim Groser has managed to achieve what he has done—and his officials. I think it is right that he acknowledges officials across the whole of Government who have been working really hard for a number of years to get this important free-trade agreement where it is today. We are talking about tariff savings of around $260 million and the potential to earn $2.7 billion by 2030.

What I also want to talk about is more good news for our primary sector. When you look at what has been happening in beef and lamb, they have just released the financial report for the last 12 months. Beef exports, for the first time in 20 years, are higher than lamb and mutton. It has broken through the $3 billion mark to about $3.2 billion, and lamb and mutton exports are about $3 billion—fantastic. So, actually, farmers up and down the country are celebrating the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We never got what we wanted completely on dairy, but it is hugely beneficial for our meat exporters, for our farmers, for our growers, for our horticultural growers, and also for our viticulture guys who are exporting wine. So, a very good week for the Government, and a terrible disaster week for the Labour Party.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): Thank you, Mr Speaker. No one else to take the call; I will. Can I address, firstly, the issue of the Government squeaking back into surplus. It is a good thing. It is a good thing. We agree that Government books should be in surplus, and, indeed, the Labour Party produced our own financials at the time of the last election to show that we would have been in surplus this year too. There are a number of points that need to be made in respect of it. They have been well made by Grant Robertson.

To get to surplus this year the Government, effectively, used the ACC system as a source of taxation. It took more in ACC levies from registration fees and taxes on petrol and road-user charges than it needed to fund ACC in order to construct a surplus. We also know, contrary to what the Minister of Finance said in his answers at question time today, that the tax cuts that the National Government implemented after the election in 2008, when it gave 40 percent of the income tax to the top 10 percent of income earners, most clearly increased income equality in New Zealand. The Minister of Finance today in question time had the gall to pretend that it did not. He said it reduced income inequality. That is a patent error and one that the Minister of Finance ought not to have made.

I want to turn to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. I agree it is a significant deal and I want to record its history. It started under the Labour Government with what was called the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement, which involved New Zealand, Singapore, Chile—and I forget what the fourth country was. The Minister of Trade at the time was the Hon Phil Goff. The Hon Phil Goff had numerous meetings with Susan Schwab, who was the trade representative from the United States, and encouraged the Americans to join into the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement process, which turned into the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

There have been some intemperate comments coming from the National Party members in the last week. They have tried to criticise Annette King and the Labour Party members for asking questions that the Opposition parties ought to be asking, such as: “What is the underlying effect on things like Pharmac?”. We already know and accept that the Pharmac model is not going to be fundamentally broken by the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement despite ambitions earlier in the process from some of the American interest groups to actually break up the Pharmac model. It is a good thing that Pharmac has been protected in its fundamental model, but it is important that New Zealanders transparently have answers from the Government as to what will be the effect of changes directly or indirectly in respect of patent laws to the costs of Pharmac. It may well be that those questions satisfy the Labour Party members. It may be that they do not. But it is absolutely our duty to ask those questions, and I thank Annette King for bringing those questions to the House.

I want to say that some of the opposition that there is in civil society to the Trans-Pacific Partnership has been caused by the way Minister Groser and the National Party members have addressed these issues. Indeed, just yesterday the New Zealand High Court found Minister Groser’s actions in refusing to provide public information to be a breach of the Official Information Act, quashed his decisions in a way that is quite unusual, and said that he had to make more disclosures to civil society. It is that somewhat arrogant approach that has caused some of the backlash against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which does no credit to the National Party.

Other members in the National Party have said that somehow the Labour Party members questioning aspects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership means that we are opposed to free trade. That is not so. We are a party that is proudly in favour of free trade. We know that as a small nation at the bottom of the Pacific we benefit from lower tariffs in respect of the countries to whom we sell goods—and of course the Trans-Pacific Partnership covers a very significant proportion of world economic output and trade.

In the short time I have got left I want to make one further reference. That is that I think the Government has sold us out on the ability of future Governments to control who buys New Zealand residential land.

David Bennett: Who signed the Chinese agreement?

Hon DAVID PARKER: The National Government does not want to do that. Actually, the Chinese free-trade agreement allows us to control the sale of residential land to overseas people.

David Bennett: Oh, it does not.

Hon DAVID PARKER: It does, Mr Bennett. You are ignorant. You should read the agreement. It has been well publicised. Just because the National Government does not think that that was appropriate does not mean it should not have argued for that freedom for New Zealand, as experienced in Australia, Viet Nam, and various other countries.

MELISSA LEE (National): It is a great pleasure to participate in this general debate. I begin by saying how disappointed I am at the contribution of the member who just sat down. I expected Mr Parker’s contribution to be a little bit more focused on the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, considering the fact that he is a proponent of free-trade agreements.

As previous speakers have said, this Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is a historic event for New Zealand. It is bringing together one-third of the world, 40 percent of the economy, and 800 million people. The market is humungous for a tiny country at the bottom of the South Pacific, and that is following a major deal with my former motherland, Korea. The free-trade agreement with Korea was signed earlier this year, in March, and I have to congratulate the Minister of Trade, Tim Groser. I had the pleasure of being there at the signing. What that free-trade agreement with my motherland actually brings is a total of $229 million a year in savings in duties alone.

What happened in Korea was that New Zealand manufacturers who were exporting New Zealand products, whether they were wine, cheese, milk, or agricultural products, were paying in excess of 187 percent in duty for some. It ranged from 36 percent, I think it was, for some of the products; for cheese it was 89 percent, and for butter and milk powder. It was a major disappointment when a baby food manufacturer in Korea wanted to import New Zealand baby milk powders but it found that its deal in Australia was much, much better because it could access those products much cheaper.

So not signing a deal with Korea would have actually meant that New Zealand manufacturers and New Zealand producers could not compete with their counterparts. Those are the countries that already had a free-trade agreement with Korea, and so this Trans-Pacific Partnership deal is also another thing. We had to be part of the deal, because if we did not sign the deal we would have been left behind. Our producers could not access those markets and our producers could not access that money. These wealthy countries are willing to spend a fortune on the proteins that we actually produce, and we do such a great job.

After signing the free-trade agreement—we have actually ratified our free-trade agreement but Korea has yet so do so, and the agreement is that it will do so by the end of this year. I have an opportunity to visit my motherland next week and I shall be impressing upon the Korean counterparts that they actually have to get on with it, but it is immediately possible. Sixty-five million dollars will come off in the first year and if they, in fact, ratify it by the end of the year, 1 January 2016 becomes year 2. That is the benefit that only New Zealand producers will take great benefit from because there are humungous savings immediately.

The free-trade agreements and the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement that this Government has actually signed with our partners are something to be celebrated by not just this Government, not just this Parliament, but all of New Zealand. It means that it is the growth of this country’s economy; the growth of New Zealand as a whole nation. It means we have a better standard of living, and we have better incomes. I am very proud to stand on this side of the House and say we are doing our very best, and shame on Opposition members for opposing—well, what seems like opposition—free-trade agreements. I believe that they will probably will come to the party and say yes, and celebrate the Trans-Pacific Partnership as well. Thank you.

JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): The National Government has indeed achieved its priority of a surplus, and I suppose it should be congratulated, because it is important to live within our means. But I think the Government is selling New Zealand a little bit short, and, frankly, the target of a surplus is a bit of a distraction from the issues that are really important to New Zealanders. And that is where National is falling behind. It is failing to take action on the issues that are most important to New Zealanders—the two biggest challenges, which are climate change and inequality. We have to respond to these eventually, and it would be better if we responded sooner rather than later. The Green Party has made these two big issues our priorities for this year.

Implementing the solutions to climate change and inequality is not only a challenge; it is actually an opportunity to create a better New Zealand. Imagine a New Zealand where every child has a warm, dry, secure place to call home; where every child can walk or cycle safely to school; and where not only are they challenged and educated but they are nourished, because they have a nutritious and tasty lunch—every child, not just those whose parents have the means to provide it. It is entirely possible, and affordable, and good for our long-term economic health to invest directly in our kids, and that is a priority for the Green Party, not just achieving a couple of hundred million dollars in surplus. We can do that—we can balance the books—but also ensure that our kids have everything they need to be successful in life. Likewise, we have the ability to invest in the long-term future of our kids by responding to climate change and reducing our carbon pollution. This is not rocket science, and it is not optional; it is something we have to do if we want to live good lives in the future, if we want New Zealand to be there for our kids to enjoy in the future.

There are practical policies that will not only reduce our carbon pollution and fossil fuel use, but actually have wider benefits. I will take just one example: investing in electrified rail across the North Island. That is an infrastructure project that is entirely affordable within the means of the transport budget. Not only would it reduce carbon pollution from moving freight around the country, it would actually reduce costs for a great number of exporters. There is a growing amount of freight that is moved by rail in this country. The more efficient we make the service and the more reliable we make the service the more people can use it. And it takes trucks off the road, which saves us money, makes the roads easier to maintain, and makes them safer for people who are trying to drive around. It makes the air cleaner. It makes the trains quieter. It creates jobs in our regions. This is something the National Party could be investing in but is failing to because of its blind, ideological opposition to rail.

Other examples where we could get these win-win benefits include investing in public transport in our towns and cities, like rail in Auckland. We got the electrification, finally, thanks to the campaigning of the Green Party, despite the wishes of the National Party. They actually have seen the enormous benefits that has brought to Auckland. The next step is the City Rail Link, and the sooner we do it the less it will cost us and the sooner we achieve the benefits, not only for those people who take the train but for the people who live in Auckland who are getting around on the roads that will be less congested because there are fewer cars on the roads at peak time. So it makes sense. It makes economic sense and it is good for our people, it is good for our climate, and it is good for our economy.

We could have cheaper and cleaner power by facilitating the uptake of solar panels. Unfortunately, this Government is not going to support my colleague’s member’s bill, which is giving a fair go for solar. It is not about subsidies but it is about ensuring that there are the opportunities, more opportunities, for households, businesses, and schools to get solar panels, which reduces the amount of money they have to pay for electricity and reduces our greenhouse gas pollution. This is the vision of a smart economy that works for everyone in the long term that the Green Party is championing.

The National Government, although it has managed to finally, after 7 years, achieve its target of surplus, is selling us short because it does not believe that we can afford to ensure that kids have enough to eat at school or that we can reduce inequality. It does not believe that we can afford to respond to climate change. The truth is not only can we not afford not to do it, we cannot afford not to respond to climate change and inequality.

DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): This year there have been two main political issues that have dominated the course of the political environment. The first has been the movement towards getting a surplus, and the second has been the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. In both cases the Government has been vindicated this week for the work that we have done in this area, and the Opposition has been shown to be false, misleading, and taking the public down the wrong track in regard to both of these issues.

Let us start with some quotes in regard to the Opposition parties looking at, first of all, the surplus that has been achieved today—a great surplus of $414 million. I think we should thank the Hon Bill English and his team for achieving such a good surplus. But let us have a look at what Andrew Little said on the Budget statement: “A lot of effort … has gone into glossing over the broken promise, but I see it for what it is—one of the biggest political deceptions in a lifetime.” “One of the biggest political deceptions in a lifetime”, is what the Labour leader said. And he said: “When the Government wilfully and deliberately makes a promise they know they cannot keep in a general election campaign, that is a huge deception.” Well, today we have delivered on that promise. We have delivered that surplus. There was no deception. There was delivery to the New Zealand public of what we promised.

Let us have a look at what Mr Winston Peters said about the surplus “I will make this prediction right now …”—this is the person who can make predictions about anything—“I will make this prediction right now: Bill English will never, ever deliver a surplus.” Well, Bill English has delivered a surplus. Where is the infamous leader of the New Zealand First Party? He said more: “This is the political test he set himself and he has failed.” He has succeeded in that test and he has delivered a surplus for New Zealand.

Let us look at free trade. When we come to free trade we all know the opposition of the Labour Party. Labour members were out protesting at all these meetings around free trade. They sent their apologies if they could not make it. Even Mr Winston Peters said this to the protesters in Kerikeri: “Trust me. I know what we are going to do here. We’ll stop them passing this law.” That is what the New Zealand First Party is saying about free trade and about the regions.

But let us have a look. There is a voice of reason on the left when it comes to free trade, and that comes from the former Prime Minister Helen Clark, who said: “What always haunts one as New Zealand Prime Minister is, will there be a series of trade blocs develop that you are not part of? Because it is unthinkable for New Zealand as an export-oriented small trading nation to miss out on that. So of course it is in New Zealand’s best interests to be in the TPPA and we should go for the best deal we can get.” That was the immortal Helen Clark from the Labour Party, who said that.

This is the illustration of the conflicts of interest you have seen through the political debate in the last year. On that side of the House, members have been against free trade. They have been against getting New Zealand into surplus. On this side, we have been for free trade and we have got New Zealand into surplus. I say to the public of New Zealand: that side of the House has never been right. Those members have never been right, and I say they should say sorry for what they have been saying over the last year to the New Zealand public. They should say sorry for the scaremongering that they put out to the New Zealand public over the last year about finance and about trade.

They should start backing New Zealand. They should actually go out there and support New Zealand getting free-trade agreements and support New Zealand getting into a good economic position, and they need to start being positive. They need to start being positive for New Zealand and looking for a direction that is forward-thinking. They need to start being honest with New Zealand, and not try to mislead the public of this country. They need to stop being controlled by their union mates, who do not want trade agreements. That is what they need to do on that side of the House. They need to start advocating for the regional economy. They need to stop going on TV saying they represent farmers, and then coming into this House and voting against farmers, producers, and manufacturers, and stopping free-trade agreements. They need to be honest with New Zealanders for once. They need to actually stand up for what would deliver for this country, and they need to stop being the scaremongering, negative, bad people that they are who are taking this country down.

MEKA WHAITIRI (Labour—Ikaroa-Rāwhiti): Ā, tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. E ngā mema o Te Whare nei, tēnā tātau katoa. Can I preface my contribution today by saying iwi were successful traders, domestically and internationally, pre and post the arrival of the European settlers. So we are no strangers to good fair trading opportunities.

Labour has five key principles that form our bottom line to protect New Zealand’s interests when the Trans-Pacific Partnership finally makes its way to Parliament. The five are that Pharmac must be protected, that corporates cannot sue the Government for regulating in the public interest, that New Zealand maintains the right to restrict sales of farmland and housing to non-resident foreign buyers, that the Treaty of Waitangi must be upheld, and that meaningful gains are made for our farmers in tariff reductions and market access.

It is the fourth principle that I wish to speak on in the short time I have available. May I make this point as clearly and as unambiguously as possible. The authority to address or speak on whether or not the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi under the Trans-Pacific Partnership have been protected, compromised, or challenged rests solely with whānau, hapū, and iwi, and the Treaty partner. The political mandate of the Treaty partner does not sit with the Crown. It does not sit with the Crown agencies—the Ministry of Māori Development, Te Puni Kōkiri, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or the superministry of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. It does not sit with the Federation of Māori Authorities, and it certainly does not sit with the Māori Party.

With humility, I hold the political mandate for the whānau, hapū, and iwi of Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, as do my colleagues Kelvin Davis, Peeni Henare, the Hon Nanaia Mahuta, Adrian Rurawhe, and Rino Tirikatene, and their respective whānau, hapū, and iwi of their electorates. We take that political mandate and responsibility seriously.

On 2 July this year I put a question to the Minister of Trade seeking who or which iwi or Māori organisations he had consulted over the Trans-Pacific Partnership. On behalf of the Minister of Trade the Hon Chris Finlayson replied saying that one of those five groups was Ngāti Kahungunu in 2010. For full disclosure, I was the chief executive of that organisation at the time when the consultation, apparently, took place. In fact, the Hon Chris Finlayson enjoyed repeating, through replies to my supplementary questions, that Ngāti Kahungunu Iwi Incorporation was wrong and that they were consulted on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

For the House’s benefit, according to his own officials’ minutes of that meeting, the meeting was actually over intellectual property rights, not the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, as he stated. Ngāti Kahungunu, along with Ngāti Kuri, Ngāti Wai, Te Rarawa, Ngati Porou, and Ngāti Kōata are the original six applicants for Wai 262, a Treaty claim against the protection of indigenous knowledge, fauna, and flora. The protection of intellectual property rights had been a continuous battle for Ngāti Kahungunu, hence the meeting with the Minister’s officials back in 2010.

In the time remaining, let me say that in my travels across Ikaroa-Rāwhiti and the country, whānau and hapū and iwi have major concerns with the agreement. They oppose the lack of transparency. They oppose the lack of public scrutiny. They oppose, yet again, that the protection of the Treaty may be used as a trade-off for other gains without first talking to them. As members of this House, we all need to meet our collective responsibility under the Treaty—that is to talk to the right people, in the right manner, and to do the right thing. Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker.

IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): What a week this has been for rural, provincial New Zealand. The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is bringing some $2.7 billion worth of tariff relief to New Zealand over the next 15 years, much of which—over 70 percent, in fact—will benefit the agricultural sector, thus filtering into our small towns and provincial cities. We have a surplus, which is fantastic for the morale of the country. As a farmer, I say that surpluses are always nice to achieve.

We also see tourism continuing to grow in regional New Zealand, with over 3 million people arriving here this year for longer and spending more money. We have an arrest in the woeful 1080 scare, which is a great credit to our police and must also give confidence to our food safety authorities. Hopefully, once the courts have given this very strong message, it will give a strong message to anyone else considering such a heinous crime. Finally, we have some positivity in the meat industry. The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is a triumph for all who have worked so hard, under Tim Groser’s leadership. The results will no doubt contribute significantly to calculations in future Bill English Budgets, as will the great result our tourism industry is achieving.

The benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement cannot be understated. In all other free-trade agreements that we have signed to date, initial calculations have been well and truly exceeded. In fact, in the Chinese free-trade agreement trade quadrupled in the following 9 years. Consequently, you would assume that the tariff benefit quadrupled in that same period. So the predictions made early in that agreement have been well and truly exceeded. Reduced tariffs are just the beginning. There are many other barriers that inhibit our export efforts, and these will now be able to be addressed as the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement creates a special relationship, enabling those discussions to take place. Every sector of our rural economy will benefit from this agreement.

There is significant potential for processed timber, as tariffs are torn down, to a tune initially of $9 million. This is borne out by comments made by Bill McCallum, chair of The Wood Council of New Zealand, when he said: “These lost opportunities are not included in the $9 million saving, because current tariffs make exports unprofitable.” What he effectively meant by that was that the market has not been supplied because there is no incentive at all for New Zealand manufacturers to involve themselves in that market. For the Rangitīkei electorate, with very large forestry holdings, the opportunity is enormous and exciting. We have large processing plants in Tangiwai, two of them—Taihape and Santoft. These are all areas in need of jobs and opportunities.

Another quote that I think reflects the opinions of New Zealanders came from the chair of the Federation of Māori Authorities Inc., Traci Houpapa, who welcomed the signed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement as a new approach to strategic and political partnerships. “New Zealand is a trading nation, we must optimise our exports and trade relationships for the wealth and prosperity of all New Zealanders.”

How interesting that those sitting opposite, who claim to be such profound supporters and such champions, in fact, of rural and provincial New Zealand, cannot, in Labour’s case, decide where they sit on this extraordinary opportunity. In the case of New Zealand First and the Greens, they totally oppose it. So much for their interest in provincial New Zealand.

Imagine how the people of Northland must feel, as they note their fresh, new MP opposing an initiative that will bring many millions of dollars into that province. Napier is the home of large timber and agricultural interests, and they are seeing their member sitting firmly on a picket fence. Of course, those Greens, who have no home—as their supporters listen to the member from Marlborough banging on about the dangers of Roundup, when his local fishing and wine industries stand to gain massively from the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. The member from New Zealand First accused Minister Groser of writing a blank cheque. He effectively has given rural New Zealand a blank cheque. Rural New Zealand now just has to fill in the numbers. I think this is a spectacular result for New Zealand—very exciting.

Finally, I want to make brief mention of a presentation that will take place in Parliament tonight. A small rural trust from Taumarunui is coming to present their efforts around whānau ora and the welfare of the Taumarunui community. I think that will be well worth attending. Thank you.

CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): I am the lucky last. It is a great honour to stand up here as the last speaker in today’s general debate. I have to say that we have heard a lot of comments today about the puffery of the surplus. The Government is giving itself a big pat on the back. But the reality is that if this were a mortgage that we were paying on a house, we would have made only one mortgage payment for the whole year—once in 12 months we would have managed to create enough money to pay our mortgage. And you think that that is good enough for this Government, this country, to be congratulating itself on? Is there something wrong, Mr Bishop? You have got a face like a twisted sandshoe. Did you not quite get those numbers? A $414 million surplus, and yet it costs us nearly $500 million a month just in interest payments.

The policies of this Government are going down like a cup of cold sick with New Zealanders, and they have had it to the back teeth with what is going on around this country. Just yesterday, in question time, it was quite interesting to see the body language of Steven Joyce when he was being asked questions about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He was almost like a small child hovering with his head down because he was so guilty, caught with his hand in the biscuit tin. He wanted to pull his trousers over his head and vanish down his trouser leg because he did not want to get the questions asked to him by the honourable member Fletcher Tabuteau. His response, though, was that everything is good in the provinces and in regional New Zealand, and I think he said to one of our members that if you just had a chance to go out there and speak to them, you would find that they are very happy with the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. Well, “delusional” sort of rings a bell in my head. He is either in denial or suffering from serious delusion.

We did go out and ask the provinces of New Zealand, and they spoke strongly against what was going on with the Trans-Pacific Partnership and many of the other policies that this Government is ramming down our throats with regard to the wholesale sell-off of our nation’s State enterprises, which we have been building up over generations. Just to go through that, New Zealanders came out and they voted this Government out of an electorate that it had held for over 70 years. That is the provinces and the people speaking about how disgusted they are with the direction of this Government.

The big sell-off started back in 1992 when the Government sold off the BNZ bank—a bank that we are proud of, that we grew as a country, and that 60 percent of New Zealanders were using, putting their money in, feeling safe, and being looked after. It sold off energy back in 1988—floated it out there on the stock exchange market for anybody to have a little bit of a fill in there. It sold off the Auckland Airport, and it has handed over corrections—things that it should be looking after itself. The Government has been selling off to Serco. Now it is talking about social welfare and selling off our State houses for the most vulnerable people in our society, who are living in substandard conditions. If this Government, which can hardly get itself a surplus, is congratulating itself for paying one mortgage payment in a year, looking after the best interests of this country, then the question has really got to be had.

I have to say that Keith Holyoake would be rolling over in his grave if he knew what this Government was actually doing now—the National Party that stood so strong for nationalistic pride and for looking after the best interests of all New Zealanders. There is a quote by Keith Holyoake that he wanted to make a country that cherishes the opportunity and ability of homeownership, and a place—a New Zealand and a nation—where everybody can have the ability and the affordability to own their own home. Well, we are far from that. We cannot even get our people who are living in State houses to be looked after, because we are selling the State houses off for foreign-national corporates to get their greedy mitts into.

I have to say, though, as far as the National Party goes, that what it is delivering on is corporate support. I mean, it is hardly a party. Actually, it could be considered to be a foreign controlled corporation. The “National Foreign Controlled Corporation” may be a more apt name for this so-called party that sits opposite us. That rings true, particularly when a few months ago we had the displeasure of seeing the Cheshire grin on the Prime Minister’s face when he was high-fiving his Cabinet Ministers because—wait for it—we got dollar parity with Australia. What an absolute sublime outcome that is if, for one thing, you are a foreign-currency trader. But for provincial New Zealanders—the ones who are selling our primary exports around the world—that is the worst thing that we would want to see happen, and here we have our Cabinet from this Government across the side here high-fiving each other and saying that this a good thing. Of course, we know what happened quickly afterwards. The price of our dollar got shafted back down to where it should be and, of course, a lot of money was made by those people trading in currency, which, I can tell you right now, the rank and file New Zealanders were not the receivers of.

