Wednesday, 24 August 2016

WEDNESDAY, 24 AUGUST 2016

WEDNESDAY, 24 AUGUST 2016

Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2.20 p.m.

Prayers.

Oral Questions

Questions to Ministers

Housing—First-home Buyers and Affordability

1. ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Does he have confidence in the Minister for Building and Housing given the falling rate of homeownership, especially among young people?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): Yes. As I have noted in the House previously, New Zealand’s homeownership rates peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so this is a long-term trend under successive Governments. It is also in line with what has happened in many other countries. The Government is taking a number of steps to help first-home buyers, including the expanded $435 million KiwiSaver HomeStart grants and getting more houses built faster.

Andrew Little: Why is his Government allowing young families to be shut out of homeownership while speculators make millions from land banking?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I suspect speculators have always been involved in the markets and at various times have made money. The Government is not stopping young people from being involved in houses. That is what the $435 million expanded homeownership programme is about, and we know that around about, I think, 90,000 people will benefit from that.

Andrew Little: Why, despite years of his Government promising solutions, are 328 properties currently being promoted on TradeMe as land-banking investments?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Firstly, they will be private properties that people own, and they have—

Dr David Clark: Oh, that makes it all right!

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: —made their own call—well, they have made their own call, actually, in that world, to allow them to decide what they want to do with it. But it is worth putting in a bit of perspective. Last year, in Auckland alone, nearly 32,000 properties were sold. If a small number of people think they should land bank it, well, that is their own personal choice.

Andrew Little: Why do just one in five young families own their own home in Takanini while in the same suburb a land banker is advertising a two hectare section for $4.5 million, a $2 million increase on what they paid for it just a year ago?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: There will be a variety of reasons why people do that, but the issue is not whether one or two people decide they want to hold a property and sell it to someone else; the question is whether others get an opportunity to do that. One of the ways they can do that is actually through the Government having a strong fiscal plan and managing the Government’s resources and finances well. One of the ways we have seen that is that interest rates have halved under the National Government’s leadership. They are now 5.4 percent. So for a family with a $300,000 floating mortgage rate, they are saving nearly $16,000 a year—that is a huge amount—under this Government.

Andrew Little: Does he agree with Harry Wotton that “It’s the Kiwi dream to own your own bit of dirt … It’s almost beyond the reach of people in Auckland … It’s getting more and more difficult to buy in Tauranga and Hamilton … It’s getting beyond the ridiculous.”; if he does not agree, why?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: No. I accept that it has had some challenges, but, as I said earlier, interest rates are half what they were. So if we were under Labour, those people would be paying $16,000 more after tax. That would be an issue. I simply point out that in the last 12 months alone 37 percent of all sales in Auckland—11,842 properties—were under the rate at which KiwiSaver HomeStart provides support.

Andrew Little: When speculators are making a fortune out of tying up land that is desperately needed for houses, is it not time to adopt Labour’s comprehensive housing plan, which includes cracking down on speculators by taxing them when they flick houses on within 5 years, abolishing Auckland’s urban growth limit, and banning offshore buyers?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: No, and the only thing comprehensive was King Tuheitia’s view that the Labour Party is toast.

Regional Economic Development—Tourism and Infrastructure

2. RON MARK (Deputy Leader—NZ First) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by all his statements?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): Yes.

Ron Mark: Does he stand by his statement that “every region of New Zealand is crucial to our growth and progress”?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Yes, in the context I made it.

Ron Mark: Why has the Government, then, given only $12 million over 4 years to councils for tourism infrastructure such as public toilets, when the Government took $630 million net surplus from GST on international visitor spending?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I think the member is wrong; the number is higher than that for GST. The Government has been investing very heavily in the tourism sector. It is one of the reasons why it is such an important part of the economy, and we saw 3.3 million international tourists come to New Zealand. What the Government is doing is—for the first time—providing that sort of support for councils. They are free to put in an application, and, I think, from the feedback that I have been getting both as Prime Minister and as Minister of Tourism, a lot of them are going to do that and be grateful. But to argue that that is the only thing that we are doing in terms of supporting tourists is a bit farcical. It includes the $140 million - odd every year we put into marketing. It includes the work we have done around black spots for mobile phones, ultra-fast broadband, and tourist facilities.

Ron Mark: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I specifically quoted the figure $12 million over 4 years to councils in respect of tourism infrastructure—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Can I have the point of order, please.

Ron Mark: My question is that he has not answered—I ask you to ask the Prime Minister to answer the question.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! No, there is absolutely no doubt that the answer addressed the question that was asked.

Ron Mark: Why is Westpac the Government’s bank, when it is not prepared to be the people’s bank in places like Ranfurly, Fairlie, Carterton, and suburbs like Greerton in Tauranga?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: The Government’s bank is the Reserve Bank—insomuch as we own it—or Kiwibank. Westpac is not the Government’s bank. We might bank with it, but we do not own it. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! That is an example of the disorder that is created if the member leads in with something before he asks a supplementary question.

Ron Mark: If the regions are crucial to the Government, why are Nelson residents frustrated and waiting for a viable solution to the Southern Link; and what is the Government doing to revitalise the Buller district, which has lost more than 1,000 jobs in the last few years?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: The member would really need to ask the Minister for Economic Development to get the full regional plan for those particular areas, but, rest assured, there is one. He has been actively engaged with those communities. Actually, from memory—I may be proven wrong—I think it was the Mayor of Buller, actually, who was very, very supportive of the programme that was rolled out. Yes, there have been some issues in relation to mining, but to argue that the Government is responsible for that, given the downturn in commodity prices, is a novel one. If the member thinks he has got an answer to it, he should probably go and ring Malcolm Turnbull, because they happen to be having a few problems in Australia in relation to mining.

Job Creation and Unemployment—Statistics

3. MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri) to the Minister of Finance: Does he stand by his statement that “There are more jobs, and people are being better paid”; if so, why?

Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): The latest household labour force survey shows unemployment down to just over 5 percent. It shows that in the last year 100,000 jobs have been created, and that the average annual wage has increased well above the rate of inflation over the last year, which means higher real wages for households. The Government will continue to focus on policies that underpin moderate and consistent growth that delivers more jobs and higher incomes to households.

Matt Doocey: Given that wages are rising at the same time that inflation remains low, how is the spending power of earnings for New Zealand workers tracking?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: Based on Statistics New Zealand figures, annual increases in earnings have now exceeded inflation for 19 consecutive quarters, or every quarter for nearly 5 years, starting from about the time the Labour Party said we had a cost of living crisis. This is the longest unbroken increase in real wages in the 26 years that this has been recorded.

Matt Doocey: How do employment levels in New Zealand compare with other developed countries?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: Comparisons with other countries are interesting and, in this case, positive, but it is no reason at all to be complacent, because there are still too many people who do not have work and too many people who would want to have higher incomes. But I can say that the employment rate in New Zealand—that is, the proportion of all people over 16 in work—is now the second-highest in the OECD. For every 100 people who are 16 or older, 66 have a job. That includes people who choose not to work, or retirees. In Australia, the equivalent figure is 61, in the UK it is 60, and across the OECD the average is 56 in 100 having a job.

Matt Doocey: Does he agree with recent reports in the Dominion Post that wages have stagnated; if not, why not?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: No, I disagree with it because it is not supported by the facts. Since this Government came into office, average annual wages are up 25 percent, and that is more than double the rate of inflation over that period. The article, which I think came from the most recent Labour Party leader, is simply wrong.

Grant Robertson: Can the Minister confirm that median household income has increased by 1 percent in real terms under his Government whilst it increased by 27 percent under the last Labour Government?

Hon BILL ENGLISH: No, I cannot.

Canterbury Recovery—Government Information for Homeowners

4. Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram) to the Minister supporting Greater Christchurch Regeneration: Does he agree with the Prime Minister, who said with regard to the Canterbury earthquakes, “on behalf of the Government, let me be clear that no one will be left to walk this journey alone”; if so, does he think all relevant information prepared by his Government has been made available to Cantabrians to assist them in navigating post-earthquake decisions?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister supporting Greater Christchurch Regeneration): In answering those two questions, may I say, to support those answers, that the Government has invested around $17.5 billion in helping greater Christchurch rebuild after the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. This includes $11.2 billion that the Earthquake Commission expects to spend in response to the earthquakes, $2.5 billion of which it spent establishing the Canterbury Home Repair Programme. It includes $1.5 billion spent purchasing red-zoned land to enable 8,000 families to move on with their lives, $1.7 billion on the Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team programme to rebuild damaged roads, bridges, and underground services, more than a billion dollars to renew educational facilities and build some of the country’s most modern schools, and another billion rebuilding the region’s health facilities—including a new hospital at Burwood and new outpatient facilities and an acute services building on the Christchurch Hospital campus. We have invested another $1 billion in important anchor projects that will see Christchurch have some of the best civic facilities in the world, let alone the country. Then there is the establishment of Regenerate Christchurch, which will see an ongoing relationship between the Crown and the Government to ensure that ongoing investment. There are many more examples I could give in answer to the first part of the question, which is yes, I do agree with the Prime Minister; in answer to the second part of the question, yes.

Dr Megan Woods: I seek leave to table an unpublished 82-page booklet, Cash settling earthquake-damaged residential properties in Canterbury, prepared by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority to guide Canterbury homeowners through the cash settlement process. It is undated, but the Government failed to release it.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The last part is very unnecessary. I will put the leave. Leave is sought to table that particular document. Is there any objection? There is none.

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

Dr Megan Woods: Does he agree with a representative of the insurance industry that if this booklet had been published 3 years ago it would have been “extremely useful—in fact, we were crying out for such a resource …”; if so, why did they wait years before beginning this resource?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: I do not agree with that insurance company representative, whoever that anonymous person might be. The book was worked on by MBIE between February and late September 2015—7 months. At the start, insurance settlements in Christchurch were at 83 percent. By the time it had finished, they had risen to 93 percent. As of where we are at the present, those insurance settlements are at 96 percent. The book itself was considered by those who reviewed it to be extremely confusing and likely to be most unhelpful. Many of those comments, in fact, came from the same insurance people whom perhaps the member is relying on. What I would point out to her is that the Government itself, in buying out the 8,000 people in the red zones, discovered over 60 different policy settings for what, on the face of it, may have seemed to be the same type of policy. The book was not published, because it was not helpful—now that I know the member has read it, that may explain some of her confusion. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! I need to just call the member.

Dr Megan Woods: Thank you. So if this book was so flawed, why was a representative of the insurance industry saying if the booklet had been published 3 years ago, it would have been “extremely useful—in fact, we were crying out for such a resource at the time.”?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: I am regularly told by the member and some of her other party members that insurance companies have acted in a disreputable manner. Why is it that when they claim that, that is the case—but when they want to say something that suits them, suddenly they are paragons? The reality here is that the settlements at the moment sit at 96.6 percent. They are continuing. The book was deemed to be confusing and, therefore, it was not published.

Dr Megan Woods: Will he apologise to the people of Canterbury for bowing to pressure and scrapping a booklet that would have aided them to get back on their feet and get a fair deal?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Given that the book took 7 months to produce and was totally useless, I am certainly not apologising for it not being published. What I am proud of is that Cantabrians working with their insurers have got to a position where there is a 96.6 percent settlement rate. What is left are difficult, difficult cases, and we are doing what we can to see them settled.

Housing—Homeownership and Affordability

5. METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) to the Prime Minister: Ka tū a ia i runga i te mana o āna kaupapa here Kāwanatanga katoa, nē?

[Does he stand by all his Government’s policies?]

Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): Yes.

Metiria Turei: Does the Prime Minister stand by his housing policies, now that 85 percent of Aucklanders think there is a housing crisis and more than half of Auckland homeowners think house prices need to come down?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Yes.

Metiria Turei: Does he stand by his housing policies, which have seen households that have to spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing go from just one in 10 a generation ago to almost one in three today?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Yes.

Metiria Turei: How long does he think his policies can be effective, when this Government has seen wage rises at something like 1 percent, 1.5 percent a year while the median Auckland house price is going up at over 12 percent a year? How long can that continue?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: The member constantly demonstrates that she does not really understand what is happening. If she did, she would see that wages have gone up 25 percent in New Zealand and, as I noted earlier to the House, interest rates have halved under this Government. For someone borrowing $300,000 for their mortgage, they are paying $16,000 a year less than they were. Probably, in pre-tax terms, it is in the order of about $22,000 per year.

Metiria Turei: Surely the Prime Minister is not trying to take credit for low interest rates, when they are happening all over the world because of weak real economic growth, both here and overseas?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: One of the reasons why interest rates are coming down in this country is that the Government has done a good job of getting the books back in order and of managing inflation expectations. It was not so long ago that her co-leader wanted to get the printing presses out in New Zealand and start printing money. That would have had interesting economic implications, as would her desire to see the poorest New Zealanders see all of their equity evaporate in housing when she takes all of that off them. I will be reminding New Zealanders of that in the months to come.

Metiria Turei: How many poor people on 60 percent or less of the median household income are buying million-dollar homes in Auckland?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I suspect very few, and they probably have not for the last 30 or 40 years. The reality, though, is that for very low-income New Zealanders there is assistance from the Government. KiwiSaver HomeStart, for instance, has both income caps and other caps, and we are seeing around the country quite a lot of New Zealanders—in fact very low-income New Zealanders—accessing that. The Government is also providing additional support for them, with income-related rents into social housing—something we have never seen before. This Government, as we know, was the first Government in decades to raise benefits in this country. We have spent over $10 billion, actually, providing support to very low-income and low-income New Zealanders, in a vast variety of ways. The member gets up as if the Government is not out there supporting the most at-risk New Zealanders; in fact we are, every single day.

Metiria Turei: Will the Prime Minister accompany me to the Park Up for Homes in Parnell tomorrow night to talk directly to homeless people about his plans to ensure that they are homed in the future; if not, why not?

Rt Hon JOHN KEY: The member should not take it personally, but I do not want to accompany her anywhere. If she wants to know why, it is because I really do not want to hang with her. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order!

Metiria Turei: I seek leave to table the UMR Research housing poll results, as yet unpublished, provided to me on 22 August 2016.

Mr SPEAKER: On the basis that I am assured it is unpublished and not therefore available to members, I will put the leave. Leave is sought to table that particular UMR Research poll. Is there any objection to it being tabled? There is none. It can be tabled.

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

Schools—Communities of Online Learning

6. Dr JIAN YANG (National) to the Minister of Education: What recent announcements has she made about expanding 21st century learning options for parents and whānau?

Hon HEKIA PARATA (Minister of Education): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Yesterday the introduction of the Education (Update) Amendment Bill was announced in this House. It is the biggest update to education in 27 years and will provide flexibility for parents and whānau, and for children and young people at the centre of learning. One of the proposals is the establishment of communities of online learning that will enable online learning in whole or in part as a supplement to classroom learning or a complement to what their schools offer. Digital fluency is the universal language of the 21st century. In the future a provider, including our mainstream schools, tertiary providers, or private providers will be able to apply to become a community of online learning. This will give students, parents, and whānau the benefit of a digital option, grow their digital fluency, and ensure they can be global citizens in an increasingly connected 21st century world.

Dr Jian Yang: What measures will she put in place to ensure the quality of education is maintained for the young people who choose this option?

Hon HEKIA PARATA: To become a community of online learning, a provider will be required to meet a very high threshold. They will be required to undergo an accreditation regime to ensure that students will have access to a great New Zealand education. They will also be subject to monitoring and an intervention regime, just like all our schools. Providers will also have to provide evidence of their capacity to provide pastoral care and to meet the well-being needs of students. They will be subject to an accountability regime, including reporting against agreed student achievement outcomes, financial reporting requirements, and Education Review Office reviews. We also propose to set strict enrolment criteria—for example, a restriction on the enrolment of students for whom there is a high risk of disengagement in an online environment. We welcome the submissions of parents, families and whānau, and the education sector to the select committee.

Schools—Communities of Online Learning and Funding

7. CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) to the Minister of Education: How will her Communities of Online Learning (CoOL) proposal differ from online charter schools in the United States, given a study partially funded by a private pro-charter foundation found students attending those schools lost an average of about 72 days of learning in reading, and 180 days of learning in maths during the course of a 180-day school year?

Hon HEKIA PARATA (Minister of Education): Significantly. As I set out in the answer to the previous question, before a provider could become a community of online learning, it must undergo an accreditation regime, be subject to an intervention regime, provide evidence of its capacity to provide pastoral care, be subject to an accountability regime, and demonstrate that it meets strict enrolment criteria—for example, a restriction on the enrolment of students for whom there is a high risk of disengagement in an online environment. We have put these checks and balances in place because, like the Labour Party members in their Future of Work document, we agree that—and I quote from Labour’s Future of Work document—“… people can obtain entire qualifications online with the same quality of direct learning and engagement as if they were on site.”

Chris Hipkins: Does her own regulatory impact statement state “Historically, academic achievement for New Zealand correspondence school students is lower than that of students in face-to-face education. Engagement can also be low.”; if so, what New Zealand evidence does she have that fully online learning that is allowed for in this proposal will result in better educational achievement?

Hon HEKIA PARATA: The member is damning 23,000 students, which is the roll of Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu (Te Kura)—the biggest school in New Zealand—and of course it has problems and challenges. [Interruption] Absolutely, and the regulatory impact statement outlines that, so I am glad the member has taken advantage of it. But like all schools in New Zealand that do face difficulties with engagement and achievement, so too does Te Kura, and it does a significantly good job with those kids who have been disengaged from other schools. As Dame Karen Sewell, the chair of Te Kura, has already publicly said, she welcomes this new approach and looks forward to Te Kura becoming a community of online learning.

David Seymour: Is the Minister aware that the study referred to in the primary question was popularised earlier this week in the American show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver; if indeed that is how the member researched this primary question, would that be an example of online learning?

Hon HEKIA PARATA: To answer that question in reverse order, yes, it would be an example of that; in answer to the first part, unlike the Opposition, who use overseas comedy writers as the font of their knowledge, we do not.

Rt Hon John Key: Does the Minister find it very odd when she constantly gets to read reports from people who claim that they want children in New Zealand to get a better education, especially the least well-off New Zealanders, but never want to do anything other than just back up their union mates?

Hon HEKIA PARATA: It is terribly disappointing for New Zealand parents, who are very focused on how they get the best education for their kids and are constantly obstructed by naysayers.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! A little less interjection from my immediate right.

Chris Hipkins: Is she seriously suggesting that a primary school child sitting at home in their bedroom in front of a laptop or a tablet is going to get an education at least as good as a child sitting in a classroom, surrounded by their peers, and with a fully trained and qualified teacher guiding their learning?

Hon HEKIA PARATA: Unlike the Opposition, I do not propose to prescribe for every child in this country or hypothetically—

Hon Annette King: Yes, you do.

Hon HEKIA PARATA: No, I do not, and that is why the bill is full of enabling provisions. We actually trust New Zealanders to make choices for themselves rather than have them prescribed to them by all-knowing other people.

Rt Hon John Key: Is the Minister aware that on Stewart Island the school there has 28 pupils and those 28 pupils are all learning Mandarin, the entire school, and they are learning online, and is that not a great thing—that young kids on Stewart Island are learning Chinese?

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The first part of the question is in order. Supplementary questions should have only one leg to them.

Hon HEKIA PARATA: I am aware of that. I am equally aware that Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Te Waiu o Ngati Porou in Ruatoria is teaching physics and chemistry in Te Reo Māori to other parts of the country. The members of the Opposition seem confused about this policy—because in my answer I made it clear that mainstream schools can be incorporated in this policy as providers of online learning.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! We now have a discussion between two front-benchers, which will cease.

Chris Hipkins: Can she confirm that all of the students mentioned in her answer and in the Prime Minister’s question were attending a school, and what evidence does she have that they will get an equally good education if they are at home by themselves without a teacher?

Hon HEKIA PARATA: Again the member falls victim to his own prejudices. In the policy that we have laid out we have said there is a full range of options of what these communities of online learning could be like. It includes provision by existing mainstream schools. It includes provision by existing tertiary institutions, and it includes provision for provision by private providers. We are not saying yet what proposals will be acceptable.

Chris Hipkins: Does she at least accept the irony that while she is talking about opening up more flexibility and choice she is massively reducing the flexibility and autonomy offered to existing public schools and subjecting them in the same bill to even more compliance and red tape?

Hon HEKIA PARATA: I do not, because this Government has invested over $700 million into those exact same schools to ensure that they can have digital technology—24/7 ultra-fast, good-quality broadband data, at no cost to them—and we have incorporated as of a month ago digital technology as a core part of the curriculum. This is a next step because this Government is future focused, living now in the present, and providing for our young people to be internationally connected. [Interruption] Yes, very disappointing for those still living in the past; I understand that.

Chris Hipkins: When her bulk funding proposal results in schools reducing the number of subjects on offer, is she going to suggest to those students who can no longer take the subjects in school that they want to that they can enrol online rather than have the teacher in front of them as they have had previously?

Hon HEKIA PARATA: First of all, I have no proposal around bulk funding. Second of all, in the funding review we are still in the middle of a consultation process. The third thing to know is that schools already offer blended learning and they do offer it outside the boundaries of their own school, and, fourthly, our Government is absolutely supportive of that kind of collaboration.

Rt Hon John Key: Has the Minister of Education seen a press release by the Labour Party from Jenny Salesa saying that when it comes to Pacific population and bilingualism in New Zealand, the associate education spokesperson for Labour said this is a crucial—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! There is absolutely no—[Interruption] Order! I do not need help from Mr Chris Bishop. There is, firstly, no ministerial responsibility, and, secondly, it is a question that I perceive is designed to attack the Opposition party, which is in breach of Speakers’ rulings.

Rt Hon John Key: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

Mr SPEAKER: No, I am not interested in arguing about it. If it is another matter, I will happily hear it.

Rt Hon John Key: Yes. I seek leave to table the press release, then.

Mr SPEAKER: No, and I am not prepared to put the leave.

Marama Fox: In addition to digital technologies being made a core curriculum subject, will the Minister consider Te Reo Māori and the New Zealand Land Wars also being made a core curriculum subject?

Hon HEKIA PARATA: Te Reo Māori has exactly the same status in our curriculum as digital technology. It is available in any school where parents wish it to be available—

Hon Trevor Mallard: That’s not true.

Hon HEKIA PARATA: —and it is resourced accordingly—it is true. In terms of the—

Hon Trevor Mallard: Not true.

Hon HEKIA PARATA: Argh! So from the past! In terms of ngā whawhai nui o Aotearoa, because the Māori Party has made strong advocacy to beef up the resources around Māori history, we have developed a significant website. I thank the Māori Party for that constructive advocacy.

Freshwater Management—Farming Practices and Water Quality

8. CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) to the Minister for the Environment: Will he commit to a regulatory regime that includes swimmable rivers in light of the comment from a Havelock North café owner who said that, “we’d trade all the compensation in the world if it would spur the Government into tidying up or cleaning up the waterways”?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment): The Government is already committed to a programme of improving the swimmability of rivers. Specific river clean-up programmes that the Government is funding include the Waikato, the Manawatū, the Whanganui, the Waitangi, the Buller, the Rangitaiki, and the Maraetōtara. In the 7 years that we have been in Government, we have spent more than seven times what the previous Government spent in the preceding 7 years. We are also the first Government to initiate a national policy statement (NPS) on fresh water, which includes requirements for improving water quality and which we are currently strengthening.

Catherine Delahunty: Will he ask the Attorney-General to specify that land use across the country be investigated in the Havelock North inquiry so that the role of agriculture and other sectors and the health of waterways can be looked at objectively?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The terms of reference for the inquiry into the Havelock North incident are very wide. What the Government does not want to do is inject into those terms of reference some prejudice as to what occurred. In my view, that inquiry needs to be able to have all the powers it needs, but without the Government, the Green Party, or anybody else predetermining what the cause of that awful incident was.

Sarah Dowie: What is the standard requirement for water to be swimmable, and how does it compare with the drinking-water standard?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The drinking-water standard is 500 times tougher than the swimming guideline—i.e., for water to be swimmable, you need to have an E. coli count of fewer than 500, and for water to be drinkable, it needs to be less than one E. coli. That is, even if every single waterway in New Zealand met the swimmable standard, we would still need to have councils selecting and protecting drinking-water standards to ensure that they were safe.

Catherine Delahunty: Will he reject the warnings of Dr Russell Death, as the Prime Minister has done, who says that even if we chlorinate all our water supplies, people are still going to get sick from water-borne pathogens associated with an intensified dairy sector?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The bit where I differ with the member is that you cannot have modern agriculture and also for this country to have high standards of water in its water bodies. If we have good management practice, if we have the technical efficiency standards, and if we implement the national fencing requirements that our Government has proposed, and if we implement the NPS that we have proposed, this country can have a strong, vibrant agricultural sector earning this country a living, as well as have the very best lifestyle and a high standard of water quality.

Catherine Delahunty: Does he think that 10 million cows cause serious harm to our clean rivers and drinking water, or is he sticking with his theory that native bird populations and volcanic ash are the real reasons that he cannot commit to swimmable rivers?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: There are water bodies that are unswimmable because of birds; there are others that are unswimmable because of volcanic activity. Where I would challenge the Green Party is to make the link between the Havelock North community—actually, Havelock North has a very low level of dairying. If the Green Party wants to maintain its story that intensive dairying is the cause of the Havelock North problem—perhaps that might run true if it was an area like Canterbury or if it was an area like Southland or if it was an area of the Waikato that has had very expansive growth in the dairy industry. I just urge that member: let the inquiry do its job. Members of Parliament should not draw conclusions as to what was the cause in Havelock North until that inquiry has been completed.

Immigration—Work Visas and Exploitation of International Students

9. IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North) to the Minister of Immigration: How many of the 209,000 work visas issued last year were for occupations on one of the Essential Skills in Demand lists?

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister of Immigration): I interpreted the primary question with reference to lists to mean the Immediate Skill Shortage List, the Long Term Skill Shortage List, and the Canterbury Skill Shortage List. It is impossible to get an exact number of visas issued under those lists, because of differences in the timing between the period of the number of work visas and the changes to the lists in that time. However, the best estimate officials have provided me in the time available is that between 15,000 and 16,000 work visas were issued for occupations on those lists.

Iain Lees-Galloway: Do “cafe manager”, “retail manager”, “winery cellar hand” or “deckhand” appear on an essential skills and demand list; if not, why are so many visas being issued for those occupations?

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Not having the lists with me, I would have to check. If the member is implying by his question that they do not, it is important to bear in mind that a visa can be issued under the essential skills category even though occupations may not be on those lists, but the employer would first need to demonstrate that there is not a New Zealander available to do the job. I reassure the member that that is an onerous test.

Iain Lees-Galloway: If visas are being issued for occupations that are not on the skills shortage list because of labour shortages, why does he not allow wages to increase for occupations in which there is a labour shortage, rather than using immigration to suppress wages?

