Wednesday, 8 February 2017

WEDNESDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 2017

WEDNESDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 2017

Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

Prayers.

Visitors

Australia—Former Prime Minister

Mr SPEAKER: Honourable members, I have much pleasure in informing the House that the Hon John Howard, former Prime Minister of Australia, is within the precincts of the Chamber. I am sure that members would wish that he be welcomed and accorded a chair to the left.

Points of Order

Leave for Introduction and Setting Down as Members’ Order of the Day No. 1—Member’s Bill in the Name of Barry Coates

JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I seek leave to introduce a member’s bill on behalf of Barry Coates that would increase and put into legislation New Zealand’s refugee quota, to be set down as members’ order of the day No. 1.

Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is objection.

Oral Questions

Questions to Ministers

Climate Change—Government Measures to Address

1. JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green) to the Minister for Climate Change Issues: Does she stand by her statement that “we have an ambitious programme of work that is going on around climate change issues”?

Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Climate Change Issues): Oh yes, I do.

James Shaw: Why has she said publicly that her climate change programme is ambitious, when privately officials have told her that it will not deal with 85 percent of the climate pollution that she has promised to cut?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: I think that what the member is referring to is that if we keep doing what we are doing today then that is exactly where we will end up, and we will not be able to meet those 2030 targets. That is why we have got such an ambitious work programme going on with climate change—so that we can actually look at how we get those 235 million tonnes.

James Shaw: Would she agree that the title of her opinion piece last October, “We’re on the right track on tackling climate change”, was misleading, given that officials have told her that “under our current policy settings, we are not on track to reduce emissions”?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: That is why it is quite clear that we have got the work programme going on. Amongst all the working groups, whether they are from the adaptation to the work that the Greens have been supporting with Vivid Economics—which is going to, I think, provide real advice there; from the forestry and planting that needs to go on to some of the energy targets the Minister has been setting and which I think will make a huge difference; from the work on electric vehicles to the work that we are doing in cleaning up our rivers and our waterways. All of that leads to the change that needs to take place so that we can reach ambitious targets.

James Shaw: I seek leave to table a Ministry for the Environment (MFE) briefing from May 2016, where officials say that the Government is not on track to reduce emissions and that 85 percent of emissions reductions will be outsourced to other countries.

Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that MFE briefing. Is there any objection to it being tabled? There is not; it can be tabled.

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

James Shaw: Does she agree that it would be misleading to tell New Zealanders that “We have a target of 90 percent renewable electricity by 2025, and are well on our way”, when energy experts Toby Stevenson and Greg Sise say that meeting that target is now “highly unlikely”?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: Certainly, all advice I am getting is that we will meet that target. We are currently at more than 80 percent. Certainly, everything that I have seen says that, actually, what they are stating is not correct. We will continue to work towards reaching what I think is really ambitious—to be 90 percent by 2025.

James Shaw: Would it be misleading for her to characterise Simon Bridges’ electric vehicle initiative as ambitious, when officials tell her that it will contribute only 0.2 percent of the cut in pollution that we need to meet the 2030 target?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: I do think it is ambitious. He is doubling their number. He was, in his previous role, and he is really enthusiastic about it as Minister of Transport, having two of them in his family now, I believe, alone. There is more that I think needs to be done, and I get pretty excited about where I think the future is in electric vehicles. I reckon where it will be in 5 or 10 years’ time will, obviously, be a lot different from what it is today.

James Shaw: I seek leave to table appendix 1 from a briefing from the Ministry for the Environment to the Minister in May last year showing that the electric vehicle policy will cut only 0.2 percent of emissions needed to meet the 2030 target.

Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that particular MFE report. Is there any objection? There is none.

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

James Shaw: Does she agree with officials who have advised her that failing to reduce climate pollution domestically now will “leave us increasingly exposed”?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: I am finding it quite amusing that the member thinks that a briefing from last May that said to me that if we continue doing things as we are now we will not reach our 2030 targets—as the Minister I turned around and I have initiated a comprehensive work programme that gets us the right information, the right facts, so that, actually, this Parliament, I hope, can make the right decisions so that we are making a difference for the future. So, yes, what they said back in May is exactly where it was. We have now got the Paris Agreement, we have got 196 countries signed up, we are ready to go, and, domestically, we will play our part.

James Shaw: If what she is saying in public is the opposite of what her officials are telling her, where is she getting her alternative facts?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: What I am getting from officials and what I am saying publicly are completely and utterly in line with each other. They are saying that if we continued doing things as we were, we would not reach the goals and accomplish what we want to as a country. We have then got a committed, comprehensive work programme that, actually, the officials have been fantastic in pulling together and leading many of the groups throughout it. We will, I hope, as an entire Parliament, not just as a party, look at the changes that need to be made that will make it better for future generations.

David Seymour: Is the Minister aware that not one single Green Party member attended last night’s excellent presentation on fresh water at Mr Speaker’s Science Forum?

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! There is no ministerial responsibility there. Supplementary question—

David Seymour: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] No, I just want to warn the member. I hope he is not in any way questioning a decision that I have just made. I would advise the member not to.

Dr Megan Woods: Will the Minister admit that this projected failure to meet New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emission target is finally sufficient evidence that failure to plan is planning to fail, and accept the need for formalised carbon budgeting and an independent climate commission?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: No.

Housing—Affordability, Supply, and Market

2. ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Why was there no mention of the housing crisis in his State of the Nation speech last week?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH (Prime Minister): I did mention housing. I said the Government is building the roads, schools, and houses needed to support our growing communities. We will continue this year with our comprehensive plan to increase the supply of housing, and, in particular, working closely with the councils, which make almost all the decisions relevant to getting any house or subdivision consented.

Andrew Little: Is it seriously his position that there is no housing crisis?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: The Government’s position for some time has been that the answer to fast-rising house prices is to get more houses on the ground faster, and the biggest step forward was the new Auckland Unitary Plan, which this Government legislated to do in 3 years instead of 10. That finally—as of about September last year—enables sufficient supply to be built, and the market and the Government is getting on with building it.

Andrew Little: Why can he not admit there is a housing crisis when Demographia—an internationally renowned research organisation—rates Auckland as the fourth most unaffordable housing market in the world?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: The reason for that is 20 or 30 years of misguided planning in Auckland, which was designed to stop the city growing. Now that the approach has changed, we have record house building going on in Auckland, and, in fact, in a number of places across the country.

Andrew Little: When the Salvation Army says housing speculators are distorting our economy and creating homelessness, why will he not show leadership and crack down on those property speculators?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: What the market needs, and the homeless and the families who are struggling to pay their rent or borrow enough money for a house, is more houses. The good news is we now have record numbers of housing being built, and the pipeline for housing and infrastructure building over the next 4 or 5 years is bigger than New Zealand has seen for decades.

Andrew Little: Now that the Salvation Army has joined Labour’s call for a Government-led affordable house building programme, when will he admit the cause of the housing crisis is his failure to lead in building more houses?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: The member—who we know who is not happy about a lot of things going well—will not be happy as he sees the Government’s building programme unfold this year. As the owner of one in every 16 houses in Auckland, we have initiated large-scale projects in Tāmaki and Northcote, on top of the completion of Hobsonville, with many more to come.

Andrew Little: In light of his statement in his maiden speech: “what I do bring to this job is a willingness to get into the argument rather than avoid it.”, why is he ducking and dodging and denying the housing crisis?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: In respect of getting into the argument, I can recall, when I was the Minister of Finance, raising the idea a number of years ago that one of the reasons for rising prices was lack of supply and being laughed at and criticised by the Opposition, who have now come round to the view, as has Auckland Council, that the problem has been planning that stopped the supply of housing when it was needed. That is now changing, and the houses are getting built. It will take a number of years of over 10,000 houses a year to get to the right number.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: If the population of Rotorua—net—is coming in from overseas under his mass immigration programme, where is the Rotorua size infrastructure and housing, roading, and hospitals that have to supply the issue of demand? And if he has not got a plan for that, why do you think we going to believe the gobbledegook he is saying today?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: The member may be disappointed in this, but although the number of people coming in is up somewhat—

Hon Members: Oh!

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: —no, no. The biggest change is New Zealanders not leaving. A party that calls itself New Zealand First should know that and be pleased about it. And because so many New Zealanders have stopped leaving because they prefer to live here, we are building more houses, more roads, and more schools to accommodate them.

Andrew Little: Will he front up to New Zealanders and join me in Mt Albert for a public debate on housing in the next 2 weeks or, like the gingerbread man, is he just going to run, run, run away? [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The House now deserves to hear the answer.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: I suggest the member invite Poto Williams along, because I am sure that would be a much better debate, and—

Hon Member: And Willie Jackson.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: —oh, and Willie Jackson.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! I am asking for a little more cooperation during question time. I will accept some level of interjection, but when it is out of control, I will have to deal with it a bit more severely.

Andrew Little: Will the Prime Minister be absolutely clear with me and this House—will he join me for a debate about housing issues in Mt Albert in the next 2 weeks, yes or no?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: I would not want to deprive the voters of Mt Albert, or the public of New Zealand, of the sheer entertainment value of a debate between Andrew Little and Poto Williams, so I am going to stay home.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! One interjection there went a bit far. It had better cease.

Finance, Minister—Reports

3. CHRIS BISHOP (National) to the Minister of Finance: What recent reports has he received on the performance of the New Zealand economy?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Finance): While the House was away, I received a number of reports highlighting the strong performance of the New Zealand economy. Standard and Poor’s has made a recent decision to affirm New Zealand’s AA foreign currency and AA+ local currency sovereign credit ratings with a stable outlook. That reflects international confidence in New Zealand’s economic and fiscal performance. They also noted improvement across a range of measures such as our current account deficit, our net Government debt, and our overall fiscal performance. This follows the release of GDP figures in December showing a higher than expected 1.1 percent growth rate for the September quarter for the New Zealand economy and 3.5 percent over the last year.

Chris Bishop: How does New Zealand’s economic performance compare internationally?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Statistics New Zealand’s latest growth figures for New Zealand show our economic growth in the year to September, at 3.5 percent, was the fifth-strongest in the whole developed world, ahead of Australia on 1.8 percent, the USA on 1.6 percent, Canada on 1.3 percent, and the euro area on 1.7 percent.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Take out your mass immigration and you’ve got nothing.

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I am sure Winston has alternative facts. This demonstrates how New Zealand’s focus on developing a strong and open economy is delivering good results for Kiwi families, especially relative to most of the rest of the developed world.

Chris Bishop: What reports has he received on the performance of the labour market?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Last week’s household labour force survey showed a continuing strong growth in the labour market. With 137,000 jobs now created in the last year, the employment rate for New Zealanders has reached an all-time high of 66.9 percent of all adult New Zealanders, while the labour force participation rate has also reached an all-time high of 70.5 percent. With Treasury’s half-yearly fiscal update predicting a further 150,000 jobs over the next 5 years, New Zealanders will continue to see the benefits of a growing economy.

Chris Bishop: What reports has he received on inflation?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: New Zealand, along with many other similar countries, has been operating in a period of historically low inflation and historically low interest rates. Statistics New Zealand’s recent figures show the Consumers Price Index inflation rate has risen slightly in the year to December 2016, to 1.3 percent for the year, with the bottom end of the target band for the Reserve Bank being reached for the first time in 2 years. This compares to an inflation rate of just 0.1 percent in the year to December 2015. It may signal a return towards more normal levels of low inflation, but we will have to see how the year unfolds.

Police—Funding

4. Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by all his statements; if so, how?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH (Prime Minister): Yes.

Grant Robertson: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. There were two parts to that question. I am very interested to know the answer to the second part.

Mr SPEAKER: I will invite the Prime Minister, if he wishes, to address the second part. [Interruption] He does not. [Interruption] Order! It should be very obvious, even to the member, that how it was addressed was by rising and answering the question. It has been addressed.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: If the Government has been “working on a package to boost police numbers since last May”, why, as Minister of Finance, did he deliberately starve police of funding when that was being requested by then Minister of Police Hon Judith Collins?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: You would need to talk to the Minister of Finance about whatever discussions those were. I can assure the member, though, that for the Government the safety of our communities is a top priority and that in the last Budget significant funding was allocated to police to pay their consistently increasing wages. After that, discussions began on how we could use the police better in order to achieve safer communities where police can catch more criminals now and prevent more crime in the future.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Why, if the evidence shows the Hon Judith Collins having multiple meetings with former Prime Minister John Key and Mr English’s Treasury officials pleading for more police funding, did he do his best to make sure she did not get that funding when he was the Minister of Finance?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: Ms Collins was a very competent police Minister and, like all Ministers, was advocating for greater than her fair share of the Budget, which is always the case. I am sure the current finance Minister is finding that that is what is happening. There is absolutely nothing unusual about Ministers putting forward bids and not getting what they want.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Does his stopping his rival for leadership of the National Party from getting funds for her portfolio because it might make her look good and then having her sacked as the police Minister see him rakishly last week finding extra police funds not point to National being a tawdry cesspit of internecine internal fighting?

Mr SPEAKER: In so far as there may be some prime ministerial responsibility, the right honourable Prime Minister.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: The member should not talk about the deputy leadership contest in New Zealand First like that. We think it is a very worthy and tough fight, which everyone seems to know about.

Superannuation Fund—Government Contributions

5. GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) to the Minister of Finance: Does he agree with the Economist Shamubeel Eaqub that “Government should be in the business of making long-term investments”?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Finance): I would answer that question by saying that it depends on what we are talking about. A good example of where we are making long-term investments is the progress we have been making in social investment through the Better Public Services programme in areas like reducing long-term welfare dependence, supporting vulnerable children, and providing better skills for our young people. This investment is worth it because of the benefits that it can bring in terms of New Zealanders living healthy and productive lives. That example, I absolutely agree with.

Grant Robertson: Why did the Government break its 2009 commitment to resume contributions to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund when there was an operating surplus?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Well, the Government, as the member may recall, if he has been following these things, made a commitment that we would resume contributions to the Superannuation Fund once net debt was back below 20 percent of GDP.

Grant Robertson: No, that was later.

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: That is right. That is the current commitment that we have made, Grant. I appreciate you are the trainspotter of the Opposition, but that is where we are at.

Grant Robertson: Is the New Zealand Superannuation Fund correct when it says that the fund is $20 billion worse off because his Government has failed to contribute one cent to the fund since 2009?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Well, I think you can make all sorts of hypothetical and theoretical suggestions, but the Superannuation Fund, of course, does not exist in isolation. In fact, New Zealand had a thing called the global financial crisis (GFC) and, also, another thing called the Canterbury earthquakes, Grant. Those things all had an impact on the Government’s accounts, and the Government, therefore, made a decision to focus more on the here and now for that period than on the Superannuation Fund. I think that the people of Canterbury, and also vulnerable people around New Zealand, are pleased at that decision.

Grant Robertson: Are tax cuts a higher priority for him than restarting contributions to the Superannuation Fund?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: No, they are not a higher priority, but I do consider it a priority to think about hard-working Kiwis who pay—

Grant Robertson: Ha, ha!

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: You laugh at them, Mr Robertson; they are not laughing. They work hard, they provide for their families, they meet the cost of everyday living, and, actually, this Government does focus on them. I appreciate that Grant Robertson thinks he can always spend their money better than they can; we do not.

Grant Robertson: What kinds of short-term priorities lead him to believe that it is a good idea to take $20 billion from Kiwis’ future retirement—bearing in mind they are the very people carrying record household debt? Is solving New Zealand’s long-term problems something for somebody else to deal with?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I am sorry; the member’s maths is hugely challenged, because it has not been taken at all. We have decided that there are priorities that New Zealanders have in terms of meeting the costs of the Canterbury earthquakes and including also providing for people during the tough times of the GFC, which, I have to say, the public appears to have supported for a considerable period of time. If the member is saying that instead of doing those things, we should have put the money in the Superannuation Fund, he is entitled to make that argument, but, actually, I think he is wrong.

Question No. 4 to Minister

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): In all the excitement I forgot to seek leave to table evidence under the Official Information Act (OIA) of meetings with the Prime Minister, Treasury, and the police commissioner regarding police resourcing desperately being sought at the time by the then Minister of Police, one Judith Collins.

Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that particular information released under the OIA. Is there any objection? There is none.

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

Police—Increase in Police Staff

6. KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National) to the Minister of Police: What announcements has the Government made about investing in police to make our communities safer?

Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister of Police): Thank you to the member. Last week the Prime Minister announced that we will be boosting the number of police staff by more than 1,100 over the next 4 years. This $503 million package, which includes 880 sworn police and 245 non-sworn staff, is about getting the worst offenders off our streets as well as preventing crime. The package is just another step on from the 600 extra police put in place since National came to Government and our investment in mobile technology, which has freed up the equivalent of 350 front-line officers.

Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi: What areas will the new police target?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: This package has been carefully put together to target both crime prevention and catching the worst offenders. Five hundred officers will be out in the community responding to emergencies, dealing with youth crime, and investigating burglaries; 140 will be dedicated to our rural and regional areas; another 140 will investigate serious offending such as child abuse, sexual assault, and family violence; and 80 will target organised crime gangs and methamphetamine. The new police will be spread around the country, where each district will get a share.

Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi: What results can New Zealanders expect from this significant investment?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: The investment of more than half a billion dollars comes with challenging performance targets for police to make a real difference in real New Zealanders’ lives. The targets include: 98 percent of home burglaries will be attended within 48 hours; 95 percent of New Zealanders will live within 25 kilometres of a police presence 24/7; $400 million worth of assets will be seized from organised criminals, up from $230 million in the last few years; and a reduction of deaths from family violence. These are among some of the targets that we expect them to achieve.

Stuart Nash: What convinced her, merely 7 months after the Government’s 4-year plan stating “no new police until at least 2020” was signed off, that an increase in police numbers was so important that it became the first election promise made by the Government in the new year?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: It would be fair to say that a number of issues did. As has already been identified by many, including in this House, the good work of the former Minister of Police had already started progressing that work in that way. We had already committed the equivalent of over 900 police in the last 8 years, so now was the time to look at the next investment into police and into our communities. So that is exactly what we did, but we were really, really clear that we wanted to make sure that the targets that those police achieved were for the betterment of all New Zealanders.

Immigration—Fraudulent Visas and International Students

7. DENISE ROCHE (Green) to the Minister of Immigration: What steps, if any, did Immigration New Zealand take to ensure validity of the visas of the nine students currently seeking sanctuary in a church, including any interviews with these students to determine the accuracy of their application before they came to New Zealand?