New Zealand First is a party that looks after the best interests of this country and these people, and it is about time this Government, the “National Corporate Controlled Organisation”, put New Zealanders first. Thank you.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.

Points of Order

Leave for Introduction and First Reading—International Transparent Treaties Bill

FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Given the High Court ruling on Mr Groser’s Official Information Act stance and the fact that we have not signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership yet, I seek leave for the International Transparent Treaties Bill to be set down for first reading forthwith.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Is there any objection to the proposal? There is objection. Leave is not agreed to.

Bills

Education (Charter Schools Curriculum) Amendment Bill

First Reading

Debate resumed from 16 September.

DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this bill. We in this House have great privileges and a great deal of time and opportunity to use them, with the ultimate product supposedly being better public policy for all New Zealanders. I am afraid to say that this bill and the speech by the member sponsoring it, Phil Goff, last time we met for a members’ day, fails dismally on that test.

If I was to try to characterise the argument made by the member and also in the explanatory note of the bill, it would be, No. 1, partnership schools kura hourua are not succeeding as a public policy. No. 2 is the premise that the reason for that failure is the lack of a requirement to follow the New Zealand Curriculum. In conclusion, the passage of this bill may improve the policy of partnerships schools kura hourua by forcing partnership schools to adopt the New Zealand Curriculum.

In order to make this argument, the member gave a large amount of energy—I think it was a vein-popping speech, which might have been aided by a little bit more brain and a little less heart, not to put too fine a point on it. He tried to argue that there are litanies of failings—most of them imagined in his own mind—and these were a consequence, as his argument goes, of partnership schools kura hourua not being required to follow the New Zealand Curriculum.

If I could introduce just one piece of information to this debate that shows how wrong that argument is, it would be this: every one of the nine partnership schools kura hourua currently in operation is voluntarily following Te Marautanga o Aotearoa or the New Zealand Curriculum. So if it is true that there are terrible problems with the partnership school model and terrible failings occurring, then it cannot also be true that the member’s bill would help to alleviate those problems, because the remedy that the bill brings is already in place.

The logic of the bill’s introductory statement and also the argument made by the member in its introduction fails the very first and most basic test of logic. But let us suppose it was true that there were partnership schools not using the New Zealand Curriculum or Te Marautanga o Aotearoa. What, specifically, would this bill do? Well, primarily, it would alter section 158G, “Sponsor’s duties”, of the Education Act 1989, and, specifically, section 158G(b), which says: “A sponsor of a partnership school kura hourua must— … (b) ensure that the school delivers a curriculum that is in line with any foundation curriculum policy statements published under section 60A(1)(aa);”. We go to section 60A(1)(aa) and we find that partnership schools kura hourua, funnily enough, are required to follow “ ‘foundation curriculum policy statements’, which are statements of policy concerning teaching, learning, and assessment that are made for the purposes of underpinning and giving direction …”.

And so we look to the latest edition of these statements, and what we find is that there are parts of the New Zealand Curriculum, the highest-level parts—the vision, the values, the key competencies—and the principles of the New Zealand Curriculum, or the Māori equivalent, Te Marautanga o Aotearoa, that partnership schools are already required to follow.

What, for instance, is that vision? Well, young people who will be confident, connected, and actively involved lifelong learners. What are those values? Excellence, innovation, inquiry and curiosity, diversity, equity, community participation, ecological sustainability, integrity, and respect. They are the key competencies that partnership schools are already required to follow under the legislation this bill seeks to amend—thinking, using language symbols and text, managing self and relating to others, and participating and contributing. Finally, the principles are high expectations, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, cultural diversity inclusion, learning to learn, community engagement, coherence, and future focus.

These are the principles of the New Zealand Curriculum—the vision, the values, and the key competencies that the schools are already required to follow. That might lead one to ask what exactly this bill would achieve. It tells us that it would ask for “that is in line with any foundation curriculum policy statements published under section 60A(1)(aa)”—i.e., what I have just discovered—to be replaced with “… any applicable national education guidelines published under section 60A(1)”. In other words, there would be a wider range of education goals applied.

What would be the practical effect of that? All it would mean is that it would reduce the flexibility that partnership schools kura hourua have to develop either their own curriculum that fulfils all of the criteria that I have already mentioned, as the current law puts it, or it would reduce the ability for partnership schools kura hourua to adopt a different curriculum that none the less—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Excuse me, Annette King, could you sit down? It is not particularly polite.

DAVID SEYMOUR: All it would allow them to do is it would prevent partnership schools from adapting to a new curriculum and would reduce flexibility.

Given that the public interest and the interests of the students are already well protected under the law by the requirements that the existing Act puts on it, we find ourselves with two possible hypotheses as to why the member brought this bill to the House and why he is so keen to make such a trivial change that would marginally reduce the flexibility that partnership schools kura hourua enjoy. One is that he simply does not appreciate the creativity, the diversity, the innovation, the “ertia”, the alacrity, and the energy that people in the New Zealand education system bring to innovate and create new opportunities for their students. He perhaps simply does not appreciate the value of a decentralised education model such as partnership schools kura hourua, and such as the Tomorrow’s Schools model, I might add, which the member had something to do with once upon a time. He does not appreciate what those things can do for the education of New Zealand students.

Perhaps he does not understand exactly how well partnership schools are currently doing. Perhaps he is not aware that with one exception—which follows the New Zealand Curriculum and whose operation would not be changed one bit by this bill, which has been canvassed—every single partnership school kura hourua is performing at least slightly above average and, in some cases, well above the expectations that New Zealand generally has for kids who are at those schools. They are an outstanding success, and it is a pause for reflection that we consider another possible hypothesis for why the member brought this bill to the House. It is that it was simply a stunt—and I tend to believe this version because I watched the member shuffling his notes, trying to work out what to say next when he made his introduction of the bill.

I tend to believe that it is a stunt designed to create the impression that partnership schools need this bill—need to be forced to follow a curriculum that they are not succeeding in—when I have shown in this speech that none of those things are actually true. It is an insight into New Zealand, and a very sad one, that a pilot of an educational model that seeks to do new things to engage kids who have not been well engaged in the system elsewhere—instead of looking at it as something that uses 0.1 percent of the education budget, that is trying something new, and that is having overwhelmingly positive results, and instead of celebrating that and embracing it, or at least giving it a chance, we choose to bring out the great Kiwi knocking machine and knock it down. I think that is a shame. I oppose this bill. Thank you.

CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): Having listened carefully to that contribution, I can say that there was nothing in that speech that explained what it is about the New Zealand Curriculum that the Government does not think charter schools should have to comply with and should have to follow. What is the problem with asking charter schools to teach to the same curriculum as every other school in the country? We did not hear that from David Seymour. What we heard from him was that because the current charter schools, the first ones to be established, are teaching the curriculum, we do not, in fact, need to require charter schools to teach the curriculum. The same argument could be made of any number of Government rules and regulations—the fact that people voluntarily do it means that maybe we could just do away with them altogether, which, of course, is the typical libertarian philosophy of the ACT Party. But, actually, if the taxpayer is sinking significant amounts of money into these charter schools—and bear in mind that they are funded significantly more than State schools are funded on a per-student basis—then they should be required to meet the same standards that existing State schools need to meet.

Many of the claims that have been made about charter schools simply do not stack up. I will deal first of all with the one that most directly relates to the curriculum, and that is their achievement statistics—the achievement statistics the Government requires of them. Hekia Parata has been regularly boasting in the House that the teaching at charter schools, and one charter school in particular, is leading to a 100 percent pass rate. What she neglects to mention is that that 100 percent pass rate is only of the students who have entered for National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). It is not based on their whole roll. Those figures have been doctored, because in order to get the 100 percent pass rate, they can simply dissuade the students from participating in NCEA altogether, and NCEA is based on the curriculum. That is one of the reasons that we have a curriculum—to ensure that as students progress through their schooling, they are going to land up in the right place. We have a curriculum so we can ensure that they are going to land up with the skills and knowledge they need to achieve NCEA and to move off into the job market and into tertiary education with the skills and knowledge they need.

Why is it that charter school students should be treated differently? Why is it that they do not need to know the things that every other school in the country is required to teach their students? There is no argument for that being put forward by the Government. It is simply continuing to run the line that it is about creativity, diversity, and innovation, as David Seymour said. Well, every school in the country should be encouraged to do those things, and every school in the country is. But State schools are subject to a level of regulation—and it is an increasing level of regulation under this Government—that charter schools are not. In fact, many of the regulations that are positive, that are designed to ensure that students are progressing in their education—like following the New Zealand Curriculum—do not apply to charter schools, and yet the increasing regulation in the State school sector is distracting away from the New Zealand Curriculum and preventing schools from teaching to its full depth and breadth, which is what we should be encouraging.

The Government has not yet put forward a good reason why this bill should not be passed. It is important in the overall scheme of things that every New Zealander, every employer, and every tertiary education provider should be able to know that New Zealand students are being taught a wide range of skills and knowledge, the depth of the curriculum, and they do not get that with charter schools because charter schools are not required to teach to that curriculum.

Another one of the arguments that David Seymour put forward was that charter schools are seeking to do new things. State schools are seeking to do new things as well, and they are seeking to do them within the bounds of the New Zealand Curriculum, which is internationally recognised as one of the most dynamic and flexible in the world. I have been recently doing some travelling and people have been asking me about the New Zealand Curriculum. They have been incredibly impressed by the focus on competencies that exists within the curriculum now. The fact is that it is not knowledge-specific—it is not basically defining that students should learn a particular fact or a particular piece of factual information at a given time—it is about the types of learning that should be taking place. Our curriculum is brilliant, and everybody else around the world whom I speak to says: “This is great.” They either want to copy it or they are trying to copy it.

Why is it that charter schools should not be part of that equation? The New Zealand Curriculum is already flexible. The New Zealand Curriculum already encourages creativity, diversity, and innovation. Those are all essential ingredients in it. Charter schools should be required to do that as well. They should not be held to a different standard. That brings me to the next point, as I—[Interruption] Has the bell gone already?

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): No, the bell has not gone—the bell does not go in a 5-minute speech.

CHRIS HIPKINS: Oh, right. I was not aware of that. That appears to be a new rule.

Dr JIAN YANG (National): This bill goes beyond the stated purpose of requiring partnership schools to teach either the New Zealand Curriculum or Te Marautanga o Aotearoa. Clause 5 would apply section 60A of the Education Act 1989 in its entirety to partnership schools. This would include the National Administration Guidelines. This bill thus runs against the purpose of the partnership schools. I will elaborate on this later on, but firstly I would like to put the discussion of partnership schools into perspective.

We have over 2,500 schools in New Zealand, and we are opening only a very small number of partnership schools—nine at the moment. We already have a number of different types of schools in New Zealand. I have been working on a New Zealand education handbook. I was surprised by the large number of types of schools we have in New Zealand. There is a strong rationale for having partnership schools. I understand the previous speaker, Chris Hipkins, mentioned why we have partnership schools. In New Zealand, we have the best education system in the world, but about 20 percent of the students are still failing in the State education system. We need to help these students. Partnership schools are just one of many ways to help these students. For those who cannot or who do not fit in the mainstream public school system and whose parents cannot afford to send them to private schools, partnership schools could be an option.

Partnership schools are just one of a number of new initiatives targeted towards addressing the issue of educational underachievement. Partnership schools bring together the education, business, and community sectors to provide new opportunities for students to succeed in education. Partnership schools are targeted at lifting education achievement in low-decile areas and disadvantaged communities that have been underserved by the education system. No one is suggesting that the State education system should be dismantled. It provides a mostly excellent service. Partnership schools are just one alternative for a small minority of students who are unable to perform in the State system. To make these students successful will, of course, benefit not only these students but all of us. Internationally there are many successful stories, such as Success Academy Charter Schools in New York.

Although current partnership schools have chosen to use either the New Zealand Curriculum or Te Marautanga o Aotearoa, this does not mean that the ability to offer an alternative curriculum should be removed from the Education Act 1989. Preventing that would prevent new partnership schools from having the freedom of choice. This would also reduce the ability of parents to make the best choice in schooling for their child. The bill expresses concerns that students will be delivered narrow and low-quality curricula. It also comments that subjects such as science may be distorted to fit the beliefs of school owners. There are safeguards in place regarding quality in both the Education Act 1989 and the partnership school contract. Given that the nine partnership schools are using the New Zealand Curriculum or Te Marautanga o Aotearoa, these concerns do not seem to have any merit. Thank you.

CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare Pāremata. I am delighted to support this excellent bill. If we are going to talk about freedom of choice, let us talk about a genuine choice for all, which is a quality, locally based, public education system. It is not giving double the money per student to failed experiments that are not accountable and are not required to focus on the excellent curriculum that has, as a previous speaker Chris Hipkins said, worldwide recognition.

In only the last 2 weeks we have seen why this bill is important. This bill is important because we have just had the evaluation of the first round of charter schools by Martin, Jenkins, and Associates. I do not know a lot about its people. They do not seem to be educational experts. They certainly were not assisted by the Government refusing to allow them to do a comparison between charter schools and State schools. But Martin, Jenkins, and Associates said that in terms of curriculum, which is what this bill is about, one of the weakest areas in the first round of charter schools was the lack of innovation in the curriculum.

The whole modus operandi, the whole rationale, for this failed international gambit called charter schools was innovation. If we read the rather narrow evaluation on innovation, we will find that the only way in which they innovated was around putting so-called experts on their school boards instead of parents. So there is no accountability to parents. There are people who may or may not have expertise. They have been put on these boards—that is the big innovation. But there was acknowledgment by the evaluators that there was a lack of innovation around the curriculum.

So that makes it pretty clear that the stated objective of offering some new, wonderful choice to marginalised students in the education system is not being met in the first round. The evaluation does not even talk about achievement and it will not allow comparison between schools. So bills like this come to the House because—[Interruption]

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Can I ask members on both sides to stop the cross talk and let the member get on with her speech.

CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: Fortunately, Mr Assistant Speaker, I have an ear infection, and I cannot hear what is being said to me on my left here, but it does make it difficult—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): The member is not missing much, but it is disruptive.

CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: I can hear white noise, and I use that term advisedly. But what I do want to talk about is the fact that the curriculum is important because of its breadth. When you get schools that are now experts in preparing for the army and marching, there is a very good reason to worry about breadth and to want the full weight of the New Zealand Curriculum to be offered to these students, because we are hearing stories that there is a lack of breadth.

Putting aside this evaluation that focused on the lack of curriculum innovation, there are also plenty of interesting stories coming out of the existing experience of charter schools. Nobody—nobody—can say that the curriculum was a success at Whangaruru School. Nobody can say that. It is a tragic story. Having spent time in the north and having talked to people who are intimately involved, it is a sad story of a school, because the authorisation board for this failed experiment allowed it to open when it was clearly not ready—not ready in curriculum terms and not ready in many other terms. The children were the guinea pigs for a failed experiment. That is an inexcusable use of public money for children who are already struggling.

I would never be romantic enough to say that the education system is perfect, for Māori students in particular. I am passionate about Māori students getting access to things like Te Kotahitanga, which challenges the Pākehā view of teaching education. But I am getting the message that it is time to go—I have got 1 minute. So what I will say about this bill is that this bill is part of a number of efforts by many Opposition members to try to make sure that we uphold what is good in our system, we protect what is valuable, and that we do not allow failed experiments to undermine the New Zealand Curriculum.

Actually, our kids deserve better than what is happening. They deserve better than what we are hearing from the charter schools. If the Government’s own evaluation tells you there is no innovation and the curriculum has not been innovated, what was this all about? What was the point of doubling the money per student only to find that kids are missing out on the breadth of the curriculum and learning how to do marching, missing out on cultural responsiveness that should be a given in schools, and missing out on the genuine education that we need to fight for, which is quality and public? Kia ora tātou katoa.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga): I think there can be no area of public policy where the difference between the left and the right is so exacerbated than that of the delivery of education. From the left’s point of view, the trade unions, the New Zealand Educational Institute, and the Post Primary Teachers’ Association should have control of what goes on. There should be one model of delivery, and that is how all kids should live.

From the right of the political spectrum, where I come from, we believe there should be quite a variation in the delivery mechanism. We already had a huge variation, even within the current system, before charter schools came along. If anyone who is in this room believes that some of the expensive private schools deliver anything like the same as some of the poorer decile 10 rural and provincial schools deliver for their kids, they are dreaming. Right across the range of the schools, even in my electorate—and I am sure other members have got the same thing—there will be various public schools that have a different emphasis on what they deliver and how they deliver it.

When it comes to charter schools, it is quite clear that there is a very, very bottom-of-the-heap cohort who is missing out altogether. These kids were actually never attending any school, and if they were, they were failing miserably and probably being expelled or excluded from the school, and so on. So what I do not understand is why the left does not at least get behind a trial. Let us see whether there can be a mechanism quite different to the current one, because the current one has failed these kids badly, or they have failed within it—whichever way you look at it. How about we look at a new mechanism and see whether it works?

I actually like the idea of saying to a unit of people who want to bring some children into a new environment: “Have a go at this. Let’s see how it works.” But the first thing I want to ask, as a question to the other side, is: is any child compelled to attend a charter school? No. OK? They are not. Right? They do not have to. It is not compulsory; they choose to. Well, that is a phenomenal starting point already, because I believe in the inherent goodness of most parents to want to have a better outcome for their kids.

The second thing about these partnership schools is to say: “Let us see whether they can deliver some outcomes.” I actually think they will. I think they already have. I think they are performing well. Then we get all of the nonsense metrics about how it is so much more expensive per child. Well, actually, there is a variation in the cost per child across the current State system, anyway. But, actually, if you are setting up a brand new partnership school, there are all the capital costs of new buildings, new property, and somewhere to house them. And so you are not comparing apples with apples when you only look at an existing school and you look at its per capita for funding just the operation of an already existing property.

Then it comes down to Mr Goff’s bill about: “Let’s have some forced rigidity so that they must stick to this New Zealand Curriculum.” I ask why. Why would you not allow a charter school to say: “We actually believe there is an alternative curriculum, an alternative way of learning, an alternative mechanism for kids at the bottom of the heap to learn, and we would like to try that.”? It may work or it may not, and you might say “Well, you shouldn’t be experimenting with kids.”, but actually, we have experimented with these kids for too long and they have got nowhere.

If you think that all the children who are in partnership schools are going to do the top-of-scholarship passing that everyone in the best schools in the country does, you are so wrong. This is a cohort of kids whom we need to put some real energy and effort into. Why would you want to put a restriction of “You must have the same structure as the State schools.”, and so on? Why would you want to do that? It may be—it just may be—that a particular partnership school has got a particular view of the world that it wants to deliver, and the parents can choose it voluntarily and want to go into it.

I understand that the current partnership schools have all pretty much stuck to the New Zealand Curriculum, as I guess you would expect, as a starting point. But what sort of a Parliament are we, what sort of a bill do we think we have to have, until we go to the bottom end of the delivery mechanism, to the kids who are struggling to even stay within the schooling system, and then say to the deliverers of a chance of getting those kids in: “You’re going to stick to the straitjacket of the State school, which did not work for these kids at any rate.”? This is why this bill is an absolutely ridiculous attempt to try to put an extra bit of a straitjacket around these schools, rather than allow them to have that flexibility, rather than allow them to have that freedom. I oppose the bill totally.

TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First): I almost feel sorry for charter schools, actually. After the contribution from that side of the House, I almost feel sorry for them. First of all, Mr Williamson just stood up and made it very clear that he knows so little about education that he thought that a decile 10 school was the lowest-decile school. How sad, sad, sad. He also just stood up and suggested that every child in a charter school is a low-achieving child who is going to fail in a State school. That does a disservice—a disservice—to the children in, let us say, the Whangarei kura. The Whangarei kura actually came out of the trust to do with the Māori Battalion, with the Māori Battalion special character provision.

David Seymour: How come this member can just make things up?

TRACEY MARTIN: So what it shows—Mr Seymour stood up and gave the greatest show of ignorance, which is how we ended up with charter schools in the first place. It was because Mr Seymour was so ignorant of these curriculum documents, was so ignorant about what was actually happening and the changes going on in the New Zealand education system, that he brought charter schools as his blackmail piece to the Government. That was the cost of the ACT Party’s vote.

These are the curriculum documents for New Zealand that I have here. These are the curriculum documents. They are world recognised—world recognised. Here is the bit that charter schools have to follow. If ever we needed to know why we needed to have these curriculum documents in this piece of legislation—I am referring to Whangaruru charter school and the non-existent Ngāti Wai curriculum they were supposed to be delivering. The Ngāti Wai curriculum that Natasha Sadler was supposed to be writing—when the school opened, the writing of it had not been finished. Children were out getting sea eggs—kina—and so on and so forth. Delivering them to elders was somehow part of the Ngāti Wai curriculum. But we could not measure it. We could not give them a qualification in it, but, apparently, Mr Seymour argues for that sort of leeway for charter schools. He does, and this Government does those children a disservice.

At the same time those members suggest that a school such as Vanguard Military School, which they laud, saying it has a 100 percent pass rate, certainly uses pieces of the New Zealand Curriculum, for example, maths and English—because it has to, because the Government has set those subjects at an 85 percent pass rate, exactly the same as it is for State schools. It is exactly the same at State schools. Vanguard pupils pick up a science: biology. When I visited Vanguard, the principal there—actually, I am not even sure he is a principal; he is not a trained teacher. The gentleman in charge of the Vanguard charter school said to me: “Well, we only offer that science because, actually, our kids can’t really reach for the other stuff.” How aspirational is that—how aspirational is that?

This is also the school that has a 100 percent National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 2 pass rate and has as one of its other subjects—not in this State curriculum—defence force studies. I cannot for the life of me find anywhere in any country an outline of what defence force studies are. That subject goes along with physical education. So what we have got at Vanguard, because it does not follow the New Zealand Curriculum documents in any way, shape, or form, is maths, we have got English, we have got biology, we have got physical education, and we have got defence force studies. That is it. That is what you are offered when you go to Vanguard.

Mr Williamson stands and says “No child is forced into it. No child is forced into it.”, but the continued suggestion to parents is that actually they are going to get this amazing standard of education. It is not happening. It is not happening in those schools. Charter schools actually have the same academic outcomes as the majority of current New Zealand schools.

David Seymour: Not true.

TRACEY MARTIN: I just want to make this clear—and Mr Seymour would not know, because Mr Seymour does not bother to actually go and visit New Zealand State schools. He does not bother to go and see innovation in New Zealand State schools. He is fixated on privatising and breaking down the New Zealand education system, but he has no desire to go and actually have a look at a real State school doing its job.

I want to make this very clear: New Zealand First will support this bill, not because we believe charter schools should be here—this bill needs to go through for the 6 years of the contracts that are currently in place, so that we can save those children from what happened at Whangaruru. But believe you me, when New Zealand First gets into a place of influence those contracts will not be renewed.

PAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): Fakaalofa lahi atu, Mr Assistant Speaker, and warm Pacific greetings to you in this Niue Language Week. In speaking in the first reading debate on the Education (Charter Schools Curriculum) Amendment Bill, introduced by the member Phil Goff, I am going to—unfortunately for Mr Goff—be opposing this measure. I appreciate that he probably brings it with very good intentions to this House, but it does not do what it says on the label: introduce “a broad and balanced curriculum” into the New Zealand educational system.

We are proud in this country to have one of the most permissive curriculum systems in the world. I should pay credit to previous Ministers of Education from both sides of the House who have done a very fine job in ensuring that the New Zealand national curriculum is of a good standard and provides appropriate settings for the training and courses that are offered in New Zealand schools, but it is appropriate that these decisions are made at a community level. I think that having people in this House deciding what is appropriate and what is not appropriate to be taught in New Zealand schools—be they partnership schools, be they State schools, be they other schools with special character—would not produce a particularly desirable outcome.