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: I reject the inference in the question. Wages are growing ahead of inflation, and jobs are growing right across the country. If that member got out of his ivory tower and went to the regions and talked with employers in those regions, the No. 1 thing they are saying is that they cannot find the labour we need.

Iain Lees-Galloway: How can he claim that immigration is not being used to suppress wages, when Westpac says wage growth is missing in action, and Capital Economics say wage growth is likely to remain low until at least 2018, and that both of those reputable organisations say the blame lies squarely with overly high numbers of immigration?

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: In respect of the last part of that question, I draw the member’s attention to certain data on how many essential skills work visas were issued for the first time in the year 2007-08. That year there were 16,118, according to the official information—the estimates I have been given. Last year there were half of those numbers: 8,329. If the member is concluding from those numbers—from that information—that wage growth is being suppressed because of extra demand for labour, that is completely the opposite of the data.

Iain Lees-Galloway: Why will he not listen to Westpac, Capital Economics, the Reserve Bank, the BNZ, the Auckland chamber of commerce, Treasury, his own immigration officials, and the New Zealand public, and carry out a comprehensive review of immigration settings?

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Two things: we listened to a number of stakeholders in this, including them—including my own officials, who are estimating that essential skills visas, both first-time granted and total, are going down by between 40 and 50 percent. I am also going to listen to the employers in those regions, who are crying out for the sorts of people whom they need to prevent fruit from rotting on the vine and to allow cows to be milked, and elderly to be looked after in our aged-care sector. I would love it if every single one of those jobs was filled by a New Zealander; that is not the reality now, and it was not when they were in office.

Ron Mark: Can the Minister tell the House again: why is this Government allowing thousands of overseas students to come here to be exploited and extorted by other immigrants of their own ethnicity?

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: The question has nothing to do with the primary question, but I will address it nevertheless. This is a very important industry and one that is held in high regard globally. It earns $3 billion a year and employs nearly 26,000 people. There are, no doubt, problems in the student market, and particularly in the subcontinent, which is why more than half of the visas presently applied for from that part of the world are being declined. I am satisfied that we are on top of the issue and being diligent about it.

Ron Mark: How would he reply to a young foreign student when she asked why an Auckland cafe owner demanded that she pay $30,000 to get the job she was applying for?

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: I would reassure that student that the Government takes that form of exploitative practice very seriously, which is why last year we significantly increased the sanctions—[Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Carry on.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: —for exploitation of people lawfully entitled to be here. The punishments are now 7 years in jail, up to a maximum of a $100,000 fine, and, if they themselves are recent residents, they can be liable for deportation.

Family Violence—Family Violence Information Disclosure Scheme

10. JONO NAYLOR (National) to the Minister of Police: What is the Police doing to assist potential victims of family violence?

Andrew Little: Not much.

Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Police): Quite contrary to what the Leader of the Opposition said, in addition to attending more than 100,000 family violence call outs a year, the new police Family Violence Information Disclosure Scheme is providing victims and potential victims with the information they need to leave potentially dangerous situations. The scheme allows potential victims of family violence or concerned relatives or friends to request information relating to the violence history of a new partner. This is an idea that I brought back to New Zealand after a visit to the UK in 2013, modelled on “Clare’s Law”. To date a total of 55 cases have been referred to the scheme since it was launched in December 2015.

Jono Naylor: In what other ways is the scheme used to prevent potential victimisation?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Police can also proactively release family violence information if they believe someone is at risk from their partner. Police have done this 31 times since the scheme was launched. This is just another example of the excellent preventative work that New Zealand police do every day. Additionally, a number of the requests have been made in relation to sex offenders living in the home of a new partner and children. This was not the original intention of the scheme, which was aimed at intimate partners and their children. However, these requests have been accepted and, after consideration, disclosures have been provided to reduce the risk of sexual assault on children.

Police—Resourcing and Methamphetamine

11. STUART NASH (Labour—Napier) to the Minister of Police: Does she believe that the Police have enough resources to implement their part of the Prime Minister’s 2009 promise to use the full force of the Government’s arsenal to “confront the P problem” given that P is cheaper, and as easy as it was to get in 2008?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Police): As the member well knows, I am supporting the police to get the resources they need going into the future, because I always support our New Zealand Police, unlike that member. In terms of meth, although there is always more to be done, this Government has made excellent progress tackling the problem, including just today the announcement of the seizure of an estimated $3 million to $4 million worth of methamphetamine being manufactured in rural Kaukapakapa following a month-long investigation. So, actually, I would like to take this excellent opportunity to congratulate the police on keeping a further substantial amount of methamphetamine off the streets. Well done, the police.

Stuart Nash: Does she believe that P being cheaper now than in 2008 means that the war on meth has failed; if not, was the Prime Minister wrong when he said that the mark of success would be the price of P going up?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I have always found that the Prime Minister is never wrong, and that is a good piece of advice to give to that member. I would also say that there are two issues when it comes to the price of a product like methamphetamine, or any price of any product, and that is both demand and supply. According to the New Zealand Health Survey, the demand for P has gone down from 2.2 percent of New Zealanders to 0.9 percent.

Stuart Nash: I seek leave to table a National Drug Intelligence Bureau document dated 11 July 2006, which shows that the price of methamphetamine has actually dropped since 2008.

Mr SPEAKER: I will put the leave. Leave is sought to table that document. It is relatively old. Is there any objection to it being tabled? There is objection.

Stuart Nash: Who is right: the Police Commissioner, who said that he was “very concerned about the availability of methamphetamine.”, or the Minister, who said to One News recently that she is not concerned?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Obviously, we are both right. But I would have thought that my comment would have been about any comments that that member has said, and that would be right.

Stuart Nash: How can she expect the police to turn around the increase in meth when the police 4-year strategic plan, signed off by both the commissioner and her less than 3 months ago, forecasts no increase in police numbers?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Quite easily. As I have told that member many times—including members of the media—we are working on a plan for future resources.

Darroch Ball: Why under this Government do we have 208 ghost stations where not even one officer on duty could be achieved over four consecutive Fridays and Saturdays?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I am not aware of any ghost stations. I am certainly aware of some people who do not turn up with their full quota in Parliament, but certainly not in the police stations.

Darroch Ball: Why under this Government, in the first 6 months of 2016, did 73 police locations have no rostered officers in townships like Carterton and Kawakawa?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Police actually allocate their resources according to demand. Certainly, Carterton, ever since the wonderful member Mr Ron Mark was the mayor, has always been a very good town with a very low crime rate.

Darroch Ball: I seek leave to table two documents from the police, both under the Official Information Act, dated 24 June 2016. The first document has the total number of police officers by location at 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. in December 2015 and January 2016. The second document is the total number of police rostered stations used in the last 6 months.

Mr SPEAKER: Those two documents are sourced under the Official Information Act. I will therefore put the leave. Leave is sought to table them. Is there any objection? There is objection.

Wine Industry—Export Growth and Government Initiatives

12. PAUL FOSTER-BELL (National) to the Minister for Primary Industries: What recent reports has he received on growth in wine exports?

Hon NATHAN GUY (Minister for Primary Industries): A recent report from New Zealand Winegrowers shows that New Zealand’s wine industry is on track to reach its target of $2 billion of exports by 2020. Wine exports have risen by 10 percent in the last year to just under $1.6 billion. This is the 21st consecutive year the industry has experienced significant growth. I congratulate the industry, which is meeting at the Romeo Bragato Conference in Blenheim today.

Paul Foster-Bell: In what ways is the Government supporting this growth in wine exports?

Hon NATHAN GUY: The Government will continue supporting the industry through market access, research and development, biosecurity, and through supporting legislation. For example, the $17 million Lifestyle Wines Primary Growth Partnership programme has already eclipsed its domestic sales target. Industry members have also given strong support today for joining in a Government-Industry agreement on biosecurity, which is great news. Finally, the Geographical Indications (Wine and Spirits) Registration Amendment Bill will help give international consumers confidence in New Zealand’s wine, as well as reassuring them of its value for money.

General Debate

General Debate

ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition): I move, That the House take note of miscellaneous business. The only question of the day is, of course, what is going on in the National Government? What is going on in the National Government? Why is it that it cannot get any consistency? Why is it all at sixes and sevens over an increasing number of policies and pieces of legislation? Shall we start randomly with, say, the shop trading hours piece of legislation, because that is topical. Everybody is talking about it. Michael Jones is talking about it. Other people are talking about it. People in South Auckland, people who are concerned about values, and people who want to preserve the integrity of Easter Sunday—they are talking about it.

You see, a few years ago, when the whole Parliament talked about it, a few National MPs actually had a view about it. So, for example, Bill English had a view about it, because he voted against it. Oh, yes—oh, yes. And he was not the only one. Chester Borrows had a view about it. He did not like it. He did not like the liberalisation of it, so he voted against it. They were not the only ones. Sam Lotu-Iiga—he voted against it. Tim Macindoe voted against it. And when there was a discussion about it a few years later, Alfred Ngaro expressed his opposition to liberalising Sunday trading on Easter Sunday. But, mysteriously, the National Government finds now, when it is confronted with this issue, that its members are all in harmonious agreement. But we know that is not true—we know that is not true.

You see, part of the integrity of this Parliament is that occasionally the House agrees that there are issues that are a matter of personal importance—matters of conscience—and so every member is entitled to vote in accordance with their conscience. That conscience might be dictated to by a number of factors, including one’s religious beliefs, and that is totally respectable and acceptable. But all of a sudden this issue—which is about the integrity of one of the great religious observances, at least on the Christian calendar, which has now become so culturally vital to the way we observe holidays and breaks in New Zealand—suddenly is not important to people’s individual consciences any more. And so we have a Government now, desperate to give the appearance of consistency and cohesion, having to tell its members of conscience—because there is only a handful of them—that they cannot vote according to their conscience. I just simply ask the question: what is going on?

It is a bit like the cigarette packaging legislation. You see, that has come up for debate too and that is an issue on which members have expressed personal views. And it is not just about what Benson and Hedges thinks or whatever the tobacco manufacturers out in Pētone think; it is about what members here think about it and the public health issues that go with it. But all of a sudden National decides that that does not matter anymore—that what was once an issue of conscience is no longer an issue of conscious anymore. What is happening with National now is it is using the same patronising attitudes to its own members as it uses to some of its coalition partners and supporters, such as the Māori Party.

The Māori Party expresses views on all range of things, and it often expresses views that support us.

Hon Bill English: Labour wouldn’t let them do that.

ANDREW LITTLE: But when it comes to having to vote for the measures enacted by Bill English and John Key and their Government, the Māori Party does not get a look in. It does not get a look in, and so the Māori Party members are compelled against their consciences and against their policy to vote for measures that are detrimental to Māori, such as selling State houses, such as doing nothing about low wages, such as freezing the education budget and the police budget. You see, the Māori Party does not get a look in with that lot. Government members talk a big game about being responsive and respectful to Māori, but they are not. They tow along the Māori Party on their coat-tails and it makes no difference, unlike the Labour Party where our rich, diverse Māori caucus is an integral part of who we are and they sit around the table and make those decisions.

The reality is this Government has given up. It has nothing meaningful to say on anything. What is its big priority right now?

Hon David Parker: Schools without schools.

ANDREW LITTLE: No, it is lost and found in the airports. That is what it is concerned about—it is the lost and found in the airport, and all its intellectual time and energy is going to finding the people who leave things lying around in airports. That is what it cares about. Forget about communities of online learning—the Government is not going to help them. The Government does not even know that the online learning that is happening at the moment is happening in classrooms to help students learn about collaboration. It wants to upset that and do the opposite. [Interruption] The Minister of Education does not even know what she is talking about. She does not know what her own policy is. This is a Government in total disarray, and it is coming to an end.

Hon HEKIA PARATA (Minister of Education): It is fascinating how obsessed the Opposition is with what is happening in the National Government. That is because there is so much happening in the National Government and so little happening in the Labour Party. That is why the attention is focused over here.

I am proud to be part of a Government that is governing for the 21st century. We are fully a part of the present and we are also focused on the future. That is why, for instance, we have invested so much as a Government into science and innovation. We know that that will underpin the economy of New Zealand and grow prosperity for all.

When Steven Joyce and I announced our Science and Society project in 2014 we were interested in how we could invest in a nation of curious minds, as opposed to a bench of pathetic minds. We are really into how we grow the inquisitiveness of New Zealanders. We have invested $760 million in this year’s Budget to show that we are prepared to put taxpayers’ money into what will count in growing the future of our country.

In addition, we have a very active regional economic development programme. This includes our partners the Māori Party. As we go around the country we support local communities to identify what will work for them now and into the future and how we can invest to ensure that we are growing strong regions, which will lead to overall national prosperity.

This is underpinned by the extraordinary and untiring work that our Prime Minister does internationally. He goes out there, he makes connections that then set things up for our other Ministers to secure trade agreements, which will then allow for the export industries, off the back of our regional economies, supported by our science and innovation. And what is the critical exponential catalyst for growing all of that? It is education.

Yesterday in the House I introduced the biggest update of education that there has been in almost three decades. For a start, it focuses on children. It puts them at the heart of our education system. Next, it provides for a mechanism called a national education learning priorities statement, which will allow for the Government to set out what the strategic objectives are for early learning and for schooling.

The particular issue that has exercised the Opposition, because it has lost touch with its own policy proposals, is that we are enabling a legal identity for communities of online learners. How anyone could be opposed to that, given the fact that we live in a digital technological society, and how important it is that our young people in particular, but actually all of us—although I am a little sad at how many Luddites there are amongst us who think that there is only one medium of learning. There is a whole range of them, and different ways appeal to different young people. This Government is not prepared to risk the failure of any young New Zealander, so we are prepared to look at what the range of options is.

Someone from the Opposition has said that this is a tragic social experiment. I would commend to historians that that was what was said when education was extended to the working classes: “This is a tragic, dangerous social experiment.” I am appealing to the Opposition to join us in the 21st century, where people use digital technology all the time—indeed, we had the Assistant Speaker having his technology interrupt the House earlier today.

What I am committed to is disruption: disrupting the way that education is delivered, in order that young people can start to see their own potential, and be able to secure the jobs that are coming out of the information and communications technology industry. The demand for that from our businesses in New Zealand is powerful, and we want our young people to take advantage of that. We want more Frances Valintines of the Mind Lab; we want more Rod Drurys of Xero—people who are based here in Aotearoa New Zealand and are selling to the world, using intellectual capital and the digital platform that this Government has seen the power for in investing into every one of our schools. This National Government, led by the inspirational and aspirational John Key, is governing for the 21st century. Thank you.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): After today’s question time, you have to ask the question: what on earth is the plan? The Government has got no idea what it is talking about now. Where is the Government taking us? The people of New Zealand are now asking that question. That party and those Ministers have got no idea. They sit there and they shrug. They shrug and they say: “Thank goodness for tourism.” They shrug and they say: “Oh, the New Zealand dollar’s killing export industry.” They shrug as, day by day and week by week, New Zealand exports are falling in real terms. That is what this National Government is doing with its so-called plan.

Banks owned by overseas companies reap billions of dollars every year. National shrugs as those billions of dollars flow offshore. The Government members speak about the importance of the regions. They love the regions right now. It is just unbelievable how the regions have suddenly come into their collective conscience. The spin machine works in overdrive, telling Kiwis how wonderful life is and how happy they should be living under the leadership of this Atlas of a man, the Prime Minister. It is just wonderful, they tell us. But what they cannot deny is that now and for the past several years the magnitude of the problem has been building such that National’s wonderful spin-machine cannot hide the magnitude of the problem. The people are beginning to see it for themselves right now.

I take Westpac as an example, taking my lead from the deputy leader of New Zealand First today. For 27 years it has been the banker for the Government of New Zealand, profiting tremendously for all that time—I think a $445 million half-yearly profit as at 31 March this year. Nearly half a billion dollars in half a year, and that money is going offshore. But what does Westpac do? There are 72 jobs being cut in the provinces as it closes its doors. Why? It is not making enough money, apparently. Its contract with this Government—the contract with the people of New Zealand—does not seem to be enough of a reason to provide core services to the people who so desperately need them, especially our seniors, who have been speaking out against this move of Westpac’s at the moment. What does this Government do? It sits there and it shrugs.

The Prime Minister’s determined and considered effort to stifle the Kiwi wage packet is working. But, actually, what big businesses—multinationals from around the world—are telling him is that they are still not making enough profit, and they could still cut more off the cost of operations and their margins could be bigger. So what do Messrs Joyce, English, and Key do? Unfettered and rampant record numbers of unskilled migrants are coming into the country, coming into Auckland in particular, creating a housing crisis, ensuring that working families cannot afford a home to live in, and ensuring—and here is the kicker—that wages in New Zealand remain stagnant. And stagnant they are. There can be no debate about that. I put it to the Government that they will start to decline in real terms.

In fact, my commendations to the Minister who spoke before me, Hekia Parata. She seemed to be the only one who has a plan. If you are a private corporate looking to cream a profit off Kiwi kids’ education in New Zealand, then Hekia Parata is the Minister with a plan. Ignore the fact that internet and online learning has been a part of the New Zealand curriculum—an integral and important part—for decades; she has got the plan. It is just wonderful—just ignore reality.

I want to conclude by saying that where once you could forgive a percentage of the New Zealand public looking at the Prime Minister and considering him a titan, an Atlas of business whose shrug would change this country for the better, now we see a man who is only a man, who shrugs and has no idea and no clue about what tomorrow will bring. Thank you.

Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Corrections): I would like to congratulate that member who has just resumed his seat, Fletcher Tabuteau. Now that is a proper Opposition general debate speech. So much better than that pathetic little effort from Mr Andrew Little—much, much better. That member has been in Parliament for only 2 short years, and he does really well. He knows how to do it: a bit of faint praise, a bit of “slap round the Government”, and a little bit of saying how much he admires the Hon Hekia Parata—and he would not be alone in that; a lot of people do. Well done. But, you know, what does Andrew Little talk about? Banging on, trying to stop me and everyone else who loves economic development from shopping on a Sunday—Easter Sunday.

You know, is it not up to us as adults to make our own decisions about what we do on Easter Sunday? Some of us will go to church, some of us will go shopping, and some of us will be just blessed that we have a day off. But one of the things that we do not want to be doing is harking back to the past, like Mr Andrew Little, who is living in the past and is very upset about technology and anything that is new. You know what, it is probably because, actually, iPhones and technology do not pay union fees and they do not vote for the leader of the Labour Party. That is probably about it, because if they did, they certainly would not vote for him.

Now let us look at what is really important: policing and corrections—fantastic, great areas. In police we have put a huge effort into technology as well as extra police officers. Police have got a mobility programme that has revolutionised the way that they work. I think back to the days when we first came into Government in 2008 and what we actually had to deal with and what we did not have. We did not have Tasers for police. I remember the great debates in the House about what was going to happen—police were apparently going to torture people with these Tasers. Did they? No, they did not. In fact, what the people who were so concerned—the Labour Party and the Greens—were all really concerned about is that police would do that. They forgot to say: “Oh yes, and there’s a camera on each of these Tasers that works as soon as it’s drawn out of its holster, and, actually, police are going to have to record that, and it’s digital, and it’s easily downloaded, and it’ll be reviewed, and all these things.”

We have got police, we have got better access to firearms, we have got stab-resistant body armour, we have got new ballistic body armour, we have got enhanced pepper spray, and we have got automatic number-plate recognition. We have got all these things going, but we have also got iPhones. We have got smartphones where police can actually—when they stop someone else, hopefully not me, on the side of the road for speeding—check all the details; they can put the driver’s licence details in. They are not little bits of paper—they are not trying to struggle with that in the rain and in the dark. They can scan the driver’s licence, hoping that the driver does actually have a driver’s licence. They can do all those things. It saves time, and what it has done is it has put a huge amount extra, in terms of police hours, on the road, on the beat, doing preventative work, and catching criminals—and boy, have they done well.

Crime is down by 16 percent since 2011—this is a huge drop—but in addition to that, what we are seeing is police being really proactive on methamphetamine. I think everyone in this House should be thrilled about that. This is a massive resource for police. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of surveillance, a lot of electronics—you know, that technology thing again—and it is very dangerous work. The trials involved are very time-consuming and very difficult, and the sentences handed out are very long. What we are seeing here, though, is police working particularly with their technology partner Vodafone in an innovation centre that they have got, constantly looking for new ways in which to use technology—and smartphones are just one of them.

Having files on their phones—this is the sort of thing, too, that the Department of Corrections is doing, particularly when it comes to its staff in the probation service, who go into offenders’ homes to check on what is happening and to go through their case management work. Those corrections staff are put in danger unless they have the right information about what they are going into. They now have smartphones with files on them; they do not have to lug round big files that can be left somewhere—people’s privacy is not compromised, as it could be—but also there are alerts on those phones telling them about anything that has happened with that offender, anything that might give them concern that they might end up going into a dangerous situation. They have help alerts on those phones to get someone should they need assistance. It is such a different world. And that is because technology not only throws up challenges but it throws up massive opportunities to actually keep our people safe, keep our staff safe. This Government is committed to that.

JENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Mr Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the general debate. We are beginning to see a National Government that is in a shambles, and the splits and divisions are beginning to show. We are seeing a Government that refuses to acknowledge that there is a housing crisis, especially in Auckland.

We hear the Minister of Education saying that she is focused on children, that the policies that she is bringing across are, apparently, because she is all focused on children—but you know what? She is not focused on all children. She is focused especially on children who are privileged, children who attend high-decile schools. When I look at this new policy that she brought in just last night, communities of online learning, I am not quite sure how it would actually be implemented on the ground for a lot of the young people in Manukau East in South Auckland. I will give you an example. When I go visiting the primary schools, intermediate schools, and many of the high schools around South Auckland, many of the young people do not actually have their own devices. Many of the homes that they live in do not have internet access. How can we expect that the access to this community of online learning is going to be of equal value to every single student regardless of where they live, regardless of the socio-economic status that their parents have, when they themselves do not have access to those devices? That is on the one hand, and that is for the kids and the students who are attending schools.

I also see so many—too many—of our young people who do not even have a home. A lot of our young people who are living in garages and cars now not only have no access to a device but do not even have a roof to call a home. Too many of these young children are not even enrolled in a school. So this community of online learning will probably be a good idea for a lot of students, but it will not be of equal access to every single student.

But let me get back to the splits and divisions beginning to show in the National Government. We also see this in the shambolic approach that it has to the Shop Trading Hours Amendment Bill. It is a disgrace that we are seeing the National Government whipping its National MPs just to get this Easter Sunday bill across the line. We know that bills on Easter Sunday trading have come through and been debated at least eight times before, and they have not passed. When we look at the previous votes, we see that nine National members of Parliament voted against this legislation. They voted with their consciences. I see the list, and there are five National MPs still here who have traditionally voted against the Easter Sunday trading bill. They are probably going to vote Yes now because they have been whipped into it by their Prime Minister.

I am most concerned about two MPs on that list in particular: the Pacific MPs who belong to the National Government. This is because this issue is of crucial importance especially to us Pacific Islanders—those of us who are churchgoers, those of us who are Christians. One of the National MPs, Mr Alfred Ngaro, was a church minister before he came into being a politician, and the other National MP, Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga, is a strong Christian. I know that if they were given the chance, they would vote against this bill. That is how, I believe, their consciences would tell them they should vote. It is my hope—there is still time; the third reading is not until tomorrow, I am told—that these two National MPs, Sam Lotu-Iiga and Alfred Ngaro, will find it in their hearts to vote with their consciences and to vote the right way. Thank you very much.

Hon NATHAN GUY (Minister for Primary Industries): Spring has arrived. Lambs are being born, calves are being born, and there is a spring in everyone’s step. On this side of the House, we are in really good shape. We are positive about the New Zealand economy. The New Zealand economy is growing at 3.4 percent. The Reserve Bank Governor is predicting that it is going to grow at 3.4 percent for 2 years—is that not fantastic news? Brilliant. Unemployment is down to 5.1 percent and 100,000 jobs were created in the last 12 months alone. If you look at those apprenticeship numbers, they are now up to 10,000 in the construction sector. Interest rates are at a 70-year low.

It is no wonder that the Opposition members put their heads down in shame—over the other side of the House, it is all very gloomy. It is all very gloomy. We have got their leader, who cannot even get into double digits. It is going to take more than a tub-thumping speech by Andrew Little to move his numbers to get them up into double digits. He is even lagging behind Winston Peters. What is also interesting is that the cracks are emerging within the memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Greens—big cracks. There are divisions already. Just look at Metiria Turei recently: she came out and said that Auckland house prices should be halved by 50 percent. Andrew Little, within a heartbeat, said: “Whoa, that’s nothing to do with us. Oh no, we weren’t consulted, oh no, that is not part of the MOU, oh”—put the handbrake on, drive in another direction away from the Greens. The MOU is in tatters. What is also interesting this week is that the Māori King cannot even support the Labour Party. Whoa, that is big news in Māoridom. There are all sorts of issues on that side of the House.

What was interesting the other day when I opened up my local paper, which I read every week as the MP for Ōtaki—who did I see in there, standing on the Kapiti Expressway, which we will hopefully have open before Christmas this year? A $630 million investment: 18 kilometres long, 18 bridges, a cycleway, a walkway, a bridleway, and millions of native trees planted. Who did I see in the paper—who were opposed right through the consenting process. Who did I see, but Andrew Little, Kris Faafoi, and a couple of their prospective candidates for Ōtaki, standing there in the middle of the expressway.

I have got pages and pages of quotes from—remember Darren Hughes and Darien Fenton, when they were Labour’s transport spokespeople? They were against the expressway. Remember Iain Lees-Galloway, when he was Labour’s transport spokesperson—against the expressway. Remember Kris Faafoi? I have got pages of quotes, how he said this thing will be terrible for Kāpiti. Then there was Phil Twyford. He said it was going to be a monster going through communities in Kāpiti. And then, of course, there was David Cunliffe—remember him? He was the leader at the last election. He was opposed to it. In the last election those members said: “We want to redesign the Kapiti Expressway.” As a result of this investment that the Government has made in the Kāpiti community, now Horowhenua District is going to benefit. A recent report shows that the population in Horowhenua is going to grow by about 10,000 in the next 20 years, 4,000 houses will need to be built up there, and a thousand jobs will be created.

So this Government has a plan. It links back into technology. It links back into solid economic performance. It links back into our Prime Minister and our Deputy Prime Minister, who are providing fantastic, strong leadership. Just look across at the country—over in Australia, where the Liberal coalition just hung on. Just look at what has happened with Brexit recently. Just look at what is happening with the US presidential election. This country—we should be incredibly proud of it.