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister of Immigration): This may be a little longer than most primary answers. I beg your indulgence. I am not aware of the exact numbers or identities of the individuals currently inside a church in Auckland, so my answer is in respect of the nine Indian students the subject of recent media, unlawfully in New Zealand, who were represented by Mr Alastair McClymont and whose requests to stay in New Zealand were declined. I am aware two of those individuals have departed New Zealand voluntarily and I understand some of the remaining seven are amongst those inside the church.

Time prevents a detailed description of each step in each application, but the steps would include an immigration officer checking that the applicant had made a declaration on the form that, amongst other statements, includes: “I have provided true and correct answers to the questions in this form. I understand that if false or misleading information is submitted, my application may be declined without further warning.” Another step would be to check that on the completion of the statement “I have attached evidence that I have access to sufficient funds to support myself through my intended stay.”—of the nine individuals represented by Mr McClymont six were interviewed either in person or by phone to discuss their studies, and several of those students were asked directly about their financial documents. The questions included the purpose of gaining qualifications, a test of their understanding of the tertiary institution they planned to enrol in and of New Zealand generally, and questions of the applicant’s bona fides—that is, their intentions on the completion of their studies.

Denise Roche: Why did the Minister claim on Radio New Zealand on 3 February that “Immigration agents will interview them, check and confirm that they understand.”, when Immigration New Zealand records show that three of the students were not interviewed and two other interviews were conducted with education agents posing as the students?

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: The questioner asked about immigration agents. I presume she means immigration officers. My answer was in respect of the process generally, not exhaustively. In respect of the three who were not specifically interviewed—it is not a requirement—the explanations that were given in the applications were considered to be satisfactory and consistent with what one would expect, and no interview was required. But, as I said, six of the nine were indeed interviewed.

Denise Roche: I would like to table this document. It contains information collated by the lawyer of the five students, and is a summary of Immigration New Zealand records of the visa processes for all nine students. It contains specific dates and notes about which students—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The document has been well and truly described. I will put the leave. Leave is sought to table—

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Speaking to the question first, can I ascertain whether or not the permission of the applicants has been granted for that private information to be released?

Mr SPEAKER: Can the member assist with that?

Denise Roche: My understanding is—through their lawyer—yes, it has.

Mr SPEAKER: I will put the leave. It will be for the House to decide. Leave is sought to table that particular information. Is there any objection? There is objection.

Denise Roche: What message does it send to people who want to study and eventually settle in New Zealand that this Government is more interested in the profits of educational providers and immigration agents than in supporting the victims of fraud?

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: The broader message is this: there are around 125,000 student visas granted every year, and the overwhelming majority of those applicants provide applications that are true in all respects. They come here to get a world-class education and, overwhelmingly, they go home satisfied with their experience. I think that is still the message that it sends.

Denise Roche: Why is his Government happy to use discretion to grant citizenship to non-resident billionaires but refuses to show compassion for students who have paid thousands of dollars of fees and who simply want to finish their education?

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: That is probably a question best directed to the Minister of Internal Affairs, given that he or she would be granting citizenship—

Hon Annette King: “He or she”—what is it? Is he a he or a she?

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Well, I go back in time. I say “he or she” because the person the subject of that question was granted conditional residence in 2006 by Labour under the far flimsier immigration instructions that existed at that time, including for money and time in country. That applicant did not commit fraud on either of those applications, and I think that is the significant difference.

Denise Roche: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I would like the question answered, which was about the compassion shown to students who are—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! No. [Interruption] Order! The question was well and truly addressed. It was significantly involved then with response to an interjection. It has been addressed.

Child Poverty—Measurement and Salvation Army Report

CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): To the Minister of Social Development, is she concerned that child poverty rates of up to “20 percent have become entrenched into New Zealand’s economic and social structure” according to today’s Salvation Army report?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Leader of the House): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Standing Orders around questions are relatively specific, and there needs to be sufficient evidence for the claims that have been made in a question provided to the Clerk’s Office. To have an allegation like that presented as fact when, in fact, all it could ever be presented as was an opinion from the Salvation Army would seem to me to make the question at least questionable; if not, in fact, out of order.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): That complaint is easily rebutted by the fact that that is an accurate recitation of what is in the Salvation Army report. That is all that is being asked for as a way of authentication by the questioner, and his complaint is a nonsensical one.

Mr SPEAKER: I thank the member for his comment. He is in fact, on this occasion, correct. I had a good look at the report. The question as it is—[Interruption] Order! The question as it is worded says that it is according to the Salvation Army report, and I can find exactly the quote then used within that report. If the member wants further assistance, I suggest he look at Speaker’s ruling 184/3 by Speaker Jack. It was in 1970, so it may just precede the member’s involvement with this House, but it certainly says that questions can use excerpts in reports and attribute them to that, and it has done so in this case. It has now become a bit disjointed between the asking of the question and the answer. I am going to invite Carmel Sepuloni to repeat the question.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Speaking to the point of order—

Mr SPEAKER: No, I have dealt with the matter.

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Leader of the House): No, speaking to the point of order—

Mr SPEAKER: I will hear from the Hon Gerry Brownlee on this occasion.

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: That does beg the question as to whether the question is asking the Minister to have an opinion about the opinion, or whether the question is: “Does she have concerns that the Salvation Army are putting around this sort of tripe?”.

Mr SPEAKER: No. The member is now on the dangerous ground of an attempted derail. What the question is asking is whether the Minister is concerned with a suggestion that has been raised in the Salvation Army report. That is a—[Interruption] Order! That is a perfectly legitimate question. It will now be asked again, and then we will hear whether the Minister is indeed concerned.

8. CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston) to the Minister for Social Development: Is she concerned that child poverty rates of up to “20 percent have become entrenched into New Zealand’s economic and social structure” according to today’s Salvation Army report?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development): No, and I disagree with their actual conclusion, which is that—and the full quote is: “In other words, child poverty rates of between 8% and 20% have become entrenched in New Zealand’s economic and social structure.” I would also point out that the statistics that the Salvation Army uses are not new numbers; in fact, they are taken from the Ministry of Social Development’s Household Incomes Report, which we released in September last year, and which were released again by the Children’s Commissioner in his Child Poverty Monitor report late last year. I say to the member that if you read the actual tables that are published in the report, instead of selectively quoting headlines—in particular, material hardship rates have consistently fallen over the past 5 years. Furthermore, I would note—as I have noted each time these figures have been released—that this report does not take into account the Government’s $790 million child hardship package, which provides more childcare assistance for low-income families, increased Working for Families payments, and raised benefit rates for the first time in 40 years.

Carmel Sepuloni: In light of her answer, is the Salvation Army then wrong when it says that the “culpability of Government in this lack of progress should be noted—especially through its welfare reforms, which have yet to identify any positive impacts on the lives of poorer New Zealand children”?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: If the member had listened to my answer, of course I dispute what the Salvation Army’s conclusions are, taken from the evidence, not even to mention the fact that over 50,000 children are no longer living in benefit-dependent homes, when all of the evidence shows that as long as they are living in benefit-dependent homes, they are destined for lives that do include hardship and poverty. This Government has done more than any Government to lift those children out of poverty.

Carmel Sepuloni: When the Prime Minister claimed that he was “proud of the steps the Government has already taken” toward child poverty, does that include the fact that child poverty rates have not improved over the last 5 years?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Just repeating the same stuff does not make it true. If you look at the facts in the report itself, they show considerable progress has been made. Is it enough? No. Is this Government content and doing nothing more? No. We all want to make sure that every single New Zealand child in New Zealand has the opportunity to live a great life, and all the long list of things that this Government has done, which the Prime Minister spoke about the other day, are all destined to help those young New Zealanders live that great life.

Carmel Sepuloni: Did she agree with Colonel Hutson when he said that “entrenched child and youth poverty has become the new norm.”, and that “politicians must stop just voicing sympathetic rhetoric and actually take real action to reduce child poverty numbers.”; if so, will she continue to ignore the Children’s Commissioner’s call for a cross-party consensus on a target to reduce child poverty?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: No, I do not agree with that gentleman’s conclusions. I do agree with him that it is time that politicians like those in Labour stop talking about poverty and join with this Government and back this Government and all the measures we have put in place to lift those children out of poverty.

Carmel Sepuloni: Given child poverty rates have remained alarmingly high over the last 5 years, despite benefit numbers going down, does she accept that her failure to collect and analyse off-the-benefit outcomes means that “Just what has happened to these people and whether they are better off or worse [remains] a mystery.”?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I have said several times in this House that we have commissioned research pre- and post-welfare reforms to see exactly what happens to people who go off benefit. But the evidence is very clear—and the Labour Party really has to get to grips with it—that a life dependent on taxpayers’ benefits leads to a life of hardship and poverty, not only for the people who are dependent on that support, but for their children. So the best way out of poverty is to get people into work, and that is what this Government has focused on. We are being successful with it. We know that for some people it is difficult. We are providing training. We are providing money for things like driver licences. We are doing everything we can to support people into employment, because that is the best way to lift them out of poverty.

Broadband, Ultra-fast and Rural—Extension and Targets

9. MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri) to the Minister for Communications: What recent announcements has he made on the Ultra-fast Broadband programme?

Hon SIMON BRIDGES (Minister for Communications): Last month I was very pleased to join the member in North Canterbury to announce that the Government is investing over $300 million to extend ultra-fast broadband (UFB) to more than 151 additional towns across New Zealand, plus 43 suburban fringe areas around the largest centres that were covered by the first phase of the programme. This extension will provide up to 85 percent of New Zealanders, in both rural and urban areas, from Ruatōria to Reefton, with access to world-class broadband by the end of 2024.

Matt Doocey: How will UFB2 support economic development in regional and rural communities?

Hon SIMON BRIDGES: Phase two of the programme is a significant investment in our regions and forms part of the Government’s commitment to helping our regional economies grow and diversify. More than $30 million will be spent on installing fibre in Canterbury alone, and it is estimated that the UFB initiative will generate more than $33 billion in economic benefit. While the full fibre roll-out will be completed by 2024, we have prioritised 29 towns in Northland, Bay of Plenty, Gisborne, Hawke’s Bay, Manawatū, Wanganui, and the West Coast, which will have their UFB builds fast tracked to be complete by the end of 2020. We are working closely with councils, businesses, and iwi in these areas to help them thrive and realise their full economic potential.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: If any of that is remotely true, why is it that in Northland the rate of investment is a fraction above 50 percent of what is being spent in Auckland?

Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I doubt, in fact, that on a population basis that is even true, and I am saddened that the member does not believe me, but let me give him the facts: over $33 million by 2020 is being invested across Northland. I appreciate he is not going to, but if he just said thanks, I would take it.

Matt Doocey: How does UFB2 help achieve the Government’s ambitious targets for connectivity?

Hon SIMON BRIDGES: The first phase of the programme is ahead of schedule in delivering fibre to the premises of 75 percent of New Zealanders by 2019. The second phase of installations will start in 2017 and be completed between 2018 and 2024. Phase two of the build will see each build area completed within a 12-month period in order to provide as little disruption as possible. By 2024 approximately 85 percent of New Zealanders will have access to fibre, far exceeding our original target of 80 percent by 2022. This will put New Zealand among the leaders in the OECD for access to fibre and means that more Kiwis will be able to tap into the benefits of fast and reliable internet right across the country.

Prime Minister—Conversation with President Trump

10. Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by all his statements in respect of President Trump?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH (Prime Minister): Yes.

Hon David Parker: Why did he tell New Zealanders, in relation to his phone conversation with President Trump, that “I couldn’t describe for you exactly the words, because actually I don’t remember exactly the words”, and how does he reconcile this with the precision of his recollections in other media interviews?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: I have been asked by a number of people about what I said to President Trump around the immigration ban, and I can recall those words exactly because I used exactly the words that I have used in public.

Hon David Parker: When he raised the highly sensitive matter of the US travel ban and told President Trump in no uncertain terms that New Zealand disagrees with the policy and wouldn’t implement it, why did President Trump meekly thank him for his view, when he is notoriously thin-skinned for even slight criticism, had brutishly attacked a federal judge who blocked it, and hung up on the Aussie Prime Minister—or can he not recall that part of the conversation either?

Mr SPEAKER: In so far as there is prime ministerial responsibility—the right honourable Prime Minister.

Hon David Parker: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Are you inferring there is not prime ministerial responsibility for the question I have asked?

Mr SPEAKER: No. I am certainly saying that there is a lot—[Interruption] Order! I am saying that there is a lot in the question, which is the member’s opinion of a leader of another country. I am inviting the Prime Minister to answer it in so far as he feels he has prime ministerial responsibility.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: The discussion I had with the president was a civil and courteous and thoughtful discussion.

Hon David Parker: Was the Hon Chester Borrows correct when he told a public meeting in Whanganui on Monday that the Prime Minister would tell President Trump that New Zealand “would condemn and resist President Trump’s discriminatory policy” and that it was “a direct attack on conscience, choice, and religion”, or did he choose instead appeasement over firm Kiwi principles, and choke—assuming he can now remember the words of that part of the interview?

Mr SPEAKER: Again, there are two supplementary questions. The right honourable Prime Minister can address one or both.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: I chose to communicate in terms that people understand, New Zealand’s view about the immigration ban. As for the member for Whanganui, he was not party to the discussion. I am not sure what was said at his public meeting. I can only tell you and the public what I said on the phone call.

Hon David Parker: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Supplementary.

Mr SPEAKER: I will just have the point of order first, and then I will come to the supplementary question.

Hon David Parker: I seek leave to table a transcript of the Hon Chester Borrows’ comments to that public rally, when he told the rally precisely what the Prime Minister would tell President Trump.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! No, I do not need any more. I need to know—where is the source of this transcript?

Hon David Parker: It is from a video clip that is not publicly available, because I am the only one who has got it.

Mr SPEAKER: I will put the leave. [Interruption] Order! [Interruption] Order! This matter is easily resolved. I will put the leave. Leave is sought to table that particular transcript. Is there any objection to it being tabled? There is objection.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Does he believe that the lack of courteous and considerate conversation has led to a large number of thin skins in the Labour Party?

Mr SPEAKER: Order! No, there is no ministerial responsibility there whatsoever.

Hon David Parker: Who instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade not to properly record his conversation with President Trump, contrary to generally accepted practice for such high-level diplomatic conversations, and will he release the American transcript of the call once it is available to the embassy in Washington?

Mr SPEAKER: Again, there are two supplementary questions. The Prime Minister can address one or either.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: Well, I am not exactly accustomed to what the protocols are around so-called high-level conversations, but, certainly, it would not be my wish or practice to record the conversations that I have with the leaders of other countries, and certainly not to do so without telling them.

Primary Industries, Minister—Conduct

11. Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) to the Minister for Primary Industries: Is he able to explain all his actions as Minister for Primary Industries; if so, how?

Hon NATHAN GUY (Minister for Primary Industries): Mr Speaker, happy New Year to you and to the Parliament. In answer to the question, yes; and by speaking.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: The Ewen McKenzie lookalike! Why, having received a letter from me on 16 January inviting him as Minister to visit drought-affected farms in Northland, did he play silly games when on 25 January, at 3.57 p.m. in the afternoon, he pretended to invite me to come the next morning to a farm in Northland, and yet he and his staff did everything not to advise where, when, and at what time the morning meeting would be held up north?

Hon NATHAN GUY: I do not need to be invited by that member to go and visit drought-stricken farms in Northland; I go and visit them on my own accord. My office did alert the member that I was coming to Northland to meet farmers, but it is commonly known up there that the member is hardly ever in his electorate.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: What in the Minister’s past incompetent behaviour, as the Minister of this portfolio and as the Minister for Racing, gives him the idea he can play these stupid games by claiming to invite another member of Parliament to come to a meeting and refuse to give any details as to where the meeting was held, and then claim that he is familiar with what is going on up north?

Hon NATHAN GUY: As I understand it, my office alerted the member that I was coming to Northland, and, as I say, I stand by my comments: I do not need to be invited by that member to visit Northland. I take my advice from farmers on the ground, rural support trust, and my officials, and that is why in the last couple of weeks I have visited Northland twice, and I have declared a medium-scale adverse event in terms of drought to support those farmers to get through that. And we will support those farmers.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Why, when he was asked on 16 January to come to the north and examine the serious situation, which would constitute a drought, did he stoop to such stupid, venal political games as to tell the media and the National Party candidate about the meeting and yet think he could refuse to tell me the place, date, and time—[Interruption] All right, if they are the venal politics you like, that is fine by me, but when we get to power, you are gone.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The question has been asked and now can be addressed by the Minister.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I have not finished.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The member has finished, because I have cut him off. Supplementary questions are meant to be concise.

Hon NATHAN GUY: I think this questioning is a circus, and I have already addressed it.

Education, Minister—Reports on NCEA Results and Māori and Pasifika Achievement

12. JOANNE HAYES (National) to the Minister of Education: What recent reports has she received on NCEA achievement for 2016?

Hon HEKIA PARATA (Minister of Education): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. I was pleased to see that the 2016 provisional National Certificate of Education Achievement (NCEA) results show that more students are achieving NCEA level 2, the recognised minimum qualification for success. The provisional role-based data shows achievement in NCEA level 2 has risen to 77.4 percent, or 43,911 young New Zealanders. This means that over 9,000 more Year 12 students achieved NCEA level 2 in 2016 compared with the 2008 year of the Opposition.

Joanne Hayes: What do these reports show about Māori and Pacific achievement in NCEA?

Hon HEKIA PARATA: One of the highlights of the provisional results is the significant increase in Māori achievement of NCEA level 2. It lifted by 2.9 percent in just 1 year, which is a reflection of the year-on-year increase under this Government. It is now at an impressive 73.5 percent.

Hon Member: Cherry-picking.

Hon HEKIA PARATA: I know Māori success is making the former Minister unhappy, but Māori are very happy with that, because it is a lift from the parlous 51.6 percent under that Labour Government. For Pasifika, NCEA level 2 has risen to 77.6 percent from 50.5 percent in 2008. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order!

Question No. 11 to Minister

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I seek leave to table a letter between myself and Nathan Guy inviting him to come to Northland, dated 16 January, and a chronology of contacts with Nathan Guy’s office showing what a venal, bumptious bunch they are.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! I am very tempted not to put the leave because of that final comment. The member should factually describe the document without embellishment. To move the matter forward, leave is sought to table the letter dated 16 January and then a chronology of interaction with the Minister’s office. Is there any objection to those two documents? There is objection.

