Tuesday, 9 February 2016

TUESDAY, 9 FEBRUARY 2016

TUESDAY, 9 FEBRUARY 2016

Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

Prayers.

Resignations

Hon Tim Groser, New Zealand National

Hon Tim Groser

Mr SPEAKER: I wish to advise the House that I have received a letter from the, resigning his seat with effect from 19 December 2015.

List Member Vacancy

List Member Vacancy

Mr SPEAKER: I have received from the Electoral Commission a return declaring Maureen Helena Pugh to be elected a member of Parliament to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of the Hon Tim Groser. I understand that Maureen Pugh is present and wishes to take the Oath of Allegiance. Would she please come forward to the chair on my right.

Members Sworn

Members Sworn

Mr Speaker administered the Oath of Allegiance to Maureen Pugh, who then took her seat in the House.

Obituaries

Rt Hon Robert James Tizard CNZM

Mr SPEAKER: Honourable members, I regret to inform the House of the death on 28 January 2016 of the Rt Hon Robert James Tizard CNZM, who represented the electorates of Tāmaki, Ōtāhuhu, Pakuranga, and Panmure between 1957 and 1990. Mr Tizard was Deputy Prime Minister between 1974 and 1975. During his membership of this House, he held a number of ministerial positions, including Minister of Finance, Minister of Health, and Minister of Defence. I desire on behalf of this House to express our sense of the loss we have sustained and our sympathy with the relatives of the late former member. I now ask members to stand with me and observe a period of silence as a mark of respect for his memory.

Honourable members stood as a mark of respect.

Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement

Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement

Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): I move, That this House express its confidence in the National-led Government and commend its programme for 2016 as set out in the Prime Minister’s statement to Parliament.

Mr Speaker, is it not great to be back? I hope that you had a good holiday and members did, and what a wonderful time it was for New Zealand. What a great display of cricket yesterday afternoon by Brendon McCullum in the Chappell-Hadlee series. New Zealand up against Australia one more time under a National-led Government—what a wonderful result. And, of course, the Sevens—a tremendous result by the Kiwis, not only just here in Wellington but in Sydney; the Warriors, of course, at the final; and then Lydia Ko back in New Zealand on Friday to defend her New Zealand Women’s Open title.

But it is not just sport that has the country in good heart; so it is in so many other economic forums. We had a record number of tourists come to New Zealand this year—3.15 million tourists came to New Zealand to enjoy our country. No wonder they are coming, because many of them are coming to live here as well. They can see New Zealand is a great place to live under the policies of a National-led Government. We are seeing more carriers flying direct to New Zealand. Emirates has decided that it is not enough to fly all those times through just Australia to New Zealand, but it is coming direct to Auckland. Of course, Air New Zealand is doing tremendously well, bringing people from the United States through its new Houston leg and through Buenos Aires in Latin America.

Let us just look around and see what is happening in the data that we see in the early part of the year. The ANZ business confidence survey saw confidence rise to an 8-month high, with a net 23 percent of firms being confident. When it came to consumer confidence, we saw record sales over Christmas, and the ANZ-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence survey had us up at 121.4—a very strong result for consumer confidence. For manufacturing activity the December business numbers were stronger than in any other month in March of 2015, and the BNZ-BusinessNZ Performance of Manufacturing Index saw the fastest rate of expansion since October 2014. In fact, when one looks at the BNZ - Business New Zealand Performance of Manufacturing Index and the expansion of manufacturing, this has gone up every single month since the moment Labour declared there was a crisis—38 consecutive months in a row. And was that not great?

Of course, when it comes to business optimism, look no further than the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, which said: “What a great result. What’s happening out there? Very strong—people looking to hire.”—and hired they were. Last week we were greeted with a new unemployment rate here in New Zealand: a dramatic fall to 5.3 percent. That is a very strong performance. We have the third-highest employment rate in the OECD, we have very strong results of growth for young people, and, of course, wages are rising faster than inflation. That was greeted with absolute joy by New Zealanders, with one exception—one exception. It was a great annoyance to the Labour Party and, in particular, to Grant Robertson, the doom merchant when it comes to employment.

Grant Robertson is worried about a robot taking his job. A cynic could say: “Too late, one already did.”—the job he wanted—but, never fear, he has got his people working with every editor of every women’s mag around the country, getting Jacinda Ardern nicely positioned on the front of all of those, just waiting. Grant is so worried about work he decided that when Parliament packed up he would go off to Paris to the OECD to learn about work and the future of work. He is going to base his commission that he is setting up on that. Here is how it went. It started at 10.30, a nice little break of an hour and 45 minutes for lunch, then a quick 20 minutes for afternoon tea, all done and dusted by 6 o’clock, and an hour and a half for cocktails. That is the future of work under the Labour Party. Job done—it was a big day!

Of course the big issue—the big issue—is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. What a tremendous trade deal this is for New Zealand. What a tremendous trade deal: 93 percent elimination in tariffs, 40 percent of our markets covered, 800 million middle-income consumers, $2.7 billion of value to New Zealand. So it had, the TPP, significance for the members of the Labour Party. Do any of us know why? Well, when we think “TPP”, we think Trans-Pacific Partnership; they think “Two-position Party”—that is what “TPP” says to them. That is because when it comes to David Shearer, he rightfully said to the New Zealand Herald—this is before he got a good spanking from the leader—“I’ll be voting for it. There’s no change there. Nothing’s changed my mind, and the national interest analysis—fantastic.”

Phil Goff is definitely voting for it, because it is, to quote Phil, the same as the China free-trade agreement that was signed under Labour. Helen Clark is a tremendous supporter of the TPP agreement. In fact, every Labour leader in the last 20 years supports the agreement except the current one. Well—that, actually, is a bit debatable.

So when you look at Andrew Little’s positions—and, granted, he has had more positions than the Labour Party has had leaders in the last 5 years—he says he hates the TPP agreement. He hates it. He got asked a pretty simple question by Mark Sainsbury: “Will you withdraw New Zealand from the TPP?”. Do you know what his answer was? “We won’t.” He is going to kick up bobsy-die, but no, no, he will not. So then they asked him: “Will you vote against it?”—a pretty simple question. He went: “Yeah, well, we already said—aah—if there—yeah—er—aah—if this legislation—aah.” He said: “We don’t get to vote on TPP.” What about pulling out? That, apparently, is incredibly difficult to do, even though the text, of which he has read 500 of the 6,000 pages, says you can just do it by simply putting in notification for 6 months. When he was asked “Why won’t you pull out of TPP?”—this was my particular favourite for the summer—he said: “Because we’re the free-trade party.” Yeah, right—“We’re the free-trade party.”

So when you look at his opposition it seems to be around sovereignty. So what he thinks is the problem is that other people, other corporations, other Governments can come to New Zealand and they can put a submission in against our law. That is apparently the problem. Here is a little technical issue. The first issue is, quite right, they can do that. In fact, anybody is free to come to New Zealand and put in a submission to our select committees. It is called open and transparent government. But what did Andrew Little do at the end of last year? I know—he rushed off to Australia to go and put a submission in against its legislation, and last night he was telling me to give David Cameron a ring, so I could put in a submission about his legislation. So he has got a massive problem with everybody else doing it—except himself.

So let us just go through one or two of the myths of the TPP. Sovereignty, I think you will all agree, we have covered off. Anyone is free to come and put in a submission about New Zealand, but this Parliament determines its law—and this Parliament on its own. There is a theory out there that somehow this affects Māori. Well, it does—positively—because the text says the Treaty of Waitangi is specifically excluded, and when it comes to Wai 262 that is excluded as well. And, by the way, the wording in the TPP agreement is basically the same as the wording in the China and Korea free-trade agreements. There is nothing new and you did not see the protesters out there then, but funnily enough you see them now.

Apparently, the problem is that it was negotiated behind closed doors. That is what Andrew Little said at Rātana: the whole problem was that it was behind closed doors. Except the only minor technical problem was that it was exactly the same in one form as any other free-trade agreement we have done, including the China free-trade agreement that was concluded by Phil Goff, sitting over there, and the Labour Government. But what is more than that, for years the Government has been undertaking consultation on the TPP. We did not wait for the text to be completed. We did not actually wait for the national interest analysis to come out. What we actually did was we went up and down the country, including to substantial groups of iwi, including the Federation of Māori Authorities. In fact, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade tells me that there has been more consultation on the TPP than on almost any other free-trade agreement that it can see—or any other things that we have done.

The last issue is that theoretically we can be sued under the provisions of investor-State. Well, do not accept my word for how difficult that is. Let me quote this for you, from Phil Goff, who said, and quite rightly so because he actually understands what he is talking about when it comes to this area: “The barrier to get investor-State dispute is very high, and the chance is very unlikely.” We have had investor-State in this country for 30 years. Forget about a case being won. There has not been a case taken in 30 years.

Andrew Little came out with quite a little doozy when he was trying to summarise his position—and, granted, his press secretaries must have had quite a field day with that. He put up: “TPP highlights divisions in New Zealand.” The right heading, I should have pointed out to them, was: “TPP highlights divisions in the Labour Party.” David Shearer and Phil Goff might be prepared to say what they think, but quite a lot of MPs are out there talking to people in the business community. Names are getting named about who is quietly supporting the TPP in the Labour Party ranks. We know why Andrew Little is not. It is because every single union came out pretty much in opposition to it. We know who elected the Labour Party caucus. It was not the people sitting over there but the union movement of New Zealand. And they are opposed, and that is why it is.

Labour is the “Two-position Party”. It is not just when it comes to the TPP. I remember in this House a very spirited debate about sending our guys, our men and women, over to Iraq to train people. I remember that spirited debate. What great work they are doing. We saw Ramadi taken back over Christmas—by people trained by our men and women. I remember that debate. At Christmas, despite Andrew Little telling us he did not want to send trainers, by Christmas he wanted to send the SAS. Labour is the “Two-position Party”. When it comes to the flag, I am not even going to bother. It is still on Labour’s website. Its position is still to change the flag by a referendum.

Let us get to the Government’s agenda. It is long and varied. Employment law will be an important piece of legislation passed this year, and important work done by the Government. When it comes to pay equity, the Government is dealing with the issues of TerraNova Homes and Care—the court cases there. We are working with the stakeholders. I think we are working very constructively there. We are looking for sensible and practical guidelines that can be implemented, and good progress is being made. Good progress is also being made on the minimum wage. There is more to come from the Government on that front, but every year this Government has encouraged and put up the minimum wage, and of course we are seeing wages growing faster than inflation.

When it comes to legislation around minimum employment standards, that too is going through this Parliament in 2016, along with work around the zero-hour contracts. When it comes to the costs for employers and employees, we are going to see ACC costs fall by $450 million in 2016. There is great work being done by the Minister and by the ministry. When it comes to average motor vehicle costs for ACC, they are being cut by a third, down to, on average, about $130.

The Business Growth Agenda—it was good to see Winston Peters coming along and supporting Steven Little, our man—well, Steven Joyce. That would be Andrew Little. I forgot his name; he has had so much attention recently. But what is the Business Growth Agenda going to do? There will be more of the regional programmes, more initiatives around tertiary education, more for ICT, more graduates in ICT, the roll-out of three graduate schools around the country, and the lifting of the number of engineers. It is about skills and innovation.

When it comes to apprenticeships, there has been a big increase in both the number of apprenticeships—those being trained—and, particularly pleasing, a very big increase in the number of Māori and Pacific students doing well in our education system. We can see that with the increase in the National Certificate in Educational Achievement levels; we can see it through the numbers going through our universities, in the successful completion rate; we can see it in our apprenticeships; we can see the growth in the Māori economy—and all of this happened on the back of the Business Growth Agenda, with more science and innovation, and certainly the National Science Challenges are helping to drive that.

I do not have a huge amount of time to go through all of the initiatives for education and health, but it is fair to say that the Government will invest more money this year, more money in both the infrastructure supporting our education and health systems, more availability for drugs in our community, more choice for people when it comes to education, and better opportunities to equip youngsters for modern New Zealand, providing access to not only world-class education but world-class health systems.

Infrastructure will be a big part of the Government’s programme for 2016. This year the Government will spend $6 billion alone in infrastructure. What it is fair to say is that we build the infrastructure, and the Labour protesters lie in the middle of it—but at least it is providing some use for them from time to time. But we will be at the table with the City Rail Link; we will be there with the East-West Link, doing work on that; with the Waikato Expressway; with more roading for Christchurch; and with more regional roading projects. They are still cheering in Taranaki about the Mt Messenger tunnel—still cheering about what has been happening there.

When it comes to housing affordability, Resource Management Act reform is high on the Government’s agenda. And for those parties who want to talk about housing affordability, the costs on business, and the costs on households, there is a simple solution: come to this Parliament and support sensible resource management legislation, and the Government will work with you.

Connectivity is a big part of this Government: with the world with free-trade agreements, but also with ultra-fast broadband—for that initiative of 80 percent—and also with rural broadband.

As I said, when it comes to housing there will be work in a number of areas, including more land being released; work on withholding taxes and their implementation—and almost certainly for foreigners—and, of course, more work on the special housing areas. When it comes to rental properties, legislation will be introduced in relation to the installation of smoke alarms in rental properties.

When it comes to the environment, there is the important legislation around the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary: 620,000 square kilometres going into an ocean sanctuary that is twice the land mass of New Zealand and the equivalent of the land mass of France. What a great way to preserve our environment.

For the least well-off in our community, benefits will rise by $25 per week for beneficiaries with children from 1 April; there will be more obligations on sole parents; and a major review of Child, Youth and Family—the review has been completed, the work has been done, and the Minister is now working on that. When it comes to social housing, we will see the transfer of social housing providers in Invercargill and Tauranga, and new places in Auckland. When it comes to Māori, there will be more work when it comes to Treaty settlements so that by 2017 all iwi who want to settle with the Government can. There is enormous work happening in the Te Ture Whenua Māori Act reforms.

When it comes to security legislation, the Government is working hard on the reforms being proposed in the new report by Patsy Reddy and Michael Cullen in relation to the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Security Bureau. There will be the small issue of the flag referendum in March.

This is going to be a very, very busy year for a National-led Government. We are hungry, we are energetic, we are ready to go, and unlike the Opposition we are united. We know what we stand for, and we know what we stand against. We have many policies but we are on the same page. We are the “One-position Party”, and with great momentum for New Zealand. Meanwhile, the “Two-position Party” can spend the rest of 2016 arguing with each other, because they are the only people who are going to be listening to them—themselves.

ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition): Thank you, Mr Speaker, for getting my name right. I move, That all the words after “That” be deleted and replaced with “this House expresses no confidence in this National-led Government because this is a Government that has given up on the future, that has no plan to prepare New Zealand for the future, that is more interested in scoring political points than solving the big problems facing our country, and is letting the Kiwi Dream slip away.”

It is great to be back after a wonderful summer. It is a bit disappointing to see that the Prime Minister is less tanned and is more red in the face, but that is what happens sometimes with a Christmas break where you fret about what is actually going on. I am very pleased to see that Michael Woodhouse has returned—that we have got through a summer with not a single worm farmer suffering a fatality or a serious harm incident and that the lavender cutters have got through their summer in good shipshape as well.

I want to congratulate Judith Collins. What Minister of the Crown has come back to Cabinet, made such a return, and in such a short space of time had such a dramatic impact not only on New Zealand but internationally? Within a month of Judith Collins coming back to Cabinet, our ranking in the Corruption Perception Index went down two places. And so for a Minister who knows all about conflicts of interest, it is amazing to see the contribution that she has already made.

The Prime Minister made a reference to Taranaki and the roads. I was very pleased to be in Taranaki this year swimming at Ōākura Beach, driving on its roads—and it does need better roads, because if there is one thing that the unemployment figures have told us about Taranaki, it is the rapid rate at which people are leaving that province because there are no job opportunities there, and 4,000 people have left in the last year alone. Thank you, National Government—thank you, National Government!

I was very pleased to be at Waitangi on the weekend just gone. They are very pleased, actually, that we had an extended Waitangi weekend. Thank you to the fine work of David Clark MP, Grant Robertson, who drafted the original bill, other MPs on this side of the House, and, of course, Peter Dunne, who very generously supported that bill. He, at least, is in touch with middle New Zealand and the holidays that they need. It was very good to be there, because that was a very important place to be on a very important occasion, and I say, Prime Minister, that it is a place for the head of Government to be on the day that we celebrate the founding of this nation and the founding document. I would repeat Te Ururoa Flavell’s plea—prayer, in fact—he gave that the Prime Minister return there to be part of that important national celebration.

That was a statement—if you could call it that—that has absolutely no vision and no plan for New Zealand, at a time when we desperately need one. It was reheated, recycled, and nothing new. We had the big announcement. The big state of the nation address was the City Rail Link—it is the City Rail Link; it does not go by any other name. It is a policy that the Labour Party has supported from the outset, championed, argued for, and supported. And the new Mayor of Auckland at the end of this year will be the next great champion of it, and he will do a fantastic job in it. But as that cause has been put up and argued for, it is interesting to see what former Ministers of Transport from that Government have said. Well, let me count the ways—let me count the ways. There was a Mr Brownlee, who was a transport Minister, and he said at one point: “I take big issue with the suggestion that the City Rail Link is helpful or popular.” And then he went on to say: “this valiant attempt to make the City Rail Link stack up struggles to make the case.” Well, something has happened in the meantime, because the case has been made and the City Rail Link is on its way.

There is another position, from another Minister, a Mr Joyce—

Hon Ruth Dyson: Or Little?

ANDREW LITTLE: Steven—I think it was a Mr Joyce, not a Mr Little. No, it was Mr Joyce—a Steven Joyce—and he is the master of flip-flops, let us face it, after Friday. Mr Joyce, the master of flip-flops, said: “That’s not smart transport; that’s pouring money down a hole.”—“That’s pouring money down a hole.” The man who took 21 years to get his degree in zoology—he knows about pouring money down a hole, so he would know all about that.

So there is no plan, there is no vision. The National Government has reheated the City Rail Link policy because it knows that that is what Auckland desperately needs. And it knows that the right-thinking people—the sensible-thinking people—have been championing that cause for many years now. And at long last the Government has been dragged, kicking and screaming, up the purple cycleway of Auckland to get to the point where it now has to support it.

But that is not the first flip-flop. That is not the first flip-flop from this Government, either in Government or in Opposition. We know what its track record is like. Remember its opposition to interest-free student loans? It was absolutely diametrically opposed to it, and, mysteriously, once it is in Government, nothing happens. Then it was opposed to KiwiSaver, that thing that 2.5 million Kiwis are now signed up to and that is helping millions of Kiwis build up their little nest egg.

Grant Robertson: “It’ll never work.”, he said.

ANDREW LITTLE: “Never work”, “don’t want it”, “deeply opposed to it”. What happened when National got into Government? Nothing changed.

Then there is Working for Families. Remember “communism by stealth”—remember “communism by stealth”? Shocking stuff—vile stuff that was going to be gone by lunchtime. National got into Government and 8 years on its members are still waiting. They know that it is good for New Zealand. This is the multi-positional, flip-flopping National Government. It does it all the time, and it is doing it again. It is time we had a Government of visions—not the visionless, passionless lot we have got over there but a Government that understands the issues facing New Zealanders. What New Zealanders are looking for now, more than ever before, is a Government that is principled, a Government that can look out to the long-term future, see what the issues are, and understand what needs to happen today to build a better future for tomorrow. That is what New Zealanders are looking for, not the pussyfooting around, the mincing, the politicking, or the point-scoring all over that we get on that side.

Those members crow about the unemployment rate. What they will not tell New Zealanders is that the reason unemployment has gone down is that thousands and thousands of New Zealanders have just given up. They have stopped looking for work. They are no longer part of the labour force, according to the household labour force survey. They have just given up; they have lost hope. That is one easy way to reduce your unemployment, but what a dreadful way to treat New Zealanders, hard-working New Zealanders who want nothing other than to get an opportunity to work and to get ahead. Well, that is what Labour is about. The single biggest issue facing us is the issue of the future of work, and the conference that Grant Robertson went to was, funnily enough, the same conference a senior Ministry of Social Development official went to.

Grant Robertson: You paid for that, John. Paid for them to go.

ANDREW LITTLE: They went to it and the Government paid for them. They went only after weeks of asking the Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety and whatever else he is whether they were going to go, whether they should take this issue seriously. He was not going to go, and somebody from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment was not going to go, so the Government sent somebody from the Ministry of Social Development. But that is an important issue, and countries around the world are getting to grips with it—Germany, the United States, and other wealthy countries with good progressive leaders who are thinking about what it means, thinking about what we need to do today to build a better future tomorrow so that our people can fulfil their dreams. That is not what that Government cares about at all—it does not care about it at all.

It was interesting when we announced the first of our major policies, which is about investing in people and investing in their futures: our education policy. Well, if you want to talk about multi positions, let us go through them. Mr Joyce, the Mr Joyce—first of all, he says: “Well, spending on tertiary education won’t do anything.” Whoops! He is the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment, so that line did not last long. Then he had to change his position again; he had spent over a billion dollars on it already, so he had to change that position. Then he said: “Oh, it’s going to cost too much—it’s going to cost too much.”, but then he realised, of course, that the Government wants to buy tax cuts. It is going to pay for tax cuts somehow, so that argument was not going to wash. So then he goes on to the third position, which was: “But the money’s not there.” But Bill English knows that it is there, because he has set it aside in future budgets—$1.5 billion. They are all over the place: no plan, no idea, do not care about the future of New Zealanders.

Then, of course, the Prime Minister’s response is to talk about waitresses, because, apparently, waitresses do not have a future. Apparently, they do not get tertiary education, in spite of the fact that a good quarter of them are already people who are studying. Apparently, on “Planet Key” waitresses do not do education or training. Fortunately, he has now promised to never ever talk about waitresses again for the whole time he is Prime Minister. I simply make this point: it is not the talking about them that has been the problem.

I want to comment briefly on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, because there are a lot of misleading statements coming out of the Government. If there is one thing that is absolutely clear, it is that the Government does not want a genuine public debate on that agreement. I want to point out that the TPP agreement is not a strategy. It is an agreement, and there are experts now around the world who no longer even describe it as a free-trade agreement. They are calling it a “managed” trade agreement, because at the end of it—15 years into the agreement, if it comes live—we will still have tariffs, we will still have quotas, and we will not have free trade throughout that trading bloc. The genuinely independent economic analysis says the benefits for New Zealand are slim. Whether you look at the Tufts University economic analysis or the Peterson Institute for International Economics analysis, the benefits for New Zealand are slim. Let us not kid ourselves. It is interesting that the Peterson Institute for International Economics says that the bulk of the value of that agreement will go to the US, but even in the US it is not expected to generate any new jobs. It is saying: “Let us get prepared for the transition: there are a lot of people who are going to be out of work.”

One of the more dismal analyses for New Zealand even said that we should expect about 6,000 jobs to go, under the TPP agreement. I hope that does not happen, but here is the point: there has been an absolute and abject failure of political handling of the TPP agreement by that Government. It has been diabolical. It would not keep New Zealanders informed while it was being negotiated—would not keep New Zealanders informed while it was being negotiated—and it dumped it on New Zealand at the end of last year. Anybody who raises the most mild criticism is shouted down as somehow not knowing what they are talking about. The Government is a disgrace. For a Government that has been in office for 8 years, it lacks the confidence of the people to know what is going on and to have a genuine debate, and that is no good at all.

Let us just remind ourselves too about the promises that were made about the TPP agreement: we are going to have a great deal on dairy. There is no deal on dairy, which is why the value to New Zealand of the TPP agreement has been downgraded so much. And it is not much better on meat. It is a managed trade agreement. It locks in agricultural subsidies for the big powers for a longer period of time. That is just the economic stuff, but it is not the economic stuff that is of greatest concern to me. It is the stuff that is nothing to do with free trade. It is the fact that we now have to sign up to other people from other countries having a say on our lawmaking; the fact that under the TPP agreement our Parliament cannot pass a law to deal with land sales, which, we know, is a major issue for many, many New Zealanders. It is not just the economic stuff; it is the non-economic factors.

And I make no apology. I make no apology for drawing a clear distinction between economic interests and non-economic interests, and they are not tradable. You cannot set one off against the other. There is no such thing as trading off the constitutional rights of every New Zealand citizen against the economic interests of others, sparse as they are. Statecraft has two dimensions to it. It is about the nation State that the Government of the day is in charge of, and it is about our relationship with other nations. Statecraft does not involve selling out the interests of the nation State that you are responsible for, for the interests of other nations that we interact with. It is a failure of statecraft, and there is not a good thing about it.

I want to say this. I am proud to say that on this side of the House there is a new generation of leaders now emerging who are principled and who reflect the demands of a new New Zealand, who are looking for leadership that is about doing the right thing for all New Zealanders—[Interruption] And that just demonstrates how sadly out of touch that miserable Government actually is. It does not care about the people. It is a party of the elite; it is a party of the self-interested. It is not a party of New Zealand’s best interests. New Zealanders are looking for a party and for a leadership that will talk about the real issues, the long-term issues, the dreams that Kiwis hold dear, and their hopes, and their ability to get ahead and to get an education and to look after themselves and their families, and to be part of strong communities so that they can continue to be part of a great New Zealand.

New Zealanders are looking for a new leadership that is about governing for physical and personal security and for economic security as well. Doing that does not require selling out to other more powerful States than our own. It is a generation that understands democracy as a process that involves and engages all citizens and that does not capture it for the special, the privileged, and the elite. That is the challenge we have.

I am proud to lead a party that does have a vision for New Zealand, that is positive about the future of New Zealand, and that does care about the people of New Zealand and the future that they face. The single biggest issue facing us is the future of work, and we are going to deal with it. New Zealanders want to know that we do have a process, that we do have a plan to deal with those whose jobs are facing obsolescence. The experts tell us that 46 percent of jobs today will be gone in 20 years’ time. This Government knows that; it is getting the same advice. It does absolutely nothing about it—in a last desperate measure. We are seen to take the issue seriously. We are talking to our international counterparts, we are talking to international experts, but the Government does not care. And its failure to do anything about it, its failure to rise to that issue and to that occasion, speaks volumes. It tells New Zealand that National does not care about ordinary New Zealanders and their future. Work is changing: technology is emerging now that is going to affect every job, and we need to be doing something about it now. We need an education system fit for the 21st century—and we will make that investment.

We need an economic strategy that is focused on New Zealanders and what they can do, that attracts investment, that does not kowtow and tug the forelocks to the powerful in the hope that some crumbs might fall off the table of other countries, that actually supports New Zealanders and their ambitions—and that is what we are doing. We need a country whose economy is strong enough to make sure that New Zealanders do get the health care that they need; that everybody does have a warm, dry, and safe home to live in. You cannot work, you cannot excel at work, you cannot fulfil your dreams, and you cannot look after your family when the roof over your head leaves you cold, damp, and sucking in bacteria and mould because you have a Government that does not care about the quality of our housing.

That is the difference between our two parties. That is the difference between the Labour Party and the National Party. Ours is a party that understands New Zealanders: their ambitions, their hopes for the future. Ours is a party that is prepared to invest in that future, to rebuild New Zealand, to rebuild the dreams of New Zealanders and give them confidence and hope for the future. I look forward to that debate. I look forward to the debate over the next 2 years, as New Zealanders see that there is one party that not only talks to New Zealanders but understands New Zealanders, and reflects their aims and ambitions—and that is us. And I am looking forward to this year.

JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare, tēnā koe. Ki a koutou ōku hoa Pāremata huri noa i Te Whare, ngā mihi o Te Tau Hou ki a koutou katoa.

[Mr Speaker, greetings to you, and greetings of the New Year to you all, my parliamentary colleagues throughout the House.]

I would like to agree on behalf of the Green Party to the amendment placed by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Andrew Little. The Prime Minister’s statement was notable only for its lack of notability. At least Auckland ratepayers do not have to fork out $4,500 to listen to that one!

Today I would like to talk about leadership, and I would like to start by talking about a subject that many National MPs are going to become very familiar with next year. I would like to talk about retirement. One of the big challenges that this Government has promised not to fix is superannuation. Most of the people in this room know the numbers. Over the next few decades our population will age and retire, our tax revenues will go down because there will be fewer people working, our health care costs will go up, and our superannuation commitments will double to $25 billion a year by 2028.

We know that the Prime Minister is very relaxed about all of this. He is so relaxed that I sometimes wonder whether he has got a special dispensation from the associate health Minister. Former finance Minister Michael Cullen was not so relaxed. That is why he set up the Superannuation Fund: to meet the cost of retirement for the current generation of New Zealanders. Almost the first thing that this Government did when it took power was to suspend payments to that fund. The finance Minister, Bill English, said at the time that this was a prudent, sensible thing to do in the face of the great global financial crisis.

We all know about the finance Minister’s values and his background, that he comes from a farming family, that he learned his frugal values as a young man growing up in the vast, desolate landscapes and the cruel frozen winters of the New Zealand Treasury. It is a shame that he did not learn back then that the bottom of a crash, when assets are undervalued, is the best time a fund like the Superannuation Fund can possibly invest. The Superannuation Fund has estimated that his decision to suspend payments to the fund has already cost New Zealanders $18 billion. This is one of the most expensive blunders anyone in the history of New Zealand could make. This is the party that congratulates itself on being good at business, good at managing the economy, sensible, and prudent.

So what did they do instead, these sensible, prudent people? What did they do instead of paying into the Superannuation Fund, a fund to provide for all New Zealanders? They gave us the great tax switch, which has cost billions of dollars, and they are still making the same mistake. They are putting aside funds to deliver more tax cuts next year. Why? Because it is an election year. The extent of National’s economic vision is to stay in power.

This economic mismanagement also extends to housing. National knew years ago that there was a looming housing crisis, but for a small group of property investors this crisis is a boom. Their properties are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through the mere fact of their existence. But, now, many New Zealanders are locked out of the property market. This is not just a problem for people who cannot afford a decent house. It is also—as the Reserve Bank says again, and again, and again—a serious risk to stability. It is a risk to the whole economy, to the well-being of the country and to the people in it, and over the years National has pretended that it has solutions.

National members insist that it is a supply-side problem, but then they confuse their loathing of the Resource Management Act with an actual solution. They insist it is not a demand-side problem, but then they implement demand-side policies copied from this side of the House, albeit in such a watered-down way that they make zero difference. By choosing not to fix this crisis they have allowed those with a large property portfolio to profit while burdening the rest of us with spiralling house prices and an unstable economy. It is a bait-and-switch that this Government loves to play—and they are playing it again with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.

The story that this Government tells us about the TPP agreement is that this deal is good for New Zealand—we can all relax. It is all upside and no downside. But everyone in this room knows that trade negotiations do not work like that. It is a compromise. There are gains and there are losses, winners and losers. National did not get the deal that it wanted on dairy access to the US. National said it would walk away if it did not get it. Well, it did not get it and it did not walk. It folded. But I see from the US elimination schedule that New Zealand did win a tariff reduction on boneless meat products—and so Tim Groser is off to Washington.