I am positive and upbeat. I am positive and upbeat about the primary sector. Today I was talking about the growth of the wine industry. It is going to get to $2 billion by 2020. The dairy industry coming off the bottom—two very positive global dairy trade auctions. The Opposition is anti - free trade, anti-irrigation, anti-cows—we heard that today—and anti - supporting the roll-out of ultra-fast broadband. I am positive about the future. We have got the direction sorted for the next 12 or 14 month. Roll on, the National Government.

EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I am not sure what I have been listening to. Was it an attempt by the Minister for Primary Industries to have a transplant of personality, to go from being a dour farmer to some sort of clown? Well, he may be bucolic and he may be full of the joys of spring, but that just highlights how this Government skates over the environmental impacts of its focus on a pollution economy.

It has been very distressing listening to the people in Havelock North this week and their descriptions of the impacts of gastroenteritis: the days off school, the days off work, cafes having to close, and over 4,500 people being very sick. We have seen similar problems with E. coli and campylobacter being reported in water supplies around New Zealand—in Pātea, in Darfield, in Hanmer Springs, in Springston. When you get E. coli in water, you know that it has been contaminated with animal faeces, and that is what this Government ignores. Its preoccupation with doubling the value of primary sector exports by 2025 by giving big handouts to agribusiness and by subsidising irrigation has meant a huge expansion in dairying and intensive agriculture in New Zealand, and that means there is a much greater risk to drinking water.

It is a core principle that if we want clean water in New Zealand, we need to protect the sources of water supply—that is, our rivers, our lakes, and our aquifers. In New Zealand we have one of the highest rates of gastroenteritis in the developed world. More than 6,200 people fell sick in 2015. That is not clean, green New Zealand, when we have a much higher incidence of gastroenteritis than Canada, Australia, and England. We need to get serious about looking at land use and the consequences of that for our water, and that is what this Government is in denial about. The Minister can go on about growth in the agricultural sector. What he will not front up about is the impacts of that on our clean water.

It was a Labour Government that developed a national environmental standard under the Resource Management Act for drinking-water sources. The purpose of that standard was to ensure that catchments were properly managed so that the sources of drinking water are protected. It will be very interesting in this inquiry into the situation in Havelock North to see whether the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council has properly managed land in the aquifer recharge areas, or whether it has been preoccupied with promoting intensive agriculture and its compromised role as a regulator, and has been far too casual in the rules that it has got in its plans.

This Government continues to sacrifice clean water on the altar of agricultural intensification, and it is putting our economy at risk by doing that. Its failure to bring agriculture into the emissions trading scheme means that the industry can freeload on the environment and not take account of the effects of its greenhouse gas emissions on the climate. Its weak regulatory response in terms of the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management means that we do not have decent land-use controls to protect water, because this Government is the master of the gesture. It is the master of doing a little in politics to try to persuade people that it is doing something, and I am sure we will see that next week, when the Minister for the Environment makes an announcement about swimmability.

The Government’s failure to set a standard for swimmable rivers in the national policy statement has meant that councils have failed to control the land uses that are leading to pollution of our rivers, lakes, and aquifers. We have got the problems in Havelock North. We have seen major increases in nitrate levels in waterways in places like Canterbury, Southland, and the Waikato, where we have had major dairy intensification. We have 1.7 hectares in New Zealand that is under dairy farms. We have 6.4 million dairy cows, and another 3.5 million cattle. That is equivalent to having a human population of 140 million people, yet without any sewage treatment. Agricultural intensification is polluting our waterways.

The Government needs to get serious about protecting our environment, because we cannot have a healthy economy without a healthy environment. The Minister completely misses the point in thinking you can focus only on economic development without protecting the basis of that economy, which is our natural environment.

PAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): E Te Māngai o Te Whare, tēnā koe. Before engaging in the main part of my discussion today, I would just like to put on record condolences to the family of Lieutenant General Don McIver, who passed away 2 days ago. Don McIver was a very great servant of this country, who not only had a distinguished and long military career, he was a proud resident of Wellington and the Hutt. He also served as the Director of the Security Intelligence Service throughout the 1990s, earning the honour of Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George for that service, as well as serving as the president of the RSA. He gave huge service to that organisation and he will be sorely missed by all who knew him.

This is a Government that is focused on delivering futureproofed Government for the 21st century. If you look at a range of portfolio areas, from law and order—which my colleague the Hon Judith Collins was just discussing—through to economic development, and from the provision of passports and the supporting of tourists coming into our country through to the education of children, this is a Government focused on doing what is working and actually leading to positive results. We are not relying on outdated ideology from another century and another decade.

To give you an example in the law and order area, here in Wellington the police have established a Mobility Innovation Lab and Experience Centre in partnership with Vodafone New Zealand, doing useful research into the use of mobile technology such as smartphones to prevent people from committing crime; to help solve crimes; to keep our streets safer; and to enable the police to get more out of the hours they spend out on the beat and to spend more hours out on the beat, rather than sitting behind the desks and processing paperwork, as they used to have to do under a previous administration.

But if you turn to other areas where the Government is innovating, I think the discussion engaged in by Eugenie Sage—the previous speaker, who just resumed her seat—is an interesting one. With the council reforms that we are proposing under the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2), where you will see a greater enabling of council-controlled organisations (CCOs), exactly the sorts of problems that we have seen in areas like the Hawke’s Bay might actually be able to be avoided.

So, for instance, we heard on the Local Government and Environment Committee last week that Watercare Services, which is the CCO responsible for delivering water services throughout Greater Auckland—the new Auckland super-city—took on board assets that were previously not well managed by its predecessor councils. For instance, in the Franklin Council you had bores of the sort that exist in the Hawke’s Bay, which were not treated. It has implemented a programme of upgrade and change across that region, where all the water delivered throughout the Auckland region is now chlorinated or treated by UV treatment, prohibiting the formation of campylobacter, helicobacter, E. coli—[Interruption]—those sorts of risks to human health that Mrs Martin seems to find so amusing, but which this Government treats very, very seriously.

In other areas, Wellington is the capital of innovation, and I am very glad to work as the National list MP based here in Wellington Central. We have some of the great innovators of this country—for instance, Xero, a wonderful company, set up by Rod Drury, who is a serial innovator. This is not his first enterprise. Xero is delivering services to Government as well as to the private sector. So as well as being committed to the capital—they are building a new head office down on the corner of Cable Street and Taranaki; Street; they have 1,400 staff, and growing—they are delivering services, at almost no cost.

For instance, their accounting software is available to schools, many hundreds of which have taken up that opportunity. Not only does it allow a school to run its accounts much more simply, more easily, and less expensively than previously—they do not need the same number of administrators to run their accounts system—it can be done enabling them to add more teachers and more people delivering learning to students. But having that data available, so we know the investment into a specific area—for instance, the dollars being spent on library services in schools is actually delivering in terms of outcomes for those students—is useful for this Government, because this is a data-driven Government.

This is a Government that is concerned about what works, rather than about ideology or theory, Mrs Martin. This is an example of a very useful innovation that is being employed. I want to commend our excellent Minister of Education for her comments earlier in this debate. I had the pleasure of joining the Hon Hekia Parata on a visit to Xero and just seeing the capabilities of its software. There are many, many other providers here in Wellington, the innovation capital of New Zealand, and I am very, very proud to live in and to be working in that community. This is a future-focused Government. Thank you.

Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): In order to solve a problem, first of all you have got to acknowledge that the problem exists. Sadly, this Government is still in denial. But in a poll that came out today, 84 percent of Aucklanders say that Auckland is suffering from a housing crisis. Worse than that, an astounding 31 percent of those Aucklanders say that they have contemplated having to leave Auckland because they can no longer afford to live there. Nearly a third of Aucklanders cannot afford to live in their city of choice.

There is a housing crisis in Auckland—of course there is. House prices in the last 4 years have gone up by an astonishing 84 percent. We are just about touching a million dollars for the average home, and the Kiwi Dream of homeownership is being denied an ever-increasing number of Aucklanders. It may be impossible to buy a home, but for a lot of Aucklanders it is becoming hard even to rent a home. Rents in the last year have gone up six times faster than the rate of inflation, and people are struggling to cope.

Over the last year I have seen the growth of homelessness in my city to a greater extent than I have seen at any time during my parliamentary career. But what has the Government’s response been? The first response, articulated by the Minister of Finance, was to blame the Auckland Council. The second response, by the Minister for Social Housing and others, has been to tinker around the edges. That is not what Auckland needs. Auckland needs a central government prepared to cooperate with the Auckland Council. It needs a central government prepared to take bold decisions, not simply tinker around and not make any difference. I applaud the Auckland Council, for this reason: it has grasped the nettle, it has passed the Auckland Unitary Plan. It has enabled the building of 422,000 additional homes in the next 30 years. What I say to the Minister is that the ball is now in her court, and the court of the Minister of Finance. What Auckland needs is a Government response that addresses the supply side. We need more affordable houses.

When I was Minister of Housing a third of all houses being built were classified as affordable. Now it is 5 percent—5 percent of Auckland houses are affordable. The level of increase in social housing has been pathetic. In fact, we have the lowest number of social houses per capita in Auckland in 70 years. You have got to go back to the 1940s to see a time when we had a lower proportion of social housing in our city. We need the Government to kick-start affordable housing. We need the Government to provide social housing. We need the Government to build on what I thought was quite a good idea—an infrastructure fund—but to build it to a more realistic level. The amount of $1 billion is one-twentieth of the cost of the infrastructure that Auckland needs in the next 10 years, if the whole of the infrastructure fund went to Auckland.

Then there is the demand side. You cannot keep increasing the population of Auckland by 40,000 to 45,000 and not provide the infrastructure in housing and transport that the city needs. You should not be letting foreign investors buy up existing houses—only forcing the price up—rather than directing them into building new houses. You should not allow the rampant speculation, where people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing nothing, and giving the first-home buyer a 50- or 60-year mortgage. It is not fair. You cannot keep increasing the population of Auckland unless you are prepared to invest back into Auckland the money that the Government is taking from those new arrivals in income tax, in GST, and in company tax. Central government is getting the revenue from the growth, and Auckland City is meeting the cost of it. If Auckland fails, because of poor infrastructure, New Zealand fails. If Auckland fails, a third of the electors of this country will not thank any party in any Government that allows that to happen.

NUK KORAKO (National): Kia ora, e Te Mana Whakawā. If I could respond to the Hon Phil Goff, who has just resumed his seat: “Don’t worry. We’re”—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Sorry, but there are two relatively senior members having a go, back and forth, when someone else has the floor. Just let him get started.

NUK KORAKO: Kia ora.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Starting again—Nuk Korako.

NUK KORAKO: E Te Mana Whakawā, kia ora. I wanted to say to the member who has just resumed his seat: “Don’t worry, because they are already there. The National Government is there. It has got a comprehensive plan as well to address a lot of the things that you have been talking about.”

My general debate speech today is about following on from the Minister of Police. It is about law and order, and it is about policing. I think the important thing is that as a list member, based in the Port Hills, one of the many things I do is travel around, and particularly go on ride-alongs with the police, with community patrols, and all of that. I have taken a very, very keen interest in policing, particularly in Christchurch pre-earthquake and post-earthquake. But one thing that I think is interesting is that it is really great to be part of a Government that is operating within a 21st century environment. That is exactly what we are doing here, with policing. Our 21st century policing is about technology and innovation. In doing that, we have a more efficient and a more effective police force. I acknowledge and commend all of those men and women who go out there every day, 24 hours a day, and do the job that is one of the most difficult in this country. One thing, though, is the incredible strides we have taken that have enabled our front-line police officers, particularly as I said before, when talking about technology.

When we look at this, it has got to be underpinned by something. One of the great things with this Government is that we have contributed almost $300 million in police investment. I think the important thing there is that there has been a massive increase in innovation and technology. To meet the challenges there are a couple of interesting things that have been introduced. We have got to keep pace with the criminal world, because they are also there, using that modern technology as well. But there are two things—encryption of communications, particularly police radios.

The other one is that there has been the introduction of almost 9,000 smartphones and tablets. When we look at that, if we equate that, those gains from using technology have increased policing hours by the equivalent of around about 350 police officers. In terms of the increase in front-line officers also—since 2009, there have been over 600 new police officers sworn, which equates to over 9,000 sworn officers within the police force. Looking at the technological advances—and, as I said, there are new risks because of the sophisticated communications available to modern criminals, but our police really are meeting the challenges.

There is one other thing, particularly when we are talking about technology, because 21st century policing is not about just technology, in a lot of ways. It is more about also maintaining the Peelian principles, and actually looking back at the basis of how our police force started. What that means is that we have developed something that really defines our police force, and it is about ethical policing as well. In saying that, the principle summed up in that idea is called policing by consent, and when we look at that, that means the police have a police force of citizens in uniform policing with the consent of the general public. What I am talking about here is that it is actually about working in partnership with communities to reduce crime.

One of the big things is about prevention first—that is a huge part of 21st century policing—and the other part is understanding and responding to the drivers of crime. Instead of being the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, we are there, trying to be a preventer—as opposed to being there and doing the after-the-fact thing. There is another part of this that we see, and it is a perceived problem—particularly from the Opposition—and the police call it deploying to beat demand. That is about “Why are these police stations not manned 24 hours a day?”. Kia ora.

JAN LOGIE (Green): This afternoon I want to speak about responsible government. I believe that responsible government provides a framework for all of our people and our environment to thrive, and, as compassionate and caring New Zealanders, I believe we all want our children to get the best start in life to be able to thrive. Yet we know that in this country, despite most of us sharing that value, we have the fifth-highest rate of child abuse and neglect in the OECD and that there are, on average, 10 children a year who are killed by the people who are supposed to be looking after them. We know also that around 60 children every year die before the age of 1, of low-income - related diseases.

When the Government, last term, consulted New Zealanders—close to around 10,000 New Zealanders—on what the Government should be doing, or what we should all be doing in this society to ensure the safety and well-being of our children, New Zealanders, young people and old alike, gave the Government a pretty consistent message that they wanted the Government to keep families together by providing services and increasing household incomes, addressing inequality, and providing safe and secure environments for children.

That was a very consistent theme from the people of New Zealand for what we wish for our children. Yet, despite the terrible situation we have in this country for our children and a very common desire to create a strong safety net for our children, this Government has, over recent years, raised the Child, Youth and Family threshold, which means that more and more families who are struggling with some really complex issues like alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, and intergenerational deprivation are being supported in a community.

That may sound like quite a good thing for those people who have had a terrible experience with Child, Youth and Family, but there is a real problem with this, because the Government has not increased funding for those organisations in the community since 2008. It is giving these organisations a lot more families with some really complex issues, which they are supporting them with, and it has, effectively, cut their funding.

When I have been travelling around the country, talking to some of these organisations and meeting the workers, I have been seeing people who are visibly distressed—who are scared that their practice is compromised and that, because of the overwhelming amount of work, they are putting those children’s lives at risk. They are scared of mistakes that may be made because of that lack of funding and the undue pressure on them.

The Government has also taken money from established programmes to set up a bureaucracy. Its flash new toy of the 21st century, the children’s teams, are kind of a replication of an existing model called Strengthening Families, but they required a whole new layer of bureaucracy, and the Government provided, again, no funding whatsoever for front-line services—the people actually working with those families. We are now hearing very, very inconsistent stories about how that is rolling out in our communities, and again our children are put at risk.

The Government has moved funding from programmes, like Parents as First Teachers, which have been given great evaluations, and Strengthening Families, which, indeed, was inconsistent, but in some places was working really well, into this children’s teams initiative, despite it not having been evaluated. Although they say they are evidence-driven, their practice is in opposition to that.

The Government has cut funding to Child, Youth and Family, so 121 social workers have been lost from Child, Youth and Family since 2010. When the Office of the Children’s Commissioner said he was not able to properly assure the safety of children in State care and asked for more funding, to be able to follow this up, the Government said “No, we’re not going to give you more funding on that because you’re managing to advocate on child poverty issues, so clearly you have got additional resources there.”, despite the fact that it was a philanthropic trust that funded the child poverty work. Sixty children a year in this country are dying from child poverty, and it is absolutely in the Children’s Commissioner’s ambit to do that. The Government’s future plans are even worse.

MAUREEN PUGH (National): Being from a rural electorate, I understand full well how vital it is that the Government continues to invest in the provinces. Although this Government is managing its finances extremely well, the investments still continue into the infrastructure that is needed to make sure that rural New Zealand thrives and can operate effectively in the 21st century. It is only by focusing on building a very strong economy that we have the privilege of being able to enjoy that investment into our infrastructure. We are investing hugely in our young people in this country through our social and education polices, we are investing in the health sector in record numbers, and we are investing in infrastructure.

I know too well the importance of connectivity, being based in one of the largest geographic electorates in New Zealand. Access to the internet is absolutely vital, and it is no longer a luxury in this day and age; it is actually essential for our rural businesses and our schools. As an MP, I rely on technology myself to communicate with my constituents across such a vast electorate. The roll-out of ultra-fast broadband (UFB) will have 98 percent of us connected to high-speed internet by 2019—

Hon Member: How many?

MAUREEN PUGH: Ninety-eight percent—and I am thrilled that the UFB build in Greymouth nears completion this year. Although this is welcome news, the Rural Broadband Initiative is actually the big one for me. For places like Motueka, Lake Brunner, Camerons, Dobson, Blackball, Tākaka, Kūmara, Kaniere, Gladstone, Barrytown, Tapawera—they have all benefited from new cell towers. Even two of our most isolated schools on the West Coast in South Westland, Haast and Jacobs River, have new remote wireless broadband, and I am very happy to report that there will be four new towers proposed for Wakefield, Pōhara, Tasman District, and even Hector. So this means that 100 percent of State and State integrated schools now have access to fibre, and the exciting spin-off that I am seeing in these communities is the innovation from businesses leveraging off that infrastructure and extending that infrastructure across their communities.

We heard today from His Excellency Lieutenant General Mateparae that his theme for 2016 is science and innovation. He understands how important it is, and this theme is strongly supported through this Government’s investment into education. As we heard earlier from the Hon Hekia Parata, digital fluency is essential in a 21st century world. Not only does investment in infrastructure help us adapt to growing demand from a growing economy but it gives people confidence and it gives them hope. New Zealanders have confidence and they have hope, and that is evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of Kiwis coming home. This is a great country enjoying great leadership.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.

Bills

Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act Repeal Bill

Third Reading

SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki) on behalf of Hon Nicky Wagner (National—Christchurch Central): I move, That the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act Repeal Bill be now read a third time. I am very pleased to take a call. If I might, before I begin, I want to acknowledge the role of the Governor-General. We celebrated his service to the Realm of New Zealand today at a State luncheon, and I just want to put on the record, to him and to Lady Janine, my gratefulness for what they have done. Amongst many things, I think they have been very good on accessibility to Parliament in terms of their work as a viceregal office.

Moving to the bill itself, it is clear that I am not the Hon Nicky Wagner. She is unable to be able to speak at this exact moment in time as she has ministerial duties, and she has asked me, as the chair of the Health Committee, to speak on her behalf. She has strongly and proudly spoken on this bill through all other parts, and here we are now at the third reading. This bill, as has often been mentioned, is relatively simple, but it is relatively significant as well for the Royal Foundation of the Blind.

Fundamentally, what this bill seeks to do is, basically, remove the foundation, now known as the Blind Foundation, from the statute book. It has, basically, been constituted for many years under statute. That has served it very well, but in recent years—in fact, I think, back on 10 January 2012—the foundation registered itself as an incorporated society. It was felt—not that I can speak on behalf of the foundation, but only from what we heard at the committee—that becoming an incorporated society was a better fit for its purposes, so that it could be fit for purpose in this modern environment, and, ultimately, that has made the current Act defunct, unnecessary. In order to make those changes, it has had to come to our select committee, which it has. It was a relatively easy process. The bill was only a few clauses, ultimately, and so it is going to seek that the foundation be removed from the statute book, and it will be able to govern itself accordingly.

I was there recently, actually, at the Blind Foundation in Parnell. Most people know of the foundation and the work it does, but most people in Auckland will know of the Jubilee Building. Although that building has now been handed over to the council, the buildings around it are run by the Blind Foundation for about 12,000 New Zealanders—not all in Parnell, but that is the main office. I think it would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the Blind Foundation is only for those who are blind. Actually, it is also for those with low visual impairment, and the services it provides really are quite remarkable and broad-reaching. I suppose I want to put on the record—and I know this is from the Minister as well—our grateful thanks for the service it provides to fellow Kiwis.

My own visit to the foundation was a really good learning curve in terms of its particular needs. I was there in my capacity as chair of the Health Committee, and it wanted me to talk it through how the political process works, which I was happy to do. I mean, what politician is not happy to get up and talk. But, at the same time, it was a valuable opportunity for me—[Interruption] Oh, the humility coming from the other side. It is quite striking.

The opportunity was also there for me to hear what its various needs were. One of them was—and I think it is important to put it on the record today—around greater accessibility. I am not going to take too much of the House’s time explaining that, other than to encourage people to go back to the Youth Parliament debates, because of one of the bills that was before the House and our youth parliamentarians. I am proud to say that the Youth MP for Tāmaki, Aaron Dahmen, gave one of the speeches strongly in support of the need for greater accessibility, particularly for those with visual impairment of some sort. So, again, I encourage the House to understand that this bill is only an organisational change. The organisation itself would be encouraging us as a Parliament, as representatives of the people of New Zealand, to look at other ways to better engage and assist those Kiwis with visual learning difficulties.

Important too—and the Minister was keen that I draw out this particular, effectively, semantic issue—is that the Blind Foundation moved from being the Foundation for the Blind to the Foundation of the Blind. It is probably no surprise to this House that I believe words are important, and, fundamentally, that change—going from “for” to “of”—is a little bit like the bill. It is quite simple but also quite meaningful: the foundation is now “of the Blind”. This is self-empowerment. This is the community itself—the blind and visually impaired community—being able to lead its own efforts, provide care within the community, and ask society to support it. This is no longer a passive “for”, if you will. This is not a community that needs everybody else to come in and help it. I think too that it is an important signal of how we approach disability issues in this country.

I want to begin wrapping up and say thank you to everyone involved. Again, it was a relatively simple process, including through the select committee, but any bill, as members will know, has a number of people involved. Thanks to them, and particular thanks to the Blind Foundation for seeking to continue to be a modern group servicing the needs of its people as they require it today.

On a personal note, I would certainly encourage the foundation to keep up its royal patronage. I think that is in keeping with what we heard from the Governor-General and Lady Janine today—not about them in particular, but the value of royal patronage.

I also want to wish the foundation a happy 126th birthday. It is 126 amazing years of service. Long may it continue, and now, through the passing, I trust, of this repeal bill, it will be able to do that as an incorporated society. I commend this bill to the House.

POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): I rise to take a short call on the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act Repeal Bill. I do want to put on record a little bit of the whakapapa of the foundation in this last reading—my last opportunity to do so.

We know that the foundation actually began its days in 1890 as the Jubilee Institute for the Blind in those lovely buildings in Parnell. In its early days, it provided sheltered workshops and was also a hostel for people with serious vision impairment. These days, of course, the definition of blind and low vision impairment has meant that there is a greater catchment of people that the foundation actually serves. It phased out a lot of the work that it was doing around the sheltered workshops and was in favour of mainstreaming so that people with low vision and blindness could actually get a greater sense of integration into their community. Then in 2002, I believe, the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act was instigated, and this allowed the foundation to become an incorporated society, which it did do in January 2012. Then, of course, the need for this particular legislation was no longer required, and that is why we are now in the process of repealing that particular piece of legislation.

Along its journey, the foundation, which is now called the Blind Foundation, has had a really strong kaupapa of being membership driven—it is about its membership—to the extent that every single member of its board of directors is either blind or has vision impairment. They really understand and are able to put in place services and programmes applicable for their membership. It has been something that I have been quite struck with, because they are so strongly encouraging of people who have low vision and vision impairment to be integrated in the community. The foundation has been a role model, really, to other disability organisations, given its length of time in the work and the fact that it is so strongly driven by its members.

Today we know that it offers a range of services. It offers services around ensuring that people with low vision can communicate with other members of the wider community and amongst themselves. It offers counselling, supported employment, and financial assistance. We know that it offers mobility assistance, and we all know, of course, the guide dogs. The other pieces of—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to interrupt the member and remind her that we are on the third reading of the bill. All that can be discussed is the bill as it emerged from the Committee of the whole House. You can make an odd passing reference, but, actually, you cannot get a bill much narrower than this. Although the history of the foundation has been given in the second reading and in the first reading, and its general work, all of that was relevant then; it is not relevant now. I just will remind members that there is no obligation to use the full 10 minutes.

POTO WILLIAMS: Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. I welcome your guidance. Obviously, there were limited submissions, and the only one came from the foundation itself. The foundation, of course, is very grateful that this bill will now go through the House. It will allow it and its governance structure to continue the work of the Blind Foundation, including work in advocacy for people with blindness issues. If I could just make one plug, one of the board members was actually talking about the discussion around the Marrakesh VIP Treaty and wanted to ensure that this Government signed up to the treaty—which it has done—to ensure that we get access to suitable content for people with blindness and vision impairment. On that note, I commend the bill to the House.

BARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): It is a pleasure to take a call on this bill. I totally support the work of the Blind Foundation. It was really fitting that today, as the emails came through earlier on this afternoon, an email about Blind Week was asking for volunteers to go out with their buckets and help with the collection week. It is certainly something well worth doing. I noticed on the letter that came today that it was actually talking about giving people the gift of freedom. It is about going to school with confidence. It is about being able to cook and to make a cup of tea. It is about being able to use new technology and equipment. All of this stuff actually goes into the fantastic work that the people at the Blind Foundation do. It is great to be able to see the foundation being separated from where it was in the past around a piece of legislation. It is quite capable of doing what it needs to do in the interests of its people.

I just also wanted to make mention while I am here and while we are talking about disability groups and those who work for people with impairments that just recently I also visited where they actually train hearing dogs for the Deaf. Again, it is about giving the people freedom. If you ever want to go into a place where you are going to be made to feel totally welcome, go to Taranaki and visit the Hearing Dogs for Deaf People New Zealand. The dogs will lick you to bits when you walk in, but they are the ears for the people. They hear the phone ring. They hear the doorbell ring. They know when somebody is around. I have always been intrigued by the guide dogs, and going and visiting the hearing dogs gave me a whole new experience.

I do want to make mention here, also, of Dr Hugh Blair. I remember back late in 1999 when Dr Hugh Blair from Massey University came to our farm. It was part of judging in a farming competition, and he saw a picture of a guide dog sitting on the mantelpiece there and he happened to make comment about the guide dogs. Although I had done a whole lot of work around genetics in dairy animals, Dr Hugh Blair was one of the people who actually did a lot of work around genetics in guide dogs, and so there are certain traits within guide dogs that actually make them better guide dogs.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): As I did with the previous speaker, I am going to interrupt and say that it is really interesting but it is not relevant. I will ask the member either to become relevant or to stop.