I had the privilege of attending the Conservative Party conference in the United Kingdom, in Manchester, last week. I was interested to hear the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, announce as one of his set piece policies during his keynote speech at that conference the addition of a further 500 free schools—what we would call partnership schools or charter schools here in New Zealand. The United Kingdom public returned Mr Cameron’s party with an unprecedented majority at the election they had in May. Mr Cameron’s party campaigned on the policies of having better choice in education and of improving quality.

When a country like the United Kingdom is leading the way with this, it is appropriate that New Zealand does look to those international models of good practice. We are not only seeking to emulate what others are doing but we are innovating in our own ways here, particularly around offering Māori students, Pasifika students, and other students from ethnic minorities the choices that are appropriate to their needs. So for that reason, I think it is a good thing that there are genuine choices in New Zealand and that we are freeing some schools from the administrative rigmarole that is imposed upon them by the Ministry of Education.

This bill amends the Education Act 1989, and one particular aspect of this bill, clause 5—which amends section 158U of the principal Act by applying section 60A, “National education guidelines”, of the Act to partnership schools—would impose the administrative guidelines promulgated by the ministry on partnership schools. I think it is actually a good thing that we have schools now that are free from having their opening hours set centrally. It might be appropriate in a Marxist country—if we go back to 1980s Romania—to have people in this House deciding what hours the schools should open their doors. But, actually, there may well be children who would benefit—learners who would benefit—from going to school for an early morning class and then having trades training in the afternoon. There might be others who would be better off taking computer graphics classes at the local polytech in the mornings and then having the schooling component offered in the afternoon.

This legislation would actually be a significant step backwards in terms of the level of flexibility we have in partnership schools. The success of these schools relies on the freedoms they have been given, and this legislation would restrict them and tie them back to those old-fashioned, old-style Soviet-era, central, command-and-control education diktats coming out of Wellington.

There is one more point that I would like to make, Mr Assistant Speaker. I should have raised a point of order at the time. There was a scurrilous word used by the member Tracey Martin. I usually like Mrs Martin—she is a very good member and a well-intentioned member—but there are certain words that are unparliamentary, and I was wondering whether you picked it up. It was a word beginning with “b”. I am not going to repeat it.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): No, I did not. But I also did not interrupt the member when—

PAUL FOSTER-BELL: No. You are a very generous Assistant Speaker for that reason. But I thought that was a ridiculous allegation from a party where a member once accepted the other “b” word—the “baubles” of office—in exchange for policy concessions. So I think that member should really have a look at her own party before slinging words like that across the House.

GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora, Mr Assistant Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise to vote and speak in support of the Hon Phil Goff’s member’s bill. We think it is a good bill, and that is why the Green Party is supporting it, but let me just respond to the member speaking previously, Mr Foster-Bell.

Talk about jumping the shark, talk about exaggerating, and talk about someone being out of touch, to describe a bill that is literally two pages and an explanatory statement as an administrative rigmarole. To describe it as Marxist State control—I do not know what planet that member lives on or what schools he has ever visited, but the fact is that all this bill requires is that those schools teach the New Zealand Curriculum. Is the member saying that the current curriculum is State control and is Soviet-planned economy? Is that member calling the current curriculum, which has the values of excellence, innovation, inquiry, diversity, equality, community, ecological sustainability, integrity, and respect—is that member seriously saying that is Marxist and that is communist? He looks completely out of touch. I feel, and I believe, it is entirely appropriate, entirely legitimate, and, in fact, good for our country for every New Zealand student to have access to the New Zealand Curriculum. Calling the curriculum Marxist I think does a disservice to the educators and the world-renowned curricula that we teach our kids.

It is hackneyed phrase in politics, “Won’t someone think of the children?”, but in this case Parliament has an opportunity to think of those children. What the Hon Phil Goff’s bill is, is a simple, effective bill trying to bring public trust and accountability to what the Government has foisted upon the New Zealand education system, which is a failed experiment when it comes to charter schools.

The background for anyone listening to the debate is that charter schools, which receive 100 percent public funding—some of them receiving five times the amount of funding that an equivalent student would receive in a State school—are not required to teach the New Zealand Curriculum. I believe that it is entirely appropriate and legitimate when public money is being spent on these students that the curriculum—which is world renowned, which is non-controversial—is provided to these kids. We have heard in the debate of the fears around it. I would also point out that it was not just the Labour Party, the Green Party, or New Zealand First; it was Treasury that came out opposed to not allowing the curriculum to be provided to charter school students. What this debate should be around is our kids getting a quality education, because the risk is that—and we have seen it in some of the failed examples—the reason to bypass the curriculum is to teach a different view of scientific reality.

I was a failed teacher trainee. I got a job to sail on the Rainbow Warrior so I got only halfway through my teacher-training course, but I got to learn about the curriculum. I was actually shocked when I met a bunch of biology teachers from fundamentalist Christian backgrounds who were studying only biology, hoping to teach only biology, so that they could propagate their creationist beliefs. As someone who believes in science—believes in the scientific method—I was deeply shocked when I learnt this. This background of allowing charter schools not to teach the curricula risks this, which is one of the risks identified by the member Phil Goff.

What we fear are a narrow curricula described by these corporate entities that are teaching for profit, that are teaching to a certain ideology or philosophical background—an area where corporations or non-profits are teaching with limited accountabilities in terms of the Office of the Ombudsmen and in terms of the Official Information Act, and are teaching with untrained and unqualified teachers. It is a failed experiment. We have seen that at the Whangaruru school, where only one out of 49 kids received a formal qualification. We have seen incredibly tragic outcomes from that school. I think we should also learn, perhaps, the lesson of the United Kingdom. I note that in the first speech on this debate, Phil Goff described that the UK Government, which had gone down this path, subsequently changed it in 2007.

So let us not have a debate just around the politics. Sure, it is a failed political deal that we saw with the charter schools, but let us not jump the shark and describe it as Marxist to simply be giving those kids who are in charter schools the New Zealand Curriculum—absolutely ridiculous. This should be a common-sense, reasonable vote, and I urge other parties to support it.

Hon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura): What a depressing and distressing contribution from the Green Party member Gareth Hughes, who has just resumed his seat.

There I was, all excited to be coming to the House to speak on a bill put forward by my good friend the Hon Phil Goff, a new, independent candidate for the mayoralty of Auckland, and I thought “Well, Phil and I, we often do TV together.”—not as much as Annette King and me, but Phil and I do. And I thought “Well, this will be good.”, and then I read it, and I thought: “Oh, for goodness’ sake! Come on, really? Where is the harm that we are trying to fix?”. And I looked at it and thought “Well, all the charter schools”—or partnership schools, as they are called here in New Zealand—“at the moment, they are teaching to the New Zealand Curriculum. So where is the great harm?”.

Well, the great harm is, apparently, that they might want to be teaching creation theories rather than scientific theories of evolution. Oh dear, well, so does the Bible. Should we ban that too? So does the Koran. Should we ban that too? So do all sorts of other things. Should we ban them too? Should we not, in fact, be a Parliament where ideas can flourish, even if we disagree with them and even if they are wrong? We should be able to do that, and so our schools should be able to teach the children whom they need to teach in the best way that they can.

When I look at charter schools—and I have one in my electorate, South Auckland Middle School—the only complaint I have heard in my electorate, Papakura, about partnership schools is that we do not have enough of them.

Tracey Martin: What about special-needs children?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: That is the only complaint that I have heard. I know that there are entities working with young people who are really struggling in our schooling system, for whom the curriculum does not hold much joy, actually, and who want to be able to do something to get some skills so that they can, in fact, become positively contributing members of New Zealand society, rather than, say, members of New Zealand First—you would not want them to become that. And when I look at some of those young people, many of them come from homes that are pretty dysfunctional. But also, some come from homes that I would not describe like that at all, with caring parents, or grandparents, or whānau who are trying to do their very best for their children and who, somehow, for some reason—whether it is their fault, whether it is a disability, whether it is a teaching fault—something has happened, or something is not happening, so that these children are not getting the very best that they can from our education system.

One of the reasons that I am someone who is in favour of this diversity in the provision of educational service is that I know that our prisons and our Child, Youth and Family residences are full of people for whom our current education system—the way in which we teach, the way that we do things, which works for the vast majority of young people, and which I fully support—has failed, for these very few young people. And I do not want to see more people going into our prisons, or, particularly, more people going into Child, Youth and Family justice services, because what we see in those is that it tends to be a one-way track through to a life of crime and misery. I want to see young people succeed in education, and I think everyone in this House does; we just sometimes disagree as to how to achieve that.

As a parent, I can tell this House with all honesty that I was a complete expert in parenting until I became a parent, and then I suddenly realised that all the things I thought my parents had done wrong, they had done right. I did not understand that parents try so hard for their children and, as children, I think we are so often ungrateful for what our parents are trying to do, or do not even understand the opportunities available to us to learn. These young people need something. They certainly do not need us getting all ideological and deciding what they need to learn. We need them to learn something. We need them to care, we need them to get passionate about something, we need them to learn, and we need to keep some freedom of choice in the provision of education.

I support the provisions that David Seymour has brought to this Parliament. I do not support the contribution of the bill by my dear, dear friend the Hon Phil Goff.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Speaking of her dear friend, the Hon Phil Goff.

Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): Where do I start? Well, let us start with: “Let’s not get all ideological.” There is one reason why we are before this House debating charter schools. It is that that party over there, the ACT Party, with its 0.4 percent support in the polls, according to the last Colmar Brunton poll, made that a condition of its supply and confidence agreement with National. It is ideological.

Now let us pick up the other point that the National members have made. You would think, listening to those National members, that charter schools were the best thing since sliced bread. How many National parents over there intend to send their children to a charter school? Come on, let us have a show of hands. You know the answer—not one. Not one, because what National MP in their right mind would send their kids to a school that did not have to have qualified teachers, that did not have to teach to the New Zealand Curriculum, that did not have to follow the National Education Guidelines in terms of the administration of the school, and that did not have any role for the parents in the way that the school was run? That is why they will not send their precious children to a charter school, but they are happy to see kids from disadvantaged backgrounds go to those schools.

Then Judith Collins said—my very good friend Judith Collins—“What on earth are we trying to fix?”. Well, let us start with the Middle School West Auckland. The Middle School West Auckland has had three reports from the Ministry of Education and three reports from the Education Review Office saying that the school is failing—saying that the school is failing. Then we have got Whangaruru School, which had 49 students last year. How many of them gained a national qualification? Let me ask Judith Collins. How many of those 49 at the Whangaruru charter school got a qualification last year? Do you know the answer? One—one out of 49. That is not even 2 percent of the kids. These schools are failing, and that is why we are having this debate.

Paul Foster-Bell said that he turned up at the Conservative Party conference and that the delegates thought charter schools were absolutely wonderful and that there would be more of them. What he did not tell us was that 8 years ago the Government of the United Kingdom at that time actually said, retrospectively: “We made a mistake. All charter schools now have to follow the national curriculum.” So there is Paul Foster-Bell saying: “Look at the example of Britain.” Well, look at the example of Britain. It said: “We got it wrong. Of course those schools should follow the national curriculum.”

Why should kids learn the New Zealand Curriculum? Because New Zealanders, as a whole, agree that that document gives kids the skills and the areas of knowledge that they need in order to go out and succeed in the community. So why would we have a situation where the law says that kids who go to charter schools—the disadvantaged kids—do not have to learn what every other kid in our country needs to know? It is a shocker.

It is a shocker, and I waited and waited for Mr Seymour or Mr Williamson to give us the justification. What I heard from Mr Seymour was that this was all a plot by the education unions and that we were their stool pigeons. Well, let me read from the Treasury paper. The New Zealand Treasury—hardly a radical or a left-wing institution—said that teacher registration is an indication of a minimum level of quality. It should have been in for the charter schools. It said that it was opposed to allowing the charter schools to hire unregistered teachers. It said that the benefits of introducing these schools would not outweigh the costs and the risks. It was not in favour. The Maxim Institute, which is hardly a radical, left-wing organisation, said that all the charter schools would do is rob the kids and the funding off the public schools that they were competing with.

This bill remedies one outstanding flaw. What we should really be doing in this House is scrapping the charter schools, and that is what we will do when we get the chance.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Education (Charter Schools Curriculum) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

Ayes 59

New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12; United Future 1.

Noes 62

New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1.

Motion not agreed to.

Bills

Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill

First Reading

CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): I move, That the Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Social Services Committee to consider the bill. Firstly, let me start by acknowledging the incredibly hard work that social workers do. Social workers are professionals, and need to be recognised as being just that. The work is too important not to have the checks and balances in place to ensure that our most vulnerable people are being cared for by qualified, registered social workers who are equipped to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of issues that children and families are presenting with.

This bill implements recommendations made to the Minister for Social Development by the Social Workers Registration Board. “The recommendations are that the current voluntary system of registration for practising social workers become a mandatory system; registered social workers have practising certificates that must be renewed annually; the title ‘social worker’ be protected in order to prevent its use by people who are not registered as social workers and people who have been deregistered as social workers; the public be able to complain to the Complaints and Disciplinary Tribunal when they receive unsafe social work services from those who are unregistered or deregistered.”

Now that I have clarified what is in this bill I want to share a story that illustrates clearly why this Parliament must move quickly to implement the recommendations in legislation. This story is not a heart-warming one, but in the context of this bill it is one that needs to be told. Earlier this year a man who was working in the role of a social worker for a west Auckland social service was sentenced to intensive supervision after he walked into a public library, sat opposite a teenage girl, placed a small mirror between his legs, and pretended to read a book while positioning the mirror to look up that young woman’s skirt. That same person had been charged with a similar offence more than 30 years ago.

Although this story is rather alarming so far, the worst is yet to come. There is nothing in the current law preventing him from continuing to practise under the title of social worker and to continue working with vulnerable New Zealanders in that capacity. No one in this House would argue for this man to be allowed to continue in that role.

Under the existing framework the registration of social workers is completely voluntary. This means that those who do not want to be registered, or, worse, those who are unqualified or unsuitable to be registered, can still continue to practise as social workers. Unregistered social workers are not required to undertake ongoing professional development, receive supervision, or complete any performance reviews of any kind. This bill will work to amend that legislation and make it mandatory for all social workers to be both qualified and registered. It will professionalise the workforce, aiming to protect the status of social workers, hold social workers to account, protect the work they do, and protect the public at large.

We have a lot of great, hard-working, and dedicated people doing social work in this country. Some of them are currently unqualified and unregistered. The majority are doing a fair and reasonable job, but we cannot continue to leave this to chance. The Social Workers Registration Board has had to deregister social workers for theft, violence, drug and alcohol offences, indecent assault, rape, and even attempted murder, yet there is nothing stopping these people from continuing to practise.

As far as I am concerned, it is dangerous and unacceptable that social workers can operate in schools, in health, and in care and protection without qualifications or police clearance. Although 99 percent of the time the outcomes of social work are invaluable, for that 1 percent of the time where it goes wrong we must ensure that we have got appropriate mechanisms for accountability in place and that we do not allow completely inadequate behaviour to go unpenalised.

I have no doubt that the general public would share my concern that approximately 500 Child, Youth and Family social workers remain unregistered, despite the fact that the Government committed to having all Child, Youth and Family social workers registered in 2015. The general public would also share my concern that the Ministry of Social Development keeps no record of how many of the Ministry of Social Development - contracted social workers in schools are actually registered social workers. In fact, after finding this out I asked the Ministry of Education whether it knew how many of the Ministry of Social Development - funded social workers in its schools were registered. Its response was: “Ask the Ministry of Social Development.” The fact that this crucial information is not being collected is as negligent as the fact that we have such an important workforce left unregulated, with only voluntary registration required.

Alongside the issues of conduct/misconduct and the insufficient data collection and monitoring by the Ministry of Social Development, there is also the very important issue of capacity. Both the White Paper for Vulnerable Children and the Children’s Commissioner’s recent report on Child, Youth and Family recognise that social workers need much better support than they currently receive. Many social workers have to deal with nigh-impossible workloads while working in situations so challenging that most of us could not even imagine them. It requires intensive training and regular supervision to work in the context of problems with mental health, addictions, and violence. Putting unqualified and inexperienced staff in such a position endangers both the people in need of support and the social workers themselves.

To return to the story that I told you right at the start, it is in no way an isolated case. A search through the media archives over the past 10 years showed up several cases of misconduct by social workers, the vast majority of whom were unregistered. Worryingly, the possibilities for this to go wrong are much larger still. In the 2013 census more than 18,000 people identified themselves as social workers, yet there are fewer than 5,000 social workers actually registered, making the scope of this issue frighteningly large.

Many prominent and well-respected New Zealanders are exasperated by the lethargy of the current legislation. In fact, one well-known New Zealander, a certain Anne Tolley, called it “outrageous and disappointing”. She was referring to the voluntary registration of social workers. It is clearly a common-sense and bipartisan view that we as a society owe it to the most vulnerable within our communities to ensure their well-being by requiring all social workers to be registered. In fact, when I met with the Minister Anne Tolley to discuss this matter, she confided in me that there was nothing at all in this bill that she disagreed with. The timing of the bill, on the other hand, seemed to be of concern to the Government, but tell me this: is delaying this conversation, only to reintroduce the exact same bill in the future, really worth the cost?

We have here in front of us the opportunity to prevent our children, victims of abuse, and other vulnerable members of society from being put at further risk. This is undoubtedly a tough conversation to have as a society, but it is one that we must have if we wish to address and prevent further suffering, and what better time to have it than now? My plea now is that parliamentary colleagues across the House support this bill to select committee.

Let me just reiterate: the recommendation for changing to a mandatory registration system did not start with me. It was recommended by the Social Workers Registration Board and the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers. It was recommended in the White Paper for Vulnerable Children, which went to Cabinet but was ignored, and the issues that this bill seeks to resolve were highlighted in the Children’s Commissioner’s State of Care 2015: What we learnt from monitoring Child, Youth and Family report on Child, Youth and Family, with recommendation 4 being all about addressing the “capacity and capability issues across the CYF workforce;”.

Before I end this speech, I just want to acknowledge all of the social workers and organisations across the country that have come out in support of this member’s bill. I particularly want to acknowledge the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers and the Tangata Whenua Social Workers Association. I want to acknowledge the fact that for the majority of organisations and social workers I have spoken to, despite the fact that they do support the bill, there are some issues that they do have that they want resolved, but that does not overshadow their support for this bill. They still want it to go to select committee, and they want the opportunity to have that discussion. So with all of that in mind, I commend this bill to the House.

ALFRED NGARO (National): I rise to take a call on this first reading of the Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill. First of all, I just want to acknowledge the member whose bill this is, Carmel Sepuloni. I think for those of us who are new to the House, in the sense of coming through, it is always an honour to be able to have your member’s bill drawn. In fact, it is sometimes not only an honour; sometimes it is the luck of the draw. I know members who have been in this House for quite some time who have never had a member’s bill drawn, so to have your bill drawn and then to have it read with the intent of being able to pursue that through the course and the institution of the House is an honour. So I do want to acknowledge the member for that.

I also want to acknowledge the fact that the intent of this bill is something that I would support in a number of different ways. Actually, this bill goes all the way back to 2003 when the Hon Steve Maharey was the Minister of Social Services and Employment. In fact, at that time—I want to declare a conflict of interest—I was actually part of an advisory committee that was putting together a blueprint, and part of that was informed by the Judge Mick Brown report, which talked about the state of current social services being delivered to our communities and the need for there to be some form of regulation and registration. Hence there was the bill that was put forward, which was the Social Workers Registration Bill, then Act, of 2003. This was put through the House as part of one of those recommendations from that report.

I just want to acknowledge that during that time—and I have actually pulled out the Hansard that talks about some of the speeches from the first and second readings, the Committee stage, and the third reading of that bill when it came through. There were 37 submissions that were put through on that bill in 2003; 30 of those were in support of the intent of the bill. As the Minister at that time, Steve Maharey was contending with some contentious issues, and one issue was the issue of voluntary to mandatory. In fact, what happened and what came out of that was that a number of the institutions of social work practice actually asked that the process be a mandatory process of registration rather than voluntary. I read from the Hansard where he spoke, in his speech on the second reading, and he said this: “Mandatory registration is not consistent with other forms of occupational regulation. Voluntary regulation regimes are the most common form of regulating other professions. For example, they are used for accountants. As a result of considering that issue, the select committee has recommended that as part of its regular review of the legislation, the Social Workers Registration Board should specifically consider the extent to which the system of voluntary registration is achieving the purposes of the legislation.”

So I think at that time the intent was to be able to consider the aspect of whether voluntary to mandatory was the appropriate process, but it was to take time with that, too. I think that also, too, inside of the bill that is currently before us in this House it talks about the time frame of a year. In fact, what the Minister actually initiated here in this Hansard was that he talked about a time limit for provisional registration of 6 to 8 years, and then also allowing for a qualifying period of 5 years. So the time frames are quite a lot longer. He realised that it takes time to be fully registered and for those to be accommodated for that as well. So the debate there was quite interesting, because it was a similar debate.

Su’a William Sio: Do you support it?

ALFRED NGARO: Well, if you listened, Mr Sio, you will hear this. That is what you do. You sit in debates and you listen to the speeches. Otherwise, your speeches would be quite short, I would imagine—“Yes” or “No”. But this is important because this is providing the basis for the context of what we are talking about—from voluntary to mandatory. He actually talked about the fact that the time frame—which your bill talks about as 1 year—is 6 to 8 years. That was what he was talking about. So that becomes really important.

So I think the fact is that what this is also telling us is of the important fact that the challenges that they faced then are also the challenges that we face now. The reason why I want to quote from those speeches—and Mr Sio will find this important—is the fact that when we talk about that time frame, Minister Tolley has actually said that she has already commissioned a review with the Social Workers Registration Board to actually look at these critical issues. So here are some of the critical issues to inform my colleague over there, Mr Sio. The Social Workers Registration Board is currently reviewing the Social Workers Registration Act, and will provide a draft report to the Minister by the end of the year. Here are the important factors: the definition of identification—

Su’a William Sio: I am going to go now.

ALFRED NGARO: Well, that is OK. Your contribution is not always valid. The factors are the definition of identification of social workers and social work practice for carers and the implications of moving to a mandatory registration system for the social worker, the social service workforce, and the public. So that tells us this: this Government does take the intent of the member and her bill to heart, but it also says that these things are already in play; these things are already in place.

The Minister is initiating this; there is already a review. Out of that review, again, we will be able to take one of the next steps to it. As part of this work we have requested that the board consider what a social worker looks like, and the specific training that needs to be requested as well. I think those things are really important. The Minister has asked the board to provide a clear explanation as to how many dedicated people there are who have been working in the sector as social workers for many years without social work degrees but with significant knowledge and experience. So those are factors. As the member has talked about, there are a number of those who are working as social workers. They may not be qualified, they may not be registered, but their practice may be valid and may be an important contribution as well. So with these things in mind the Minister has initiated this review as well, and we think that is important.

So we—and I myself—applaud the intent of this bill; however, we cannot support this bill as it is currently drafted. We believe that there is some work that has already been initiated and has already been reviewed so that this bill, OK, will not actually fulfil the purposes, but the review that has been taken with the Social Workers Registration Board is already in place, and we think that is important as well. There was some comment that was made about the current situation for social workers in practice and so what I do know is, and the facts are, that on 30 June 2015 the Child, Youth and Family Service had 1,377 registered social workers, although not all of these are front-line staff. We know that that is a commitment that has been made as well to ensure that we do have those who are qualified and those who are able to provide this important service for our most vulnerable, and those in need as well.