RON MARK (Deputy Leader—NZ First): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! I need to remind members that points of order are to be heard in silence.

RON MARK: Thank you, Mr Speaker. For my edification, could you explain to me why when the Hon Nathan Guy made such a blatant and venal comment you did not bring him into line—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! I did not—[Interruption] Order! Can the member resume his seat immediately. I did not hear such a comment, but I will study the transcripts later to see whether it is in the Hansard.

Voting

Correction—Education Legislation Bill

Mr SPEAKER: On 14 September 2016, when the House was considering the Education Legislation Bill, the result of the vote on David Seymour’s Supplementary Order Paper 220 was incorrectly recorded as Ayes 96, Noes 25. The correct result is Ayes 95, Noes 25. The record will be corrected accordingly.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. That is an extraordinarily long time ago for this House to be correcting a matter about a member’s personal vote, and, frankly, I have not heard of reaching so far back into our history. Perhaps the member should be told to take the dummy out of his mouth when he is speaking.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! I have made a New Year’s resolution that I will try to get through this year of Parliament without asking members to leave the Chamber, but for me to be able to achieve that I do need some cooperation from members. Silly points of order like that one will not assist me in meeting my New Year’s resolutions. I ask the Rt Hon Winston Peters for a little more cooperation.

DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. In the spirit of that, can I assist the member. It was not my vote that was corrected; it was someone else’s. It was my Supplementary Order Paper. Perhaps, instead of talking about me spitting the dummy, he should go to Bay Audiology.

Mr SPEAKER: Thank you for tidying that up.

Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement

Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement

Debate resumed from 7 February.

Hon PAULA BENNETT (Deputy Prime Minister): What a contrasting start to the year for New Zealand’s major political parties. We have the fabulous Prime Minister, Bill English, making policy announcements, a state of the nation speech, and having a clear plan for New Zealand’s continued success. We look over at the other side of the Chamber and we have gloom and doom, despair, and an absolute shambolic start to the year.

To be clear, the Labour-Green Opposition has gone very quickly from good vibe to clear divide, yes? Good vibe to clear divide. It is a classic case of the commentator’s curse, really, as in the past week Labour has disintegrated. The vibe is well and truly gone, and Labour is all over the show. Even the Greens must be questioning how they could possibly be associated with “Angry Andy” and the new candidates who are coming out now, given the principled stance that the Green Party takes.

Rt Hon Bill English: New? They’re not new.

Hon PAULA BENNETT: Well, they are. I am sorry, Prime Minister, but we are told that they are the fresh new faces of the Labour Party—the fresh new faces of the Labour Party.

It is interesting that after everything that Laila Harré has gone through, Labour is now to the left enough that she will join it again. Yes, that fresh new face! Labour has finally gone so far left that she feels comfortable to step up and be a fresh new face, Prime Minister, of the Labour Party.

Then, of course, there is another little fresh new face that is sneaking in—and you know I am getting to the big one—but Greg O’Connor is another good, fresh new face. He is a young, up-and-coming, inspirational young person, who less than 1 month ago said he had no plan for politics. But at least he is on the same no-plan pathway as his leader, quite frankly.

Maybe Andrew Little is the fresh new face. I mean, he has gotten rid of the glasses. He has shined himself up a bit. He has done that, so maybe he is the fresh new face. But then you heard him just yesterday, and you have seen him this week, and he has been as angry and negative towards New Zealanders and talking New Zealand down as you have ever seen.

Of course, you cannot go past the latest Alliance Party reboot: the great Willie Jackson, where the ultimate—ultimate—captain’s call has gone wrong. “There is no revolt!”, shouts Andy. “Labour is totally united!”, he hollers to us continually. “There is no open revolt!” There is no open revolt—well, quite frankly, tell that to Willie’s partnership schools, which Chris Hipkins wants to shut down. Tell that to the kids who are learning and getting ahead on a policy that actually works and is successful. Now, of course, Willie says he will stand by Labour—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Refer to members correctly.

Hon PAULA BENNETT: Certainly, Mr Speaker.

Jami-Lee Ross: But he’s not a member.

Hon PAULA BENNETT: He is not a member, but there you go.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Can I just clarify that we refer to people by their surnames; we do not use Christian names.

Hon PAULA BENNETT: I will do that, Mr Speaker. So then we get to Willie Jackson. “We need people like Willie Jackson”, says “Angry Andy”. I mean, that is “Angry Andrew”—oh, my God—Little. So there we go.

Hon Member: “Angry Andy”—she did it again.

Hon PAULA BENNETT: No, Andrew Little is what I said at the end of that.

Dr Megan Woods: No, you didn’t. You said: “Angry Andy”.

Hon PAULA BENNETT: I did so. Do not argue with me. Get a debate call.

Let us tell it to Poto Williams, who actually had to hire a PR firm and put that out—pay the 100 bucks an hour. This was not a moment when she felt she might get her point across on Facebook. We have all done it at times—when we have just thought: “Actually, I want to make a point.” This is someone who put enough consideration into it that she went to a PR firm, which then went to the media and put it there, and, when it did not get enough pick-up, put it on an open Facebook page, where she would—but there is no open revolt, remember, from Andy—“Angry Andrew”, angry “Angry Andrew Little”.

Mr SPEAKER: Order!

Hon PAULA BENNETT: There is none of that from Andrew Little; none of that at all. There is no support from Poto Williams’ leader, and no support from the Labour comms team, obviously, because they did not think it was a good idea. So she spoke out, actually, on something she felt principled enough on. She stood up and said what she saw.

What about Peeni Henare? How is he feeling? He was asked whether he would consider going on the list but was not told who might actually take his seat. “There is no open revolt, by the way.”, says Andrew Little. It is all resolved now! It is fine! There is no actual revolt there! Andrew Little says that it is all rumour. “Trust me, Peeni.”, he says. “That rumour was started by the Māori Party members. They were the ones who were saying that your seat was at risk.”, says Andrew Little. He says “Don’t worry.”, and then, all of a sudden, we have got Andrew Little literally shoulder-tapping Willie Jackson and saying: “You don’t want to go for this seat. We’d better not upset a member, but here’s a list place for him.”

Let us tell that to Nanaia Mahuta, who has actually just had her job in Government promised to Willie Jackson. Willie Jackson is the one who will be the Minister for Māori Development. Nanaia Mahuta has been a loyal servant to that party—and to Māoridom, actually, in many cases—for 18 years, and now she is told, in the media, that her job will be going to Willie Jackson. Tell that to the future leadership of Labour, Young Labour, which openly put a letter out there. We hear from Andrew Little that there is no open revolt; however, there is, and Young Labour, the leaders of the future, put out an open letter.

I do not even want to go to commenting on what Willie Jackson might think about Grant Robertson, because I think that it is personal, it is ugly, and it is just somewhere I do not want to go. But let us say that there is no open revolt. I mean, Annette King—how is your list-ranking place? You were not mentioned with the ones that Andrew Little said would be ahead of Willie Jackson. I am worried about you, Annette. I am worried about you.

Mr SPEAKER: Order!

Hon PAULA BENNETT: Annette King—I am worried about Annette King and the list ranking, because she was not mentioned. Right?

Sue Moroney—you are here. Sue Moroney, do you have to stand aside for Willie? Are you standing aside for Willie Jackson? That is just dreadful, Sue Moroney—not to mention that it is another woman cut out. No list ranking there. No list ranking there.

This is the one that does get me: David Parker can be in the list ranking. David Parker is ahead of Willie Jackson now.

Hon Steven Joyce: And Sue Moroney.

Hon PAULA BENNETT: No, I am not sure Sue Moroney is ahead of Willie Jackson. I have heard that Trevor Mallard is ahead of Willie Jackson. Trevor Mallard is.

Is it not the death knell, though, that your leader does not think you will win your seat if you are Kelvin Davis, and you are put before Willie Jackson? Actually, now Andrew Little does not think Kelvin Davis will win his seat, so he has had to put him up ahead in the rankings.

By the way, we all keep hearing about the democracy of the Labour Party—how it ranks candidates and how it selects them, and how open and transparent and wonderful its process is—and yet we have a captain’s call from Andrew Little that, quite frankly, is now ranking people via the media and putting them ahead of anyone else whom we are seeing. Let us just quickly recap. We have got no women up there, even though Labour has its quota system—remember? We have got a quota system for women, and there are no women now who are in the top.

I presume that Andrew Little is putting himself as No. 1 because, by the way, he is too scared to run against our Jonathan Young again—he is too scared to run against our Jonathan Young again. I do not blame him, actually. I do not blame him for that. But he is far too scared to actually step up and run in a seat again, because he will lose by—what was it? It was 12,000 votes, we were just hearing. That is where Jonathan Young has taken a Labour seat and now, well and truly, made it. I must say, I think that is a little—well, it is about how angry Andrew Little—

Mr SPEAKER: Order!

Hon PAULA BENNETT: —might get, but it is equally, of course, about how good Jonathan Young is. Let us be honest there.

But there we have that call. So we have got Andrew Little, one presumes, and then, in no particular—

Hon Steven Joyce: What, are you sure?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: Well, I am not totally sure. But then we have got David Parker, and then we have got Trevor Mallard, and then we have got Willie Jackson. A few women might be further down the pecking order, by the way, if we are lucky. We have got Raymond Huo, by the way, whom I have not seen hide nor hair of, but, of course, Labour does like the Chinese vote when it matters for it, and that is where it really does go.

Rt Hon Bill English: What about Laila?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: Well, Laila is up there somewhere, but then we are not really—

Hon Steven Joyce: Is she ahead of Trevor?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: She could be ahead of Trevor, but they are not really sure exactly where they are going.

Ladies and gentlemen, this just proves what an absolute shambles the Labour Party is. It cannot even run itself, let alone think about running this country and looking after New Zealanders and putting their interests first. The National-led Government is a Government that will continue to see the success of New Zealand, will put New Zealanders first, will look at what their needs are, and will work harder than anyone else in this country. I am really proud to be a part of the team that is doing that. Thank you.

Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour): For those who are listening in today, you have just heard a speech from the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand setting out the Government’s agenda in election year, and setting out the policies that they will go to the election on and fight for New Zealanders on. [Interruption] No, what we heard from the “Mistress of Blowhardiness and Blatherskite” was full of bluster and animal manure. There was not one mention of what their plans, their dreams, and their hopes are for New Zealanders, and not one word in support of her leader’s statement. She spent 10 minutes talking about the Labour Party. Well, when they cannot muster a paragraph on their own programme, that just tells us how worried they are about the Labour Party.

I have to say to the member that if she wants to talk about the new faces, she should have a look at the Cabinet that her leader chose. Bill English, the soufflé that never rose, is in first place—he is back. And then we have got the new face of David Bennett—the new Minister David Bennett—and of course we got Jacqui Dean. She is the new face of Cabinet. And Nick Smith—well, he is a very new face in Cabinet. I mean, I could go on, but I am not going to waste my time talking about National. I want to talk about the real issues that affect New Zealanders, because there are some real issues out there in our community.

We are a very good country. I am proud to be part of this country, which I was born in. I am a fifth generation New Zealander, and I have had some wonderful opportunities in my life. It is a country where I got a good education, where I got good jobs, where I had a chance to own my own home, and where I had healthcare when I needed it. I have been one of those—along, probably, with you, Mr Speaker. I must acknowledge that you are looking happy to be back in this place today.

Mr SPEAKER: Absolutely delighted.

Hon ANNETTE KING: Along with you, Mr Speaker, I am sure we have lived the Kiwi Dream. We have had that opportunity, and I have been very fortunate in my life, but I am worried that the opportunities that I have had will not be available for our kids and be not available for our grandkids. I am worried that that Kiwi Dream is slipping away from them and thousands of New Zealanders are missing out. We can do better. We must do better. But what did you hear from the Deputy Prime Minister on how we are going to do better? We heard ridicule, we heard her make jokes and talk about other political parties, but we did not hear one thing about how they will improve the lot of New Zealanders.

What we actually need is leadership. We need determination and we need commitment. But what do we have? We have Bill English, who is a slow follower. That is what he is, because he is too scared to make the hard decisions. He has to have it focus-grouped first and it has to be voter-tested. That slow, conservative, and dithering approach is not what is needed in New Zealand now. In New Zealand we actually need someone to step up, speak out, and have a vision for this country. That is exactly what Andrew Little offered in his state of the nation speech. That is what he offered in his speech here just a day ago. He stood in this House and he said that we are a great country and these are things that we need to do and that we can do together. We did not hear that from the Deputy Prime Minister.

I have to say—and maybe the Māori Party member Marama Fox will agree with me—that the only thing Bill English talks about is his social investment approach. It is his biggest claim to fame—

Marama Fox: Ask Willie. There’s a housing development—

Hon ANNETTE KING: Just wait. I call it the “emperor without clothes policy” because he was the Minister of Finance who would not fund Whānau Ora, who would not put in the money that was promised for Whānau Ora. Of course, the social investment policy is really just Whānau Ora with another name. He had the opportunity to fund it and make a difference, and he did not.

So what has happened under this Prime Minister? When he was the Minister of Finance, he oversaw $1.7 billion missing from the health budget. People say to me: “How can that be right? Every year National has put more money into health.” Well, I will tell you how it is right. If you do not cover the cost pressures in health, if you do not cover the wage pressures in health, and if you do not cover the population growth, a hole develops in your health budget. These are not my figures. They were worked out on the same Treasury calculations that have been used for decades—$1.7 billion is missing in the health budget over 8 years. We know it. Members cannot deny it if they are out in their communities and have not got their heads stuck in the sand. I can tell the members that I know what is happening out there—they must know what is happening.

Let us see what it is. Let us, first of all, look at where some of the pressures are because $1.7 billion is missing. Take mental health. Mental health services in New Zealand are under huge pressure. It does not matter where you look, there are people who are missing out. They cannot get mental health services. You must be seriously unwell to be able to access the service in New Zealand. You have to turn up to an emergency department—that is where you will get a service—or get brought into the service by the police because the crisis teams have been unable to address the issues. All around New Zealand there are people who are seriously mentally unwell and are not receiving the care that they should. That is not a country that we want to have. That is not providing the care that New Zealanders need when they need it. Emergency departments—failures. They are the measures. Have a look at them I say to the members opposite with their heads down because they know it is true.

Let me talk about the second issue that shows you how there is money missing out of the health budget: the cost of going to your doctor. Many New Zealanders have not been able to afford to go to a doctor—434,000 New Zealanders in the last year did not go to their GP, because of the cost. The cost was $28 in 2008; it is now $40 and going up—that is the average. It can be far higher than that. Maybe those on very low-cost access are going, but those who are not are paying top dollar—and they are not going.

The third issue that I want to put up as a measure of this Government not addressing the health needs of New Zealanders—one of the fundamental requirements of any good Government—is the New Zealanders who are going blind because they have not received treatment. This is a First World country. I can tell you that it started with the 38 patients in the Southern District Health Board area who have irreversible partial sight loss because they waited too long for a follow-up treatment. Imagine how scary it would be to not have a treatment that you need, because the Government could not provide the follow-up treatment. That is 38 people just in the Southern—

Marama Fox: Happened to Māori all the time—170 years of it. They died.

Hon ANNETTE KING: Let me tell the member opposite—[Interruption] No, these are not—I beg your pardon?

Marama Fox: They died—Māori—all the time. For 170 years.

Hon ANNETTE KING: Well, yes. I have not even got on to people dying. What I am saying is that I have listened for years to those members opposite bemoaning the fact that a Labour Government in the early 2000s sent patients to Australia for cancer treatment because we did not have the facilities, we did not have the equipment, and we did not have the staff after 9 years of a National Government. But we got them treatment. What do we have now with people losing their sight? They did not get treatment. But it is not just those 38. What does the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists say? It says there are 20,000 to 21,000 people overdue for follow-up treatment, and that is just from five district health boards—and that is not all of them. It estimates that more than 100 people could lose their vision or go blind because of the delays. Can you believe that in a country like New Zealand we cannot provide the treatment that people can have for conditions that can be treated? I find it terrible—a shame on this Government.

So I say to the members opposite that it is time to look at what is good for this country, what is needed, and what the people are asking for. They are asking to be able to own their homes. They are asking for a good education for their kids. They are asking to have health services when they need them—not when it is convenient for the Government to provide them, if they have got some money. You see, they are basic things that people are asking for. They want a job that pays a reasonable wage, and that is not too much to ask. But what did we get today? We got a speech from the Deputy Prime Minister that was a disgrace. It is a disgrace that you could stand in this House and talk about another party and never mention what your dreams, hopes, and vision for this country are.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Children): Mr Speaker, can I start by wishing you a happy New Year and the same to my colleagues around the House. Also I have a word of sympathy for those of the staff who live here in Wellington, because up in the Bay of Plenty and the East Coast we have had a fantastic summer and it is pretty miserable down here in Wellington. As I say, I do feel sorry for them.

I have a message for the member who has just resumed her seat, Annette King: if you do not want people to talk about you, you actually have to behave as if you really are focused on the things that matter to New Zealanders—not worry what is happening on the backbenches behind you, because then everyone will be talking about you. That is just a reality. If you want to be in Government, you have got to learn to govern yourselves before you can get the privilege of governing other people. So that is just a little word of advice to those on the other side.

I just want to talk today about poverty, because there was a question in question time earlier. For quite some time the Labour Party members have been focused on things about poverty that actually do not really count—and I want to make that point today. They have talked a lot about how we measure it, as if we are going to go out, knock on doors, and get a statistical record of how many people are actually suffering from poverty. I do not mean to demean anyone who is suffering hardship, but the reality is—and it is recognised internationally—that to try to measure poverty using one simple measure is impossible.

Carmel Sepuloni: Choose one.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: You cannot choose one. That is the whole point. It is multidimensional. It is on a spectrum from bad to worse, it is complex, and it is impossible, and no country in the world has successfully managed to come up with a simple measure for poverty. For year after year, I have listened to the Opposition talking about how we measure it. Well, this Government has got on with addressing it, and in order to address it you have to understand what the drivers of poverty are. All I hear from the Opposition is: “We are going to legislate against it. We’ve got a bill in the ballot. We’re going to legislate against poverty.” I mean, how ridiculous is that?