What this Government needs to do is acknowledge the reality. It needs to stop telling us that it is good for all New Zealanders and start being honest about who gains and who loses. As usual with this National Government most of the gains, most of the profits, are privatised and most of the costs are socialised. Exporters get lower tariffs, which is a good thing. Taxpayers pay more for our health care, which is not. We have been hearing for years that this is a good deal. Well, we can see it now, and it is just not that great. I already know what the Government’s answer is to that. It will say that this deal is good for exporters and that means it is good for all of us. But that is not entirely true. The stuff that we export is mostly raw commodities and milk powder—industries that, right now, come with a huge environmental cost. And they do not pay for it, the rest of us do: with beaches and rivers we cannot swim in, the loss of native species, and clean-up costs paid for with tax money.

And we are not even that much of a trading nation. Compared with other nations our size, our exports per capita are low. What we are, really, under National, is a gigantic property market with the most unaffordable houses in the world. Our economy is based on sourcing overseas debt to buy and sell our own properties back and forth to each other at ever inflating prices. Or we sell them to investors from countries that are awash with cheap credit and hot money, which few Kiwis can compete with. We have $821 billion invested in the housing market while our exports bring in less than a tenth of that in revenue every year. Under National that ratio is getting worse. The more National talks about openness and free trade and congratulates New Zealand on being a trading nation, the more insular our economy becomes.

Yes, we are the most remote developed country in the world. Yes, we should be a trading nation, one that sells high-value exports to the rest of the world—not a gigantic property bubble that ships mostly milk and logs. But the way that we get there is to fix the internal imbalances in the New Zealand economy; fix the tax system, which is broken by design; fix our environmental laws so that polluters pay the real cost of their damage to the environment; shift the incentives towards businesses that create high-value products and jobs instead of property speculation; create an economy and a trading system that is designed around the well-being of the people and the environment.

The other thing I want to say about the TPP agreement is that this Government is hugely committed to it. It has been a focus of our diplomatic service for many years. In a list of this Government’s great achievements, it ranks somewhere up between playing golf with Obama and that panda that we still do not have. What do we get out of the TPP agreement in economic terms? No one can say for sure yet. Some studies estimate that it will cost thousands of jobs in return for a tiny increase in exports. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade is more optimistic. It predicts an extra 1 percent of GDP growth by 2030. That is a couple of billion dollars a year, so over time that adds up to real money, right? And that is why this Government is so committed to the deal.

Something that we know the Government is not committed to is addressing climate change, because it thinks it is going to happen way off in the distant future, if at all. It is kind of like the housing market or the New Zealand Superannuation Fund—it is somebody else’s problem. But climate change has been happening for years. The world is already getting warmer. New Zealand’s weather has already altered. We are now living in the climate-changed future that National thinks will never happen, and that has actual economic costs that are going up year by year. In 2013 and 2014 the combined costs of droughts, floods, and insurance payouts was between $1.2 billion and $2 billion a year—coincidentally, 1 percent of GDP. That cost to the economy has increased a hundredfold since the early 1990s. It is still going up in line with the level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, and the same costs from droughts and storms and floods and fires are happening all over the world.

So the gains that National hopes to win from the TPP agreement in 15 years’ time are already being wiped out by the economic damage of climate change—today. By the time we even get to 2030, any wins from the TPP agreement are going to be rounding errors compared with the costs of adapting to climate change, and yet National is doing nothing about it. We are not transitioning to a low-carbon economy; our emissions are still soaring. We could be leaders in the new high-value, cleantech, low-carbon economy. Instead, these guys treat our atmosphere—the air that we breathe—like an open sewer into which they dump 220,000 tonnes of gaseous waste every day, most of it sourced from within this room. We are still mining coal; we are still desperately trying to get the big petroleum companies to drill for oil in our seabed, even though there is no future for oil.

In December I attended the historic COP-21 accords in Paris as part of the New Zealand delegation. New Zealand signed a commitment to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees. It was an historic event, but, unlike the TPP agreement, the Paris Agreement is non-binding. Apparently it is more important to safeguard the rights and profits of big pharmaceutical companies than it is to safeguard the air of the planet that we live on. The day after—the day after—the Paris Agreement was passed, our Prime Minister announced nothing would change. It would be business as usual. We will keep on polluting and we will keep on drilling.

What should he do? What would a real Government do? What will the next Government have to do? It will have to lead—to actually lead. We have regions that depend on fossil fuels for their local economy. The National Government should be starting the conversation with those regions now about how to lead the transition to a stronger, more resilient, sustainable economy. The longer we delay, the harder it is going to be—the greater the damage to businesses and communities and families and lives. We are going to need to stop developing farmland in drought-prone areas. We need to stop property developments in flood basins. These are huge challenges with huge costs, and it has to happen. The only question is whether we start now while it is cheaper and easier, or later with more cost and more pain. By choosing to do nothing this Government has chosen the high-cost, high-pain option, so we have big problems in the future.

But, you know, we have economic growth now, right? That is what we hear from the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance and the Minister for Economic Development—that last year we had one of the highest rates of growth in the OECD. They mentioned it a few times—every minute. The Hon Steven Joyce is in charge of growth. He is personally committed to growing the economy by repeatedly restructuring his own ministries to boost GDP. I reckon that by the year 2025 one in three working New Zealanders will be management consultants working for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. OK, to be honest, that is not true. It is the least frightening statistic today, and I made it up.

National is very proud of its management of the economy and its delivery on economic growth, but it should not be, because when you look at what is creating that growth, it pretty much comes down to our record high levels of immigration, which is also driving the Auckland housing crisis. If we look at GDP growth over the last 7 years of this National Government and we take out population growth and the Christchurch rebuild, the growth vanishes. It is close to zero—7 years and the real economy has gone nowhere—after all this Government’s talk about growing the economy, focusing on the economy, the Business Growth Agenda, all those handouts and those bailouts, all those sweetheart deals like South Canterbury Finance, the Saudi eco-farm, Warner Bros, Rio Tinto, Skycity, and Serco. I tried to list them all, but I ran out of space on my whiteboard. Take away the effect of immigration and the Christchurch rebuild, and all of that adds up to a big, fat zero. National has delivered nothing.

Time is running out. The superannuation shortfall is getting larger. Our climate is getting warmer. This Government is into its eighth year. It has collected $510 billion in tax. It has spent $555 billion, or over half a trillion dollars, and it has nothing to show for it—no real economic development, no ideas, and nothing to say, except that it is all Labour’s fault.

Next year its own 9 long years in Government is going to be up and the next Government, a progressive Government, is going to accept responsibility and show some leadership. We will address the problems this Government ignores. We will fix what it has broken and provide leadership for a smarter, fairer, cleaner future. I started out today by talking about retirement. I came into Parliament only 18 months ago, so, hopefully, my own retirement is still some way off. In those 18 months I have noticed that it is very easy to fool yourself that all of the talking and all of the shouting and all of the meetings and the press releases and the speeches make some kind of difference in the real world. Well, it does not.

I once worked on a microfinance project in the Andes. It was high desert country, and one of the farmers whom I was working with said to me one day: “Don’t try to cross the desert by walking in circles.” I think that that is the mistake that this Government has made. It is lost in the desert of the real. It is leading us in circles and telling us how far we have come.

When I do retire and I look back on my time here, serving as a Green MP, I know that we will not have achieved everything that I want us to achieve because politics is hard and change is hard. But I do want to be able to say that we tried—that we took on and confronted the greatest challenges of our time and we tried to solve them; that we were brave enough to lead and not just follow the focus groups—because it is better to try and, if we fail, to learn from our mistakes and to try again than to do nothing. Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): It is always wonderful to have applause before you start your speech. This is the Prime Minister’s statement that was put out today, and it reads nothing like the pathetic speech that he made as the Prime Minister—very embarrassing in the extreme. In this document he says that the Government is “taking the public with us by clearly outlining our actions and priorities.” Is there any New Zealander, including the backbench of the National Party, who thinks that that is remotely true? There is not a maramara murmur, no confirmation at all, because they know it is false, demonstrably false.

Look, he is taking us down the road to low wages against leading economies.

Hon Member: What rubbish.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: No, it is not rubbish. Rubbish is your speciality. These are the facts. He is taking us down the garden path of outlandish claims about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement—all sorts of claims. The Prime Minister said it was going to be worth $5 billion by 2025. Who in trade and foreign affairs is saying that now? Oh no, it is $2.7 billion—almost half. By when? Five years later, some time, never.

Of course, that does not concern people like Mr Goldsmith, because just getting a ministerial car is all he has ever wanted, just to be able to call himself somebody. Of course, if you have got that sort of character you are really starved of recognition. In fact, it is a burning hunger, which compels you to do what? To never stand up for the people who voted for you in the first place. That is a condition so bereft in the National Party backbench today. You have got all sorts of members here from the regions, from the provinces, from zombie towns. There is no infrastructural investment—no, no. It is all going to Auckland. Oh, sorry. Taranaki got a farm. Taranaki got a road. That is all—it got just that. But what about the economy in Taranaki and around New Zealand or, for that matter, in Northland, going down the pathway towards police numbers going down not up and crime in—

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Oh no, they’re not.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Oh yes, they are, and, more important, somebody very close to you, Minister, knows it, so do not ask in this House whether I know who that expert is. He is very close to you. He understands the regional police numbers. Minister, you do not and never will.

Hon Member: Are you talking about me?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Well, you ask him whom I am talking about. I do not want to get too close to the family here, but those are the facts. Here we go, down the pathway to no growth after the Christchurch earthquake and massive consumption immigration. I am glad the Greens mentioned that because, you know, when I and my colleagues used to talk about immigration and its massive costs if it was not focused, we used to get accused of being racist or xenophobic. Sometimes it is better late than never, but the costs have been huge.

Then, of course, it is down the pathway to separatism that this National Party has taken us. Remember the slogan “Kiwi not iwi”?

Hon Hekia Parata: Here we go.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Oh yes, Hekia Parata and all those ones over the back there are all looking down now, all with their knees knocking. They went along with that campaign and when they got in what did they do? They threw it in the rubbish bin and pulled out their separatist pathway down which they are now taking us.

Look at the Resource Management Act. The Resource Management Act is meant to be an Act that is going to change the economic future of this country. Everybody knows that it is necessary. But what did National promise in 2013 and what is it delivering now? Well, go and ask the Māori Party because it wants iwi to own the water.

Hon Te Ururoa Flavell: Not all of it.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Oh, here we go. The Minister for Māori Development says “Not all of it.” Well, Minister, we thought that the water belonged to everybody: European and Māori—whoever is here. Whatever their background, be that person Korean, Chinese, or Indian living here legally, the water would belong to all of us. But here we go straight down the pathway to separatism. [Interruption] It is no use shouting out like that because, first of all, it bespeaks a bad education and a lack of ability with the English language. It is no use screaming out like that. The National Party is down there. It has had a deal with the Māori Party and if you go on to the website you will see all sorts of iwi saying what is going to happen.

I want to say this: one party is going to stand in the way of that nonsense and that party is New Zealand First. We have been prepared to deal with any political party if they are talking common sense, and we say to the National Party that it is high time it stopped going down this pathway of division and dissension based on race and started to plan.

Marama Fox: What does your Treaty negotiator think?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: No, no. Forget about Marama Fox. Marama Fox, of course, is one of those people who have been here 5 minutes, but in that short, truncated time she has become—what—an expert on everything. She is an expert on everything. There is no problem, be it legal, constitutional, environmental, geological, or spiritual—Marama is an expert on everything. Oh, I wish that we in Māoridom all had a mother like that, because our economic and social demise would have stopped a long, long time ago—a long, long time ago. It is unbelievable. [Interruption] I know you almost look Māori, but you are not.

What did John Key promise when he first became the Prime Minister? He said that he would promise to deliver the brighter future. Remember that? It seems so long ago—

Ron Mark: To who?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: A very good question: to who?

Hon Members: To whom.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: To who or whom, and in which country? He surely did not mean his backbench or his Cabinet colleagues or, for that matter, the Minister of Immigration and whatever other job he cannot do properly. He promised a brighter future. Well, what has happened? Debt has increased massively. Debt is something you have to pay off. Every home knows that. Has the economy been growing? No, it has not. Apart from Christchurch and massive consumption from immigration, it is static. Even New Zealand First and the Greens agree on that because they have come around to seeing the wisdom of our economic analysis.

Ron Mark: That’s right. It took a while.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: It took a while. He said he would close the gap with Australia by 2025. There are 9 years to go, and he is not saying a word about it. And then, of course, he talked about police numbers and law and order. He has got a Minister of Police who does not know what is going on. His brother does, of course, but he does not. He will not listen to his brother. He just goes on thinking he knows everything, like so many of the people over there, and the rest is history. Sometimes in provincial New Zealand towns, like Motueka and Kaitāia, over the weekend there is just nobody available at all. There is no one available at all.

Then, of course, he got on to the TPP agreement. If the TPP agreement was so good for New Zealanders and if there had been so much discussion, as he claimed, with Māori, how come 99.9 percent of Māori do not know about it? If there has been so much consultation—[Interruption] Oh, did he mean with Marama? Oh no! Marama claims to know nothing about it, which would be the first thing and the only thing she knows nothing about. Her colleague and cousin, Hekia Parata, apparently knows all about it.

Hon Hekia Parata: I do.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Oh, she does—just like the school up in Whangaruru. I knew a lot about that. Tell me this. How much was spent up there? No, not $1.8 million. It will be about $4.4 million when it is all over. And who owns the farm? Now that this experiment has gone belly up, who owns the farm that the Minister gave to those people up there? I can tell you this. Whether it be South Canterbury Finance or that deal up there in Whangaruru, now collapsed, I can tell you that you have to be a commercially illiterate incompetent to give people a farm and when the arrangement does not stack up—[Interruption] No shouting out. If the Minister is negotiating to get the farm back, then she most definitely gave them the farm. She gave them the farm; otherwise what would the negotiations be about? What sort of incompetent Government gives South Canterbury Finance an uncapped guarantee so that it blows out $800 million, or gives a group of Māori with no record in education a school and a farm to go with it, and when it goes belly up they own the farm?

Hon Member: Disgraceful.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: It is just disgraceful. [Interruption] I thought you were making a sign, Mr Speaker. I just wanted to make sure it was not true.

All over the Western World, in the United States and elsewhere, experts are saying: “What’s wrong with the TPPA?”. They are in the Republican Party and they are in the Democratic Party. But, of course, the National Party is so struck with the latent genius that it knows more than everybody in Congress. Government members went out and said, last week, that we have got a deal. Demonstrably we have not. If anything is changed in Congress, which it will be if they go ahead with it—[Interruption] Oh, forget about Anne Tolley. What does she know about anything? This is the former Minister of Education who said her qualification was that she had two children. Well, on that basis there would be 500,000 women in this country who would be capable of doing that job. Back to my point. You have got a Congress that is seriously doubtful of its benefits for them. Then you have got massive Japanese subsidies, massive subsidies in Canada, and massive subsidies in the EU, with whom they want a trade deal shortly. Tell me, what is the benefit of that?

As the farmers in New Zealand find out just how bad this National Party is, there is going to be a voting shift. There already has been, in the north. Come along to the Dargaville field days, on the 3rd, the 4th, and the 5th. Come up there, National Party members, and start flying your flag. Explain to those people what happened to the four huge promises in the by-election. [Interruption] Which flag? Good point.

Clayton Mitchell: Which one?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: I suggest the white feather—the one the Prime Minister wore to the trade deal.

Come up and talk about the 10 bridges that were promised in the by-election. Where is the money for seven of them? What happened to the super-highway from Wellsford, down to Warkworth, and to Pūhoi, which is not even started yet. What happened to this big promise that Steven Joyce and all of his colleagues, including the very innocent and naive Mr Bishop, made when they turned up? It seems that when it comes to the naivety shower the National Party wants all the water. Mr Joyce went up there and promised that they were going to get 10 bridges and a super-highway all the way to Wellsford. Any engineering reports so far? Any in the Northland plan announced last week, of the 58 things that were given, up in Northland, which Mr Reti was up there to applaud and acclaim? Which one included the 10 bridges? Which one included the super-fast highway all the way to Wellsford?

What about the Government’s taxpayer-subsidised cellphone coverage, cell tower coverage, also promised by his National colleagues in the Northland by-election? Not a word—not a word. No wonder the Prime Minister got confused. He got confused when he mentioned the man who gave that speech—knowingly, the man who is the political Samson without hair—Steven Joyce. He went round and round the country, regurgitating rubbish, thinking that a whole lot of words would go a long way. But everyone up in Northland is rubbing their chins and saying: “But what did you promise in the by-election?”.

Here is the rub. At the meeting Steven Joyce was asked by the member for Northland one fundamental question: “Mr Joyce, is there going to be a monetary and fiscal policy change in Wellington to back up your 58 point plan?”. His answer? Have a guess. It was “No.” It is all window dressing. But whatever happened in Northland, it is not going to stop there. It will be going to Whangarei, as we all know, because in Whangarei they do not like being called “zombie town”, and the Gisbornes, and the Wanganuis, and elsewhere around the country.

Hon Member: Who called them that?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Who called them that? It was the leading economist whom the National Party keeps on quoting.

Hon Member: They don’t.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Oh yes, they do. Fancy their being so out of touch. [Interruption] I know the member for the ACT Party has fallen in love recently. That was his last big item. I always find it really amazing how his politics have changed. This is the party of big money. Usually big money has two things that go with it: a sense of class, a bit of reserve, a sort of natural reticence. But no, just like the member from out that way who used to be the Minister of Justice, from the National Party, appearing in women’s magazines—no, the biggest feature item of his political achievement lately is that he has fallen in love. With the greatest respect—the greatest respect to the ACT Party member—look, it happens to everybody if they are lucky. It happens to everybody if they are lucky. It is not a selfie occasion. Frankly, get over yourself and start thinking about ordinary New Zealanders, because they are who put you here. The fact is that the ACT Party is down to one member of Parliament and it has had more money than any other political party for the time it has been here. I know that he is in serious want of advice: get over himself, take the personal stuff out of the media, and start on policy, passion, and people, and he might have a chance—a bit late but he might have a chance.

Five minutes to go—can I just say this here. What is very clear from the Prime Minister’s speech and so many of the speeches for the National Party is that the Government is out of touch now with ordinary New Zealanders. It is not so strange really, when you think about it, because the median wage today is enjoyed by not even 70 percent of the New Zealand people. There are a whole lot of people in this country, in the tens and their hundreds of thousands, old and young, who are up against it just to get by. That is a tragedy for a country that used to be a world leader and used to be able to claim, like no other country on earth, a greater disbursement of wealth and egalitarian equality and performance, and social and economic delivery. But now it is dog-eat-dog—everybody for himself—and, under the National Party, it is: “If we can get enough money to sell our propaganda we will try to fool the people one more time.”

Well, we have got a message for the ACT Party, the National Party, and their cohorts the Māori Party over there. They had better enjoy it for a little bit longer, because they are not going to make the next election. That is for certain—they are not going to make the next election. That is for certain. In the next few months, and if it takes a year or a bit longer, there is one party and its name is New Zealand First, and we are going to go out there and turn this country’s politics upside down, like we did in Northland and like we are going to do in March on the flag when we prove how out of touch this Prime Minister really was—prepared to spend $26 million—

Marama Fox: What about Treaty settlements?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Oh, what about Treaty settlements? I will tell you what we will do for the Māori people—I will tell you what we will do for the Māori people. We will stay with housing, with health, with education, and First World wages, and we will leave Treaty settlements to the Māori Party and those academics who are having a most rich, wealthy, affluent life on the backs of their own people’s numbers and have forgotten about their people. Go to Moerewa and ask any Māori up there: “What have you got out of the Treaty?”. Go down to Ngati Porou and ask the average Māori: “What have you got out of the Treaty?”. So here we are in a most un-Māori way seeing Māori members of Parliament screaming out when they hear common sense. It will not save them. Our message, as we close with this speech today, and as it was in the Northland by-election, and as it will be as soon as the flag option choice goes down in March, is for the New Zealand people to hang on a little bit longer. Do not give up, because help is on its way.

Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL (Co-Leader—Māori Party): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker, kia ora tātau katoa e Te Whare. Hei wāwāhi i taku kōrero i te tīmatanga mai o tō tātau Pāremata ka whai wāhi ki te hunga mate e kōrerohia ana i runga i ō tātau marae. Arā, ko te āhuatanga ki a Hera Johns o roto o Ngāti Tūwharetoa i kawe nei i ngā take mātauranga, te āhuatanga ki a Andy Sarich o Te Tai Tokerau, pērā anō te āhua i te māmā o Rāhui, i tēnei rā tonu nei i tukuna atu ai ki Te Kōpū-ō-Papatūānuku, ā, ki Te Pirihi o Te Hāhi Katorika, a Hēmi Harward kei Taranaki i tēnei wā, otirā, tērā pea i nehua i tēnei rā. Arā noa atu rātau! Ka tangi atu te ngākau mō rātou kua ngaro atu i te tirohanga kanohi. Koutou i Te Pō, e moe, e moe, e moe! Tātau te hunga ora, ki a koe, Mr Speaker, ngā mihi o te Tau Hou, otirā, tātau e noho nei, ngā mema Pāremata, ngā kaiārahi o ngā rōpū, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, hapi New Year ki a tātau katoa.

[Greetings to you, Mr Speaker, and to us all in the House. As an opening to my address at the start of our Parliament, I take the opportunity to acknowledge those who passed away and were accorded tributes on our marae: in other words, the situation relating to Hera Johns from within Ngāti Tūwharetoa, who was involved in matters concerning education; the circumstance related to Andy Sarich of Northland; the situation with Rāhui’s mother, who may have been buried today in the bowels of mother Earth; and, similarly, the Catholic Church minister Hēmi Harward, who is presently at Taranaki but at the same time may have been buried today too. There was a host of them. The heart is in grief for them who are lost from view. To you in the void, sleep, rest, slumber! To us the living, to you, Mr Speaker, but at the same time to us seated here, members of Parliament and party leaders, New Year greetings, acknowledgments, and salutations to you collectively, and a happy New Year to us all.]

The last speaker talked about something like: “Help is on its way.” The Māori Party says: “Do not wait! Help is here. Right now! Help is here right now. The Māori Party is in the House.”

Just yesterday many of us enjoyed some time to commemorate and think about Waitangi Day and the change to the legislation allowing for public holidays—awesome. In fact, those workers at the AFFCO meatworks in Rangiuru managed to get over the line to have a holiday despite having to challenge legally that issue, so I want to give a big ups to them for taking that take on. Waitangi is a day when you see the good, the not-so-good, the confused, the theatrical. Everybody gets a chance to express their views; I suppose, get an understanding of our country’s founding document, our history, and the challenges that face us. The conversations about Te Tiriti o Waitangi means to us an ongoing dialogue. Dr Hirini Kaa described our journey as Māori for the restoration of Treaty rights as a “patient movement for justice”.

So the Treaty, aside from the fact that it has passed us these past couple of days, does provide us with a foundation and a touchstone that we hope shapes our unique cultural identity. Can I suggest to members that to give respect to both Te Tii and to the marae at Waitangi, we should—you should—consider coming at 6 o’clock on 4 February. What is significant about that? Well, actually, that is the time when we go in and pay our respects to those who have gone on, who are passed away. We have done that for the last couple of years. You know—no police, no problems—it is calm at 6 o’clock. It is a beautiful thing that happens. We go to the marae and pay our respects to those who have passed on. There are no hassles, it is a time to reflect on the Treaty, as it should be. I ask that, in that situation, in giving respect, you receive respect. So members might like to consider that.

On the lips of many people is the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, or TPP—call it what you like—as mentioned by the Prime Minister. As the only independent Māori voice in this Parliament, in the Māori Party we have definitely focused our attention on the impact of the agreement on Treaty rights. It is no secret that our party was born out of the whole notion of the protection of Treaty rights and obligations, and that will always be the tāhuhu of our whare: the ridge pole of our whare. We want to make it absolutely clear today that the Māori Party recognises the benefits that may come from these sorts of agreements—the economic benefits that flow, particularly for those large Māori exporters in the primary sector. Our people have a whakapapa in trade overseas. That does not scare us. We have listened to the debate carefully—the pros and cons—we have sought independent advice on the impact on Treaty rights and obligations and on mātauranga Māori, which is intellectual property rights for Māori, and under those circumstances, if it is that there is any possibility that the Treaty rights and obligations are threatened, then we will not support those in any way, shape, or form.

The two mighty members of the Māori Party—my sister Marama Fox sitting right here—we have got a huge work programme on, focusing on whānau, whenua, whare, and whakapapa. Whānau, families; whenua, land; whare, housing; and whakapapa, cultural revitalisation. As a party, we will continue to work to keep up the pressure on measures that eliminate poverty, and as of 1 February, beneficiaries with dependants will get $25 more in the pocket—a Māori Party initiative supported by National. That is right. I heard last year that this New Zealand First lot tried to claim that—whatever. The Māori Party put that on the table with regard to our committee, the committee on addressing poverty in this country, moved by Tariana Turia. We claim it; it is ours. New Zealand, enjoy. This includes the work that Marama has also been doing with regard to advocacy around education, around health, around economic development, and so on. That will continue.

We will continue to work in good faith with the Government over the resource legislation—the amendment bill. Mr Paraone says we need to consult with Māori; Mr Peters says we should not have any Māori involved. Mr Paraone, sort it out. What is going on? If you need a hand to get you fullas’ position sorted, see the Māori Party.

Pita Paraone: Just do your job.

Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: We are. We are. We are helping our people out, and that is the difference. There is no use being on the sidelines; you have got to be there to help out our people. We have been criticised in some quarters for our relationship with the Government, but, all along, as the Prime Minister spoke about, we have acted in good faith with a view to being constructive, something that other parties could well learn from the Māori Party. I take my roles and responsibilities as Minister for Māori Development, Minister for Whānau Ora, and Associate Minister for Economic Development very seriously. We want to contribute to the bigger picture, not just chuck bombs and not just chuck little stones over here to try to make the bike wobble—kāo. We want to contribute positively, and we will continue to do that to have impact for whānau, hapū, iwi, and the wider nation.

It would be no surprise that our pou tokomanawa, our central pole, is whānau. Whānau are vital for nurturing our children. Our whānau are critical agents of change. In last year’s Budget, an additional $49.8 million was made available to build on the successes of Whānau Ora navigators and maintain the volume over coming years to provide support and advocacy for whānau. Since its establishment about 6 or 7 years ago, Whānau Ora has undergone considerable evolution. We now have three commissioning agencies that act as brokers to match the needs and aspirations of whānau. We also have a partnership group made up of Ministers and iwi chairs and representatives to develop an outcomes framework. We have a clearer vision ahead and a dedicated workforce that provides direct support for whānau capability building. So I will continue to work with my ministerial colleagues to expand and develop Whānau Ora.

In the Reo space and the whakapapa space, sustaining and strengthening Te Reo Māori in this country—and indeed in my portfolio—is vital to reviving and strengthening our cultural identity. I expect to complete the passage of the Māori Language (Te Reo Māori) Bill into Parliament this year—fairly shortly I hope—with the establishment of Te Mātāwai, an independent sector entity to oversee the Māori language sector. That is going to be pretty helpful. The bill will place iwi, hapū, and whānau at the helm of Māori language revitalisation. Can I thank the members of the Māori Affairs Committee for their support in that.

The second string to my bow is, of course, with regard to Māori regional development. Strong Māori and regional economic development are essential elements in realising whānau success. So I see whānau, hapū, and iwi at the forefront of our regional economic development renaissance. And last week, in the north, we were a part of the Tai Tokerau Northland Economic Action Plan, in particular Northland College was a great day, a wonderful launch of that particular activity. The current Māori economic asset base is now $42 billion and ready to grow if we give it the right recipe and the right watering to let it bloom. We want to make sure that that happens.

Te Ture Whenua is coming around the corner. I am looking forward to having an introduction early this year—3 years on, more than a hundred hui, an exposure draft, and 20 hui currently in action as we speak. We are back on the road and ensuring that it is well consulted. Everybody knows what is going on in that particular space. There were plenty of written submissions. We have moved on them, we have listened to the people, and we intend to carry out and move on those recommendations from our people.

The last pou, of course, is strong communities. As I wrap up my speech, strengthening Māori communities is usually necessary to support their capacity as a strong resource base for whānau, hapū, and iwi Māori development. I have got a couple of things in that particular area that I am looking forward to contributing to the Government programme. There is so much happening.

I want to close by simply saying that as we commemorate that Treaty partnership, it is timely to remind my ministerial colleagues that I am but one cog in the machinery of the State. As part of the broader response of fulfilling our Treaty obligations, I will be encouraging my ministerial colleagues to embrace Māori development and Māori approaches as a core object of their portfolios. I am looking forward to the great amount of work that we are going to carry out this year, and to the outcomes that may come to Māori communities. Transformative gains require alignment of policy and services with Māori needs and aspirations. We are definitely heading in that direction. It is going to be a great year and I am looking forward to the work.

Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future): I want to begin by paying a tribute to the late Rt Hon Bob Tizard, who died just a few weeks ago. I am one of the very few members in the House today who had the privilege of being here when he was a member. I see the Hon Annette King, and I acknowledge her. I am sure she will agree with me that Bob gave the appearance of being permanently irascible. As someone once said, he was the most balanced man in the House; he had chips on both shoulders. But that actually belied a considerable intellect, terrific ability, and a form of warmth that meant that he did have a very strong sense of compassion for the underdog.

I think he was a parliamentarian of an era that we no longer have, and I think it is important to pay tribute to people like that—to span, in Parliament, from Walter Nash through to Mike Moore as Prime Minister. As a parliamentary candidate, he first stood in the 1951 waterfront election, so I pay my tribute to him and express my sympathy to his family on their sad loss, and my appreciation, for one, of his tremendous contribution to our country.

The debate on the Prime Minister’s statement is a chance to talk about the direction that the country is heading in over the coming 12 months, and it is very difficult to do that without reflecting upon the immediate past, the last few days—the events at Waitangi. I want to say this: I believe that commemorating the events that happened on 6 February 1840 is extremely important and is foundational to understanding this country’s past and contributing to its future, but I am also reminded of the words that Norman Kirk uttered at a time when the Waitangi commemoration first became a national holiday, in 1973. He said that this is a day for all New Zealanders, not just the people of Northland—for all New Zealanders—to celebrate the unique gifts we possess by virtue of the fact that we are New Zealanders. It seems to me that in the controversies that have surrounded the day almost interminably in recent years that phrase has been forgotten. Waitangi Day is for all New Zealanders. It is not for the hotheads. It is not for the activists. It is not for the protesters. It is for all New Zealanders to celebrate what it means to be a New Zealander.

I think that means that if the Prime Minister feels it inappropriate to go, so be it, but I think then we need to look afresh at the nature of what goes on at Waitangi on Waitangi Day and the day beforehand. I, for one, do not accept the proposition that the best way to celebrate a national day is to protest. I do not believe in sweeping things under the carpet, but I think that the idea that our national day is somehow less about celebrating who we are and more about protesting our differences has gone too far.

Every year we have this debate, and every year nothing happens. It may well, therefore, be time for the senior leadership in this House, across the parties, to get together and try to nut out a pathway forward that prevents us from being back here next year, the year after, and in years to come, saying: “If only we had a national day that wasn’t marred by what went on at this most recent occasion.” In that respect I acknowledge Mr Joyce. I thought he handled a very unusual situation with considerable calm and pride, and I guess we will wait and see whether John Oliver and co. followed what he had to say.