BARBARA KURIGER: OK, thank you. Really, yes, you are right—thank you for that, Mr Assistant Speaker. All I really wanted to say today is that it is a pleasure to be supporting this bill. I do support the great work of the foundation. I do encourage people to get out and collect for them. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I rise in support of the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act Repeal Bill. This is a relatively common-sense bill. It removes a law from the statute book that is no longer required. I do not see any need to prolong the debate unnecessarily, so I simply lend the Labour Party’s full support to the bill.

JAN LOGIE (Green): I also would like to give a relatively short speech, on behalf of the Green Party, in support of the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act Repeal Bill at this, the third reading.

The Green Party, along with every other single member in this House, is supporting this bill because it makes sense. It is not a complicated piece of legislation. What it does, as has already been mentioned, is remove a piece of legislation off our statute book because it is no longer needed. When the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind changed its name in 2002 from the Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind, in the new Act was a provision that if it established itself as an incorporated society, it would be able to take the Act off the statute book.

It has come time and the foundation has chosen to do that, for two key reasons. One is to emphasise the foundation’s status as completely independent from Parliament, and also just to avoid any confusion that might arise from the statute remaining on the book. It is a very sensible thing.

We in the Green Party absolutely want to acknowledge the work of the Blind Foundation, its very, very long history, and its leadership of people across disability communities. We are also acknowledging, again, the reflection of the change in social values that happened with that changing of the name from “for the blind” to “of the blind”, which really clarified its status as an organisation controlled mainly by and for people who are blind or vision-impaired. That reflects a shift away from seeing people with disabilities as objects of charity, to being people with inherent capacity, the same as anybody else—able to act for themselves when provided with the right supports by society, like any of us. That is a philosophy that we certainly buy into, and it is nice to see that rounded off in this piece of legislation. Thank you.

JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki): It is very good to see the Blind Foundation so forward-looking, and the fact that this House is universally endorsing the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act Repeal Bill, which is a member’s bill in the name of Nicky Wagner, is the final step for the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind to really launch itself on that forward-looking journey and leave the constraints of this piece of legislation behind it.

I want to pay tribute, particularly, to those Blind Foundation volunteers in all our communities, but, perhaps, in particular in my community, because I know them a little better. They do reach out into the community. They do provide professional services not only for people with vision issues but also for other members of the community, with a view to the integration into our society of people with vision impairment. So it is interesting to know that the Blind Foundation now supports over 11,000—in fact, nearly 12,000—New Zealanders who are blind or who have low vision, which is many of us in this House. Actually, I could not do a single thing without my glasses, so the issues to do with vision impairment are wide reaching throughout our society. The Blind Foundation recognises that and it is reaching out into society, and I commend it for bringing this bill to the House.

DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): I am going to make only a very short contribution to this debate on this very short but, nevertheless, very necessary bill. It is good to see it coming now to its final stage. The Blind Foundation does do wonderful work throughout New Zealand in many and various ways and has widespread community support. So I just want to say that we in New Zealand First wish it well for its future.

In 2012 it became an independent incorporated society under the Incorporated Societies Act, so its original legislation, the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act 2002, is therefore redundant and it is necessary to repeal it. New Zealand First will have pleasure in adding our votes in favour of the bill at this last reading.

SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): I too want to join with others across the House in supporting this third reading of what is a member’s bill initiated by the Blind Foundation, which has again shown to the House and to its stakeholders and to the whole nation its level of innovation and credibility in terms of keeping itself modern, keeping itself relevant, and keeping itself focused on the future.

Others have spoken at length about the history of the foundation. I do not want to go there, but I do want to just reflect for a couple of minutes on the matters that came before the select committee. Firstly, there was a short, but quite important, initial briefing from our ministerial advisers. I think it is worthwhile just noting that the ministerial advisers supported this bill wholeheartedly. They did not offer any further drafting suggestions. They did not offer any changes, and they did not recommend any to the committee.

What they did do was highlight the fact that this is one of a number of private Acts of Parliament that provide for the incorporation of single entities. The problem with these historical and largely traditional pieces of legislation is that for the most part they are, by today’s modern standards, not what we would call high-quality pieces of legislation. They are not high-quality statutes. As a general rule, they fail to provide or address what we now consider to be quite important issues relating to governance and rights and obligations of the governance holders, and they fail to address things like officers’ duties. I think it is very laudable and creditable that the foundation took it upon itself to address these sorts of issues through bringing this member’s bill to the House. There are probably a number of other worthy, creditable organisations that, like the Blind Foundation, need some improvement to their governance, and to their legislative status as well.

There was only one submission to the select committee, and it came from the foundation itself. The foundation was very keen to highlight in its submission two key reasons for this legislation to proceed. The first one was that by keeping the Act on the statute book it causes confusion to the foundation, to its stakeholders, to its members, and to the other people who contract to it, do business with it, and support it in its good work. So although the foundation is still a statutory body, it is not going to be one that is reflected in the way that it used to be under the existing legislation, which is now completely out of date.

The Blind Foundation’s second point was that it wanted to repeal the Act because it wants to make sure that it can communicate to all and sundry that it acts independently of Parliament—that it is not a creature of Parliament—and the foundation’s rich history, I think, will be well served in the future by this new piece of legislation.

There is one technical point that was raised in its submission that I do think is of merit and does need a little bit of focus, and that relates to a copyright matter. The foundation does an enormous amount of good work in terms of providing audiobooks for people who are blind or who have low vision. There is an issue that relates to copyright rules and regulations, which means that under this legislation, when the foundation does that good work of providing audiobooks for its members and stakeholders, it will be exempt from the Copyright Act under Part 5 of that Act.

So this is a good piece of legislation. It is a worthy piece of legislation, but I think the most important thing about it for the foundation is that it is forward-looking. It builds on its creditable, creative past and will set the foundation up for a long and prosperous future doing enormously good work for more than 12,000 New Zealanders who are either blind or have low vision. I join with others in commending it to the House. It is a very good piece of legislation.

KEVIN HAGUE (Green): In previous contributions on this bill, I have spoken of my admiration for the foundation and its considerable good works. My father-in-law is a regular consumer of the services of the foundation. With the blind dogs, talking books, computer-based services, and a variety of others, his globe—the way he actually perceives the world—is largely through the services that the foundation provides.

But in this contribution I want to talk specifically about the central idea that is in the bill that is before us. That is around, essentially, the evolution or the conception of what the foundation is and its legal status. Other speakers in this debate have talked about that history—of moving from an initially kind of 19th century idea of charity, from a time when we had a small State and the role of the State was not constructed in a way that actually saw these services as being part of the State. We moved from that charity model to a more paternalistic model of the role of the State. This change to the status of the foundation that is in the bill before us is effectively sealing into law that next stage of the foundation’s devolution towards an empowerment model.

Others have spoken about the importance of that, but I want to speak about the importance of that from my own experience. As members will know, I used to be the executive director of the AIDS Foundation. In the 1980s, when the HIV epidemic was first striking these shores, the Government of the day—indeed, the Parliament of the day—faced a very difficult choice about how to respond to that pressing and urgent problem. What it chose to do—actually showing some foresight—was not to centralise the response to the epidemic in the ministry on the Treasury benches, but, rather, to empower those groups that were most affected.

That is the parallel that I see between the response to that epidemic and what we are doing with this bill, because the courage shown by the Government at that time was to say: “OK, we don’t know how best to work with gay men, injecting drug users, and sex workers, so what we’re going to do is actually empower groups from those communities to work with people from those communities.” That response was something that was completely alien to the way we had gone about responding to that sort of problem previously, but it worked. Our country, Aotearoa, has one of the best records of achievement in responding to that epidemic. Injecting drug use—we have had virtually no infections amongst injecting drug users for many years now.

The best way to respond to the needs of people who are blind or have low vision is to say: “You know best how to work with your own community, and, as a Parliament and as a State, we will do what we can to empower you to respond to the needs of your community.” That is the way that those needs will be best met. I am really pleased that in this bill that is precisely what we are achieving today. I commend the bill to the House.

Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): It is a pleasure to speak to the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act Repeal Bill. The purpose of this bill is to enable the Blind Foundation to modernise its structure. Others have commented very fully on the history, so I will not go into that any further, but I do want to highlight a few points of the foundation’s function.

The foundation has a presence in Whangarei, along Kamo Road, and earlier this year I had the privilege of attending its annual general meeting. I would like to highlight one of the activities that it undertakes. The foundation in Whangarei operates a newsreader service from the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). The recording device itself is housed at the YWCA and locals volunteer as newsreaders to read local news headlines and components of the articles into the recording device. People with impaired vision are then able to dial in every day and hear the news headlines. This is particularly well received by people with impaired vision across Whangarei and in Northland. So, amongst other things, I would like to thank the YWCA, the newsreaders, and the foundation staff who organise the roster.

I would also like to note Health Informatics New Zealand’s (HINZ) Clinicians’ Challenge from 2015. The winner of the active project/development category was Dr Hong Sheng Chiong and his team, with their contribution to the visual impairment domain. The HINZ challenge is a joint initiative between the Ministry of Health and Health Informatics New Zealand. Dr Hong and his team developed an attachment that clips on to a smartphone, and that gives the user a 40-degree view of the retina—the back of the eye. That view can then be imaged, it can be stored, it can be monitored, or it can be transferred to other professionals. Normally, equipment of this sort is worth tens of thousands of dollars—a slit lamp is what you are talking about—but Dr Hong’s team has been able to go into production mode with this attachment for several hundred dollars.

At the recent 2016 Talent Unleashed Awards, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak singled out this device and awarded it the Best Start Up - Social Impact award. Devices like this make it much more likely that the greatest cause of blindness in New Zealand, macular degeneration, will be detected earlier. Of everyone in this House over the age of 50, one in seven will get macular degeneration. This, then, is a vote of thanks to the Blind Foundation, thanks to volunteers, and thanks to those using their skills and time to advance and improve the quality of life for those with impaired vision. I commend this bill to the House.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): It is a pleasure to be able to take this opportunity talk to the third reading of this wonderful bill, the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act Repeal Bill, put forward by the Hon Nicky Wagner. First of all, I would like to say that I had a very good friend who was on the board of the Blind Foundation and was, I believe, one of the supporters of this. I think this is a very good bill in terms of repositioning the foundation more appropriately to its future vision. I just want to acknowledge that last year the foundation celebrated 125 years of excellent service, and, of course, this bill is about repealing the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act to recognise the foundation’s status as an incorporated society, which, as many of us know, is a much more appropriate structure for voluntary organisations.

The main provision—as I think we are all aware, but just to recap—is that it repeals the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Act 2002. It also replaces the foundation’s name in the Copyright (General Matters) Regulations 1995 with the “Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind Incorporated”, which, of course, is a very good name and an appropriate name.

I think the key thing about this bill is it seeks to deal with the statutory inconsistency that we have at the present, which is that the foundation is no longer a statutory body. By moving to an incorporated society, what this bill does is reinforce that independence. On that basis, I commend this bill to the House.

Bill read a third time.

Bills

Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill

In Committee

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I seek leave for the Committee to take all questions across all clauses, schedules, and introductory parts as one debate.

Hon Member: And voted on separately?

Hon DAVID PARKER: Yes, and vote on the clauses separately. Thank you.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is no objection.

Clauses 1 to 14 and schedule

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I might just make a few introductory comments. I was not able to be present at the second reading when this passed through a five-party coalition, including the Labour Party, the Greens, New Zealand First, the Māori Party, and the Hon Peter Dunne.

This bill seeks to close a loophole that exists in New Zealand law, but not in a number of overseas jurisdictions, and that loophole is that in New Zealand it is possible for someone to employ the labour of someone working in New Zealand for less than the minimum wage. That is because in New Zealand the minimum wage applies only to employment relationships, whereas in some overseas countries, like the United Kingdom, it applies to work rather than employees. The loophole has also been closed in countries like Canada, although there they have used a dependent contractor alternative.

I think that many people in this Committee know that there are some problems faced by the people who are at the bottom end of the employment market. They are powerless. They are feeling the sharp end of the fact that the percentage of the New Zealand economy—and indeed a lot of Western economies—that is going to labour is decreasing, and the percentage of the economy that is going to capital is increasing. They are the people who suffer most from the increasing gap between high earners and low earners, because they can be paid less than the minimum wage. They are being exploited.

This bill is not a universal panacea. It does not give those vulnerable people holiday pay. They still will not get their ACC levies paid. They will not get sick pay. They will not get their tax deducted. They will not have remedies through the Employment Court for unfair treatment. They will not get double time and things like that on statutory holidays, but they will, at least, get the minimum wage. I am sure that there will be other questions that arise during this that I am very happy to answer, but the underlying thesis of this bill is that it is wrong that someone in New Zealand who is working should be able to be paid less than the minimum wage. I do not see it as controversial.

Can I just talk on one thing about process. Can I thank the select committee members. I was given a very courteous hearing at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. I could see that the issue taxed some people and interested them. Can I say of Andrew Bayly that I could see him thinking through the consequences of what it is like and how it is wrong that we can create incentives for unscrupulous employers who are paying less than the equivalent of the minimum wage to be able to undercut people who do not embark on that unscrupulous behaviour. In the end, I could not get Andrew Bayly across the line, but I was grateful for the consideration that he gave it.

Right at the end of the process, we had actually had eight drafts of this legislation considered by the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee as a consequence of drafting that had been done at the request of the committee by the Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO). It had responded to issues that had been raised by the select committee, following hearing submissions, in an effort to make this bill narrower so that it did not catch people who were close to paying people the minimum wage in contractual relationships—so we just really narrowed it down to the most vulnerable in society.

Sadly, in the same week that the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety castigated Labour members for not cooperating on the Easter trading bill to vote up amendments that were needed to that legislation, even if we were opposed to it, the National Party members on the committee then did exactly that. Rather than voting in favour of amendments that made the bill better, which is what we are meant to do at the select committee, even if we are going to vote the bill down, they voted the amendments down, which a lot of work had gone into. All of those amendments are before the Committee in the lengthier of the two Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) that are on the Table of the House in my name, Supplementary Order Paper 203.

I have also prepared a change-tracked version of this bill, which I will now seek leave to table for the assistance of the members. Mr Chair, if I could seek leave to table this.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is no objection. It can be tabled.

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

Hon DAVID PARKER: Thank you, Mr Chair. I have copies of a change-tracked version, which I hope will assist members. Sometimes Ministers do this to show the effect of the Supplementary Order Paper with the tracked changes. Members will see that it is, in fact, a document that has been drafted by PCO that shows those tracked changes that were before us at the select committee. That is the effect of the SOP. There are a couple of changes to that form, which I have marked in handwriting. I am happy to answer questions. I did it in handwriting so that people would be able to follow those changes that have been made. There is another Supplementary Order Paper, Supplementary Order Paper 204, which is in shorter form, that I anticipate some questions on as well.

I look forward to this debate. I think it is an important issue. This bill is either going to up or down by one vote, if the earlier votes on this bill are any guide. Whether it goes up or down, I hope I have highlighted an ill in New Zealand, which I think is the rising exploitation of vulnerable people in New Zealand. Thank you.

CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): It is a great privilege to stand up and take an early call on this bill, and there may be opportunities for me to speak again. We have come out very strongly supporting this bill, and initially with some reservations around a couple of the points. However, when we went to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, we thought that we could iron out some of those points. It was a very, very difficult situation when, of course, we did not have the numbers to get even the discussion to go through to actually make some amended changes that would have made this bill become the bill that I think it is going to become.

Hopefully, today, this will go through with these amendments, because concerns have been allayed to New Zealand First by a number of concerned people out there—particularly by one group. They have certainly rallied around to email us. I will be responding to those emails, of course, once we have seen these changes come through.

These changes are important and they do tidy up some of those unintended consequences, particularly in and around the ability to ensure that for people who are doing a piece-rate or, in fact, are giving a service to multiple principals at the same time, that that can actually be calculated in total. I think some of the new amendments coming through to make this non-retrospective, to leave those businesses in situ—as they stand—for now, and to let time make that change will make it a very subtle and easy-moving change.

As we said right at the very start, we have some serious concerns in relation to, particularly, new schedule 2 at the back of the document, in relation, particularly to paragraph (f), which refers to newspaper and pamphlet delivery services. The unintended consequences of allowing this to remain in the bill, which is now going to be removed, would actually, potentially, inhibit particularly those older people from getting jobs, because they will be going up against younger people, who will be more able and more quick to go and deliver pamphlets and so on and so forth. Despite new section 11AC, which provides for a fair and reasonable amount of time, we believe that this will actually, in effect, go against those people who are trying to supplement their superannuation with a couple of hours—or what may even be 4 to 8 hours—in a job that could be done by a 16-year-old in the same time it would take two to do it, for example.

We do believe that this bill is necessary. We also have some concerns—along with a number of emails from a particular sector that has some concerns—which will be eliminated once Supplementary Order Papers 203 and 204 have been introduced. They were discussed in the select committee. Mr Andrew Bayly, I would certainly like to have your take on that. We hope that we can get some sensibility in the Committee today to get these through, because the emails that we have been getting in support of this bill far outweigh the number of contacts we have had from those people who oppose it, because it does tighten up those dodgy dealers who are taking advantage of vulnerable workers who should, ultimately, be paid a wage as opposed to being forced on to contracts.

This here does not stop those young contractors from being contractors. In fact, I had an email, which I have got, from a father who was concerned that this would stop his son from doing his apprenticeship and being paid a contract wage despite his son getting better than the minimum wage. I said: “This bill will not in any way stop that from happening.” All that this bill will do is make sure, from this day forward, that those principal contractors make sure that they hold that data, that information, on the hours, the days, and the way in which their rate of remuneration is calculated, which is currently in law under the employment standards legislation. It is tied in with health and safety legislation. This absolutely encapsulates all those three things and puts them nicely into a package to say that this country is starting to look after those people who are being taken advantage of without actually causing mayhem and chaos for the genuine operators inside the contracting world.

We do support this. We are pleased to see that we have had an amendment made, also, in relation to new schedule 2. That is around public entertainment. That has been amended also after discussions and considerations with the honourable member David Parker, and, of course, there has been the removal of pamphlet deliveries, which we see as a potential problem for a particular sector of the people who do that sort of work. Thank you.

JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): I am pleased to rise and stand—I would like to make some brief introductory comments on this bill that we are looking at in the Committee of the whole House. This is because I chair the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and I was away from Parliament at the bill’s second reading. I am not going to make a second reading speech, but I just wish to make some comments. The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, by majority, recommended the bill not be passed. I understand that the member the Hon David Parker—and I acknowledge him here today—has brought through Supplementary Order Papers 203 and 204, and I do acknowledge the intent of the sponsor of the bill, the Hon David Parker, was to protect some of the most vulnerable workers in our workforce who, he believes, are working in contracting arrangements but may be receiving less than the minimum wage.

Many of those working in lower-paid contracting industries are overrepresented in New Zealand’s low-income statistics. Those overrepresented include women, Māori, Pacific Island people, and disabled people, and I believe the reason why we as a committee cooperated with the member and gave him, and officials, adequate time to look at potential solutions to this problem was that I think we all agree that we do not want to see vulnerable people being exploited. We are not for that by any means.

Some submitters considered that contracting arrangements are becoming increasingly common so that businesses can reduce costs and avoid the duties and obligations that they attach to employees, such as holiday pay, sick pay, ACC compensation and levies, and the like. Those are great concerns. We did hear anecdotal stories, so we are able to understand how some people feel, but we were unable to ascertain actually how big this problem was, which we made comment about in the report. We acknowledged that there are some issues in the workplace for low-paid workers who are classified as contractors, but the issue, we believe, certainly on this side of the Chamber, is not adequately remedied by this bill. Ensuring that a contractor’s remuneration is no less than the minimum wage, which is what the intent of the bill is, does not, we believe, meet the bill’s intended outcome, as noble as that outcome is. Contractors still have their ACC levies, their sick pay, their holiday pay deductions to be made, after which the balance that a contractor may receive could still be less than the minimum wage.

I think that as we progressed through consideration of these matters, we came to understand that there is quite a distinction between those who are self-employed or are contractors, and those who are employees. There seems to be an opportunity for clarity to come, and, I would say, regulatory monitoring of the classifications that workers are under. I think that it would be fair to say that we believe that this is the nub of the issue that needs to be addressed, instead of actually treating every contractor as an employee—i.e., making their remuneration to be a time-based payment as opposed to other forms of contract arrangement.

We oppose the bill, although we understand the intent and support the sentiment of that. We oppose the bill not for political reasons at all, but for practical reasons. We do not believe that the bill addresses the real issue. Can I just highlight in my time that I have right now—just to touch on some of the reasons why.

We believe that there are existing provisions in the Employment Relations Act that address the problem that this bill seeks to remedy. The problem the bill seeks to remedy is workers placed in employee-like situations, but as contractors without the benefit of employee protections such as minimum wage entitlements, etc., as I have mentioned. The remedy proposed in the bill is to require “principals” engaging contractors and those providing services listed under schedule 2 to record the time a contractor takes to undertake the work and the remuneration paid, then to maintain those records for not less than 6 years as evidence that they have paid the minimum wage or above.

I understand that some of the thinking behind this bill comes from—I am just happy to reference at this point—the International Labour Organization’s Employment Relationship Recommendation, 2006 (No. 198). Article 4 states that “National policy should at least include measures to: (a) provide guidance for the parties concerned, in particular employers and workers, on effectively establishing the existence of an employment relationship and on the distinction between employed and self-employed workers;”. We understand that the Labour Government in 2006 endorsed these, and rightfully so. It also states that national policy should “(b) combat disguised employment relationships in the context of, for example, other relationships that may include the use of other forms of contractual arrangements that hide the true legal status, noting that a disguised employment relationship occurs when the employer treats an individual as other than an employee in a manner that hides his or her true legal status as an employee, and that situations can arise where contractual arrangements have the effect of depriving workers of the protection they are due;”. So we understand those measures in that recommendation that was endorsed by the then Labour Government.

But article 8 says this—and this, I think, is perhaps the point of difference, or the point that we feel should not be contravened—“National policy for protection of workers in an employment relationship should not interfere with true civil and commercial relationships, while at the same time ensuring that individuals in an employment relationship have the protection they are due.” So, essentially, what we are doing in order to fulfil articles 4(a) and 4(b) is putting in a process where contractual obligations and commitments are being narrowed down to be based and measured on an employment basis, which is an hourly rate. That I see as an interference of true civil and commercial relationships. I think that the objections that we are hearing from the commercial and contracting fraternity in our country are that although they agree with the intent that vulnerable people must not be exploited, they do not want to see the interference in civil and commercial relationships. But there has to be another way to address this problem, and that is what we believe. We believe that there are many other measures to do that, and no doubt, perhaps in time, I will take another call, hopefully, and be able to address that. Thank you.

IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): I thank the chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, Jonathan Young, for his contribution, although it troubles me a little bit that there is still a large degree of confusion from members opposite about what this bill does, despite the lengthy consideration it was given by the select committee. So I want to clear up one piece of confusion.

The select committee chairman, Jonathan Young, said that we should not require everyone to be paid only an hourly rate, and we should allow other forms of remuneration, such as piece-rates and other forms, to exist. This legislation does not stop that. In fact, one thing that I think has been completely overlooked is that employees—people who are in a classic employment relationship—can be paid a piece-rate, but our employment legislation requires them to still be paid the minimum wage, regardless of how they are being paid.

So this is not a debate about whether or not we should allow people to continue to be paid a piece-rate. This is a piece of legislation that seeks to close the loophole that says that by having someone in a contracting relationship rather than an employment relationship, that person is not entitled to the basic standards that they are entitled to in an employment relationship, in particular the minimum wage. There are people who are in an employment relationship who are paid a piece-rate, and under current employment law they still need to be paid the minimum wage, whereas someone who is contracted but paid a piece-rate is not required to be paid the minimum wage. So I really want to make that point clear, because I felt from Jonathan Young’s contribution that there was still an element of confusion from the other side of the Chamber about that.

I also want to address the issue of people who are self-employed. Again, Jonathan Young referred to the ILO guidelines. This is around ensuring that we do not mask the true nature of the relationship by claiming that someone is self-employed. Someone who is in a contracting relationship where they are receiving most or all of their income from one source—from one principal contractor—cannot realistically be considered to be self-employed. In fact, Supplementary Order Paper 203, which David Parker has put up, seeks to clarify the nature of self-employment, and to exclude those people who are genuinely self-employed but include those who people might wish to deem to be self-employed but who are, in fact, in a contractual relationship—in particular, those who are in a dependent contractual relationship.

As David Parker pointed out, other jurisdictions have done this. Great Britain uses a method that is similar to the one that is proposed in this legislation. Canada has defined dependent contractors and afforded them the rights of employees. So this is not something that is unusual; it has been done in other jurisdictions and overseas. The sky has not fallen. Their economy has not collapsed because their Parliaments have decided to pass legislation that affords the normal rights of employment that everybody working in New Zealand ought to be able to rely on.

I think it is important to note that we are not trying to rule out piece-rates or anything like that, and that we are not trying to impinge on people who are genuinely self-employed—and, in fact, David Parker has sought to clarify that.

I want to support the comments made by David Parker around the decreasing share of economic growth that is going to labour, to workers, no matter what the nature of their employment or contractual relationship, and the increasing share that is going to the owners of capital. That has been driven through a range of different mechanisms, but there is no doubt that substituting traditional employment relationships with contractual relationships, in order to circumvent things like the minimum wage and the other minimum standards that are afforded to employees, is one thing that is driving that decreasing share of the fruits of productivity going to the people who are providing their labour in businesses.

We need to tidy that up. This legislation does that well, and it does it even better with the amendments that David Parker is proposing in his Supplementary Order Papers 203 and 204. The larger of those two is the result of the submissions that we heard at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, and there is an additional Supplementary Order Paper that seeks to address some of the issues that have come up since the bill has come back from the select committee. I applaud David Parker for working closely with the business community to try to address the concerns that it has raised, but I must say that a number of the concerns that I have seen raised demonstrate more of a lack of understanding of the legislation, rather than genuine issues that could arise if the legislation is passed.

There was another matter that I wanted to raise but which has escaped my mind momentarily, so in the meantime I will simply look at some of the other changes that David Parker is proposing, to bring some clarity to this legislation. New section 6A is to make it clear that the rate of remuneration is not to be less than the minimum rate. As the legislation was originally drafted, it required a minimum rate for contractors, but it was not clear that the rate of remuneration was not to be less than the minimum rate for employees. That obviously was not the intention of the original legislation.