The other alternative that I hear from the Opposition is that they are going to throw money at it. They are not quite sure where the money is going to go and they do not like it when we actually give the money to some of the poorest people in this country—those who are dependent on a benefit. I would have thought—the first time in 40 years—we would have got some acknowledgment of that, but, no, the Opposition voted against that, strangely enough, while at the same time wanting to put more money in. So the real answers as to how to address poverty have not come from the opposite side of this House. The real answers have come from this Government, which has looked at what the drivers of poverty are and how we address those to help people lift themselves out of poverty; not the Government taking action to get them out of poverty.

The first thing we have looked at, of course, is benefit dependency. If you want to be poor, you live on a benefit for a long period of time. I do not know how many of those people manage, and I take my hat off to those who have to raise a family on the small amount of money that is the benefit. It was never designed to be a lifestyle support. It has always been given by the taxpayers to support those who have fallen on hard times whilst they get themselves back on their feet. That is the whole principle around Whānau Ora. That is why this Government has supported Whānau Ora, which is about families, independent of the Government, looking after themselves and their children and living in New Zealand in the way we want all New Zealanders to do. So the first thing we have to do is get them independent from the taxpayer, off a benefit, and into work.

We have had major success. In fact, the proportion of the population now that is dependent on a benefit—they are receiving our main benefits—

Carmel Sepuloni: And then find out what they do when they go off benefit to see that they are OK, rather than leaving a tetraplegic woman to live in a van because there is no follow-up from Work and Income New Zealand.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: —and you can yell, but it does not change the facts. It is 10.3 percent; 10.3 percent of our population are receiving a main benefit, and that is the lowest it has been in a December quarter since prior to the global financial crisis. I think that is a tremendous achievement that this Government and, more importantly, hard-working New Zealanders have made to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

The best group of the lot, of course, are sole parents, most of whom know that the best future for their children is not living on a benefit for long periods of time. I was really shocked when I had a look at some statistics—and I am having them brought up to date. To June 2015, if you look at those people in our population who are dependent on a main benefit, 71 percent of them had been a child in a benefit-dependent home during their childhood—71 percent. That is appalling and we have to change that. If we are talking about intergenerational dependence, we have to stop that happening to the children of today, and the best way we can do that is to help their parents into work. So the total number of those on sole parent support now is just under 65,000. That is an enormous reduction in the number of sole parents relying on a benefit, and that is great for them and it is great for their kids.

There are now over 50,000 fewer children living in benefit-dependent homes than there were in 2011, so we know that those children have good role models—their parents are working. I know that many of those parents have gone into perhaps unskilled, lower-paid jobs—I hope they are secure jobs—but they are on the ladder of employment. They are in a position where they can go on to earn more money. If they are on a benefit, they are waiting for a Consumers Price Index increase every year. That is all they can look forward to. But if they are earning money in employment, they are able to get on that ladder and increase their incomes.

So, on behalf of the taxpayer, this Government is absolutely committed to helping people get into employment and lift themselves and their families out of poverty by a whole range of means, not the least being the education statistics that my colleague Minister Parata espoused in question time today. One of the best levers to help people into employment is making sure that they get qualifications, and to see the tremendous advances that have been made in educational achievement, particularly by Māori and Pasifika—who form too big a part of our benefit statistics—I think is outstanding, and I am amazed that the House did not burst into spontaneous applause. It is absolutely fantastic, and it is due to those hard-working teachers and parents who have worked hard and supported those young people to get those educational qualifications.

So when we come to look at the statistics around poverty, unfortunately there are still too many people who are experiencing hardship, and that is why this Government invested $790 million in Budget 2015-16. We will see the effects of that partly in this year’s Ministry of Social Development household incomes report and fully in the 2018 incomes report. It takes a while for the statistics to feed through.

In the meantime, we are not sitting on our hands. We have done a tremendous amount to help those families who are experiencing difficulties and financial hardship. We have increased their childcare support. We have introduced the free doctors visits and prescriptions for children under 13. We have extended paid parental leave and we have increased parental tax credits. We have served, alongside our partners Fonterra and Sanitarium, over 8 million breakfasts in schools—over 8 million breakfasts that this Government and its partners have provided to New Zealand children over the last few years. We support organisations like KidsCan, which makes sure, particularly at the start of the year, that kids have shoes and sandals, that they have raincoats, and of course we have supported the Nit Busters programme.

This Government does not just talk about poverty and hardship; this Government has set out to address the drivers of poverty and hardship and support New Zealand families to lift themselves out of that hardship.

TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First): Kia ora, Mr Speaker. Yesterday the Hon Nikki Kaye returned to the House, and it was great to see her. It was great to see her on her feet and as passionate as she has ever been, I believe, with regard to New Zealand education and New Zealand children.

One of the things that Minister Kaye did was she challenged the Opposition to fact check. So I decided that I would. I went away and had a look at a couple of things that had been said by the Government and its support parties. I want to start with some things that the Māori Party and the ACT Party made mention of in their contributions yesterday, and it is something that they have said a few times. One of them is the statement that New Zealand First does not support settlement bills. So I thought: well, I will go and find out—I will go and find out.

New Zealand First has been in this Parliament since the 45th Parliament, since 1996. We had a small break between 2008 and 2011, where we refreshed and came back in strength—and came back in strength. During that time, there were 54 settlement bills. During the time that New Zealand First has been in the House, there have been 54 settlement bills. Of those settlement bills, New Zealand First has voted in favour of 49. New Zealand First has voted against five. The ACT Party has voted against seven.

Let us be clear. When the Government support parties want to talk about who supports settlements, on record, in the Hansard, they need to have a look at the people whom they sit just down from rather than shouting across the House with regard to New Zealand First.

Tim Macindoe: New Zealand First still welched on the deal late last year.

TRACEY MARTIN: I would suggest to the Government whip that if the Government is going to include secret clauses that even Māoridom do not know about in legislation—secret clauses that Māoridom do not even know about in legislation—then they should expect some opposition from the Opposition.

Let us also have a talk about the fact that the Māori Party yesterday apparently took credit for, among other contributions or other things that they have achieved for Māori, free doctors visits. I will agree that the co-leader of the Māori Party amended that initial statement to say “raising the age of”. This is a party that says, and colludes with others to say, that New Zealand First does not stand for Māori and that the Rt Hon Winston Peters does not stand for Māori in this House. In 2005 free doctors visits, which yesterday the Māori Party claimed credit for in its coalition with the National Government, was introduced in a memorandum of understanding between New Zealand First and the Labour Party. So let us get clear: you cannot have it both ways. Alternative facts, at the end of the day, will be shown to be exactly that.

So if we keep going forward, Mr Seymour, for example, talked about expanding charter schools because they are doing so well. I believe that the Māori Party supported that vigorously yesterday. Let us just be clear: I believe that the co-leader of the Māori Party shouted out again and again and again that they are working for Māori. Let us be clear: 95 percent—

Marama Fox: Ask Willie. I think I said: “Ask Willie”.

TRACEY MARTIN: I do not need to talk to Mr Jackson, ma’am. You are speaking to the wrong party. They completely disregard the fact that 95 percent of Māori students in this country are at English-medium schools, completely ignoring all those Māori students whom apparently the Māori Party does not care about, because it is concentrating only on charter schools in this supposed position of power. But let us be clear about their academic outcomes, shall we? Let us be clear.

In November last year the Ministry of Education put out a report quite clearly showing that the data that was used—Mr Seymour of the ACT Party stood up and said that Vanguard, for example, had a 100 percent NCEA level 2 pass rate. What is unfortunate is that there is a Ministry of Education report that says: “Oh, dang. They didn’t report it in the same way that every other State school has to report it.” So that pass rate dropped to 60 percent—60 percent.

Hon Anne Tolley: You want to fact check that, because they don’t have to report it that way.

TRACEY MARTIN: You fact check it, ma’am. If I have to, you have to do it. Sorry, Mr Speaker, not you, but I suggest that Minister Tolley might like to go and check the ministerial education report.

Then what we have is we have Te Kāpehu Whetū (Teina) achieving only two of its 18 targets—only two of its 18 targets—but apparently this is doing wonderfully well for Māori students; so well that Mr Seymour says that this country should expand charter schools so that we can spread the profit margin around the sector there. Not only that, but this Government apparently has agreed with Mr Seymour to start opening science charter schools and technology charter schools. Perhaps other speakers from the Government might like to stand and take a call on that. Perhaps they could tell us how that works out.

What was interesting about the Prime Minister’s speech was that he did not say a thing about students. He did not say a thing about students. He did not mention the number of Victoria University students who have been walking around the streets trying to find somewhere to live. He did not talk about the students up in Auckland who have been swapping sex for somewhere to live. He did not talk about the university student associations that are handing out more food parcels than they have ever handed out before. He did not talk about the special needs students.

Talk about fact check! Ms Parata stands and talks about how well this Government is doing in education, and yet we have just had the Education and Science Committee ask for another review—around about the 10th review—of how badly we are delivering as a country for children with special needs. There are one in five children with dyslexia and one in eight children suffering from dyspraxia. There are so many cases of autism now that we do not have any level of professionalism to deal with it.

One of the other things that Mr English did not comment on was workforce planning. Do we have any—do we have any? We do not since this Government removed it 2 years ago. Mr Joyce removed anybody’s responsibility for workforce planning. But what we do have, and it was mentioned in Mr English’s speech, was a new global impact visa, which will be piloted to attract up to 400 young technology entrepreneurs. So there are 100 places for international candidates per year, but only 20 places to support current New Zealand entrepreneurs in technology are going to be funded by this Government. This is what the Prime Minister said yesterday.

But wait, there is more. Of those 100 places for international candidates per year, they get the opportunity for a 3-year open work visa and are then eligible to apply for permanent residency. This is designed to attract those who may not be able to qualify under other visa categories. So we have not got enough people coming into the country at the moment! We have got high levels of unemployment, particularly among our young people. Forty-one thousand work visas were handed out last year, and this Government has decided “What we’ll do is we won’t tell the New Zealand public that actually we’re not going to cut down on work visas; we’re going to come up with something with another name for people who can’t use the usual process, for average everyday Joe, and we’re going to give them another streamlined pathway into New Zealand. That’s what we’ll do because that’s what the New Zealanders are crying out for. We just won’t tell them that’s what we’re going to do. We are sure they will agree with us by the time it’s too late to do anything about it.”

It has been an interesting debate from the perspective of alternative facts. Never before have I sat in this House and listened to so many people spin rubbish. The country has people living in cars, and Mr Seymour says that you should vote for the ACT Party because it has been delivering a rational economic policy that has allowed people to build their lives—their lives in cars, their lives where their children are so transient that they cannot gain a proper education. Interestingly enough, it was the proprietor of a charter school who made that statement to me. They said: “Oh, it’s really difficult because Māori students are so transient.” Oh my goodness! It is because they cannot find a job, it is because they cannot find a house, it is because they cannot connect to their communities, and that is why the public school system has been saying it for years. Charter schools are not the answer. This Government is not the answer. Bring on 23 September.

Hon ALFRED NGARO (Minister for Pacific Peoples): I quite like that member, Tracey Martin. I think that she is passionate. I think that she comes up with different ideas. She definitely does her homework. I have to say that that speech was not the most positive speech that I have heard from that member, nor was it being aspirational. When one has a party that is called New Zealand First, it should then be about messages that put New Zealanders first, and that is exactly what this National-led Government under the Rt Hon Bill English is actually doing.

Mr Deputy Speaker, can I wish you a happy New Year—and it is great to be here in the House—and also to all other members in the House.

I have to say that before we started we had one of our national days of celebration. It was Waitangi Day, and it was great to be with the Prime Minister. We were at Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei Marae, and it was a surreal moment for those of us who have been up to Te Tii Marae—it was one of those ones when you are surrounded by Māori wardens, there are police, there are security officers, there are protesters, and, in a sense, it is all on. It is all happening. And there we were at Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei Marae, at 7.30 in the morning, sitting in the wharenui, and there was a back door open. We were at the front of the paepae, the mihis were happening, the back door was open, and people were just wandering around—there was none of that. What occurred to me was this: this is the place and this is what it is meant to be like in regard to celebrating the things of importance for New Zealanders, which Waitangi Day should represent.

As the mihis started to go on, we had the different members of the public who were there, and, especially, they were remembering Bastion Point. As Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei said, this was the appropriate place to be for Waitangi Day 2017, not only to commemorate but to celebrate the importance of that. Joe Hawke was there—part of the Hawke whānau. He could remember, 40 years ago at Bastion Point, making a stand for the justice of the whenua, of the land, and of the people, and that was critically important.

But here is the other message that came out of that, too. The reason why they asked, in the invitation to the Prime Minister of the day, was that they could see that they now need to continue to grow this relationship with the Crown and with the Government. The Rt Hon Bill English got up and he spoke, and he said: “Here is the importance of that relationship.” In other words, you can talk, and talk is cheap, but what is it in that relationship that has truly made a difference in those 8 years? Here is what he talked about, on the importance of the Treaty on the day of Waitangi. He said: “Under a National-led Government, of the 82 Treaty claims, how many have been completed under a National-led Government? Sixty-six Treaty claims have been completed.”

Sixty-six—that is a great accomplishment. That is an achievement. That is leadership to the heart of the nation. So when people talk about things that should be done, that is what this Government is leading, and it is its commitment. But if we were to break down to the average Kiwi and the average New Zealander what the difference is under a National-led Government in this partnership and this relationship—let us take it under the Treaty of Waitangi—for Māori in this community, it is simply this: you get to choose. You get to choose your destiny. You get to choose the pathway for your whānau, for your people, for your iwi, for your hapū. You get to choose.

No longer should it be the Government making the determination of your destiny or your future. That is the difference under this National-led Government. That is the difference that we heard about in the talk that was happening. And the talk was not cheap, because even in the wharekai, as the messages went around—and, yes, we had Tukoroirangi Morgan from Tainui and others who were there. They were saying that this is what Waitangi Day should be.

This is the sort of relationship that we can expect under a National-led Government, where the bottom line is this: actually, let the communities choose. Let the people choose their destiny and their determination. A simple principle: less of government, more of community, and more of people. That is right—that is a fact that you can tick. That is a fact that is out there. You cannot argue with that, and you cannot argue with the speeches that came from the people who were there.

I want to say this: I am proud to be able to go through the rest of that day, because the Rt Hon Bill English is a Prime Minister who says what he means and means what he says. I remember that we went down to Ōkahu Bay and the people there were coming to talk to him about the things that make the difference. They talked about law and order, they talked about the health situation in our country, and they talked about education—things that are important to the heart of our communities, as well. Those things are quite critically important, and I have to say that that is critically important to us.

Here is another key message: under this Government, what are we focused on? Opportunities for all people. So let us back up the rhetoric. If I turn around and say that I trust this Prime Minister to deliver on what he says and to mean what he says—I can remember going with this Prime Minister and we were at the Henderson High School teen parenting unit. I have to say that Henderson High School is my old high school, so I am not being biased. There we were, and Helen Peke, who is the kaiako there, was turning around, and there were a number of these teen parents there. As they were talking, the Prime Minister asked them this question. He said “What does it mean to be here in this teen parent unit?”, and they simply said this: “It means there is an opportunity for me to further my future. I’ve made a choice in my life and I don’t have to just settle for it. I can determine another destiny for me, for my children, and for my future.” Then this is what he simply said: “Well, here’s what I’ll make as a commitment. We’ll back you 150 percent of the way. All you’ve got to do is continue to back yourself.”

So what is the result out of that? We have the lowest rates of teen parents, of sole parents, in New Zealand since 1988. That is an achievement. That is one that you can tick off. You can fact-check that. That is critically important for us and for this country as well. That is truly making a difference as well.

People wanted to know about the plan. I can remember there was a time in this House when many speeches over there—and my good friend and parliamentary colleague Kris Faafoi was talking about the health of some of the families that he was working with in Mana, and the fact was that they needed to get to GPs. They were struggling to pay the fees to go to the general practitioner to care for their kids. He said: “Not only that, but I go down to the local chemist and there were prescriptions that were sitting at the chemist’s and they weren’t being picked up. Why? Because parents could not afford the prescriptions.”

So what has happened under this Government? Free GP visits for all of us under 13. Secondly, under that, prescriptions are also paid for as well. And here are the Ginsu knives, as well: importantly, we are looking at dealing with the issues around rheumatic fever. This is a Government that is not just big on talk but big on action. I know that Mr Faafoi will be happy because that has met a critical need that he has in his own community of Mana, and that is critically important, as well.

Let us talk about the HomeStart package. I went to a debate—in fact, I was at that debate with Mr Sio Williams, and we were there, and the young people were asking: “Is it affordable?”.

Carmel Sepuloni: Didn’t you know his name? It’s Su’a William Sio.

Hon ALFRED NGARO: Su’a William Sio—sorry. We were at this debate and we were talking about housing affordability. I know that the conversation was about whether it was affordable for young graduates coming up. I had to say to them that, look, here was the reality: when many of us started to get our first homes—I will put my hand up; I was 34 years old, the tender age of 34, before I went into a house—when I went into a house, it was not the flashiest, DIY stuff; it was the things that we had to do to make a difference. In fact, the curtains were sheets.

Here is the simple message. Sorry, but I want to acknowledge Jenny Salesa; I did not see that Jenny Salesa was in the Chamber, but she was there, as well. I said to them: “Don’t give up the dream, but begin to start now, and you can make your way there.”, because here is what this Government has done. Under a HomeStart package, with the grants for buyers, we have now put $435 million into the HomeStart package to help 90,000 people—first-home buyers—into a home. So far, since March 2016, 12,000 have taken that opportunity, with another $10,000 package that is helping them get into homes. That is the commitment under this Government, under the leadership of the Rt Hon Bill English.

I want to talk about education. For Pasifika communities, education is absolutely, critically important, and I would have thought the fact is that right across the House, across Parliament, people are saying that we should be celebrating and working together. Well, here is an announcement that is truly making a difference. I have been involved in boards of trustees for over 20 years, with my children and in the communities. The thing that we want to see is that we know that for a lot of our Māori and Pasifika kids it is about entering into early childhood education, or kōhanga reo—you know, language nests—to help give them that ability to be able to gain confidence in the curriculum. We know that, under this Government, not only have we set a target but we have achieved that target into the 90 percents, where more of our Pasifika children are now entering into early childhood education, which is giving them a much better start.

But let us talk about participation rates and completion rates. It is not only that; now there are the retention rates and the completion rates for Pasifika in tertiary education. So we know that back in 2006 they were down in the low 40 and 50 percents. We know that in 2015-16 they are now up at 70 to 80 percent. Those are the completion rates that we are seeing for Pasifika for education, which we know makes a difference.