I do think that the risk to New Zealand of not getting this right is that the sense of national cohesion that we all like to feel will be diminished. It may well be that the outcome is to have, effectively, two national days: a day we celebrate the commemoration of the signing of the Treaty and a day we set aside to be our national day. It may well be an event around Matariki or some other significant occasion in the year—I, for one, would scrap Queen’s Birthday and turn that into a national day for New Zealand—but I think that continuing as we are simply gets us into a position where more and more people each year will feel alienated and left out, and simply want to get on with what comes next. I hope that there can be some constructive progress before we face this situation 12 months from now.

I want to talk this afternoon about a very important aspect of the Government’s programme that sits under my portfolio of responsibilities. I think one of the big changes that this Government has made for the better has been the investment approach to the provision of public services—the fact that we actually seek to figure out what the cost of providing a service will be and what the gains to come from that will be before we simply plough money into it. The development of the Better Public Services result areas has been very important in that regard, and I refer particularly to Result 10, which comes under my responsibility.

Under Result 10, our ambition is to have 70 percent of the 10 most common Government services provided to New Zealanders carried out online by 2017. We are just under 50 percent at the moment, and are tracking well towards that. That puts us in a very strong position internationally.

I had the privilege last week of giving the annual digital leaders network lecture at the House of Commons in London, and it was very interesting to see the high regard in which New Zealand is held for the progress that we have made in terms of the delivery of Government services in a way that is much more convenient to people. Most of us live our lives these days governed by these things—mobile phones. Most people do their banking, their travel, their insurance, and a range of other transactions watching the television at night, and they want to know more and more why their interaction with Government, in terms of Government services, cannot be carried out in the same way.

We have already made a start. The recent change to 10-year passports has seen the rate of passport renewal online go up by almost half, from somewhere in the low 40s, in terms of percentages, to somewhere in the mid-60s now. People are getting used to the idea that you can do things online. We have a very high rate already of tax returns being filed online, but there are many other things we can do to suit a citizen’s convenience—to tailor Government services in a way that meets the citizen’s needs rather than the rigid structures of Government. That is quite a radical change.

I am very proud that New Zealand is part of what is known now as the “D5”—the Digital 5, the five most digitally advanced Governments in the world. It is a very eclectic mix: Estonia, which leads because of its particular circumstances post the Soviet invasion, when it literally rebuilt its entire bureaucratic system online; Britain and New Zealand, similar sorts of States making good policy progress; and Korea and Israel, for whom the pre-determinant of better online services has been national security. But the Digital 5 is becoming more some form of international working together and cooperation than just a talk shop.

We have had a couple of meetings over the last 2 years. We are now planning to expand that process of interaction between our officials, to make sure that the sorts of things we are doing both gel with what our citizens require and also create opportunities for our IT industry locally. It is far more of an issue in Britain than here, because of its much larger size and capacity, but there is scope for doing that here—for bringing Government and industry closer together in terms of the way in which we progress the development of key services for New Zealanders. That will be a big priority this year. It is consistent with the transformational approach that this Government is taking to the provision of services, and it is in line with what public expectations seek. Most people, when you talk to them, expect to be able to make contact with Government online, expect to be able to do their business that way, and enjoy a measure of frustration when they find that they cannot.

I want to end with a little anecdote. When I was the Minister of Revenue, one day the geeks in the department came to me on a Friday afternoon and said: “We’ve just developed this little app that shows you your student loan balance online.” It was about 3 o’clock on a Friday afternoon. We had just launched it. Saturday morning I was in my electorate office and a constituent came in complaining about student loan repayments, so I smiled and said: “I can help you here. We’ve got this little app that now does all these things, and shows you exactly where things are.” She looked at me stone-faced, and she said: “I know, but I can’t pay online, can I?”.

The point of that story is this: the app was barely 12 hours old, launched without fanfare. This person already knew it was there and knew what it did not do. I think that is the challenge we have got to keep in front of us. It is not so much what we can do but that the customer’s expectation is always for that step more. As we go through this transformation process Governments are going to have to put themselves in a position where they can meet that “Yes, but what I want is this.” type of argument. So that is going to be an important priority this year.

I simply conclude by welcoming all members back to the House. I welcome Maureen Pugh to the House, and I am sure we will all have many robust debates over the next 12 months.

DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): It is great to be back, and in the spirit of the beginning of the year, I would like to begin with some agreement. I agree with Andrew Little that the National Party is, by and large, managing the policies that Labour put in place, but I want to agree with the Prime Minister that the National Party is managing those policies so much better. Such is the history of these two parties over the time that they have governed our country.

I want to pay tribute to the outgoing member, Tim Groser, and the fantastic job that he has done with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is extraordinary that a small economy of $240 billion at the bottom of the world has managed, over the period of a decade, to draw in 11 other economies with a collective GDP of $27 trillion and create a free-trade zone and an agreement that will have inestimable benefits for New Zealanders and New Zealand exporters. And I say “inestimable” because the argument for free trade is often very much like the argument for freedom generally. The reason that we want freedom is that we do not know exactly how people will use it and how big the advantages of having freedom, including freedom to trade, will be. So I say to all of those who naysay and say “We don’t know, and can you name it, and can you show us exactly how valuable this thing will be?” that I do not think they really understand the true purpose of freedom.

While we are on the Government’s agenda, I have been enormously proud, of course, to work with my good friend and colleague Hekia Parata on the partnership school kura hourua policy. The members opposite must be getting worn down opposing this policy when they see 93 percent and 100 percent pass rates announced, and when they see that this policy has the guts to do what none of them would ever do, and that is to actually close a school when it is failing children.

They will whinge and whine and cry, but they know that in reality this is a policy that is not in danger of failing. Oh no, what the members opposite and their supporters are terrified of is that this policy is succeeding, growing, and multiplying. On that, I want to thank my colleagues Marama Fox and Te Ururoa Flavell from the Māori Party, who have made this policy possible. Here is the real kicker for the members opposite: this is overwhelmingly a highly positive policy for Māori.

As I was listening to the Prime Minister’s speech I was asking myself: “Where is the highlight? What is the thing that I should focus on in reply?”. The truth is that, really, there was not one. There was just a large review of well-managed policies, many of them introduced by the Opposition.

Once upon a time we had a National Party that would have told you that tax cuts were critical to a centre-right Government. This Government says it may cut taxes in 2017. What sort of centre-right Government does not talk about tax cuts for 8 years? It is too difficult, it would seem, in a period of low inflation to index tax thresholds to inflation. Since the last tax changes, all that time ago, the failure to index tax brackets to inflation has cost the average family $500-plus every year from now on, and has cost some over $1,500. That is a small change that would be good for working families and good for New Zealanders, which is a bridge too far for this centre-right Government.

The OECD tells us that we have one of the highest tax rates on capital of any developed country, and yet it would be too difficult to have a policy of deliberately dropping the company tax rate and harmonising it with the Māori authority tax rate over a period of time, and so we actually find ourselves in a situation where we are spending more money trying to stimulate the economy with a partnership here and a regional plan there than we are prepared to give back to the businesses that made the profits in the first place. They are two issues where a centre-right Government should be making movement to improve the policy settings and improve our productivity.

Our productivity matters, or at least it used to in the rhetoric of centre-right Governments, because we used to talk about being the Switzerland of the South Pacific, we used to talk about being in the top half of the OECD, and then things got choppy around the world and we forgot all about it. In the last year those chickens have started to come home to roost in unexpected ways. In the last 48 hours and in the last year we have seen foreign Governments telling us that they will cut benefits for New Zealanders. It would be easy for us to retaliate by cutting benefits for nationals from those countries coming here.

The reason that that is not an effective strategy is simply this: other things being equal, people want to migrate to higher-productivity economies. Other things being equal, on balance, people have moved from lower-productivity economies to New Zealand, and from New Zealand to places such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and so on. They do not want to come here as much as we want to go there, and we are finding ourselves at a loss in these negotiations about entitlements in each other’s countries.

Aside from the agenda of improving the tax and regulatory environment and raising productivity for all New Zealanders, we have also taken our eye off the ball when it comes to improving our country in the long term. Everybody knows that in Australia, in Canada, in the United Kingdom, in Germany, and in practically every other developed country with which we would like to compare ourselves, Governments are recognising that people live longer and it is time to adjust superannuation. These countries are raising their ages of entitlement to reflect that very basic reality.

We know that although there are presently five taxpayers per superannuitant, by the time current university students retire there will be only two, and they know it as well. A sensible country that wanted to look into its future and confront its long-term challenges would very simply open up a debate about raising that age. It is not a question of if it will happen, but when, and this Government has denied us the ability to have that conversation, which is far, far worse than denying us doing it—denying us even being able to openly discuss it.

If the Labour Party had really wanted to reach out to millennials, it could have confronted one very simple fact, and it is this: in the last year the average student loan has been $28,000 and in the last 3 years—roughly the average time that people study—the median house price in New Zealand, forget Auckland, has risen $78,000, or almost three times as much. If the Labour Party wanted to deal with that issue, Labour members would not be reading out and counting the Chinese names that they find in the property data. What they would be doing is actually confronting the supply side determinants of house prices and the difficulties that have led to Aucklanders building 40,000 homes in the last decade compared with 50,000 in the 1990s when the city was much, much smaller.

I could go on, but, in summary, what we have is a nominally centre-right Government that is tied down by an MMP reality and cannot make the types of reforms that would confront New Zealand’s long-term challenges, that would improve productivity for all New Zealanders, and that would actually do more of the type of partnership school kura hourua reform that actually improves the quality of social services for those who most need it. In this environment, I think the ACT Party has a huge amount to offer, and I am looking forward to offering it all year. Thank you.

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Economic Development): Mr Deputy Speaker, firstly, may I say that I hope you had a good summer break. I hope it was relaxing. Mine was, thank you. I rode a horse, grew my vegetables, and went to the Wairarapa and to the Hawke’s Bay and Coromandel. I went up north last week—pretty relaxing up there. I had the launch of the Tai Tokerau Northland Economic Action Plan. We had a visit from the occasional visitor to Northland, the current MP, Mr Peters.

I also had, it is fair to say, a reasonably well-reported experience with an unmanned aerial vehicle. It was an interesting day indeed at Waitangi. I have been thinking about that day on the odd occasion since, and I have been thinking about the protesters. I have been thinking about them because they have had, obviously, a lot to say—and fair enough, too; it is the nature of protest.

A lot of what they have had to say has been very interesting. Primarily, they have accused this Government of not opening up and giving information. I think the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is very important. I think it is one of the political fault lines about whether we are going to be forward-looking as a country, embracing the opportunities that the world provides to us in an open, competitive environment, which gives our exporters and farmers a chance to succeed; or take a backward-looking, defensive position, where the world is out to get us and we should just try to crunch down and hope the world goes away, which is what some of the other Opposition politicians promote.

So I would like to devote a small amount of time this afternoon to making a few points about trade and the TPP. I would like to make the point that trade access is hugely important for a small country like New Zealand. It is not just important; it is hugely important. Without fair and equal trade access, we cannot sell as much of our goods, we get less for them, and that means fewer jobs and lower incomes.

In particular, it is about jobs in regional New Zealand, in our small farming communities like those in the far north that I visited last week, who are rightly looking for opportunities for their young people to be employed. It is about the people who know it is really hard selling meat into Japan with a 38.5 percent tariff over what the locals are able to sell it for. It is about the people who are trying to sell kiwifruit or ice cream into TPP countries. I heard the Leader of the Opposition pooh-poohing the dairy benefits of the TPP today. Well, there is a small ice cream company in the Hauraki Plains that has been started by international investors and is providing jobs to those people who would appreciate the opportunity to sell ice cream into the US and Japan.

I am told by the protesters about investor-State dispute resolution provisions. Well, that is hugely more likely to help New Zealand than hinder it. We already have an independent justice system that protects the legitimate activities of all sorts of companies, including large multinational ones, which, if they feel wronged, can go to court in this country. Nothing will change for us, unless we start doing something like nationalising companies at, I do not know, 5 percent of their value—and then we would have other problems anyway. But the investor-State dispute settlement provides opportunities for New Zealand companies in countries where the court system is perhaps not quite as independent.

Some people have been really loud in this debate, but reject the whole concept of trade. Why would you listen to Jane Kelsey if you are actually interested in trade? Give Jane her due; she hates trade agreements. She would roll back the China free-trade agreement, she would roll back the Korea free-trade agreement, and she would roll back the South-east Asia free-trade agreement—any one of them. So why would you get advice from her? She is hardly likely to provide advice that is reasonable and balanced. I would like to point out that without the China free-trade agreement we would have been a quiet country after the global financial crisis, a country that would be able to afford far fewer of the medicines that those protesters claim to be concerned about having access to.

Then there are others who say that they support free trade, but not this deal. They try to say “This one is worse.”, but yet they cannot point to why it is worse. They keep talking about all sorts of things. It was negotiated by the same officials—including Tim Groser, who used to be an official—who negotiated all the other deals. It has similar trade-offs, similar clauses—and it is just not good enough, apparently. Perhaps they are grumpy that their lot did not sign the deal. I do not know. But that is a ridiculous way to approach the arrangement.

Then there are those who say it sacrifices our sovereignty. I had an experience, as we know, with somebody who said that—well, not quite in those words—last week. How can that be so? We have the sovereign right to withdraw from any trade deal at any time—any trade deal at any time. I understand that with the TPP it is 6 months’ notice, then you are out. We never do withdraw, but why not? Because we would have to give up the benefits as well as the costs, and every single Government has said that the benefits are worth having, and they have not walked away.

Then there are those who even say it is anti-democratic, though the current Government has been elected—I do not know, once, twice, three times on the TPP, and the elected Parliament has to approve the legislation. That is democracy. I have got an idea: if it is about democracy, why do the protesters not persuade the guy who is trying to sound like he agrees with them to actually go to the country in 2017 with a commitment to pull out of the TPP, a commitment to leave the TPP? He should stop waffling around, and wander out there and say: “I’m with you, protesters. I agree with you. I’ll pull New Zealand out of the TPP.” Then we can have a further democratic test about the future of this legislation.

The most important point I want to make today is the reason why this Government is doing this: because everyone on this side of the House cares about the future of this country. We want to provide good jobs for our people, security for our families, and a big enough national income so that we can afford the best health care, the best education services, and so on, which my friend the toy-thrower was worried about. It is our sincere belief that this agreement will help do this for this country, otherwise we would not be here.

So I say to Andrew Little: at least the protesters have the excuse that they maybe do not know all there is to know about the agreement, but if you have been in this House and if you have been in the debate, you should be prepared to stand up for your country. He can stand up either way. He can stand up in favour or stand up against, but enough of this mealy-mouthed going out—he spent half his speech, nearly, saying how much he hated the TPP, but on the radio this morning he was saying that he would support it and would not withdraw from it.

Well, I say that if you really want to show any sort of leadership, then step up and say you will pull out, sunshine, because your rhetoric does not match what you are actually doing. You are playing politics with the future of New Zealanders. His colleagues know it, and it is not good enough.

This will be an important year for New Zealand. They all are, but this is an important one. In this year this Government—the John Key Government—will focus on building the opportunities for New Zealand, growing the skills, growing the innovation, building our infrastructure, improving our natural resources allocation, attracting investment in this country, and, most important, providing export access to our farmers and to our businesses to be able to sell overseas. That is crucially important.

So for any naysayer on the other side who has a speech-writer trying to write up stories about this Government having a vision, I say: look in the mirror, it is you who is playing politics and who has no vision for this country. Thank you.

CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): There is no more important investment any Government can make than the investment that it makes in its people. I would hope that that is something that there is universal agreement about around the House.

I want to go back, back to the future a little bit, back to the past, to the Labour Party’s heritage, in a quote from Peter Fraser and Clarence Beeby back in the 1940s, when they stated, in revolutionising New Zealand’s education system at the time, that: “The Government’s objective, broadly expressed, is that all persons, whatever their level of ability … whether they live in town or country, have a right as citizens to a free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers.” That vision that they articulated for our education system then is just as relevant today as it was back when they were introducing universal free access to secondary school education, one of the lasting achievements of that first Labour Government, because the Labour Party has always stood for quality free public education. We have had free quality public education in New Zealand in the past, and we can have it again.

There are some other aspects of that quote that I want to pick up on. When they talked about “of the kind for which they are best fitted”, Fraser and Beeby recognised that one size does not fit all, and that there does need to be differentiation in the education system, as opposed to the standardised model that the current Government preaches, which suggests that every child should learn the same thing at the same time and that the education system should act, effectively, as a pipeline—a production line, as Hekia Parata so regularly describes it. One size does not fit all. And we have had successive Governments throughout New Zealand’s history that have taken pride in boosting participation at all levels of our education: boosting participation in early childhood education, boosting participation in schooling, and boosting participation in tertiary education.

I think that now, for the first time in New Zealand’s history, we have a Government that is proud of lowering participation. Steven Joyce actually boasts about the fact that there are fewer people in tertiary education—post - secondary school education—now than there were previously. That is the first time in New Zealand’s history that we have had a Government that has been proud of something like that. Every other Government, be it Labour-led or National-led, has been pushing to extend participation in all levels of the education system, and we have now got a Government that is doing the opposite and actually trying to say it wants fewer people in education, and I think that that says everything about this National Government.

Contrasts abound when it comes to education. Let us look at the respective track records. I am proud to be a member of a party that capped the cost of tertiary education—post - school education—as opposed to this Government, which has seen massive increases in the costs students face. I am very proud to be part of a party that removed interest on student loans, as opposed to the Government on the opposite side, which cut eligibility for student loans. I am proud of a party that extended access to student allowances, as opposed to the Government on that side, which cut access to allowances. I am very, very proud to be part of a party that introduced a universal entitlement for every child, every 3 and 4-year-old in New Zealand, to 20 hours a week of free early childhood education and quality early childhood services.

Of course, one of the first things that this National Government did was cut the word “free” from the 20 hours of early childhood education a week. I am very proud to be part of a party that consistently increased school funding so that parents were not having to reach into their pockets as much to chip in all the time for the cost of their kids’ education—as opposed to this Government, which has seen that money blow out to over $100 million a year that parents are now paying in supposedly voluntary donations for their kids’ schooling. Those are the donations—on top of that there are all the extra costs that parents now face, which this Government is blind to, and technology is one of the biggest. The current Government seems to turn a blind eye to that. There are some brilliant initiatives happening around the country to ensure that kids can get access to the technological devices that they need for their schooling, and the Government is doing nothing to pick those up and ensure that they are spread throughout the country.

I want to turn to the big announcement that Andrew Little made in his state of the nation speech, where he recommitted the Labour Party to the principle of free education and made a particular pledge to 3 years of free post-school education for all New Zealanders. I think that that is very, very important.

Let us turn the clock back a little bit. There was a time when I was a long-haired student protesting about student debt and rising student fees, when student debt was about to clock $3 billion. That seemed like a lot of money at the time. Does anyone want to hazard a guess as to how much student debt is now? Fifteen billion dollars is the total amount of student debt amassed. But here is the interesting thing about student debt. Since the student loan scheme was introduced, at no point has the Government ever reached the stage where it collects more money in repayments than it is lending—for borrowing—every year, and it is not likely to do so at any time in the near future. In other words, every year we continue to lend out more money than we are recouping, and the student loan scheme has been in place for decades. The mountain of debt continues to grow. Student tuition fees continue to grow. The average amount borrowed per student continues to grow, and this Government simply turns a blind eye to that.

We can do better than that, and introducing free post-school education is going to be an integral part of the agenda of the next Labour Government. John Key decided to pooh-pooh that and say: “Why should the waitress have to pay for the lawyer?”. Well, what if the waitress wants to be a lawyer? What if the waitress is actually working part-time while studying to be a lawyer? Waitresses have ambition as well. Let us also remember that they are part of a wider society and receive the health care paid for from the taxes of others, drive on roads paid for from the taxes of others, and will receive superannuation paid for from the taxes of others, and, yes, they too will have access to a free education paid for from the taxes of others. That is called living in a society. We contribute to each other’s welfare, and we do not simply look at our taxes as a personal contribution that we all benefit from only in personal terms. Our taxes are the contribution we pay for living in a civilised society, and our society benefits from higher levels of education.

Then the Government tried to say, of course, that our policy was elitist, but it ignored the fact that it extends to all levels of post-school education, not just university students. We are talking about the people doing apprenticeships. We are talking about the people doing block trades course in polytechnics. Those people will also benefit from 3 years of free post-school education under a future Labour Government, and I think that is a very good thing. Schooling is no longer enough. In the days of Fraser and Beeby, when they articulated that great vision, they were talking about schooling, in the large part because it was a quantum leap, then, to extend free universal secondary school education. Well, that was then, this is now. Now we need more than just a secondary school education and most New Zealanders know that. To have Steven Joyce taking to Twitter immediately afterwards and saying that increasing participation in post-school education would achieve—in his exact words—“absolutely nothing” is an indictment on that Government and the value it places on education.

We should have a free education. Education is opportunity. Education does provide the ladder on which people can reach their full potential, and it is an investment in our future. For those who say that we cannot afford that, the answer quite simply is we cannot afford not to do that. We are reaching the point where, as Grant Robertson and Andrew Little have both pointed out, 46 percent of the current jobs that people in New Zealand do could become obsolete in the next few decades. We simply have to invest in education so that all New Zealanders have the opportunity to continue to be productive members of the society in which they live.

How is it that the Government can find money to give away a farm, as Hekia Parata did when she funded the Whangaruru charter school? The Government effectively gave away a farm but it cannot find money for people who want to increase their skills through post-school education. It can find money for tax cuts but it cannot find money to invest in our country’s future in a way that I think would deliver far bigger returns not only to the society as a whole but also to the Crown.

Bear in mind one simple fact: the higher someone’s level of education, the higher their average levels of earning, and the higher the tax they pay so the more money that flows back to the Crown and does allow investment in those other public services I have mentioned. I am very, very proud to be part of a Labour Party that is firmly fixed on the future and is looking at investing in the future by investing in our people. That is what the next Labour Government will be all about.

Hon HEKIA PARATA (Minister of Education): Ā, tēnā koe e Te Mana Whakawā, huri noa i tō tātou Whare tēnā tātou i te tīmatanga o tēnei tau hou. Ngā mihi nui ki a tātou katoa.

[And so acknowledgments to you, Mr Assistant Speaker, and to those throughout our House at the beginning of this New Year.]

Our country is in pretty good shape. It is a country that we can be proud of, it is a society that is inclusive, and it is an economy that is strong and growing. It is being led by a Prime Minister with a Government that respects, understands, and supports New Zealanders in all facets of life. It is a Government that has an agenda that is comprehensive, both in terms of its social agenda as well as its economic agenda. It sees that the role of the Government is to provide opportunities for all New Zealanders of whatever age, stripe, or regional location to take advantage of a better life and pathways forward for themselves.

It is a Government that, taking that agenda, understands what practically has to occur. That includes, for instance, as my colleague Steven Joyce said so persuasively earlier in the Chamber, signing up to trade agreements, recognising that we are a small country a long way away from our markets and that we trade to do well and to provide the quality of life that we want for ourselves. So joining this trade partnership is something that I stand squarely behind.

Like him, I have been thinking over the weekend: “What is it that is being protested against, and most particularly by Māori, who came out on the streets to demonstrate their opposition?”. I absolutely support their right—everyone’s right—in an open democracy to be opposed or to take a point of view and to express that point of view. But here is the thing: if we want to enjoy a quality of life, whatever that is—as Māori, Pākehā, Asian New Zealanders, whether we came to this country last week, last century, or whenever, and however we came here, we want the best possible opportunities for them.

That means having the skills and qualifications to be able to participate, having the kinds of homes and families that support that participation, seeing the opportunity of jobs and building businesses so that they are free to make choices for themselves. This Government on this side of the House does not proclaim to itself the right to make those decisions for New Zealanders, but rather to create an environment in which New Zealanders can exercise those rights and choices.

For me, as Minister of Education, I see my job as a very simple one—not an easy one, but a very simple one—which is to ensure that we get the participation at early childhood, which sets up our youngest learners to participate and be successful in their compulsory education, which allows them to then go on to tertiary choices, whether that is to university, whether that is to polytech, whether that is to participate in some kind of workplace internship, or whether that is to go into employment.

So I have been surprised to sit here and listen to the nonsense that the member who spoke before me, Chris Hipkins, spouted about what it is we are doing in the education system in New Zealand. For a start, we have the highest participation in early childhood education we have ever had, and what is more, we have been a Government prepared to put itself publicly on the line and say that 98 percent of all new entrants should have participated in early childhood education before they go to school. And where are we now? We are at 96.1 percent. That means that we have got to get at least another 2,500 under-5s into early childhood education. Where are Māori at? They are at 94 percent, the highest ever early childhood education participation.

And has the Government shirked on that responsibility or cut costs there? Listening to the Opposition, you would think so, but, in fact, early childhood education now accounts for $1.6 billion of Vote Education, which is a 75 percent increase in the 7 years we have been in Government. That is significant. It is not a cut, but if you listen to the Opposition you would think that, which shows how important it is to have national standards so that everyone can learn to count, add, and subtract, and to know the difference between an increase and a decrease.

In schooling, we now have more kids being successful. Look, we do not want them to arrive at Year 12, after they have had 12 years of education, and discover that these young people do not have the skills to participate in a 21st century economy. We have invested significantly to ensure that all young New Zealanders get our minimum qualification of National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) level 2. And what is the record there? Well, at the end of 2014—the 2015 results are not yet available—we are at just over 81 percent, heading towards our target of 85 percent. That means that 6,500 more young New Zealanders have our minimum qualification than when we came into Government, and a good number of those are Māori and Pasifika.

When we came into Government, Māori—the previous Government, that, according to the previous member, was so caring about education it was prepared to preside over a system that saw Māori languish at 43 percent and Pasifika at 51 percent. What does that mean in real terms? In real terms it means that 13,000 Māori 16 to 18-year-olds had the opportunity to sit and pass NCEA. When we came into Government 6,000 were achieving NCEA—fewer than half.

At the end of 2014, we are now up at just over 9,000. That is 3,000 more, that is a 50 percent lift, and it is because this system, with its teachers and principals, has focused on everyone succeeding. The only thing that has changed is expectation, an expectation that this Government has been emphatic and relentless about. The schools have not changed. The teachers and principals, by and large, have not changed. The curriculum has not changed. The Education Review Office’s review has not changed substantially. What has changed is this Government’s relentless expectation that every young person will get the best education possible and will leave with skills and qualifications that allow them to participate.

There is not one pathway; there are several. It is this Government that introduced the possibility of alternative pathways, of vocational pathways, of building skills. This Government introduced trades and services academies that recognised that not all young people go to university. Those who want to go to university, we do support them, and I speak absolutely in favour of student loans.

I come from a family of 10. I come from a family where, with student loans, had they been around, we would have seen more participate in tertiary education. What our student loan programme offers is the possibility for everyone, and what the compulsory schooling system offers is the possibility that almost every young person will have the qualification to make the choice of which pathway they go on.

Our Government has not done this in isolation. We have also invested in a social programme of extending paid parental leave, of extending visits to GPs to 13-year-olds, of helping those families living in the most hardship by increasing the benefit from 1 April. We have decreased ACC levies, we have done a whole range of things, including providing breakfasts at no cost—not free, but at no cost to schools—to any school that wishes to take them up. So this Government has made very practical investments in all of the policy intentions that we have placed before New Zealanders, and we are seeing them work.

We are seeing more young Kiwi families get into their first homes through the HomeStart programme. We are seeing more young New Zealanders being immunised through a comprehensive approach to health. These are not in isolation from our investment in economic development. I had the pleasure of being in Northland last week at the launch of the action plan for Northland, a place that is a cornucopia of opportunity with the right levels of investment. My colleagues Minister Joyce, Minister Guy, and Minister Flavell have invested considerable time in identifying what specifically needs to be invested in in order to realise that potential, in order to grow that regional economy, in order to provide more jobs for young people.

Only one example that I can give, of many, was attending the Northland College launch of a mānuka plantation and the opportunity for the kids at that college, as well as long-term unemployed, to have the opportunity not only to plant mānuka but also to see the science of mānuka and why it is that that flower produces natural antibacterial properties that in turn infuse our mānuka honey, which in turn gets harvested and sold overseas at a far higher level than would be the case here, in order that it can come back and help invest in the roads and the bridges and the plant that is necessary to grow the economy.

The kids at Northland College recognise and, more and more, understand how getting a great education translates into a possibility of jobs, and why it is we want the markets that the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, along with China and Korea, will open up for them. They see themselves as participants now under this Government, not as victims or as casualties, but—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member’s time has expired.

METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): “Whakarongo ake au ki te tangi a te manu e rere runga rawa e, tūī, tūī, tūī-ā! Tui-ā i raro, tui-ā i runga, tui-ā i waho, tui-ā i roto, tūī, tūī, tūī-ā! Ka rongo te ao, ka rongo te pō, tūī, tūī, tūī-ā!”

E Te Kaihautū o Te Whare, tēnā koe. He rawe te kite i a koe i tēnei wā o te Tau Hou. E rere haere ngā mihi ki a koutou katoa huri noa i tēnei Te Whare o Ngā Raiona. E mihi hoki ki ngā mana whenua o tēnei whenua, arā, ko Te Āti Awa, Taranaki Whānui me Ngāti Toa Rangatira hoki, tēnā koutou mō ō koutou manaakitanga ki a mātou, ngā mema Pāremata, ia tau, ia tau, ia tau, tēnā koutou katoa.

Ahakoa ngā ngaru hukahuka mōrearea o te wā, kua tae tātou ki te rau tau rua tekau mā tahi, ā, ko ngā tikanga me ngā akoranga ā kui mā, ā koro mā ka kawea tonutia e tātou. Rua rau tau kua hori, kua pakangatia, kua auētia, kua moea e tātou, e wai atu, e wai atu kia oraiti ai ngā whakatipuranga. Nā tēnei, kua puritia ko Te Reo me ōna tikanga. Kua whaia ngā kupu a Apirana, kua toro atu ō tātou ringa ki ngā rākau a te Pākehā hei oranga mō ō tātou tinana. He whāinga nui, whakaharahara tēnei i te mea, i te mura o te ahi o korehāhā tātou e haere ana. Kua toro atu tātou Te Māori ki ngā hangarau, ki te ipurangi, ki hea, ki hea, hei aha? Hei oranga mō tātou!

Hēoi, kāore anō tātou kia tae ki Te Ana-ō-Ora! Kua puritia kētia tātou e ngā herehere taumaha o te wā. I tēnei rau tau, e mate ana a ngāi Māori i ngā kāinga makariri, i ngā kāinga kore haumaru, i te kore kāinga. I ēnei rā, e mate ana a ngāi Māori ki te rapu mahi hei whāngai i te whānau. I ēnei rā, ka māuiui tonu ā tātou tamariki i ngā mate i te wā i ō rātou tīpuna. Ahakoa he uri rangatira tātou, he uri tokoiti, ā, ko te kōrero Māori he wero tonu ki ētahi o tātou.

Nā reira, he aha ngā mea e ngaro ana? I titi kaha ngā kupu a Pīhopa Justin Duckworth ki taku manawa i te hui i Rātana i tēnei tau. Ko āna kupu, e kōrero ana mō te matekaitanga o te wairua, ā, e kitea ana tēnei āhuatanga i te toiora o te whānau, o ngā tamariki hoki. Ko tāku, e matekai, e takarepa ana te wairua. Ki ahau nei, ko te wairua takarepa tērā e ārahi ana i te apo kia tūkinotia a Papatūānuku, kia whakatuma hoki i ngā uri whakaheke.