And that reminds me of what I wanted to address, which was one of the other points that Jonathan Young raised, which was to say that even if you provide a rate of remuneration for contractors that is at the minimum rate, they still have to pay ACC and various other costs—as do employees, in fact. Employees who are on the minimum wage are taxed, they pay their ACC levy, and what they take home in their pocket is less than the hourly minimum wage rate. And it would be exactly the same for contractors. So if that is being used by members opposite as a reason to say that this bill does not meet its intended purpose, then I think it fails. What it actually demonstrates is just another way in which this legislation gives those contractors the same rights as they would have if they were in a traditional employment relationship.

I am keen to hear from members opposite what their response is to those matters. I am keen to hear from them that they are clear about what this legislation does. I urge members who have been using those arguments to oppose this legislation to reconsider their view, because I do not think their fears are warranted. I think that the fears they have expressed have come from confusion about the legislation, rather than what the legislation actually does, and I urge them to reconsider their vote.

ALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa): The loophole that Mr Parker has been talking about, I say, does not exist—or the tidy-up that is required, I say, does not exist. Sure, there are dodgy employers, there are employees who can be, and are being, taken advantage of, and there will be employers, essentially, treating their employees as contractors—for sure. But there is no need to change the law. There is no need to change the law, particularly in this manner.

This bill creates confusion around what is a contract and what is an employment relationship. It does not help the people whom it is aimed at helping, and I will give you just one example: the guys who deliver pamphlets. They came into the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—they are one of the people who are mentioned in schedule 2. They are contracted to deliver pamphlets. A group of pamphlet deliverers came in and said they do not support the bill. They do not support the bill. The reason is that they are not interested in what their hourly rate might be—they are not interested in the hourly rate that they would be receiving under this bill. They want to do the job and get the job done in their own time. And that is just one example; it is not necessarily pamphlet deliverers. It might be guys who are pruning trees, trimming hedges, cleaners, or builders and construction people—all manner of people who are out there willing to give their service for a specified sum.

Think about the people who are employing these contractors. Think about the need to be clear on what cost they are outlaying for the benefit that they receive. There has to be certainty, and that is what a contract gives. This bill would bring in a whole lot of uncertainty around the end result in what is today a very fixed-price contract, and the terms are now no longer clear. The person paying the bills is not really sure what the end result will be because the costs are associated with some person’s ability to work quickly or slowly. It relies on keeping time. There are people who would prefer to work faster than, you know, Mr Parker, or faster or slower than me, and that is for them to decide—but the contract, when one writes the contract, is clear about the certainty of the cost for the person who is going to pay the bills. That is very important, and the confusion is the problem with this bill.

The underlying intent is noble and worthwhile, and, as I say, there is no doubt—no one wants to see employees being paid less than the minimum wage. But there are already laws in place to protect those people. There are already minimum wages, there are labour inspectors who go out and about and do exactly that: make sure that people do get paid the minimum wage. They also check whether or not the relationship between the employee and the employer is a genuine employee-employer relationship. And if there is a situation where an employer is contracting someone who is really an employee there are also, today, rules and legislation to ensure that head contractor is not able to abuse the position that he finds himself in, is not able to pay or treat an employee—in reality, an employee—as a contractor. So that is the issue.

The Minister has already dedicated more resource into the labour inspectorate. That is the solution to the problem that Mr Parker is trying to address in this bill. But, in fact, the bill—you know, even in the explanatory note to Supplementary Order Paper 203—is narrowed so that it applies to certain companies: “The Bill is intended to apply to companies only where the company consists of a single person as a shareholder and director who personally provides the specific service.” So there are a lot of conditions that have to be met.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): May I respond to some of the points that have already been made. I will start with those that have most recently been made by Alastair Scott. Piece-rates already exist for employees. You cannot get the minimum wage for picking an apple an hour. There is a piece-rate that applies and is agreed by the employer and the employee that is reasonable, and if, after having agreed that piece-rate, you actually go out there and pick an apple an hour, you do not get the piece-rate and you do not get the minimum wage. So let us not pretend that somehow this would be different. The same logic and legal language is implied here in respect of a contractual arrangement as it is for a piece-rate, so I think that argument is a nonsense.

In respect of the idea that the problem does not exist, we know there is a gap in the law. The only question is how often are people being abused. There is no doubt that some people are being abused and, indeed, the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee conceded that. The select committee conceded that some people are being abused in this relationship; we do not know how many. I am personally convinced it is rising. I think we are seeing more exploitative practices, especially in Auckland. Some of them are associated with desperate people. Some of those desperate people are here on student visas and, you know, they are more open to exploitation than people who have other support structures around them if this is their own country. There is no doubt this is happening; it is just a question of how much.

What were some of the instances that we heard at the select committee? We heard an instance of a gym that had fitness trainers who were employees, who were put off as employees and taken on as contractors, and they did not think they were getting the minimum wage. We had some other examples in other industries that had been given to me by law centres. Why do we not see this coming forward? Well, in virtually every one of these instances, the person who gets the payment is a party to tax fraud. If they are getting paid less than the minimum wage and the tax is not being deducted at source, you can bet your bottom dollar that they are not going to the tax department and paying their tax, so they are complicit in tax fraud. They are never going to come forward and say: “Ping me for the tax I didn’t pay on the payment that I got that was less than the minimum wage.”

The idea that people have remedies in practice because they might be an employee rather than a contractor—and here I want to concede the point that Alastair Scott made, which was that for some of the people who are being abused, even if the pretence is that they are a contractor, at law they probably are an employee if the legal test is applied properly, but in reality they have no effective remedy. They have no effective remedy for a number of reasons. The old guardians of these things are not their guardians now. Most of these practices never occurred in yesteryear, because we had high rates of union coverage, and the unions were effectively the police that stopped this happening. You did not actually have to rely upon labour inspectors. We had advice from the department of labour as to whether labour inspectors are active in this space. It readily conceded that labour inspectors actually go after bigger issues that are systemic, rather than in respect of the issues of one person.

The number of prosecutions we see that come into that category every year throughout New Zealand would be able to be recorded on my fingers—I would not have to go to my toes. They are ones like the Masala prosecution last year, where people were being paid $2 an hour—$2 an hour. I think that is disgraceful. I am sure everyone in this Committee thinks it is disgraceful. But we have other instances.

One of my colleagues, in light of this bill, came up to me just a couple of weeks ago and said that another one had come into his office. Again, this person had come into his office and said: “I’m being offered remuneration where, effectively, I’ve got to take it. It is a contractual rate for a fixed-dollar amount per day that is much less than the minimum wage.” My own secretary in my office, Deb Thornton, whom I have worked with for 10 years, recently came to me about her son’s flatmate in Auckland—again, the same thing, and this time it is in the hospitality industry. Doing dishes or waiting at tables—$50 for the night, no matter whether you are there for 5 hours or 8 hours. This is happening.

And when I hear the National members saying “Well, it might not be that bad. It’s not that often it’s happening.”’, it sounds to me a bit like the people—and I am not saying that it is quite this bad, but in the old days, you know, when they tried to get rid of slavery, the people who ran those businesses said “Oh, it’d be a terrible cost for me to have to pay for people, rather than to employ them as slaves.” And then I am sure that there would have been some people who at that stage said: “Well, it doesn’t matter if there are only a few slaves”—because that is, effectively, what we are saying here—“so long as the number of people who are in this vulnerable position is not huge, so long as the number of people being exploited is not large, it is OK.” That is not right.

The principle here is that people ought not to be able to get around the minimum wage by taking people on in contractual relationships, and that is what is at the heart of the ILO rule that Jonathan Young read out. The bit at the end about saying you should not stop non - employment relationships—this does not stop non - employment relationships. You can still have contractual relationships; you just cannot pay them less than the minimum wage. That is all this bill does—nothing more.

In respect of the pamphleteers, I agreed to that amendment because, you know, I really value the support of New Zealand First. I am not sure it is right. Maybe we need to tidy up the issues around piece-rates for people—

Jonathan Young: Yes, they’re the most vulnerable, according to them.

Hon DAVID PARKER: What was that?

Alastair Scott: They’re the most vulnerable.

Hon DAVID PARKER: No, what Clayton Mitchell said was that there are people who are elderly and who choose to do this for a bit of pin money and a bit of social experience, and they should be able to take longer than a piece-rate would allow. I personally think a piece-rate would protect that situation, but I agreed to that in order to get the support of New Zealand First. I do think that might be an area of law that we need to tidy up because I think a piece-rate should be able to be used in that situation.

What about the competitive effects? What about the radio station that also sells advertising, instead of using the pamphleteer? If the radio station has to pay the minimum wage to all its employees, why should the competing advertiser who is stuffing pamphlets through letterboxes not have to pay the minimum wage? We are on a race to the bottom in New Zealand because we still think we are the fair country that we were 30 years ago. We are not that country now, and we have not updated our laws to reflect it. We need to update our laws to reflect it so that the most vulnerable people cannot be abused by toe-rags—and they are toe-rags—who will employ people for less than the minimum wage in order to improve their profitability or to sustain their business. Some of them will say: “We’ll go broke.” Well, that is true of any business that cannot afford to pay someone the minimum wage. You do not drive down wages in a high-income society by allowing less than those minimums.

The final thing I would say, in respect of the idea that people can go to the Employment Relations Authority and get a remedy, is that I have spoken to labour barristers who operate in this area. They say that in the rare cases—because most of these people, as I have said, are vulnerable and have not got the skills or the money to do it, and they have probably been complicit in tax fraud because they have not paid their tax on the money that they have earned—when they do go, if they have got a written agreement, the Employment Relations Authority, understandably, puts a lot of weight on the written form of the agreement. And even though you might think that it is an employment relationship, if it is written up as a contract, it is very hard to get over the written form of the contract in practice, even though theoretically, at common law, an underlying test should be applied.

So I think that there are people being abused by these sorts of relationships. I think it is on the rise in New Zealand. I think this sort of corruption should be stamped out, and I think this bill would be a good way to do it.

KEVIN HAGUE (Green): I want to thank the member in the chair, the Hon David Parker, for that contribution. I was not part of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, and I must say, listening to the debate today, I have actually been a little bit confused about some of what the bill says. I suspect, actually, that some of the members on the Government benches have not understood what the bill does, either, and I noticed, actually, as David Parker was speaking, that Alastair Scott was nodding along. I think that probably suggests that David Parker has the right on his side.

I do have some questions about the bill, and I want to come to those, but, first of all, there are some remarks of a more general nature that I want to make arising out of what other speakers have raised in the debate so far. To some extent this bill goes to the relationship between society and the economy, and social arrangements and the economy, and there is a parallel around the environment as well. I think that we have set up an economy that people need to serve. Any economics student will tell you that capital will extract as much value as it can from labour, if it is allowed to do that. The observations around the changing share of surplus going to capital and to labour I think illustrates exactly this point. Capital, when it can, will extract as much value from labour as possible.

Clearly, we do not believe it should be that way. We believe that we should start out with an aim of having a fair society, and we should design and engineer our economic arrangements to deliver on that goal. The brake that we have currently on extracting the absolute maximum from labour, by capital, is the minimum wage and other protections for workers. But, very clearly, contracting out work is one of the mechanisms that capital has used to evade that brake. The result is that we are seeing more and more people—I think David Parker is right—exposed to that maximal exploitation, as a result. I think that contracting out work goes hand in hand with the casualisation of the workforce. These are both mechanisms that are being used by capital to evade the brake of the minimum standards, that floor that Governments have set.

Of course, capital will exploit contractors if it can. This is kind of a classic case of what do we do now when that situation occurs. Leaving it to the market to resolve—OK, that is never going to work because it is the market that is the problem. One of the roles of Government is to step in, in those cases of market failure where the market will not deliver the social results that we as a society need. I think it is unfortunate that Government members are now speaking against taking that role—taking the role of Government to step in and fix that market failure, to actually protect those people who are employed through contractual arrangements.

I guess I want to come to the particular question that I have, and this may be as a result of not having sat in on the select committee. My question relates to schedule 2, and I would like to hear from David Parker about how exactly those particular occupations have been selected. [Bell rung] Thank you, Mr Chair. When I look at schedule 2, very clearly these are functions that are often associated with the contracting of work, but what I am failing to understand—and I would appreciate hearing from the member—is why these particular ones have been selected and why there is not, I guess, a more general specification of the nature of that work, rather than the approach of itemising and listing that has been taken here. It does seem to me that a problem that is typically associated with this approach is that if we get it wrong, then we end up in an invidious situation where something has been excluded and, properly, it should be included.

We also have the problem of, I guess, futureproofing the schedule for the types of work that may emerge in the future, that we do not currently have to deal with—relating to the issue that I have raised about the general situation, that capital will always be looking for ways to extract more value from labour. What we are likely to see, I think, is that where we have this tightly defined list, the types of work themselves may actually change to enable that to occur. I will not take all of this second call, but that is the first of the big questions that I have. Perhaps we could return to some of those other questions in subsequent calls.

SUE MORONEY (Labour): It is a real pleasure to rise and participate in this debate on a bill that would make a great difference to, I believe, a rising number of people in our society. This bill, brought in the name of the Hon David Parker, seeks, quite simply, to ensure that contractors—people who are employed as independent contractors, or engaged as independent contractors, I should say—should receive no less than the minimum wage. It should not be terribly controversial, but it is very interesting listening to National members trying to find excuses for the reason why they will not allow the minimum wage to be the standard for people who are independent contractors.

We have heard them use arguments like—well, look, I am going to quote from Alastair Scott because I thought what he had to say was pretty insightful. I use that word in both ways of using it: it gave me great insight, but it could incite people as well. What he said was that, yes, there are dodgy employers out there—his words, not mine—but he said that that was no reason to have a law to stop it. Actually, that is the very reason to have a law to stop it. The very reason we have any employment law in this country at all is that if there are loopholes in the law, if there are not laws to prevent it, there are people who will exploit vulnerable people. That is the very reason why we have any industrial relations law at all in this country, Mr Scott. It is not an argument to say that “There are dodgy employers. There are always going to be some. Never mind. Let us not do anything about it.” On this side of the Chamber we are not content with that. We do not think that is the sort of country we want to live in. We want a country that believes that if people are engaged to provide their labour, in whatever form—whether it be in a standard employment relationship, whether it be in the role as an independent contractor, however they offer their toil—they ought to have some standards that go alongside that.

There is another spurious argument that is being used by National members, and I think this shows the level of desperation, to try to argue their way out of what is, in fact, a very simple bill. It is not complicated. I think their strategy is to try to make it confusing, try to make it look complicated, but in fact it is very simple. I think when David Parker got up and spoke before, what could have been more simple than the way he put it. This bill is to ensure that people are not earning less than the minimum wage and are not being exploited. It is very, very simple.

National members are arguing that this bill should not pass because if an independent contractor gets the minimum wage, or at least the minimum wage, for every hour that they toil, then they have got to pay their ACC contribution, their tax, and a range of other measures. Well, guess what? So do employees—so do employees. They do not have all those things taken off, and then get the minimum wage applied. Gosh, if they want to move that amendment, I would vote for it, by the way—I would be happy to support that sort of amendment to this bill. But that is not what actually occurs for ordinary, everyday employees in standard employment relationships. They have the law on their side requiring that they have to receive no less than $15.25 an hour, and then they pay their ACC levy, and then they pay their income tax—not beforehand, but afterwards. So that is a ridiculous argument coming from—

Jonathan Young: Sick leave?

SUE MORONEY: Well, it gets paid out of their wages, Mr Young; it gets paid out of their wages. Does the member honestly believe that it gets paid by the employer and then the employer pays them the minimum wage afterwards? Please, because you are going to need to think about that very carefully and change your vote on this if that is what you truly believe actually happens in standard employment arrangements. I think anyone listening to this debate will know that that is complete and utter nonsense; it does show how out of touch the National Party members are. It seems to me that they are voting against this because they really do not want to ensure that people who are in these situations can demand to have at least the minimum wage.

I want to just go through whom we are talking about, so that people listening to this debate are really clear. It is not everyone in every circumstance; the member David Parker has written a schedule of whom this would apply to. It would apply to people who are providing services under a contract for service in the following areas: building and construction services, cleaning services—and I am going to pause on that one there because that, to me, is the one where I see the most exploitation happening in this area. People are supposedly going to gain so much benefit out of being self-employed independent contractors by going and doing a job that most in this Chamber would never have done—to go and toil for hour after hour after hour, cleaning. I know that what is happening in that industry is that more and more frequently, those employees and those self-employed independent contractors are being made to clean larger and larger areas and are being given a shorter and shorter period of time in which to do that. In many instances, they are being given ridiculously small amounts of time—no one, no matter how fast, no matter what their superpower is could ever clean that area in that amount of time. It is this type of loophole that is allowing that to continue to happen, and it is this schedule 2 that will put a stop to it.

So, there are cleaning services. Courier services would also be covered by this legislation, as would food catering services and fast-food delivery services. Food catering services, I think, are another area where there is rampant exploitation going on. Many of the cases that have gone through the courts, that have been picked up by labour inspectors, have in fact been in that particular area of food catering and the hospitality area. The member has brought forward Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 203, which would remove the next item on schedule 2, which is “newspaper or pamphlet delivery services to letterboxes”.

Alastair Scott: He’s not sure he wants to. He’s not sure. He just said himself he wasn’t sure about that.

SUE MORONEY: Well, he is so sure that he brought an SOP forward, Mr Scott, that you can vote for. I look forward to Mr Scott casting his vote in favour of that, because when he spoke that seemed to be the only area that he had a concern about. He did not seem to think it fitted. Well, it turns out that the member is prepared to accept that argument, and is prepared to amend the legislation in order to address that very issue. Personal home care—

Alastair Scott: So they’re not entitled to a minimum wage now, are they? Pamphlet guys aren’t allowed a minimum wage?

SUE MORONEY: —support to an individual in an individual’s house is another area. Pardon?

Alastair Scott: Pamphlet deliverers are not entitled to a minimum wage, according to this legislation.

SUE MORONEY: Well, now Mr Scott wants to include them. He wants to include them now—that is where the confusion is. I think the confusion is on that side of the Chamber; it is clearly not on this side of the Chamber. If Mr Scott wants to put that up as an amendment to the SOP, he would have my vote. I will put that on the record right now. I am very happy to support that. But I would want to see that the National Party members would be prepared to support it as well, because if they genuinely do have a concern for what is happening in this area—if they genuinely do want to address making sure that the minimum wage is an entitlement for people when they offer their labour, no matter in which form they offer their labour—then they should be supporting this bill.

There is another amendment to schedule 2 that I want to speak to briefly, and that is that where originally schedule 2 had also included “public entertainment services as an actor, musician, or singer”, David Parker has brought forward Supplementary Order Paper 203 that would make sure that it applied to people who were doing that in a professional capacity. I admire him for doing that. I think it is important to bring that forward, because I can tell you, no one wants to pay me the minimum wage for my karaoke. I was bit worried that my car karaoke might be captured under this schedule, but it is very good that that has now been clarified. [Interruption] Well, my colleagues know a little too much about my car karaoke; they want to pay me to not continue to indulge in that. So it would be professional entertainment services that would be captured by this, and I think that is right and I think that is proper.

The manufacture of clothing, footwear, or textiles would also be captured by this.

Telemarketing services is the next one on the list, and that is a pretty interesting field too. It is a growing field.

Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill in the Committee of the whole House. The issue is that this bill is not going to deliver what it intends to—it is the way it is proposed. The way this bill is proposed is confusing, not at just one level that can be sorted, but it is confusing at all levels. This bill confuses employee and contractor status and expects businesses out there to treat both employees and contractors the same way, because this bill proposes to apply the minimum wage to contractors in the same way it applies to employees.

This bill misses that employees get holiday pay on top of their hourly wage, and for the ACC argument that we heard from the member who spoke before, the ACC earners levy is deducted from their gross earning through PAYE. For contractors, they will not be receiving any holiday pay, which employees get on top of their minimum hourly rate, and they will also be required to pay the ACC earners levy and work levy. So there is a big difference in employee and contractor status, and contractors earning just the minimum wage is not going to help them earn more.

We have heard a lot from various people, even after the select committee process. People are urging that this bill should not proceed, especially the business sector—those people who represent businesses—because they see that this bill is based on some wrong assumptions. Because this bill is based on some wrong assumptions, it is confusing and it is also unworkable. During the select committee process, the member in charge of this bill was unable to provide us with any concrete evidence. We heard some anecdotal stories, but there was no concrete evidence about how widespread this problem is. We do acknowledge that there is a problem, but we need to know how big that problem is. Because we do not know how big that problem is, I do not see that it is necessary to amend the current legislation.

We have heard from businesses saying that it is going to harm contractors. This bill is going to harm contractors, and not just that, it will create a lot of uncertainty in the business sector. The example that the member used from day one—I would like to use that same example of delivering flyers. If a person is delivering flyers for more than one client, who will be responsible for the enforcement of this legislation? Who will decide who should be the client who will be responsible for paying the minimum wage to the contractor? This bill assumes that a contractor works for only one client at a time, which is not true—that is what I mean by wrong assumptions. There are a lot of wrong assumptions in this.

To the member—in his contribution, he used the example of Masala restaurant. I believe that those people were employees, not contractors, so that is, again, a very, very confusing example given by the member. We do acknowledge that the problem is there, but this bill is not going to address the problem. We need to know how widespread this problem is, and we also need to look at the practical aspect of how we deliver this bill on the ground. That is really important. This bill is confusing, it is not workable, and I would like to ask the member in charge of this bill, David Parker, to take the next call and tell us why he assumes that contractors should be working for just one client at one time.

I also want to know from the member how this confusing legislation is going to help contractors. What happens to the holiday pay, and what happens to the ACC earners levy and work levy? I want to know that, and I also want to know from the member whether he has done any evaluation on the value of—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. This debate is interrupted and I shall resume the Chair at 7.30.

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

Dr PARMJEET PARMAR: Just to summarise, before the dinner break I was saying that this bill is very confusing. It is because of the way it is proposed, because it mixes the employee and contractor statuses. And I was also saying that this bill is not workable and is based on some wrong assumptions. Before the dinner break, I was asking some questions of the member in charge of this bill.

I was asking why the member assumed that a contractor should be working only for one client at a time. In a situation where a contractor is working for multiple clients, who will decide the client that will be responsible for the minimum wage for that contractor? It is unfair to put that responsibility on clients and the contractor, and I would like to ask the member in charge of this bill to answer this question. I would also like to ask the member how this confusing legislation is going to help contractors, especially regarding their holiday pay and ACC levies, because with holiday pay and ACC levies, it is not going to deliver what the member actually intends to deliver through this legislation. Thirdly, I would also like to ask whether the member had an opportunity to do an evaluation on the work that contractors do in various industry sectors. We know that contractors work in various industry sectors like manufacturing, forestry, construction, cleaning, and so many other industries. I would like to know from the member whether he had the opportunity to do an evaluation on the value of work that contractors do and their earnings.

The reality is that the current legislation is enough to address the issue that this bill intends to address. This bill will actually intervene in a way that will take away the choice that is available to people in the market place. It will take away the flexibility that is available in the market place. It will also reduce the earning power of contractors because contractors want to work efficiently to be able to earn more. They want to have the flexibility available to them to be able to work in their own time. I know several families where, just to balance their family and work life, a member works as an employee but the other member takes up some contracting jobs because it gives them the flexibility to balance their family and work life. That is the kind of flexibility that people really like when they become contractors. We need to see that we are moving forward with the workforce, not going backward. We are not restricting our workforce but we are making it modern and we are making it flexible and practical too.

If this legislation goes through, the focus will be on time. The focus will be on the number of hours and on contracts. The whole focus will come on just one factor, and that is the time factor. There will be no focus on productivity. There will be no focus on flexibility. There will be no focus on choice, which is available to people currently. This legislation also does not take into consideration any cost overruns, because it is possible that people are unable to estimate the number of hours they will take to finish a contract, so they will underestimate the number of hours they will take to finish that project and there will be issues of cost overruns. There will be a possibility of a number of people coming and claiming those kinds of costs, complicating the whole situation.

As I said before, this legislation will actually harm contractors and will create uncertainty in the sector, and we do not want to see that. This legislation will also require self-employed people to pay themselves the minimum hourly rate. Examples that Sue Moroney gave before the dinner break, of those self-employed people—truck drivers, courier drivers. They will be required to pay the minimum hourly wage to themselves under this legislation. That will limit their ability to earn more, because that means we are adding more compliance costs on to them. There will more administration costs for some of these people because I know these people like to work on their business in a way that they are quite involved in the way that they deliver their contracts. They will have to employ another person to deliver those kinds of administrative jobs. That means they will have to pay another person to do that kind of record-keeping and then their overall earning will be definitely affected.

As this bill has progressed through the House, we have seen that a number of businesses and a number of people have realised that there are a number of flaws in the way this bill is proposed and that it is not going to deliver what the intention is. We all know that we should not underestimate what the business sector is saying and what contractors are saying. They are quite capable. They know what they are doing out there, so it is not a good idea to mix the employee and contractor statuses. We want to see that we have fair employment legislation, but, on the other hand, we also want to have flexibility in our workforce while enforcing that fair employment legislation. We are doing that.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I was challenged by the last speaker, Dr Parmjeet Parmar, to immediately take to my feet and respond to the question of what we do with a contractor who has got more than one principal. The member was on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and was there when the Parliamentary Counsel Office drafted an amendment at the request of the select committee. That very point, which was a fair point, had been raised by submitters, and raised by rural delivery people saying: “Look, every individual contract that we have here would be insufficient but you take them altogether and we get much more than minimum wage. Please do not include us.” So there was a clause drafted, which is in Supplementary Order Paper 203, because that amendment was blocked by Dr Parmjeet Parmar and others at the select committee. It says in clause 10 on Supplementary Order Paper 203, adding clause 6A(2) to the Minimum Wage Act, that this requirement to pay the minimum wage “does not apply to a specified contractor”—which is the terminology—“who is providing a service to more than 1 principal at the same time …”. I think that is pretty clear.

I am not going to refer to anything else that that speaker raised, because all of those points have already been addressed quite well by either me or other members speaking in favour of the bill. I will refer to the premature release that we had from Business New Zealand. It has not really covered itself with glory on this bill. I read the opinion piece in the newspaper. In fairness to those at Business New Zealand, they obviously had not read the amendments that had been proposed but been blocked by the National Party members in the way that we referred to earlier. I know that because, having seen their misinformed piece in the paper, which did not refer to all of the protections that address most of their concerns, I met with them and gave them the form of the bill that had those amendments in them, and they plainly had not seen them previously.