Can I simply say this: under this Government and under the leadership of the Rt Hon Bill English, we know that we are making a difference. It is not about the talk, which is cheap; it is about the action, which makes a difference. We have got a plan that is comprehensive and is making a difference. It is dealing with the critical issues of concern but, most importantly, we are not going to keep beating the deprivation drum, to turn around and talk about all the things that go wrong. In fact, we are going to talk about aspiration. We are going to talk about the opportunities for enterprise and economic development that make a difference for our families, for our children, for our whānau. This is the party—the National Party—that does put New Zealanders first. Thank you.

KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. Ngā mihi o Te Tau Hou ki a tātou katoa. We have just heard a fantastic speech there by Alfred Ngaro, just telling us—

Fletcher Tabuteau: No, too far—too far.

KELVIN DAVIS: Well, yes, I do not want to go too far, but I—I overstepped the mark there, sorry. He spent the first part of his speech telling us what a great day he had at Waitangi, how he spent his time trailing around the country with the Prime Minister and what a fantastic day it was. The trouble is that they were not actually celebrating Waitangi Day at the place where the Treaty was signed. What is the difference between Governor William Hobson in 1840 and Prime Minister William—

Su’a William Sio: English.

KELVIN DAVIS: —English in 2017? The difference is that Governor Hobson was at Waitangi on 6 February in 1840.

Su’a William Sio: He fronted.

KELVIN DAVIS: He fronted. Who did he front to? He fronted to a group of angry Māoris. He fronted to the likes of Pōmare, my tupuna. He fronted to the likes of Te Kēmara, he fronted to the likes of Kāwiti, and he fronted to the likes of Te Tirarau—all these great Ngāpuhi ancestors. He had the courage to front like a leader. Kanohi ki te kanohi [Face to face], as we say.

I tell you what, Māori really love and appreciate when somebody has the courage of a leader to turn up, eyeball to eyeball, and say what they think. I would not have blamed Andrew Little for not turning up to Waitangi Day. He got the same memo that Bill English did: “No, you are not going to be able to speak there.” But Andrew Little, the leader he is, said: “Kelvin, I’m going to that. I’m going to Te Tii Marae. I’m going there and I’m going to tell those people exactly what I think, and I’m going to give them an opportunity to talk to me.” Andrew Little fronted up in front of the TV cameras—there were about 10 cameras and a whole heap of other microphones in front of him. Before we went across the river to the marae he said: “I’m going to tell these people that their media ban is wrong.”

What did Andrew Little do? He stood at the gate of that marae. We got called on, and he took the opportunity that he said he would and he told it to them straight—assertively, but with respect—that he thought the media ban was wrong. He had the courage, as a leader, to do what was right. He did not turn up 3 or 4 days in advance and speak to 50, basically, pacified, placated iwi leaders—0.001 percent of the Māori population in New Zealand—a group of Māori who have got enough crumbs to, basically, make up seven-tenths of a loaf of bread, and who are told: “If you want the other three-tenths of your loaf of bread, be nice to me. Say nice things about us.” Instead, Andrew Little, the man he is, fronted up.

Andrew Little did not have a battalion of Diplomatic Protection Squad (DPS) people around him, protecting him—because I have seen what the previous Prime Minister had in terms of DPS support. Walking through the airport there, there were four people clearing the way for him, with their telephone cords going down their backs and plugged into their ears—four people. That is walking through the airport on the way to the Koru Club, so I would hate to think how many DPS staff Bill English might have had at Waitangi, if he had been there. Well, Andrew Little had, I think, two, maybe three, sort of loitering, but when he went on to that marae, he had on one side of him Willow-Jean Prime, and I was on the other side of him. In Andrew Little’s words, he said: “Thank goodness Willow-Jean was there.” Andrew Little heard the edict “You will not be allowed to talk.”, but he also knows just the nature of the debate on Te Tii Marae, and on many marae. Basically, when you have got the floor, the floor is yours. Andrew Little knew that. He had the guts to stand up and talk to the people of Ngāpuhi and to give them the opportunity to talk to him.

Straight after the pō’hiri, we went out and we were in the “issues” tent, where political issues are raised. There was a crowd of about—I do not know—over 100, or 150 maybe, which was able to throw questions at Andrew Little. He stood there and he answered them. Not everyone was going to agree with him, and not everyone liked what he had to say. I mean, Tukoroirangi Morgan was not happy with what Andrew Little had to say, but Andrew Little stood there, and he got a great reception from the people. Bill English—where was he when the people of Waitangi wanted to actually direct questions to him? I mean, what is the worst that could happen, in this day and age, on Waitangi? Back in 1840, for William Hobson, if my ancestors really did not like what he had to say, they could have knocked him on the head and then spread him out in the next hāngi. The worst that could have happened to Bill English going on to Te Tii Marae is, maybe, getting a tongue-lashing from an 80-year-old nanny in a Zimmer frame. Andrew Little was not afraid of that 80-year-old nanny in a Zimmer frame.

So, despite being told he could not speak, Andrew Little went there, and he gained immense respect from the taumata of Te Tii Marae, the people of Te Tii Marae, and all the thousands of New Zealanders who were there. That was on 5 February. The next day, 6 February, not only was Andrew Little in the whare rūnanga, up on the Treaty grounds there, to give a lovely prayer for the country, he was also at Hoani Waititi Marae later that afternoon, and then also down here in Wellington at another Waitangi Day event.

So we have heard Alfred Ngaro talking about how it was great that Bill English went on to Ōrākei Marae and he had this opportunity to talk about the relationship between the Government and iwi, and I say: “Well, what’s wrong with the other 364 days of the year when that sort of thing can happen?” Really, Bill English should have fronted, should have been at Waitangi, and should have given the people of Tai Tokerau the opportunity, because that is where the Treaty was signed. There is no point running away from that.

Carmel Sepuloni: Gingerbread man.

KELVIN DAVIS: Gingerbread man—run, run, run, as fast as you can. It was just like, you know—celebrating Waitangi Day elsewhere in the country is like celebrating Rātana down in Gore. You have got to celebrate Waitangi Day up in Waitangi. The Prime Minister could be there in the morning, shoot around anywhere else in the middle of the day, and get somewhere else in the afternoon, just like Andrew Little did. The man is full of energy, he is getting around, and he is being seen.

It is really disappointing that the Prime Minister, in his first opportunity to really front and show that he has got some political courage and some political leadership, ended up turning tail and running. All we saw of Bill was the back of him. In fact, we did not even see that, because when he disappeared through the dust cloud, it was like he had gone through the back roads of Pipiwai, where the dust is blown up and choking the locals there. We did not see Bill English for the dust.

What has Bill English inherited—what has he inherited from his predecessor? Well, he has inherited a housing crisis that is just spiralling further and further out of control. First-home buyers are locked out of the market, 41,000 people are homeless—and a lot of those people are up north, too, I have to say. They are homeless and unemployed. The Prime Minister could have been there to hear from some of these homeless people and some of these unemployed people up in Tai Tokerau, but where was he? He was gone—disappeared amongst the dust.

The way the Government has decided to address the housing crisis is to remove “housing” from the titles of its Ministers. So, really, now we do not know who is actually in charge of trying to rectify the—well, we believe we know who is in charge, but without a “housing” label to their title, it is a bit hard. It is a way of the Government just, sort of, shuffling responsibility, so that nobody really gets pinged for the mess that housing is. Our homeownership rate is the lowest it has been since 1951—that is an indictment. My three children, aged 18, 20, and 22 this year—how are they going to afford a house? They will struggle—they will struggle. They want to move to Auckland. I am not quite sure, really, that they are going to be able to achieve that, because they cannot afford the million dollars that the average house costs in Auckland. They cannot afford that, and I do not know how all my other relations’ children are going to afford it.

One in seven Auckland houses are now sold to major property speculators. As Andrew Little said, what is wrong with saying to property speculators overseas: “If you want to come to New Zealand and own a house, then build one. Don’t come here and increase the housing problem by just buying up houses left, right, and centre. Build your own. Build your own, and then we don’t have to worry about trying to find another house for a New Zealander who is having difficulty with their house.”?

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am sorry to interrupt the member, but his time is long gone. A 5-minute call on behalf of the National Party—Chris Bishop.

CHRIS BISHOP (National): Well, yesterday’s speeches were such a contrast, were they not, between the upbeat, aspirational message of the Rt Hon Bill English and Andrew Little’s speech. This year is going to be a big contrast, and first and foremost this year will be a contrast between the stability offered by this National-led Government and Bill English, and the instability on the benches opposite. It did not take long for the vibe of the Labour-Greens state of the nation policy launch to wear off. What happened on the weekend was something unprecedented. It was admitted by Kris Faafoi on Breakfast this morning that it was unprecedented. We had this extraordinary spectacle of Poto Williams, an MP inside the Labour Party—a sitting MP—hiring a public relations firm to put out a press release expressing opposition to her leader, Andrew Little. Unbelievable.

There is a petition running online right now from Labour Party members in opposition to Willie Jackson joining the Labour Party. The fresh faces of Labour’s renewal are Laila Harré and Willie Jackson, although, in some ways, that is probably appropriate because Willie Jackson knows all about coups. He knows all about rolling leaders, because when he was an MP, for just 3 years between 1999 and 2002, he rolled the leader, Sandra Lee, of the Mana Motuhake o Aotearoa party, which was part of the Alliance. So it is highly appropriate that he should be aspiring to join a caucus that knows all about coups and that knows all about rolling leaders. We are looking forward to having him inside the Parliament, up high on the Labour Party list, ahead of Trevor Mallard and ahead of David Parker, their intellectual heavyweight. We are looking forward to it. So things over on the other side of the House are an absolute mess at the moment.

Scott Simpson: Open revolt.

CHRIS BISHOP: It is open revolt, as my good colleague Scott Simpson says. This Government offers stability and solidity.

It will also be a contrast this year between the visions of the economy of the parties: an open, outward-looking, focused economy offered by this National-led Government, and an inward, close-minded mentality offered by members opposite. This party and this Government believe that New Zealand’s future lies with being open to the world, with trading on the world stage, with welcoming foreign investment, and with welcoming migrants to this country, whereas the Labour Party and parties opposite are the parties opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, the parties opposed to foreign investment, and the parties opposed to New Zealand making its way on the world stage.

It will also be a contrast between a party and a Government that are focused on getting results with Government spending, and a party and parties opposite that measure success only by the quantum of spending. This Government is very focused on doing more with less and on getting results out of our public services. We have heard members on this side of the House talk about that so far in the debate today, but Labour and parties opposite measure success by how much they can increase budgets. We saw the mess that that got us into in the mid-2000s, which National had to sort out after 2008.

This will be a year that is marked by a contrast in approaches to tackling social problems. This Government is pioneering an innovative, fresh approach to tackling our intractable social problems, using data and innovative approaches like Whānau Ora, and utilising the skills and expertise of our social sector, our non-governmental organisations, and even our private sector. We call this social investment. Parties opposite increasingly just rely on the failed formulas of the past: big Government. They have never seen a problem a good dollop of Government spending could not solve. Well, we know that that has not worked. We know, as our Prime Minister said, that it results in servicing misery and in ever-increasing Government Budgets increasingly servicing misery in our communities. We are determined to tackle the problems that have bedevilled New Zealand for far too long, and that is what we are doing.

Fifthly and finally, this year will be a contrast, most importantly, between aspiration and negativity. This party and this Government have an aspirational, ambitious vision for New Zealand: making its way on the world stage, confident, welcoming of migrants, welcoming of the multicultural society that New Zealand increasingly is, and tackling those hard problems that have bedevilled us. Parties opposite are characterised by relentless negativity: negativity about New Zealand’s prospects and negativity about how we can tackle those prospects in the world. That is the contrast that will be placed before the New Zealand people on 23 September, and I have every confidence they will choose the optimistic path and re-elect this Government.

MARAMA FOX (Co-Leader—Māori Party): It has been quite enjoyable sitting down and listening to the rhetoric of politicians, and I have to admit that I am a politician, but I am a little bit over politicians. For the last few weeks, I have been travelling around the country, and it all culminated in Waitangi, where I heard deals being done and half-truths being spoken and information being misinterpreted just to see who could get the limelight, to see who could stand at the front of the list and have all the nation look at them. Well, I will tell you, I am a little bit over it. Waitangi is, in fact, a celebration of nationhood—the birthplace of this nation, where our people came together. Both the whakapapa of my father and the whakapapa of my mother came together and signed a union to live together in harmony. But there are two different versions of that Treaty. One says we never ceded sovereignty; the other says we did. Our country does not know how to live with the reconciliation of that, and so we agree to live by its principles, because that is more palatable and easier to understand.

You know what? It was a very interesting time watching all this manoeuvring going on and being accused of being deceitful for somehow misleading the people in regard to Willie Jackson going to the Labour Party. I know I have heard a lot that has been said in the past couple of days about how he thinks about us, but I am going to quote this one. “[I]n the past two years, he”—Flavell—“has done a good job for Maori, and can feel satisfied with a new Whanau Ora injection”. He goes on to say: “Flavell knows the Maori spend is minimal in any budget and I know from experience that the Labour spend for Maori was never particularly high. … But in politics you have two choices: Be part of the opposition and have no opportunity to advance anything; or be part of government and take the chance to advance things for your people. Flavell has taken the second option and for that choice he deserves to be commended.” That was Willie Jackson in May 2016.

It is not that I do not appreciate the game of politics, but I wonder what the heck happened to the values of the people who walk in this place, because some of them I see advocating—

Stuart Nash: You are aligned with the National Party and you’re talking about values?

MARAMA FOX: —for things like stripping every reference to Māoridom out of the Resource Management Act. That is what New Zealand First promises. Some of them say “Don’t give those Māoris a say in water.”—that was said in this House—or that the Government has been “brownmailed” by the Māori Party. “Don’t you dare give those lake beds and those riverbeds to Māori.” And yet beside that member is a man who was the chief negotiator for an iwi to get just that.

Then we hear “This is our new face who has a charter school, who is establishing a social housing development”—which we have been assisting in, for the right thing to do for our people, because that is right, do it for the people—“and who has a Whānau Ora provider.” And now they are just going to bury that under the carpet when they walk in the House? Come on, politicians. I have really had enough of left wing, right wing, because it is the same bird. For 170 years we have been at the behest of the same bird. Have we gotten any better? Actually, for a few things in the last few years, we have, and it is by no coincidence that that has happened, because the Māori Party sits in Government. I hear what you say, Mr Nash. I hear what you say, but we did not stand up to go into Government just so that we could sit on the other side and throw stones at other people.

We have done amazing things in this Government, like papakaīnga development. I have been invited to the very next one at Kohupātiki, to the family of Meka Whaitiri, who are now developing a papakaīnga. We have stood up for suicide prevention—$2.1 million—because if a 9-year-old in this country chooses to take their life instead of live their reality, then we are all doing something wrong. The best way that we can fix that is for Māori mā to have some faith in ourselves as a people—that we have the answers, that we have the vision, and that we no longer need to be led by the politics of a left or a right. Blue undies, red undies—same skid marks. We need to move on.

METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker, tēnā koutou katoa. Ngā mihi o Te Tau Hou, tēnā koutou katoa. Nine years. Nine years. That is the conclusion of the new report from the Salvation Army today, Off the Track. Nine years, and the Government has not made a dent in child poverty rates. It is a damning report, a damning indictment of a Government that neglects our most vulnerable kids, that neglects our most vulnerable in our society.

The figures from the Salvation Army’s state of the nation report called Off the Track tell us that our economy is growing. They tell us that jobs are increasing in this country. And then the report asks how it is possible that after 9 years of a National Government, we still have 200,000 New Zealand children living in poverty. Is that National’s plan—to entrench child poverty in our country? To make it the new normal in Aotearoa New Zealand? Is—[Interruption] “Yes”, says somebody from the National side.

Carmel Sepuloni: Jono Naylor said it.

METIRIA TUREI: Jono Naylor just said yes to the question I asked, which was whether it is National’s policy to entrench child poverty in our country. So we have got the answer. We do have the answer—that the National Government, with Jono Naylor, led by Bill English, is happy that 200,000 New Zealand children are still living in poverty after 9 years of a National Government. Jono Naylor is laughing and joking with his friends on the National side, because they think it is funny that our kids are sick and poor and ill and struggling to have a decent life, to get a decent education. They think it is funny on the National side. We do not think it is funny on this side of the House.

The Salvation Army’s state of the nation report is its 10th report, and it uses the Government’s own numbers, its own data, to show whether we have made progress on those issues that are most important to New Zealanders—issues like housing, like crime and imprisonment, like child poverty. The report is called Off the Track because that is a title that refers to our love of our country, to the tracks and the walks that New Zealanders love, and to our wild places. But walking these tracks requires a map of where you are heading, clear markers along the way to make sure that you are making progress, and a clear starting point and a clear ending point for your journey. Off the Track deals with the issues that are most important to families. It is critical that we have this regular snapshot of how our country is doing on these issues that affect families every day.

So we in the Green Party thank you, Salvation Army, for the report and for your consistent work in holding a mirror to us about our progress on things like child poverty and housing. But it is sober reading, because it tells us that National’s promise to fix poverty by growing the economy has failed us—broken. National has not reduced child poverty. It has not invested in families. National has not made sure that families have what they need to put a roof over their kids’ heads, to pay the bills, and to put food on the table.

National says that more people are in work, but working families are not earning enough to live in dignity, and 200,000 children still live in poverty. National says that more people are off the benefit, but homelessness is increasing and 200,000 New Zealand children still live in poverty. National says that economic growth is the solution to child poverty, but we have a growing economy and 200,000 New Zealand children still live in poverty. National thinks that economic growth will just magic away all of these problems. It does not know how it will happen; it just believes that it will happen. It is a mantra of National members. It is a magic wish they tell themselves at the end of every day, a prayer they tell themselves before their breakfast in the morning. It is a wish and a prayer; it is not a plan. It is not a plan that will solve these issues for our families.

Bill English can pray that economic growth will solve his problems for him, but the Green Party will act on a plan to solve these issues for New Zealand’s families. We know that there is a way to end child poverty, to fix the housing crisis, to make sure that there are decent incomes for every family in this country, and it is our intention to put that plan into action—not pray, not wish; to act. When we are part of a new and progressive Government after the election in September, we will solve the housing crisis. We will end child poverty in this country. It might take a little time to fix the damage that National has done in the last 9 years, but with a plan and the will to act, and our kids fully in our minds, we can make a difference.