Me pēhea tātou e noho ki tō tātou whenua whai rawa nei, whai mātauranga me te mōhio he tamariki kei tua e mate ana i te hiakai i te kura? Me pēhea tātou e noho whai rawa nei me te mōhio, he whānau kei tua e mate ana i te whare mākū? Me pēhea tātou e noho nei i Te Pāremata, e whakatakoto tikanga ana mō te painga o ngā tāngata katoa, e kore e rongo i te haehaetanga o ō tātou wairua i ngā mahi mōrikarika o tēnei Whare, e rongo ana i te mamae? Ko te hiakaitanga tērā o te wairua, ā, ko tēnei wairua hiakai nei, e hiakai ana i te tika! Ki te kore koutou e hiakai ana i te tika, he moumou wā tō noho ki Te Whare nei—moumou wā!

Kei te hiakai ahau, kei te hiakai i te tika! Kei te hiakai au ki te ārahi i a tātou, e kore a āpōpō e mahue i a au! Koia nei taku tū i konei! Koia nei te tū a Te Pāti Kākāriki! Kua kauria ngā moana mōrearea o te wā, kua mau ko Te Reo me ōna tikanga. E hiakai ana ahau kia mihia ko te ata hāpara. Kei te hiakai koutou? Ka waiho ake ngā kupu ā Matiu, ūpoko tuarima, whiti tuaono hei kai mā koutou! Ka koa te hunga e hiakai ana, e hiainu ana i te tika, ka mākona hoki rātou, tēnā koutou katoa.

[“I listen to the cry of the bird soaring above; sew, sew, and sew it up! Sew it from below, sew it from above, sew it from the outside, and sew it from the inside; stitch, stitch, and stitch it up! The world and the void, hear, sew, sew, and sew it up!”

Greetings to you, Mr Assistant Speaker. It is so wonderful to see you at this time of the New Year. Acknowledgments are flying around to all of you throughout this the House of the Lions. An acknowledgment as well to the mandated iwi authorities of this land: namely, Te Āti Awa, Taranaki at large, and Ngāti Toa as well. Thank you collectively for your kindness to us, the members of Parliament, each and every year. We thank you all.

Despite the foaming and tempestuous difficulties of the time, we have arrived at the 21st century and continue to persevere with the protocols and teachings of our elderly women and menfolk. Two hundred years have passed, and we have fought, lamented, and married, to ensure the survival of our future generations. As a result, we have maintained the retention of the language and its protocols. The words of Apirana have been pursued; our hands have reached out to the implements of non-Māori as sustenance for our bodies. This indeed is an extraordinary achievement in the face of intended and near extinction. We of Māoridom have reached out to technology, the internet, in every nook and cranny, and for what purpose? As a livelihood for us!

However, we have not yet reached the momentum of life. We are held back by what are very mundane burdens of the time. During this century Māori are sick as a consequence of cold, unsafe homes, and some without homes. In these times Māori are suffering because they cannot find jobs to feed the family; our children remain sickly as a result of diseases that existed in the time of their ancestors. Although we are of chiefly lineage, we are small in number and speaking Māori continues to be a challenge for some of us.

So what elements are missing? The words of Bishop Justin Duckworth at this year’s conference at Rātana were unwavering to my heart. His words talked about the hunger of the spirit and that this condition can be seen in the soundness of the family and children also. My view is that there is a spiritual hunger and a spiritual deficit. To me, it is the deficient spirit that is leading the avaricious to violate mother Earth and to antagonise successive generations.

How can we remain aligned to this productive, educational, and knowledgeable land of ours, knowing there are children over the beyond suffering from hunger at school? How can we, who live with the resources and know-how sit by, when over yonder, there are families suffering as a consequence of damp homes? How can we, who sit here in Parliament setting down protocols for the betterment of all, not feel the lacerations of our spirit as a consequence of the repulsive actions made in this House, nor feel the pain? That is the hunger of the spirit, and this spiritual hunger craves the justice! If you do not hunger for the justice, you are wasting time sitting here in this House—wasting time.

I am hungry; I am hungry for justice. I hunger to lead us; I will not miss out tomorrow! This is my stance here; this is the position of the Green Party here. We have swum the apprehensive seas of the time and the language; its protocols have been retained. I am hungry to greet the first light of day. Are you hungry? I leave you with the words of Matthew, chapter 5, verse 6, to digest. Those who hunger and thirst for justice, they will rejoice and be satisfied too. Thank you all.]

Hon NATHAN GUY (Minister for Primary Industries): Mr Assistant Speaker, can I wish you a very happy New Year, and can I wish the whole House a happy New Year—2016 is going to be a very, very busy one for the Government, and our work programme has been laid out in the 2016 Prime Minister’s statement here this afternoon.

I have started the year by moving around the country a fair bit in the last few weeks, after I went down to the Marlborough Sounds and had a very good holiday. I managed to check out the blue cod fishery there. I must say it is in pretty good shape. I managed to catch a few—all sized legally, of course—and they were delicious, I might add.

Importantly, I have been cruising around the country. With Minister Smith and Minister Barry, I announced the reform of the Marine Protection Authority and all that work that we are doing there in the two recreational fishing parks in the Marlborough Sounds and in the Hauraki Gulf, which have been well-received. Ultimately, that will mean that mum and dad will be able to get out there and enjoy catching a fish.

Importantly, what we have also done is—I have been down to North Canterbury. Of course, it has been struggling through a prolonged period of drought there that is into its second year now, so we have extended that declaration for another 6 months. But I must say that El Niño has not gripped the country like we did once think it was going to. There has been quite an amount of plentiful rainfall on the east coast of most of the South Island and the North Island. So we all breathed a sigh of relief there, but there are certainly still some tough times to come for those farmers in North Canterbury.

As Minister for Racing I also attended the Wellington Cup, the Karaka Million—which was a huge success again—and also the New Zealand Bloodstock Yearling Sales. It is very pleasing to see that the overall turnover in its sales is up by 27 percent. There are some positive signs there, showing the strength of New Zealand breeding stock and attracting a lot of international investment as well as New Zealand investment.

And then, of course, as Minister Parata has just outlined, with my colleagues Minister Flavell, Minister Joyce, and Minister Goodhew, we were all in Northland the other day to announce the Northland regional economic development there. The action plan of 58 initiatives was well-received by the local community.

Tracey Martin: Seventy years it’s taken for National to do something for Northland.

Hon NATHAN GUY: In fact, I am not even sure that the local member could bag it, because a lot of those 58 initiatives across the primary sector are going to be well-received. Also, just on the weekend, I was down at the Hilux New Zealand Rural Games in Queenstown. What a fantastic event that is. It is showcasing New Zealand’s primary sector and the hard work that our farmers do, and, actually, also showcasing that we can have a bit of fun with those activities. My cowpat did not go that well. It got to about 25 metres before it exploded. My left arm needed a bit of work there.

Then, of course, I went out and supported the Ministry for Primary Industries with its response on the Tau fly from South-east Asia, in Manurewa. I want to thank the people in South Auckland for their support, because we have just stepped that operation down and closed it off over the last couple of weeks because we did not have any further finds. So it just shows that the Ministry for Primary Industries can step up a good response with the New Zealand public’s support.

But, importantly, I want to talk about the Prime Minister’s statement, which outlined that over the next 5 years economic growth is going to be at around 2.7 percent. Of course, on this side of the House we are very buoyed that the unemployment figure came out last week—5.3 percent. It just shows that the Government is doing something and is working closely with New Zealand businesses on attracting and ensuring that they can take on more employees, and with the hard work that they do, often businesses are working 7 days a week. Also, incomes are going to be growing faster than inflation. ACC levies are dropping by $450 million this year, which is fantastic. That is the equivalent of a massive tax cut, and when you drop that down to every individual who owns a vehicle, that is around $130 per vehicle. Then we get into the regional economic development space—the five plans that we have got. We are working our way through, working closely with those regional leaders.

I have talked about Northland, and there is some great work happening in Minister Tolley’s patch of the East Coast and the Bay of Plenty. There is some great work starting to happen in my area, in Manawatū and Whanganui, and working closely with those regional leaders down on the West Coast of the South Island as well.

But the big issue and the big talking point over the last few weeks has been the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). I thought the Prime Minister summed it up very, very well this afternoon in his address, where he talked about Labour having two positions. So we will not be talking so much about the TPP agreement; we will be talking about Labour’s two positions. It is the party of two positions—

Hon David Cunliffe: Don’t abdicate the real issue.

Hon NATHAN GUY: —and now Mr Cunliffe interjects because he knows that when he was leader he backed the TPP because it was very important for the productive part of the New Zealand economy. Mr Goff, sitting next to Mr Cunliffe, also backs the TPP. Every Labour leader including Prime Minister Helen Clark backs the TPP.

Tracey Martin: Perhaps you just stuffed up the negotiations.

Hon David Cunliffe: You guys screwed up. Admit it.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member will resume his seat for a second. It is a robust debate. A bit of interjection back and forth does not hurt but I just ask the two members who have been pretty constant to settle down a bit and especially to not accuse me of screwing it up. Thank you.

Hon NATHAN GUY: Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. What I would really like to hear concisely and clearly from Mr Cunliffe when he stands up and makes a contribution this afternoon about Labour Party policy is what their position is on the TPP, because there is so much confusion. Even today they are talking about ignoring bits of the TPP agreement if they were lucky enough to get into Government. How on earth can you have an agreement that is ratified through the New Zealand Parliament and you are saying to everyone here in New Zealand: “Oh well, that’s a bit that we are actually going to ignore if we ever come into Government.” How on earth can you do that? How is it that Labour and New Zealand First members can turn their backs on the most productive part of the New Zealand economy with the TPP? How is it that New Zealand First members can turn up at the Northland Field Days and say that this deal is terrible for those Northland farmers? There is $274 million of tariff elimination almost overnight—almost overnight and this deal is worth around $2.7 billion by 2030.

So how is it that Labour and New Zealand First can turn up in the regions and say, in Labour’s particular case, that they are a party that supports free trade? Well, if you go out on the street in Lambton Quay or go into Oxford Street, the main street in Levin in my electorate, with a camera and a microphone and say “What do you think of Labour’s position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership?”, people would not have a clue because Labour is sending out mixed messages.

We on this side are very supportive of free trade. Even Helen Clark realises that this agreement is hugely important for the New Zealand economy, and when we think about what it means for New Zealand, ultimately it means more jobs, it means more money. We will not get rich as a country unless we can sell products to the world. We are talking about 800 million consumers. We are talking about 36 percent of the global population. We are talking about the No. 1 economy in the world, the US; the No. 3, Japan. We have been trying for 20 to 25 years to get a free-trade agreement with these countries. This is fantastic. What is not well understood is that we get a level playing field with our biosecurity and food safety regime across all of these countries. Members will be aware that from time to time we get products held up at the border. Now we will have a streamlined approach across these 11 other countries with food safety and biosecurity. This is hugely significant.

Also, in the Prime Minister’s statement for 2016 he talks about the importance of biosecurity and how we are working together with industry to manage and respond to important risks. We are doing a lot in this space, it is my No. 1 priority—more money in last year’s Budget, an extra $27 million, more X-ray machines, more people on the front line. I was there with the Ministry for Primary Industries saluting and celebrating with the 51 biosecurity officers who were sworn in just coming into Christmas last year. We are doing a huge amount in this space.

The statement also talks about the importance of Resource Management Act reform and that is hugely important for businesses and, actually, for mum and dad as well if they are just extending their deck or putting a fence up. So we are asking the House to get on and support the Resource Management Act because it is hugely important, particularly when you start focusing on housing affordability. We are doing a lot in research and development: about $300 million invested across the primary industries and research and development. The Primary Growth Partnership—we are doing a huge amount in this space.

As a final comment, a huge amount of money is invested in infrastructure. About $6 billion over the next year and a big part of that is in roading and a huge amount of that, 2,000 jobs, is in the Wellington region for Transmission Gully and for the Kapiti Expressway, which is going fantastically well. Maybe at the end of the year we will be driving on that 18-kilometre route. It is very exciting and I endorse the Prime Minister’s statement. It will be a busy year in Government. We are going to get on and do things and make this great country a better place to live.

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA (Labour—Hauraki-Waikato): Ka tika, me tū ki te tāpiri atu i āku kōrero tuatahi i Te Whare nei mō tēnei tau, ki ērā ā Te Minita i waihotia, rātou kua wehe atu, aua ingoa kua whakahuahua mai ki roto ki tēnei Whare. Tēnei anō, ka whakatakoto i tērā ingoa o te kuia ki Taranaki, arā, a Mereiwi Broughton, ā, ki tērā ki Ngāi Tahu ki a Linda Gwennell. E kore e warewaretia rātou katoa, kua hipa ki tua o te ārai. Ko te tūmanako kia whai whakaaro ki ngā whānau pani i noho i raro i te kapua pōuri, nō reira, e te hoa, e Rāhui, tēnei te mihi atu ki a koe me tō whānau, kei runga i Te Marae o Pōhara. Nō reira, tēnā tātou katoa.

[It is fitting that I rise to add my first sentiments in this House for this year to those that the Minister for Māori Development left here, in regard to those who have departed and those names that were mentioned in this House. I also put forth that name Mereiwi Broughton, elderly lady at Taranaki; and that one of Ngāi Tahu, Linda Gwennell. All of them will never be forgotten. They have passed beyond the veil. The hope is that we think about the grieving families beneath the gloomy cloud. And so to you, the colleague Rāhui, I acknowledge you and your family there on the marae of Pōhara. Therefore, acknowledgments to us all.]

For those listening to the debate, they could be forgiven for being really concerned about what the year ahead holds for them. The tone of the Prime Minister’s statement was reiterated at the first political meeting at Rātana, which many of us turned up to. He was dismissive and defensive, and there was an 8-year creep of arrogance in the tone of his presentation there towards issues regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. But, more significantly, if in the last 8 years prosperity has been seen throughout many communities in this country, why is it that the Prime Minister did not mention the growing rates of inequality and poverty?

At the hui at Waitangi—although it was the Prime Minister’s decision not to turn up, and for whatever reason that was the case—when we talk about the sovereignty of New Zealand and what is important to us as a country, there is no better place than Waitangi to actually demonstrate that New Zealand has moved on. And, yes, Waitangi is a symbol of where our nationhood began, but it is also a place where we can say, as a Parliament, that New Zealand has moved on in its thinking about that partnership relationship. However, that has not been the case, simply because of the way that the Prime Minister has treated that whole discourse about sovereignty and the Treaty. I am really concerned because the tone of the Prime Minister’s statement has not provided the level of balance that is required and that all New Zealanders deserve. On the one hand there is the promotion of a growing economy and the lowering of an unemployment rate, yet the reality in many communities is that it is very difficult to find a job, and to hold a job beyond 90 days. There is growing youth unemployment.

The issues around the TPP agreement are significant and cannot simply be dismissed as a group of Māoris protesting. In fact, on 4 February over 20,000 people rocked up to say that they were not happy with the process that the Government had undertaken, which had diminished any sense of public consultation or information, and it was only at the last minute at the end of last year that the documents were released. The national interest test will be debated before the select committee, but those people who turned up to protest were nurses, they were doctors, they were workers, they were grandparents and parents, they were teachers, they were academics, and they were employers. They were not just a bunch of Māori who are unhappy about the Treaty, and it was wrong of the Minister of Education to try to classify and diminish the broad-ranging interest and concern about the TPP.

This is why it matters. This is why the concerns about the process matter, and how New Zealanders will ultimately judge whether or not the Government is acting in its best interests. Why is it OK to spend $26 million on consulting on a flag, but not on a trade agreement as significant as the TPP? It is not OK. The process will matter when many New Zealanders walk towards 2017.

If you have a Government that rides roughshod over the interests of New Zealand, that spells trouble because it is a blatant, dismissive treatment of legitimate concerns of a broad range of New Zealanders who are just saying: “Look, we need to know how this agreement affects us.” For the Māori sentiment, yes, there is a Treaty clause in there. Yes, it is based on the China free-trade agreement. But, for example, when the Minister talks about these young children learning about mānuka honey and all the pharmaceutical benefits of it, I ask her this. Will the intellectual indigenous property rights of Māori be protected through that Treaty clause? Will mātauranga Māori be protected through that Treaty clause? Can Steven Joyce quantify what the benefit to the Māori economy is?

Even if you talk to Māori who are actively involved in exporting, what they will tell you—many of their relationships are with Korea; take ginseng, and the production of that from a small business in Maniapoto—is that that benefit was really forged on a relationship and it took a lot of hard work. Simply saying that the reduction in tariffs will deliver to the Māori economy is, again, not the full truth. So the Government needs to be accountable if it is to convince New Zealanders that this TPP will deliver the types of benefits that they are happy to promote, in a very glib way, in a public forum. But when you drill down to the detail, exactly explaining it and how that happens, it is very, very difficult—very, very difficult.

I am really concerned about the way in which the Government is treating New Zealanders through poor process, but it does not stop with the TPP. Take, for example, the Minister of Māori Development outlining some of the key issues ahead of the Government that it is wanting to put through—Te Ture Whenua Māori. If this was such a good process, why is it that Māori have had to take the Government to the Waitangi Tribunal and hold it accountable, again, on another poor process, and on being totally dismissive of concerns of Māori landowners with regard to what the impact of that law will have on Māori landowners, on the Māori Land Court, and on a range of many issues that affect those Māori landowners? Poor process—another poor process—again, in the domain of the Minister for Māori Development. Te Reo Māori bill—well, he did not start that bill, and to some extent he could have had a way out, but he persevered. That is his choice. But the poor process has meant that through the prolonged effort of trying to promote something that all Māori would want to do, which is to preserve and uphold Te Reo Māori, you have got a mishmash of a process. He has badly handled this.

Water—I was at Waitangi and heard a number of interests from the iwi leaders group with regard to how they thought they were acting in good faith with Ministers on progressing an agenda that, at its forefront, challenged the “first in, first served” consenting regime. Underpinning some of the Māori concerns is that the first allocation should be back to the environment—back to the water system. They worked with farmers and with all users. The Ministers gave many undertakings of what they would do, yet did not deliver. So here is a Government that has the full process in the TPP, Te Ture Whenua Māori, Te Reo Māori, and water reform. There are some significant issues this year.

But Labour wants to look to the future because it is important. We do not want a future of indebtedness. We want to tackle the issues of inequality and poverty. I am really pleased with our Working Futures Plan, which sets out and opens up the pipeline and the horizon for a number of young people. It says that the first 3 years of tertiary education will be free. It will provide a range of opportunities to those young people who never ever thought that post - secondary school education would ever be achievable and affordable.

The Minister got up and glibly said that so much is being achieved in the education space. She has omitted to address the issues of those young people not in education, employment, or training. There are significant numbers, and that is the hardest group to get to. This policy, which Labour has alongside the rest of the pipeline of educational opportunities, looks at challenging how we invest in that next generation to lift their skills, invest in their opportunities, and open up their pathways to education and training so that they can participate in a modern economy.

Andrew Little did well when he promoted this policy. He said that we are not afraid to tackle this, head on. We are not afraid to change priorities. We believe that investing in the next generation will be a signature of the next Labour Government. Kia ora.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister of Immigration): Mr Assistant Speaker, can I wish you a happy New Year. I trust that you and all colleagues have had a very good break and are feeling refreshed, with batteries recharged, and ready to go. For myself, I spent a lot of time in the beautiful Central Otago, deepening the mountain bike tracks, trying to keep the rabbit population down, and otherwise relaxing and doing a little bit of reflecting on, and reading about, new responsibilities, having now taken the Minister of Revenue portfolio off the Hon Todd McClay and passed back the police portfolio to my successor, the Hon Judith Collins. I am sure she will do a great job of that.

I was listening very carefully to the replies to the Prime Minister’s statement, including from Andrew Little, the Leader of the Opposition, who in his first—just about breathless—intonation mentioned me, which is rather interesting. Of all of the very important burning issues of 2016, apparently he is still exercised by worm farms and lavender growing, never mind that the regulation that that referred to has been changed and has not even been brought into law yet.

I do think that despite the levity around all of that last year, one of the things that that conversation did, in the passage of the Health and Safety Reform Bill, was that it shone a light on workplace health and safety in a way that has not been done in this country for many, many years. I was very, very pleased, albeit I did not make any public statements about it at the time, to note in December the Statistics New Zealand release of the 3-year moving average workplace death rate. Bear in mind that the Government set what we know is a reasonably challenging goal of a 25 percent reduction in death and serious harm in New Zealand by 2020. I am pleased to report that we are well on the way to achieving that. The death rate has now reduced by 25 percent. It is a 3-year rolling average, and one swallow does not make a summer, but I think that is a very good indication of both the importance that this Government places on workplace health and safety and also the response, the very pleasing response, from industry to that call.

I also note that the Forest Industry Safety Council mentioned late last month its very good performance in halving the serious harm rate since 2013. As we know, that was the annus horribilis for forestry deaths, with 10 that year. We had one death in 2014 and three in 2015. One is one too many—I certainly accept that—but I think that the trajectory of improving workplace health and safety in this country is very much on track. That is before the Health and Safety at Work Act has even been brought into effect, on 4 April this year.

The Prime Minister also mentioned employment standards. I think it is very important that we have a fair and flexible employment framework. I know that the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee is working extremely hard, under the astute chairmanship of Jonathan Young, to bring that bill back before the House in the next couple of weeks. It will provide for extra paid parental leave, including—thanks to David Seymour and the ACT Party—extra support for parents of severely premature babies, on top of the generous increases that the Government is putting in place. It will increase the sanctions on employers for poor record-keeping and other failures to meet minimum employment standards, and, importantly, it will address the issue of zero-hour contracts. I know that the committee is working productively, but it does not agree on all aspects of that bill. I will be looking forward to the debate in the future. This is a very, very clear indication that the Government, as the recovery continues to improve, wants to make sure that all workplaces are fair, flexible, and safe.

I want to touch on revenue for a moment. This is one of the areas where, for a new Minister, the work programme is pretty much set in stone—there is not a lot of wiggle room for me to come up with too many pie-in-the-sky ideas, which I think the Inland Revenue Department will be mightily relieved about—with, of course, the Business Transformation project occupying a significant part of its change programme over the next 5 years. The commitment by the Government is about $900 million, on top of the investment that the Inland Revenue Department is already able to make, into what will be about a $1.5 billion change project. I think that, together with the tax simplification and tax administration changes that the Government will be making, will leave us in a much better place to collect the revenue that we need to ensure that we have the health, education, and social supports required.

I do want to touch on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. And before I go into the substance of that, I want to acknowledge, as the previous Minister of Police, the very good work that the New Zealand Police did, particularly in Auckland last Thursday. I read a number of comments and anecdotes about the fact that the police should have been harder on the protesters, that they should not have allowed them to close motorways and intersections, and so on. I want to remind this House that there was actually another country that probably does not have the reputation for freedoms that this one does, and that is Hong Kong, where, in September and October 2014, a protest shut down the main thoroughfares into Hong Kong for 6 weeks—6 weeks. For the New Zealand Police to deal with that protest in the way they did—calmly, fairly, and without a single arrest—I think speaks to the very, very important role of protest in our democracy. Yes, it is important to protest and to make the point; but, actually, it is also important that people go about their business freely, and I thought that our New Zealand police did an excellent job last Thursday in enabling that to occur.

But I must say I am absolutely none the wiser for Mr Little having said that he was going to unequivocally, today, for all time, clear up Labour’s position on the TPP agreement. I must say I am absolutely none the wiser. This is very much a “dollar-each-way” response. In fact, I sit and watch the “Dollar-Each-Way Davids” over there—David Cunliffe, David Clark, David Shearer, and David Parker—all advocates of free trade. There are others, like Clayton Cosgrove and Phil Goff. We know that these MPs understand and support free trade. So my question is this: how on earth can a party support free trade in this country, and the reducing of barriers to trade, and not support the TPP agreement—the largest trade agreement ever negotiated in the world.

A lot has been said about dairy not being as good as it could be. Let me get this straight: anybody who opposes the TPP agreement because dairy was not good enough is basically saying that because the upside was not good enough, that is a downside. Well, I am sorry, but I will take the bird in that hand anytime. And that is particularly the case with regard to primary products, which is very good in terms of the upside, in spite of the speed with which they dismiss $2.7 billion of net benefit, when we also know by comparison with the New Zealand - China free-trade agreement that the very, very conservative estimates of net benefit in that trade agreement—the single best thing that the previous Labour Government did for this country—were well understated, and the actual benefits are many, many times more than that.

So let us take it at just $2.7 billion, and let us think about what that means if we do not go in, because we know that the upside is very strong, but the downside is very, very dangerous. I think the Prime Minister mentioned this at Rātana a couple of weeks ago. I was not there, but I will paraphrase because I think the analogy is very important. If one is a freezing worker producing lamb for export into countries that presently have a 30 or 40 percent tariff put on it, and if our neighbours sign up to a free-trade agreement that eliminates their 30 to 40 percent tariff, and if you are the consumer in that receiving country seeing a New Zealand lamb and an Australian lamb, and your New Zealand lamb is 30 to 40 percent more expensive because of the tariff—which lamb are you going to buy? I think the question answers itself.

For all of those who oppose this agreement because of what it might do for Māori and the Treaty, let us think about how many young Māori men and women work in those industries—those primary export-focused industries—whose jobs would be lost if Australia’s lamb tariffs were reduced or eliminated, and New Zealand’s were not. The upside is very good, but the downside is dramatically bad for this country. I do not think that deep down Labour disagrees with that, but it is so deeply, deeply in debt to the people who put its leader into power—into the Leader of the Opposition’s place—that it cannot publicly state its strong support for free trade. I know that if, in a very, very distant future it becomes a Government, it would not touch this trade agreement. In fact, it would be singing a very different song. This is a very, very good agreement. I think we start this year with a very clear understanding about who supports New Zealanders.

RON MARK (Deputy Leader—NZ First): It is a privilege to be able to stand and rise and speak on behalf of New Zealand First in this debate in reply to the Prime Minister’s statement. I guess I would start by saying to you, Mr Speaker, welcome back to the House, and to all other members, likewise. I hope you enjoyed the summer break. I hope you took the opportunity to reconnect with communities. One of the things I noticed when I returned to Parliament after a 6-year semester is that people who spend too much time in this place do get disconnected from their communities. They may make wonderful speeches like the one we have just heard by the Hon Michael Woodhouse, but the reality as to how connected they are pretty much comes home when one is attending a barbeque or a community event back in the community and people start telling you what is really on their mind, and telling you, as an MP, what they think about the business of this House and the way in which it is being conducted.

Before I get into those comments from folk on the street back home and around the country, I do want to take the opportunity to say thank you to the police, to the Fire Service, and to the council staff and district health boards for what they have done in supporting the country during our summer holiday period. One tragic accident in Masterton that saw the loss of two young lives, which is totally needless and pointless, severely tested police officers, emergency crews, and ambulance staff on that evening. I think we will hear more about that as it goes on. The bottom line is that these are kids who have died—a couple of kids are in hospital—and the people who bore the brunt of that are the emergency services who had to attend on the day, and, of course, the grieving families. So, again, congratulations to the police, and thanks for their work, and thanks to the Fire Service, which attended countless calls throughout the country over that holiday period while we were enjoying our time off.

Back to the business of the House, and I am going to say right from the word go that New Zealand First is looking forward to this year. I am looking forward to seeing our members of Parliament, like Tracey Martin, asking some very pertinent questions like: “Who is Andrew West at Lincoln University, why did Steven Joyce promote his appointment, and why is Lincoln University currently undergoing such a serious set of investigations, and is there a Serious Fraud Office investigation?”. Tracey Martin will probably also be asking questions like: “Why is the Minister of Education allowing the people of Rangiora who supported the Rangiora High School to be asset-stripped?” I guess it is probably something to do with propping up the flagging Government funding so that it can generate a mythical surplus somewhere along the line by ripping off the people of Rangiora, who actually funded that school through a farm and through the earnings of that farm. But it seems to me that Tracey will be asking some serious questions.

I am really looking forward to hearing Clayton Mitchell talking to the House about the wonderful attributes of the occupational safety and health legislation that went through the House, because all we heard out there over the Christmas break from farmers and from small-business people was moaning, whingeing, and bitching about this Government and how out of touch it is and how it simply does not understand the consequences of what is now being visited upon them by WorkSafe. We went up to Waitangi, along with Winston, and New Zealand First got—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): The Rt Hon Winston Peters.

RON MARK: Oh, the Rt Hon Winston Peters, and, actually, the finest leader of any political party known to—I think, probably, he will go down in history as the most astonishing and outstandingly successful political leader of all time in New Zealand, without a doubt. I thank you for raising that, Mr Assistant Speaker, about the Rt Hon Winston Peters. So we went up there, and what did we hear?

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member will resume his seat. I corrected the member gently, but the member has had a couple of sessions in here and should know that he does not bring the Speaker into debate.

RON MARK: Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. It is so interesting to hear small-business people and medium sized business people asking us, New Zealand First MPs: “What the hell has happened to the National Party? What has happened to it? Has it become the party of the corporates? Has it become the party of the globalists?”. It certainly does not understand the consequences of the occupational safety and health legislation that it has visited upon us and, of course, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.

Well, Fletcher Tabuteau is our spokesperson on the TPP agreement, and I am not even going to attempt to try to address some of the nonsense that we have heard in the House today. The one thing we do know is that Minister Woodhouse just said that the benefit gain was $2.7 billion and yet all of his leaders on the front bench have been telling everyone it is going to be $3.5 billion. So someone is right—

Hon Michael Woodhouse: The leader’s definitely right.

RON MARK: —someone is not right, someone is accurate, and, as Mr Woodhouse is now saying, the left hand in the National Party does not know what the right hand is doing, but that is because the left hand and the right in the National Party are probably kept in the dark, like him. He is too far back on the benches there to really know.

I will certainly be asking questions about defence, and, I have got to say, that will bring in Darroch Ball, who will be asking about the Limited Service Volunteer scheme. After all the denials and after all the Official Information Act gaming that has been going on—you would actually think some of these Ministers have been on an Xbox, the amount gaming skill they have and how they are able to manipulate the Official Information Act. National went into an election in 2008 telling the whole nation that it believed in boot camps, that it believed in young people being put into military training, and that this was going to be the saviour of our youth, and yet what has it done?

Darroch Ball: Cut it.

RON MARK: It has cut it, slashed it, and burnt it, and it is closing it down. Instead of having the three Limited Service Volunteer operations in New Zealand—three centres: Burnham, Trentham, and Auckland—we are now going to have just one in Auckland. And here is the irony—well, no, I will not tell you, because Darroch Ball has been doing some homework and I will leave it entirely over to him. But there is more to come, so watch out for Darroch Ball as he puts the questions, once again.