When we talk about the time frame—I want to just comment on that, because I think that is important. The member in her bill talks about a 1-year time period to move to mandatory registration, which we believe is not sufficient to implement the significant changes. As I said when I quoted from the Hansard of 2003, it was acknowledged even by the Hon Steve Maharey that a transition period of 6 to 8 years was absolutely needed in order to move people from a non-registration process to a registration process. We know that further work is needed to understand the supply of social workers. I was privileged to be able to hand out the graduation certificates to social workers for the Diploma in Whānau Ora at the Waipareira Trust in west Auckland. I know that the training that was needed there was quite significant. It was specific to those in the Māori community working with whānau, and so that is another good example of the fact that social work practice is not just what we expect it is. It actually has a variety of complex needs, and expertise that is needed, as well, to fulfil those roles.

So in summarising my comments on the first reading of this bill, I again want to acknowledge the member for her bill being drawn and the intent that she has, which is to work towards a form of mandatory registration. The fact is, however, that we do not support this bill because the intent of what has already been initiated—a review by the Minister to ensure that the Social Workers Registration Board comes back with other details—we believe fulfils the areas of need there. So we do not support the bill, but we support the work that is already taking place to meet these needs. I commend my speech but I do not support the bill.

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA (Labour—Hauraki-Waikato): As I make a contribution to this debate, it is not surprising—listening to the contribution of Alfred Ngaro—that the Government will not support this bill in its first reading and referral to the select committee. Heck, it does not support registered teachers in charter schools, so it is no surprise.

But here is the thing—and I hope that common sense does prevail, because there is every opportunity for this bill to go to a select committee and be heard concurrently with the review that is being undertaken by the Minister. That review will show what the state of care report has shown: more work needs to be done to ensure that in the space of social work there is a lifting of its professionalisation, and that registration can help.

I agree, in part, with the comment that was made by the previous speaker about the transition time, but it is 12 years since 2003 and a voluntary registration method, and there is some urgency to ensure that those most at risk in our communities and in our schools have the opportunity to have access to registered social workers who are able to participate in different response models in the community where it is needed most. We have all visited our community organisations and our social service providers, and they have all told us—whether they are social workers in schools, or in faith-based organisations, or community providers—that now, more than ever before, there is a real need for social workers who are registered, who have best-practice approaches to some of the most challenging situations. In fact, more than anyone else, community providers will tell you that the benefit to the family, the whānau, and the children whom they are working with of having a registered social worker is a lift in the outcomes for those families who need it most.

Some of the challenges in 2003 remain as the challenge today, which is the cost of moving towards a registration programme and the cost to community organisations. All those issues can be considered at the select committee. I visited a number of Māori providers, and they will highlight and amplify just how important it is to have access to social workers, let alone registered social workers—and right now they will make do with whatever they have, but they do want access to registered social workers. Best practice matters, because the families that they work with have the most severe and urgent circumstances that require a different approach.

Social workers today working in our communities are working as part of multi-disciplinary teams. We have had social sector trials in the Waikato. We have got the Family Safety Network, we have got the child safety teams, and we have got Family Start. All of them have access to social workers, and all of them will say that they would benefit from registered social workers. The transition time, yes, is an issue, the cost is an issue, but they would never ever say that having a registered social worker would not make a difference. They would actually say that having a registered social worker across that profession would ensure that they are getting best-practice delivery in the services that are being provided.

I support the intent of the bill, and I recognise that urgency is really important when we think about our decision to send it to the select committee. There are outstanding issues that can be addressed—whether or not a 1-year transition time is sufficient—but we need to start now, because it is 12 years on since 2003, when a voluntary system was brought into place. We can do this concurrently with the review that is being undertaken by the Minister, and it is necessary. It is necessary because children, people suffering from mental health issues, refugee and migrant communities, women who have been victims of abuse, and men who have been the victims of sexual abuse all need access to qualified, registered social workers. There are not enough social workers there—and there are certainly not enough registered—to ensure that the professionalism and the best-practice approach that they should have access to are available. This bill will help that outcome.

MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): I am rising to speak to the Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill. I will not be speaking in support of this bill, but I do acknowledge the Labour MP Carmel Sepuloni, whose name this bill is under. The bill was drawn from the ballot, and I too have had a member’s bill drawn from the ballot recently. It is great to see your ideas being formulated, developed, discussed, and challenged.

There is an issue with this bill, with the Minister for Social Development, Anne Tolley, having already requested the Social Workers Registration Board to look into registration. So I think that it is very much a question of timing—timing of when that report will come back. But also in this bill is an issue with 1 year—1 year being set as a milestone that social workers need to be registered by. I do not think that that is enough time for this very diverse and complex workforce to be registered. When you look at social work, it is about timing. It is about getting to the social issues at the right time and providing the right interventions.

When we look at the question of regulation, or of not being regulated, I would challenge that a bit and say that it is about effectiveness. What we need to do is look at the whole of the social work workforce and understand what the blocks and the obstacles are for them to be achieving their aim of improving the social well-being of all New Zealanders. One programme currently in the United Kingdom, called Reclaiming Social Work, is giving social workers the ability to get back to face-to-face work, to engage with the people they are working with—not as a desktop exercise where they are filling out forms. We hear some very scary statistics through the Children’s Commissioner, with his interim report that some social workers are spending less than 25 percent of their time in face-to-face engagement with the people they are working with.

We need to ensure and understand that it is not just about how we regulate or register; it is about how we free up working practices so that social workers can go out there and provide effective interventions face to face. What we are talking about at the moment is social workers who are so fixated on writing down care plans, but what we need to do is upskill this workforce. They have expertise. It is all very well being passionate, but you need to have a skill set—a skill set that you then use to provide interventions. Maybe that might be around psychological therapies that make a real change to people’s lives. That is what I would support.

I think that it is fair to say that also what we need to do is address the problem—mitigate social problems—and even prevent them right from the start. When you look at some of the successes in the House this week, and as the state of the nation report by the Salvation Army said, if we want to address social problems, then we need to get right up front. What we do around social problems addressed by poverty is around providing better jobs and better incomes. In New Zealand, that means exporting more products offshore. By engaging in free-trade agreements, we provide more jobs and better incomes for people in New Zealand, which addresses social problems like poverty, which increases the social well-being of all New Zealanders. When you look at social policy, you can have all the aspirations in the world—this social policy or that one—but at the end of the day, you need to pay for it. This is about having a Government that can provide strong economic management and create surpluses that can then be reinvested in good public services, which go on and give people a good start in life.

Could I join people around this House in acknowledging the work of social workers throughout New Zealand. I know that in my electorate of Waimakariri we have been very hard hit post-earthquakes. It is great to see the social work teams getting into local schools—thanks to the Associate Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery, Nicky Wagner, with her psychosocial plan that allows social workers to go in and make a difference in the lives of young people in New Zealand. Thank you.

JAN LOGIE (Green): It is with pleasure that I rise to speak to the Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill, which has been put forward by Labour’s Carmel Sepuloni, and congratulations to that member on getting this drawn. It is a bill whose time is well and truly overdue, and the Green Party is very pleased to offer our support to this bill.

While I stand, though, I do feel compelled to address some of the arguments that I think I understood from the last speaker, Matt Doocey, although it was a little bit unclear to me exactly what the main point of that speech was. I was hearing, on the one hand, that skill sets are really important, and that if we are looking at ensuring safety and good social change in our communities, then we need our social workers to have the skill sets. Well, actually, that is part of what this bill is about. Social worker registration is the oversight and the assurance of skills and ethics within the social work system. But I also heard from that member, kind of contrary to that, that actually what we need to be doing to solve our social problems is not looking at social workers at all, but signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, because that is going to solve all our social problems! Well, I have news for that member. We have signed quite a few free-trade agreements over the years, and somehow our social problems have not dissolved. It does not seem to be that simple. Actually, there is a place for registration.

Earlier we heard from the member Alfred Ngaro that the Government cannot support this bill because, although it agrees with significant amounts of the content of this bill, the Government is doing a review. So the Government does not want to hear from the public, to help inform that review, which actually sending this bill to a select committee would enable? I really do question the logic of that. If the Government is interested in this—and the Government says it is on its agenda—then support it to the select committee. Enable the public, enable unregistered social workers, and enable registered social workers to comment on this bill.

There was one specific point in the content that I heard challenged by the member Alfred Ngaro, and that was the transition time of 1 year. He pointed out that initially, back in 2003, when the Social Workers Registration Act—which did not bring in mandatory registration—was brought in, Steve Maharey said it needed 6 to 8 years’ transition. We are 12 years on, and surely that is not enough reason to block this bill. If that was your only point of difference, let it go to the select committee and argue that point. Change the transition time. I personally do think that maybe it is somewhere in between—that there is a degree of urgency on this, but maybe 1 year to register the 3,000 unregistered people who are practising at the moment may be too short. We should have that public discussion.

Yes, there are issues to consider with this. We know that the funding of our community organisations has been deeply squeezed by our Government, while they are having to deal with more and more complex cases that the Child, Youth and Family Service is referring to these community agencies. With that funding being squeezed, there is a real danger that they are increasingly going to start using unregistered social workers, because they may not feel they can afford registered social workers. The increased costs that would be associated with this bill in that locked funding environment may be detrimental to them.

But surely our priority is our children, it is the people who are using these services, and it is the importance of us making sure that they have a body that they can complain to if something goes wrong, that they can be sure that when they are dealing with a social worker, that person is a social worker who has been trained and who has a code of ethics that they are working to, which is what comes with being a registered social worker. There have been all too many stories of unregistered social workers who have not been able to be monitored and whose behaviour has been out of line. In 2003 my colleague Sue Bradford said that the underlying question of the original bill was whether we as a society want to begin the process of professionalising social work in a positive and empowering way. Twelve years on, to me the answer is still yes, and registration is the way.

TODD MULLER (National—Bay of Plenty): I rise to say a few words in respect of the Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill. It is not surprising that, along with my colleagues on this side of the House, I stand to oppose this bill. Essentially, at the core, the reason for our objection is summarised by the view that if you are going to do something, you do it properly. What we are looking at here is a bill that, unfortunately, is half-baked in execution. It is good in intent. We have all echoed the intent, but when you drill deeper into the specifics in respect of this bill, it does not work. With respect, I think it is reasonably naive. Even if we quote Nanaia Mahuta, who is a very considered and reflective contributor to debates in this House, as she said, and acknowledged, the transitional cost in respect of this particular bill is quite significant. And it is quite significant. Let us just dive into some of the detail here.

The report of the Social Workers Registration Board itself talks, of course, to the benefit of registration and the trend line of increasing numbers over the last few years from 3,500, 3 years ago, lifting at about 500 or 600 a year, to now over 5,000. But if we reference, of course, the census of 2001, 18,327 people listed their occupation as social work. Then if you apply the definition that is listed in this bill, “a person who practises social work”, this is not a matter of a handful of thousands, as the previous speaker suggested, who are unregistered and would need to be transitioned to a mandatory registration regime within a year. We are talking of thousands upon thousands who could be caught up in the definition in respect of social work and being required to be mandatorily registered.

So there is an effective question that the review that is currently under way needs to address. We all can talk with complementarity around the effectiveness of the registration of social workers. We now have over 5,000 who have been registered. But if there are potentially another 10,000 or more who could be caught up in this registration process, who have given many years of their life in professional service, doing fantastic work on the front line of what are some of the most difficult social challenges in this country, but are not registered now and have not necessarily got formal qualifications to support their years of support and commitment to families and individuals in this country, they need to be protected, to ensure that their life’s work is acknowledged and can somehow be captured and acknowledged as part of a new mandatory framework. These are the difficult sorts of policy questions that the Social Workers Registration Board, in its review, is grappling with in terms of transition times and getting that definition accurate and appropriate.

This review is getting close to its conclusion. It is not years away, as some have suggested. The draft report, as you have heard, is due for the Minister in November and the final report is due in December. From that basis I think we will be able to see movement in this area in a far more considered and measured way than what is being suggested in this particular bill. In respect of the definitions that I have touched on already, our view is that the definition as listed here is far too broad, and when added to the, I think, pretty unsophisticated time line of 1 year, it makes this completely unworkable.

In conclusion, my view is that there is good intent, of course. The way this bill is written is not going to help the debate. Let us get that review finished. It is comprehensive. Let us reflect on that and then put a framework in place that delivers the right outcome and one that can sustain this very valuable profession into the future.

RIA BOND (NZ First): I am proud to rise on behalf of New Zealand First and speak to the Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill at its first reading in the House today.

When this bill was first drawn from the ballot, this quote from Nelson Mandela came to my mind: “A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” This quote fits with how we, as a legislative body, bring bills into this House and pass them, particularly the bill we are reading and dealing with now, which involves our youngest citizens to our frail elderly. New Zealand First supports this bill. This bill makes common sense. I wish to thank the Labour member Carmel Sepuloni for bringing this bill before the House. This bill is needed in today’s environment of social services more than ever before.

Social worker services are crucial to this country in dealing with the multiple levels of delivering services to our most vulnerable and our elderly. I need to acknowledge that this bill is also endorsed by the Social Workers Registration Board. In fact, after reading the many in-depth reviews provided by the Social Workers Registration Board, I am stunned that 12 years later we are still yet to make a decision and take on the recommendation by the Social Workers Registration Board for the mandatory registration of social workers.

A survey from 2002 showed there is, in fact, wide support for this movement, both from the profession and from the public. This remains the case today. In 2003 the Social Workers Registration Board was established by the Government under the Social Workers Registration Act 2003. The purpose of this Act, back then, was to protect the safety of members of the public by prescribing or providing for mechanisms to ensure that social workers are competent to practise, and are accountable for the way in which they practise, and to enhance the professionalism of social workers.

Anyone can use the title “social worker”. They do not have to be qualified, competent, or experienced. The public expects that all social workers are actually registered. In fact, a survey undertaken showed that 80 percent of the public surveyed actually thought that social workers were registered. Currently, anyone can call themselves a social worker without having any qualifications or being registered with the Social Workers Registration Board. We are told that over 18,000 people class themselves as social workers, yet there are only 4,700 who are actually registered as social workers. Social workers—unlike other health professionals such as nurses, doctors, psychologists, occupational therapists, and teachers who, like social workers, also work with the public—are not currently required to be registered.

Clause 6 of this bill inserts a new section, section 5A. This requires any persons practising social work to be registered and to hold a current practising certificate. This bill will provide New Zealanders with the assurance that anyone working as a social worker inside our schools, hospitals, and communities and with families, our children, and our elderly will, in fact, have the necessary qualifications and experience to do so. I am also pleased to see that clause 8, with a new section, section 85A, will provide that the Social Workers Complaints and Disciplinary Tribunal will deal with unregistered and deregistered social workers. What this new section allows is for accountability for those individuals who have been replaced by their employers for serious complaints and misconduct so that these individuals cannot simply just carry on in the social services sector without first being held accountable. Since voluntary registration was introduced in 2003 there have been 17 cases of reported misconduct by people who worked as social workers or community workers—16 of whom were unregistered.

Quickly, before I finish, I just want to share with this House that 37 years ago I was first placed in foster care. I got picked up by social workers, and the comment that has stuck with me for the rest of my life, and even today, was when I was told by the social worker: “Why didn’t your mother just abort you? Knitting needles are free.” How many more kids need to hear things like that? We support this bill.

JONO NAYLOR (National): I think, perhaps, I need to declare a potential conflict of interest. As far as I know, I am, perhaps, the only person speaking on this bill who has a qualification in social work. I may be corrected on that, but I have to say I have a social work degree.

Carmel Sepuloni: But are you registered?

JONO NAYLOR: I am not registered. I am not a registered social worker. I have practised social work, and although some may say that I am currently not practising social work, I think, actually, all of us as MPs, when we have constituents coming through our doors, at times find ourselves practising what would often be referred to as social work in terms of the way that we have to deal with some of those constituents.

The social work profession has for a long time been a very broad one. I took the liberty this afternoon of looking at the website of that fine institution, Massey University, to look at the kinds of careers that it says a degree in social work may offer you. It is a long list, but it can be read reasonably quickly: hospitals and primary health care, mental health and addictions, voluntary and community organisations and Government organisations, child protection, youth justice, housing, offenders, residential care, management and supervision, tertiary education, community work and community development, refugees and migrants, and schools.

The kinds of things that I have heard this afternoon may have made me think that social workers only practise with children and young people or that, perhaps, they only work for Child, Youth and Family, because much of the focus of the debate this afternoon has been in that area.

I would say that I absolutely endorse the idea that people who are working with particularly vulnerable people should have some level of professional accountability, and that they should, perhaps, be registered. If I thought that this bill was going to achieve what we want it to achieve, I would support it. But it is not going to achieve that. It is so universal, it is so all-encompassing, and it is so broad that, really, it is not necessarily going to achieve what seems to be the intent behind it.

Of course we want children and young people who are having social workers working with them, and older people and vulnerable people of any kind, to be cared for appropriately. Of course we do not want any children or young people to have the experience that the previous speaker, Ria Bond, referred to. This bill may or may not fix that because actually, as we know, from time to time, even with registered social workers, there still has been disciplinary action and people have been deregistered. We have doctors who have all sorts of professional boundaries that they have to adhere to, and that still does not stop people from practising badly. So this bill will not necessarily fix all of our problems.

At the moment, I am not sure how this would work. If I were to leave Parliament tomorrow and perhaps get a job with Alzheimer’s New Zealand and go and work running a day programme with Alzheimer’s patients, I think, given that I have got a social work degree, I can pretty confidently say I would be practising social work. If this law was to pass I would not be able to call myself a social worker because I am not registered, and I am not sure that that is necessarily the intent. Perhaps it is the intent, but we have got to look at this carefully.

This is a broad, broad way that things are operating. Yes, at some point we need to look at mandatory registration in certain areas of social work, perhaps. Let us face it: in other professions you do want to know there are professionals looking after you. I said to someone today that when I go into hospital I do not mind if the care assistant makes me a cup of tea or, perhaps, if I am incontinent, helps clean me up or otherwise, but I do want a registered nurse to administer my medication. There are times and places where, obviously, registration is going to be crucially important.

It is important that we do do this review. This is not about just putting something off. It will not be, as the sponsor of this bill, Carmel Sepuloni, has said, us bringing back the exact same bill. No, once this review has been completed and the Minister for Social Development has looked at it, when we bring back another proposal, perhaps for mandatory social work, it will be comprehensive. There will be a definition, I believe, of what social work is. To simply say a social worker is someone who practises social work is far too broad and it is not going to achieve what we want.

At this point in time I cannot support this bill, although we do support the intent of keeping vulnerable New Zealanders safe when they are having social workers practising with them. Thank you.

KEVIN HAGUE (Green): When I began my working life in the 1980s I worked, for a time, as the research officer for the Auckland team of detached youth workers. Detached youth workers were social workers who worked with young people whom we, at that time, used to call street kids. The detached youth workers ranged from being highly competent, professional social workers through to people who were, actually, just people typically associated with churches, I have to say, who had no qualifications and no particular skills, just a particular motivation to work with those young people. The range of quality was extraordinary, from those who did good with the people whom they worked with to those who did harm.

I have spent most of my working life in hospitals and health care systems. So I want to pick up where Jono Naylor has just left off. In health care settings, most of our professions have mandatory registration and mandatory regulation. Social workers are one of the very few exceptions to that rule—an inappropriate exception.

If someone calls themselves a doctor, we have confidence that that person has appropriate training, and has the appropriate skills and knowledge to undertake the particular set of medical work that they are doing. We have confidence that they are experiencing ongoing medical training to keep their skills up to date—that could be a problem for Jono Naylor working for Alzheimer’s New Zealand. We have confidence that they work to a mandatory code of ethics. All of that we have confidence in, and that is important.

It is important because we need to trust the person who calls themselves a doctor. We need to trust that person, because of the capacity for harm if they do not perform their job adequately. In the medical setting it is obvious, is it not? We would be aghast if someone called themselves a doctor but actually was not really registered as a doctor or did not have those qualifications. It would be completely inappropriate.

But social workers are also so often in the setting where they actually have the possibility of causing harm to the people whom they work with, because those people are vulnerable. The reason why people are working with a social worker is that they have need, they are vulnerable, and therefore they need to be able to trust that the person calling themselves a social worker is in fact subject to all of that regulation, to assure the quality of the service that they provide. It is a no-brainer.

Mandatory registration of social workers is an absolute necessity. My partner is a social worker, and I know that the variability in the quality of work that I experienced back in the 1980s continues to this very day, even though we have voluntary registration. Voluntary registration has not proved to be enough. We need to go mandatory.

I want to finish by addressing the argument—if you could call it that—that has been presented tonight by members on the Government benches. Essentially, they say: “Well, we agree with mandatory registration. We agree with mandatory registration, but actually we want to have a review.” Well, what is the review going to address? The review is simply going to address the issues that are already canvassed here.

All of the words that we have heard from Government members will all be blown away, and in the tide of history what the good social workers will hear tonight is that this Government chose to vote against mandatory registration, chose to vote against professional standards for social workers, and voted against the issues of great social work.

ALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa): I rise to oppose this bill. But I would also like to pick up where Mr Hague left off when he described the vast range of types of social workers who are out there today practising social work. We even heard Jono Naylor, the qualified, the graduated social worker. We know there are youth workers, as Mr Hague described. There are scout leaders. There are volunteers. There are people sitting on the end of phones, on citizens advice bureaus, on helplines—all doing social work, all calling themselves social workers. In some cases these people will require to be police checked because of the work that they are doing and the people whom they are interacting with. In some cases a graduate degree is required, or perhaps even a postgraduate qualification is required for a particular role that they are doing in the community. But of course they are all doing social work.

The main reason that I oppose this bill is that the Minister for Social Development, Anne Tolley, is already putting in place a review of the whole system around the Social Workers Registration Act, and it is only sensible and practical that we wait for that review to be completed before we jump and make any ad hoc decisions that might be consistent or inconsistent with that review. Thank you.

CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): I commend this bill to the House.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Social Workers Registration (Mandatory Registration) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

Ayes 60

New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12; Māori Party 2.

Noes 61

New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.

Motion not agreed to.

Bills

Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill

First Reading

ADRIAN RURAWHE (Labour—Te Tai Hauāuru): I move, That the Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Government Administration Committee to consider the bill. Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. This bill is about upholding the intent of the principal Act, the Official Information Act 1982. I want to refer to the purposes of the Official Information Act. The purposes section talks about “the principle of the Executive Government’s responsibility to Parliament,—” it talks about increasing “the availability of official information”, it talks about enabling “more effective participation in the making and administration of laws and policies;”, and it talks about promoting “the accountability of Ministers of the Crown and officials,—”.

There is an anomaly within this Act, though. The anomaly is that it does not include parliamentary under-secretaries. Parliamentary under-secretaries are not subject to this Act, and my bill seeks to fix that anomaly. My bill seeks to fix that by amending section 2, “Interpretation”, of the principal Act by inserting “ ‘Minister of the Crown’ means a Minister, Associate Minister, or Parliamentary Under-Secretary”. I have done this because the Official Information Act is one of the few mechanisms of democratic accountability in New Zealand to give taxpayers and voters the confidence that decisions made on their behalf are right and proper.

We have some grave concerns about the way in which the Government has operated under this Act. Only a year ago the Prime Minister, John Key, admitted that the Government sometimes delays releasing official information right up to the deadline if it is in its best interests for it to do so. At the time the Chief Ombudsman, Beverley Wakem, made it quite clear that the Government is not allowed to delay right up to the 20-day deadline for political purposes. The Government’s record on transparency has been woeful. Just yesterday the High Court ruled that the Minister of Trade, Tim Groser, acted unlawfully when responding to an official information request.