Further, I said: “Look, if there are any other provisions here that you would like to have incorporated that would make this more practical, I am open for business, because I am really just trying to cure this social ill without overregulating things.” They came up with three proposed suggestions, all of which are in the Supplementary Order Paper. There is a transitional provision that says that this will never apply to contracts that are already in existence even after the Act comes into effect. So it will not affect those arrangements that are already in place. There is a provision making it clear that where there is an agreement as to what a reasonable time is, that agreement is at the time the contract is formed not half-way through it. I thought that was pretty clear anyway, but I was willing to clarify that. Then, lastly, there is a provision to have an equity and good conscience discretion so that for the labour inspector, having taken all those things into account, it still would not be fair to ping the person who was not paying the minimum wage—well, they did not have to ping them. So that is in there too.

Notwithstanding that, this premature release from Business New Zealand shows that, if it is right, Peter Dunne is going to cast a vote against this at the Committee stage, which is a shame. I am taking it that someone would have raised a point of order if the press release was right in saying that this bill has already been voted down at Committee stage, because I have been here for the last couple of hours, and, hopefully, I was not asleep so long that I did not notice that.

The one other thing that I have not responded to was the question from Kevin Hague and the Greens who asked why we had gone for a list in schedule 2. The original form of this bill, when it went under Darien Fenton’s name at a previous iteration, actually did not have a list; it applied to all contractual relationships. We actually put in a list to reduce compliance costs because we did not want to catch brain surgeons, who are, plainly, paid more than the minimum wage, so we went for a list approach.

Really, having gone through all of this, if I was going to do it again—I think this bill is good—the better approach for a future Parliament is to actually have the approach that is taken in Canada, which is dependent contractor legislation. This is because that then does go further and addresses the things that Dr Parmjeet Parmar says, at least, that she is worried about—because you could also clean up at the same time things like holiday pay, unfair terms and conditions, and contracts that prevent people who are in these dependent contract relationships even joining together and telling their boss that the terms are not good enough. I will wait until I hear any other new questions.

CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I rise to support the Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill full-throatedly, because I believe that this bill reflects many of the pressures people are facing in the modern workforce and in the modern economy. We have to accept the fact that in the Western economy effort and contribution have been decoupled from reward. That is the simple reality of the modern workforce. People are going to work every day, working hard and creating the conditions for prosperity, and yet they are not sharing in that prosperity. While people on higher incomes are enjoying prosperity, those who help them to create the wealth are not. That is a reality of the modern economy. They keep being promised jam tomorrow while they watch people higher up the economic ladder tucking into a three-course buffet dinner, and it is not good enough.

I will tell you that the members on the opposite side turn a blind eye to that, and they are irresponsible if they ignore the growing groundswell of support amongst people in low-income jobs who are increasingly frustrated and angry with the fact that they are not getting their fair share of the economic reward and of the rewards for success in this economy. The people out there delivering leaflets for our local supermarkets in a howling Wellington southerly help to create the massive profits that Progressive Enterprises and Foodstuffs—i.e., Countdown and Pak ’N Save—are enjoying, and yet they are not enjoying a share of that themselves. They are not even getting paid the minimum wage.

So when this Government talks about choice, who are they talking about the choice for? It is not for the people who are offered the opportunity to take a contract that is worth less than the minimum wage on a take-it-or-leave-it basis—they do not get a choice. The only choice they get is to not work. I think it is wrong that we say to people that they should not have the opportunity to work unless they are willing to work for below the minimum wage. The question that I have got for the members opposite is: if they think that that is right, why do they purport to support the minimum wage in the first place? The minimum wage is meaningless if there are so many loopholes that firms can simply get out of paying it by using contractor arrangements.

Let me look at another example that I came across recently of people who are barely earning the minimum wage despite doing work that I would have assumed was relatively lucrative. It is some of the contractors, whom I met, who are working on the roll-out of fibre for ultra-fast broadband. They explained to me the chain of the contracting that people go through before any money reaches them. The Government have Crown Fibre Holdings, who let a contract to Chorus, who let a contract to Downer Group, who let a contract to a principal contractor, who then lets a contract to a subcontractor, who then hires labour on a casual basis.

That is the layer of contracting, and every step of the way someone is clipping the ticket so that by the time you get to the person who is in the street putting the cables into the ground, they are earning barely minimum wage, if that. They are often contractors who have then got all of the overheads that go with being a contractor as well, and yet they are doing a job that traditionally would have been regarded as the role of an employee—and they are barely earning the minimum wage. That is wrong. It is morally wrong that we have created that environment where people who are out there working hard and creating the conditions for economic prosperity for everybody are not getting their fair share of that.

The members opposite can go on and on and try to discredit this bill by making claims about it that simply are not true, but it is time they confronted the reality that a growing number of New Zealanders are feeling frustrated and let down and left behind and forgotten. If we do not want to have a situation like they have had in the UK where they ended up with Brexit, or in the US where they are ending up with the rise of Donald Trump, we would be wise to consider that. We would be wise to consider the fact that every New Zealander has the right, if they are willing to go out and work for it, to enjoy a share of the economic prosperity that others enjoy. They are willing to go out and work for it, and they are not getting that reward.

The members opposite can continue to turn a blind eye to that, but as the groundswell and the growing numbers of people who feel disenfranchised and forgotten continues to expand, they will inevitably feel the consequences of that. I think we are a better country than that. New Zealand workers deserve a better deal than that. This bill is only a small step, but a significant one and an important one, and it has my full support.

MARAMA DAVIDSON (Green): The Greens will be, absolutely, supporting the Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill. I will pick up from where my colleague Chris Hipkins just left off at the end of his debate.

This is actually about bringing our society up to one that is fairer and that is more cohesive. The thing is the low-wage society, which is what this Government supports and believes in, has just done us in badly. We are seeing the ugly rearing head of it right now. This is why just today the low-wage economy—which is why this Government is opposing this bill. It is making up all sorts of excuses and reasons. The Government members even tried to say to us that they support the principle of the bill but that it is a messy bill—that is an absolute excuse.

Again, I have to say, I have been sitting here feeling—I am just trying to keep my language parliamentary—vomitous about us sitting here on the salaries that we are all on, and more, and having the absolute cheek to even fight against a minimum wage of—what is it—$15.25. We are going to deny New Zealanders $15.25. We are going to deny contractors a bit of legislation to bring them up to $15.25—us here in this House, us here sitting on these salaries. I have felt vomitous about that; I am going to use that word. It is a feeling of being really disconnected, and it is quite abhorrent, actually—quite abhorrent, actually—that we can even have the cheek to stand in this Chamber and argue against new section 6A, which is about bringing the “Minimum rate of remuneration not to be less than the minimum rate” of $15.25. Wow, go us! Go us in here! Go us in here! OK, I will get back to the bill. Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.

The Government’s cries of opposing this bill have been that it is impractical and that it is not going to do what it is intended to do. It is doing that under the guise of being sympathetic with the intent. Thankfully, none of us is going to fall for it. None of us and New Zealanders is going to fall for it. Do you know what happened today? Research released today from Otago University showed that more than half—half—of all homeless New Zealanders are working or studying. I am going to ask that we research how many of those workers are on any sort of contract. According to schedule 2, that means that I am going to ask that we research how many of our building and construction services, cleaning services, courier services, or food catering services contractors—all of those are listed in schedule 2—are struggling or are in any sort of insecure housing situation, which the report is showing that half are.

I will move on from there. We are also supporting this bill, as I said, because it is one step towards fixing what this Government has neglected in terms of inequality increasing. So we will be supporting this bill. We will be trying to support workers and reduce the inequality that has been worsening under this Government. Do you know what it actually is? This is the thing: this bill is to help us steal less from workers—from contractors. This bill is to stop us from stealing the money that we steal off contractors by paying them a little bit more towards what they are worth—towards what they are worth. That is what this type of legislation is actually about. It is not about giving people who contract more; it is about stealing less. They deserve that. They need that, and then some, to live a good life. So that is also what this bill is about. My colleague Catherine Delahunty is going to go into more detail around carers.

Dr JIAN YANG (National): Let me start my speech with an example to demonstrate the spirit, the nature, of a contract. I am currently doing up my garden. I have a contractor. He employs a few people, and he gave me a quote and I accepted the quote. He did not specify how much time it would take. He said about 4 weeks, but now 4 weeks have gone and the work is half done, due to various reasons. There was bad weather, a couple of his workers left, and the plants that he had ordered did not arrive on time. So for all sorts of reasons the job did not finish within the time frame he had informally talked about. However, I am not particularly worried, because I know that I am not going to pay more, and he is not particularly worried because he knows that he has a job to finish and I am not going to get somebody else to finish the job. So this is the beauty of contracts—flexibility. Flexibility is particularly important.

I do have sympathy for the intention of this particular bill. However, I would say that this bill is trying to resolve a problem that does not really exist, because there is no empirical evidence to support this, and also we do not know how widespread the issue is. Having a contract is a commercial activity—for that reason we need to listen to the voice of business, right? For example, the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) has a membership of 4,500. It is a large organisation. The chief executive, Kim Campbell, said that although the bill has good intentions, it would create more problems than it tries to resolve, and a contractor may well have more than one job at a certain time. So this person may not get much from one particular job, but could get many more jobs, and if you add up all the jobs, this person—he or she—might be doing quite well. So this bill may well reduce types of contracts that we are currently using and therefore reduce flexibility.

Also, the bill may not necessarily help the contractors themselves, because some people may not be able to finish within a time frame and therefore may not be able to enter a contract. Also, as my colleague Dr Parmjeet Parmar said, the bill itself might entrench contract workers, because, in the end, the contract workers might have to set the pay, which, in the end, may not work out in their favour because they have other things to factor in, like sick leave, holiday pay, or ACC levies—these things. I also quote Mr Kim Campbell from the EMA, and he said: “I think probably common sense will prevail and I’m reasonably confident there are enough people who’ve got some common sense in Wellington who will see this is not going to work”.

So I do think that we should let common sense prevail, and common sense should prevail as the risks outweigh the benefits and the bill would not achieve its goal. The bill is more of an attempt to address wage level concerns for a selected group of occupations rather than to address concerns over the nature and value of contracting for services generally. There are many other problems with the bill. Also, as my colleagues have mentioned, the administrative compliance cost is a factor we need to consider. Just imagine that contractors have to record what they have done today, and when. So this can mean lots and lots of work to be done. There is also confusion regarding the provisions. What kinds of jobs should the bill apply to and what kinds of jobs should it not apply to? For example, construction and building services are covered by the bill, but technical maintenance is not. The bill, therefore—

Su’a WILLIAM SIO (Labour—Māngere): It is alarming when I hear two members in a row from the Government come down to this Committee and read out lines—political lines, obviously—in opposition to this bill. They are lines that I do not think they believe in—lines that, I think, if they do believe in, then they have not seriously considered what they mean for their reputation. It is alarming also that the Hon David Parker has revealed to this Committee that one of those members, who is a member of that particular committee, opposed the amendments of the committee that would have improved this bill, but then comes down to this Chamber and says that she does not understand what is going on. That is alarming.

Anyway, I want to acknowledge, firstly, the Hon David Parker, for the professional and caring way in which you have, I think, ushered this bill through, because the manner in which you have ushered this bill through has enabled the passage of this bill in its first and second reading. I hope that those political parties that have supported this bill thus far will continue to support it in its third reading. I want to thank you because if this bill is passed tonight and it gets implemented immediately, it will have an immediate impact—a good impact—on those people who are self-employed at this point in time who are paid less than the minimum wage. I know many in my community who will be applauding this Parliament if this bill is passed.

Once upon a time we used to consider in our community that for somebody who was self-employed—“that’s where the money’s going to be”. We used to encourage so many of our young people to get into self-employment opportunities. We used to brag about having a contract to build houses, having a contract to paint for Housing New Zealand, and having a contract from the telephone companies, because we believed that if you worked hard enough and you were honest about your day’s work, you would receive a fair wage. We are talking here about making sure that we protect those people who are now self-employed, so that they are at least paid the minimum wage.

We are a signatory to International Labour Organization Convention 131 about the minimum wage. If members of the Government would read that convention they would know what that minimum wage is about. It is about ensuring that the worker and their family are able to support themselves. It is about ensuring that a worker and their family are able to afford the cost of living of their particular country. At the moment, if I look at what is happening and how we now as a country are looking at using self-employed opportunities or contracting work out, employers—not all, I can say, but some employers—are using them to get away from their responsibility to the workforce. They are using them to undercut their costs.

That is not just me saying it. If you look at the report that was prepared by the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, there were a number of submitters who made submissions, including Caritas—the social services of the Catholic Church—the trade union movement, the New Zealand Public Service Association, FIRST Union, and the New Zealand Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux. These are people who are close to the ground to where it is happening and they note in this report that there is a trend towards firms offering work to contractors, rather than employees, in order to reduce costs and avoid duties and obligations. That was the submission made by this group of people to the select committee. FIRST Union said that it had seen work that was predominantly performed by employees now being contracted out and weighted significantly in favour of the principal’s interest.

I do not know whether members on the other side of the Chamber recognise the error of their ways. Instead of us being proud of a New Zealand where our workers are earning good money and they are spending that money—and if you know anything about economics 101, and most of us do, that money is circulating and helps generate more wealth—that lot seems intent on driving down salaries.

PEENI HENARE (Labour—Tāmaki Makaurau): Tēnā koe, Mr Chair. As I rose to my feet, I had to check the bill that we are debating, because it sounds like the Government is actually talking about the housing crisis, because this problem does not exist either. There are not any problems with this particular bill.

I hear calls from the other side saying: “Give us some examples.” So I want to start my contribution with an example. New schedule 2, inserted by clause 14, talks about services as an actor, musician, singer, or support crew for the production of advertising or content for television.

Some people might know that I used to work at Māori Television. I was fortunate enough to be there when Māori Television led the way with Anzac Day coverage—full-day coverage—and Te Matatini National Kapa Haka Festival coverage, with a worldwide audience of over a million people. What else was there? It was a part of Christmas in the Park, the Rugby World Cup—

Meka Whaitiri: Te Ata’s tangi.

PEENI HENARE: —Te Arikinui Dr Dame Te Atairangikaahu’s hui mate, her tangi. While we all sit there and we watch and we “Wow” and we are amazed by the images on our television screen, what people who are viewing at home do not know is that the key grips, the riggers for the equipment, the lighting people, and the cameramen are all contractors. Just recently Ngā Aho Whakaari, the union representing the workers in this particular industry, threatened to strike. Why? Because those workers were not being paid what they were owed. They were being paid, in some instances, below the minimum wage—below the minimum wage.

Meka Whaitiri: There’s an example.

PEENI HENARE: There is a classic example. So while we all sit there and we watch television and we think: “By crikey, Māori Television’s doing a fantastic job.”, I think about a man by the name of Don Selwyn. Don Selwyn through the 1960s and 1970s knew that technology was going to change the world. So what he did was he focused on the young people. He trained a generation of television producers, of film directors, of movie makers, of camera operators, of key grips, and of riggers for television sets and productions. It is sad to see that despite his hard work through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the birth of Māori Television saw some of those contractors get paid below the minimum wage. There is a classic example of what is exactly wrong with the current legislation.

I want to congratulate Mr Parker, because he has done a great job at cajoling those on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, those across this House, to make sure that we can get this bill across the line. We have bent to the right, bent to the left, bent over backwards, changed a few words, and shaken hands. We all smiled when we agreed on these amendments. Now, all of a sudden, we have already heard about the press release that has just been prematurely let out.

Hon Ruth Dyson: Oops.

PEENI HENARE: Oops—amateur move. Now we are still fighting for the rights of workers in New Zealand.

I think it is absolutely despicable that the narrow-mindedness of this Government is actually going to force many of the constituents in Tāmaki-makau-rau and many of the hard-working whānau right across Aotearoa into more poverty. Our colleague Marama Davidson has already talked about the working poor, and what this does is this actually guarantees that they will remain the working poor. Let us be honest here, the minimum wage is still very low. Let us be honest here. Let us be honest. Let us work hard, get the minimum wage, and still struggle! So we are not asking for the Government to open up Treasury and let everyone reap the benefits of the money that pours out from the doors. No. We are actually asking them to come up to only the bare minimum level—the bare minimum.

It blows me away, as I said—the narrow-mindedness of this Government to turn its back on the hard-working people of Aotearoa New Zealand, in favour of what—market forces? Let the market sort it out? Will market influence make sure that those who work hard, regardless of how many contracts they might have, actually get a livable wage and be able to go home and provide for their families?

So, Mr Parker, I applaud you. You have done a fantastic job, Mr Parker, to bring this bill here, and it does upset me that a key stakeholder in our community—

JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): I would like just to clarify a couple of things, because we are being, I think, unreasonably lambasted by members of the Opposition. They are attempting to make a political feast when we are talking about principles here. The issue around this proposed legislation is not intent, but it is the mechanism.

A case in point has been the confusion that seems to be happening around some schedule 2 inclusions or exclusions. We have had the sponsor of the bill, the Hon David Parker, talk about pamphlet delivery people needing to be on the minimum wage, and why would we not agree with that, and we have had Chris Hipkins come into the Committee and do a grandstanding rhetorical speech saying the same thing, yet we find in schedule 2 that they have been deleted.

The reason that they have been deleted through the discussion in the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—and I believe Clayton Mitchell has proposed this deletion and the member has agreed to it—is that there are many retired people who do pamphlet delivery who do not walk as fast as a 20-year-old but do it for a lifestyle choice, or perhaps they do it for supplementary income, and possibly they will never do it fast enough to really get that minimum wage. But if the “principal”, as defined in clause 6, says: “I can actually get these delivered by a younger, fitter person, because this is what we estimate this job needs in order to be done, in terms of length of time.”, then it creates exclusion for them. This is part of the complexity—can I say complexity—around this bill and how it will affect lots of people in our communities. So the member has agreed to take that group of people out of schedule 2. That is just evidence of the great complexity around this space.

I heard what the member was saying before—how he believed that, perhaps, if it does not succeed in this format, then some work can be done around contractual law and looking at some of those other areas. I would think that what I am hearing and, perhaps, members are hearing is that right through the contracting community people are saying that this is creating confusion. Let me give another example of that, because in new section 7A—inserted by the amendment to clause 11 on Supplementary Order Paper 203—which is entitled “Remuneration and time record to be kept”, it states in new section 7A(2)(d) that “the number of hours spent providing the service by the specified contractor and the remuneration for those hours:” needs to be recorded. When we come to what the Inland Revenue Department states an employee person is, they are a person who can be told at any time what to do on the job and when and how to do it. So they have their hours of work controlled by their employer.

Essentially, this is what we are saying in new section 7A, that we are needing now—and I am not saying that we are excluding piece-rate or excluding the ability for a person to put in a contract price for a deliberate outcome—to pass all of that through a filter of a time-recording process. There may be some exclusions, which, perhaps, the member could talk about later on through that as you go on to new section 7A(6), which I would probably like the member to explain, especially new section 7A(6)(d). This is the confusion. It is blending contract, which is clearly under contract law, with law around employers and employees. I just think that the example of schedule 2 and the exclusion of newspaper and pamphlet delivery services to letterboxes is an example of the complexity and the confusion that is being created.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): Can I respond to Jonathan Young’s point, when he was just referring to new section 7A, inserted by clause 11 on Supplementary Order Paper 203, about records being required to be kept about the number of hours spent providing the service by the contractor and the remuneration for those hours. Of course, if you read down to new section 7A(6) it says: “This section does not apply if— … (c) the agreed rate of remuneration is calculated otherwise than by reference to the number of hours worked … and (d) the principal reasonably believes that the agreed rate of remuneration … is sufficient to remunerate … at a rate that is higher than the prescribed minimum rate …”. I do not think I need to say more than that.

IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): There is a group of people who earn more than $50 an hour and have not earned a cent of it tonight, and they are the National caucus members who have stood up and spoken on this bill without reading a word of it, I think, and especially without reading any of the amendments proposed on the Supplementary Order Papers put up by my colleague David Parker. If they took time to read them, they would realise that every single one of the arguments they have put up against this legislation is dealt with in the Supplementary Order Papers proposed by David Parker.

Let us go through their arguments. First of all, we had Parmjeet Parmar saying: “Well, what if someone is working for multiple contractors, multiple principals? Which one of them is responsible for paying the minimum wage? Oh, gosh! It is so damn difficult. We can’t do it.” It is simple. New section 6A(2), in clause 10, says “Subsection (1) does not apply to a specified contractor who is providing a service to more than 1 principal at the same time …”. End of story—that problem is dealt with right there in that proposal in David Parker’s Supplementary Order Paper 203.

Then we had this other argument about: “Oh, well, you know, it could take the person longer than they thought it was going to take them to do the job, so you’re going to have to pay them more because they’re going to do more hours, or the person might be old and they might not get around as quickly as a young person and so, you know, it would be terrible to have to pay them more.” Well, let us have a look at new section 11AC, in clause 13, entitled “Specified contractor may not recover minimum remuneration for time that exceeds agreed reasonable time to provide service”.

So it is pretty simple. When you enter into the contract you agree how long it should take to do the job, you agree on a rate that would make that job pay the minimum wage, and if the person takes longer than the agreed reasonable time, that is fine—new section 11AC says they cannot recover any more money because they went over the agreed time. The only requirement is that the agreed time is reasonable and the rate of pay is reasonable.

Let us face the facts. National’s opposition to this legislation is purely ideological. It is not based on any practical concerns at all, because every single one of the things that its members have raised in this debate tonight is dealt with. They have not raised one single legitimate concern—or at least if they have raised a legitimate concern, David Parker has dealt with it. It is all here in the legislation, and it is all here in the Supplementary Order Papers. The fact is that National does not want workers to earn a reasonable wage. It wants some employers to be able to circumvent our employment law and pay people less than the minimum wage. That is why National is opposing this legislation. It does not want working people to get a fair share of the improvements in productivity. It wants only its supporters—the owners of capital—to get all of that share, and it wants people to work harder and harder and harder for less and less pay.

That is why people cannot afford to live in houses under the National Government—because they do not earn enough to pay the prices that the National Government allows our housing market to get to. That is what is going on in this country, and that is why Chris Hipkins was absolutely right when he said that if you ignore these problems for too long, if you push people down, then you get Brexit, you get Trump, you get all of those things that we are seeing around the world, and that is exactly where National is leading us.

National members cannot argue this one on the facts. They cannot argue this one on the detail of the bill. They have come down here and demonstrated that they have not been paying attention and they have not been earning their money, reading the bill, and properly considering the amendments proposed by David Parker. They are opposing this purely on ideological grounds, because they want working people to earn the barest minimum, if not less, so that the people they stand for—the few at the top; the speculators—can do well out of a growing economy and everybody else can get stuffed. That is why National is opposing this bill.

DAVID CLENDON (Green): I am pleased to take a short call to speak in support of this excellent bill. Before I deal with some of the detail of the provisions of the bill, I would just like to make two observations about the Government’s objection to it. It seems to me the first point its members are insisting on is that this bill is unnecessary—that the provisions within the bill are already covered off by existing legislation. That presupposes the drafter of the bill, Mr Parker, is given to flights of fancy and has an overactive imagination. None of these characteristics are evident in my experience of Mr Parker. I think it cannot be denied by anyone who is actually observing the New Zealand workplace that so-called contractors are often at a distinct disadvantage.

The second concern we have heard from our friends in National on the Government benches is about the intense complexity of this bill. It runs to some 14 clauses—scarcely six pages of text. I recall when Simon Power was Minister of Commerce. He was putting through a lot of legislation to reregulate the finance industry. They were complex bills, and I say this having sat on the Commerce Committee at the time. They were extraordinarily complex. It, in a sense, bothers me and concerns me that the combined intellectual horsepower of these fine folk we see this evening considers this to be a complex bill. It is quite extraordinary. The bill is extraordinarily straightforward, in fact.

I can say I speak with a level of experience. I have been an employer and an employee, and, indeed, I have also worked as a contractor—on a very fair rate, I might add. But the problem is that often people working as contractors are working at a distinct disadvantage. There is a significant power imbalance between those seeking to earn their way in the world and those who are in a position to employ them as contractors to contract to them. This very straightforward, easily understood bill I think seeks to even out that field, to even up the situation a little, and to make it a fairer situation.

New section 4B, inserted by clause 7 of the bill, is fairly straightforward, I would have thought. Matters must be taken into account in establishing a rate: how long the job will take and how long is a reasonable amount of time for a person to take to provide the service. New section 8B, inserted by clause 11, requires that information about remuneration must be kept. It requires a person paying someone for services to keep good records, and it goes on to say that those records must be available to a labour inspector. So far I am not intellectually challenged by any of this, I must say.

Hon Members: Ha, ha!

DAVID CLENDON: I make no immodest claims to superior intellect, but I am finding this quite straightforward to comprehend. It goes on to say that in the event that it is found by an inspector or someone else that a person has not been rewarded sufficiently and reasonably and fairly, the person paying the amount may be taken to task and obliged to pay compensation, in effect—to top up the payment that person has received to meet a reasonable minimum standard. None of that challenges me. None of it do I find unreasonable, unfair, or difficult to incorporate into existing law. It may well be, and Mr Parker has very modestly conceded, that this bill may be far from perfect. This is the purpose of select committees: to make bills better and bring them back into the House in a form that we can then integrate into the existing statutes. Nothing in this do I find difficult; nothing in this I find would disrupt the existing employment situation in New Zealand in any negative way.

I must refer to some of the majority view of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, which identified the printing and distribution sector as potentially almost a victim of this bill. It highlights the fact that the digital age has made things slightly difficult for the print industry. That is a given. Disruptive technologies come along and do create challenges for older forms of technology, and this form, the digital form, has made print a difficult thing. It goes on to say that—I am running out of time, so very briefly, it implies that if we pay these people too much, the entire print industry could collapse. If we give a few more dollars to people stuffing letterboxes with leaflets, with local papers and the like, the entire print industry could be brought to its knees. Somehow I doubt that. I do not see that as being a credible proposition.

SUE MORONEY (Labour): We have had some very interesting contributions on this, some of which have put some light on this very simple bill, which is, in fact, so simple I think it lasts for about three pages—too much for the National members to get their brains around. They find that too complicated. About three pages’ worth of regulation that simply aims to ensure that people who would consider themselves as being self-employed or contractors are, at the very least, able to earn the minimum wage of $15.25—too complicated for the National members to get their tiny little brains around.

Well, I want to ensure that people listening to this debate know that the party opposite is very deliberate in why it is voting against this very good bill. It is deliberate, and I think Parmjeet Parmar, when she gave her contribution, gave it away, actually. She said—

Carmel Sepuloni: What contribution?

SUE MORONEY: Well, the contribution was varied, but the part that I want to concentrate on is when she said that the Masala restaurant case, which a previous member had referred to, would not even be covered by this bill, anyway, because those people were employees. So let us just think about that for a minute. In fact, what she is telling the Committee is that this bill would actually mean that it would stop that employer from using another mechanism to not even get into court, because the only reason that case even got before the court was that the workers were not being engaged as contractors. Had they been engaged as contractors, the labour inspectors could never have even prosecuted, and that is the point about this bill. It will give labour inspectors the right to actually investigate and prosecute those dodgy employers whom Parmjeet Parmar is instructing to use the contracting provision to get around the minimum wage provisions—it would actually prevent that case from even getting to court.