Mr Speaker, I have got to say that I do, on occasion, get a little bit grumpy in the House, and you have probably noticed that. When our first-term MPs are acting as front-bench spokespeople and taking on Ministers who refuse to answer questions and do not tell the whole truth, the exact truth, and nothing but the truth in their answers to questions, you know, I have to say that our first-term MPs in this House have more than delivered what they were expected to. These people are punching way above their weight. By comparison, we have got a whole bunch of National Party first-term MPs who sit there, stand up, and read out an oral question, a patsy question that has been written for them—they probably did not even know what it said until they walked into here—and then they have got the embarrassment of reading out the real patsy supplementary questions to go with it. There is none of that over on this side. There is hard questioning for the Ministers on the facts and on the details, and there will be more of that throughout 2016.

Let us talk about the one thing that the Prime Minister did not want to talk about: the Middle East. You know, Iraq, Afghanistan—hardly a mutter or a murmur about it. And what did we see over the summer break? Well, we saw the Minister of Defence, Gerry Brownlee, telling everybody: “victory in Ramadi”. Within 2 days we found out it was not actually a victory in Ramadi. In fact, they are still fighting in Ramadi right now as we speak. In fact, it would appear, when you look at the bluster, the propaganda, the bumf, and the rubbish—which, you would think had been written by Comical Ali, who was the propaganda Minister for Saddam Hussein—that we had had a stunning victory and it was all over. Well, the fact is that it is not. What we know over on this side of the House, because we do have connections, we do know the facts—

Clayton Mitchell: We do our homework.

RON MARK: We do our homework; that is right, Mr Mitchell. Ten thousand police and Iraqi defence force personnel are up against a couple of hundred Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters. And they are still fighting there. They do not have control. They are dealing with an insurgent that knows how to fight, despite the fact that it has no air cover and that the combined power of the world’s air forces have absolute, unequivocal, unchallenged air superiority. If we had seen the same sort of fortitude, tenacity, and leadership out of the Iraqi officers at Ramadi, it would never have fallen.

And whilst we are focused on a big victory in Ramadi and talking about an impending attack on Mosul—my connections tell me that planning has not even started at Mosul; they are still trying to figure out how they are going to finish Ramadi—what are we hearing in Helmand? What are we hearing in Afghanistan? I will read you a little line: “Security conditions in Helmand witnessed a considerable deterioration over the course of early November”—and this is an older report, I am not going to give you the later one—“as an expanded Taliban assault on northern central districts occurred alongside defections and withdrawals of Afghan National Security Force personnel.” I will go right down to the paragraph that mentions attrition and desertion—and this is one of the things it says: “On investigation it was reported that only 70 of 520 Afghani national police assigned to Sangin remained at their posts in early November. The risk of further deterioration remains high.” And what do we now know? Despite everything, we are suing for peace against the Taliban, the very force we said we were going to destroy.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): It is my pleasure to speak as part of the Government’s response to the Prime Minister’s statement at the start of this parliamentary year. What a great summer it has been in this wonderful country that we live in, with the sun shining and so much optimism as we go out and about and talk to people around the country. One of the first things I did politically for the year was go to Rātana Pā with the Prime Minister, to support the Prime Minister there and go on to the marae and hear the speeches. I have to say that one of the things that surprised me was the question “Well, what’s in it for Māori from the TPP? What’s all this TPP about, and what’s in it for Māori?”. And I thought the answer to that was pretty obvious: most Māori, like most New Zealanders, want access to a job when they leave school, access to earn a good income for them and their family, to be part of a country that can afford the best quality health-care and education, and to afford a living standard that is good for them and their family. And that is why this Government continues to focus on doing the basics well. The basics are about providing that strong, stable, sensible, and economically sustainable environment, which is what a Government can deliver. If we do that over an extended period, which we have done in this Government for the last 7 years, then that leads to higher levels of confidence, as we see in every review of consumer and business confidence that comes through. And it is that confidence that leads to investment, and it is investment that leads to the jobs that employ young Māori and young New Zealanders from all around this country.

One of the problems that we have had in New Zealand—and if we go back, when I grew up we often heard that New Zealand was one of the three or four richest countries in the world back in 1951 and in the 1950s and the 1960s, and it has all been downhill since then and woe is us as a country. That is a negative way of looking at New Zealand’s history, but there is an element of truth in the fact that we were a highly prosperous country back in the 1950s and the 1960s, and the primary reason for that was that we had open access to the UK market, which was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We lost that in 1973, and we have been out in the wilderness ever since looking for access to markets to sell our goods. We are living in a big, bad world. Nobody has to take our products, nobody has to receive things that we sell them without putting tariffs on or making life difficult for us.

Why do we have to sell our goods? Well, most people would notice that we do not build cars in New Zealand, we do not build TVs or iPhones. So there are things that we import, and in order to pay for them we need to export. That is why we have to have access to international markets. It is not written in stone. There is no rule out there saying that every country should accept New Zealand’s goods. They do not have to, and they make life difficult for us and they have made life difficult for us over many decades. Over the last few years they have put high tariffs on New Zealand products, and right now New Zealand farmers, or producers of all sorts of materials who employ New Zealanders, compete against other countries that have tariff-free entry into markets such as Mexico or the United States. New Zealand producers have to pay tariffs, and so we are at a competitive disadvantage. That is why it is so important that we continue our efforts to break down those barriers.

So for me I struggle to understand why any New Zealander would not be fully supportive of the massive, massive progress and breakthrough that we have had with the TPP and the opportunity for New Zealanders to have better market access to markets with 800 million people there to buy our products. That will enable us to sell more of our products more effectively, become a wealthier country, and be able to employ more New Zealanders, whether they are young Māori near the Rātana Pā or New Zealanders from all over the country, and provide them a better opportunity to do well in their lives. It is a cause for great celebration. It astonishes me that the Labour Party, the once-proud Labour Party, the once - free trading Labour Party that Phil Goff represented so well when he was trade Minister, has now lost its way entirely. It does not know what it stands for, in my view, and has retreated back. From the point of view of a New Zealander, it worries me that the main Opposition party has lost its way to that extent, and that that consensus that we had in New Zealand about the importance, as a small country at the bottom of the world, of gaining access to international markets has been undermined under this current leadership. I just hope the Labour Party will—and I encourage it to—rethink and get in and support that.

I was also pleased to see the Prime Minister’s announcements on the huge investments going on in and into Auckland, a city where I live and am proud to call home. As every Aucklander knows, the place is booming. It is growing fast, and we have all the challenges of growth that you would expect. We need to build more roads and transport infrastructure to move people around, and we need to facilitate the more rapid development of housing so that our Aucklanders can afford good housing in their city. So I was very pleased to hear the Prime Minister advancing the City Rail Link, which will be an important part of the overall Auckland transport package. At the moment we have a dead-end there at Britomart Place; if we can get that circle going we can massively increase the throughput in the rail corridor in Auckland, and you can expect over the next 20 or 30 years, as the city continues to grow and continues to be prosperous, that development will cluster along those railway lines and the city overall will be more efficient. I was also very excited to see the announcement that the East-West Link will be advanced. For those who are not sure what the East-West Link is, it connects the motorway going from State Highway 20 around the Māngere Bridge across to the southern motorway, and that, again, will be very important basic infrastructure work. The National Party, as the Prime Minister said this morning, is the party that develops the infrastructure for the city; unfortunately, the Labour Party supporters are the ones who sit in the middle of it and block the traffic, like they did last week. We are trying to make some progress, and that is important.

In terms of the broader atmosphere, I am not surprised that New Zealanders are feeling confident. We continue to grow well; the New Zealand economy grew 2.3 percent last year. If we look around the world, that is rare; that is good-quality performance. We have had annual wage growth in New Zealand: the average annual wage is now $57,000, an increase of $10,000 since we came into power in 2008, and employment is growing rapidly. So we have got 175,000 extra jobs that have been created over the past few years. In my role in the commerce space, one of the sorts of things that I will be focusing on over this year that I think is very important for New Zealanders is that we are reviewing the financial adviser space. New Zealanders have been very strong in the habit of seeing investment in private property and residential real estate as an important way to save. That is fine, and very good, but we should also encourage New Zealanders to invest in financial markets and to broaden their asset base. KiwiSaver has made good progress in that area over the last few years, but the most important thing we can do as a Government is maintain confidence in the conduct of financial markets in New Zealand, so that New Zealanders can feel confident to invest and grow their wealth. That is why we have had big changes in that area in the last couple of years.

One of the areas that we are looking at very closely this year is the review of financial advisers. At the moment we do have a system where the average man or woman on the street looking to invest is having to navigate the way through authorised financial advisers or registered financial advisers or qualifying financial entities, and it is a bit confusing. So we have been out working hard trying to work out how we can have a system that is easy to understand and enables New Zealanders to get better access to financial advice. We are working very closely with the industry over the course of the year to get that right, because it is an area that is very complicated, and we want to regulate in the best possible way so that we are facilitating good advice.

The other area that I might just mention briefly is competition law. Here we are in a small economy, an isolated economy at the bottom of the world. It is very important for New Zealanders to make sure that we have a robust competition regime for the domestic market, so we can get access to the best possible prices. That is why we have been reviewing section 36 of the Commerce Act at the moment, and we will be looking very closely at that over this year. Thank you very much.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I understand the next call is a split call. Jenny Salesa—5 minutes.

JENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, for this short call in response to the Prime Minister’s statement. New Zealanders are not a greedy people. Most are highly aspirational for their kids. Their dreams are modest, such as owning their own homes and having a secure future for their children, a well-paid, secure job, and some time to enjoy life with their family and friends. Together, these make up the Kiwi Dream.

However simple these aspirations may appear, this Government is not doing much to keep them within the reach of the majority of New Zealanders. This Government does not value the dreams of middle and low income parents, and more and more of my constituents in South Auckland, as well as thousands of New Zealanders, are being shut out of the Kiwi Dream.

Inequality, for which we all pay the price in due course, is on the rise here in New Zealand. The economy is increasingly weighted towards people already doing well, and blocking others from getting ahead. In spite of protestations to the contrary from the other side, the reality is that this Government has turned a blind eye to the appalling rates of poverty blighting the future of many tens of thousands of our children—the kind of poverty that we see on a daily basis in our electorates in South Auckland. Research highlights the close links between poverty and underachievement from preschool onwards, creating bigger and bigger problems for our children and our society well down the track.

A genuinely forward-looking, forward-thinking Government should be doing everything it can to make sure that the Kiwi Dream is within reach of every single person. My colleagues and I have been out on the road in the last few weeks with the Future of Work Commission, talking to businesses, teachers, educators, and ordinary New Zealand citizens. We have had a great reception to the issues papers and the plans that we have. We plan to modernise our education system, so that every child is better prepared for jobs—even the jobs that have not even been invented yet—in our country as well as globally.

Our leader, Andrew Little, has committed the Labour Party to a new principle—a new principle that I wholeheartedly support—we will not tolerate poverty in New Zealand in the 21st century. In Government, action against poverty will be nested at the heart of everything that a Labour Government will do. We will work towards making sure that every early childhood education teacher is fully qualified, so that every child gets the best possible start in life. We will make sure that hungry children are fed. We will make sure that children grow up in healthy, warm, and dry homes, not ones that are cold, full of mould, and in winter contribute to children passing away. Every decision our Government will make will be checked against its impact on child poverty.

Education is one of the keys to unlocking future prosperity for those on low incomes and for those who are not able to find work. They need education, they need training, and they need the barriers to education and training to be eliminated. We would not continue the current governmental neglect of education. National refuses to properly invest, shifting more and more costs on to parents and students while wasting valuable time and resources trying things on our kids, copying experiments that have failed elsewhere. We plan to make sure that our children are ready for work in the 21st century with the right skills and training, without the fear of being saddled with debt. The nature of work is changing rapidly and our education system must keep up with that to ensure that the opportunities of the future are such that we in New Zealand are able to compete in a global economy. The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research estimated that 48 percent of New Zealand jobs are at risk from automation within the next 24 years.

Our new policies are bold, and they will open the door to higher learning for people who have never studied beyond high school. We will ensure that every New Zealander has the tools that they need to be able to have a share of the Kiwi Dream. Thank you very much.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Adrian Rurawhe—5 minutes.

ADRIAN RURAWHE (Labour—Te Tai Hauāuru): Ā, tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te W’are, otirā, ki ngā mema katoa o Te W’are nei, tēnā tātau katoa.

[Greetings to you, Mr Assistant Speaker, but at the same time to all members of this House. Acknowledgments to us all.]

It is a pleasure for me to rise in this debate. I think there are some really important issues that have been raised and need to be addressed as well. A number of people have mentioned Rātana Pā. That is where I come from. That is my marae—the centre of my universe. It never ceases to astonish me to see the number of politicians who come to Rātana Pā, say what they have to say but do not listen to what we have to say. And I have to say that some of the comments from the Government benches today about what was said at Rātana bear only a resemblance to what they said, not what they should have heard.

I endorse the words of Rāhui Papa who spelt out quite clearly why Māori are against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. The Government benches would do well to take note of that. It is not every day that you get 20,000 to 30,000 people walking up Queen Street, and a large proportion of them were Māori. They were expressing their disappointment with the Government, because we as Māori know what partnership is. I can tell you that the process that was used for so-called engagement with Māori on the TPP agreement was sadly deficient. That was spelt out by Rāhui Papa and I endorse those words. He also talked on behalf of not only Rātana but also the major Māori movements that were on that paepae, and I think that the Government members have misread what they have heard at Rātana, and they would do well to start doing some listening, because if they do not, then I think that the actions of the people who expressed their frustration on the roads of Auckland will become more common. As the people who participated in those protests have said, it is not over yet.

I think that that is a warning to the Government that any Government that thinks that its policy is so great, that this partnership deal is so wonderful, should be able to take the people of New Zealand with it, and it has failed to do that. It has failed Māori and it has failed ordinary New Zealanders, who not only do not see any benefits for them but are happy to come out and express that. If the benefits are so good, then why is it that the Government cannot convince ordinary New Zealanders that there are benefits for them? I will tell you why. I think it is because, say if you ask the ordinary people a simple question like “Are you better off since a National Government came into power or are you worse off?”—I can tell you that, as my colleague Jenny Salesa has spelt out in her speech about poverty, there are huge numbers of our w’ānau who continue not only to live in poverty but to have a decrease in their spending ability at the local supermarket, and these are the things that really matter for them.

I also want to look at one of the fundamental building blocks to ending poverty, and that is education. That is why we believe that our Working Futures Plan and having 3 years of tertiary education is good for all New Zealanders. It is fair, it addresses issues like access to education, and I personally have received a lot of good feedback from our people on this issue. So I think there is some positivity coming into the future and I will leave it there—2017, bring it on. Kia ora.

SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): It is a privilege and a pleasure to rise in support of the Prime Minister’s statement made in this House earlier this afternoon, and to oppose the amendment presented by the current Leader of the Opposition.

Before I commence my contribution I just really want to pass a quick comment on the contribution of the Labour member who has just resumed his seat, Adrian Rurawhe, because it epitomises the problem and the woolly thinking that the Labour Party has right at the moment. He was praising the actions of protesters, many of whom clearly had absolutely no idea what they were protesting against, who were just there for the day out and the loudspeakers and the parade, and then demanding from the Government that we provide solutions to economic problems and challenges, but providing no alternative or plan about how wealth can be created to invest in creating those solutions so desperately needed by so many people. And that really sums up the problem that the Labour Party has in terms of its position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, because the party is split, it is divided, it is not unified, and it is all over the place.

It has been a very good summer for the Government. Economic indicators are looking good, our economy is growing, and forecasts are that over the next 5 years or so the economy will continue to grow at about 2.7 percent per annum. Unemployment is down. We now have unemployment at levels not seen for the last 7 years and we are amongst a very small elite number—I think it is only one of three OECD countries with lower unemployment than ourselves. ACC levies have been reduced and will be reduced further this year. Tourism numbers are up by a staggering percentage, with 38 percent growth in the last 12 months in terms of international visitors.

This is a Government that is united, that is focused, that is energetic, and that is disciplined, and, what is more, amongst the Government caucus we all like each other. We all get on. It is a strange concept for some parties in this House, but we actually enjoy each other’s company. We had an opportunity today in our caucus to hear a very fine contribution from the Hon Tim Groser as he made his final contribution and speech to the National Party caucus. I really want to just acknowledge with grateful thanks, as a rural provincial MP, the work that Tim Groser has done on behalf of all New Zealanders, but in many respects it is the rural and provincial areas of the country that will gain the most in the years to come from the work that he has done. On this side of the House we support our leader, we support the Prime Minister, and we support his Cabinet. We are focused on the work we do and we are determined to bring even better outcomes for New Zealanders than have been achieved over the last few years of this Government’s administration. We do get on with each other and we like each other’s company.

Contrast that with those members who sit opposite. They are ill disciplined, they have no focus, they are low in energy—as one American political aspirant might describe them—and they are people who are divided, split, and do not have any sense of unity of either thought or purpose. Those are not the signs of a party that is ready for Government in any way, shape, or form. There is no sign of any bold new thinking. There is no sign of any intellectual rigour. There is no sign of any planning or forethought about what might be done. The only solution they come up with is more spending of money, of hard-working taxpayers’ money, and no plan at all about how to generate a greater level of wealth so that economic wealth can be spread around for the entire nation. How is it that in that divided Labour Party opposite, the Hon Phil Goff can be granted a special dispensation to support the TPP, while David Shearer, apparently, even though he does support the TPP, is granted no such dispensation? And what about Clayton Cosgrove, Stuart Nash, and some of those other free-thinking, right-thinking people in the Labour Party caucus?

The TPP will benefit primary producers and manufacturers in my electorate. These are people who understand trade, they understand the necessity for us to make our way in the world, and they understand and support what this Government is doing because they know that it means more jobs, more money, and better, brighter futures for us all. They understand and know that only good things come from trading internationally, and that Labour’s position is not only confused but, on this issue, is very wrong.

I concur with the comments of one of my colleagues earlier this afternoon—I think it was the Hon Paul Goldsmith in his contribution—when he said that he is actually very disappointed and saddened by the once-proud Labour Party, which actually was supportive of free trade, which actually had a fine free-trade principled position. Its former leader Helen Clark, of course, said it would be unthinkable—unthinkable—for New Zealand not to be part of this agreement. Voters in my part of the country know that, and they now feel let down by this Labour Opposition.

I just want to spend a minute or two talking about my electorate, because it is one of the most beautiful parts of the country and it has been a very good summer. There is grass that is green in parts of my electorate where normally at this time of the year there is not green grass growing, and so the effects of El Nino have not been as harsh or as dramatic as we were concerned about before Christmas.

But it would be remiss of me, when I am speaking of my electorate, not to note the passing of one of the Coromandel’s great iconic characters. Barry Brickell OBE, passed away a couple of weeks ago. A potter, artist, railway builder, visionary, and absolute true Coromandel character, he will be much missed in Coromandel and much missed in the region. As I walked past some of his wonderful clay pots that have been a feature of the Beehive since it was constructed and opened all those years ago, I was moved to just touch a pot and think fondly of Barry. I will miss his wonderful, long, typewritten letters. He used to write letters to me on a manual typewriter, covering a whole range of subjects. I learnt very quickly that it was much easier to engage him in a conversation—or, preferably, go and visit him—in order to engage and respond to those wonderful letters that he used to send me. As I say, our region is the poorer for his passing, but his legacy will absolutely live on.

Over the adjournment I was able to visit most parts of the beautiful Coromandel electorate, and I have got to report that people are in good heart. We have actually been, in my electorate, the net beneficiaries of much of what is called the Auckland property boom. So much focus has been paid on how much houses are selling for in Auckland and who is buying them, but, actually, very little attention has been paid to what happens to the people who have sold their homes and where the money does go.

Well, I am pleased to report that an awful lot of that money has been coming to regions like mine. In towns like Thames, Ngātea, Paeroa, Te Aroha, Whitianga, Whangamata, and Katikati—these are the towns that are reaping the rewards of the Auckland property boom, because people are selling their homes in Auckland and they are coming to live in one of the most beautiful parts of the country, where they can buy property that by Auckland standards appears to be of remarkable value. They get a terrific community, they get wonderful services, they get great schools, and they get—naturally, of course—a terrific quality of parliamentary representation. But I would say that, would I not?

They are coming in their droves. What happens then is that often they are buying houses that mean that maybe they have got some surplus cash, so they are ripping out bathrooms and putting in new kitchens, and that is keeping the tradespeople happy. Then the appliance dealers and sellers are selling new fridges, new stoves, and new freezers, and so the economy in the Coromandel is actually doing very well. Because so many people do visit the Coromandel over the summer, I want to thank those people who have kept us safe over the summer: the police, ambulance, search and rescue, the coast guard, fire service, and all the volunteers who have done such a terrific job when we have so many visitors.

This is going to be a very busy and good year for the Government. We have got a very full agenda of work ahead of us. I chair the Local Government and Environment Committee, and on our agenda alone we have got a very big piece of work, which is phase two of the Resource Management Act reforms, which will be coming before my committee shortly. We will continue working on the suite of Christchurch-related legislation that is currently before us, and we are working on changes to improve the safety of young children in terms of swimming pool fencing. That will be coming to the committee and the House later this year. It is going to be a good year for the Government, it has been a very good summer, and I am looking forward to getting back into it. Thank you.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): The next call is a split call—Catherine Delahunty, 5 minutes.

CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare Pāremata. I would like to address the Prime Minister’s speech on the theme of leadership, but before I do that I would like to acknowledge the loss of two extremely visionary leaders in our region over this summer: Gordon Stephenson, an extraordinary man who developed the Maungatautari Ecological Island Trust and also the Queen Elizabeth the Second National Trust; and also Barry Brickell, whom the previous speaker Scott Simpson mentioned, who was a friend of mine for 42 years. He was a unique master craftsman and conservationist who had fought very hard for the conservation values of our area.

But back to the Prime Minister’s speech and the issue of leadership. Leadership is critical at all levels, and leadership is not about going to the rugby when things get tough. The Prime Minister’s leadership has actually raised eyebrows and questions in this last week, and after Rātana I think there are some important issues that the Prime Minister did not want to hear about but should listen to.

When we went to Rātana, on the paepae there was a very clear message to the Government. The message was that it has failed to listen to the concerns and failed to engage with Te Tiriti relationship seriously. It could not have been laid down more clearly by people such as Rāhui Papa—and I acknowledge his family’s recent loss as well. Respects to his whanau, but also respects to him for the kōrero, and the kōrero of others on that paepae who made it crystal clear that they could not support the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement when it had been imposed on them in this abusive way—let alone the content of it, which my colleague Marama Davidson will address shortly.

Rātana was the beginning, and the Prime Minister did not like it. It was obvious that he did not like it. So when he was challenged by Te Tii Marae about the TPP agreement, instead of saying “I will support the kawa of the marae.”, he threw his toys and said: “No, I’m not coming.” I have been to Waitangi every year for 15 years, and so far no one has thrown a squeaky sex toy or replica phallus at me, yet, for undermining sovereignty—but there is still time! Who knows? However, if they do, I will still be coming back, because, actually, we are there to listen. Whakarongo ki Te Tiriti o Waitangi [Listen to the Treaty of Waitangi] and the people who hold it in their hearts in Tai Tokerau.

It was very disappointing to see the Prime Minister refusing to acknowledge protocol. A protocol was offered to him: to not politicise the pōwhiri and to speak elsewhere. He could not abide by that, so he went to the rugby and had a sulk. That is not leadership. We need visionary leadership in this country that will face up to the challenges, and if we put out challenges that others disagree with, we should face those challenges.

Politicians—we have protocols here that all the citizens who come to Parliament have to abide by. Metiria Turei made this excellent point, that when Ngāpuhi or any other tangata whenua iwi come to Parliament, they have to abide by our protocols. When we go to marae, it is our responsibility, as politicians as well as citizens, to abide by the kawa of those marae. What is more, particularly at Waitangi on Waitangi Day, our job is to whakarongo—to listen.

So the Greens actually went to Waitangi to listen. We had a warm welcome at Te Tii Marae. We stuck to the kawa. We did not politicise the pōwhiri. We went to the political tent, and we listened in the political tent, where we heard about the TPP agreement. We heard about indigenous voices from COP-21. We heard about water and the importance of protecting water by not pretending no one owns it. We listened and contributed; that is what leadership is about.

Leadership is not about being in the club internationally, imposing your will upon a country, and then turning round and saying: “I’m not going to engage because I want to set the rules.” That is not Te Tiriti o Waitangi, it is not respectful, and it is not the way in which leadership takes place. I am proud to be a Green member, because I think we demonstrated leadership at Waitangi and we received the benefit of others’ leadership. I honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Kia ora tātou katoa.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I call Marama Davidson—5 minutes.

MARAMA DAVIDSON (Green): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare, huri noa ki a koutou ngā mema Pāremata katoa.

[Greetings to you, Mr Assistant Speaker, and to all of you, members of Parliament throughout the House.]

My tūpuna understood trade, and they understood economy. Being savvy economists and savvy traders is in our Māori whakapapa. I was just in Kororāreka in the Bay of Islands over Waitangi weekend, looking out over the very bay where Māori and Pākehā trade was a flourishing infrastructure by the early 19th century. This was so all around Aotearoa, I know—I cannot resist this, but our people once were traders. But despite iwi becoming involved in a new trading economy with Pākehā, they did not fundamentally change the way they organised whānau and hapū, and there lies the difference. The power structures that were necessary in order to maintain our honest care for each other, our whenua, and our wai had to stand strong. I am thinking about the words of Ani Mikaere, who talks about the word “rangatira” and who says that “with ‘ranga’ coming from the word ‘raranga’ which means ‘to weave’ and ‘tira’ referring to a group, it is apparent that the task of [a] rangatira” was to weave together a group.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, as we have heard from many learned experts from around the world and from here, is not about trade. This crappy deal is not about weaving people together. The learned experts in all sorts of fields and stakeholder groups, alongside mass movements—including 250,000 in Germany—of caring citizens around the world, are opposed to this deal and are standing up strong to say so. As the spokesperson on Māori affairs, I am proud that the Green Party stands strong with those caring citizens and learned experts, and certainly with the vast majority of tangata whenua, who feel super-excluded by the process and who know that the driving force behind this deal is not to weave people together. It is not to sustain Papatūanuku, our big mother.

The Federation of Māori Authorities may not have been on the anti-TPP hīkoi, but, Mr Key, there were many more Māori on the hīkoi—Māori taking claims to the Waitangi Tribunal, Māori on the front lines of commentary about this deal, and Māori collaborating internationally with other opposed groups—and I mihi to Moana. I want to say to Mr Key: “You just keep holding on to your few allies and holding them up to be the majority—and they are not.” They are not. There are so many other voices who need to be heard in this House, no matter how many times this Government ignores them.

I have been hearing from previous speakers from the Government, who have obviously been ignoring those voices when they say they cannot present alternative visions. They are not alternative visions; they are what we need to survive in this world. This here and now that we have got—this is the alternative that we need to change. Those voices are not just opposed to this deal—those people, like the Greens, have visions for better trade, for fair trade, and for better industries that are not going to die a painful, excruciating death and take our people with them. Along with the voices who need representation in this House, who oppose the TPP agreement, I want to also support the tribunal report that said the Crown does not have widespread support for Te Ture Whenua Maori Act reforms. Minister Finlayson came out over the weekend and dismissed the tribunal’s response. I want to say it is Ture Whenua Maori—it is Māori land. If Māori are not collectively rushing and driving these changes, then our job is to turituri, to taihoa, and to whakarongo [to be quiet, to wait, and to listen].

I am always mindful of the honour it is for me to stand in this House, represent the voices, and represent the Green Party. Kia ora.

Hon NICKY WAGNER (Minister of Customs): I move, That this debate be now adjourned.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the debate be now adjourned.

Ayes 63

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

Noes 58

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

Motion agreed to.

Debate interrupted.

Bills

Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill

First Reading

Debate resumed from 8 December 2015.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Members, when we were last debating the first reading of the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill, the Hon Ruth Dyson was speaking and has 30 seconds remaining if she so wishes.

Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I most certainly do want to make the most of this opportunity. I want to begin by wishing you and all members of the House a very happy New Year, in this the Year of the Monkey, and say that Labour is supporting the referral of the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill to the select committee. I hope that when it comes back to this House and progresses through to the third reading all parties are supportive of it, because in civil defence that would be a very good message for us to give from the whole of Parliament. I am still of the view that there is more room for communities and people in this legislation—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. Your 30 seconds has gone so fast. I call Mark Mitchell, who has more than 30 seconds.

MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): It is a real pleasure to stand and take a call on the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill. I just want to acknowledge the Minister of Civil Defence, the Hon Nikki Kaye.

We may not think it but this is a really important bill. I just want to hark back to 2007-08, when in another role, in another time, I was involved with an initiative that was born out of a World Economic Forum decision to form, with some of the big logistics companies around the world, what were called “LET” teams—logistics emergency teams. The purpose of those teams was to be able to deploy into areas that had been hit by humanitarian disaster and were in need of first responders to get supply chain solutions and logistics, and medical supplies and food, to the people who had been cut off from that type of support.

I was very lucky that I was involved in logistics emergency teams deploying to places like Lebanon, Indonesia, Pakistan, when they had the earthquakes there, and Haiti. One thing that I really noticed, one thing that became glaringly obvious, is that especially in these remote areas Governments, of course, should be taking the lead in terms of coordinating humanitarian groups and logistics companies in the private sector. The private sector is very efficient. It can get things done, but of course it relies very heavily on Government support to be able to reduce compliance issues and access and transit through airports and ports and things like that, to be able to coordinate and allow teams to actually get on the ground and deliver the aid.

One thing that I really noticed and that became quite apparent is Governments, sometimes, are not really that good at doing that. It highlighted the fact that for them to be able to provide support and respond properly in a civil defence incident there has to be a lot of planning. There has to be genuine strategic planning around how they are actually going to go from a contingency type of environment, where you are dealing with a situation that may be a week to 3 weeks old, and then transitioning into more of a sustainment type operation, where the support may be required for 6 months, 12 months, or anything up to 18 months.

So I just want to highlight the fact that the work that Minister Nikki Kaye has done and the ministry has done around this is actually really important. New Zealand, of course—we are really lucky. We are not necessarily facing the same challenges that you might have in an environment like Lebanon or Pakistan or Haiti, but the fact of the matter is that it is really important that the Government is able to make sure that we have got a very good policy setting in legislation that will allow for that coordination and allow for that transition from a contingency type environment into sustainment and sustainability.

Unfortunately, we are subjected to our own issues when it comes to—we saw, obviously, what happened, the tragedy that we faced in Christchurch with the earthquakes. We have adverse weather events all around the country. I have had them in my own electorate of Rodney and I have also had a couple of tsunami warnings that we have had to deal with. When you have got a peninsula with 30,000 people on it, it is actually pretty important to make sure that we have got really robust civil defence action plans in place.

So what the bill actually does is it “amends the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002 to enable better recovery from New Zealand’s most frequent emergencies—those of small to moderate scale.” The Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill will amend the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act to establish a legislative framework for recovery management by providing the mandate for recovery managers and by requiring high-level preparatory recovery planning. This is really important, so that there is a standardised set of policies and guidelines that recovery managers are able to refer to and work to so that we have a standardised programme right throughout New Zealand.

It supports a seamless transition from response and into the initial recovery phase by establishing a transition notice mechanism that will make some emergency powers available for a specified period of time. I will talk about those transition notices a little bit later in my speech, but they are actually very important and a very important part of the overall work that has been done on this. It is to establish a permanent legislative authority, and, of course, that is going to allow some proper focus in terms of appropriation.