I mention these in the context that there seems to be a culture within this Government of either avoiding or just not responding appropriately and in a timely fashion to Official Information Act requests, and therein lies the reason for this bill. We in Labour are committed to having open and transparent Government, which is why this bill is now before the House. The bill aims to fix this anomaly and to maintain the high standards of transparency that taxpayers demand of their Government.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

ADRIAN RURAWHE: Before the dinner break, I was talking about my amendment bill, of course. Just to recap, there has been a review by the Law Commission, which made 137 recommendations—quite wide-sweeping ones. I want to also mention, if I did not before the dinner break, that the Chief Ombudsman has started a review of the Official Information Act as well. I understand that that will be due out before the end of the year. As I was saying, the Government’s record on transparency has been quite woeful. Just yesterday we had the High Court ruling that Minister of Trade Groser acted unlawfully when responding to an official information request.

I think that goes to the nub of my bill. This is about open and transparent Government. Any party in this House that believes in having open and transparent Government ought not to have any problem with my bill. I think there will probably be some parties that do, but I want to talk about one of the drivers for having this bill in the first place. Last year the Government appointed a parliamentary under-secretary, and some of our members on this side of the House have been rather frustrated at not being able to make official information requests to the parliamentary under-secretary, who has responsibility for charter schools but also as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister for Regulatory Reform.

Charter schools were excluded from the Official Information Act when they were set up. That arrangement, according to the Chief Ombudsman, may very well be unconstitutional. I suspect that in the Chief Ombudsman’s report at the end of this year—I am hoping we will get a more substantive position from the Chief Ombudsman. It is, therefore, vitally important that those with oversight responsibilities for these schools, such as the parliamentary under-secretary, should be subject to proper and democratic accountability. National and the ACT Party may claim that they have already accounted for this in respect of those delegated responsibilities, but I would say that if so, they should have no problem supporting this bill, which seeks to correct the anomaly in the legislation.

Can I read out a couple of quotes, and this one is from David Seymour’s maiden speech when he said: “public policy should be measured only by results.” If I was thinking about the results of applications for official information regarding charter schools, then this public policy has been a dismal failure. I would love to hear members opposite address that issue. If that is true, if someone can make that kind of statement about public policy and then not support this particular bill, which goes to enhance that public policy, then there is something drastically wrong. I would say that what is wrong is that that particular member is not upholding what he said when he came into this House. Here is another quote from Mr Seymour about another bill that he wants to put into the members’ bills ballot. Yesterday, I believe, he made the statement: “In my view it is politically, morally, legally and, in terms of public policy, the right thing to do.”

I say to this House that this is the right thing to do. Open and transparent Government should never be subject to not being able to access that kind of information, and I highly recommend the Law Commission’s report The Public’s Right to Know: Review of the Official Information Legislation. I would suggest to Mr David Seymour that he go and read this. I suggest that everyone does. It makes, as I said before, 137 recommendations on this very issue. This is something that the Government of this day should address. I think that, to be fair, these could have been corrected earlier, but I refer to my earlier comments around the way that this Government has handled official information requests, and I believe that it has escalated it to a position where this bill is sorely needed.

Ā, nō reira, tēnei te mihi ake ki te Whare nei. [And so, I truly acknowledge this House.] I look forward to everyone’s contributions, actually. Nō reira, tēnā tātou katoa.

SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): I rise in opposition to the Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill in this first reading. Look, I acknowledge what the sponsoring member, Adrian Rurawhe, said with respect to the concept of transparency, but when we are talking about this bill—official information with respect to parliamentary under-secretaries—I think that he is blurring the lines between parliamentary work and executive work. I think that that is a slippery slope, and, obviously, this bill is one that the Government opposes.

To put this assertion into context with respect to this bill, I do need to acknowledge the importance of the Official Information Act. It is significant in respect of its intent, its purpose, and the functions that it sets out in its principles as to accountability. But that is also a balance between transparency and privacy.

Given that I have got great respect for the principles of the Official Information Act, I have chosen a few key words from it that sum it up really nicely, and those are about availability of and access to information; effective participation; administration of laws and policies; accountability of Ministers—as the sponsoring member has mentioned—and officials; promotion of good Government, which is something we believe in on this side of the House; a balance between public interest to that information; and privacy. I believe that we have got that balance right at the moment.

I believe in this Act because once upon a time in a previous career I was a Government official and it was my responsibility to administer official information requests also. I will talk a little bit more about that shortly.

The Official Information Act, the parent Act that this bill seeks to amend, goes to the heart of the principles of natural justice about giving the public of New Zealand the right to access information so that they can build a case with regard to their circumstances in line with a particular policy or practice and so that they can fully understand the reasons for a determination on a policy and assess whether that was a proper decision, whether it was made without bias, and whether it was made fairly.

But, in the same breath, officials need to have the right to have free and frank conversations so as to debate outcomes, and that goes toward better decision making, and sometimes those conversations do need to be protected. Then there is something that in my previous role I experienced—vexatious litigants—but that is probably a story for another day.

But certainly as an official, in respect of the parent Act that this bill seeks to change, I felt a quiet pressure and a healthy intensity to make myself as an official accountable, the department that I worked for accountable, and, ultimately, the Minister and Executive Council accountable. Parliamentary under-secretaries are not part of the Executive Council. The Executive Council is made up of Ministers inside and outside Cabinet, with the Governor-General presiding over it.

Parliamentary under-secretaries do not have a warrant. They are responsible to the designated Minister and they do the Minister’s bidding. That is set out by the relevant Minister, so the line of accountability rests with that Minister. The line of accountability, and I will say that again, rests with that Minister, and all information relating to that role can be accessed through the Minister’s office—that is, one that has the appropriate resourcing and systems in place to meet statutory criteria of processing that request, assessing it, and communicating it appropriately within the time frames required.

It would be a slippery slope if we were to make parliamentary under-secretaries subject to the Official Information Act, as set out in the bill. It is blurring the lines, again, as I said before, between the Executive Council and parliamentary functions. What would be the ramifications of that? What would be next if parliamentary under-secretaries were included? Would members of Parliament be next, and all the parliamentary side of work that goes with that?

The communications of members of Parliament, unless they are directly with a Minister’s office, are not subject to the Official Information Act, and that is for a good reason. We all have constituents who come to us every day who find themselves in situations, whether it is through deliberate actions or unwitting actions, that put them in a precarious position with respect to the law. If that is all subject to the Official Information Act, then how can we do our job effectively if our constituents are fearful to disclose all of the information to their case? It is like a lawyer-client privilege. It is there for a reason. To ascertain true facts, there needs to be full disclosure.

There are all types of examples that come under that, but in respect of this bill it is about parliamentary under-secretaries. As I said before, the information of parliamentary under-secretaries can be obtained from the Minister because of the line of accountability. The relevant Minister tells the parliamentary under-secretary exactly what they can and cannot do. There is no separate warrant. The information pertaining to the role can be directly sourced from the Minister’s office.

I need to talk about accountability, and that comes to the role of the Office of the Ombudsmen. The sponsor of the bill and I sit on the Government Administration Committee, and we have had a chance to review the Office of the Ombudsmen. It is the overseer, of course, that goes toward that accountability under the Official Information Act. I believe that it is well administered. Not only is that the place where the public go if they are aggrieved about the outcome of their request for official information but, if it is not processed within the time frame, this is where those constituents go.

The Ombudsmen look at that, assess that, and make a ruling. They are independent and they are impartial, and so their job is a significant one. It is a check and balance for the Executive Council and all that goes with that work.

Just to wrap up—again, this bill seeks to amend the parent Act, the Official Information Act, by including parliamentary under-secretaries, and it is simply not necessary. The Official Information Act, at this stage, is fit for purpose. Recently, we had technical amendments through a statutes amendment bill that modernised the Official Information Act, allowing for requests to be made verbally and requests to be delivered electronically. It was an opportunity to update that Act and have a look at its functioning. The Act is within a suite of vehicles that hold the Government to account.

Funnily enough, this is an approach that is one that is consistent with the Helen Clark and Labour - led Government in 2002, when she appointed two parliamentary under-secretaries. And so I say what is good for the goose is good for the gander, and there is no need for this bill.

CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): This is a very simple bill. It is a very simple bill. It is very straightforward. It is a very common-sense bill. It is a bill that fixes an anomaly and takes us in an important direction, which this Government—a member of which just got up and opposed this very simple and common-sense bill—says that it is headed in the direction of, but actually it is not. I think this is a classic example of paying lip-service to democracy. In fact, one could go as far as saying that it is actually faux democracy—f-a-u-x.

The Official Information Act is one of the incredibly important mechanisms that this Government has, that this Parliament has, and that this country has for democratic accountability and for public information to be made available. Unfortunately, the refusal by this Government to allow this bill to go forward to a select committee is really just putting a big block in the face of that. It is actually blocking transparency. It actually impacts on New Zealand’s integrity and international reputation.

We, supposedly, pride ourselves on being a First World nation, a democracy based on the Westminster system, which holds accountability and the ability for public information to be made available in high regard. Well, I think there is something drastically wrong in our system. That member, Sarah Dowie, talked about a slippery slope. Well, this is a slippery slope, which is anti-democracy.

I would like to remind the Government that in 2013 the then Minister of Justice, Judith Collins, in her initial response to the recommendations in the Law Commission’s review of the Official Information Act and the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987, made an announcement around improving the legislation and processes that govern the openness and transparency of public agencies. Well, 2 years on, where are we? Two years on, where are we with the recommendations on the improvements to the Privacy Act? We are no further on.

I would also like to remind the Government that it signed us up to the Open Government Partnership and put forward an action plan between 2014 and 2016 that actually compares very unfavourably with the other Open Government Partnership members. The average number of actions in their commitments was 41. In New Zealand’s commitment, the number of commitments we have is four, and two of them are pre-existing Government policies. It has been described as being the least ambitious.

One of those commitments was to look at the 60 recommendations in the Transparency International New Zealand Integrity Plus 2013 New Zealand National Integrity System Assessment report. Another one of those commitments was to look at the introduction of “systematic proactive release of official information” and the promotion of “enhanced compliance with and understanding of the Official Information Act 1982”. Well, I would say that what this Government is doing today is completely taking the opposite approach. It is saying one thing—it speaks out of both sides of its mouth. On one hand the Government says it is committed to transparency and open government and signs us up to these commitments, but the reality is that it is not interested in making more information available to the public.

The appointment of a parliamentary under-secretary is a function that should be able to be scrutinised under the Official Information Act. There should be information available. Unfortunately, this Government does not practise what it preaches.

DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I would like to thank the member Adrian Rurawhe for giving me this opportunity, by bringing this bill. I felt a little bit bad over the weekend because I said on the radio that it was evident that the member had brought a bill that he did not understand, had not written himself, and had probably been allocated out of the Labour caucus ballot. I still feel bad, but I now know from his speech that it was absolutely correct. You could see him reading away, bumbling through his notes.

I also saw one other thing in that speech—actually, let me come back a second. I want to pay a compliment to Sarah Dowie, who made an excellently set-out speech. She logically laid out the argument and the facts, and was not the Opposition rude when it was vexed by the force of Sarah Dowie’s argument?

But coming back to the bill, I felt a bit bad, but maybe I should not have because I also noticed something about this bill, which is that it is indeed a stunt bill. I was flattered perhaps to star in most of Adrian Rurawhe’s speech. This is a bill entirely designed to target a particular member—strangely enough, me. You have to ask yourself, why did the Labour Government not change the law when Dover Samuels was a parliamentary under-secretary back in 2005? I have got a few theories about why that might be. It might be because Labour actually understands the Official Information Act quite well. It might be that it understands the Official Information Act quite well because most of its front bench were in Parliament in 1982 when the Act was originally passed. It might also be that Labour understands how this actually operates. It is in the Constitution Act, which almost all of the Labour caucus were here to pass.

Parliamentary under-secretaries derive their power entirely from Ministers. They do not have decision-making powers.

The Labour Party probably understands that the purpose of the Official Information Act is to allow citizens and the House of Representatives to keep an eye on the executive, to understand how it makes its decisions, and why, and what those decisions are. If any member of this House or the public wants to know about policies where I have assigned responsibility from the Minister, they need only go to the Minister for the official information, because the Minister makes the final decision and the Minister has all of the official information.

This bill is redundant. It is only useful as a stunt by the Labour Party, and have we not seen the hypocrisy of it coming out because, of course, Labour itself did not act when it had parliamentary under-secretaries in Helen Clark’s time.

Finally, can I suggest that in the law and public policy that Adrian Rurawhe was so keen to quote, the exercise of the law should be proportional. What that means is that in order to achieve its purpose, which is to allow citizens to hold the Government to account, the law should use only the amount of inconvenience and effort required to achieve that. We have already established that it is possible to hold the executive to account and to understand its decisions by making an Official Information Act request to the Minister responsible. What extra benefit would there be from placing an additional burden on parliamentary under-secretaries to comply with the Official Information Act?

Denis O’Rourke: What harm would there be?

DAVID SEYMOUR: And what harm would there be? I am hearing this from the old man in the corner. Let me tell him what harm there would be. The harm would be that he would be the first person to stand up when parliamentary under-secretaries in this Government, or in any other, requested additional funding and resources to comply with Official Information Act requests—that is what would be required.

So I will conclude by saying that this bill is a political stunt. It is sad for the quality of debate on public policy in this House that it is the second Labour stunt bill that has come up today. It is a stunt bill because it does not achieve any of the purposes for which it is required. All it does is attempt to attack me, and although I am a little bit flattered, I cannot support the bill.

Finally, the law, in achieving its objectives, should be proportional, and would be a disproportionate application of the law to apply the Official Information Act requests to parliamentary under-secretaries. When Labour wrote the Constitution Act of 1986, when it had intellectual giants like Sir Geoffrey Palmer—unlike today—Labour got it right. Even when the Muldoon Government introduced the Official Information Act in 1982, it actually got it right. So those laws will stand tonight because my colleagues on this side of the House and I will be opposing this silly, vexatious stunt bill. Thank you.

CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare ko tēnei pō. I would like to congratulate the member who put this bill to the House, and to disassociate myself from any of the disrespectful and patronising remarks that we have just heard about why the member wrote this. I think it is unnecessary to behave like that in this House. We have too much of it. It is actually important to talk about issues, not attack people or disrespect people who get a member’s bill through. Member’s bills are actually quite an achievement, they are quite a struggle to get selected from the biscuit tin, and they also represent the sincere interests of many of us. Even if other people do not understand it, we should at least show some respect.

I think that it is a great pity that this bill will not go to a select committee because it would have been a chance to discuss the Official Information Act in relation to parliamentary under-secretaries’ roles. I am fully aware that Labour had parliamentary under-secretaries. The Greens had parliamentary under-secretaries under Labour as part of a coalition agreement. I think that it would be good to talk about making those positions accountable and making them absolutely clear and subject to the Official Information Act, because anybody who has had the experience of trying to carry out their opportunities under the Official Information Act to the Minister of Education’s office will understand how frustrating the situation is around a particular issue.

I think it is worth remembering that the parliamentary under-secretary gets paid more money. Often it is through a high-level political agreement—i.e., a coalition agreement—that that person gets power. They get a lot of opportunity to influence policy and to spend public money, but we cannot ask them any questions. I think that is a shame, especially since many of us are deeply frustrated and, in fact, are struggling to get answers out of the Minister of Education. I believe that the current Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister of Education would probably be more frank, which would be quite helpful. I would be interested in his often very frank remarks on these issues, and I would like to hear from him on those subjects.

So I think it is a shame that it is not going to go forward so that we can look at what it would mean. Would it really be such an undermining of the executive if the parliamentary under-secretaries were directly covered by the Official Information Act? One of the reasons that some of us are exercised about the Official Information Act is the parliamentary under-secretary role at the moment relating to information on charter schools, because we have had an authorisation debacle, and we have had a very interesting funding formula that is now being adjusted because so much money was put in per student that even the parliamentary under-secretary and the Minister know that it is wrong. So they are having to tweak the model, but it would be much better if, instead of the arduous and often frustrating struggle to get through to the official information—when half of it is redacted anyway—we could actually talk straight about what is going on, why it is going on, and how much money is being spent.

As much as we pride ourselves on being such a developed country, voting once every 3 years is not participatory democracy, and we do need the mechanisms of Parliament that we have to be a lot more rigorously open and a lot more transparent. The public heavily rely on the Official Information Act, as do the Opposition parties. Frustrating as it may seem to Government Ministers and their coalition partners, we actually need those mechanisms so that we can hold the Government and the parliamentary under-secretary—whose policy has had a huge influence on the Government education strategies this term—to account, and a lot of money has been spent.

It would be great to be able to get straight answers. And so, for many of us, I appreciate the member’s bill, because I know that what he is trying to achieve is some consistency across that idea of open and transparent and healthy democracy. So it was great to hear Sarah Dowie talk about the importance of the Official Information Act and how important it is to have transparency, but then it is highly contradictory to turn round and say: “But not for this.” No, this position—which actually accrues considerable funding and considerable policy influence and opportunity—will not be subject to the Act. So I think it is a special deal, and if a person gets a special deal they need to be subject to the same challenges as the Ministers. I think that is an important part of the job.

I would say to the current parliamentary under-secretary—I hate the expression “Harden up”, and I hated it when he used it; I think it is a shame and a disgrace—if you want to be in a position of responsibility and influence, not only should you be careful what you say about other human beings; you should also be careful about being accountable to the public. Kia ora tātou katoa.

MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): I wish I was able to stand here and talk to something more important like the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, but the reality is—and normally I would ignore it, but I am actually going to address it—this bill is called the Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill, but it should be called the “Pick on David Seymour Bill”. I heard the Green member Catherine Delahunty get up and immediately launch an attack on David Seymour about the comments he made—a vicious attack on David Seymour—and I just could not believe the hypocrisy of it.

Sitting in this House during the course of this debate, I have listened to the Opposition members not talking about the Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill, which should not be directed at any individual, but they have sat there attacking David Seymour the whole time. So I would have to assume that this bill was submitted with a view to attacking David Seymour. I am actually a bit surprised at the member who has brought this bill to the House, because I sit with him on a select committee and I thought that he would have been better than this. But, actually, when I see who is sitting behind him, the Hon Ruth Dyson, I think that she is probably the puppeteer and the one who has put this bill together.

A further example of the hypocrisy is the fact that the Green member stood up and said that the Greens had parliamentary under-secretaries under a Labour-led Government. She freely admitted that they had parliamentary under-secretaries under a Labour-led Government. The same with the Labour Government—it had a parliamentary under-secretary in Dover Samuels, as David Seymour pointed out. So the question is this: if those members felt so strongly about an amendment like this, why did they not do anything while they were in Government? I can tell you why they did not do anything—because they did not think it was necessary. They knew it was not necessary. They are doing it now because they are making a personal attack on a member of this House: David Seymour, member and leader of the ACT Party.

This bill is totally unnecessary. It is going to erode the current distinction that is drawn between the executive, which is subject to the Official Information Act, and other members. Sarah Dowie made a very good point, and I agree with her, which is that the minute you start to erode that distinction—and the executive should be held accountable, and it is held accountable through the Official Information Act—you can start to move dangerously into a territory called mission creep. That is, you start off with one intent and all of a sudden you add something else to it and you decide that you are going to do something else, and, before you know it, you have eroded and eaten into a protection that this Parliament has—simply by introducing a bill like this. That relationship between an MP and their constituent must be protected; she is absolutely right. When constituents come to see an MP, there is complete confidentiality around what is discussed, and an MP needs to be free to act on behalf of their constituent. A bill like this is just going to move slowly towards mission creep—an eroding of that confidentiality between an MP and their constituent.

A parliamentary under-secretary is not a member of the Executive Council. That is right, they are not subject to the Official Information Act, and neither should they be—the Minister is. The Minister is the person who is responsible for the powers and responsibility in the delegation of a parliamentary under-secretary. Therefore, that is where the Official Information Act requests should lie, and that is where the information should be generated. This bill is, therefore, unnecessary. Thank you.

DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): Initially, there are a few words I would like to mention in favour of this bill. Firstly, it is short, concise, effective, common sense, necessary, and annoys the young, wet behind the ears member for the ACT Party. All of those are the great advantages of this bill and, therefore, New Zealand First will have no hesitation whatsoever in supporting it.

It is a common-sense measure because actions taken by parliamentary under-secretaries, being actions taken by politicians, ought to be subject to the fullest possible scrutiny by members of the public. Currently the public cannot do that because parliamentary under-secretaries are effectively protected from it by the way the current law is written, and that is wrong. They should be subject to the same Official Information Act rights by the public as any Minister but also any public servant who has to provide information or any Public Service agency that is also subject to that Act. So when you think about the whole spectrum of information that the public should be able to obtain, they should be able to get it from any person who is related in any way to Government functions, and that is the point.

That is where Mr Seymour got it wrong, because it is not about delegations and it is not about who has responsibility for information; it is about who actually has information that the public wants to be able to access. For that reason alone they should be able to access it directly from parliamentary under-secretaries in the same way that they can access it from Ministers or from bureaucrats or from Government agencies. So as far as New Zealand First is concerned, it is unacceptable that people can be delegated Government functions as politicians and yet be protected from the Official Information Act. So that is why we say it is common sense that this piece of legislation should pass.

This Government has an extremely bad reputation for secrecy, especially on its record with the Official Information Act. Only this week we have seen solid evidence of that, because the secrecy around the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement negotiations and the content of that agreement, whatever it might be, remains secret for no apparent reason.

David Seymour: Ha! Eleven other countries?

DENIS O’ROURKE: It is for no good reason whatsoever—absolutely none. And this member over here can snigger, but the people of this country want to know what is in that agreement, and the High Court has ruled only this week in the Kelsey case—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Come back to the bill.

DENIS O’ROURKE: —that that information should be available. So what I am saying is that this Government has a very bad reputation as far as Official Information Act matters are concerned, and it should welcome the opportunity to support this bill, to show its commitment to providing in a transparent way the information that people in New Zealand want to get from wherever in the Government, whether it be from parliamentary under-secretaries or anybody else.

Finally, by opposing this bill, this Government is showing two things. First of all, it believes it needs to protect its parliamentary under-secretaries because of their sheer ineptitude in being able to do their jobs properly, and Mr Seymour falls directly into that category. He is a parliamentary under-secretary only because of a political deal done with the National Party so that it could stay in office. Nobody would dream of putting a wet behind the ears MP like this in a parliamentary under-secretary position. He simply cannot handle it and this Government knows it, so it wants to protect him from the ravages of the Official Information Act. Secondly, this Government wants to hold on to its bad habit of secrecy, so it will not support this bill, but New Zealand First will.

BRETT HUDSON (National): I rise in opposition to the Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill. Some people have tried to talk a lot about the Official Information Act itself, but I would rather focus on the specifics of this bill—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: How refreshing.

BRETT HUDSON: —because it seeks to do some very specific things. It does not seek to amend the entire Official Information Act. I refer back to what the sponsoring member, Adrian Rurawhe, raised, because he made points about what he said the bill would achieve and the problems that he articulated it would address.

The points I will make are threefold. First of all, when he speaks to what it will achieve, quite frankly, he is flat-out wrong. Secondly, he talks about the problems—he spent over half his speech articulating the problems that the bill was to address. His bill will not—cannot—address the problems he raised. Thirdly, it is simply unnecessary because the mechanisms exist today to get the information that the Opposition members might want from a parliamentary under-secretary.

First of all, let us look at why what it would do is, quite frankly, wrong. Mr Rurawhe said to us that this would provide greater scrutiny and accountability of the executive. It is going to give greater accountability of the executive, except for one small but rather substantial and important issue, and that is that parliamentary under-secretaries are not members of the Executive Council. This bill does nothing—nothing at all—to address accountability of the executive. What it does is it undermines the distinction between the executive and Parliament. That is what they are looking to do. That is what that member is looking to do—he is looking to undermine the distinction between the Executive Council and these members of Parliament.