So the party opposite is arguing that it wants to vote this bill down so that it can ensure that employers like the Masala restaurant can get away with what they are doing and not be brought before the court, because all they simply have to do is require those vulnerable people whom they were employing to not take up an employment relationship but just engage them as contractors, and it will all be sweet. They will be able to continue to exploit those people, and I think that it is a disgrace that National thinks that that is OK.

We have already heard that there has been premature speculation, I think I will call it, from Business New Zealand about the fact that this bill—it has announced to the nation that it has been voted down. Well, we have yet to take a vote, actually, and I hope that whoever put that press statement out—I know that they will be earning more than the minimum wage. They probably do not deserve to, quite frankly, if they are going to make pronouncements about matters that have not even taken place yet. But I genuinely hope that Business New Zealand, through its incompetency, has not only prematurely speculated but has got this, in fact, quite wrong, because I hope that all the parties that have supported this to date actually keep their nerve—hold their nerve—in the face of those who want to exploit people who work hard in this country. I hope that every party holds its nerve against those employers who actually do other good employers a disservice.

The thing I want to say to Business New Zealand is this: the majority of the members whom it represents will not be using this provision and this loophole. They are the employers who actually play by the rules, do the right thing, and pay people a decent wage for the work that they perform for them. They do not want to have to compete against the dodgy employers who use this loophole to exploit their staff, because that is the race to the bottom and most employers in New Zealand do not want to engage in that. They do not support what the National Government is doing. They do not support the idea that their competitors, because they have no ethics and no morals, are able to use this loophole to actually pay people less.

ALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa): I would just like to reflect on the contribution from the last speaker, Sue Moroney, regarding Masala restaurant and its $2 an hour issue. That was an employer-employee relationship, and that was an abusive employer, and that employer should be punished. There is no one disagreeing with that. There is no one disagreeing with that. If that same employer had these guys on a contract, that would make no difference. The employer would still have an employer-employee relationship with those people, and they would still be breaking the law. So we all agree that these—to quote Mr Parker—“toe-rags” are the guys who we want to make sure do not operate. We all agree on that, but this is not the solution to that problem. The solution is to give labour inspectors more resource, which is what the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety has given in the last Budget, to make sure that those employer-employee relationships that are out there that are covered, or disguised, if you like, by a contract, are not a contract at all. So let us be clear: there are employer-employee relationships that are disguised as contracts, and that is unacceptable. This is not the way to solve that problem; in fact, this does confuse things.

So let us look at Supplementary Order Papers 203 and 204. I was looking at the original list, and then we found that the pamphlet guys, the guys who are the most vulnerable—these are the guys who sort of kicked this whole thing off, the guys who took a long time to deliver pamphlets because they wanted a social outing. At the end of the day, if you added up the hours that they took delivering those pamphlets, they were certainly getting paid less than the minimum wage. They were certainly getting less than the minimum wage, but they were happy with it because they used it as a social occasion, and they were slow—they were slow. A young fella on a bike would earn more than the minimum wage delivering the same pamphlets. The guy who wanted pamphlets delivered, he did not give a toss who delivered those pamphlets—he did not care who delivered those pamphlets. He was concerned only about those pamphlets being delivered on time and at the right price.

It just seems bizarre to me that those people who kicked this bill off are excluded—are excluded—from the protection that this bill is designed to give. The most vulnerable, according to some, are excluded—they are not protected—all because of Mr Tabuteau’s contribution earlier. That was New Zealand First’s condition of support for this bill. Disgraceful—disgraceful—allowing the most vulnerable to be paid less than the minimum wage for your political gain. You have got Mr Parker, who has all the right intentions, confused. Unfortunately for Mr Parker, that group of people is not protected in the bill proposed by Mr Parker. That is a disgrace.

The other thing that was interesting was Mr Lees-Galloway quite rightly pointing out that if a time was agreed to and an hourly rate was agreed to then that was, essentially, a contract. That is what I would call that: a contract. He would call it some sort of quasi-contract employment, based on the time. If the person went over time, there was no recourse for that person to claim extra. So I do not see any improvement in the bill, because this is just what a contract is. It is a fixed price for a job to be done.

Iain Lees-Galloway: You’ve got to agree a rate that meets the minimum wage.

ALASTAIR SCOTT: It does not matter what rate you agree. It could be $50 an hour, but if you limit the time, then the total amount, “x” times “y” equals “z”—it does not matter whether “y” and “z” are around the other way, it still equals “z”, does it not? You are just playing with numbers. Whether it is a high hourly rate and a short time or a low hourly rate and a high period of time, the total is the same. That is of all concern. I am pleased to see that Mr Lees-Galloway appreciates the certainty that a contract gives a builder, or a customer, if you like.

The other exclusion, the other group of people that is excluded now under these Supplementary Order Papers, is those who are employed from multiple sources, and the courier driver was used as an example. So here we are—that is the third line down, “courier services”.

JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): I would like to congratulate the Hon David Parker on bringing this bill to the House and seeing it through the select committee process, because, fundamentally, this bill is about fairness. It is about creating a fairer New Zealand, and that is what we are here for. I know that most New Zealanders want to live in a country where if someone goes out and does a full day’s work, they have enough to live in a warm, safe, and secure home and to put food on the table so that their kids do not have to go to school hungry. That is fair.

There are two problems here, and this bill solves one of them. The problem in New Zealand, firstly, is that the minimum wage is not even high enough now for all New Zealanders who are working a full day’s work to be able to afford those things that we consider essentials, which everyone in our society should have access to. With the minimum wage at $15.25 an hour, people are taking home just over $514 a week after tax. Is that enough when you have got a couple of kids—maybe a single parent—with the way that house prices are going in Auckland? No, it is not enough. Too many people are struggling, working hard to make ends meet, and they cannot. That is not the New Zealand that I think most of us want to live in. Even those members opposite—I know they do not want that either. I just think that they are a little out of touch with what is happening under the ideological approach taken by this Government.

So this bill solves one problem, which is that contracts are being used to get around our minimum wage rules and to pay people less. This bill just makes it hard for people to do that—impossible for people to do that—and that is a good thing. That is a good thing. It is one step closer to a fairer society where people earn enough from their work, and that is what we want.

I know how difficult it must be for the members opposite to confront the fact that their ideology is not supporting the outcomes of a fairer New Zealand, because they probably really believe it. Coming from the United States, I can tell you that that ideology of always more competition, always cutting wages, not having a higher minimum wage—it does not work. It just leads to a grossly unequal society where there are some people who are incredibly wealthy and are benefiting from this approach, but many people—many, far too many—are struggling, are working 60- to 80-hour weeks, are working multiple jobs, and do not have enough to pay for the basics. They do not have enough for healthcare, and what is happening in that society is that it is coming apart. We can see that with the rise in the popularity of Donald Trump.

That is the natural outcome of policies that are justified on the basis that they are good for employers and therefore good for jobs and therefore good for growth and therefore good for society. But the reality is—all the evidence shows—that that is not how it works, and so we have to protect workers. We have to make sure that they are getting paid enough. There is not any real evidence that higher minimum wages lead to higher unemployment. There is no evidence.

Chris Bishop: There is. There’s a bucket load of it.

JULIE ANNE GENTER: There is no evidence of that. I know it is really hard for those people brought up in the religion of the National Party to confront that reality, but go look at the evidence. Go look at the evidence, because the countries that are doing the best right now are the ones that have high protection for workers, they have higher wages, they have good social services—

Hon Member: Scandinavia, for a kick-off.

JULIE ANNE GENTER: Yes, Scandinavia—take a look at Scandinavia. But New Zealand is a small country, and it is a country that prides itself on fairness, looking after our natural environment, working hard, and sharing the benefits of that hard work. I know that that is the New Zealand that we can create together, but in order to do that, we are obviously going to have to change the Government, because this lot does not understand how it is that we will create a New Zealand where everyone has the same opportunities.

The Government is fundamentally committed to its constituency, which is a group of very privileged people who are out of touch with the reality of families who are struggling. So I am very proud to be voting in favour of this bill tonight, and, with my party, I know that we are all strongly supportive of the efforts of the Hon David Parker and the work that went into this bill in the select committee.

DENISE ROCHE (Green): I am pleased to take a call for the Greens on this bill, and I want to thank the Hon David Parker, like others have done, for bringing it to the Committee. A piece of legislation like this is about resolving a problem, and the problem has been identified really, really clearly and really well throughout the bill. It has been discussed on this side of the House, but completely ignored on that side of the House.

The problem is that some employers use contracting arrangements to force wages down to ensure that they get services provided to them at cheaper and cheaper prices with no consideration at all for the people who are providing those services. According to 2013 statistics, self-employed workers with no employees received an average of $26,700 per year from their labour as contractors. Compare that with waged workers, who received in the same year $36,700—so about a third more.

What this Government is saying by its opposition to this bill is that it believes that people who work should not receive a fair day’s remuneration in whatever way they provide that work, and it also believes that some people should pay the cost of their labour—so they should pay for their equipment, they should pay for their tax, they should pay the ACC, and they may even have to pay for their own health and safety. If it is a true contractor, that is not a problem, but what we have seen more and more in more and more areas, like home care, is that fact that people are being taken on as contractors as a way for some employers—and they are employers—to avoid the employer-employee relationship.

We have a hugely deregulated industrial relations system as it stands. This piece—this small piece that Mr Parker is offering with this legislation—is an attempt to try to fix a problem, and it is a grave problem. There have been examples already from across this side of the House about the grave exploitation that occurs in our communities, and I do not know whether members from that side of the House actually are in touch with any of their constituents who have had problems. I am a list MP and I get people talking to me about how they are being ripped off.

We hear about the labour hire workers—vulnerable workers who are coming on working visas—who are actually migrants who are desperate to be employed. They are taken on as contractors by labour hire companies and exploited to the hilt, and they have very little protection. They do not have the protection of a trade union and they have very little protection in legislation, and this is one way of trying to address that. I agree with my Green Party colleague Julie Anne Genter that, yes, we were a country that used to say that everybody should have a fair go. We used to believe in a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, and we could be that country again. But in order to do that, we need to stem the tide of exploitation that this Government has allowed to happen with its deregulated environment for industrial relations, and we have seen cut after cut after cut to the right of workers to be able to negotiate decent wages and conditions.

This is not about real contractors screwing the system. That is not what it is about. This is about offering some minimum protection through paying the minimum wage to some specified people, when they have a principal contract. This is not about cowboy contractors screwing their clients. That is not what this is about. We would not be supporting it if it was. This is actually about fixing a problem. That problem—thank you.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): It is a pleasure to be talking on this bill. It has been fascinating listening to the debate. I have got to say at the outset that I think Mr Parker has been very genuine in bringing this bill to the House, and I think no one in this House would disagree with the general intent that any worker in New Zealand should be entitled to fair remuneration and pay. That cuts across everything, and everyone in this House—including National members, who stood behind it—believes in that same principle. However, how this bill has been framed I think has some issues, and I think one of the things—and it has been a very confusing debate, partly because we have had a number of members talk tonight who have not been party to the ongoing discussions around the nature of this bill. I have heard some very confusing arguments, particularly in relation to what it means to employees. Actually, what those members mean, in terms of contractors and, vice versa, what it means for contractors when, in fact, they are employees, and that is a very important part of this debate, and I think—that lack of clarity around what we are dealing with.

So, broadly, we have three categories: we have employees; we have contractors, who are basically in full-time employment contracts; and we have the temporary or semi-permanent contractors working on a part-time basis. To sit here and hear that National is not worried about all of this and that we are uncaring and all that sort of stuff is simply codswallop. It is codswallop, because from this Parliament and this Government we have passed a number of changes to the employment and contracting relationships, but the most recent one, of course, is that we have passed the bill around stopping zero-hour contracts. We do want to strengthen the relationship, and to make sure that we do have a fairer system between employers and employees and contractors, and, also, some of the things we have done around the employment rights are very important.

I absolutely dispute—dispute—the allegation that we do not worry about the minimum wage, because since this Government has been in power, since 2008, I hasten to add that without exception every year we have pushed up the minimum wage by 50c, up to $15.25. [Interruption] And now I hear a member over there saying: “Whoop-de-doo!”. Well, that is the issue, because, one, it is about making sure that employees and contractors get fair reward but, also, it is about making sure that employers are still prepared to offer the jobs, and that balance is the critical part of what we are talking about tonight.

So where to settle on the issue about vulnerable employees? I think there is a point about it, and that is what we have been talking about tonight. But what I find staggering is that since the time we started discussing this in our Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, a lot of the discussions were around people delivering mail and newspapers and all that sort of stuff. Well, of course, I found out tonight that that has been deleted. And then we have got new provisions in the existing ones that I just ask you to reflect on. Why are we worrying about truck drivers and services delivering goods, and why are we worrying about market research and telemarketing? That is one of those 12 that are in schedule 2. I just put it to you that we have come up with a list, and I am not sure about the logic around some of that list. But I cannot understand why—we have actually dealt with probably the most potentially vulnerable workers, who are the ones out delivering the pamphlets. The question is this—and this is what we talked about in the select committee. Those people—and they did come to our select committee, the newspaper people. The people who often deliver those are the younger people—and I now know that the bill excludes under-16-year-olds, but it also does not deal with the issue about older people, and I heard my colleague talk earlier about the older person who cannot walk as fast as the younger person. And we also heard about the people with disabilities—again, we have not mentioned that tonight—and part of this is about creating opportunities for jobs for them.

What this bill does—it has two things that really cut across the gybe, and one is how the State is basically interceding between two parties, namely contractors and employers. I heard about the argument about—

KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): I move, That the question be now put.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am not quite ready to do it yet.

Hon Member: Well, we are.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order!

JAN LOGIE (Green): I was not necessarily going to speak in this stage of this bill, but after hearing Andrew Bayly, the last speaker, I feel compelled to respond, because what I heard that speaker say was that older New Zealanders and people with disabilities do not deserve the minimum wage. I have got to say that that is the absolute reason for this legislation. It is that there are people in our society who think like that and that we actually need to protect people from them. There are people who will take advantage, who hold discriminatory views that belong in the 1950s, and who take advantage of people, and we need to protect those people from them. This piece of legislation—I thank the Hon David Parker for bringing it to the House. It is about lifting this base standard in our society to be a little bit fairer.

I have listened to a lot of the debate tonight, and I would like to frame the rest of my contribution just to speak a little bit more specifically about how this affects women. Casualisation of work and insecurity of work, which is a significant part of the contracting environment for many, disproportionately affects women. The research that was done by the Council of Trade Unions in 2013 showed that temporary workers are more likely to be female than permanent workers are, and women make up 58 percent of temporary—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am reluctantly interrupting the member, but as I ruled on an earlier bill this afternoon, we are in the Committee stage. All we are debating now is whether the details in the clauses in the bill reflect the agreement of the House to proceed at the second reading. The member is giving a very interesting second reading debate, but it is not relevant.

JAN LOGIE: Thank you for that guidance. I was linking to this bill in terms of the employment contract environment that contractors sit within and how that impacts on women, and the benefit of this bill for women who are in contracting environments in this country. We recognise that through the process, to try to get the bill passed, there have been limitations made that have excluded some workers, which women would have benefited from. This is part of the process of trying to make a difference when we have this Government in power. That is a shame, but it is still worth doing, and women would still benefit from us passing this legislation.

This Government has talked specifically—and I know that for contractors this is particularly relevant—about work being the answer to poverty in this country, particularly when we talk about child poverty; work is the answer. Contracting is a significant part of our work environment these days. If we want our children to be able to achieve at school, to be healthy, to be safe, actually we need to ensure that their parents who are in sole-parent - headed households—mostly women—actually get a fair deal. This legislation is one small step towards helping us do that. It is entirely inconsistent for this Government to say that work is the answer, and then not to put the protections in place to ensure that people get the benefit of that work, and to allow employers, who hold the attitude expressed by the previous speaker, to rip off those workers of what they deserve. This Committee should not give that Government any more space in expressing those views. I hope the Government will reflect on its values and come to support this bill.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I call Jonathan Young—slightly reluctantly, given his earlier comments.

JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): Thank you for your kindness. I would just like to address the comments that the previous speaker, Jan Logie, made. I believe there may have been a misunderstanding—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to interrupt the member before he starts. I am going to repeat the warning that I gave to the previous speaker slightly into her speech. I let her run almost certainly out of order because she was replying to some things that were earlier out of order. That has now stopped. The member will come back to the bill.

JONATHAN YOUNG: I am, Mr Chair. I was going to refer to schedule 2—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Good, good—that is good.

JONATHAN YOUNG: —and I did refer to it in my last contribution. The issue that I believe has occurred in terms of the exclusion from schedule 2 of newspaper and pamphlet delivery services to letterboxes, which Andrew Bayly, the member speaking prior to the previous speaker, spoke about, came through an agreement, I understand, between Opposition parties. The reason for that is when it comes to pamphlet delivery services, there is a broad range of people involved. Some of them are retired people who do this either to provide supplementary income or for a lifestyle choice because they enjoy getting out and getting the exercise. There is a multitude of reasons, which they presented to our committee.

The reason why the exclusion occurred is simply that when a principal makes a decision around getting a quantity of pamphlets or newspapers delivered, they work on the quantum of quantity, time, and expense, and there are some people who can do that far more quickly and far more efficiently. They tend to be younger and more mobile. That creates—I would not say discrimination, but it creates an exclusion, and—

Sue Moroney: They set a rate. They just have a discussion about it.

JONATHAN YOUNG: Yes, except that the previous speaker felt that there was ageism being expressed from this side, but that is not the case at all, so I am just defending that point.

Coming back to the amendment to clause 11 on Supplementary Order Paper 203, which inserts proposed new section 7A, I would invite the sponsoring member to bring some clarity particularly to section 7A(6), which says that the section requiring 6 years of record-keeping “does not apply if—”, and there are a number of conditions there. But subsection (6)(d) states: “the principal reasonably believes that the agreed rate of remuneration payable to the specified contractor is sufficient to remunerate the specified contractor at a rate that is higher than the prescribed minimum rate of remuneration under section 4C.” What I would like the sponsor of the bill to perhaps expand is the rationale behind this, because what I see in this particular point is that a principal is somebody who is obviously looking for the contractor to do the work. They are offering the work, and if they simply believe that what they are paying is going to be more than the minimum wage, then they have an exclusion from keeping a time record.

My concern about that is that it is not the honest principals out there but the unscrupulous ones, who could look at this passage and say: “There’s an out for me.” I would appreciate it if the sponsor of the bill could perhaps expand on that point, to bring some more clarity.

KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): I move, That the question be now put.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Looking at the number of calls we have had—the member in the chair has had six, and Mr Young has had four—I think there has been ample opportunity for people to express their views.

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

Ayes 58

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

Noes 63

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

Motion not agreed to.

ALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa): I would like to go through the list in schedule 2, which has been commented on earlier. Perhaps Mr Parker could address how that list was derived, and why some other vulnerable groups are not on the list. In fact, he has already explained why the newspaper and pamphlet delivery group, which was on the list, has now been excluded, but I would also like to point out, and ask about, the situation regarding multiple sources of income.

Where you have multiple sources of income from doing one of these jobs, you are excluded from this bill. So we could have a situation where we have got a sparky, for example, who has multiple sources of income—like a courier driver—and that would exclude them from the bill. We could have a cleaning services contractor with multiple sources of income who is excluded from the protection that this bill aims to provide. Courier services are mentioned. Food-catering services—one could imagine a cleaner going from one restaurant to another and being treated by both restaurants as a contractor, and maybe even being abused by those unscrupulous employers, which is what they are, after all. Those “dishos” would not be protected because they have got multiple sources of income.

Chris Bishop: What’s a “disho”?

ALASTAIR SCOTT: Well, a “disho” is a guy who does the dishes, of course.

Chris Bishop: Oh, righty-o. I thought you said “Bisho”.

ALASTAIR SCOTT: No, not “Bisho”—“disho”. Mr Bayly asked the question earlier about telemarketing services and market research services. Why are they on the list and why do they need such protection?

I do not understand about these multiple sources. We could have a person doing the same job from one source and we could have a second person doing the same job but from multiple sources, and the multiple-source person would be excluded from the protection that this bill is designed to give. So I would like Mr Parker to explain that.

We get to a situation where we have excluded so many people who are apparently vulnerable that this bill becomes redundant and those multiple-employed contractors are left to the protection of employment law, which is what we should be looking to to ensure that poor employers—they are not contractors; they are employers disguised as contractors—are targeted. This bill does not do what it is designed to do. That is what I would say, and I think there is a better way of doing it.

I think that the labour inspectors had more resource given to them in the last Budget. That is, in my view, the appropriate place to give the resource, and it is for those guys to enforce the law that already exists around employer-employee relationships and to dig into situations where employer-employee relationships are disguised inappropriately as contracts. They should be—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member will resume his seat. There are two points that I want to make to the member. The first is that about the first 3 minutes of his speech—I think he even admitted it by saying that Mr Bayly had said it all before—was repetition, so if I could warn the member for that. The second thing is that the member cannot focus with anything other than a passing reference on other approaches to the problem. This bill has been accepted at second reading, and we are talking about the detail that is in here now, not alternative approaches.

ALASTAIR SCOTT: Thank you, Mr Chair. The detail of this bill is so—“confused” has been used before. It is ambiguous and confusing—I am going to use the word “confusing”. It confuses the relationship between employer and employee with that of contractor and contractee, and that is why we cannot support this bill.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I will quickly respond to the last two points made, which is, I am afraid, repeating what I have said earlier, because these points have already—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am actually going to sit the member down. I am not going to allow him to respond to irrelevancies.

CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): I move, That the question be now put.

Motion agreed to.

A party vote was called for on the question, That clause 1 be agreed to.

Ayes 60

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

Noes 61

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

Clause 1 not agreed to.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I will report this bill to the House, informing it that the Committee, in rejecting clause 1, has rejected the bill.

House resumed.

The Chairperson reported that the Committee had rejected all the provisions of the bill.

Report adopted.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: The House, having adopted the Committee’s report that it has rejected the bill, does not set down the bill for third reading, despite Standing Order 310.

Bills

Customs and Excise (Prohibition of Imports Made by Slave Labour) Amendment Bill

First Reading

Debate resumed from 10 August.

MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): It is a pleasure to finish my call on the Customs and Excise (Prohibition of Imports Made by Slave Labour) Amendment Bill. I just want to acknowledge the sponsor of the bill again, Mr Henare—someone whom I personally have a lot of respect for.

Hon Member: What about his rugby ability?

MARK MITCHELL: That is outstanding. It goes without saying. I just want to say that the spirit of the bill is right. I think we would all agree in this House that we want to see human trafficking and slavery rubbed out right throughout the world. The problem with this bill is that it is just too wide in its interpretation. We live in a world now that has got a sophisticated, complicated global supply chain, and the real challenge would be for us to identify and say what products may have been produced in countries where slave labour is used or where slave labour has contributed to the production of an item.

Just a very quick example of that would be sugar. Sugar—if it was an at-risk product—is obviously produced in many countries around the world. We do not know whether or not slave labour has been used to produce it in some of those countries. Maybe there is a strong chance that it has been. But the fact of the matter is that if we in New Zealand try to ban products being sold and ban people from having access to those products that have sugar in them, you can see the challenge that we would be presented with in terms of how we would ban those products. So although I think the spirit of the bill is right—I commend the spirit of the bill—in a practical sense this bill cannot be used in any real, meaningful way to try to combat slave labour or identify products that have actually been produced or manufactured with the use of slave labour. Thank you very much.

RINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): I am pleased to speak in support of this bill, the Customs and Excise (Prohibition of Imports Made by Slave Labour) Amendment Bill, sponsored by my good colleague Peeni Henare, and can I congratulate him on bringing this bill to the House.

This is a very worthy bill, which cuts to the heart of a great evil that prevails in this world, unfortunately, in this day and age, and that is slavery. It seeks to prohibit the importation of goods produced by slavery. As we know, there are those unscrupulous operators who profiteer from slave labour, and, indeed, we do import goods that are produced by slave labour.

It is almost ironic that we have just had the Government reject a worthy bill to guarantee a minimum wage for contractors—that has been rejected. But I am not surprised, because, once again, the Government has shown its complete ineptitude at navigating its moral compass on behalf of New Zealand. Here we are again: what have we heard from the Government in terms of this bill so far? I have reviewed Mr Mitchell’s speech that he has just given and all we hear are excuses, excuses, excuses. All we hear is that “Oh yes, slavery is abhorrent but—but—it’s too difficult to define, it’s too broad, and the supply chains are too complex. How will we be able to differentiate between what is produced by slave labour and what is not?”. We get the same excuses coming forward from the Government, so it really just rings hollow.

Their rhetoric rings hollow, because what we know is that this is all about their ideology and the principles that they stand for. If this bill had some sort of free-trade agreement dimension to it, well, the members opposite would be doing cartwheels and doing whatever they could to make sure that it gets over the line. But a worthy bill that is all about taking a stand as New Zealanders, where we take a stand and we show leadership from this Parliament against the evils of slavery—what does the Government do? It says: “Oh, it’s too hard, too complex. Oh no, we can’t do it. It’s a worthy cause, slavery is not OK—but no, sorry, we can’t go there.” Well, that is not good enough—that is not good enough.

I was hoping that this bill would be an Amazing Grace moment for this House. I was hoping that there would be some enlightenment that would elucidate the Government so that they would—my colleague Peeni Henare, he is a modern day William Wilberforce. He is leading the charge against the abolition of slavery, the abolition of the perpetuation of slavery in these modern times, through us banning the import of these goods. I was hoping that this would be an Amazing Grace moment for this House, but, sadly, they have not taken up the call from my colleague here. Alas, they have not. That is very sad because we should be taking a stand. This is a worthy piece of legislation and we do need to take it seriously. That is exactly why this bill needs to go to a select committee.

The USA has implemented legislation to this effect. Belgium has passed legislation to this effect. So if it is good enough for those major countries to implement such legislation, then we should be investigating it. We should be looking at their examples as to what they are doing. So, sadly, yes, I was hoping that this would be the Amazing Grace moment where this House would come together and we would take a stand for our country and think of all of those millions of folks around the world who are victims of slavery and take a stand against that, but, alas, it is very disappointing that this Government is opposing this bill. But I do support this bill and I support my colleague Peeni Henare. I congratulate him on bringing this bill to the House. Kia ora tātou.

Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): It is a pleasure to speak to this bill. I would first like to thank the member Peeni Henare for conceiving and working up this bill, which does address an important issue. Let me address, though, why this is challenging. Firstly, there is the inability to identify slave labour components. In a complex multi-source logistics and manufacturing global supply chain how do you identify what was done in a slave labour environment and what was done in a standard environment? Secondly, there are the real risks of being caught up in trade restrictions and being challenged by the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Thirdly, the case is made—and I heard it just a moment ago—that Belgium and the USA have such legislation. Well, the USA has actually always had slave labour legislation since the Tariff Act of 1930, but only recently has it closed the loophole that still allowed products to be imported if they otherwise could not meet consumer demand—the consumer test of 1930. Even so, after many years of legislation with little impact it too struggled to identify the sources of slave labour. I think we should also reflect on the fact that the USA is currently having that legislation challenged in the courts as well.

Belgium has also been mentioned. Since 2003 Belgium has had a social label for products and services that meet the ILO covenants, which include rejection of child labour and forced labour. The Belgian social label requires chain management of the entire production chain, down to the raw materials phase. For example, for a T-shirt, it is not just the sewing workshops but also textile factories and cotton fields. Because this is too expensive and complex, the Belgian production chain has been looked at in what is called a delimited fashion. That assesses a social analysis of the whole production chain using volume, weight, costs, and risk. This is a work in progress for Belgium as well. The social label in Belgium is guaranteed by the Government. It is underwritten by Belgian law for socially responsible production, and it is awarded by a committee called the Committee for Socially Responsible Production. A recent report on the Belgian experience shows that few businesses take it up, consumers do not understand the value of the label, and it does not significantly affect consumer purchase choices.

I think there are other tools that we can bring to this problem. Firstly, I think we can support anti-slavery measures through the WTO and the 1998 International Labour Organization Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. Secondly, we require ILO provisions in all our free-trade agreements. Thirdly, expanding the issue of slavery beyond trade to include slavery in all forms via the United Nations. I want to reinforce that we are absolutely supportive of the intention and principles of anti-slavery, and would welcome engaging with the member on steps forward that learn from the approaches that other countries are taking, and which help us fine tune and develop new tools that we might use. I commend this contribution to the House.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Marama Fox.

Marama Davidson: Marama Davidson.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Davidson. I really apologise.

MARAMA DAVIDSON (Green): Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, whose name is Trevor Mallard. Kia ora. I want to stand and strongly support my wonderful Tāmaki-makau-rau colleague Peeni Henare and this Customs and Excise (Prohibition of Imports Made by Slave Labour) Amendment Bill, which basically seeks to prohibit the importation of products—stop getting them in here—that have been made in whole or in part by slave labour.

I want to, actually, pick up on my colleague Rino Tirikatene’s speech—where on earth are my words—on the concept of New Zealand as leaders of the global world. Because, absolutely, the products and the type of work that we are trying to prohibit definitely impacts on indigenous people around the world. So New Zealand can and should—of all the nations, we are well placed to stand up and say “We do not accept what part we play in oppressing workers around the world. We do not accept that as a country.”, and we are well placed to do that because we do not need to accept those products that are oppressing entire communities, entire nations around the world, including indigenous peoples and communities, and including poorer communities. As an indigenous rights spokesperson for the Green Party I am pleased to stand up and support the bill, including on that notion.

I want to go back to some of what my colleague on the National benches Dr Shane Reti was just saying around the difficulties of the law. What is important—what is important? This is human rights leadership legislation. We have to keep taking these steps to uphold New Zealand as a country that upholds human rights. This is what is important about this bill. The very notion of putting this legislation in place makes several statements that are incredibly important. It makes the statement that we will not stand for people being oppressed, in terrible working conditions, being paid little or nothing, and being kept in really oppressive conditions to produce these products. We will not stand for that.

But by doing that, by passing this bill, it is actually about the community discussion that will follow. It is about the discussion that did follow when the Belgian and US legislation, similar to this bill, was put in place—that is actually what is also important. So we can argue the definitions of slavery and we can argue the details of the bill—and we should—but the principle and the leadership, which will then be followed by the community discussion on what we uphold as the direction for our world to go in, is what is important. That community leadership is what I wanted to also touch on.

As well as being a spokesperson for indigenous peoples around the world and for the changing of power relationships and upholding that the world that keeps a few people really comfortable and a whole lot more—a whole lot more—literally breaking their backs to keep a few people really comfortable, is not a world that this nation Aotearoa New Zealand stands up for and supports, and that we want that to change. That is an important step for New Zealand to make, and it is also because we have prided ourselves as a country upholding human rights. We are proud of our membership in the United Nations as a human rights State—we have done all of these things. So this is an important bill and one that I am very happy to support.

The last point I want to pick up on—how much time have I got?

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Just under a minute.

MARAMA DAVIDSON: OK. It has been raised by the Government benches about the difficulty of tracing back to see whether products have been made by slave labour. In my research, there are ways and steps that we can take to actually do that. We can make proactive steps that are not always mandatory, and can help: things, for example, around social labelling systems. We can support the communities and the industries taking those steps, as well. So I just want to finish up by supporting indigenous and poorer working class communities, upholding our human rights reputation in this country, and getting through the practical challenges.

DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): I would just like to take a short call on the Customs and Excise (Prohibition of Imports Made by Slave Labour) Amendment Bill. I would like to acknowledge Peeni Henare, the member who brought the bill to the House. He is a good member of this House, and he has got a genuine intention to do well for this country, but this bill, unfortunately, does not achieve a purpose that he would be proud of in his legislative career. This is a bill that I think the previous speaker, Marama Davidson, summed up more eloquently in the sense that it is a statement of intent rather than a statement of fact about the ability to do anything that would be serious in that area and have the effect that the member bringing this bill to this Parliament would like to see.

A number of members have gone through the difficulty in the definitions and just how you define slave labour. We are in a very modern manufacturing world that has a lot of supply chains, and there are a lot of different products and definitions of what slave labour could be, so that could be an issue.

Fletcher Tabuteau: Did someone talk about supply chain?

DAVID BENNETT: Is there a problem from New Zealand First? Yes, be quiet in the cheap seats over there. The nature of the bill has got some major issues.

The previous speaker, Marama Davidson, tried to pronounce this bill as something wider than it actually is, and I think that member needs to look at what it is actually about. You know, in many cases you could say that there are some aspects of the system that Labour and the Greens support that do not insist on freedom of choice. The union movement, for example, has a major impact on the ability of individuals to do what they would like to do. They are coerced into acting in the interests of the majority, not in the interests of their individual requirements. You can actually take it to a very wide scale if you wanted to, and that could be a danger to the labour and green movements, which are so based on those things as part of their base of support.

When you look at slave labour, nobody wants to see slave labour in any form. I do not think there is any debate about that in this House. But it is not what the previous member said. She was saying that there are only a few people in the world who are gaining from billions of people who are in slave labour. That is not the case. You know, people may have different working conditions, they may have different income levels from us, but that is part of the growth of those countries. Not everybody starts at the same level. China, for example, which brings millions of people up to our standard of living every year, has increased its standard of pay over many years, and the vast bulk of the Chinese population is seeing huge gains through industrialisation, globalisation, and being part of the world economy.

It is easy for the labour and green movements to say that something is slave labour because it is not under the terms and conditions that they perceive somebody should be paid in New Zealand. That is the difficulty of this—there are so many transactions going on in the world, there are so many people who are gaining through the economic system of the world, and we should not be saying that there are major issues in that regard, because there are not. There are a lot of people who are actually transitioning from a subsistence lifestyle into a lifestyle very much like ours where they have that standard of living.

There are so many difficulties with this definition. We understand what the member is trying to do, and nobody is against sending that message, but this bill does not achieve that, and, unfortunately, it will not get the support of this House.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this bill and I do commend the member who has put this forward. I have to go back a couple of contributions from that side of the House to acknowledge Mr Reti and his considered debate in the House tonight. An analysis of actual detail—how refreshing from that side of the House—instead of being told how complicated it is, how broad it is, and something about supply chains: beautiful. You have picked that up really well.

Let us just look at some of the facts here. What I want to do is acknowledge Mr Reti’s contribution and take some of the wording from the Tariff Act 1930 from the US and its recent update. Let us see what the US is trying to do: “ ‘Forced labor’, as herein used, shall mean all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty for its non-performance and for which the worker does not offer himself [or herself] voluntarily.” What a definition. What a great place to start for the member who spoke prior, David Bennett, to come to the select committee and say, actually, what Mr Peeni Henare has in his legislation may not be on the money, but look at the precedent from around the world and the countries that have acknowledged that this is a problem. In fact, Mr Reti’s contribution was so good that it belied the fact that there are specific solutions and there are specific attempts. Yes, they are complicated, but that is not a reason—it is absolutely not a reason—to not support sensible legislation to combat slave labour.

New Zealand First, as you can tell, supports this legislation. New Zealand has been an advocate for labour rights for most of its history. In fact, it was just last week that we had the New Zealand Business and Human Rights Forum come to speak in Parliament and use the facilities. At that forum’s launch it was said: “New Zealand businesses are increasingly recognising that respecting human rights is not only the right thing to do – it’s also good for business.” This bill should be unanimously passed tonight because I do concede the point around definition and where we proceed to from here, but we need legislation to begin that battle and to encompass the efforts of the World Trade Organization trade agreements.

Actually, I will go through some of them. For example—and let us not confuse the issue here—New Zealand First completely opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement because it is a bad trade deal, but in it, at least, the US was trying to work towards “the highest-standard, most progressive [work standards] in history. It’s got strong, enforceable provisions for workers, preventing things like child labour. It’s got strong, enforceable provisions on the environment, helping us to do things…” to protect people. The United States is seeking an enforceable labour obligation that would require countries to uphold international labour standards in their laws and practices as reflected in the 1998 International Labour Organization declaration, and Mr Reti spoke to that.

We have a framework. We have something to begin the debate and this House—this Parliament—needs to bring it into legislation to make it meaningful, to make it binding on the House, so that we can not only look after workers in New Zealand but also protect businesses here and look after people from around the world. Thank you.

PAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): E Te Mana Whakawā Tuarua, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou katoa e ngā mema. I stand in opposition to this bill, but I want to congratulate the member, whom I have a great deal of respect for, Peeni Henare—

Carmel Sepuloni: Congratulate him on his luck.

PAUL FOSTER-BELL: —on having the bill drawn but also on having very noble intentions in bringing this measure to the House. I absolutely agree and concur with the intention of that respected colleague across the Chamber.

We agree on this side that slavery is absolutely abhorrent and that goods produced under slave conditions are morally unacceptable. However, we have before the House—and this is where I differ with “Professor Tabuteau” who is currently leading the Chamber—I differ with him in that—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): The member will withdraw.

PAUL FOSTER-BELL: I differ with the member who just resumed his seat—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): The member will now sit, and then he will stand, and now he will withdraw and apologise to the member.

PAUL FOSTER-BELL: I withdraw and apologise to the member. I differ entirely with the member who spoke previously, in that I think that a bill that has unenforceable measures should not be passed by this House tonight. Given this is a member’s bill, it is not beholden on Government members on this side to find a way to make the unworkable workable; it actually behoves the member who has introduced it to introduce legislation that is practical and enforceable.

This is a Government that does take slavery very, very seriously. I refer the House to the case of the Oyang 70, a Korean fishing vessel that tragically sank offshore in 2010 with the loss of six lives of Indonesian crew members. Those crewmembers were kept in conditions that were very comparable to that of slavery. They were working under very harsh conditions, they were subject to beatings, they had their passports taken off them, they were mistreated, and they were not properly remunerated for the work that they did. Everything about their conditions that they were kept in was equivalent to slavery. So I am proud of the fact that this Government has taken action in a practical and pragmatic way on that particular issue, and, as of April this year, fishing vessels that operate in New Zealand waters have to be flagged as New Zealand vessels, and, therefore, New Zealand labour laws and human rights provisions apply.

I think, in its intention, this bill is good, but we have heard some of the practical difficulties of enforcement. I would like to refer to another commodity. We have heard about sugar, which is something that our former trade Minister Hon Tim Groser used last time this bill was introduced—or the last time a bill of this nature was introduced to the House in 2009. There is another commodity—a precious commodity in the world—cocoa, which is produced under a wide range of conditions. We have the very excellent Wellington Chocolate Factory based here in the central business district of Wellington, which produces a highly ethical product. It carefully checks that its cocoa is not only organic, and it is not only fair trade, but it is also ethically produced by staff who are properly paid for the work that they do. It also ensures its sugar is fully organic, and when it imports it into the country it audits that all the way back. It even goes so far as to use a wind-powered sailing vessel to make sure that its product is completely ethical. The problem is that very fine product costs $15 a block for a quantity half the size of the Whittaker’s competitors from further up the country.

So what I am saying is that it is not physically possible to perform a scientific test on a product like cocoa—or sugar, or any number of other commodities—that proves how it was made and whether those conditions it was produced in were ethical. Customs would not be able to enforce this at the border. It would not be able to provide a test, and if you want to have a very good, ethical product that can be sold as an export overseas, and is a high quality product—which I enjoy myself—unfortunately, what that means is an audit trail going back that would end up incurring significantly increased costs on ordinary New Zealanders, perhaps those who can least afford to pay them. I urge caution with regard to that.

I think a better approach to take on this would be a diplomatic negotiations approach. We are represented in the International Labour Organization and we are represented at the World Trade Organization. We do have the moral high ground in this country. We can encourage and, in fact, put conditions into the agreements that we negotiate that enforce others to adopt humane labour legislation. I commend Peeni Henare for his intentions in this, but, unlike Mr Tirikatene, I do not think that this is the new Amazing Grace—we have not seen a second coming of William Wilberforce. It is a well-intentioned measure, but it is highly flawed, and I recommend that it should not pass.

DENISE ROCHE (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise to take the second call on the Customs and Excise (Prohibition of Imports Made by Slave Labour) Amendment Bill, and I want to thank the member Peeni Henare for bringing it to the House. Ahakoa he iti, he pounamu: it is small, but it is perfect. What I like about it—and I think this is the best use of that whakataukī, actually—is that it is really clear and really straightforward and really simple. The Greens are proud to be supporting this bill.

The tragedy of modern-day slavery and forced labour is that it still affects something like 21 million to 29 million people in the world, according to the International Labour Organization. We believe that everyone deserves fair work conditions and fair pay. What this bill does is it takes a clear moral stand against slavery and bonded labour. Whether we benefit from slavery directly or indirectly, we still need to take a strong stand on it.

A couple of months ago the Global Slavery Index was announced and Don Lord, who is the Executive Director of Hagar New Zealand—the human trafficking and slavery awareness organisation—said that slavery was increasing here in Aotearoa New Zealand, up from what they had estimated to be about 600 in previous years to about 800 this year. Although that on a global scale is very small, it is still something that we should be very worried about. Mr Lord also went on to say that “New Zealanders should also be thinking about the goods they purchased to ensure they came from ‘clean’ supply chains.” There are ways of doing it; it is called certification. We do it for fair-trade goods all the time. Mr Lord said that “It’s definitely something we as New Zealanders need to become more aware of, we need to … make conscious decisions.” That is what this bill is about. It is about triggering a whole way of ensuring, firstly, that consumers are able to see whether the products they are buying have come through a supply chain that relies on slave labour, and, secondly, that those products will be prohibited from being sold here.

I recognise that this bill is not perfect. There are some issues around the definition of bonded labour or slavery. There are probably some parts of it that will need to be ironed out during the select committee process. That is where we rely on our democratic process and our people. We trust in the people of Aotearoa New Zealand to submit on these bills, once we pass the first reading, so that we can make better informed decisions and also have the debates about what the best way is to implement this.

So this is a perfect bill. This is a bill that basically addresses a huge issue in our world, and we should be taking a moral stand about it. I get a bit distressed when I hear—it is just sort of like an ideological response—from the other side of the House, basically saying that this is unworkable. I do not believe that that is true. If we have the will, and if we trust in our democracy, then we will actually end with a bill that will do some marvellous good for consumers in New Zealand. Better still, it will make a difference for people who are bonded and who are slaves, because if we do not buy that stuff, then the demand for it starts to fall away. That is what we need to be doing. I do not want to be part of a supply chain, as a consumer, where the products are produced through slave labour. This is our way of being able to draw a line in the sand and say no, we will not allow those sorts of products to come into this country.

We are totally supporting this bill. We would encourage the members on this side of the House to support it also so that it can go to the select committee where it can be improved and debated and discussed and we can have our experts tell us how best to change it so that it is totally workable and we can end slavery in the world.

DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this bill. In reference to comments made by the member who just resumed her seat, Denise Roche, is it not curious that she said it was ideological to point out the practical difficulties in implementing this bill, and then went on to say that if only we had enough belief, then the bill could work? Some members might think that the latter was ideological and the former was practical, but in the world of the Green Party things can sometimes get a little bit messed and muddled.

I would like to join members in tributing the author and introducer of this particular bill, Mr Peeni Henare. Nothing that Mr Peeni Henare brings to this House could possibly be poorly intentioned. I will say something else for this bill: it is much, much better than the lost luggage bill, vastly better, and I commend—

Hon Members: Aw!

DAVID SEYMOUR: —oh, that is a bit unfair—I commend the member for bringing a bill that does have good intentions and does, at least in theory, seek to solve a serious problem.

We have heard a little bit about William Wilberforce and Amazing Grace, and I would like to join with Rino Tirikatene in commending that film to any members who have not seen it. It is a fabulous narrative of an important part of this nation’s cultural history and the efforts of a parliamentarian, William Wilberforce, in ending slavery. However, that is about where I part company with the bill, and it comes down to the practical difficulties of actually tracing the origins of the components in a particular product.

If we cannot talk about William Wilberforce, I would like to talk about another great thinker, Leonard Read, who is the author of an essay that I would commend to all members of the Committee. The essay is called “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read”, and it explains the difficulties in identifying all of the people engaged in manufacturing something as simple as a pencil. Throughout the essay, if you care to follow it—I will not give you the whole thing—he traces the copper that holds the rubber on top of the pencil. It had to be mined somewhere; somebody had to manufacture the mining equipment; somebody had to drill for and transport and refine the oil that fuelled the mining equipment—and that was just to extract a small part of the copper that held the rubber on top of the pencil. He then went on to talk about the timber involved, the paint, the graphite—or the lead, as people call it—and every other aspect of distribution, retailing, logistics, and so on that goes into the consumption of one single pencil.

Even a product that simple has so many contributors to its construction that it is impossible for anybody to truly trace the origins of something as simple as a pencil. Of course, most products we consume are far more complex than a pencil. The point that Leonard Read sought to make when he wrote that essay is that no Government department would ever be able to have knowledge of, to anticipate, and to plan the manufacture of something as simple as a pencil. And so it will come to pass, if this bill is to become a law, that as wonderful as the fine men and women who—

Clare Curran: What’s the alternative? Do nothing?

DAVID SEYMOUR: —work for the New Zealand Customs Service are—we are getting to the alternative, Ms Curran. Just be patient.

Chris Bishop: Good things take time.

DAVID SEYMOUR: Absolutely. The Customs Service will not be able to trace the origins of every aspect of any product and all of the people involved in its production.

Our Government needs to focus its efforts on doing a few important things well. Can I make the suggestion—as many members in opposition to this bill have already raised—that there are a wide range of consumer information devices, brands enabling consumer choice, and people who specialise in marketing the ethics of their products, including Paul Foster-Bell’s wonderful chocolate, which, actually, provide the kind of information consumers seek in order to make ethical choices far more efficiently than the fine men and women of the New Zealand Customs Service ever will. For those reasons—they are not ideological; they are purely practical, a distinction I hope that Denise Roche will understand one day—I oppose this bill. Thank you.

PEENI HENARE (Labour—Tāmaki Makaurau): Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you very much for this opportunity to reply. Can I thank the Hon Maryan Street, who—[Interruption]

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): No, no. Order! Can I just ask the people on the cross benches to settle down. We will start this time again. Thank you.

PEENI HENARE: Mr Assistant Speaker, tēnā koe. Thank you very much. Can I start by thanking the Hon Maryan Street, who attempted to bring a bill like this into the House a number of years ago. Interestingly enough, looking through the Hansard and looking through that debate, I am not exactly surprised to hear what we have heard from the Government this evening. In fact, it is almost a cut-and-paste attempt to try to belittle this bill.

Trade Aid presented a petition signed by 17,000 people in 2005. That was over a decade ago. I would imagine, and, in fact, if that petition were to run again—and this is an idea for us to consider—I daresay there would be more than 17,000 people who would support this bill or the intention of this bill, and I want to thank them for their efforts in years gone past.

As I look across this House I wonder how different it would be if people told Kate Sheppard and the women’s suffrage movement: “That’s too hard to do.” I wonder how different this House would look. I wonder how different New Zealand would look if members in this House told my esteemed colleague Louisa Wall that the marriage equality legislation was too hard to do. I wonder how different New Zealand would look if, in the face of such odds, my colleague backed down. We are fortunate that she did not.

I wonder too, then, from the House, to New Zealand, to across the world, what the world would look like if David Lange had backed down in front of the major superpowers of the world instead of standing up for nuclear-free Aotearoa New Zealand. Those are three examples of brave positions taken by socially progressive parties and socially progressive politicians in Aotearoa New Zealand to make a change here in this House, across Aotearoa New Zealand, and, indeed, in the world.

I take the point by Mr Tabuteau, and I do want to thank New Zealand First and the Green Party for their outright support of this bill. I take his point, and I believe in it. Human rights, if adhered to, if promoted, are in fact good for business. When customers walk through a jewellery store and see a diamond, I wonder what they think about that diamond and where that diamond has come from. The blood diamond trade is well documented. If we say that it is just simply too hard to take a stand against such an abhorrent trade, then I am afraid this world is going to be a poorer place. This world will be a poorer place if we back down from taking a stand. In a time when trade is as important to Aotearoa New Zealand as it was in the time of my ancestors, I wonder whether our country—our Government—is brave enough to redefine the landscape of trade moving into the future. I wonder whether it is brave enough.

In terms of the contributions this evening, although I do thank many members across the House for their praise of my athletic skill on the rugby field—and I am sure I heard some mention of my good looks—I am saddened to hear that the Government is not brave enough to support this bill and allow democratic processes—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member cannot accuse another party of a lack of bravery.

PEENI HENARE: Tēnā koe. Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. In closing—I understand my time is nearly up—I want to finish with the words to a song. The Leader of the Opposition knows all the words to this song, I can say.

Old pirates, yes, they rob I,

Sold I to the merchant ships,

Minutes after they took I,

From the bottomless pit.

I hope that this country takes a stand against slavery right across the world. Tēnā koe.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Customs and Excise (Prohibition of Imports Made by Slave Labour) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

Ayes 60

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

Noes 61

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

Motion not agreed to.

Bills

Public Works (Prohibition of Compulsory Acquisition of Māori Land) Amendment Bill

First Reading

CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare nui ko tēnei pō. I move, That the Public Works (Prohibition of Compulsory Acquisition of Māori Land) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Māori Affairs Committee to consider the bill. This member’s bill is simple. It aims to protect the remaining pieces of whenua Māori still held collectively from forced acquisition under the Public Works Act—the Public Works Act, which has been identified by the Waitangi Tribunal as cutting against the Treaty guarantees of rangatiratanga.

The bill was inspired by a whānau. It was inspired by a 21st century attempted confiscation, an example of what can still happen to Māori land, and what should not be allowed to ever happen again. This is the story that I learnt from the Grace whānau. The New Zealand Transport Agency is building the Kapiti Expressway, and it decided that it wanted a block of land. It did not initially contact the owners, Patricia Grace and her whānau. It later told her that it did not know how to find her. One of our most treasured authors, her books a taonga across Aotearoa—impossible to find her? Impossible. The Grace whānau had to fight the Transport Agency to the Environment Court, where they eventually won because they were able to turn their whānau title into Māori reserve land, but that took time, resources, skills, lawyers, stress, and pain. Their neighbours, also threatened by the Public Works Act, were not able to successfully defend their piece of whenua. Although the Grace whānau won their case, they have a huge, intrusive motorway being built right on their boundary, compromising their use and the tapu of their land.

I would like to take this moment to honour that whānau, the Grace whānau. I also need to acknowledge their tupuna, Wī Pārata Te Kakakura, who donated large areas of land for Waikanae township and other whenua for projects such as the Manawatū railway. This is how his generosity has been rewarded: his descendants have been forced to defend one of the last small blocks of the whenua kept for them. This House needs to respond generously, as Wī Pārata did, for change and to make this right. We need to make their effort one of the last fights ever for whenua Māori and stop this raupatu dead in its tracks.

This story, the Grace story, illustrates how the Public Works Act has operated and does operate on the ground for people, for whānau and hapū. If whānau or hapū do not know how to fight through the court or are divided and ruled by a cash offer, the land can be lost as collective whenua Māori for ever. Is anyone getting a flashback here? Could it be 1880 or 1920 or 1978? Do we remember the Public Works Act at the so-called Raglan golf course struggle, or in relation to Takaparawhā, Bastion Point, where I stood myself in support of those people in 1978? How is it that the same blunt instrument that alienated thousands of hectares of whenua from the mid-1880s onward is still sitting on our law books?

Many blocks or pieces of land or whenua are very small, but with a very deep history and meaning to their collective owners. Their existence is a testament to the failure of colonisation to destroy the concept of collective whakapapa-based relationship to whenua, which my culture has forced into the courts and labelled as a property right. In a related process, Te Ture Whenua Maori Act is being rewritten, and at almost every consultation hui the Public Works Act was raised as having significant impact on people’s lives. The No. 1 priority of any land reform should be to protect the small amount of land remaining in Māori ownership from further loss. Freehold Māori land must be protected from the Public Works Act. Raupatu must be prevented under that reformation, but we wait to hear the Government’s intention to do that.

Accompanying my bill is a petition, and everywhere the Greens took that petition, the tangata whenua told us heartbreaking stories of their land losses and their struggles against this Public Works Act. Many of the remnant blocks are not covered by Te Tiriti settlement negotiations. Everywhere we went, from Waitangi to Te Tai Tonga, people wanted justice for past confiscation as well as protection against the law being used to take the very little they have left under customary or freehold title.

A number of Pākehā have said to me, as we are wont to do to each other: “Why does the bill not apply to us?”. I have been so tempted to say to them, and to my own: “Sometimes it is just not about us; it is about the most heinous use of the Public Works Act.” I am quite sure that the Public Works Act has been used against individual households most unfairly, but that is not as a key tool used to destroy a system of land tenure. This is a breach of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, article 2.

This bill is about recognising a shocking history and drawing a line as a first step. Having drawn that line and protected this whenua from future confiscation, we also need to examine the past abuses and commit to justice for whānau and hapū whose whenua was unjustly taken by the Crown for purposes that were often not enacted and for temporary use that became permanent raupatu. I ask this Parliament to be leaders to support this call. Enough is enough. We will all be better off if we take this chance to prevent future hurt.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.