The bill is actually the first stage of a wider review into the legislative framework for recovery. The second stage will address the legislative framework required for recovery from large-scale emergencies, and I gave an example earlier of the tragedy in the earthquake that we faced in Canterbury.

Historically, most attention has been given to preparing for and responding to an event. However, as we have seen in the Manawatū-Whanganui region following the severe storm in June, the clean-up and recovery phase can involve a huge amount of work at the front end and then, of course, there is the continued clean-up. The new law will give clarity to those leading this work and will help ensure it can be carried out as swiftly and as effectively as possible. It will do this by providing appropriate authority for those directing, coordinating, and managing the recovery. That is actually really important because there is nothing more frustrating for emergency services and a civil defence team than trying to make things happen and not being clear or sure around the authority that they have under the Act.

I said I would speak about the transition notices, so I will just touch on them very quickly. The transition notices will enable civil defence emergency management officials to carry out works, clear roads and other public spaces, and remove, dispose of, secure, or make safe dangerous structures and materials. Again, Christchurch and Christchurch City highlighted the importance of being able to do this quickly. They can enter into premises, for example, to save a life, to prevent an injury, or to rescue and remove injured or endangered persons. These powers will ensure that what was achieved during the response is not destabilised when moving into that contingency and sustainability phase, putting life and property back at risk and/or derailing an effective and timely recovery.

It is proposed that these powers could be used only during a defined transition phase. Their use must be proportionate, reflecting the consequences and scale of the emergency, and they must only be exercised to the extent reasonably necessary for the public interest. A declaration of a state of emergency is not necessary for the issuing of a transition notice. That is actually quite important to highlight because some emergencies will generate impacts of sufficient severity that the recovery may be very challenging initially but the safety of the public and property is not in immediate danger, meaning that maybe a state of emergency was not declared but it is still quite important to be able to issue a transition notice. I am very happy to stand in support of the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill. Thank you.

JAN LOGIE (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. I rise to take a call on the first reading of the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill. The Green Party is supporting this bill. We acknowledge the need to resolve some issues that have been identified through reviews and we recognise this bill as part of that process. This bill relates to recovery from small to moderate disasters, and we have been told to expect legislation later in the year for larger-scale disasters on the scale of Canterbury, which we hope never to see again.

There is a lot of work going on in this space. There has been the review of the response to the Canterbury earthquake, management of natural hazards through the Resource Management Act, and the building emergency management. Of course, all of this sits—hopefully—within a framework of the National Civil Defence Emergency Management Strategy and relates to the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002 and the 2015 plan, which this legislation sits within, or over. It is important to point out that part of what this bill seeks to do is legalise guidelines and processes that are already in the existing plan but are not formalised through legislation. So we may be a little bit behind the eight ball in doing this, but it is probably good that it is coming to the House now.

The 2002 legislation, which this all sits within, focuses on the four Rs—reduction, readiness, response, and recovery—and this bill specifically focuses on the recovery aspect. This is an appropriate area of work for the Government, and I do not think anyone in Canterbury or with links to Canterbury would argue that this is not a critically important area of Government concern and Parliament’s concern.

The Green Party will be interested in the discussion through the select committee of any issues relating to the oversight and consistency of this bill with other work that is happening, as well as the existing frameworks and experience on the ground, because that we have a lot to learn from. It is undoubted that we know we have an increasing need for civil defence emergency management planning. As a result of improved reporting but also climate change, increased population pressure, and building on land that was never meant to be built on, we have seen a massive increase in natural disasters over the last few decades. Globally, there was an average of 78 recorded national disasters every year through the 1970s. Now there are over 350 recorded natural disasters every year, and some of the figures I read showed that 217 million people have been impacted on by natural disasters every single year since the 1980s. In New Zealand we have been spending between $1.2 billion and $2 billion—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.

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

JAN LOGIE: As I was saying before the bell interrupted me, there is no doubt that the number of natural disasters around the world and in this country is increasing, and in recent years New Zealand has been spending between $1.2 billion and $2 billion a year in cleaning up natural disasters in this country. This bill is dealing with those things in terms of emergency management and it is dealing with natural disasters, although it is also dealing with issues beyond that. A state of emergency may also be triggered by an epidemic, an actual or imminent attack, or a warlike act, so we are not talking exclusively of natural disasters in this legislation. As we know, though, natural disasters—and it does seem some days, when you are looking at the world, that terrorism is also increasing around the world.

Clearly, despite our existing legislation’s focus on reduction, preparedness, and prevention, we need to be doing more as a society around that. We need to be building strong, interconnected communities to prevent terrorism. We need to be ensuring strong biosecurity measures around public health at our border. We need to invest in public health in this country and to have strong regulations around where people are allowed to build, and we need to put plans in place and support our councils to deal with rising sea levels and the flooding that we know is coming. And, critically, we need to ensure that we reduce our carbon emissions and take some leadership on preventing even worse climate change.

We need to do much more on all of these measures, but the reality is that we already have communities living in at-risk areas. One degree Celsius of warming has happened and more is already locked in, so we will have an increasing number of increasingly severe storms and droughts in this country as climate change evolves. We also know that we live in a country with fault lines, which we cannot control. There are limits to our ability to control nature and other people, so no one—especially not the Greens—is arguing about the importance of having good emergency management.

This bill is focused on the recovery aspect of the four Rs, which are reduction, readiness, response, and recovery. Specifically, the main provisions of this bill are to introduce group and local recovery managers and the requirement to put in place a recovery plan in the event of an emergency. Currently, the Act does not establish these roles or clarify the mandate for these people, even though they are in the plan that was put in place and agreed on last year, I understand. As I mentioned earlier, we are actually a little bit behind the eight ball in bringing this to the House, and I would have thought that if there was a need for legislation, it perhaps would happen concurrently with that decision or before locking that plan in. So existing roles and processes set out in the documents that exist do not have legislative mandates.

Legalising these roles intends to ensure that these people can do their jobs, and that seems to be a good thing. I would note as a caveat, though, that we certainly will be interested in hearing the perspectives from people at a local level, because I certainly know that in some communities where you have got really strong, good community networks there is the possibility that a more formalised structure may override and negate those networks. We saw that happen in Lyttelton, where its time bank meant that they had a list of contacts for everyone in that community and it listed their skills. They were able to jump in after the earthquake and connect, act, and build community as well as being engaged in that response and recovery, and then the formal structures came in and shut those people out. That, from what I have been told by the people there, was not a positive experience for them.

I have also seen the same in Paekākāriki after a flooding, where there was an amazingly innovative response of matching people who were affected with those who were not, so that the people who were not affected could go and deal with Work and Income and all the other institutions, which may not necessarily be very easy to deal with even in the best of circumstances. I would hate to see a system that locked out those very strong community responses, so we will be listening to hear from people to make sure that that does not do that.

What this also does is allow the Minister to declare a 90-day transition period after a national state of emergency and to extend this for another 90 days. The Minister can override normal legislation and continue to exercise emergency powers for up to 6 months in this legislation. The regulatory impact statement noted that the public may see this 90-day period as too long, even if it was most administratively efficient. So although we are certainly supporting this legislation at this stage, we will be listening very carefully to make sure that this is not another centralised Wellington attempt to impose the views of this Government on to local communities.

Good emergency management response utilises the knowledge and skills of communities; it does not override them. We would hate to see any legislation that furthered that type of approach. Thank you.

CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): It is great to be back after our summer adjournment and great to see everybody’s smiling faces back in the House, and, of course, our newest member on the other side there. It is lovely to have a new face to get to know. It gives me great pleasure also to look around this House.

Again, I see quite a collegial approach to this piece of legislation. In fact, I think, from memory, the last piece of legislation that we were discussing before we went into the adjournment we actually had a cross-party accord. It is great to see parties coming together when it comes to common-sense thinking. I can say that New Zealand First will be supporting this bill through to the select committee, and we look forward to pulling that apart and seeing how we can tidy it and titivate it to make it even better.

This is largely an innocuous piece of legislation. We see it as tidying up some areas that really help to communicate better with communities to actually help those affected communities get back on their feet very quickly, effectively, and in a timely fashion. I think every party has clearly said that that is the intent and that they are going to be supporting that through. This bill, the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill, is designed to affect just small and medium sized events that happen around the country. As the Greens have pointed out, those events, weather events largely, are happening more and more frequently and costing the country and communities a lot in lost profits and revenues, and, of course, jobs, etc. So everything that we can do to help those civil defence organisations and the local tertiary authorities to get themselves back on their feet, I think, has to be absolutely commended.

The bill basically does four things. Firstly, it identifies who does what and mandates roles of responsibility to that effect. Secondly, it works out how we do it and strengthens the recovery planning, establishes recovery management roles, and recovery coordination. Thirdly, it goes through transition management planning to establish transition notices, which gives the Minister, as we have just heard, 90 days and a further 90 days to make sure that the recovery is on track to get the area affected back on its feet quickly and effectively. Fourthly, it creates legislative authority allowing Crown funding, which comes back to the “Who pays?”.

I guess out of all those four things, the top three are absolutely fantastic, but there is a question mark around the “Who pays?”, because we have seen this Government get into a debt situation—over $100 billion now and rising—and it really is a question of how we are going to manage the “Who pays?” effect. I think Christchurch is a fantastic example where we have seen budgets being blown out, cumulative costs working into billions of dollars, and largely the insurance companies have not been able to cover the bill or have not actually been legally obliged to cover some of those bills. So the “Who pays?” is a big question that we are looking to have identified and worked through.

The transition notices, I think, are a great piece of legislation to go into here, giving the mandate of the Minister to identify this area, whether it be the whole country, whether it be a part, an area of the country that needs to have special attention provided, and it works through the groups, the civil defence emergency groups—what are they called here? I have got it written down. They are the groups that actually provide the services to make sure that it happens. So if we have got a transition period and a transition notice is given, then we can actually make sure that if a road needs to be shut down, if a property needs to be entered into, and if there are works that need to be done, we can get on with the job, we can close down that area, we can close it off to the public and it will not inhibit the recovery of one of those medium or minor infringements.

As I said earlier we are seeing more and more of these incidents around. We have had floods in the Wairarapa, we have had floods in Matatā, and Northland has been flooded. They seem to be happening at least annually, sometimes biannually, and it is a huge cost to the communities at large and particularly to those councils that are largely left to pick up the bill. Again, we would like to see a framework put into place describing what the amount of money is that is put aside for something as large as a medium-scale issue, such as flooding whether it be weather, whether it be high seas with king tides coming with high winds. Cyclone Bola is another example of where we needed civil defence to step in and help out.

It comes back to those five P’s: perfect preparation prevents poor performance. I know that we talked about the risk reduction, the readiness response, and recovery, but what we are really talking about is preparing ourselves for the worst-case scenario and ensuring that our communities can get back on to their feet as quickly and less onerously as possible.

The area that I have some concern with—and it came out in the regulatory impact statement—is with regard to the Order in Council. It says here: “For constitutional reasons, Orders in Council are generally only provided for where there exceptional circumstances. For this reason, they would be more appropriate to large-scale emergencies that (fortunately) are extremely rare—and which are not the focus of Stage One of the review and hence the analysis summarised in this [regulatory impact statement]. Any options for Orders in Council might fall in the ambit of the second stage of the review.” It would certainly raise some eyebrows in New Zealand First to have that brought into effect and anything where you have got an Order in Council I think we need to look very, very closely at as well.

We do support this bill through to the select committee. We think it actually addresses a number of issues that happen when you have a weather event or a civil defence emergency event, and we look forward to see whether we can break it apart more closely, look at it, and hear from submitters at the select committee. Thank you.

BRETT HUDSON (National): It is wonderful to be back after the summer adjournment. It is good to see you again in the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker.

I am looking forward to speaking on this, the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill. This is a bill that addresses better recovery from New Zealand’s most frequent emergencies, which are those of a small or moderate scale. It is part of a wider review. This is the first phase. The second phase will address the legislative framework required for recovery from large-scale emergencies such as the Christchurch earthquakes. But, as acknowledged, this is addressing those emergencies that are most frequent in New Zealand—those emergencies that are of small-to-moderate scale. What it is doing at the heart, if you will, is establishing a legislative framework for recovery management, providing a mandate for recovery managers and requiring high-level preparatory recovery planning.

What we have seen, and we have continued to see, with most of the smaller or moderate emergencies that we experience in New Zealand is a very, very heightened focus, as you may very well expect, on response. But the transition from response to recovery has not always operated as smoothly and as effectively as we and those who have suffered loss and injury and other issues may expect.

So this bill will seek to address that by supporting a seamless transition from response to the initial recovery phase. It establishes a transition notice mechanism that will make some emergency powers available for a specified period of time. It is those emergency powers that will enable those recovery managers to move swiftly and effectively into that most important next stage, which is when the response has been addressed but it is now time to recover and to address some of the major damage that may have happened, even in only a moderate-scale emergency.

We have got a really good example, actually, in the Manawatū-Whanganui region following the severe flooding there. It was an event that was classed as a moderate emergency but actually showed us that the clean-up and the recovery work involved a huge amount of work, something that, perhaps, we were not quite as prepared for in the transition as we should have been.

So the new law will give clarity to those leading the work. It will help ensure that it can be carried out as swiftly and effectively as possible. It will give them the appropriate authority they need to undertake works. Things that that may enable, for instance, are carrying out works to clear roads and other public places, removing and disposing of dangerous substances and materials, and actually entering into premises. One of the things that was heightened, I think, in that particular Manawatū-Whanganui event was the issue with seeking to have people leave their residences for their own safety and a lack of authority for those leading the recovery to actually ensure that that could happen.

So these amendments will seek to address that, and if it is to save life, prevent injury, or to rescue or remove injured or endangered persons, those recovery managers and teams will have the due authority that they would require to enforce those relocations. But it is important when we are considering granting some quite considerable powers that we make sure that we have pragmatic steps to make sure that they will not be extended or abused. For instance, one of the things that we will be doing is stipulating that the powers can be used only for a defined transition phase and that they must be proportionate, reflecting the consequences and scale of the emergency. So they must be fitting and they can be only for a defined period of time.

Another part that I see in this, which has not perhaps been canvassed that strongly but I think is important as we are giving these additional authorities and powers to recovery managers, is that the Act has compensation provisions for such emergencies, particularly when damage is caused by emergency management officials in undertaking their actions. There was, I believe, a small gap in that during the transition phase the Act, as it currently stands, might have prevented such compensation being payable to land and property holders. That is being addressed in these amendments so that if the officials do cause loss or damage during the transition phase, those property owners can be recompensed for that.

So I think it is very pragmatic and sound. It is a very smart thing for us to be doing. It is part of a wider review that will also address larger-scale emergencies, and I commend this bill to the House.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I call Eugenie Sage—a 5-minute call on behalf of the Green Party.

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

[Mr Deputy Speaker, greetings to you. Secondly, to the members of our House, greetings, salutations, and acknowledgments to you all.]

I am pleased to take a short call on the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill. The Green Party is supporting this bill because we believe that we do need to strengthen the law to help communities recover from small or moderate-scale emergencies and to make that transition from responding to the emergency to focusing on the recovery. We recognise that the principal Act, the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act, does not provide adequately for the planning and management of recovery.

When this bill was introduced in December, my thoughts were with the thousands of families in places like Cumbria in Scotland and in Northern Ireland. They were being flooded, sometimes for the second or third time in a decade. We had the floods in Chennai in Tamil Nadu in India, where at least 280 people died. They were facing the risk of water-borne disease after those severe floods and 17 straight days of rain. That is precisely the kind of weather that we are experiencing more of and it is likely to become more common with a warming world.

That is because warmer air holds more moisture. If we have global temperatures rising by 1.5 to 2 degrees, this risk of extreme weather events becomes much more severe and we will have legislation like this being triggered more often. We have seen the misery of that here in New Zealand with the extensive flooding in South Dunedin in June 2015 and in Whanganui, where there was record flooding. The river overflowed its banks and people were evacuated. In the rural catchments there was large-scale damage to farmland.

We need to take action to reduce our emissions so that we reduce the threat of these severe weather events that we are getting with climate change. We need to prevent these emergencies by having a much more ambitious target to reduce our emissions—to have the fence at the top of the cliff rather than the ambulance at the bottom.

We are certainly supporting this bill, but we will be very interested in submissions because of the way in which the emergency powers that override normal law operate. Under the current legislation when a state of emergency ends, the extraordinary powers that override normal law end as well. But the bill allows the Minister at the national level and mayors at the territorial level to direct that emergency powers continue beyond the emergency period, through the mechanism of this transition notice. It allows the Minister to declare a 90-day transition period after the national state of emergency or, if the transition phase warrants the use of extraordinary powers to stabilise the response and the transition into recovery, to extend this for another 90 days.

That means that the Minister or mayors can override normal legislation, such as the Resource Management Act, and can continue to exercise these extraordinary powers for up to 6 months. These powers include carrying out works, preventing people from entering public places, closing public roads, and giving directions to stop any activity or to take any action. They are very broad powers. We have seen in Christchurch that residents were prevented from going into the central city, where there was widespread demolition, by the extraordinary powers that the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority used that overrode the Resource Management Act, which prevented people from getting involved and having a say on demolition.

The powers in this bill, as the regulatory impact statement recognises, are potentially too long, in terms of the 90-day period, before a reassessment needs to be made. We will be very interested in the submissions and in seeing what checks are needed on these powers, how they are going to be reported on, and what sorts of constraints there should be on the extraordinary powers. We recognise the defects that require the legislation to be amended, but we think that the provisions for the transition notices and the extension of the extraordinary powers are not sufficiently constrained. We will be very interested in the submissions. Thank you.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I call Adrian Rurawhe—a 5-minute call on behalf of the Labour Party.

ADRIAN RURAWHE (Labour—Te Tai Hauāuru): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te W’are, otirā, tēnā tātou katoa.

[Greetings to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, but at the same time to all of us.]

I am pleased to take a call on the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill. As my colleagues have already stated, we will support this bill to the select committee. I look forward to the submissions to the select committee. I will be encouraging my constituents in Whanganui and in Whangaehu. The village at Whangaehu has been flooded four times in the last 11 years. So when we talk about recovery, we are talking long term. This bill addresses part of that issue, but it does not look at the long-term effect of flooding in an area on an ongoing basis. The Whangaehu village is a very small village. There are only about 12 houses there and about 10 of them get flooded every time the Whangaehu River floods. As I said, it has flooded four times in the last 11 years. The issue around recovery is real for those people. Transitioning from response to recovery should be done as soon as practicable. This bill addresses that. But there are some things that the bill does not address, which my colleagues have already raised, that I want to highlight as well. In particular, there is risk reduction. When you look at places like Whangaehu and Whanganui, risk reduction has a direct impact on the response and the recovery. I think that my constituents will be very interested in this piece of legislation, so that is why we are supporting it to go to the select committee.

But I also recognise—this is quite anecdotal—the feedback. One of my constituents lives only a couple of hundred metres away from me, and her house has flooded four times. She is in her nineties. She is determined to stay on her papa whenua, on her land. So we have to do something long term for some of these people. Recovery for some people in this instance, in instances that do not happen very often in a particular area, is one thing, but I think we also need to look at where incidents like this, events like this, happen to residents over and over again. Something more permanent needs to be done, whether it is relocation or it is raising their homes so that they do not flood. These are things that could be easily remedied, I think. I had a conversation with the Mayor of Rangitīkei, who really wants to address that issue with the residents in the Rangitīkei who are continually being flooded. In the Act itself, of course, we do support the inclusion of the transition periods. I think the implementation, though, needs to be carefully thought out. There have been some valid issues that have been raised in this debate already. I think that is something that the select committee needs to grapple with, to make sure that this legislation can be the best that it can be. Thank you. That is all I have to contribute to this debate. Kia ora.

TODD BARCLAY (National—Clutha-Southland): Mr Deputy Speaker, I would just like to acknowledge you and wish you a happy New Year. I look forward to seeing you down in sunny Gore on Friday. Thank you for your efforts down there. It is a privilege to speak on the first reading of the Civil Defence Emergency Management Amendment Bill. I just want to acknowledge, at the start of this contribution, a guy in my electorate called Craig Sinclair, who was a police officer in Mataura for a good couple of decades. He has just recently transitioned to the civil defence area. He is the civil defence management adviser for Otago and Southland. One of the moves that made him want to transition to that was to be part of the transformation that we have been seeing in civil defence. The Southland area that he mainly covers is quite diverse. It is largely rural, but there are also considerable risk areas with regard to Milford Sound, whether it be through flooding, tsunami, or landslide risks.

One of the things that he was saying is that when you are dealing with risks, no matter how big or small, there is a lot of emotion involved. You are dealing with a lot of volunteers in the recovery aspect as well, which made me think that the relevance to this bill is that it is good that we are providing a bit more clarity with regard to the transition between the civil defence issue and into the recovery phase because, obviously, associated with the processes that you need to go through in a risk—and every issue that you are dealing with is different—there is a lot of emotion involved as well. That is picking up the point of one of the previous members about the need for extraordinary powers in that regard because no two events are the same, I think that what this legislation does is frees things up a little bit more. Instead of having such a stringent legislative process that each event has to follow to the letter of the law, it provides much more flexibility but, by the same token, a lot of direction. With that, I just wanted to offer my support, and I look forward to following the bill through the select committee. Thank you.

KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): Can I just join the member who just took his seat, Todd Barclay, in wishing you a very happy New Year, and to the rest of the Speaker’s team, and also to all the members from around the House. I can guarantee that we will argue, bicker, and get to the stages where it got to at Seddon Park in Hamilton last night, but I do wish you all the best for the year.

As some members on this side of the House have said, we will be supporting the changes that are contained within the civil defence legislation. There are some reservations, which we will take to the select committee, where we will take the opportunity to ask some of the officials some questions. But on my first look at this piece of legislation, I think it will be very useful, especially to those people who do the hard graft when the small to medium events happen in our community to be able to, I think, as the previous speaker says, give them more options as to what to do when you are moving from the response stage to the recovery stage.

As a number of speakers have said, no two events are similar, and you can find yourself moving from the response stage to the recovery stage very, very quickly. In some instances you may be doing those two functions at the same time.

I have certainly had the privilege of being within civil defence emergency centres when events have been happening where I think this piece of legislation will help. I do not think there was confusion—because I think that would look unkindly upon the people who are running the operations—but I think that they have got some constraints upon them that say “We can do one thing here, but we can’t do one thing in another area.” I think the proposals that are made in this piece of legislation will, I guess, give those people the options now, and some flexibility to be able to do what they need to do when they are moving from one phase to the other.

I just wanted to make a couple of practical examples of things that have happened in my area in Porirua. If we can cast our minds back to June 2013, there was an almighty storm. A number of households were cut off with their power. I think that some were also cut off with their water because trees were down. At first, we thought things would be returned back to normal pretty quickly, and certainly the response was: “OK, most people have got their power back.” But there was a group of about a 150 to 200 people in and around pockets of Porirua who could not get their power back for days. Certainly, as an MP, and working with our local mayor Nick Leggett and some of his councillors in his civil defence emergency team, there was uncertainty as to who could push in which directions and how hard to make sure that those people got their power back.

There is one story I remember very vividly. We turned up to an area of Titahi Bay, which is the community that I live in. These people had been without power for 2 to 3 days. Thankfully, the council had made its arena available so they could have showers or charge their phones, but many did not take up the opportunity because they simply did not know when their power was going to come back on. So they stayed, just hoping that their power would come back on—an absolute vacuum of information.

So we turned up, and, as you can imagine, the locals were not happy. It did not matter whether or not we were from the power company or from the council or were the local MP, we were a target. It did not matter that we had no authority or ability to get their power back on; we were there, we were the target, and we got it in the ear as to why their power was not on. And fair enough; I think that is fair.

But I think this piece of legislation will enable those who are dealing with these incidents a little bit more leeway and a little bit more influence to deal with the likes of power companies and to be able to say: “OK, 2 to 3 days is enough when there are 200 or so households that haven’t had any power.” In the end, we went and spoke to the linesmen who were working down the road and said: “If you don’t get this power back on before the end of the day, there is going to be, potentially, some violence on the street, and, potentially, targeted towards us if we stick around much longer.” Thankfully, the power did come back on, but I think that was an instance where those people who were responding and moving to the transition of recovery, especially for those families, could have done with a bit more power.

I think that this piece of legislation does that, because, as other speakers have mentioned, the proposed recovery powers that are within this legislation will allow those who are dealing with incidents to carry out works, clear roads and other public places, and remove, dispose of, secure, or make safe dangerous structures and materials. Some of that may already be happening, but it may be on an ad hoc basis. It will also provide for the conservation and supply of food, fuel, and other essential supplies, such as water.

It will also allow the dissemination of information and advice to the public, which, in the instance I have just talked about, did not happen very effectively. So it ended up being myself and the mayor with a loud hailer on the street corner, which was the only information that some of these residents had had in the last 2 or 3 days. It will also allow agencies to evacuate premises and places; exclude people and vehicles from certain areas; to get on to premises, which is also very important to perform assessments of any damage that might have been done; to close roads and public places; give directions to stop activity or to limit the consequences of emergency, potentially for the purposes of coordinating recovery efforts; and require information for the recovery, e.g., from lifeline utilities such as power companies in the instance that I mentioned there.

So, all in all, I think this piece of legislation does deal practically with a number of practical issues that the people who are dealing with the small to medium emergency issues face when they are asked to respond. I do not think it takes care of some of the major issues that we saw come out of Canterbury, and I think that will come in the wider part of the review of civil defence legislation that is to come, which is one of the criticisms that we have with this piece of legislation—that maybe, perhaps, it could have been part of a catch-all review of civil defence legislation as reviews happen. In this instance, it has not happened, and I guess something is better than nothing. We will have the opportunity to also question the merits of the approach in the select committee hearings.

I guess it will make a positive difference. It will give, hopefully, those people, like Trevor Farmer in my area, the power to do some things that they have not been able to when we do have flooding or storms, which we also saw up on the Kāpiti coast late last year. Hopefully, that will make the lives easier for the people who are affected and also for the people who are responding and helping with the recovery to some of these incidents.

Bill read a first time.

Bill referred to the Government Administration Committee.

Bills

Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

First Reading

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): I move, That the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Commerce Committee to consider the bill. This bill amends the Patents Act 2013 and includes measures to build on Australia and New Zealand Closer Economic Relations. The Patents Act 2013 came into force on 13 September 2013 and was a significant step toward driving innovation in New Zealand. It replaced 60-year-old legislation and introduced a patent system in New Zealand that is tailored to the 21st century. Significantly, it also aligned our patent system more closely with that of Australia. In doing so, it enables measures to be taken to build on Australia and New Zealand Closer Economic Relations to further integrate trans-Tasman regulation.

Currently, most patent applications filed in New Zealand are also filed in Australia. Each application undergoes a separate examination process in each country to determine whether the application relates to a patentable invention and, therefore, whether or not a patent should be granted. Importantly, each country examines its application to determine whether the invention claimed is new, involves an inventive step, and is useful. This results in significant duplication of effort and resources to perform, essentially, the same task.

Part 1 of this bill provides for the implementation of a single patent examination process and a single examination process for Australia and New Zealand. Single, more efficient patent application and examination processes will remove duplication for both businesses and intellectual property offices of Australia and New Zealand. These processes have the potential to create significant savings for businesses and exporters needing professional advice and related services for obtaining patent protection. It will also make it easier for businesses to protect their inventions in both countries. A business will be able to prepare and file one patent application and pay one fee to either IP Australia or the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand, granting a patent in Australia and New Zealand.

The bill allows for IP Australia and the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand to develop work-sharing arrangements for the examination of patent applications. For example, it will enable patent applications for the same invention to be examined by a single examiner in either country. This will eliminate duplication of examination effort by IP Australia and the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand. The process will, however, take account of differences in national patent laws and result in two separate and independent patents. Each patent would be tailored to the specific and individual laws of Australia and New Zealand.

Part 2 of the bill implements a single trans-Tasman regulatory framework for Australian and New Zealand patent attorneys. Patent attorneys are a small profession providing specialist advice to businesses on the protection and exploitation of intellectual property rights. The regulation of New Zealand patent attorneys has remained essentially unchanged for more than 60 years, and because of this the framework falls well short of modern standards for occupational regulation. With the majority of Australian and New Zealand patent attorneys being registered to practise in both countries, a single regulatory framework will mean patent attorneys will be regulated under a modern occupational regulatory framework. It will save them time and costs because they are able to practise on both sides of the Tasman, it will break down barriers to patent attorneys offering their service on a trans-Tasman basis, and it will encourage competition within the profession for the benefit of businesses that need their services.

The bill seeks to implement the framework as set out in the Arrangement between the Government of Australia and the Government of New Zealand Relating to Trans-Tasman Regulation of Patent Attorneys. The framework will include a single register of patent attorneys, maintained by IP Australia, a trans-Tasman intellectual property attorneys board to administer the qualifications regime and investigate complaints about patent attorneys, and a trans-Tasman intellectual property attorneys disciplinary tribunal to determine such complaints.

The Government has worked closely with Australia to establish the framework, and I am grateful to my Australian counterparts for their work in this area. This is a small but significant step forward for our economic relationship with an important trading partner, and it will further the creation of a seamless trans-Tasman business environment. Once again, I do thank the Australian Government for its cooperation and assistance in this endeavour, and I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour): I thank the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs for his contribution and from the outset say that Labour will be supporting the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Obviously, we want to see the detail, as is the norm, and we reserve our rights to examine that closely, but I do share with the Minister on the importance of patent protection. For those of us who have been in business, in either large or small organisations, it is evident. And one of the biggest costs—and the Minister I am sure would acknowledge this—to an innovative business with an innovative product is the ability to protect the intellectual capital and the intellectual property of that particular item. I recall talking with a patent attorney in Auckland last year very briefly who made a case that one of the biggest contributions the Government could make would be to provide assistance in some way, shape, or form—possibly resource—to assist companies to lock down that intellectual property. I think the bill’s intentions, aims, and objectives will assist in terms of streamlining and making that more efficient and, hopefully, in reducing costs.

If you look at it in its most very basic form, if you cannot protect the intellectual property—you cannot afford to take out effective patents that are wide-ranging and global, which are extremely costly—then the truth is, whether you are a large company or a small company, somebody is going to eat your lunch. Somebody is going to steal that intellectual property, and for many innovators in New Zealand there are a couple of emotions that occur. You want angel seed funding but you do not want to give away the business, or you do not want to tell anybody about the product because you are scared someone will come along and replicate it or steal the idea. And there are those jurisdictions in large countries around the world that are pretty prolific, you would have to say, in identifying products, replicating them, rushing them back into market, and, effectively, destroying the business of origin that actually came up with that idea or that product.

I commend the Minister for this bill. It will go some way to assisting those businesses, especially those businesses as our relationship with Australia, as the Minister has said, grows closer and closer, at least commercially. The ease of doing business and alignment of business rules and regulations; this is just another layer. We have done it in law, we have done it with banking, we have done it with accountancy, and this is another layer where we can assist those businesses that are commercially operating with if not our largest then one of our largest trading partners. I think the bill has been widely consulted. I think I would be surprised if there was not a large degree of buy-in from the sector. However, I am sure there are aspects of this bill where those who are submitting to the select committee will be able to make some positive suggestions to improve it. I say to the Minister: this is a good effort. This is far more straightforward than his venturing into the world of cartels where—as he crawls under the desk—we have some very interesting proposals around why we should not be aligned with jurisdictions like Canada, like Australia, and like the UK in terms of imprisonable offences for cartel behaviour.