Secondly, Adrian spent more than half of his speech talking about the issue of Ministers delaying responses to Official Information Act requests , clocks being reset, and information being difficult to get hold of. Well, we on this side actually dispute that. We are not accepting his proposition that that is a real issue. Even if we were to be charitable for just a moment and permit that possibility, there is nothing in this bill to ensure that by simply extending the processes as they exist today to include parliamentary under-secretaries it is going to address a single point of the problems he articulated. This bill does nothing to actually address what the sponsoring member raised.

The third point is that the bill is unnecessary. As Mr Seymour pointed out himself, parliamentary under-secretaries are not decision makers. They take all of their powers and all of their activities from the Minister whom they are responsible to. If members opposite wish to scrutinise the work of the ministry or the work that the parliamentary under-secretary may have been delegated, they can do so through questions to the Minister whom the parliamentary under-secretary is responsible to. So the bill does not do what the member says it will. It will not fix the problems the member actually addressed, and it is unnecessary in the first place.

What is more, it is actually another Labour flip-flop. As we know on this side, in 2002 Helen Clark used the very process and the very situation we have when she appointed two parliamentary under-secretaries, neither of whom were subject to questioning through the Official Information Act. Dover Samuels was one; you may remember him. He had a little hotel incident. So here we have the Labour Party flip-flopping from the Cabinet Manual under Helen Clark, and just a few days ago it turned its back on her when she talked about the need for the New Zealand Government to be part of free-trade agreements to improve prosperity for New Zealanders. I will tell you what, this Labour caucus compared with the previous Labour Government is just a series of flip-flops—more flip-flops than a busy beach in summertime.

David Seymour: Dad joke.

BRETT HUDSON: It is a dad joke—thank you very much. But I think that this gives us an opportunity. Given that we have got a bill that does not do what it says it will—it is not going to fix the problem—we should question the motives of what this bill is about. I heard Ms Dyson saying throughout Ms Dowie’s speech: “What are you protecting him from?”. I think that is a very clear reference. As Mr Mitchell said, this bill is not about Official Information Act scrutiny of parliamentary under-secretaries; it is about trying to attack Mr Seymour. I will tell you what, these Opposition members do not learn much. They are very slow learners. I am not here to sit in judgment on Mr Seymour, but, very clearly, if they think they can win by attacking Mr Seymour in this House, they have got another think coming. I oppose this bill and I call upon all members on this side to oppose it. Thank you.

EUGENIE SAGE (Green): E te Māngai o te Whare tēnā koe. Tuarua, ki ngā mema o tō tātou Whare, tēnā koutou katoa.

[Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Secondly, I acknowledge you all, the members of our House.]

We are proud to support this bill and congratulate the sponsoring member, Adrian Rurawhe, on the Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill. It is astonishing, the criticisms that Mr Seymour has made. His complaint is that the bill is all about proportionality—that there would be no extra benefit and the harm would be that the parliamentary under-secretary’s office might have to provide some additional funding in order to answer Official Information Act requests. I think that reflects the attitude of this Government to our democracy. It is not about open government and transparency under National; it is much more about secrecy. This bill is a good bill because it goes to close a small loophole—the fact that parliamentary under-secretaries are not subject to the Official Information Act.

It is really ironic that we are debating this bill today after the afternoon’s debate on Phil Goff’s member’s bill, which would have ensured that all students, including those in charter schools, have access to a broad, balanced curriculum, because although National speakers have said that parliamentary under-secretaries do not make decisions, they sure have a lot of influence on policy. It has been this particular parliamentary under-secretary, Mr Seymour, in his role in education and regulatory reform, who has developed a lot of the policy on charter schools. They are such an ideological nonsense in terms of their failings and the large amount of public money they have attracted at the expense of public schools, and the Opposition has not been able to call the parliamentary under-secretary to account on this policy development because he has not been open to the Official Information Act. So this bill is a good one because it closes that small loophole.

It is very disappointing that the Government is voting against it, because it shows just how cynical members opposite are in relation to the Official Information Act, to democracy, and to open government. Where you have openness in government you build trust among citizens. Where you have secrecy, as this Government promotes in its endless denials of requests for official information, in its delays, and in its redactions, then you promote distrust. This bill is about promoting openness and transparency, and that is why the Green Party is voting for it.

We only have to look at the record of this Government. Under the law, the requests are supposed to be answered within 20 working days, yet the Prime Minister himself has admitted to the Government’s use of delaying tactics, pushing it out to the 20-day maximum, because, as the Prime Minister said, the “Government might take the view that’s in our best interests to do that.” So this Government regularly uses the Act to drag the chain on releasing information because it is in its political interests to do so.

If we are to build public participation and if we are to build trust in our political system, we need to be promoting openness and transparency. We need to be reforming the Official Information Act to make it incumbent on Ministers and departments to release information much more proactively on to the web. We need to make sure that parliamentary under-secretaries, who may not be part of the Executive Council—but these parliamentary under-secretaries are generating policies that this Government implements, so they should be part of the schema of the Act. The Office of the Ombudsmen is reviewing the way in which the Act is applied. The report from that review is due at the end of the year, and I think it will show some of the very poor practice we have seen under National—some of the ways in which information requests to departments are routed through to Ministers’ offices so that the Ministers can delay the release or can take out anything that might be embarrassing for the Government.

This bill is a very tiny step toward redressing that imbalance that we have at the moment, and toward making a step towards openness and transparency. It is cynical of the Government to oppose it and to take a position that is based on secrecy, encouraging more suspicion of policy development and decision making by the Government rather than more trust by the public—the people whom we represent.

DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): It is a great privilege to speak on the Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill. First of all, I just want to speak about that last speaker, Eugenie Sage. Really, it is offensive for the Green Party to come into this House and speak about openness when we consider that only a matter of years ago there was an election within the Green Party that it was not actually going to make public. Remember those days of openness within the Green Party, with its members coming into this House and spouting about openness? But when it comes to their internal political dynamics they will not be open with their own members, they will not be open with the public, and they will not be open with the wider community.

Eugenie Sage: We will in Government, Mr Bennett.

DAVID BENNETT: You can laugh all you like in the Green Party, but the people know what you are like, and they know that you are really the Communist Party in drag. They know that if you ever got into Government there would be no chance of any openness, because you and your ilk have always tried to make sure that there is no public accountability, because that is how the green parties and the communist parties around the world have always operated, and there is no difference there. We have seen it—your true colours have come out—in terms of how you deal with yourselves in this Parliament and in this party. So we cannot have the Green Party talking about openness.

New Zealand First members are sitting over there. There was a sustained and derogatory attack on the fine member of this House in front of me, and I felt very disappointed about that attack on this young man, who is doing such a great job leading his own political party and making such inroads into this political environment. And the New Zealand First Party had to attack him. Pure jealousy is all that that was—that was just pure jealousy. One member of this party can do more than 14 in that party. That was all it was about. Well, there is only one member in that party as well, actually. There are 13 followers who turn up and come to speak sometimes. They sit there and warm the chairs, but they do not do any actual work for any New Zealanders.

This bill is not necessary. It is not necessary in this situation. You know, we have got a situation where there is a distinction between the executive and Parliament, which is not subject to the Official Information Act.

Sue Moroney: She’s got to hide. Come on.

DAVID BENNETT: That is Sue Moroney over there: another member who is well-known for her openness. Sue Moroney—I am sure we all know about what you want to do. So the Official Information Act—

Sue Moroney: Come on. Bring it on, big boy. Come on.

DAVID BENNETT: Yes, well, tell us about the new union movement. That would be lovely to see. That would be an open environment, would it not, in terms of how you elect leaders to the Labour Party?

Sue Moroney: Is that as good as you’ve got?

DAVID BENNETT: Well, no. That is good enough for a start, and that will do.

This bill is actually something that is not necessary in this House, and I think it was a personal attack on the fine young member in front of me who is doing a great job here. Parliament should not be used in that way, especially when we hear about openness from the Green Party and personal attacks from New Zealand First that really take the heat out of members’ days and make it an unfortunate experience for those who are listening. Thank you.

ADRIAN RURAWHE (Labour—Te Tai Hauāuru): Ā, tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. He tino hōnore tēnei kia tū ake ki te whakahoki i ngā kōrero ki te Whare e tū ake nei, ā, ki a koutou e tuku kōrero ai mō tēnei take. Tēnei ahau e tuku mihi atu ana ki a koutou.

[Thank you indeed, Mr Deputy Speaker. This is really a great honour to rise and to respond to the contributions to this House standing here and to acknowledge you who have contributed to this matter; my acclamations to you collectively.]

I just really wanted to start off in Te Reo Māori to bring some decorum back to the proceedings, because I think that some of the contributions that I have heard are so far off the mark. Let me start with the first contribution from Sarah Dowie. I mentioned in my earlier contribution a report by the Law Commission called The Public’s Right to Know: Review of the Official Information Legislation. If that member does not like this bill, she is going to really be annoyed—seriously annoyed—by this report because not only does it bring a responsibility around the Official Information Act; it broadens it quite a bit. That is what the Law Commission is saying, and it goes a lot further than my bill. My bill is just a tiny little change to make sure that the parliamentary under-secretaries are subject to the Official Information Act.

I read out some of the clauses and the purposes of the principal Act and I would say to the House that it is incredibly important to refer back to the purpose of this particular legislation, which was passed in 1982—33 years ago—and has endured. I would like to say that my bill, I believe, enhances and respects the purposes of the principal Act.

We also heard that one of the reasons why members are not supporting this bill is that Labour did not do it when we were the Government. Well, let me tell you that I think we have had three or four Governments in that time period of 33 years and any one of those Governments could have done it. I draw this distinction between the Clark Labour Government and the National Government. I stand to be corrected, but I am not aware of the extent of issues around the Official Information Act during the Clark Government that we now have under the Key-led National Government. That is just not right. Only yesterday, as I said, there was a decision by the court around the behaviour or the findings against the—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Come back to the bill. You will be on tricky ground.

ADRIAN RURAWHE: It is relevant to the principal Act, and I stand here in response to the kōrero that was given on this. My comments are related exactly to what members in this House have said.

I want to acknowledge the Green Party and the New Zealand First Party for their support on this bill.

I will just say one more thing in terms of one of the arguments around the cost. What is the cost of open and transparent government? That is a question that we should be answering, and for a member to stand up in this House and to say that that is one of the reasons why he is not going to vote for it is very sad. It is part of the woeful, sad performance of the National-led Government on issues around official information.

I stand here before you to say that this is not a vindictive bill. This is not about targeting one person; this is about making better law for this country and, as I said before, making better public policy.

Nō reira, tēnei ahau e tuku mihi atu ana ki a koutou katoa, tēnā koutou, kia ora mai tātou katoa. [And so, I commend you all; well done, and my appreciation to us all.]

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill be read a first time.

Ayes 61

New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12; Māori Party 2; United Future 1.

Noes 60

New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1.

Bill read a first time.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the Official Information—[Interruption] Do not squander the opportunity. [Interruption] Order! The question is that the Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill be considered by Government Administration Committee.

Bill referred to the Government Administration Committee.

Bills

Keep Kiwibank Bill

First Reading

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour): I move, That the Keep Kiwibank Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Finance and Expenditure Committee to consider the bill. I accept from the outset that there is a major philosophical divide between the major parties of the Opposition and the Government, and the minor party of the Government—Mr Seymour, who has been the subject of intense scrutiny tonight—in respect of the retention and/or sale of public assets. This bill is precise and surgical in what it attempts to do. It attempts to protect what is a jewel in the Crown of public assets—that is, Kiwibank.

I note that the history of Kiwibank is one where the incoming Labour Government in 1999 promoted the concept and then put it into operation, under sustained opposition, I have to say, from the National Party members, who, I think, used terms like “communism” and other things in relation to the establishment of Kiwibank. They said it would not work and that it would be an encumbrance to the public purse. On all counts the National Opposition was wrong.

On coming into Government the National Party had a road to Damascus experience and realised that Kiwibank was a public entity with huge support from the public—not just in a philosophical sense but in terms of the thousands of customers who lined up to participate in Kiwibank. And I note the history of Kiwibank in terms of interest rates. It was the first time for many, many decades that a bank occasionally went against the tide and struck an interest rate that was slightly lower than the benchmark of all the other competitors, and in that way it actually created some true competition. So the notion that the State should not have a role in a bank or in certain entities was put asunder.

The Keep Kiwibank Bill, as I said, seeks to protect Kiwibank as an entity. As Kiwibank is a wholly owned subsidiary of New Zealand Post Group, the board of New Zealand Post Ltd could sell all or part of Kiwibank without recourse to Parliament. I acknowledge that the chairman of Kiwibank is one Dr Michael Cullen from my tribe.

Hon Todd McClay: A good man.

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: A good man. I think it was a good decision by the National Government to appoint him. I know where Dr Cullen sits on these issues. He sits firmly—as he did when he was the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance—in the camp that is in favour of the retention of these assets. But if the board was packed with National Party cronies with a mandate to flog it off, one man standing alone on the board—one man doing a “Custer’s Last Stand”—could not prevent it. So this bill seeks to put in some basic safeguards.

The bill would ensure that any proposal to partly or wholly privatise Kiwibank would require the support of 75 percent of all members of the House of Representatives or, alternatively, support from a majority of voters in a referendum in order to lawfully proceed. That last provision, I think, seeks to respect the thousands of customers that Kiwibank has now gained and retains and continues to grow.

I note with interest that the week this bill was drawn from the ballot was very apt. That was the week that finally, and sadly and tragically, Solid Energy came a complete gutser in respect of its future, at the hands of National Ministers and a National Government that saw it like a sinking ship just sliding into the sea over many, many years. I remind members of this House of the mixed-ownership model and the promise by Prime Minister Key that that mixed-ownership model would get us $7 billion to $10 billion, which was then revised down to $5 billion to $7 billion. The actual returns, as we know, were short of $5 billion, at $4.7 billion.

I would have thought that if Mr Scott and a few of the other eminent business people over there had forecast that—[Interruption] Well, that member talks about economics. Solid Energy was an export award-winning company under a Labour Government. In fact, we resurrected it again after the last National Government tried to hock it off and drive it into the ground. It was an export award-winner returning solid returns to the taxpayer, and under this Government’s watch—and I mean it was “watched” literally—it came a gutser.

Solid Energy was watched while the Government got advice—thousands of pages of advice—warning that things were going wrong. The Government was warned that Solid Energy was being too expansive, that it could not agree on valuations, and that the board believed that what went up would never come down in terms of the coal commodity price. When every other mining company around the world was immediately circling wagons to protect themselves as their commodity price went down, this Government sat there and did nothing, and that asset has absolutely come a gutser. And now, of course, in the week that this bill was drawn from the ballot, we find out that the sort of last remnants of a deal, to save a few jobs for a few months or a year or so, is to hock off the remaining commercial parts in an asset sale.

We also note that this Government has talked about capital recycling. It is an interesting term. I think it may have authored it or invented it. Certainly it has reinvented it, because now, of course, we know the Government is looking around for $1 billion to $2 billion and that may indeed see further asset sales going ahead. I simply did not believe, with respect, the Minister of Finance when he said: “That’s it.” If that was it, Solid Energy would not have been in the position it was. I would also say to this House that, despite all the conjecture, every opinion poll that I have seen over the years in respect of whether people are in favour of, or against, asset sales has shown overwhelmingly that they are against the sale of assets. I suspect that if you polled people specifically on Kiwibank there would be greater than an 80 percent—80 percent in the last poll I saw—or 90 percent support in respect of retaining Kiwibank.

This piece of legislation is straightforward. There is no impost on the Crown. It simply puts another check and another balance in place so that if the board decided that it wished to hock off Kiwibank, as it can do legally without any parliamentary intervention or ministerial intervention, it would require, as I say, a 75 percent majority of this House or, alternatively, a referendum.

To conclude where I started, I accept there is a divide and a philosophical divide—perhaps an ideological divide—in respect of State assets, but I would wager that it would be an extremely dangerous proposition for any Government to propose the sale or disposal of this asset. We have been through a global financial crisis. We do not know whether there is going to be another global financial crisis or whether the economy is going to turn again—we do not know. We know that New Zealand Post itself is struggling as a group because of the changes in technology. We know it is attempting to combat that. The physical mail in terms of non-parcel mail is deteriorating. Its books are under a certain pressure—and, presumably, will continue to be under pressure—as technology moves. That could indeed provide motivation for, or necessitate, the hocking off and selling of a major asset within that group that is Kiwibank.

It would be quite a prize to sell off. It would presumably get quite a good and nice price given its profitability, given its stability, and given its huge growth over the years. This bill simply seeks to put in safeguards, and if the Government is true to its word that it does not want to dispose of Kiwibank, I would assume that it would see no reason to stand in the way of this bill. I urge the House to support it.

DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): It is a great pleasure to speak on the Keep Kiwibank Bill. I think the first thing we need to look at is the role that Kiwibank plays. Kiwibank is part of the New Zealand Post Group, which is a State-owned enterprise. As a State-owned enterprise, New Zealand Post has its own board—and that board, as we have heard mentioned, has some members on it who have had political experience. But the board, essentially, is the governance body for that organisation of New Zealand Post. The board of New Zealand Post makes the governance decisions in relation to things like Kiwibank as one of its subsidiaries. So Ministers of the Crown themselves do not exactly direct State-owned enterprise operations in the day-to-day sense. That is done through the management of the organisations, but also the board has the governance role, not the actual Ministers who are the shareholding Ministers.

So, effectively, under the current structure of that organisation the board has the ability to wholly or partly divest part of its asset in Kiwibank, as the member who has raised this bill has made known. So that is one point that we need to be aware of. Another point is that the member is requesting a 75 percent threshold of MPs or a referendum to essentially allow any transfer, wholly or in part, of that organisation. I think the important part to look at there is what consistency or any precedent there may be for that approach. It is very difficult to find any precedent in New Zealand law that has that 75 percent requirement. I guess if you were looking at this legislation and taking it to its full effect, then what would happen with the organisation the member just mentioned, Solid Energy, for example? Should that also then have a 75 percent rule? Should KiwiRail have a 75 percent rule? Should some of the other State-owned enterprises have a 75 percent rule? Some members of the Labour Party are nodding, but that is not what this bill does.

So the question is whether that would apply to everything. Even if it did not apply to all those State-owned enterprises, there may be a list that those members want to have a 75 percent rule with, and there may be a list that they do not. There is a lack of consistency there, and I think members of the public would be very interested to find out why this State-owned enterprise subsidiary is seen as any different from Solid Energy or from—

Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Solid Energy is history. Solid Energy doesn’t exist.

DAVID BENNETT: It may be history, but the thing is that the 75 percent rule is only being asked to be applied to one organisation. What about something like KiwiRail? Would the 75 percent rule be applied to them? Is that what the member wants as well? If he does not, then that would create an inconsistency in legislation that I am sure members of the public would not want to see this Parliament have as an inconsistency in the way things are done.

Then there are also the impacts of the bill. One of the big things with a bank is there is always the potential for a bank to run into difficulties. We have seen that in the past with things like the BNZ. When a bank gets into difficulties, under the rules that have been set by this legislation there could be some quite difficult time frames involved. For example, if a bank ran into difficulties and then you had to have a referendum, that would take a matter of months, and that would not be enough time for a bank to survive if it was in a matter of difficulty. Also, if Parliament was not sitting—for example, if this bank got into trouble in December and Parliament was not coming back until February, what would happen then for those 2 months? The bank would essentially have a run on funds and go under, and there would be no recompense. Basically, the Crown would have to take that debt in the end. That would be an issue that would have to be considered.

We understand what this member is trying to do here, but there are some issues that you have to take into account. The first one is that New Zealand Post itself has its board. It has its own governance approach, and it is not for Ministers to get involved in and direct that on a day-to-day basis. The second thing is that you need some consistency. There is some inconsistency in the treatment of other State-owned enterprises, especially some organisations like KiwiRail. I just do not know why Opposition members feel that they value Kiwibank more than KiwiRail, for example, and will have this rule around Kiwibank, but not around KiwiRail. They need to work through that inconsistency, which sends the wrong message to corporate New Zealand, or the State-owned enterprises in New Zealand as a particular whole.

Then you have got that third issue: if there are any problems with the bank, and the bank is required to meet certain capital funding regulations from the Reserve Bank, and it relies on the market to do that. If it was unable to access to the market because there was a hamstring on its ability to make decisions or its ability to be able to direct itself to meet the needs that that organisation might have if it ever got into difficulty, then that could be a compromising situation for the Parliament but also for the members who are in that bank. Also, it could compromise parts of our banking system, which nobody wants to do.

So I think when we look at this bill it may be seen as somewhat simplistic in approaching just one part of one State-owned enterprise, but there are many follow-on effects. I look at those follow-on effects for the whole banking system. If a bank like Kiwibank did get into trouble and did fail, that is a big part of our banking system, and you would not want to have that follow-on effect. If there is no ability for decisions to be made, how would that have an effect? There is no ability for decisions to be made, because you would have to wait for Parliament to resume to do that, or you would have to do a referendum. A referendum is quite a time-consuming process. So those are the decisions that would be very difficult, if there was a problem with capital raising or funding of the regulatory requirements of the bank.

This is an interesting bill, in the sense that it has a particular bent to it. I think that as a Parliament we need to consider these kinds of bills in a very open way, but also consider what the implications actually are for other parts of the State sector and the State Service. In this case, there are some real issues around consistency. It would be creating a precedent around a 75 percent vote, which has not been used in this Parliament for a long time, if ever. That would create an element of inconsistency with other laws, which would be an issue that would have to be considered. And then you have got the flow-on effects—should anything go wrong with the bank, how that would actually be dealt with, in that sense. So I look forward to further discussion on this bill. Thank you.

GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): I learnt a couple of things there. The first is that David Bennett is easily confused, and the second is that the National Party members have not yet decided what they are going to do on this bill. David Bennett did not say—he did not say. I think David Bennett is a leader in the National Party caucus. I think this is the time for him to step up and talk to his colleagues and assure this House that the National Party will be supporting this bill. The only reason he gave, in opposition, was, effectively, that he is easily confused.

There is no inconsistency here. This is a bill about Kiwibank. This is a bill about what has now become an integral part of our banking system. It is an important part of what I now presume both the National Government—I will come back to that in a minute—and parties on this side of the House believe is an important role as part of our State-owned enterprise structure, which is to have a presence in that banking system and to give New Zealanders the chance to be part of a New Zealand - owned bank that has played a very important role in improving the customer experience in banking in New Zealand and giving New Zealanders the chance to know that their money is part of the reinvestment into New Zealand.

The member who resumed his seat, David Bennett, seems very confused about this bill and was worried about the impact on capital raising and meeting its regulatory requirements. Nothing in this bill affects that, at all. The only time when it would mean anything whatsoever would be if the Government wanted to sell it, and that is the problem for the National Party members. In their heart of hearts they have never liked Kiwibank. They have never wanted it to exist. They would sell it if they could get away with it. That is the absolute truth about the National Party’s attitude towards Kiwibank.

It was not that long ago when Bill English—I think he was taped at a National Party conference somewhere—was talking about the fact that Kiwibank would not be able to be sold in the first term, but after that all bets were off. He was caught out. He was caught out telling the truth, and he had to recant from that because the National Party members knew New Zealanders wanted Kiwibank there. This bill is necessary, if for nothing else, because it means the National Party members have to get up now and tell us if they really support Kiwibank. If they really support Kiwibank, if they have really disowned what Bill English wanted to do, all those years ago, then they will back this bill.

Chris Bishop—I will wager this. He is up next, and I will wager that he will not get up and say he is going to support the bill, but he will not say whether they are going to oppose it, either. That is what I will wager. I challenge him to do that. If he says they are going to oppose it, if he says outright that they are going to oppose this bill, then that is the signal New Zealanders know: it is on the block. Kiwibank is on the block, to be sold by a National Government. This is the chance for the National Party members to stand up for an institution that has done good in our banking system and that New Zealanders want to see in front of them.