The solutions to end child poverty and fix the housing crisis are at our fingertips. A responsible, compassionate Government will put those solutions in place. Here are just a few: community hubs in schools to build community services for the families who need them; closing the gender pay gap so that we properly value women and their work; new greentech jobs with decent wages for ordinary Kiwis and their families; a children’s payment so that we value our children like we value our elders; building new homes—many more new homes—with iwi and community organisations and with others in the market, so that every New Zealand family has access to a decent, warm, dry home. These are the solutions that will get our country back on track.

We know our starting point; it has been created by National. Our starting point is a housing crisis, the worst homelessness in two generations, jobs that do not pay enough for families or equally for women, and entrenched child poverty that degrades the life chances of thousands of New Zealand’s children. We know the destination: decent incomes for every family; warm, dry, secure homes for every family; a great education for every child; men and women—men and women—respected and well rewarded for their work.

We have the plan in the Green Party to get us to that destination, and this year I am asking New Zealanders this: let us make life great for all of us, for all our families, for all our kids, for all our communities. Let us make life great for everyone in this country, and change the Government at this election and get our country back on track. Thank you.

SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I want to wish everyone in the House—granted, it is February—a happy New Year. It is good to be back. I just want to take a quick umbrage—point out some strange contradictions coming from the last speaker, Metiria Turei.

The first is that the bus has already left with a lot of the good initiatives that the Greens just raised. One of them was around communities in schools and trying to build that up. I can already think of what we have done in the school area, where we actually have schools cooperating together and supporting their communities. I think, actually, in my own electorate of Tāmaki, of some of the schools in Glen Innes that actually work to support the wider community, where they do their cooking in schools, they do their gardens, they have the social workers, and they invite the parents in. These are ideas that the National Government has already implemented and has done years ago, and yet here are the Greens theorising about it and talking about it as their idea, when, in fact, if they really looked at what was happening on the ground—I suppose not being constituent MPs does not help them—these things are already happening. My colleague here, Alfred Ngaro, who has also got great connections into the Tāmaki area, knows that amazing things have already happened.

The other thing I thought I would point out is this “pick and choose” approach that a lot of the Opposition has to these religious groups. Metiria Turei is more than happy to support the Salvation Army on this report, but I would be fascinated to know, rhetorically speaking, what she thinks of the Salvation Army’s position on drugs, on issues of life and stuff, because it just seems so convenient how they pick and choose on those matters.

I want to start, though, beyond that, with something more positive, which is acknowledging our new Prime Minister and our new Deputy Prime Minister—an incredibly exciting new team, I think, a very confident Government, and one that is showing great continuity. Being back in the electorate the last few weeks, my voters are particularly pleased at how the transition has occurred and how strongly this Government has begun—as I say, a strong, positive start. That is how you run a Government.

That has been a complete contrast in the last few weeks to Labour and the Greens. They are demonstrating already just how you run a circus act. I used to say that Labour is full of old ideas, but after hearing the Little state of the nation speech recently, clearly, there are no ideas at all. When I was asked a few days ago by the single Labour voter in my electorate what it stands for, I was genuinely unable to answer. What does Labour actually stand for any more?

Scott Simpson: Haven’t got a clue.

SIMON O’CONNOR: Have not got a clue, someone—actually, my good colleague Scott Simpson—says. But, look, to be fair to the Labour Party, it is in some ways a timeless party. The year 2017 is going to be the year of Willie Jackson, Laila Harré, and Greg O’Connor—and, no disrespect to Greg, but we are not related. They are back—Willie and Laila. They are back, and, this time, they are going to be great. Yes, really—this time, for sure, they will be great.

When we think about the opening addresses this week, what a contrast: the Prime Minister, Bill English, giving a clear, confident speech full of fresh ideas for all the 20 minutes allocated, and the leader of Labour covered his prepared speech notes in less than 12 minutes—less than 12 minutes. He ran out of ideas and had to try to start again.

Scott Simpson: Ran out of speech.

SIMON O’CONNOR: He ran out of speech. And they say that speaking succinctly is a great skill, but in Parliament all you get is a short, “Little” speech.

But already this Government has brought out an array of new ideas. In fact, my colleague Maggie Barry has just come into the room. I know there have been a number of announcements in the conservation space already, including around the kiwi—just absolutely fantastic. But the big one, and I know colleagues have spoken to it, is around the police announcement, that we will be funding 1,100 new people within the police force. I think that is tremendous news.

I am very fortunate in the seat of Tāmaki to live, ultimately, in one of the safest areas, and I think a lot of that comes down not just to the amazing work that our police do, but, actually, it does not matter whether it is Ōrākei through to Glen Innes, Glendowie to Kohimārama, we have very strong, positive communities that look after one another, and, consequently, low crime rates. But I know, again, being out in the electorate, people are very, very pleased at this announcement that there will be more police on the beat. They are also particularly pleased that there will be a number of ancillary support staff. One has to think of those, say, working in the Institute of Environmental Science and Research and the likes of forensics to support what the police do. I know there are a number of members in this House who have linkages to the police—in my case, through my dad and a number of friends—who appreciate that it is not just the bobbies on the beat, and we are grateful for what they do; it is all those people in behind, supporting them in their jobs. So it is a really good announcement.

Another element that has gone down particularly well is the announcement of an 0800 number for those non-urgent crimes. I do not know about other members in the House here—I am sure it has happened from time to time that an issue is arising in your neighbourhood, and dialling 111 seems just a little bit extreme. And then, at that time, trying to track down the exact phone number for the local station—I am happy to report that in my electorate they are open and operating, in some cases, 24/7. But to have that 0800 number where you can report that sort of second-level, non-urgent crime I think is a fantastic—

Todd Barclay: Cat stuck up a tree.

SIMON O’CONNOR: I do not think I am going to repeat that exactly. But that is really, really positive.

There are a number of other positive elements happening within Tāmaki and around Auckland, of course: the Waterview Connection—granted, it is more out west, but that is going to be an amazing transport service when it opens in a few weeks’ time. It will have an immediate effect, I predict, right across the Auckland isthmus. What is happening with Tāmaki Drive at the moment, speaking more to constituents personally—I am very conscious of the dynamics around Ngapipi Road and the suggestion from Auckland Transport that we are going to have to put in traffic lights and a roundabout. We are fighting that one, and we are also continuing to push the promotion of the Tāmaki Drive petition to increase the access to that wonderful gem in Auckland and demand that the council upgrade that road and that cycleway to make it far more engaging.

If you have been in the electorate the last couple of weekends, be it in Ōkahu, Kohimārama, Saint Heliers, Mission Bay—what an amazing area. It is vibrant, and the small businesses—the new ones that have opened and those continuing—are really thriving in the business space. I think it is just a tremendous testament to the work that this Government is doing to support them, particularly in the small business space.

It cannot go without saying, too—again, coming back to the Prime Minister—it is fantastic, so early on, that the Prime Minister chose to come into Tāmaki to celebrate Waitangi Day. It was great to be up there along with a few other colleagues to support the PM up in—I was going to say Bastion Point. There is also another appropriate cultural name, and I will leave that to my colleague Peeni Henare to bring up.

Carmel Sepuloni: Ōrākei.

SIMON O’CONNOR: Well, no, Ōrākei is the name of the suburb. Bastion Point is a very particular point in time. Ask your colleague Peeni Henare, who is still a constituent MP—and a damn fine one at that, too, I might add, as just a bit of a message across the House to his party leadership.

Scott Simpson: Oh, watch out for Willie. Watch out for Willie.

SIMON O’CONNOR: That is right. But it was just fantastic to have the Prime Minister there.

I just want to turn very quickly to the Health Committee, welcoming the new members on board there. We have an incredibly intense workload ahead of us but there are already some really positive signs coming out of the health portfolio: 93 percent of children getting their B4 School Check.

But I want to use these last couple of minutes to talk about the announcement today around cannabis. Most members of this House will know clearly where I stand on the issue, but I welcome today’s announcement. First and foremost, I think it takes a very firm line against the legislation of recreational drugs, but what I do support is making medications available when necessary, so the announcement today that specialists will be able to prescribe cannabinoid medications is excellent. First and foremost, it makes life easier for those who need it. Having sat through hours, if not days, of hearings, particularly around assisted suicide—so, talking to a lot of people from palliative care—the efficacy in some very particular circumstances of cannabis-based products has been well and clearly signalled, so those specialists will now be able to prescribe without having to go through the Minister.

It also separates out medical marijuana from that recreational use. For too long medical use has been put forward as a Trojan Horse to slip recreational marijuana past the public. Making cannabis into a proper medication—a pill or an inhaler—is good news because it does end the suggestion that it should be smoked. We do not smoke medication in this country. No one smokes paracetamol cigarettes, you do not huff ibuprofen, and I have never seen anyone freebasing antibiotics. Of course, the Green Party will not be happy with New Zealand’s marijuana policy till they can spark up a big, fat spliff right here in the debating Chamber and get “blitzed as a bat”. I have to say, I am looking forward to that being in Hansard. But, perhaps, marijuana would lose some of its allure if we could make it available only as a suppository. Then, if the Green Party members do not like it, they can literally shove it up their—oh, I am out of time.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: That is enough.

CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): Let us just pretend the last speech never, ever happened. Can I just say that yesterday during the Prime Minister’s statement, Bill English did not mention child poverty, he did not mention inequality, and he did not mention homelessness. When he said the Government’s programme of responsible economic and fiscal management is delivering benefits for New Zealanders, it is clear he did not mean all New Zealanders. Working and low-income families continue to face harsh realities while the Government continues to turn a blind eye. National has started 2017 the way that it plans to continue: by ignoring the massive issues, the important issues, that New Zealand is facing at this time.

So today’s state of the nation report released by the Salvation Army, aptly titled Off the Track, shows just how out of touch this Government is. The findings of this report are alarming and this House should be ashamed of what was in that report and where New Zealand is at. New Zealand has had such consistently high levels of child poverty that it has now become entrenched and normalised in our society. The lack of affordable housing has resulted in a level of homelessness not seen in New Zealand in the lifetime of most Kiwis. On top of that we have record levels of imprisonment and recidivism. This all comes despite the apparent positive economic growth and welfare reforms claiming to target those in need.

In his statement, the Prime Minister continues to applaud his Government’s efforts at cutting social support for Kiwis in need and reducing benefit numbers, yet these very policies are shown by the Salvation Army’s report to be the crux of child poverty issues. The increasingly conditional nature of welfare leaves many families without any financial support. Working for Families support has been cut, despite this having had a positive effect on low-income families when Labour implemented it. The Government is also making it harder for people to get on to benefits and is even making it a struggle for some to get into Work and Income offices. There is an assumption out there that the perceived group of welfare bludgers or beneficiaries who could be working or should be working are the only ones accessing support. They are a mythical fabrication invented by the National Government, and, in fact, there are a large number of New Zealanders who have to access welfare or who have to access those Work and Income offices, including people with disabilities, including our solo mothers, including unemployed men, and including our senior citizens.

So it is unfortunate that recently I have heard from a senior citizen, a woman called Alexis. All she wanted to do—a 70-year-old woman—was to drop off her change in bank details to her local Work and Income office. She gets there and she gets asked for ID—not knowing why, not knowing what they will do with it, and not knowing what they will do when they find out she is who she is. She struggles to get through the door. She gets in the door. There is nowhere to put her change of bank details. She gets told by the security guard: “If you leave them there, there is no guarantee that anyone will read it.” She is then yelled at by someone else behind the barrier: “If you leave it there, there’s no guarantee that anyone will read it.” That 70-year-old woman stated on her Radio New Zealand interview that she had worked for over 50 years, she had paid her taxes, and now she just wants to be able to walk into a Government agency and get the respect and dignity that any New Zealander deserves. If she had not had to go there, she would not have known what other New Zealanders have to put up with, and she said it was unacceptable.

The Government remains solely focused on reducing benefit numbers, yet it still fails to collect the information on the outcomes of individuals who do go off the benefit. The current insecurity and instability in the labour market mean that stable, well-paid employment is not guaranteed. The working-poor demographic in New Zealand is growing, with many parents taking on multiple jobs and still struggling to make ends meet. The Salvation Army report shows that over the last 5 years, despite benefit numbers going down, child poverty has remained high, yet this is glossed over with political rhetoric about reducing benefit dependency.

By focusing only on reducing benefit numbers the wider and more entrenched issues are ignored and instead we are left with high rates of child poverty, inequality, and continuous benefit cycles. We also see alarmingly high rates of youth who are not in employment and training, and that is despite the Minister of Education telling us how successful our young people are. In fact, our “neets” figures—so our figures of young people who are not in employment, education, or training—have increased to 90,000 now. That is an increase of 20,000 from a year ago. A year ago it was 70,000; now it is 90,000. But what else could we expect really from a Government that has a leader who talks about young people in a demeaning way, referring to them as “pretty damned hopeless”?

The lack of concern for vulnerable people epitomises this Government. The social investment approach it is claiming to use is just empty rhetoric. A real investment approach would tackle child poverty to prevent the long-term damaging impacts of growing up in hardship, but the Government is refusing to even measure child poverty let alone attempt to reduce it. We heard that from the Minister today. She said there were lots of different ways to measure it and she refuses to just pick one, refuses to be accountable for this really important issue, and refuses to work with other political parties to not only measure child poverty but actually come up with some targets so that we can actually try to start to eradicate it. A real investment approach would be focused on breaking the cycle of poverty. Instead, this Government is removing support, ignoring long-term outcomes, and leaving more people trapped in poverty.

Another area that the Government has failed to invest in—and all New Zealanders, the only ones who are not aware of this is the Government—is housing. So the lack of available affordable housing has led to an unprecedented rise in homelessness. The last figures we saw were 41,000, but actually Alan Johnson, at the launch of the Salvation Army report this morning, said that that 41,000 is a mass underestimation of what the issue really is, or how bad the problem really is. There is more proof that coming off a benefit does not guarantee you will get out of poverty any more. For those who find themselves living in cars, in June last year it took, on average, 217 days for those people to be housed, yet the Government seems to think that if it does not acknowledge the problem it will not exist.

In fact the Deputy Prime Minister went on TV last year and said that her biggest accomplishment as the Minister for Social Housing was moving people from cars into houses. We see the statistics. It is taking 217 days to house a person who is living in a car, and what makes it worse is that a year before that statistic came out it was only 108 days. So I do not know how the Deputy Prime Minister can claim that as any sort of accomplishment. In fact, I think she has got nothing to be proud of at all.

When I look more closely at an example in my own electorate about how this housing system is failing, it is pretty apparent when we look at the case of a woman called Tracey Penny—a tetraplegic woman with a 4-year-old daughter and a husband who is her caregiver, who has been on the Housing New Zealand waiting list for over a year and was homeless living in her modified van for 6 weeks. She had to come in and see her member of Parliament, who happened to be an Opposition member of Parliament, and then get some media attention before the Government even did anything to actually support that family.

The embarrassing thing is that this woman was told that there were no modified houses available in the Housing New Zealand stock, so she would just have to wait. And 2 days after she first came to my office to bring this to my attention, my office ends up having to support another family who have no one in the family with a disability but are taken to a fully modified house and told: “Take this house, otherwise we’ll put down that you declined it.” After a conversation with Housing New Zealand, where we all decided this was an inappropriate option, because actually this was set up for someone who needed wheelchair access, that offer was withdrawn and that family ended up getting another house, and then, after being told there were no modified houses, Tracey Penny ended up getting a house immediately.

But let us not underestimate why that happened. That happened because there was media attention and she had an opposition MP involved. It should not take that for the Government to spring into action. But all of us on this side of the House have seen that happen far too often. Until the media get involved then there is very little action that that Government is undertaking.

So we know what the major issues are facing the country and we are not afraid to act on them. Bill English, however, in his Prime Minister’s statement, ignored the housing crisis, ignored inequality, and ignored the plight of children living in poverty. That is not what a leader would have done.

SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): At the beginning of the parliamentary year I would like to acknowledge you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and the other presiding officers, and fellow members across the House, and welcome them back to what is going to be an election year of stark contrast. We have seen that already. We have seen already, in the first couple of days of this parliamentary session, the stark contrast that is going to be presented to the voters of New Zealand later this year in September.

On this side of the House we have had a great prime ministerial statement from the Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Bill English. It was focused, clear, optimistic, and aspirational for New Zealand, setting out a clear plan and pathway for the future direction of New Zealand. It was aspirational for New Zealanders. What a contrast we saw on the Labour Party side—Andrew Little, with a party that is in open revolt, civil war, total disunity, and with backbench MPs from the Labour Party hiring public relations firms, if you please, to take a public sideswipe at their leader. It is unheard of in an election year. It is unheard of—that ill-discipline in that party, that once great, proud party, which in its own right used to seek to lead the Treasury benches, but now has to be propped up by the left-leaning former Alliance Party and the Green Party and Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. They will be, I think, punished at the polls later this year for their disunity, for their lack of focus, and for their doom and gloom and negative view of all that is so good about our country.

I want to just acknowledge the Prime Minister and thank him for giving me some extra work to do this year, in terms of my new role as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Conservation. So what it means is that I am going to be working even more closely than I already do, in my role as chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee, with the two key Ministers who are doing such a good job in terms of protecting the environment, the natural conservation estate, of New Zealand.

This is a Government that has done more in the last 8 years to protect, enhance, and ensure the future prosperity of our natural environment than any Government in the previous history of New Zealand. We can be proud, on this side, of the huge commitment that Maggie Barry and Nick Smith have made to ensuring that our natural heritage is protected for all time.

In the Coromandel electorate we have had a great summer. The weather has been warm, the wind has been up a bit, and we have had a fire that was devastating for a number of people who lost their homes. But for tens of thousands of New Zealanders they have had a wonderful, stunning holiday and vacation in the most beautiful part of New Zealand, where the weather has been good.

Then, to top it all off, not only have we had a great summer but we have had a couple of terrific announcements that will benefit the good people of the Coromandel. There are two in particular that I would just like to highlight. In terms of policing, we had this announcement last week of a huge increase, of 1,125 more police coming into our policing system. It is communities like mine around the Coromandel that will benefit the most from this—rural policing, provincial towns where there will be more cops on the beat, a higher visibility, and things like mobile policing units that will really help in communities around my electorate. Also, we have had news that we are going to have this new 24/7 non-emergency police contact number, an 0800 number, that is going to help people who do not feel that their need is sufficiently urgent to ring 111, but they still want to talk with a local police officer about something that is important to them in their area. This is a very, very good idea.