In this bill the Minister makes the case and says we should be closer aligned with one of our biggest trading partners in terms of the regime around patents, and I agree with him. Not a few weeks ago he was sliced apart by Guyon Espiner on Morning Report when trying to make a case for the reverse. So I say to the Minister: we are not here to talk about that bill. That bit of fun and that bit of theatre will come later. But I say to the Minister: there is a little bit of inconsistency here, you know? Tonight it is going to be consistent with Australia and our trading partners, but in terms of cartel behaviour, where people’s livelihoods can be seriously destroyed—not only those in business but those impacted by that cartel behaviour—it is: “Oh, no, we don’t want to line up with the UK, all that jurisprudence. We don’t want to line up with Canada. We don’t want to line up with the US. We don’t want to line up with our Australian cousins.”

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: However, we are talking about this bill.

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: Indeed. “We are going to go out there as sort of frontiersmen and women and strike our own way in the world and do something completely different.” So I just take the opportunity, given your comments, Mr Deputy Speaker, to counsel the Minister that before the next bill gets to the House, he may want to have a bit of a rethink and somehow take some advice from the whip or others and allow consistency of argument to actually win through.

So, in essence, as I say, we support this bill. As the Minister said, I do not think it will turn the lights on in the communities at home and it will not be front page news, but I agree with him that this is of critical importance to businesses if they want to protect their innovation. There is nothing worse than seeing the look on an entrepreneur’s face when they have invested time, money, and their own sweat into developing an idea and a product, only to see that torn asunder and taken away by somebody who counterfeits it, or somebody who just simply gets there before that entrepreneur could get it to market. Because in many cases—in fact, I would argue, with small business, in most cases—they simply have not had the resources or the expertise, because this is heavy-duty law, to take out patents in multiple jurisdictions. That requires a level of international legal skill that, to be fair, most business folk would not have, and the costs of doing that in varying jurisdictions are prohibitive. There is nothing worse than seeing the look on the entrepreneur’s face as that innovative product is basically stolen from under them, so I commend the Government for this.

I will be interested in the various views that are put up before the select committee. There does not seem, on the outset of this, to be a lot of downside in it. I would be very interested in what sorts of costs are going to accrue or be passed on in the trans-Tasman agency to those taking out patent protection. I would be interested to know whether those costs would increase—hopefully, they would decrease; intuitively, you would think so—but I am sure submitters and others who will be interested in this piece of legislation will want to know at its essence whether this will facilitate easier and cheaper ways to gain patent protection for those products, for that intellectual property, and for those innovative ideas. We are sort of the old No. 8 gauge wire country. That has translated, in the 21st century, into being top-quality world innovators. The globe is littered with New Zealanders who come up with the bright idea: the solution to problems that others, with more money and more experts, have not been able to conquer.

So I would support this bill. We will look at the detail of it. I think it is a very good piece of work by the new Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, and I just pray that in his other work with other pieces of legislation, i.e., the Commerce (Cartels and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, he still holds that principle that we should line up with our trading partners. I wait with bated breath and anticipation to hear those arguments about incentive and disincentive in respect of imprisonable offences around cartels be played out in the same way that he was levelled by Radio New Zealand National on Morning Report just before Christmas. So I commend the Minister for his good works, and we look forward to others that follow.

MELISSA LEE (National): I would like to thank the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs for bringing this bill to the House and I commend the member who just sat down, Clayton Cosgrove. He speaks sense, and it is a great opportunity to speak in support of the first reading of the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Before I go on, Mr Deputy Speaker, I would like to wish you a happy New Year, especially since yesterday was the Lunar New Year for the Chinese and Koreans and many, many nations that actually celebrate the Lunar New Year. I would like to say kung hei fat choy, xin nian kuai le, and se hae bok mani baduseyo, which actually mean “May you receive lots of blessing and luck for the new year.”

It is the Year of the Fire Monkey. Monkeys are born this year, or they turn 12, 24, 36, 48, or 60. They do actually say that those who are born in the Year of the Monkey, especially in the fire monkey year, should avoid the colour red. [Interruption] Apparently so. Anyway, that was a little bit of trivia there for you, Mr Deputy Speaker.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Anyway.

MELISSA LEE: The bill as it has been put to this House is fairly straightforward. It is to deal with matters arising from the current application of the Patents Act 2013. The bill will also align, as other members have said, the patent system more closely with that of Australia, and will better reflect our closer economic relations through integrating trans-Tasman regulations. When passed, this amendment legislation will be the first major update to the way our patent law profession has operated in over 60 years. In doing so, it will strengthen our reputation as a good place to do business and will reduce costs for applicants. I think the previous speaker, the Hon Clayton Cosgrove, actually talked about the reduction in costs. When you are making only one application that is actually going to both countries, instead of having to do both—one in New Zealand and one in Australia—instinctively you would think that the costs would be less for those businesses that are wanting to register their patents.

It is important to remember that New Zealand patents are the intellectual rights that are granted for an invention of an individual or a company or group that has created a new product or process. Patents cover a variety of areas and can include new products, processes, or ideas. I am sure that we have seen court cases dealing with both Apple and Samsung, which have intellectual property. They were trying to protect their inventions. I know that New Zealand inventors and New Zealand writers protect their work and creative output through copyright as well as their inventions through patents, and I think protecting our creations is very, very important.

This bill will make three main changes to the 2013 Act. It amends the grounds on which a person can oppose the grant of a patent under the Patents Act 2013 and proposes a single patent application process and a joint registration. As I have just explained, you do not have to do it in both New Zealand and Australia. You can do it in just one, and it goes to both Australia and New Zealand. The first change proposed in the bill will be an amendment to the Act “to explicitly exclude lack of unity of invention as a ground of opposition.” during the pre-grant process. “Unity of invention” is a term used whereby a patent application can be applied to only one invention, or a series of close or interrelated inventions. Under the current wording there is the potential for an interpretation of “unity of invention” to be used as a ground to object to a patent application. The 2013 Act introduced this ground of opposition into the pre-grant process by allowing “a grant of a patent to be opposed on the ground that an accepted patent application claims patent protection for more than 1 invention”—a wording that was unintended when the 2013 Act was actually legislated. I know it is a little bit confusing.

The second and third changes introduced by this bill deal with consolidating and better applying existing laws between our two nations. The single economic market programme will support a single patent application that will establish a single application portal where applicants can file one set of documents and pay one fee. As I said earlier, that basically means that we will reduce the costs, in my view.

I look forward to the submission process in the select committee. I believe this is a good bill, and I commend it to the House.

CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and happy New Year to you and to everyone in the House and across Parliament, including all the staff. As perhaps the only speaker on this bill tonight who actually sat in the Commerce Committee from 2009 through to 2013 when the Patents Bill, which is now the bigger Act that this bill is amending, was being passed—sat through all of the hearings, the debates, and then the big drama that ensued in ensuring that it passed in a way that did not suppress our innovation in this country—I think that it is good to bring a little bit of historical perspective.

I want to just go back a bit to nearly 10 years ago, when this bill had its gestation in a process that began under the previous Labour Government, and that was ultimately about wide-ranging reform of our patents system and the Patents Act of 1953. The year 1953 is quite a long time ago, well before I, and, presumably, most people sitting in the House tonight, appeared on the earth—not all, but most. The Patents Bill had its first reading in 2009, and it included a provision to update and modernise our registration requirements for patent attorneys and align New Zealand’s regime with that of Australia.

It is useful for people to know—and they may not have worked that out tonight, listening to the debate so far—that the current bill that has been tabled is not a new bill. Well, it is a new bill, but it has its gestation in a previous bill that sat on the Order Paper for a long time. But by the time that that bill, the bigger bill, made its way back to Parliament in 2011, the Commerce Committee recommended that that part of it that was about the modernisation and updating actually be separated—because there had not been a single trans-Tasman framework for regulating patent attorneys established, even though it had been signalled by both the New Zealand and Australian Governments. It could not be included in the bill at that point because the framework had not been established. So that is what we are seeing here tonight in this bill.

Labour is certainly supporting that to the select committee and sees no problem with that in theory, because streamlining is a good idea, the modernisation and updating of this regime is clearly important—it was 1953, it is now 2016—and it is supporting efficiencies in the patent process. Again, as my colleague Clayton Cosgrove said, in terms of the alignment of the jurisdictions, we have no issue with that. We had no issue with that in another piece of legislation that went through the select committee last year on accounting standards and how they operate. That is a good and sensible thing to do. But I do think it is important that when a bill comes to the House, you do actually hear its history and that it was part of a bigger bill that did pass through the House in 2013—and that it has sat, waiting, until that streamlining framework has actually been established, which has now occurred.

I do, however, want to express a concern. It is not an outright concern, and my hope is that any fears will be allayed when we get to the select committee. But I do want to express a concern with one of the aspects of the bill. The first part of the explanatory note says that since the Patents Act 2013, the bigger bill, entered into force “an issue has been identified with the grounds on which third parties can oppose the grant of a patent on an accepted patent application.” Melissa Lee referred to that before. The questions I have are: who has expressed the concerns; where have these concerns been expressed? I did not hear the Minister allude to what the concerns are. All of the information that I can find out about this bill does not go into any detail about that. It all uses exactly the same phraseology around that.

The explanatory note also talks about the fact that, as enacted, there has been some kind of “drafting error”, as it was described somewhere, in the Patents Act 2013 that “allows a grant of a patent to be opposed on the ground that an accepted patent application claims patent protection for more than 1 invention …”. And that is described—and it is jargon—as “a lack of unity of invention.” It then goes on to say that “There was no policy intention to introduce lack of unity of invention as a ground of opposition in the Patents Act 2013.” Well, I sat on that select committee and perhaps it is a stuff up, and perhaps it is a drafting error. And if that is the case, then that is fine, but there were reasons, and I want to go back to the intent of the bill that came back to the House in 2013, and just draw the House’s attention to what it said.

It said—and this is paraphrasing part of the commentary on that bill—“We think that the grounds on which third parties can oppose a patent being granted, request that a grant of patent be re-examined, or request that a patent be revoked should be consistent, and recommend amending the appropriate clauses of the bill to achieve this.” It said: “Many submitters favoured pre-grant opposition, and argued that it allows New Zealand businesses to limit the scope of troublesome international applications; and that an opposition mechanism allows overly broad patent claims to be narrowed, preventing patent owners from wrongfully asserting invalid rights, and thus reducing costs and disruption to business.”

Well, what that is shorthand for are these things called patent trolls. Patent trolls are endemic in the United States. They are an industry unto themselves. They do not produce anything. They do not add any value. All they do is litigate and create barriers to innovation, and huge costs. And they result in small businesses, particularly innovation businesses, going under. My concern is, well, what is this drafting error? We spent a lot of time discussing this in the select committee: what impact will that have on putting up the barriers to patent trolls? The whole point of having third-party opposition to patents was to provide a mechanism to ensure that there could not be rampant patent troll activity.

Just to give you a sense of the extent of patent trolls—most of them come from the United States. It is important that people know where the litigators and attempts to try to prevent innovation and companies from achieving a patent are occurring, and that they come from the patent trolls. In 2015 more patent law suits were filed in the United States than in any other year save one, buried beneath heaps of high-tech lawsuits, led by patent trolls—shell companies with no real assets other than patents. About two-thirds of all patent lawsuits were filed by patent trolls.

Hopefully, those fears will be allayed in the select committee. I am raising that concern because I do hope that the history of this bill—the importance of patent reform—is not being reinvented, and that we are not going to open up New Zealand businesses that are trying to achieve patents to risk from that patent troll regime.

BRETT HUDSON (National): I rise in support of the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. As has been canvassed across both sides of the House today, this bill will do three things in the main: an amendment to the grounds on which a person can oppose the grant of a patent under the Patents Act 2013; a single patent application process and a single patent examination process with Australia, which not only will be hugely beneficial for those who apply for patents, in terms of time and cost savings, but will actually save time and cost for the regulatory bodies also; and a joint registration regime with Australia for patent attorneys—something that is manifestly to the benefit of patent attorneys in New Zealand. It is quite a small, highly specialised profession over here, one that is quite considerably larger in Australia, and it makes a great deal of sense where it is possible—and it was determined some time ago that it should be—to adopt a single registration regime. In fact, it is a bit broader than just a registration regime; it will also adopt a single code of conduct and a single disciplinary code and approach also.

I just want to turn for a moment to the part about the grounds of opposition to the grant of a patent. Ms Curran kindly read to us from the Commerce Committee report on that 2013 legislation when it was investigated. I note that what she read was the point that people wanted to enable opposition to patents if there might be a situation where the granting of such could be deemed unreasonable or, in fact, not worthy. But in all that she read out to us, it did not actually address the point that this amendment addresses, which is specific to one, and only one, condition, which is that that is known as the unity of invention. If we go back to the Patents Act of 1953, there was nothing in that Act that prevented someone making a single patent application for, perhaps, a new product, or a new method that might in fact have more than a single invention within it. There was nothing, as read out in that report for the 2013 patents legislation, that actually gave any indication that the committee or, in fact, the Minister who introduced it, or the officials were deeply concerned about lack of unity.

I think this probably falls into an unintended consequences thing, because what we are at risk of with the current provisions—where anything that can be shown to have a lack of unity of invention cannot have a patent approved—is that where someone has created, has innovated, and has this new product that has more than a single invention, they can file an application for only one of them. In the meantime, they lose any rights to any second or subsequent innovation that might exist within that product. It does not seem to me to be a very sound way of helping to bolster and foster innovation in our economy today by, basically, saying: “If you do innovate, don’t innovate too much, because you can have a little bit but not all of it.” So I think it is a very sensible thing that we are actually going to address what is clearly, by looking at the historical Act, an anomaly. As I reiterate, there was nothing in the select committee report for the 2013 patent legislation that indicated that lack of unity of invention was actually an issue.

The other part I want to touch on is the single patent application process and the single patent examination process with Australia, because one of the things that I think is quite telling in this is that about 95 percent of the patent applications that are filed in New Zealand have a corresponding application in Australia, but at the moment they are filed separately, they are assessed separately, and they are examined separately—for something that ultimately is intended to have protection across both countries—so bringing them together is a sensible part of a single market patents programme. The approach that is planned seems to me very pragmatic. You file one application in a portal in either country, and that creates a separate application in the other, but you have a single fee. You can submit for a single examination, which, quite frankly, not only is going to reduce time and costs for the applicant, whom we should be most concerned about, but, it holds, also will save time and costs for those who assess the applications. So I think this is a very sound bill. I think it will go some way to providing sound regulation, but regulation that is also both time and cost-effective. I commend the bill to the House.

GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora, Mr Deputy Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. First, I would like to start by welcoming MPs back on the first day of Parliament and hope that they and all New Zealanders had a fantastic summer break with their friends and whānau.

I rise to support the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I have found that talking about patent law is a sure-fire way to lose people to talk to at parties and a sure-fire way to fall asleep at night, but it is something critically important to the future of New Zealand and our prosperity. The Green Party knows that intellectual property and patent law is important as part of building a smarter, richer Aotearoa New Zealand.

In this contribution I would like to touch on some of the broader issues, but first touch on this bill. The bill does three things, which you have heard tonight. It amends the grounds on which a person can oppose the granting of a patent under the recently amended Patents Act 2013; it creates a single patent application process and a single patent examination process with Australia; and it creates a joint registration regime for patent attorneys. Back in 2013 that legislation, which I know Clare Curran talked about, was amending more than 50-year-old legislation. The highlight for me was the campaign successfully convincing the Government to—I have forgotten how many backflips there eventually were, but finally we got there—ban all software patents. It was an incredibly good step. That was not a long time ago, and here we are—having to fix up this mess in the original legislation.

The amendment to the grounds on which a person can oppose a patent application is the correction of the drafting error around the unity of invention clause, which we have heard about. It seems pretty much common sense to be passing this, if it is in fact a drafting error. One of the questions I will be looking out for in select committee is around hearing from patent attorneys how many cases actually were affected by this so-called drafting error, because I have read reports that there is an argument that this change should be applied retrospectively. When the Patents Act 2013 was passed, it did include an element of retrospectivity in terms of New Zealand priority claims. So it is an interesting case: we applied retrospectivity in one case, but not this one. I am looking forward to having that discussion in the select committee.

That cleans up the mess, but the big part of the bill deals with a part that is bigger in scope, which is a single patent examination and application process. We have heard tonight that 95 percent of those 6,000 patent applications filed in New Zealand are also filed in Australia, so there is a strong argument around common sense and efficiency in avoiding duplication by having a similar regime.

On the other side of the ledger, I understand that there would be concerns around New Zealand losing its sovereignty. The tribunal, for example, only has, at least, a single New Zealand member, so I understand some of those concerns. But I would like to respond to them, and point out that, in fact, it is hard to argue there is a loss of sovereignty, because there will be one examiner from each country, a New Zealander in the case of New Zealand hearing a New Zealander who is domiciled here. Both the officers would be applying their own unique jurisdictional legislation when it comes to those cases.

We heard, in the small amount of consultation around this bill, that Australian patent attorneys support this registration process, but patent attorneys in New Zealand have raised some concerns around the likely increased regulatory and business compliance costs to register and practise in New Zealand. It is going to be interesting to hear from them in terms of their perspective in New Zealand, because when you look around at just the single patent examination process, the “SEP”, the Government’s own departmental disclosure statement does say that there was no consultation and that the cost and benefits of implementing it have not been quantified. In fact, it is unclear whether the fees would need to increase or decrease. So there are still substantial questions for a bill that has been in the pipes for a long time.

In the remaining time, I would actually like to touch on the wider and, in fact, more important issues. It is great to be seeing the Government of New Zealand discussing patents and intellectual property in our Parliament, but what we are doing tonight is simply scratching the surface, dealing around the edges, the fringes, and in fact ignoring the biggest, most important question facing us, which is how we increase the innovation potential of New Zealand.

The Government is happy to deal with intellectual property issues. In fact, that is exactly what we see in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. There, the Government is explicit—you could say that it is patently clear—that there is going to be a cost to New Zealanders in the order of $55 million from the copyright extensions of term limits. So the Government is happy to talk about intellectual property when it comes to the TPP agreement, happy to talk about a joint regime with Australia despite all the questions and perhaps additional costs for New Zealand patent attorneys—all nearly 200 of them—but it is not talking about how we actually increase the number of patents we see filed in New Zealand. Under this legislation it may be easier, and it may be more expensive to file a patent in New Zealand and Australia, but we are not having those conversations.

How do we get more Kiwis coming up with those good ideas, commercialising them, marketing them, and exporting them? New Zealand does have an innovation problem, and numerous reports clearly show that. Members no doubt are aware of the New Zealand paradox, which is that we face lower growth internationally compared with our competitors, ostensibly, despite having the right economic mechanisms in place. On a per capita basis, I think the answer is pretty clear. I agree with Shaun Hendy on this point: the answer to the New Zealand paradox is that, in fact, we have an innovation problem. We are in the bottom half of the OECD when it comes to research and development. We file four times fewer patents than the OECD average. If you agree with the recent Productivity Commission report—it notes that there has been an increase in research and development spending currently; however, the actual innovation benefits are debatable, and when it comes to the patents area we are in fact stagnant.

As a country we need to ask ourselves why we are spending more money on research and development but only getting the same number of patents, and why that is so. The result is that New Zealanders have got to work harder for every dollar we earn as a nation, and we continue to slide down those economic rankings. If you have a less innovation-focused economy, you remain reliant on those raw commodities, the milk powder and the brown paper bags, the raw logs lining up on the port. We see our talented young Kiwis head off overseas. All members should know—although I think that the Government sometimes has its head in the sand over it—that there is a limit to the amount of milk powder we can export. There is a limit, and we are seeing it in our waterways at the moment when we cannot swim in them over summer. We are seeing that limit. But there is no limit to the amount of intellectual property, services, products, and software that we could be exporting across the world.

Chris Bishop: Human ingenuity is limitless.

GARETH HUGHES: Human ingenuity is limitless. I agree with the member when he raises that point. But why is the Government not seeing the number of patents rise? Why is the Government continuing to see New Zealand in the bottom half of the OECD? Why is the Government continuing to prop up coalmines, hoping for oil in the deep seas—

Chris Bishop: We don’t prop up coalmines.

GARETH HUGHES: —and subsidising irrigation? You say that but you do not follow with your actions. I know the member wants to be a Minister one day, and maybe when he is a Minister one day, he can actually implement the stuff, but at the moment what we do see from the Government is a focus on more milk, more cows, and more coal. It is a recipe for disaster. It is a recipe that sees us slide down those rankings, and it is a recipe that sees New Zealanders working some of the longest hours for some of the lowest wages, and paying some of the highest costs of living in the OECD.

My vision for New Zealand is one that invests in innovation. At the last election we took a policy of investing an extra $1 billion over 3 years, in terms of research and development. It was a policy to increase the number of places in tertiary institutions. As a country we could be providing more advice for Kiwis to be developing those good ideas, patenting them, marketing them, and commercialising and exporting. What the Green Party wants to see is New Zealand not just languish at the bottom half of the OECD but get to the top half. We want to see more patents filed, more in line with the OECD average. We want to see more collaboration between our great Kiwi thinkers. We want to see an economy that is built on ideas and not just on grass, water, and coal, and turning that into milk powder.

In summary, if you look at the New Zealand economic story over the last decade, despite some of those great exemplars—I am thinking of the Rocket Labs and the Xeros—what we have seen is an economy becoming more simplified, more dependent on a few raw commodities, and it is that old story of being dependent on milk powder. So tonight as we discuss patents and intellectual property, let us not ignore that elephant in the room, which is the innovation gap that stares our country in the face. Next year is election year, and I look forward to standing on the hustings and arguing for a more innovative economy, one that invests in its people and actually sees us innovating and thriving. That is the recipe for a cleaner, smarter, fairer Aotearoa New Zealand.

RIA BOND (NZ First): I would just like to start this evening by saying that I am really pleased to be back in the House. I have found that being away for the past 8 weeks has been rather interesting, but I have been really pleased at a local level, in my office, being kept really busy helping constituents.

I am pleased to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the first reading of the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. The New Zealand Patents Act 2013, which took effect on 13 September 2014, constituted a comprehensive redrafting of New Zealand’s patents law. Given the scale of this mammoth exercise, I am not surprised that, once again, this Government has passed legislation that has had unintended effects and consequences. Last year two anomalies were identified in the legislation. These two anomalies were, firstly, the possibility of a post-acceptance, or a lack of unity, attack, which could place patent applicants in the difficult position of having to choose between two valuable independent claims; and, secondly, significant uncertainty surrounding patent filing dates, on which validity may turn.

New Zealand First is not surprised that this Government has brought forward the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, because this bill proposes three main things, as previous speakers have discussed in the House tonight. Three main areas are proposed as changes: the amendment to the grounds on which a person can oppose the grant of a patent under the Patents Act 2013, a single patent application process and a single patent examination process with Australia, and a joint registration regime with Australia for patent attorneys.

As I said earlier tonight, the Patents Act took effect in September 2014, and issues have arisen, specifically the grounds on which a third party or third parties can oppose the grant of a patent on an accepted patent application. This allows the grant of a patent to be opposed on the grounds that an accepted patent application claiming patent protection for more than one invention can be put simply as lack of unity of invention. For those folks at home tonight who are watching and are finding tonight’s discussion a little bit confusing, I will try to give you an example that is quite straightforward and quite simple. The example that I am going to give you tonight is that I have invented the rPhone. The rPhone is one component of my full unit. The second is my proprietary battery. However, my battery fails to be protected under the patent. Therefore, it gives a third party the opportunity to develop a battery that will fit into my one unit under the patent. That puts me, as an inventor, at an absolute disadvantage.

I think that this issue was not a ground for opposition under the Patents Act 1953, which was replaced by the Patents Act 2013. I can see that there was no policy intention by this Government to introduce lack of unity of invention as a ground for opposition in the Patents Act 2013. From the simple example I have used tonight with my rPhone invention, I had one unit invented, with two major components: the rPhone and the proprietary battery. If this ground remains as it is, then the patent applicant may be, as I said, unfairly disadvantaged.

New Zealand First does support this bill, because this bill will amend the application so that the patent protection is claimed for only one invention. That means the applicant will lose patent rights to the invention or inventions, such as the proprietary battery for my rPhone invention that I have given, which would have put me at a disadvantage and allowed a different battery to go into my invention. Therefore, the proposal in this bill is to amend section 92(1)(c) of the principal Act, to specify and exclude lack of unity of invention as a ground for opposition. New Zealand First is looking forward to listening to the submitters at the select committee talk specifically to this so that we can actually get, I guess, a more informed grasp of this, particularly.

The second main change proposed is the single patent application process and single patent examination process with Australia for patent attorneys. Currently, since the Patents Act 2013 took effect, the documentation that must be provided for both Australia and New Zealand patent applications is almost—well, essentially it is the same. The criteria for granting a patent are now more similar to those in Australia, but with significant differences. The procedure for examining the two patent applications is the same, however.

What has been discovered is the significant degree of duplication of work between the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand, also known as the IPONZ, and the Australian Patent Office, also known as IP Australia. This duplication of work does increase costs and complexity for applicants. Given that around 95 percent of the patent applications filed in New Zealand have a corresponding application filed in Australia, it makes common sense to have a consistent approach to establishing a single portal application where applicants may wish to apply for the same invention in both countries, and we can also access that in either portal. This allows applicants to file one set of documents and pay one fee. That generates two applications: a New Zealand one, which is sent to the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand, and an Australian application, which is sent to the Australian Patent Office for further processing.

The third main change is the joint registration regime with Australia for patent attorneys. In New Zealand they make up a small profession that provides specialist advice to businesses, obtaining and protecting intellectual property, especially obtaining patents and registering trademarks. Currently, there are 493 patent attorneys who reside in Australia or New Zealand and who are registered in both countries, so that is 55 percent of Australian and New Zealand patent attorneys. Often it is asked what the benefits for patent attorneys will be, and we can see quite clearly that it is less red tape and increased business opportunities for attorneys not currently registered in both countries.

I do want to bring it to the attention of the Government that I find this is an area that is quite complex in the regulatory impact statements and the debate pack and the ministerial statements that I have read through today. As I said earlier, New Zealand First will be supporting this bill’s referral to the select committee because we actually look forward to hearing from the submitters at the select committee as to how these three main points that are proposed for changes in this bill can actually affect, increase, or invigorate competition between Australia and New Zealand. So in saying that, I listened to the previous speakers tonight, and the fact that we are all supporting this bill says that we are concerned about patent application and the protection of inventors when they do invent a specific invention that is going to take the world by storm.

I want to look at the statistics that I asked the Parliamentary Library to prepare for me today, and they, in some ways, do actually add to these proposed changes. Interestingly enough, in the years 2005-15—and there is no definition as to exactly what it costs for these businesses to go through the process. The number of prosecutions under the New Zealand Patents Act 1953 in 2013 was 54. These prosecutions have occurred in New Zealand for inventions protected under the New Zealand Patents Act. What it does not tell me, though—it does not show the inventions developed in New Zealand that are copied in overseas jurisdictions. So I have got this chart here that I am really looking forward, as a member of the Commerce Committee, to using to ask those questions and to get some solid answers, because there are areas in this bill that still do not quite explain the ins and outs for me. So New Zealand First looks forward to this bill going to the select committee. Thank you.

KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National): First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to wish a happy New Year to all members of this House and to the staff working here in Parliament. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the Hon Paul Goldsmith on introducing this bill, the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. This bill amends the Patents Act 2013, and it makes three major amendments. The first amendment is to the grounds on which a person can oppose the grant of a patent under the Patents Act 2013. The second one is to propose a single patent application process, and the third one is to have a joint registration with Australia for patent attorneys. Ever since this Government took over in 2008, it has been trying to make sure that ease of doing business is achieved, and having the singular registration authority across the Tasman with Australia will allow patents to have a single application process, which will reduce the fees structure as well as the paperwork.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the launch of the 26th chapter of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, which gave me the opportunity to meet the representative of Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand, who mentioned that the passing of the legislation to have chartered accountants working across the Ditch on a single regime has really helped their businesses. Similarly, this bill will give patent attorneys the opportunity to lodge a single application, so that the paperwork is reduced, the fees are reduced, and businesses can do the business they want to do much more easily.

The joint registration regime will help attorneys to have more working capacity. There are fewer than 1,000 registered patent attorneys in New Zealand and Australia. Each country maintains separate but similar registration regimes for patent attorneys, and over half are registered to practise both in Australia and New Zealand. A single trans-Tasman regulatory framework for patent attorneys was endorsed by Australia and New Zealand in 2009; New Zealand and Australia signed a bilateral agreement for implementation of the regime in 2013. The regulatory framework will introduce a single trans-Tasman register for patent attorneys—a single definition of service that may be performed only by registered patent attorneys. Our trans-Tasman Governments worded a single disciplinary regime and code of conduct, and a single disciplinary tribunal will determine complaints and discipline of attorneys. This will help businesses to have their problems addressed by a single authority.

The single patent application process and the single patent examination process with Australia—out of the businesses that registered their patents in New Zealand, the majority, 95 percent, also registered their patents in Australia. It is very important that we should give opportunities for businesses to have ease of doing business, rather than that they are stuck with paperwork or paying double fees on their patents. The world is now where you can have a very competitive business, and, unless you reduce your costs, you will not be able to compete with the other companies across the world, because the markets are open and anybody can come and work anywhere. We have passed many pieces of legislation that are helping businesses to do business in New Zealand as well as Australia. With these words, I commend this bill to the House.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): The next call is a split call. I call Jan Logie—5 minutes.

JAN LOGIE (Green): I rise to take a short call on the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. My colleague Gareth Hughes has given the major contribution on the first reading previously and I recommend that people watch that.

My colleague Gareth has informed me that this is a critically important issue for New Zealand, and although most of us in New Zealand may not be all over patent law, I think most people do understand that if we are going to position ourselves strongly as a country, economically as well as socially, we would benefit from moving our economy more towards one based on innovation, low-carbon, greentech, and more of a knowledge-based economy than the current low-wage economy centred on the depletion of our resources and forests. So patents are very relevant in that context.

What this bill does is three specific things, and I am not going to repeat what everyone else has been saying in too much detail, but what it does is create a single patent application process and a single patent examination process covering both Australia and New Zealand. I think on my first reading of that I thought: “Oh, this is going to bring up issues in terms of sovereignty and the differences between Australia and New Zealand.” But, interestingly and encouragingly, on closer reading it does not seem to do that. What it does is provide one portal for applicants to file their applications for Australia and New Zealand, because 95 percent of patent applications filed in New Zealand are also filed in Australia. So now you will no longer need to file in both places. You can file through just one portal and it will go to both places. You will have to pay just once rather than twice in two different countries. But it will be considered by an examiner in Australia according to their law and an examiner in New Zealand according to our law. There is no change in terms of the status of our laws in that sense; it is just providing an easy pathway in, streamlining it, and reducing costs for applicants.