I have a fear that Chris Bishop will not do that and he will not stand up and back Kiwibank, because the National Government is in trouble. It has got through the Future Investment Fund—the money it made from the asset sales. It has spent it on fixing the Beehive roof and, no doubt, the panel beating on Chris Bishop’s car down in the basement. It has all been used up now because the Future Investment Fund was up for anything. It was meant to be for education and health. That is what we were told. There is still money to be spent within the billion dollars on each, but the Government has spent it. It has exhausted the money. There is nothing left in the Future Investment Fund kitty, and now the Government is talking about capital recycling programmes. Well, it is very, very possible that Kiwibank could be up for a bit of recycling under this National Government.

So this bill is the chance for the National Government to put all of that to bed and to say to New Zealanders: “We believe that this is an important part of our infrastructure in banking and what the New Zealand Government believes is in the best interest of New Zealanders.” If the Government does not, it shows how out of touch it is with where New Zealanders are today. If it does not, it shows that this is still an agenda for the National Party. It has run out of money from the Future Investment Fund and it knows it has got big capital needs in the future. There is going to be a lot more panel beating done on Chris Bishop’s car if he is not careful. The Government has to find that money from somewhere, and unless the Government members get up and tell us in this House that they support this bill, we know that the National Government’s agenda of selling Kiwibank is on the table. That is the challenge, Mr Bishop.

CHRIS BISHOP (National): Well, the National Party is not voting for this bill. We do not support it. So that was a challenge that was laid down, and a challenge that was accepted. We are not voting for the bill, because it is not a good bill.

There are generally two types of members’ bills that come before Parliament on a Wednesday. There are genuine bills that are advanced in good faith by members to make, generally, small changes but consequential amendments to Acts that actually make a difference to the lives of people. I have got to say that usually it is the Green Party that advances those sorts of bills. So the bill that is next on the Order Paper, the Electricity Industry (Small-Scale Renewable Distributed Generation) Amendment Bill, I do not necessarily agree with, but it is a bill advanced in good faith by Gareth Hughes to deal with the interesting and important issue for the future of the New Zealand electricity industry about solar electricity. There are other bills in the ballot as well. My colleague Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi has a bill to authorise the use of kirpans, or the carrying of kirpans, on flights, and, of course, David Bennett has the interestingly titled Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill, which is a very important bill. I, for one, am looking forward to that being drawn from the ballot and considering that on the Justice and Electoral Committee.

So there are genuine bills, and then there is a second type of bill. That is what I would classify this bill as falling into.

Paul Foster-Bell: The showboating bills.

CHRIS BISHOP: Those are the sorts of bills, as my colleague says, that are the showboating bills—the more political bills, ones that are advanced for symbolic value only. They are highly political, and, often, actually, the only real point of the bill is to get the name of the bill into the ballot—for example, Jacinda Ardern’s Child Poverty Reduction and Eradication Bill. I know for a fact that that bill does not do that, but, I mean, who would be opposed to that name? I mean, who is in favour of child poverty? No one, right? Who wants to reduce it? Everyone. Who wants to eradicate it? Everyone. So the name is the point there, and that is the point with this bill, the Keep Kiwibank Bill. It is interestingly titled. It has got a good name.

Kris Faafoi: It’s pretty simple.

CHRIS BISHOP: It is nice and simple. That is right, Kris. It is nice and simple. Let us all get behind the Keep Kiwibank Bill, except, and this is where the bill falls down, what this bill would do—let us be very clear—is place Kiwibank, a State-owned enterprise, into the same constitutional realm as the entrenched provisions of the Electoral Act 1993. Section 268 of the Electoral Act says you cannot alter the term of Parliament—so from 3 to 4 or 5 years, say—which is one of those fundamental constitutional provisions or, for example, the fact that the voting age is 18, which is of fundamental, critical importance to the democracy that we have in New Zealand. Apparently, the future of Kiwibank is so important that it is equivalent to about five provisions in the New Zealand constitution in the Electoral Act that are entrenched, and it is on par with that, according to Clayton Cosgrove.

Paul Foster-Bell: Ludicrous.

CHRIS BISHOP: Well, sorry, that cannot be the case. As my colleague Paul Foster-Bell says, that is ludicrous. Mr Cosgrove, in his opening remarks, made reference to Sir Michael Cullen as the chair of Kiwibank. He is a scholar of epic proportions.

Paul Foster-Bell: A knight of the realm.

CHRIS BISHOP: He is a knight of the realm, as Paul Foster-Bell says—he loves knights of the realm. Sir Michael Cullen is a historian. He is a very learned man. I am going to venture to suggest that a man like Sir Michael Cullen, although he may well believe in the importance of Kiwibank, I highly doubt he thinks that Kiwibank is so important it should be basically entrenched in the New Zealand constitution—I highly doubt that.

The National Party will not be supporting this bill for the reasons that I have advanced and that my colleague David Bennett has advanced. The Labour Party forgets its history of Kiwibank on this bill, it really does. It is a little bit like paid parental leave—forced into it by the Alliance Party after the 1999 election. It was not a policy that the Labour Party advanced, and then all of a sudden it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And, of course, it forgets the 1980s when the Labour Party advanced important macroeconomic and microeconomic reforms that made a difference to this country when it sold off vast swathes of the New Zealand public sector for the benefit of New Zealanders.

Kris Faafoi: You’re starting to sound like Bennett, sit down! You’re entering the Bennett zone, sit!

CHRIS BISHOP: It forgets that history, but I think I have said enough at this point. We will not be supporting this bill.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member’s time has expired. I did not want to interrupt the member in his final flow, but I do want to warn Mr Faafoi. When he insults me like that, it hurts.

JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): The Green Party will be supporting this bill to the select committee. Obviously, we are very much in support of keeping Kiwibank in public ownership. The campaign against the National Government’s planned asset sales last term was a huge focus for the Green Party because we understand the value of keeping assets that have been built up over generations by New Zealanders in the hands of New Zealanders so that they can all benefit in the future. In the case of our Government-owned bank, Kiwibank, it is incredibly important, not only because it is a State-owned asset. I mean, we have other State-owned enterprises that do not necessarily return the same strategic benefits to New Zealand, like, for example, we have a State-owned commercial television station, which does not really make sense. It would make sense to have a television station that actually provided public broadcasting, but owning a television station for the purposes of commercial return does not necessarily make as much sense. I mean, I personally would support public broadcasting on television, which this Government has completely killed and which we probably will not get back as long as it is in power.

But Kiwibank is incredibly important because we have had a long problem in New Zealand with a lack of competitiveness in the banking sector because of the big four Australian banks, which had a very cosy relationship, did not compete on price, and, of course, that all contributed to—it was great for them, there were huge profits that were sucked out of New Zealand back to Australia—our current account deficit, the largest share of which is our investment income deficit. So having the State-owned bank has been incredibly important for New Zealand to ensure that we are not losing all of that profit overseas. Some of it is staying here in New Zealand.

I must comment, as well, that Kiwibank is a great bank. It is kind of like Air New Zealand. I am a client of Kiwibank, and I have actually never had better service from a commercial bank. So I think it is doing a great job for its customers, it is doing a great job introducing competition to the banking sector here in New Zealand, and that is important to our economy.

It is critically important that we retain public ownership because we are too small. When the National Government put up the State-owned energy companies for partial privatisation, of course we saw it was impossible to be sure that the private owners would be here in New Zealand. So if Kiwibank is not kept in public ownership there is an incredible risk, a huge risk, and a very likely risk that we would see Kiwibank slowly becoming yet another foreign-owned bank, which is not what we need.

I have said we will support this bill to select committee, because although we support the aim of the bill, I think it would be interesting in the select committee to tease out whether or not this bill is the best way to achieve that aim, and I can see some potential issues with the way in which the bill has been drafted. In particular, it does seem to tie Kiwibank’s future to New Zealand Post, which may not be the best way for Kiwibank to arrange its business and for us to keep it in public ownership here in New Zealand. But I am open to this bill. I think it is a worthy endeavour, and I do think that it will be interesting, if it makes it to the select committee, to see exactly how it could be improved, potentially, to ensure that we do achieve the aim, which is so incredibly important, of keeping Kiwibank in public ownership.

I think that, politically at least, National has realised that it cannot sell Kiwibank. That would be incredibly unpopular. It went ahead with the partial privatisation of the energy companies even though that was incredibly unpopular and did not make fiscal sense, did not make economic sense, and did not make strategic sense in the long term. But it went ahead and did it, because it was an election promise that it campaigned on. But I do think that the victory for all those who stood up and supported the Keep Our Assets campaign and who voted in the referendum is that we will not see further privatisation of incredibly important assets like Kiwibank. So there is a partial political victory there for all those people who stood up in the Keep Our Assets campaign.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): It is a pleasure to talk on this bill tonight—rather strangely named, I have to say, the Keep Kiwibank Bill. To me this is one of those topics that is very appealing in a conceptual way, but when you start to look inside the technicalities of it, I think it starts to fall apart a little bit. For instance, this whole issue about making sure you retain ownership of Kiwibank—you have to ask yourself: what does actually constitute a sale? Just to give you some examples of what I mean about that, what happens when the directors of New Zealand Post legitimately want to raise cash through the form of issuing new equity to fund an expansion of, for instance, Kiwibank’s operations itself, or maybe other operations within New Zealand Post? That is one example. Secondly, does raising equity to meet increased prudential requirements that the Reserve Bank may legitimately impose on all banks, including Kiwibank, constitute a sale?

Thirdly, if the board of New Zealand Post chooses to sell part of the business, maybe even part of Kiwibank operations, does this constitute a sale, particularly if it is a minority part of Kiwibank’s operation, or if it is in fact a larger portion of the bank’s operations? When does that constitute a sale? And what about the issue of issuing quasi-equity instruments, which hopefully Mr Clayton Cosgrove has a good feeling for, such as—just to give him an example, just to refresh his memory—convertible debt instruments, which are very common instruments in capital markets. In fact, I note that back in April earlier this year Kiwibank was in fact in the process of issuing another round of equity instruments to help fund-raise and meet its ongoing debt-financing requirements.

What I have done is just quoted four examples of where equity may legitimately be issued or sold, and do they constitute a sale? This is obviously something that this bill would need to seriously address, and I do not think it does. But the next question, for me, is: why stop here? We own numerous State-owned enterprises, and so what is so special about Kiwibank? Why not, for example, Landcorp? I am surprised that the member has not put that up. If we were to propose Landcorp as an example, I do note that Assistant Speaker Mallard made a very important speech back in October 2007, when even he acknowledged that selling land, farms that Landcorp owned, was actually a legitimate part of its business. So it is, again, a similar example that I use with Kiwibank. It may be that Kiwibank may want to sell down part of its operations, so we have got a corollary there. I just do not understand what makes Kiwibank so special for the Opposition.

The third thing is: why we should be impeding New Zealand Post? I note in New Zealand Post’s recent profit announcement that it actually achieved a profit of $135 million. This was reported very recently. But of particular interest to me was that of that $143 million, actually, $46 million came from the sale of its Australian business. Again, you know, here we have got this entity, New Zealand Post, which includes Kiwibank, and here we are: just in the last few months, New Zealand Post has been selling down some of its operations. And, of course, everyone is very happy that New Zealand Post is making a profit.

Finally, I cannot understand why we are imposing this rigorous test of a 75 percent majority of this House to approve such a sale. It is an extraordinary test, and my colleague, Mr Chris Bishop, was talking through on this before. Why should this be contemplated? Why is such a test required, which is even more onerous than passing bills through this House? That is what I fail to grasp. Finally, I would have to say: if we were to pass this bill, what does that imply for the governance structure of New Zealand Post? I think that for anyone sitting on that board, to have that inflexibility cuts across the whole role of governance in New Zealand Post, and would, perhaps, impede the ability of directors.

RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): I am very pleased to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take a call in this first reading of the Keep Kiwibank Bill 2015. This is a good bill and New Zealand First is proud to support it. In fact, if we have one complaint, one criticism at all—and it is not about the bill itself or about this process of lawmaking; we have no issue with that. If we have one complaint about this process, it is that this bill should not actually be necessary. It should not have been necessary for Mr Cosgrove to craft this bill and to put it in the ballot, and to be lucky enough to have it drawn and to bring it to the House. We congratulate him on that, but I fear that it is necessary, and listening to Government members tonight has done nothing to assuage those fears.

As Mr Robertson said when he spoke, if the Government members do not stand up and say unequivocally that they are going to support the bill, or do not confirm that they will be voting against it, that is pretty much as good as saying that, yes, Kiwibank is going to be on the block, at some point in the medium future anyway. It is a way of saying “We do not want to entrench the New Zealand State ownership of this bank, because we want to give ourselves the opportunity to flick it off at some point down the track.”, which is a reasonably safe bet, I would say. It will surprise nobody that the free-market ideologues who seem to run the National Party these days do not have any interest in safeguarding the future of New Zealand’s bank in the hands of New Zealand citizens, voters, and taxpayers.

Mr Bennett pretty much said that, of course, National will not interfere in the decisions of New Zealand Post’s board, and that sums up National members’ attitude, I think, generally to State-owned enterprises overall. They would really rather not have them. They would really rather that everything was actually in the hands of the private sector. They do not like the sort of socialist connotations of the taxpayer, through the State, having ownership of what they call businesses, even if these businesses are, in fact, essential parts of the fabric of what makes New Zealand New Zealand. They just regard any kind of State ownership as being anathema to what it is that is the core of their way of thinking about things. So they have come out and flagged that they will not support it.

We will be supporting it, and Labour, obviously, will support the bill, and the Greens have said that they will support it through to select committee. As to the other support parties for the Government, we do not know the mind of the Māori Party. We may not know until the vote. It is a safe bet that Mr Seymour will support it. But we do not know about Mr Dunne. He has surprised us once tonight already, and, who knows, perhaps he might do that again.

Do not get me wrong: New Zealand First is entirely in favour of private enterprise and of private ownership of businesses. But there are times when something more than a simple pure profit motive is required. There are times when a public service is required. There are times when a public good is involved. It is on occasions like that that the State has to be involved, because only the State can be involved, and that really is where the State should be involved. We did that for a long time. We used to own the BNZ, for example. We used to own the Post Office Savings Bank for more than a hundred years. We owned the Post Office Savings Bank, then we owned PostBank, as it was called, and then it got flicked off in 1989 to the Australians, who now own the major slice of the New Zealand commercial banking sector, apart from, of course, Kiwibank, the Taranaki savings bank, the Southland Building Society, and one or two other little minnows.

It is curious that the Australians own almost all of New Zealand’s commercial banking sector when, in fact, for a commercial trading bank to operate in Australia it has to be majority Australian-owned. That seems to be lost on this Rogernomics National Government. If we fast forward from 1989 to now, the pendulum has swung the whole way. National is in power. It was Labour, obviously, that was in power in 1989, when Kiwibank was created. Mr Cosgrove has seen the light, and he has realised the value of holding this valuable asset in the hands of the taxpayer and the State. He has brought this very fine bill to the House. We are proud to support it, and we challenge other parties to do the same.

JAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany): I stand, along with my colleagues, in rising to oppose this bill. I heard a comment from Mr Prosser, who used the word “anathema”. I just think this is a bit of a constitutional anathema. We do not use the 75 percent provisions in this Parliament for partisan issues like this. We typically use the entrenchment provisions around entrenching and ensuring that there is a greater level of support around the House for ensuring something is not able to be played around with during a political process for things like the Electoral Act. We have entrenchment provisions in the Electoral Act so that a party cannot come in by a bare majority and completely change the electoral system in New Zealand. There is a good reason why you would have the 75 percent provision inserted into legislation.

But when it comes to something like an asset owned by the Government—actually not directly owned by the Government; owned through a company, through a company, and then owned by the Government—that is not a good reason why we should be inserting a provision requiring 75 percent of this House to vote if that asset was ever to be sold. There are no plans by the Government to sell Kiwibank. There are no plans by the Government to look at floating shares through Kiwibank. But that is not a reason why this House should legislate to put in place such a high bar around that.

I see that this issue is a bit of a knee-jerk reaction around the Future Investment Fund and the floating of energy companies that the Government did several years ago. Let us just remind ourselves that that took place after the Government went to the public and asked the public whether or not they supported that policy through an electoral system. The Government put that on the table and people voted for the Government through a general election, knowing very well that that was going to happen. To then come into this House several years later and say that because the Government went and did that, we should put in place such a high bar around one particular company that the Government has ownership in through several other companies—I cannot see why we would need to do that.

I note that there are parties in this Parliament that are voting for this bill and for putting in place such a restriction around Kiwibank. I notice the New Zealand First Party is wanting to put in place this restriction around Kiwibank. I find that quite interesting because it was not that long ago, in the political life of Winston Peters, that he actually wanted to float shares in Kiwibank himself. In an interview with Guyon Espiner in June 2011, Winston Peters actually talked about his previous plans for floating Kiwibank. He was asked by Guyon Espiner: “In 2008, you proposed floating shares in Kiwibank. Is that still your policy?”. Well, he bluffed and blustered around it, as Winston did, but what he said was: “If you want to expand Kiwibank”—

Hon Clayton Cosgrove: I raise a point of order, Mr Assistant Speaker. The member has misled the House. I do not think you ever promoted that, in any capacity you had.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Possibly unlike the member, I did listen to the fact that the member was quoting.

JAMI-LEE ROSS: Let me just start again. He was asked by Guyon Espiner about floating shares in Kiwibank, a previous policy of Winston Peters. He said: “If you want to expand Kiwibank and didn’t have the money, and so you were taking, say, from 1 billion to 1.5 billion, floating the second 500 amount—”. Then he was interrupted by Guyon Espiner—Guyon does that from time to time. But the fact of the matter is Winston Peters previously had a policy of floating shares in Kiwibank, a policy that Winston Peters and New Zealand First went to the public on because they felt that was an important option for Kiwibank to have. Having a provision like this put into legislation would stop Winston Peters from being able to float shares in Kiwibank should he ever want to do that again in the future. I think that New Zealand First Party should probably reconsider their position given the previous pedigree that Winston Peters has.

Winston Peters also has some pedigree around selling airports. Airports are important assets, just as banks are important assets. I say to New Zealand First and other parties in this Parliament, when the New Zealand Government sold off Auckland Airport, did 75 percent of this Parliament vote on that? No. Was there a majority of people, through a referendum, voting on that? No. I think we need some consistency on issues like this.

The Government entered into a process of selling shares in some companies that we went to the public on in a general election and asked their permission to do that. There has been a great investment into areas like education, ultra-fast broadband, and Kiwibank because of that. There are no plans to get involved in doing that with Kiwibank but there should not be such a high bar—such a high threshold—put in place. We should use that only for important provisions, important legislation, like the Electoral Act, where you should not have a small majority in Parliament overturning an electoral Act. It should be left for important issues like that.

JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): I rise on this first reading of Clayton Cosgrove’s Keep Kiwibank Bill. I just wanted to commend the last speaker, Jami-Lee Ross, for what was actually a fascinating history lesson on the career of Winston Peters. I am not sure how relevant it was to the substance of the bill but, nevertheless, it was absolutely fascinating.

I would also just like to pick up on some of the comments made by the member Chris Bishop as well, where he started off by saying that there are two types of bills that are entered into the House by members on members’ days, which, generally, are, one, public interest bills—bills that are genuinely designed to advance an interest, perhaps in small ways, sometimes in grand ways—and, two, other bills that are really just political statements and so on. He categorised this bill as a political statement rather than as a bill in the public interest.

I would like to say why I am voting for this bill, which is because Kiwibank is an incredibly important strategic asset to New Zealand. In the darkest days of the great financial crisis, the main banks owned by other banks in Australia, the Australian-owned banks, repatriated most of their cash and stopped lending into the New Zealand market. That threatened the ongoing existence of most of New Zealand’s businesses, especially those small and medium enterprises that make up so much of our economy.

Kiwibank, being a publicly owned bank, stepped into that void and continued to make loans, particularly into the small to medium sized enterprise end of the market. In fact, part of the reason why it is a successful bank today is because during that period time when the Australian-owned banks had stopped lending into the New Zealand market it significantly expanded its loan book, supported the New Zealand economy, and supported all of those small and medium enterprises to keep going. If it had not done that, New Zealand’s version of the crisis would have been a great deal worse than it was.

Our businesses were able to continue trading, they were continually able to have access to credit, they continued to operate, and they continued to buy and sell from each other and to each other throughout that period of time. So the presence of Kiwibank in the New Zealand economy was absolutely critical during that financial crisis. It is not inconceivable that such a crisis will happen again in the not too distant future.

Structurally, its ownership by the public was critical to its decision to continue to do that, to continue to make those loans, not just because it was a bank owned in New Zealand—its shareholding was held in New Zealand—but because it was a publicly owned bank. It has a mission above and beyond profit to its own shareholders. It actually sees itself as a bank in the service of the New Zealand economy and of New Zealanders, above and beyond the dividend that it needs to provide to New Zealand Post and, thereby, to the Crown. So it is an incredibly important strategic asset, and it is critically important that we hold on to it.

This is not a perfect bill. There are a number of provisions in it that are a little clunky and there are things that I think can be worked through, but that is why we have the select committee process. So I think, for those members opposite who are criticising the provisions of the bill, I would then suggest to them that if they are criticising the provisions of the bill rather than the principle of the bill, which is that we hold on to Kiwibank—then they should vote for the bill to move into the select committee so that together we can clean up those provisions and make it work, and so that we can make it work to the satisfaction of both sides of the House.

To me it seems a perfectly rational response to say: “Well, look, the bill isn’t perfect, but if we agree with it in principle, then we should move it forward into the select committee process, and in so doing make sure that what comes out the other side is a much better bill and that it will be workable and that it will preserve that principle—that we hold on to this incredibly important strategic asset to the New Zealand economy.”

I think my colleague Julie Anne Genter, when she spoke on this bill earlier, described the experience that New Zealanders have of Kiwibank. I have spoken mostly about its strategic importance to the New Zealand economy, to our small to medium sized enterprise sector, and so on, but it is also a greatly loved institution in New Zealand. I think that New Zealanders as a whole would want to make sure that it is retained in public hands—in the hands of New Zealand and the Government.

With that, I believe that we should keep Kiwibank, we should support this bill through to the select committee, and the Green Party is delighted to be voting for it to move to the select committee. Thank you.

ALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa): Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this Keep Kiwibank Bill. My question is to Mr Cosgrove: why Kiwibank? Why just Kiwibank? Why not New Zealand Post and the whole business? Why have you picked on one piece of their business? Why have you restricted the board of directors of Kiwibank from conducting their business in the best interests of their shareholders? Why not the “Keep Landcorp Bill”? Why not the “Keep KiwiRail Bill”? Why not keep—[Interruption] Because KiwiRail is an important piece of New Zealand infrastructure, Mr Cosgrove. I do not understand why you have picked on Kiwibank, as a small piece of the New Zealand Post portfolio.

This bill is part of an attitude that comes from Opposition members, which says that they know best. They know how to run the business. As Mr Cosgrove is on the Finance and Expenditure Committee, I am surprised that he put this bill up. He talks about understanding how governance works, and talks about how the economy works. But then he puts this thing up, which cuts across basic governance, basic company law, and basic property rights.

He is telling people—being the board of New Zealand Post—what to do and how to do it. That is really the fundamental problem with this bill, because it cuts across. It has not been well-thought-out. It cuts across and creates a whole lot of problems that I am sure Mr Cosgrove did not intend to create.

Mr Bayly gave the example of New Zealand Post possibly needing some cash to support Kiwibank, perhaps, or perhaps to support the New Zealand postal delivery service. What are the directors supposed to do? Are they able to go and raise funds from offshore? Would that be allowed—to take on some offshore shareholders?