The second really good announcement that has come out this year from this very good National Government is the announcement relating to the phase two roll-out of ultra-fast broadband. There is a $300 million investment that is going to see 12 townships and communities around the Coromandel electorate getting fibre, and that is going to be life changing for the people in those communities. It means that they will be able to connect with the world in a way that they cannot do already.

This year we are faced with a stark contrast between the divisive and open revolt that is occurring in the Labour Party and the clear, aspirational goals, the optimism, and the positivity of Bill English and the National Party team. This is a good Government. It is going to be a great year. I am really looking forward to all that it brings.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: A 5-minute call to the National Party—Jono Naylor.

JONO NAYLOR (National): At the start of what is going to be my last year in politics I have got to say that I feel very upbeat about the future of New Zealand under this current Government. I feel very upbeat and I feel very positive about leaving New Zealand in good hands, with this current Government. I just want to tell you exactly why that is.

In this Government we have good leadership. I have been approached a number of times over the last year or two by people who have said to me: “So, what will happen to the National Party without John Key, when John Key leaves?”. I said to them: “It’s pretty simple. What will happen is that when he is ready to resign, the National Party will get together. I’m sure there will be a robust kind of conversation about who should be the next leader. Then we will select that leader, we will all get on with it, and we will carry on in the same strong way that we have before.”

At the end of last year my little prophecy came true. That was exactly what happened. We had a transition in leadership, from one who, I think, was a very, very good leader, to another one who is a very, very good leader and will prove himself to be yet another good, long-term Prime Minister for New Zealand.

The second reason that I am upbeat about the future of New Zealand under this Government is that this Government is continuing to use applied and creative thinking to solve some of the issues that are tough nuts to crack in modern society. This is a Government that is prepared to explore new models for social housing, rather than simply say that because something was tried in the 1940s and 1950s that that is the only thing that can ever be done, and that is what we need to keep going back to doing. There is a bit of a theme happening, where it is back to the future and using things from the past to solve new problems.

This is a Government that is using applied and creative thinking, through social investment strategies, through special housing areas, and other things, to combat the issues that we are facing in New Zealand in order to give us a better and more stable long-term future.

I am confident for the future of New Zealand under this Government because this is a Government that is prepared to face up to the challenges facing regional New Zealand. It is aspirational for our New Zealand towns and regional areas. So we have seen regional economic growth action plans put in place for Northland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Gisborne, Hawke’s Bay, Taranaki, Manawatū, Wanganui, Canterbury, the West Coast, and Southland. The regions of New Zealand across the board have now got action plans in place, based on their strengths, based on the things that they are good at, and that they can be even better at, so that they will continue to prosper for the people of New Zealand. Growth means jobs. Jobs mean a path out of poverty. This Government will not shy away from looking at ways that we can create jobs for those people, to build themselves a better future.

The other reason that I am upbeat about the future of New Zealand under this Government is that after having an 8-year history of strong, stable Government, there is still no shortage of ideas for us to go forward. This is a Government that continues to churn out policies and initiatives that will benefit everyone in New Zealand, with ambitious goals for them.

In the environmental sector we are setting goals to be predator-free by 2050. This week there has been an announcement that we will have more police. There will be more jobs. There will be better outcomes for those who are at risk, under our social investment strategy. There will be better justice for victims. There will be shorter wait-times for medical interventions, and there will be better connectivity, through ultra-fast fibre connections throughout New Zealand.

This is stuff that is just churning out, even now. This stuff has been going on for 8 years, and yet there are more ideas. This is a confident Government. As we go into election year, this is an opportunity for New Zealanders to say: “Hey, guess what? We’re on a good path.” This is a Government that has shown it can transition leadership well. It has got great goals and aspirations for the rest of New Zealand. This Prime Minister, as we heard in his announcement yesterday through his opening speech for the year in Parliament, has set out a really good path forward for New Zealand—a good path forward that will benefit all of us. I feel very confident that New Zealand is in good hands. As I say, when I leave Parliament in September, New Zealand, under this Government, has still got a great future, even without me here.

SUE MORONEY (Labour): They used to be known as the “Key team” and now they have just turned into the B-team. Did that speech not say it all, really? There was Jono Naylor saying how excited he is to get out of the place. He cannot wait to get out of the place. But before he goes he thought he would talk about a new model for social housing—the rest of New Zealand calls them cars. But that is what National calls it. When people are sleeping in cars and when people are sleeping in tents on riverbanks, National says that is a new model of social housing. It is an absolute disgrace.

I want to start off this speech by telling people how happy I am. I am happy that it is 2017 and this is the year that New Zealanders get to change the Government. They get to change the Government, and for many New Zealanders—for most New Zealanders—they can hardly wait. Although what the Salvation Army told us this morning is absolutely true—the economy has started to grow and yet poverty remains stubbornly stable. It remains stable. So from the heights of the global financial crisis, poverty rose under this Government and it has remained there, despite the fact that the economy is growing.

I want to tell listeners the story of a constituent whom I went to see last week. I think that this woman represents the situation that far too many New Zealanders find themselves in. She is 21; her partner is also 21. They both work full time. They have just had their first baby. After they have paid a ridiculously high rent for a two-bedroom unit on the back of another house in Hamilton—they are paying $380 a week for the privilege of living in that two-bedroom unit. After they have paid that and they have paid for their car insurance and their medical insurance and their food for the week, they have $45 left each week. These are two New Zealanders trying to do the best they can, working full time, but they, like too many other New Zealanders, are paying a high rent. Like too many other New Zealanders, they are stuck on the minimum wage.

It used to be that we kind of accepted that when you got your first job—maybe at 18 or 19—you would be on the minimum wage there, and after you had been doing that job for a little while, of course your wage would go up. But that is not what is happening, and that is not what has happened for these two 21-year-olds. They are stuck on the minimum wage and they know that they are going to be stuck there for some time to come. At the end of the week: $45. That is $45 to get themselves to and from work, $45 to pay for any medical emergencies they might have, $45 a week to pay for formula for their baby, $45 a week to pay for nappies and all the other things that come with having a new young child. That is the trap that far too many New Zealanders find themselves in: stuck in minimum-wage jobs, not going anywhere, and paying high rents. The squeeze is such that they just cannot make ends meet.

I went to see them because they had written an email—they had sent it to many members of Parliament—to describe their predicament and ask for help. Two 21-year-olds, doing the best they can, both in full-time employment, are asking members of Parliament for help. They had gone to Work and Income and found that they could not receive help there, so how are they to feed their family? How are they to survive? Unfortunately, although my office can help them and has helped them to get a little bit more support into that household, the truth is that while they are paying high rent and while they are on low wages—like far too many New Zealanders are—they are not going to be able to get ahead. That is the truth of what is happening for that family and far too many others like them.

I say “far too many others like them” because the Salvation Army told us this morning when it did its state of the nation speech that in 2011 around 64,000 New Zealanders relied on the minimum wage for their income. That is a reasonably high number. But the shocking thing is that by 2016, last year, that number had risen to 152,000—actually, almost 153,000 New Zealanders reliant on the minimum wage—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I was informed by the whips that this is a split call. The member’s time has expired.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): To the previous National speaker Jono Naylor, who said he felt upbeat because he was leaving Parliament, I can say to him that we have got a deal for the whole lot of you. We are going to do our best to get rid of the whole lot of you—you can all feel upbeat.

This is a Government that says we should be celebrating growth. The question I ask is, for whom? At a time when the world is asking about perpetual growth and about what it is doing to the environment and what it is doing to the world’s population, New Zealanders are asking the question “What’s all this growth done for me?”, and I could not say it in any better way than it was said in an email that I received today. It said: “Traditionally I’ve been an avid National supporter. However, I’ve lost all confidence in National. I’ve finally seen through my own eyes the extent of the gap that is growing between the wealthy elite and the rest of New Zealand. I’ve always considered myself”—

Hon Dr Nick Smith: “Yours sincerely, Damien O’Connor.”

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: That member should read it, because it is one of his constituents. “I’ve always considered myself to fit into the category of upper echelon income earners. However, the realisation that it is the tier below the wealthy elite that is being thrashed the very hardest—the good old Kiwi business person, working hard, taking risks, investing everything they have financially and emotionally into their business, only to be constantly beaten down by the elitist policies that have been implemented over the past 8 years by John Key and his band of self-serving merry men. Accordingly, Labour can count on my support at the next election.” That is one of your constituents.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Name them.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: No, I am not going to do that. I am not going to do that.

That is backed up by the release today from the Salvation Army—

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Won’t name them.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Oh, he is going to discredit the Salvation Army. This is an organisation entrenched in our society, and in societies around the world, as looking after the most needy. The subtitle of the report is Off the Track because it says that all the economic reports cannot fully capture what is happening in the lives of ordinary New Zealanders at a social and personal level.

I respect this organisation, and it has given us a report here saying three key things—“seemingly entrenched rates of child poverty and child abuse”. Over 200,000 children in this country are in poverty, after 8 years of a National Government.

The second thing is “the burgeoning incarceration rates of prisoners, along with high recidivism rates”. Over 10,200 prisoners are in our prisons, and the National Government is going to spend a billion dollars—a billion dollars—on new prisons, but it will not support Salisbury School in Nelson to look after the kids who are at risk. Over 70 percent of the prisoners in our prisons are illiterate because the National Government refuses to spend money in special education and look after those children and give them an opportunity. When parents are expected to pay more for education and many of them cannot, those kids have no hope. And the National Government is prepared to grow employment in prisons, not out in the real world. It crows about growing employment, but it knows that a 3-hour-a-week job is so-called employment. It is an outrageous indictment on any Government that we should end up with these statistics.

The third thing that the Salvation Army has said is that “an alarming lack of safe, affordable housing that has resulted in a level of homelessness not seen in New Zealand in the lifetime of most Kiwis.” Forty-one thousand Kiwis are homeless and tens of thousands are in overcrowded, cold, and damp houses through this country, and the Minister over there would blame the councils, while National sells off State houses to its mates to flog them off for a big fat profit, and then turns around and says: “Oh well, the market will decide.”

It is an outrage, what this Government has done to New Zealand under the premise of growth and the trickle-down theory of the rich pissing on the poor. These guys are prepared to endorse that, and then turn around and try—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I think the tone of the member’s comments could improve.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: I withdraw. I cannot say my speech in a strong enough way to endorse what is a very comprehensive report from the organisation that is expected to, time and time again, pick up people, literally, off the streets and look after them because this Government—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order!

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: —has trampled on them in its 8 years—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order!

Hon MAGGIE BARRY (Minister for Seniors): Well, following that rude discourse from a member of Parliament who ought to know better because he has been around for a while, let me pick up on one of the themes that the Prime Minister set the tone on when he made the statement. It is about New Zealanders caring for other New Zealanders. We are a Government that cares.

As the Minister for Seniors, one of my priorities this year is going to advance the notion of an age-friendly New Zealand by creating places where our vulnerable elderly can walk around at their leisure. Helping our elderly to be safe in their communities, with a police force that is answerable to burglaries and to other, more serious crime, is something that really will make a difference and will make an impact on the lives of New Zealanders. Age-friendly New Zealand is something that has been picked up by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a general template. The WHO set the boundaries, if you like, and we have picked it up and it is now being trialled in Hamilton, Kāpiti coast, New Plymouth, and my Office for Seniors is supporting them in that.

Some of the very real challenges that exist for New Zealanders are around the most shameful of problems, and that is elder abuse. Elder abuse and neglect are things that are growing in New Zealand—perhaps growing at the pace of our ageing population. It is very difficult to determine. There are around 2,000 recorded cases per year and we know that figure is only a very small proportion of the people who do not come forward and complain. In a population of our size we could expect it to be closer to about 17,000 people. What I am aiming to do this year as the Minister for Seniors is to evaluate the way we deliver elder abuse services to New Zealanders, to have a more involved and inclusive approach, and to put more resourcing into delivering outcomes for vulnerable older New Zealanders.

The SuperGold card is an important part of ending social isolation, which is one of the things that leads often to elder abuse—when people are in their own homes or they feel that they cannot get out and about. So the card, with its transport concession, which this Government has funded very generously for a long number of years now, is making sure that people have access to that. So, as the Minister, from very humble beginnings when we inherited the card we looked around the world, decided it was worth keeping, and we have—my predecessor, Jo Goodhew and I—put a lot of time and effort into making sure that that card gives deliverable resources, discounts, and privileges to seniors. I think of it as an entitlement. It is what seniors deserve because they deserve our respect, they deserve our support, and they deserve dignity. So that is one of my main priorities as the Minister for Seniors, and it is one that our Prime Minister, Bill English, understands very well and supports absolutely.

The other thing that was signalled by the Prime Minister in his statement was about the continuation of conservation and environmental initiatives from this Government. I am speaking primarily of Predator Free 2050, which is one of those big, hairy stretch goals that the world admires and takes notice of. The Department of Conservation (DOC) is very good at dispatching unwanted mammalian eco-invaders, so what we have been doing is helping DOC to partner with others.

We have set up the Predator Free 2050 entity. I convened its first board meeting 2 weeks ago. They are a high-powered, very focused group of people, who will make key decisions about landscape-scale predator control. We will probably start around Taranaki but we will move around New Zealand and, community by community and town by town, we will take over again what is our birthright for our flora and our fauna—and that is to get rid of the big three, initially—that is, rats, stoats, and possums. We are doing that across the Crown with Operational Solutions for Primary Industries New Zealand. I am working with the Ministry for Primary Industries, Minister Nathan Guy, and with my colleague the Minister for the Environment, Nick Smith, as well. And I commend our newcomer, if you like. He is the chairman of the Local Government and Environment Committee, Scott Simpson, who spoke earlier. He is our new conservation and environment parliamentary private secretary and he is already doing great work.

So this is a Government that takes our environment and our conservations measures very seriously indeed, We are about to launch a series of initiatives around planning ahead; not being caught up in the 3-year cycle but having a 20-year plan so that we can have a conservation - environment science road map. We will be announcing something to that effect a little bit later this month and encouraging people to have some input into scientific, evidence-based conservation and environment that all across-Government entities can buy into and plan in advance. This is how we are going to get to where we need to go and that is what we do as a Government. We try to measure and then make decisions that are informed about the science, and that is why we use 1080.

I was in Northland last week. We made several announcements on another environmental issue that is very close to my heart, and that is the War on Weeds. Chief amongst them are wildings. Last year in the Budget, Minister Nathan Guy and I managed to get another $16 million, so we are giving that out to a variety of groups who are doing excellent work in keeping these wildings—which are really escapees from forest farms and domestic gardens—controlled. One of the ones, of course, that Labour might benefit from here is in the dirty dozen. The War on Weeds includes wandering willie. I know you have a wandering Willie of your own. Let me say to you here that we have the technology to deal with this pest—this invasive thing. There are biological controls. You can chop them down, but if you are not vigilant, gee, they will come back again with a vengeance. And that particular individual, Willie Jackson, I know of old, has reinvented himself more times than you would imagine possible. But we have the technology. We can help Labour take this pest out, so I am just saying the offer is there.

There are even more serious problems than that one, of course, that plague our forests. In Northland we have an issue where the kauri dieback needs management. Our discussions with iwi have been very fruitful around using 1080, which is the only effective predator, landscape-style weapon that we have, actually, against these unwanted eco-invaders. So we have dialogue with iwi and communication with volunteer groups, coupled with a good funding model—which is the DOC community fund I announced $700,000 worth of last week in Northland, going to about eight different groups—these are the kinds of things that will really make a difference to New Zealanders’ lives and to returning our natural taonga to their place where they deserve to be and to get rid of the creatures that we do not want.

In the arts, culture, and heritage field the other initiative, Landmarks, is something that I feel that the House and the wider public will know more about, and will need to, because it is going very well. Landmarks combines the Department of Conservation, Heritage New Zealand, and Arts, Culture, Heritage along with Tourism New Zealand to attract visitors to the paths less well trod. So Māngungu Mission House, Te Waimate Mission House—these are places that people do not go quite as often as they do to Tāne Māhuta or the Waitangi Treaty Grounds. What we have done is we have put together the Landmarks, which are the important places that tell our stories, and that talk to us about the values that we have around our history and our heritage—our natural heritage, as well as our pre-European and our colonial. So Landmarks, which is going particularly well as a pilot, is something that we are going to be, hopefully, rolling out around the country and we will have some announcements on that a little bit later in the year.

The Regional Culture and Heritage Fund has also been very popular. Todd Barclay has been a very articulate advocate in his area and one of his area’s museums was given funding. It is a fund of last resort, so the Crown will fund one-third, the local community will come up with one-third, either through philanthropy or business, and we will also have a way in which we can help fund through local authorities and regional councils.

I acknowledge Dr Shane Reti, because in the Whangarei area he has been very persistent around the Hundertwasser facility. We put $4 million towards that last year. We are very determined that such an excellent facility, which will really allow development of an economic nature to occur in the region, attract visitors, encourage people to get jobs and to work. Conversations with articulate local MPs really do help individuals who are struggling to go through the paperwork, not sure where to start. That connection with Government is really very helpful to ensuring the projects that are difficult to fund will survive and will thrive, and that is my aim as a Minister: to make sure that we listen very carefully to them.

So that fund, which has about $6.5 million—I have just announced another round, and there is about $12 million in that, and there will be a third round of funding as well this year. So I encourage all of you who have excellent heritage places—art galleries, museums, performing arts venues. I made the fund a lot more flexible last year and those dividends are now going to be handed out to people so that they can preserve their own special places.

First Encounters 250—the arrival in New Zealand of Captain James Cook. He would not have made it as far as he did without the Tahitian chief Tupaia. They circumnavigated New Zealand, and in one particular visit they went to a place and Captain Cook—his story is that he wanted to visit Gisborne. Tupaia helped him. This is a story of two men and their encounters with our tangata whenua. The story will be told—it is about the beginning of our nationhood. This is a programme that is being funded by Government. There are some very exciting things that are happening, and I am very proud to be part of this Bill English - led National Government.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am informed this is a split call—Paul Foster-Bell.

PAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): E Te Māngai Tuarua o Te Whare, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou katoa, e ngā mema. It is a pleasure to take a split call with my distinguished colleague the member for Clutha-Southland, Todd Barclay. It is also a great honour to follow on from the Minister, the Hon Maggie Barry. With Maggie Barry and Dr Nick Smith we have a fantastic team advancing the Government’s conservation and environment work, and this is a set of policies that is very important to, and popular in, Wellington Central, the area in which I work. If we look at the measures implemented so far in terms of increasing the protection of our natural species, namely, the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, the War on Weeds, but also the Battle for our Birds, there is much that is being done in that important blue-green space that attracts a positive comment from the local people—the citizens in Wellington Central.