When New Zealand has, I think, four times fewer patents being filed than the OECD average, I think it is a pretty clear indication that we need to be doing more to encourage innovation in this country, ease the way, and create the environment for people to start thinking about patents, about inventions, and about how we could be setting up new projects in this country. What this bill will also do is amend the Patents Act 2013 to explicitly exclude lack of unity of invention as a ground for opposition in the pre-grant process. We have been told that this was a drafting oversight in the previous legislation. Questions have been raised by other speakers in the House tonight who were part of seeing that legislation through in 2013, who have said that they personally will be interested in hearing submissions and examining that point more closely because it was a very thorough process apparently. But drafting errors do happen, particularly when it is a comprehensive piece of legislation, as that was, dealing with a law that had not been changed in a very long time. I do note that some lawyers’ responses have been saying it is good to see this being fixed up.

Some people have raised the question about why it is not being retrospectively amended and although the Greens certainly do not usually support retrospective legislation, I do think that the point they made, or the way I read it, was interesting in that it is quite possible that some applications have been filed and not yet examined, so that is worth consideration. Thank you.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): The Hon David Parker, 5 minutes.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I rise on behalf of the Labour Party to take a call in the first reading of the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. As other members have usefully described the bill, I will not do that all again. I will, though, just recount for the House that we always need to keep in mind the balance that we are trying to strike with patent law.

On the one hand, we want to encourage innovation in society. To do that, we have got to give commercial advantage in some situations where people invest time and effort in making a new discovery. Why do we do that? We do that for two main reasons: one, we want to encourage the world to become a better place through encouraging that sort of endeavour that makes new discoveries for the benefit of humanity over time. On the other hand, we also want to encourage the long-term publication of those inventions so that other people can leverage off that knowledge and either take that invention further in the future or produce that same new invention more cheaply to the benefit of more people. We try to achieve that by giving people a time-limited monopoly right to exploit, for their commercial gain, the commercial opportunities that arise from their invention. Obviously, if someone does not have that monopoly right, it is less likely that they will invest in the first place.

There are other models of investment. There are some people who think that drug discovery would be more efficient worldwide if the countries that, effectively, fund the cost of those drugs cooperated, decided what were the drug targets, and actually put Government funding into pursuing those directly rather than letting the private sector do it, or at least some of it. A lot of the research that is relied upon by the private sector is already publicly funded. There are some who think that it would be more efficient for countries to move beyond a patent route for drug discovery and more cost effective given that in the end it is Governments that, by and large, fund the patented drugs through their health systems anyway. Nevertheless, we are where we are in that international paradigm and we should make sure that it works appropriately.

We also must always be aware that if you are giving someone a monopoly right, they exploit it to maximum advantage and they are not constrained as much in their conduct. They price it for the maximum price they can sell it for, rather than competing down to a price that relates to the cost of producing the good or the service, mainly goods, that have been patented. So we have got to be really careful that we do not inappropriately extend the terms of patent right. If we do that, we actually do not end up with any more patented goods; we actually just extend the period of patent royalty and the monopoly rent that can be extracted from exploitation of it. So if this legislation was coming to the House suggesting an extension to the term of patents, I for one would be standing up and asking the Government to prove that this would actually meet the social purpose of patents, which would be to encourage more innovative discovery on the part of people and society. I do not think it would. Therefore, I am one of those people who do not think we should extend patent rights beyond the current terms that we have.

Having said that, we have also got to be aware that we have rules that are pretty consistent with what the rules are internationally, otherwise it is a bit unwieldy, internationally. Perhaps we could also suffer the disadvantage that overseas patented innovations would not become available in New Zealand because those who had those patented rights would not be willing to bring them to New Zealand and New Zealand would suffer a disadvantage in that regard. For that reason I think that the Government is probably right to be correcting this anomaly, which seems to have been introduced in 2013, that allows a patent to be challenged on the ground that more than one area of invention that has been patented lacks unity. As I read the explanatory note—and I do not pretend great expertise in this area—it suggests that the lack of unity as a ground of opposition, which was introduced in the Patents Act in 2013, is out of whack with the rest of the world and can lead to unfairness in that patents that ought to be approved are either not approved or are struck down later.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): It is a pleasure to be here and I hope you have had a good break. It is great to be talking on this bill tonight on the first day of Parliament for 2016. It is particularly great to be talking on this bill, the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Although this bill seems confined to the extent of what it is seeking to address, I put it to you that this bill is actually crucial for New Zealand, not particularly around the exact provisions in this bill but what it means for New Zealand. In essence, intellectual property is really a pre-eminent source of competitive advantage in today’s knowledge economy. For New Zealand to grow in the international sector, how we protect intellectual property, how we promote intellectual property, and how we assist people to want to undertake that innovative process and go through a patent process is absolutely crucial if we are to continue to be successful as a nation.

Traditionally, bankers and financiers have always looked at the balance sheets of companies and looked at the fixed assets. It was interesting that my colleague Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi was talking about the chartered accountants—and, of course, there are a lot of rules around how you value fixed assets. More recently, probably over the last 10 years to 15 years, there has been a migration to also valuing brands. But now intellectual property is so crucial to driving future wealth that the need to focus on that part of the balance sheet is really, really important. It is staggering. If you start to think about all the Crown research institutes that the Government has an involvement in and all the intellectual property that resides within the Government itself and all its activities, let alone the commercial sector, it is a huge value that is often unrecognised and probably not properly valued in the sense that it is not exploited and utilised as well as it should be.

The key issue with intellectual property is that it is very, very difficult, first of all, to define what is new and unique when you go to patent a product—that situation—and certainly to actually undertake the search, which often has to be a worldwide search, to make sure there is no competing intellectual property that may be related, but it is quite difficult to understand whether it is valid or not. The second thing is actually the process of registering a patent. If any of you have been involved in it, you will know that it is a multiple-step process, taking many years to complete. If you are successful in actually getting the intellectual property, which is not always the case, there is an ongoing monitoring and management process that is difficult and expensive. So anything that we are doing to actually enhance or reduce that cost is removing some of the barriers to helping our vibrant innovators in New Zealand to actually get under way and do some of this good work. When you think about the dynamic parts of our economy, we should be doing all of this.

So I have got to say I highly recommend this bill. I think it is insightful. I think it is a great step towards improving New Zealand’s economic situation. Thank you very much.

Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): It is my first opportunity to contribute this year, so can I offer a New Year greeting to all colleagues and particularly, as it is the lunar New Year for the Year of the Fire Monkey: Kung hei fat choy. Xin nian kuai le.

This is a very important bill, as the member who has just resumed his seat, Mr Bayly, has quite correctly pointed out, and I am passionate about intellectual property for exactly the reason that Mr Bayly has specified. We stand on the brink of what is called the second information revolution, and the Labour Party has been thinking a great deal about the impact of that revolution on the future of work: the importance of having a resilient economy, a well-trained workforce, and adding value through productivity that lifts incomes and provides a good life for all New Zealanders. It is absolutely crucial that we get away from thinking of ourselves just as—well, it is not bad in itself; it is a good first base—producers of world-class commodities and agricultural products. We must add value to that, and the No. 1 way to do it is, by adding information and protecting that sustainable competitive advantage, requires intellectual property rights. This bill tweaks—it does not radically change, but it tweaks—the system through which those rights are awarded and maintained.

What I would like to do is divide my remarks into three sections: quickly touch base on the principles that drive this reform, a quick summary of the provisions and some issues that the select committee may wish to consider, and then a word at the end on the process as we sum up.

The principles are that whatever we do in the area of intellectual property and patents must serve a higher order goal: the strategy of building a high-value, information-rich, highly productive economy in a very dynamic and rapidly changing world. This bill has got to play a small but positive part in that process. Drop it down a level and, from the point of view of the individual company—and we are a nation of small businesses; 80 percent of our companies employ fewer than 20 people—we have got to reduce the costs to Kiwi companies of getting a patent. We have got to make it easier, and we have got to make it more effective. That is the No. 2 test. The No. 3 test is that we have got to make those patents more effective. They have got to be easier, not harder, to enforce—certainly across the Tasman, and globally if we can get it.

How do the provisions shape up against those tests? Well, the first provision, the key one, is the amendment of grounds. That is, the removal of the opportunity for third parties—not, say, the New Zealand company taking the patent out, but, as my colleague Ms Curran said, removing the possibility that offshore patent trolls can make an objection based on the fact that a singly accepted patent application applies to more than one invention. That is called the lack of unity of invention objection. It is often used in defensive patent objections and filings by patent trolls.

It was very sobering to hear the statistics from Clare Curran: about two-thirds of all patent activity in the United States is defensive or trolling patents. I have heard from a very senior patent attorney in New Zealand that around 90—nine, zero—percent of all patent activity in New Zealand is defensive patenting by international companies, and only 10 percent is by New Zealand companies seeking to acquire intellectual property rights of their own. We have to turn that round, we have to get that balance better, and that is a key objective. As this goes to the select committee, at first blush the removal of that trolling provision looks like a very good idea, but let us get the select committee to test through the submission process how that is going to work in practice.

The second major provision is the trans-Tasman patent protection process. It has two component parts, both of which are voluntary under the framework called the single economic market patents programme, which was agreed between Kevin Rudd and John Key on behalf of our two countries several years ago. The first is the single application process, or SAP, and the second is the single patent examination, or SEP. That framework creates a single portal, an online patent application process where a company applies only once, and it feeds through to apply to both jurisdictions: Intellectual Property of New Zealand in New Zealand, and IP Australia across the Ditch. There is a single examiner who works through the evidence and awards, or does not award, a patent that applies to both countries.

That is really important. Potentially, it saves cost, it saves time, and it saves duplication. But if we look through the lens that around four times as many patent attorneys reside in Australia as in New Zealand, and at the fact that the average size of a Kiwi company is much smaller than the average size of an Australian company, we have to ensure in the fine print how this will work so that it suits New Zealand companies, because they are those we are elected to represent. We just want to make sure, in detail, that this is a step in the right direction.

There are some issues the select committee can look at in that regard. The first is in the regulatory impact statement, paragraph 4, where is says that the costs have not yet been quantified. It goes so far as to say that we do not know whether the cost of filing is going to go up or down. It should go down because there should be efficiency gains, and the value should go up because it applies to both countries, but it would be great to get some evidence from officials on whether that will in fact be the case—because we get paid for our results, not our good intentions.

Secondly, the scale issues are really important, and not least in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) context. I know that is a slight side issue, but there was relevant debate earlier around the application of patents to software, where around 94 percent of the ICT industry surveyed said that they did not want patents to apply to software, and I believe that the Government took some heed of that. That is crucial because it shows that in the heart of the information revolution the patent system, which was designed for the industrial age, does not work so well in the information age. As part of the Commerce Committee now, I want to make sure that this and other intellectual property legislation is futureproofed to take account of that second information revolution.

There are some wonderful quotes by Ian Taylor, the president of the largest IT-represented body, the Institute of IT Professionals of New Zealand, and, of course, the chief executive officer of the Dunedin firm Animation Research. He says: “We’re an export-driven sector, so we love free trade. However this can’t come at the cost of the future of the technology industry, and that’s what it will be if New Zealand’s current law banning software patents is traded away in the TPP.” I think that is a very interesting little vignette. It is a side issue to this bill, but it goes to the heart of why we also need to take a very careful look at the TPP, and it goes to the reasons why Labour opposes it.

The third key provision is the joint Australia - New Zealand registration of patent attorneys. There are about 200 in New Zealand and about 800 in Australia. They are going to have a single representative body, with a single registration process and a single disciplinary regime. Those clever patent attorneys also tighten up the loophole: you will not be able to provide patent attorney services at all unless you are registered through that joint trans-Tasman body, which, of course, will ensure both minimum standards and no doubt minimum costs.

The governance regime is a key issue the select committee is going to have to look at in that regard. What do we mean by that? Well, who runs this thing? What rules will it be run by? Given that there is a little bit of a difference or disequilibrium between the average Aussie intellectual property - rich firm and the average Kiwi firm—we are smaller; we are more nimble—we need to ensure that the rules suit those Kiwi companies. We need to have a governance system that allows us to go to bat for our own. If it does not, then we may see the benefits of this trade-creating measure occur disproportionately on the other side of the Ditch, and that would not be our primary objective. We need to have a good relative level of influence, based on a very important constitutional principle, which is called sovereign equality. We are a sovereign State. Australia is a sovereign State. The rules have got to be equally fair to both. We are not a state of Australia; we never will be. The select committee will have to ensure that the fine print of these governance provisions reflects the principle of sovereign equality. In so doing, we protect the interests of New Zealand businesses.

I have done a quick romp through this—the principle, the provisions, and the process. The process simply is that the select committee needs the time and the due diligence to make sure we hear from the industry. I hope we will hear from the tech sector, from the patent attorneys, and from the lawyers, and we will work through the detail from there. Labour supports this bill at its first reading. Thank you.

STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): It is great to speak on the Patents (Trans-Tasman Patent Attorneys and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. It is an important bill, and I think there is general agreement across the House on that. It aligns our patent laws with those of Australia and builds on the CER agreement, which was signed in 1983, 33 years ago. It is ironic that we are talking about that tonight—there is great agreement across the House about the aligning of these two countries’ laws and getting a single patent application and examination process across the two countries—when we were talking earlier about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and really this is just an extension of what CER is, effectively. We have also heard today that we have fewer patents, based on our population, than we should have, compared with other countries. I think that goes to our smaller market and the economies of scale that are required to do research and development and to get a patent across the line. The cost of a patent means that you have to sell a significant number of goods or an idea to make that patent worthwhile and that application worthwhile. So I think we have a smaller market. We must innovate. But getting that scale across markets, with agreements like the CER agreement, makes it much more viable for businesses to go out and innovate. I do agree with that. I think it is quite important, although we have an economy that has a major plank in it based around primary production, that we do innovate. Those innovations come often from that industry and those businesses—in an engineering sense anyway, I know—that have developed products but have struggled to get the market size for them to warrant the cost of applying for that patent, which is very, very expensive. Certainly, being able to do that in one application across both markets will really seriously lower those costs and give those innovative companies an opportunity to consider taking that next step and enhancing the value of their business and our economy. So it is with great pleasure that I commend the bill to the House.

Bill read a first time.

Bill referred to the Commerce Committee.

Bills

New Zealand Business Number Bill

Second Reading

Debate resumed from 3 December 2015.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): When we were last debating the second reading of the New Zealand Business Number Bill, the honourable Minister was speaking and has 7 minutes remaining.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs) on behalf of the Minister for Economic Development: In continuation of the speech on the New Zealand Business Number Bill, the purpose of which is to enable easier and more efficient interactions for business in New Zealand, I would just like to carry on and make a few points, if I may. The bill has been clarified in its intent that all corporate and public entities will be eligible for New Zealand Business Numbers, whether or not they are in business, but that unincorporated entities must be in business. What is meant by “in business” for unincorporated entities has been clearly set out in the legislation, and I support these amendments, following the Commerce Committee’s investigation of the bill. I also support that criteria have been added to regulation-making powers, so that the flexibility required to respond to a changing ecosystem is retained but with appropriate controls. I am pleased to note that the committee has recognised that the New Zealand Business Number will also benefit entities when they interact with each other and it has inserted an additional purpose clause to that effect. The committee has also recommended that the trading name of a corporate or public entity be publicly available. The committee has also taken the opportunity to examine the privacy implications of the bill and the controls that have been put in place. I am pleased that the committee is satisfied that the bill’s privacy safeguards are indeed adequate.

I would like to comment on two points raised by the Labour Party in its minority view. Firstly, the Labour Party asks why the IRD number is not used as the New Zealand Business Number. The IRD number would be a very poor choice for a publicly visible business identifier. The IRD number merely represents a set of tax and social policy affairs, it is subject to tax secrecy provisions, and it is actually not a unique entity identifier. Entities are entitled to have none, one, several, or many IRD numbers. The global location number that has been chosen for use as the New Zealand Business Number is an international identifier. It is part of a wider system that enables businesses to meet sophisticated needs such as supply chain processes, and where country locations of businesses need to be accurately identified in a standardised way.

Secondly, I disagree with the Labour Party that the New Zealand Business Number will be yet another number. I note that some submitters raised concerns about the removal from the bill, as introduced, of the requirement for eight Government agencies to recognise businesses by their New Zealand Business Number. Along with my colleagues the Minister of Finance and the Minister of State Services we have commenced the development of a directive to Government departments and a direction to Crown entities that interact with business to drive the implementation of a whole-of-Government approach to the New Zealand Business Number. I am pleased to inform the House that the proposed directions are more ambitious both in scope and breadth than what was contained in the exposed draft of the bill mentioned by submitters. The directions have been consulted on and will be in place early next year. They will set out clear expectations around uptake and use of the New Zealand Business Number by Government agencies.

The benefits of the New Zealand Business Number ecosystem cannot be realised without this legislation. The New Zealand Business Number ecosystem will provide an opportunity for a step change in how Government works, but also how entities work with each other. Businesses will spend more time on their business and less time on administration. I commend this bill to the House.

Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): After listening to that speech, I wonder whether that Minister really is as familiar with the bill as he ought to be. Unfortunately, this bill will actually increase costs to business in the short term—this bill will increase costs to business in the short term. That is why we on this side of the House are reluctant to support this bill without reservations. We will be supporting it; we will be lending our support because we hope that this policy can be properly implemented over time. We are embarrassed for the Government, for the fact that it has not ironed out the obvious things that could be fixed up front that could make this a real boon for business.

The idea of a single number for business has been around for a long time. This Government has had attempts at it before, and it is an excellent idea—it is an excellent idea. It is incredibly frustrating for business to have several different numbers, and to have to come back again and again and again to different Government departments with different numbers in order to get what should by right be access to Government services for every business. Instead, with this multi-numbered system there is an increased overhead, and there is increased compliance as those numbers are updated and tested and verified throughout Government. So we have an overly complex system.

Nobody in this House, I hazard to say, would disagree with the intent of this bill. The intent is very, very worthy indeed, but what the Government has failed to outline is a plan, a clear plan, for how the bill’s stated purpose will be achieved—that is (a) to enable businesses in New Zealand to interact more easily with Government, and (b) to reduce the costs of business transactions in New Zealand. I will explain this more in my address, because initially at least, it is absolutely beyond dispute that we are creating another number. There are only a small group of Government departments that will have this service available initially. For all other interactions with Government, other numbers will be required. So there will be multiple numbers right from the start and there will be a hurdle initially because a new number will have to be set up for this New Zealand Business Number system to work.

Existing businesses will get another number—yet another number. We only hope that the next step will happen, which will mean that the existing numbers are gradually reduced. But hope we must—hope is all that is left to us when one has read through this bill and seen that the Government has not allocated suitable resources to make this happen.

Why is no IRD number used? Well, Mr Goldsmith explained to us that an IRD number would not be suitable as an international business number. Nobody is disputing that—that was not the point at issue. If the international business number was suitable, why would the Inland Revenue Department not adopt it? Is it worried about security issues? Is the Government saying that this new number will not be secure enough? Is that what it is saying, or is it saying that it does not have joined-up government? Because what I hear from officials is that they were never able to resolve those issues behind closed doors, and now Ministers are wearing the consequences of that. Cabinet is forced into an embarrassing position where it has not got the policy straightened out and it is trying to implement it anyway. There are still many hurdles to get over.

The Labour Party finds itself agreeing with Federated Farmers on this. The initial list of Government departments does not include agencies such as WorkSafe New Zealand and Immigration New Zealand, and people are interacting more often with local government, which also is not a part of this system—so you have multiple numbers. Imagine your average worm farmer out there wanting to interact with Government, doing the right thing. The average worm farmer, completely worried by the new legislation introduced, is trying to find out from WorkSafe New Zealand what their obligations are, in order to avoid the kinds of catastrophes that happen all the time from worm farming—according to this Government. Well, I am afraid, that worm farmer will have to have—probably, if they are interacting with some departments—this new number, and also a completely separate number for their interactions with WorkSafe New Zealand. If they have got workers from overseas working at their worm farm they will have to have another number again for Immigration New Zealand—a whole series of numbers.

We see very quickly that this bill has not yet got to the place that it needs to get to. We see that this Government has not yet shown how it will get to this utopian single number, because it has not done its homework yet. It is a good idea; it needs to be supported, but this Government needs to outline a plan as to how it is going to get there. Instead of worrying about what is going on this week at Waitangi, instead of the Prime Minister worrying about the flag and where the next $26 million is going to be spent on this pet project or that pet project, the Government should be focusing on the nuts and bolts of making sure that New Zealand businesses can get on with the productive stuff that they do.

It is wrapping them up in red tape, and that is not unusual for this Government. We know with the child support legislation it has put additional obligations on small business. It tried to introduce car-park taxes. It has a penchant—this Government—for introducing new obligations on businesses. Unfortunately, here we have another example in the short term. As I say, on this side of the House we hope it will get there; we hope that it will get to the single number, but at the moment we find ourselves agreeing with Federated Farmers that the system is not right.

We also agree with Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand, which says that “without significant uptake there is a risk that the identifier is not integrated and utilised widely, and just becomes another number, rather than a replacement for the many current identifiers—as is intended.” It shares the same concern. So we see these business organisations also expressing this concern.

The Labour Party is certainly not on its own here. It is clear that businesses that work with a number of departments will have to obtain a number of numbers. The additional, yet another, number is the opposite of the purpose of the bill—that point is clear. It will cost more in the short term. So businesses will have to comply, and that could be tolerated if we had the long-term plan. I want to urge this Government to outline that plan and to say how it is going to roll it out across the whole of Government and how it is going to resource departments to implement the necessary changes so that they can make interaction a whole lot easier for business. That is what is missing here. That is what is missing from that side of the House—a credible plan for rolling this business number out across the whole of Government.

I look forward to the next speaker explaining how that may happen and where the resources are coming from. Is it going to be in the next Budget? I guess we will wait and see, but my hunch—and what has been shown up from the appearances of officials at select committees—is that the Government has not done that work yet, it has not outlined how it is going to roll out over time, and so it is asking in this bill, effectively, New Zealand businesses to carry more costs and more compliance until it sorts its act out. We urge it to get busy on that project rather than the distractions it has been busy on up until now.

And there is a real risk, too, with this number, that it will not ever get across that hurdle. There is a very real risk that businesses will wait and see, that they will not sign up too quickly to this new system because they are not convinced it is going to be implemented. They are worried that it is going to be another number, and then that other Government departments will not invest in that resource because they do not want to sign up to a system that is going to become redundant—be yet another number and replace their existing systems—if there is not a plan for a complete roll-out.

This is a bill, as I said at the beginning, that has a very good intended outcome. But, as we have seen before with this Government, there have been other attempts at this that have failed. This Government needs to sort out how it is going to do this in a way that is credible. It needs to allocate the necessary resource to make this happen in a way that is credible. We do not want another—what was the name of that system for the education payroll?

Hon Members: Novopay.

Dr DAVID CLARK: Novopay. We certainly do not want another Novopay, and Minister Parata across there, the Minister of Education, I think, would agree with me. We do not want to go down that track again.

But that is the risk with coming out with half-baked solutions and trying to implement half-baked solutions before you have outlined where the end point is, before you have signed up all of your departments to deliver the services, and before you know that the plan is in place. And that is why this Government needs to display to New Zealanders that it has done its homework. This is a Government that is getting more arrogant, it is getting more out of touch, and it is losing the track that it once had, and so we see it is happy to implement this system, which is imposing extra costs on business, in the vague hope that it will sort itself out over time. We urge it to do that, from this side of the House. We will be supporting the bill, but we are doing it with those reservations—and they are significant reservations.

We stand alongside Federated Farmers, we stand alongside Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand, and we stand alongside most of the business people who submitted, who expressed their concerns about the way that this bill is being implemented. This Government needs to do its homework. It needs to lay out a credible plan. It needs to have a bigger vision. And we urge it to do that so that this bill can be implemented in a way that really and truly does make doing business easier with the Government. It is about time.

MELISSA LEE (National): Thank you for the opportunity to rise and take a call on this piece of important legislation for the Government’s agenda to promote innovation and business. From the way the previous speaker, Dr David Clark, was speaking, I was considering for a moment that he might be opposing the bill, but I am glad that he is actually supporting the bill. Just a reminder that he spoke about Novopay, and I just want to remind that member that it was actually one of his colleagues who advised the previous Government to take that on.

It is important to remember that a key goal of Government is to cut red tape where possible, and a key measure in doing so is creating efficiencies in transactions between business, sole traders, and others engaged in business with the Government as well. As stated in the report of the Commerce Committee, we noted that the bill’s efficacy will depend on Government agencies’ widespread adoption of the New Zealand Business Number. Without this, the bill’s outcome would be in danger of becoming another overhead for business and Government, which could increase businesses’ overhead rather than minimise them. And I know that members opposite have also mentioned this.

In New Zealand at the moment many businesses, trading companies, sole traders, and active societies are hampered by the problems of dealing with multiple Government agencies without cross-sharing of data. Their business can actually be hampered by the bureaucracy when dealing with trading partners internationally as well. This bill addresses these problems, most succinctly by giving each New Zealand business a one-size-fits-all, globally recognised data number with the Global Location Number, the “GLN”—a number that allows businesses to step up their engagement with the State and business partners without compromising costs or their own opportunity to get wider advice.

Implementation of the New Zealand Business Number is the result of the Government’s legislation agenda to promote better business, and it is a key component of the Better Public Services programme as part of Result 9, “Delivering better public services to business customers”. This programme is aimed at reducing by 25 percent—25 percent by 2017—the costs to businesses of dealing with Government. So far, more than 1 million New Zealand businesses, and counting, have been allocated a Business Number. Through Government and business working with the new Global Location Number model, there will be a number of positive benefits for business around New Zealand.

Many businesses, traders, and suppliers want to take advantage of the initiative, which will give them a much better relationship with New Zealand Government agencies and will decrease their costs by the end of 2017. I know that the member opposite David Clark was slightly concerned that initially there might be an increase in costs. Often when new things actually take place, there are some increasing costs, including, I guess, when there was a new leader on the Opposition benches—you know, they had to change their stationery, and these things do actually cost a little bit of money.

This bill is one of many actions that our Government has been taking over the last several years. This bill is actually a way of helping all New Zealanders get smart about business and of helping businesses get more services from Government. It is not about red tape; it is about reducing red tape. Through the adoption of the New Zealand Business Number, companies and traders will have far fewer repeat occurrences in Government administration that arise from the high level of red tape that our Government is currently trying to unwind and reduce. National believes in improvement to public services, and we believe in innovation and better business. The New Zealand Business Number is, simply, a promotion of those key principles. This is a great bill. I have enjoyed the process the Commerce Committee has run—

Dr David Clark: It was a good process. Congratulations to the chair.

MELISSA LEE: —and I believe that we actually had good advice and we have actually had thorough debate. There was some disagreement, but, as the member opposite David Clark said, we believe in the principle, and I am glad that the Opposition is actually in agreement that this is a bill that we should all commend. I agree with those members, and I commend the bill to the House.

JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I have it on good authority from my colleague David Clark, who was obviously a Labour representative in the debate on this bill, that it was indeed a good select committee process in the Commerce Committee, and, of course, that is what select committees provide for us: an opportunity to have a thorough debate and listen to the public view and sentiment as to the quality of the legislation that we are examining in those committees. Interestingly, we have come out on the side, after all of that thorough process, of having decided that, actually, our reservations, in part, are around whether or not this has been done in the most efficient way, but I also sense a lost opportunity here, as well.

I will come back to the Government’s own Better Public Services target that it has set for itself around small business, because I want to ask some questions as to whether or not that is as ambitious as it could be, and, indeed, whether or not this bill really should be sitting at the heart of the Government’s agenda for small business when there are so many other things that we need to be considering for that sector. I want to start off by paying tribute to the fact that small businesses in New Zealand generate more than 40 percent of the jobs per annum, if the past has been anything to go by.

If we want to look at boosting employment in New Zealand, if we want to look at supporting the productive economy, we should be looking at what we do to support small businesses. There is no argument on that front on this side of the House. That is why Andrew Little used his state of the nation speech last year to articulate Labour’s view that small business needed to be at the heart of our regional economic development plan, and that is the reason that David Clark and I work so closely together on those issues.

If you ask small businesses what it is that they want central government to be tackling for them you will see some common themes, and I would roughly like to put them under these generic headings. First is about the team. They want the right staff, and that means well qualified in the areas that they need them to be qualified in, or readily able to be trained, and—this is what small businesses say to me often—they want the right attitude.

But there is a role for the Government to play in that space—for instance, if you look at the fact that we have had a massive shortage of people in particular industries, like, for instance, the trades. We have had a massive shortage of skilled people in that area. When you go out and ask small businesses why they are not training people in that space when they have got that work they will tell you that it is because it costs to train a person on the job: “If I’m training someone in an apprenticeship it is going to take me at least a year before they are productive in my business. Why am I going to make that investment? There is no incentive for a business owner to do that.”

If central government wants to answer that call, why are we not looking to create that incentive? That is something that Labour looked very closely at. That is why we decided to implement the Dole for Apprenticeships scheme, where we are saying: “Look, you give something by training your employees, we’ll give something back by giving you the equivalent of the dole for a year to train that individual, but you finish their training through 3 years.” That is an example of listening to the needs of those small businesses, and it is something that Labour is very mindful of.

So it is about the right staff, the right time, and having the right team. Having the right team, though, almost ignores the fact that, actually, small-business owners themselves have their own needs in terms of training and capacity. If you talk to a lot of small-business owners, when they go into the role of becoming a small-business owner or manager they often do not necessarily anticipate the growth they experience, or they will have gone in with the ultimate goal that they would have the bach, the boat, and more time to spend with their family. They very rarely achieve all three, particularly time. We almost need to be asking small businesses to give a little of their time in order to gain a little of their time, and by that I mean capacity building, and training. Those are some of the needs that they have articulated.

How do we service those gaps at the moment? Well, banks might offer the occasional training as part of their offerings to attract small businesses to them. On the other end of the scale you have Icehouse with its $20,000 programmes that, yes, generate enormous returns for those businesses, but in terms of the cost it is just unaffordable. So there are massive gains to be made in that space if we partner with those who have some experience in that area and whom businesses trust. So that is another area where I think, again, it is a missed opportunity. Finally, I come back to the notion of time—giving back businesses time to work on their business rather than on the compliance around their business. It is a massive issue. It is what we all talk about—the cutting of red tape and so on.

There are layers to this, though, and the Government has decided to pick off a layer with its Better Public Services targets. It wants to reduce the amount of time that business spends basically providing the Government with information. That is not about doing things more efficiently, for instance, in the way that we might deal with provisional tax. It is not about the meaty stuff—it is simply about the form filling. That is not to diminish its importance, but we could be doing so much more. The Government has set itself a low bar. For instance, cutting 25 percent off the time it takes to register a company is probably going to save a company about 40 bucks. We could have been much more ambitious—and that is the point Labour is trying to make.

The Business Number initiative—12 million bucks of investment—is actually, in the very early stages, going to produce very little reward for the small businesses that we are so heavily reliant on in our economy. So that is where, I think, we would express some disappointment. Why did we not go bigger? And on that note I just want to say that we are still waiting for the Government to produce its plans around provisional tax. Labour has already presented a very comprehensive plan on a pay-as-you-go regime. We are yet to see anything other than a couple of flow diagrams and lovely charts from that side of the House. I would love to hear in this environment whether or not the Government—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.