This bill also sniffs of xenophobia, because this also talks about the importance of having to have a bank owned by the Government. It is not necessary.

Hon Clayton Cosgrove: How is that xenophobia?

ALASTAIR SCOTT: Because Mr Cosgrove does not want anyone else to own Kiwibank, other than New Zealand Post. That is a ridiculous situation to be in. There are lots of building societies out there. If you want to bank with a 100 percent locally owned building society, bank, what have you, you are able to do that. But there is no reason to restrict the directors of New Zealand Post from conducting their business. The nanny State attitude coming from the Labour Party is alive and well. The Government Superannuation Fund is also something that Mr Cosgrove has wanted to interfere with, and control and influence.

As soon as we get politicians involved in businesses, it begins a slippery slope of conflicts of interest. That is why I cannot support this bill, because if it would enable Grant Robertson to decide what—is Grant Robertson going to use Kiwibank under his control to fund his housing projects in Auckland, perhaps? This is the beginning of the end, the beginning of a slippery slope of political interference in what should be independently run State-owned enterprises, and that is why I do not support this bill.

RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I have a concern that Mr Ross may have misled the House in his comments about Winston Peters. I wonder whether you might like to invite him to withdraw and apologise around comments about the sale of airports, particularly.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Yes—the member will sit down. There is an appropriate time to take that point of order, and, in any case, if a member is suggesting that someone deliberately misled the House, it is a matter of privilege and has to be addressed in a particular way. If the member thinks that it was an accidental misleading and that the member responsible should correct it, then the proper thing to do, it now being so late, is to go and have a discussion with that member and see whether he does want to make that change.

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour): I thank members for their contributions tonight. I have got to say that even those who oppose the bill, by and large, have made pretty good contributions and have made some valid points.

To the point that was made repeatedly—I think Mr Bishop was the first person to make it—he is right. It is very rare that we would seek to use entrenchment provisions in a wide-ranging way, apart from many of the Acts—the Electoral Act and others—that he mentioned. It is rare. It is unusual. And the point about it is: it has come to this. That is why. It has absolutely come to this. Those guys over there would sell their grandmother for sixpence if they could—they could. They have revealed tonight that all bets are off. And I agree with Mr Bishop: in an ordinary time, with a conventional Government that listens to the people and that does not fire money away or sell assets in a fire sale, as these guys—saying they would get $10 billion, they ended up getting $4.7 billion. We would not be here. We would not have this provision, and we would not be trying to promote it in the Parliament.

I would say to Mr Scott the same thing, “But it has come to this”, because Mr Scott and his ilk just fundamentally believe that they have a right to flog everything off. Mr Shaw made some very pertinent comments from his professional background, in terms of the impact and value of Kiwibank during the global financial crisis. But Mr Scott comes from a place where he says that anything goes. But I do agree with him on this point, and I have always maintained this point: that it is not appropriate for politicians to be stuck in and hands-on with State-owned enterprises.

But this bill does not do that. This bill, of course, does not prevent Kiwibank and New Zealand Post from taking a whole host of any commercial decisions that it deems appropriate under the State-Owned Enterprises Act or the statement of corporate intent. So all this sort of scaremongering and bunkum from Mr Scott, whom I think is better than that—perhaps Mr Bennett we expect it from; Mr Bennett may have written his speech for him—but I actually think Mr Scott is better than the speech he gave. He knows damn well, and other members do, that under the State-Owned Enterprises Act nothing is precluded apart from if that entity wanted to sell Kiwibank. That is the only decision.

So all this sort of scaremongering and the bunkum about the Superannuation Fund and nanny State and the Labour Party wanting to get its hands on State-owned assets and interfere—well, the problem Mr Scott has got is the history of that. The history of Labour Ministers of State-owned enterprises is exactly the opposite, actually. It is exactly the opposite.

So all this does—as is self-evident—is that it puts a safeguard, another check and balance, another blockage in the way, and another check for some parliamentary scrutiny—75 percent majority of Parliament or a referendum—if it was trying to dispose of this asset. We know there is motivation to do it—we have heard a bit of it tonight—the capital recycling and the attempt to source $1 billion to $2 billion for other projects, given that it has run out of money from the Future Investment Fund. We know that these guys, if they could get away with it—if public opinion would tolerate it—would sell it. So I just simply say, it has come to this. It is unusual; we should not have to propose measures like this to protect strategic assets, but there it is, we are.

The other point that has been made is why Kiwibank and not others? I simply say to members of Parliament, I am happy to take an amendment as we go through to cover all State-owned assets, if they think that is a good idea. Mr Scott thinks we should cover Landcorp—I am with him. Other assets—I am with him; very happy to do that.

Alastair Scott: KiwiRail.

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: KiwiRail—I am with him on that. The same with Mr Bishop—if they want to propose amendments, I am very happy to cooperate to expand the scope of this bill so that the remaining assets that New Zealanders have are protected. This is not inconsistent. This is basically a very precise and surgical bill to ensure that a vital strategic asset for New Zealand is secured and maintained, and that this Parliament, as representatives of New Zealanders, will decide what happens, not a few National Party cronies working against public opinion with their own interests in play and not those of the citizenry. I commend the bill to the House.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Keep Kiwibank Bill be now read a first time.

Ayes 61

New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12; Māori Party 2; United Future 1.

Noes 60

New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1.

Bill read a first time.

Bill referred to the Finance and Expenditure Committee.

Bills

Electricity Industry (Small-Scale Renewable Distributed Generation) Amendment Bill

First Reading

GARETH HUGHES (Green): I move, That the Electricity Industry (Small-Scale Renewable Distributed Generation) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Commerce Committee to consider the bill. My bill deals with breaking down the barriers for all small-scale clean energy, but in New Zealand this mostly means solar. So I would like to start at the beginning, where it was once said there was light. About 150,000,000 kilometres away, in the sun’s core, hydrogen atoms are fused into helium through nuclear fusion, and sunlight, or photons of energy, find themselves after 10,000 to 170,000 years, and possibly billions of collisions within the sun, finally escaping, reaching the surface, and travelling into space. Those photons then travel at the speed of light, and over the course of the 8.3 minutes they take to get to earth, if they hit a solar photovoltaic panel on someone’s roof, they are turned into free, clean energy. My bill is about how we deal with that electricity, and the rules around it.

Up and down the country and across many countries, I have met with various people who have gone solar and are excited by the ability to produce their own power from the sun. The International Energy Agency, and even our own Treasury, acknowledges that solar power has a big role to play in a low-carbon, clean-energy future. Up and down New Zealand I have met dozens of Kiwis who have gone solar. They tell me that they have gone solar because they love the freedom and the sense of energy independence it brings. What they have seen is, as power bills reach record highs and solar power’s costs reach record lows, that the costs have dropped some 99 percent across the course of my lifetime. Those people have looked up at their roofs and they have wondered.

As individual consumers, they do not want to be totally dependent on the big old power companies and just passively pay the power bill, which seems to keep going up. They want to be able to do it for themselves. They want to be able to participate, but the unfair market rules in New Zealand mean that for many Kiwis the solar dream has become a headache. I have met with farmers, business people, school principals, and marae representatives—all people who have invested their own money in solar—but I would like to talk about a couple whom I met in Auckland. Roly and Gail Runciman are superannuitants in Howick in Auckland, and they went solar. They told me that they went solar in their retirement age; they wanted to spend their life-savings to try to fix their power bills, as they were on a fixed income.

Last year Roly grabbed a ladder, took me up on his roof, and proudly showed me his solar panels. What we discussed up there was how it was that the power companies had all the power in the relationship—that they could set the buy-back rate for his surplus energy, which they then sold on at full retail price. We talked about how the power companies had recently slashed their buy-back rate by 72 percent, at short notice. Roly told me: “It’s stacked against someone who wants to do something a little bit entrepreneurial, as well as doing something for the country.”

Now, along with that, there is additional ridiculous red tape when it comes to solar. Across the country there are 29 different regional forms, fees, and rules. Some lines companies take months to deal with an application. One solar company told me that when it quotes for solar panels for a customer, of the 60 days it takes them to put a solar panel on someone’s roof, only 1 day is spent actually installing the panel, the rest is dealing with paperwork. Some cities require a resource consent, some do not. Some have fees, some do not. In some places, like Cambridge, you can pay up to $850 to connect to the grid, yet only an hour-and-a-half drive up the road in Auckland, it costs zero.

I do not think it is on for power companies to have all the power, and for the little guy to have none, except the power to switch to another retailer, which treats them exactly the same. So that is why I drafted this bill—to give those Kiwis a fair go. My solution is a simple, common-sense amendment to the Electricity Act to empower the Electricity Authority to act as an independent umpire. The Electricity Authority would be empowered to deliver on three tasks: the first is setting a fair and reasonable non-subsidised buy-back rate; secondly, establishing standardised contracts to provide certainty for all participants; and, thirdly, for reducing that ridiculous regional red tape with a standardised connection framework. The big issue was the buy-back rate, and currently the buy-back rate is entirely decided by the electricity retailer, which, you could argue, has a commercial imperative to see a solar customer as a competitor or a threat to its profits.

So if surplus solar energy is produced on someone’s roof, those electrons automatically flow back through the grid, and, essentially, are used by the neighbour or someone down the road. That neighbour or someone else down the road is charged at the full retail rate—an average of 26c per kilowatt-hour across the country—yet the power company unilaterally decides what to give them, and it can change this with only 30 days’ notice. Currently this is as low as between 4c and 8c. It is entirely out of step with other countries and it is incredibly unfair.

I do not think it should be politicians setting the rate, but I definitely do not think it should be the power companies—the ones with all the power—setting the rate. That is why I support having an independent umpire. So I believe the answer is for the Electricity Authority to develop an understandable, transparent, and clear formula that is fair and reasonable. I do not believe this is about setting up households to compete with power companies; it is definitely not about trying to make fortunes via public subsidies for people going solar. It is simply about fairness and certainty.

So my bill is trying to help those consumers—the schools, the businesses, the maraes—but I also believe it is helping the power companies, because the power industry finds itself at a crossroads in 2015. For 100 years it has grown fat by selling more power—that has been its business model. It has pushed power down wires in one direction, and thought about it like water-pipe engineers—trying to get all those electrons from point A to point B. But disruptive technology like solar, like batteries, and like electric vehicles is asking them to think more like computer engineers. It is as different now as sending mail by the post is to people sending emails over the internet.

So my bill asks those power bosses a fundamental question: will you fight solar, or will you work with it? Because currently it looks like the power companies are scared of solar, and they are actively trying to discourage those Kiwis trying to do it themselves. So if we continue those rules that give all the power to the electricity companies, we are simply going to force people to go off-grid with battery technology, leaving fewer people on the grid, raising prices, causing more people to leave the grid—in other words, the utility death spiral, which is being discussed so often overseas.

Over the last adjournment I was over in Silicon Valley and I met with Tesla Motors to discuss their new lithium ion Powerwall battery. I also met with Enphase Energy, which is doing great research and development work in Christchurch and has teamed up now with Genesis Energy to offer battery storage solutions for Kiwis here. The price of batteries is halving every 8 years, akin to Moore’s Law, and what we are seeing is the ability to harness storage technology to deliver cheaper, cleaner, smarter electricity for everyone on the grid. So the choice is: are we going to work with solar and battery technology, or are we just going to force them off and see batteries as their ticket to go off grid? My vision is 100 percent clean energy, a modern smart grid with customers in control, with customers having power—but this is going to require those electricity companies to think differently about their role. They have to think as energy service companies and care about their customers’ needs and what the customers want, and not just try to sell more power down the wires to drive their profits.

So I am urging power companies to support my bill for a clear, fair, and transparent regime for solar homes, or they may well just see their customers leave them. Ultimately, though, my bill is a vote on fairness. It is a vote for certainty, and I am asking MPs today in this Chamber: are they going to be standing with those individual Kiwis like Roly and Gail—Kiwis in Tauranga, Palmerston North, Ōhāriu—or are they going to be standing with the big, old-fashioned power companies? We can set fair and reasonable rules for distributed generation, we can allow consumers to participate in the electricity market, we can see a more modern, resilient grid, and we can grow more good local jobs.

I am hoping that members can support this bill. We can shine a little light on it—excuse the pun—and if we get a hearing in a select committee, we can hear from solar customers, solar companies, and the electricity industry, because there is a real issue. My bill, I believe, is a good way to deal with it, but let us have that discussion in the select committee. I believe it deserves a little bit of sunlight. Kia ora.

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery): I think it is very interesting that the member Gareth Hughes makes an impassioned plea for New Zealand to move progressively towards more renewable energy. What I want to say to him is that in 2010 there were very significant changes to the electricity industry marketing arrangements that were designed to encourage greater use of renewable energy, and in 2014 we saw that figure soar just a little above 80 percent of all our electricity being generated from renewable sources. We are on track to have that generation reaching 90 percent by 2025, so there has been a fundamental shift—probably the biggest shift—in the way in which electricity is dealt with in this country during the last 5 years. There is no question about that.

The bit I disagree with the member on is the assertion that unless there is a higher price paid, or a fairer price paid, more people will go off the grid. The reality is that to stay on the grid at the moment represents a good deal for anyone who chooses to have some supplementary arrangements around generation for their particular home. I know a little about this because I am doing this myself. I expect that some of the household costs that I might face will be reduced because I will have a system where generated electricity will first meet demands at my own property, and any surplus will then be exported over the import/export meter and, as the member said, picked up by, perhaps, a neighbour or someone else, simply because it is the shortest distance for any of the electrons to particularly travel. But that does not take away the need for there to be a reliable grid for the times when there are not huge amounts of sunlight, when there is not sufficient electricity generated from a roof space to supply either the needs of the particular residents or, perhaps, anybody nearby as well.

So the issue is, then, what the balance is between a wholesale price that is struck for electricity, which, remember, is struck on a market mechanism, and the price that is paid for delivery of electricity to your home. At the moment, if you look at it, if someone has a solar system—and that is largely what we are talking about, because there is not enough embedded wind for us to really get comparative figures on it at the present time—then if someone is with Contact Energy, they will get an 8c a kilowatt hour payback for exported electricity. If they are with Genesis it is 5.46c a kilowatt hour. If they are with Mercury Energy it is 8c a kilowatt hour. If they are with Meridian Energy it is a 7c summer rate and a 10c winter rate. If it is TrustPower it is 7c across the year.

The point here is that if you go to the deepest, darkest part of winter this year, 2015, the wholesale electricity rates—if you take just one day that is reasonably average for the days in July, then you will get a wholesale electricity rate of somewhere around about 4 to 4.5c per kilowatt hour. The electricity companies will be buying at that rate and they will be selling at a higher rate, but they have all of the infrastructure that is necessary to generate that electricity in the first place, the infrastructure to monitor how much of that is being used and to actually be able to put a price on it. I do not think it is reasonable to say we want to have a structure that says that that price cannot fluctuate.

The suggestion that somehow the Electricity Authority is going to come up with an algorithm that will deal with the embedded rate on a daily basis, alongside some sort of spot price, I think is hopeful thinking. What it will lead to is higher prices, because you cannot have a demand for electricity in New Zealand that is relatively constant in its growth rate—although substantially reduced on what we faced in 2009. In 2009 we were looking to have to add about 150 megawatts per year of generating capacity to the system each year. We are nowhere near that now, because there has been this different way of dealing with electricity. But to say that the next step is to tie the feed-in tariff, effectively, to some sort of formula struck by the Electricity Authority, I think will not lead to lower prices. It will lead to higher prices, in fact, because the higher you go with that price, if it is struck at a reasonable rate, the greater the burden it is—or you become, as the generator, in my case—on everybody who takes a little bit of that electricity.

So I think also, then you look at market trends. Right now it is virtually impossible to watch peak-hour television without seeing solar energy companies advertising their products at pretty attractive rates. I have got to say that there is quite a difference between those attractive rates and what you end up paying, because of the relatively small size of the systems that are being advertised in the first place. None the less, the take-up rate is extraordinary.

If we just look at that, solar energy in New Zealand has in the last 3 years in fact gone up by three times. So people are making choices about their energy security, about their energy supply, definitely not based on price but based on what they perceive as being a good contribution they can make to good environmental outcomes in New Zealand. I would ask myself: why would we want to disrupt that? Why would we want to be saying that we must have some compulsory system that makes it so attractive that everybody will automatically go out and sign up to it? Because that is what the member is asking for. He is asking for authority in this bill for the Electricity Authority to come up with some sort of algorithm, or whatever it might be, to determine what the daily price is—or the monthly price, or the yearly price—for electricity.

I cannot see how it is a good thing to say to schools—for example, which can buy their electricity through, say, Meridian Energy spot-price planning that might take them down as low as 3.5c on some days in the winter and even lower in the summer—that, in fact, by having a feed-in tariff that is at a much higher level, even though it will not provide all of the services to that school, there is going to be such an encouragement that they will go out and make that sort of investment. They will not do it for that reason, because we are a long way from a point where the investment in solar energy is rational enough for people to get economic benefit from it.

If the member was prepared—

Stuart Nash: No, that’s not true.

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: The member over there, Mr Nash, calls out across the House: “That’s not true.” Well, I look forward to him making his speech that will give the figures that will indicate that it is an economically rational decision to put in sufficient photovoltaic panels on the roof of a house to run that house and provide a bit of surplus, and for that surplus to actually pay for the capital investment over a reasonable period of time. If it is over 25 years it might happen. If it is over 30 years it definitely will happen. But if it is over 10 years it will not happen, and no amount of mucking around with the price is going to change that. The reality is that the more people who are taking electricity out of an embedded system the higher the price for anyone else who has to take it from a network system. There is no getting away from that fact at all.

I am not surprised that we are getting that from Mr Nash. He was a man who was supportive of some of the dopey electricity reforms of the Labour Government the last time that it had the opportunity to be in Government. He was a strong supporter of all of the compulsory arrangements around solar energy and everything else.

Stuart Nash: What? I wasn’t in Government.

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Well, he says now he was not there, but we know he was out knocking on doors telling people to vote for the Labour Party. He was at the time.

This is not a bill that I or the National Party will be supporting. [Bell rung] Two minutes? I have got 2 minutes. That is good because there is a lot more I want to say about the dopey policies of the Labour Party during that time. In a 9-year period we had no fewer than four electricity crises—four. Four times the Government went to New Zealanders and said: “There’s a problem. The lakes are too low. We are going to have to ask you all to conserve electricity and, by the way, we are going to have to build this massive white elephant, the reserve generation capacity. We are going to spend $90 million building it and another $90 million feeding it with diesel fuel—very, very clean for the environment.” It took simply a reform of the electricity marketing arrangements to ensure that in the last 7 years there has not been an electricity crisis. We are now seeing electricity prices fall and in 2014 we saw the driest year in New Zealand’s history and not one flicker of the lights.

So this is one of those nice, feel-good ideas that will cost people who have the least capacity to buy into it a great deal more than they are paying at the moment.

STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): Gerry is right. I am sure that if Helen Clark in 2005 had not told the Labour voters in Epsom that they had to vote for Richard Worth, then I would have been in that Labour Government. But, unfortunately, it did not happen in Epsom, and I lost it.

Let me tell you a story. When I lived in Mount Eden we used to drive past an appliance store, and there was a big plasma TV in there and it was $10,000. The sort of thing that we used to say, when we drove past it, was: “When I win Lotto, I’m going to buy that television set.” Ten years on, you can now buy a plasma television, twice the size and much better quality, from The Warehouse for $500. The point of my conversation is that demand drives innovation, and at the moment there is an incredible amount of money being spent on disruptive technologies, which is driving innovation to the point where the price will come down and solar and battery technology will become affordable to a good number of New Zealanders.

One thing Mr Brownlee said—I should call him “Sexy Coal Gerry”, I suppose—that was quite salient was when he talked about what he is doing in his house. He said “At the moment, we will stay on grid.”, and at the moment I agree with the Minister. At the moment, it is not necessarily a rational economic decision to put solar on, because the payback is a long time. But the thing that I do know is that the future for electricity is changing; I do not know whether it is going to be in 5 years or 10 years, but the bottom line is that in 10 years’ time the electricity generation story will be completely different from what it is now.

But the other thing that I read from this bill—and I could be wrong, and this is where I think the Minister may have misread the bill, but maybe I have—is that this bill is not saying there has to be a higher price for buy-back. What it is saying is that it needs an independent arbiter in the Electricity Commission to actually set legislative terms and conditions that those who are actually implementing solar—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Price control.

STUART NASH: No, I have been on record, I think, saying that I do not think subsidies in this market work. If there is a subsidy for the solar generator, then those people who actually cannot afford solar are subsidised, and I do not think that is right. If there is a subsidy for the power companies—i.e., they pay a lot less—then those who cannot afford solar are subsidising it. I think it should be somewhere around the wholesale rate, and this is why two power companies actually dropped their price considerably earlier this year. They said “Why should we have to pay considerably more than the wholesale rate?”, because, in effect, they were subsidising the people who put solar in. I do not think that is right.

But what I do think needs to happen is there needs to be a level of certainty for those people who have made a decision to implement solar. I do not think that certainty is there if the only organisations that have the ability to set the price are the ones that have to buy it. In fact, the reason why the Electricity Authority was set up in the first place—and I personally think it was a great initiative, so credit where credit is due—is actually to provide an independent body that will advocate on behalf of consumers and will, in a way, mitigate a lot of the power, excuse my pun here, that the power companies do have. I think it has done not a bad job of, first, educating consumers; second, holding a lot of these gentailers to account; and, third, providing the sort of independent arbiter that we need in a country of 4.5 million people, a long country, and in many places with not enough people to make a lot of this stuff economic.

The Labour Party is supporting this bill to the select committee for the very reason that I would love to hear what the experts have to say on this. I have done a lot of research into this, but I do not consider myself an expert. If the experts take a good hard look at this and say that this is not a bad way forward, then that is great and we will support it on the way forward. If they do not, then let us hear what they have to say in the first place. This is why the Labour Party is supporting this bill, because it is about what the future looks like, and we need to start addressing these issues now. Thank you very much.

MELISSA LEE (National): Thank you for the opportunity to take a call this evening on the Electricity Industry (Small-Scale Renewable Distributed Generation) Amendment Bill. I begin by commending the member Gareth Hughes, whom this bill belongs to, and congratulating him on the ballot. He has been very lucky.

I have to say that I agree with what Stuart Nash said. The technology is not actually quite there to do it now. I think this is something for further down the track when technology actually catches up with us. It is sort of like mobile phone technology. Mr Hughes and I have talked about the price of mobile phones many, many times over at the Commerce Committee during our time here. When mobile phones first arrived in New Zealand they were so expensive that they were available only to those people who really wanted to have that technology, and they paid a high price for it. Look at where mobile phone technology is now. Back in those days you could not even text people. You could not even have memory on the phone for 10 people—10 of your best friends perhaps. Mobile phone call charges have dropped humongously as well. So technology needs to get to where it is feasible for people to use it. I think we probably need to actually wait for that.

The National Party opposes this bill because it seeks to change the current regime of solar and renewable energy generation in New Zealand. It seeks to change it in a way that is not in the best interest of the electrical market or consumers at large, and it should not be progressed to further readings. I do not support it going to a select committee. We oppose it because we do not believe that interfering with the market to support one form of electricity production over another is a benefit to taxpayers and consumers alike.

I think that Minister Brownlee actually called it price control, and that is exactly what Mr Hughes is proposing—that we should actually control the price of solar generated electricity feeding back into the grid and that it be paid a specific price, a higher price than what the power companies are prepared to actually pay. Do you know that, as Minister Brownlee said, New Zealand already has at least 80 percent of electricity being generated in a renewable form? I come from a country where traditionally our ondol, the warm floors that we love in Korea, were generated by coal, and many, many places in that country still use carbon, coal power, to generate that. We in this country are very, very lucky and I think this is a bill that we do not require.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.