This Government is advancing a comprehensive economic plan, which is also benefiting our local residents. I recently went out to visit a film production facility, headquartered in Cuba Street, and it has its studios in the old Shelly Bay flying boat base. It was the site where the recent remake and rebooting of Goodbye Pork Pie was completed, edited, and the final post-production work was done. And it is currently the site where the stunt work for Peter Jackson’s next epic, Mortal Engines, is being prepared.

This modern facility, unfortunately, is on what one might call the city fringe. So it is currently reliant on broadband, which is sent via a microwave signal, instead of benefiting from ultra-fast broadband over a fibre link. So it is an example of the sort of business that will benefit hugely from this Government’s added extra investment into ultra-fast broadband, which is not only going into regional New Zealand but will benefit the businesses that are on the city fringe or even some of those in the central city area that have not yet been connected. These are huge employers in our local area and this will add to the already growing rate of employment. Let us not forget the 130,000 jobs that have been created over just the last year by the solid efforts of this Government, and the expected further job creation over the next few years to come.

The economic surplus that this Government has achieved—the fiscal surplus—has given many more options than would be the case if one engaged in the reckless spending as proposed by the Opposition. I want to single out an area that I will call for some of that spending to be invested in. We have lifted the amount of money that Pharmac is funded by to well over $700 million. It received the biggest ever increase in funding. In fact, it is now funded at the highest rate ever in New Zealand’s history. This has allowed New Zealanders to get access to a wide range of modern, and sometimes more expensive, medications.

Three years ago Pharmac’s own anti-infective subcommittee looked at the way we fund and provide HIV medication in New Zealand. Its own committee suggested some changes. Pharmac is not a political agency. It is funded by the Government but it makes its own decisions as to what medications are provided. But I think this is a very serious issue. Studies have shown that where people take HIV medication after exposure there is a 50 percent lower chance of death or serious illness. So this represents not only a significant reduction in human misery but, actually, a much increased rate of saving to the taxpayer. It is a win-win and in my view it is a no-brainer. This is something that Pharmac needs to look at very, very seriously.

I am also calling for Pharmac to look at something called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or “PREP”. This has a nearly 100 percent efficacy rate in preventing the transmission of HIV. The National Health Service in England has trialled it with 10,000 people. In New South Wales it has been trialled with 3,700 people, and there are trials underway in Victoria. Again, given the possibility for not only huge savings to the taxpayer but also the prevention of human misery, this is something that Pharmac needs to look at very seriously. It was with pleasure that I signed the AIDS Foundation’s petition on this today, and I will be taking an HIV test in public to promote this issue. It is a disease that does not discriminate based on gender or sexuality or ethnicity or any other factors.

So this is a Government that is working hard. It is providing New Zealanders with real choice and it is a great pleasure for me to support it fully.

TODD BARCLAY (National—Clutha-Southland): It is a privilege to be able to speak on the Prime Minister’s statement, to take a call following my good friend and colleague here, Paul Foster-Bell, a list MP based in Wellington Central. It is interesting to note that there are actually no Labour Opposition members sitting in the front benches. I suspect that is probably because they are making way for the new, fresh-faced Labour Opposition that will be coming through after the 2017 election.

This is going to be a fantastic year for National, a fantastic year for New Zealand, and a superb year for Southland. We have our Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Bill English, as a man of Southland. Southland could not be prouder than what it is today. National has had a superb start to the year with the Prime Minister’s strong statement in Parliament the other day, followed by his strong announcements in the first couple of weeks of the year. National has already come through on proving that we have got fresh ideas and fresh talent, and we have got a futureproofed initiative for New Zealand around regional development. Already the Prime Minister and communications Minister have announced a $300 million ultra-fast broadband package, and I am proud to be the representative of Clutha-Southland, an electorate whose area will benefit from 11 towns being included in the next phase of the ultra-fast broadband roll-out.

Additionally, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Police, the Hon Paula Bennett, announced a Safer Communities package a couple of weeks ago, which will see the police force increase by a 10 percent rate and an additional half billion dollars spent on increasing police resourcing. The important part of that for an area such as Clutha-Southland is that all the parts of New Zealand will benefit. All 12 policing districts will benefit from additional resourcing at the discretion of the commissioner.

Today I just wanted to spend a couple of minutes speaking about education. I want to acknowledge the Hon Hekia Parata, who is not here at the moment in the House, and I am not meant to mention that—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): No.

TODD BARCLAY: —but she is not here. I want to mention her, because—

Hon Member: Here in spirit.

TODD BARCLAY: She is here in spirit. I want to acknowledge her because I think that she will be known as the greatest Minister of Education that this country has had. The reason I want to talk about that is that—

Hon Member: That’s not very tactful, Todd.

TODD BARCLAY: No disrespect to the Assistant Speaker in his former role, but the reason I want to mention that is that she has taken on the ballsy task of reforming the Education Act, which in over 30 years has not been reviewed in the comprehensive way it is being reviewed. Additionally, she is pushing through a funding review. It is an honour to sit on the Education and Science Committee, and today to have been elected as the deputy chair of that committee as well.

There are a number of changes that this Government has put forward in education over the last 8 years. We have introduced national standards under the Hon Anne Tolley. We have introduced communities of learning. There has been a funding review in light of the 45 percent increase that this Government has seen into the Vote Education area. We have seen a 45 percent increase in Vote Education. Special education funding has gone up by 35 percent as part of that, and early childhood education funding has more than doubled. So if you look at the significant increase in investment that the Government has put into education, the number of reforms that we have seen through under the Hon Hekia Parata, the number of new programmes that are being funded, and the increased funding in current existing programmes, there is a real need to be able to review that funding system. She has taken on that task and she has done it in a collaborative, comprehensive way with buy-in from the sector around where they think that investment needs to go.

This is a child-centred approach that the Minister is putting in place. It is making parents more comfortable in being a participant in their children’s learning. It is making the sector feel that they are the profession that they so strongly want to be known for, and that is one thing that the Minister is fierce in advocating for on their behalf as she is getting around the region. It is also giving a greater line of sight into the investment of the $11 billion that the Government puts into education.

So these two tasks, the funding review and the review of the Act, are two massive pieces of work that any Minister of Education from any shade of politics would be struggling in wanting to achieve, because of the political risk associated with that, but also because everybody in this country is either a participant in the education sector or has been a participant in the education sector. So therefore everybody has got a view, and therefore she has taken on a task where there are 4.5 million different views. I want to acknowledge her in the work that she has done in this portfolio over the last 6 years, and I want to wish her all the best for the future. Thank you.

Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): Mr Assistant Speaker, it is the first session of the new year. May I acknowledge you in the Chair and colleagues on all sides of the House. It is a time of change. It is a pivotal year. It is the time that New Zealanders get to decide who they want to help govern their country for the next 3 years. Summer is a fast-fading memory—just ask any Wellingtonian, or Todd Barclay, who can barely remember the faction feud, which meant he just survived in his seat by only the barest of margins, by kissing the papal ring of Bill English.

We are here to decide who is going to run New Zealand for the next 3 years, and the Labour coalition is going to be here to give New Zealanders the chances that they deserve. You know, it is about them, not about us in this House, and people have reasonable expectations: a home to live in, a home to own, a home to base their families in without fear of being sold out and sent down the road, a good school for the kids, and healthcare when you need it. Those are not things that used to be too much to expect, but, for too many New Zealanders, they have been lately—the ones living in the cars or the garages, and the ones working full time who cannot afford to both put food on the table and send the kids to the doctor. That is not OK. That is not the best of us.

Todd Barclay: Why don’t you hang around? You’re bailing.

Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: That is not the New Zealand that we want to be part of. “Oh,” says the member, “hang around.” Well, why did he not ask that of John Key? As I have been going around those in the business community, they say to me that never in the history of New Zealand politics have they known a popular Prime Minister, one who was so popular for so long, who did so little and who left so quickly with so many major issues undone.

We live in a good country—we know we do—but it is a country that could be so much better for so many deserving New Zealanders. That Prime Minister and the new one were not willing to lead. They were not willing to address child poverty. They were not even willing to measure it. They were not willing to solve the housing crisis because they were not willing to have the State build houses, and they were not willing to tread on the toes of rich foreign investors and landlords. They were not willing to keep the funding for our health system up so that the 60,000 New Zealanders who have been shunted off waiting lists in the last 12 months could get a fair go, and they were not willing to fund our schools to proper levels so that every Kiwi kid could get a fair chance, let alone being willing to address some of those longer-term challenges that we are leaving to our children, unaddressed and getting worse. Global climate change is not a philosophy; it is a fact, and this Government has done nothing—nothing—to address it except gut Labour’s earlier, sound plan.

Child poverty is growing and getting worse, homelessness is getting worse, our health crisis is getting worse, and look at the crime statistics—our streets are getting less safe, not more. That is why it was Labour that first pledged 1,000 extra police and National that pledged to catch up.

Bill English, they say—the new Prime Minister—is a decent bloke. I think he is in it for the right reasons, but he sure as heck is not a leader. It was not just his lacklustre performance when he was touting for the job; anyone who listened to his state of the nation address would agree. There was no vision; there was no excitement, not even on his own benches; and there was certainly no plan to grow New Zealand’s economy or restore its widening gaps. Economic growth, if you take away migration, is less than 0.5 percent a year, and the share of that wealth going to ordinary New Zealanders is getting less and less as the ones at the top are taking more and more. Those are the ones who give some of it to the National Party, which runs it like a business, taking big donations to keep itself in power, so it does not have to change the rules, and the rich keep getting richer.

Well, it is time for New Zealanders to rise up and say that that is not good enough for all our children. It is not good enough to have less and less funding for our schools and our hospitals, or to have people living in cars and garages. So this is the year that Kiwis decide—when Andrew Little is the Prime Minister who makes change happen.

Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): Can I just begin by acknowledging the visitors we have here in the gallery to listen to the final part of today’s contribution to the debate on the Prime Minister’s statement, and by letting them know, in case they were not aware of it, that as an added bonus later this evening, we are going to have Michael Wood’s maiden statement. So it is like chocolate dip on ice cream—it is just the best that is going to happen today.

Like many of us in this House, our grandparents, our great-grandparents, or those further back in our family history, came to New Zealand after a very courageous decision to leave their home country. They came to New Zealand to build a better life for their family. It must have been very hard. Whether it was a Pacific Island, Europe, England, or America, it does not matter—it is a huge decision to leave your home and go and set up in another country. People did that because they thought New Zealand would give them a better chance to own a home, to have good education for their family, and to have a future that was better, and, when I grew up, that was still the case. I was brought up in a family where our values were based on working hard, studying hard, being able to get a good job with fair pay, and saving for a deposit for a home. That is what I want for our children and our grandchildren. It is not like we want a multimillion-dollar house. We do not want gold taps; we just want the security of a home that we can call our own.

I do not think that is too much to ask, but for thousands and thousands and thousands of New Zealanders, that dream is no longer on their menu. They cannot work hard at school, get a job that has fair pay, work hard and save hard, and then own a home, because there is a housing crisis in New Zealand and homes are unaffordable. Even for people who are renting, they are paying over half their income every week in rent. How could they ever get ahead in the way that most people in this House were able to? How dare the National members get to where they are—comfortable, secure in their own lives—and pull the ladder up behind them so that other people cannot make it? How can that be a good thing for a Government to do?

Poor old Todd Barclay. Having preached to Labour about unity, having scraped in by the narrowest of margins in his own electorate coup—boy, are they ever proud of Bill English. They are not just proud of Bill English; they are desperate to get him back—they are totally desperate to have an MP who works for their electorate. It is a terrible, terrible situation for Todd Barclay, who comes in and preaches to us about problems.

So people should be able to live in New Zealand, save hard, and buy a home. That is not too much to ask. They should be able to send their children to their local school and be confident that that school is resourced enough to give their children not just an average education but the best education possible, because we know that that is what will give them the best chance in future to have a great life. We know that when people are sick they should be able to get access to the health services they need. There has been $1.7 billion of underfunding in the New Zealand health system in the last 8½ years. That is $1.7 billion—

Todd Barclay: No.

Hon RUTH DYSON: —that should have been in the health system, but—Todd Barclay is right—it is not there. Independent analysis has been done on those figures. That is how much Tony Ryall and Jonathan Coleman have taken out of the health system. I have heard that Minister say that we have got the most money in the health system we have ever had. You only need to put $1 more in from last year’s Budget and that would be true, but it has not kept up with population growth and health inflation pressures. That is the only way to fund our health system so that we can continue to meet the health needs of every New Zealander.

A decent job, a decent home, health services when we need them, and the best possible education for our children. That is the Kiwi Dream, that is what a change in Government on 23 September can deliver again for New Zealanders, and that is what I know this side of the House will be working very hard to deliver. Thank you.

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Leader of the House): I move, That this debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to.

Maiden Statements

Maiden Statements

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Leader of the House): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. There was a set time for Mr Wood’s maiden statement. We should follow that. I just assume that we are going to go on to other Government business in the next 4 minutes to make that happen. Is that right?

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Let me assist. The debate is now interrupted—[Interruption] Order! The debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day. In accordance with Standing Order 360(3), I call on Michael Wood to make his maiden statement, and I am assuming that it is the will of the House that it will suspend for the dinner break at the conclusion of the speech.

MICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): I rise to speak, grateful that so many parliamentary colleagues from around the Chamber have made a special effort to be here for my humble opening remarks. It is also a privilege to make my maiden statement while you are in the Chair, Mr Speaker, and I thank you for that opportunity.

It is an appropriate time to thank and acknowledge others who have helped me in my long and winding journey to this place, which began with a bright and rather optimistic challenge to the member for Pakuranga some 15 years ago. I thank my Labour Party colleagues and caucus and the wider party for their support, and for the occasional brutal but useful lesson meted out over that time.

Representing harmoniously the two intertwined wings of my party, I acknowledge the presence here today of both my leader, Andrew Little, and members of the New Zealand Council of the Labour Party. I also want to acknowledge my opponent from the Mt Roskill by-election on the other side of the House, Parmjeet Parmar, and thank her for an energetic campaign that ensured that Mt Roskill voters had a real choice on offer at the polls.

Finally, my undying gratitude goes to those who provided political and personal support to me during the long by-election campaign. I had an outstanding campaign team, made up mainly of young activists with a strong desire to make life better for their fellow citizens. They also had an understanding that doing so requires hard graft, discipline, and winning elections to make change. Led with precision by my campaign manager, Shayne Misselbrook, who, at just 28 years of age, marshalled over 900 volunteers from all walks of life, it was a campaign that showed that politics is still relevant in people’s individual and community lives—a theme that I will return to later.

At all times I have had the unflinching support of my wife, Julie, who balances her support for me with her own local government career, the understanding of my boys Jacob and Daniel and the relative indifference of my 1-year-old son, Thomas, and the backing of many friends and wider family—my aroha to you all. I intend to do your support justice.

The electorate I am proud to represent in this House is a place that people have been coming to for a start in life for hundreds of years. The Waiohua people first settled in Mount Roskill some 600 years ago, attracted to the bounty of the harbour and the wetlands and to the protection of our maunga, Puketāpapa and Te Tātua-ā-Riukiuta. Pākehā settlers arrived in the late 19th century to farm and labour, seeking to build better lives than the ones that they had left behind in the grim, industrialised cities of the United Kingdom. Then, in the 1930s and 1940s, the first Labour Government began building the Mount Roskill that we recognise today. State homes were built in their thousands around places like Three Kings, Wesley, and Mount Roskill South, providing housing and the basis of community for huge numbers of working-class families, who flooded into the area seeking their start in life.

In Mount Roskill, change has been constant. From the 1960s onwards, large numbers of people from the Pacific communities came to Mount Roskill, seeking work, education, and a place of opportunity for their families, and, in more recent decades, people have come from every corner and continent of the globe, with the Indian and Chinese communities in particular deciding to settle in Mount Roskill. Some have fled war and persecution; others poverty and insecurity, but all have come for that same reason—to make a start, to build a life for their families, and to contribute—and that has certainly been the experience of my own family.

Julie and I settled in Mount Roskill in our early 20s. With reasonable, middle-income jobs, we could buy a modest house and put down roots. We have made friends, joined groups, and raised our children. Our eldest boys go to our local decile 2 public school, Waikowhai Primary School—a melting pot of people from different faiths, backgrounds, classes, and socio-economic situations, and one of the beautiful, beating hearts of our community. Because we have a stake in our community, we have been able to give back in different ways, and we have also received help from others when we have needed it. Mount Roskill gave my family the start in life that we needed, and others are no less deserving of that opportunity.

What I have seen in Mount Roskill and elsewhere is that individuals do well, achieve their potential, and contribute back when they live in strong and fair communities. It is a false choice to suggest that we must choose between successful individuals and a fair society. The two rest upon and reinforce one another. And so, in this House, I see my fundamental duty of representation to my constituents as being to work towards just structures and systems that build strong and fair communities, allowing individuals to flourish. Sometimes I feel that, with good hearts, we put band-aids on problems in our communities, but that is often ineffective, temporary, and expensive, whereas communities with decent housing, high-quality education, good jobs with living wages, and a bit of stability and hope will have the resilience and resources to get through, with fewer ad hoc interventions.

Decent, affordable housing lies at the heart of stable, successful communities. It worries me deeply that a young couple today—like Julie and me 14 years ago, but today—need $1 million to buy into my working-class, decile 2 street in Mount Roskill South. I fear that my mixed community risks being homogenised when ordinary working people are being priced out of basic rentals.

My predecessor Phil Goff spoke about the centrality of decent housing in his maiden speech, some 35 years ago.

Grant Robertson: Is that all?

MICHAEL WOOD: That is all. His pleas received a brusque and simple interjection—“Heh!”—from one of the right honourable Prime Minister’s predecessors. I live in hope that members across this House might work together more constructively on solutions for housing during this term.

Phil has been both a mentor and a friend to me since Julie and I moved into Mount Roskill, 14 years ago. His record of service to our community has been outstanding, as evidenced by his long tenure, which was interrupted only by a brief sabbatical between 1990 and 1993. Phil’s decency, warmth, and capacity for sheer hard work made him a parliamentarian respected in Mt Roskill and across this House. On behalf of Mt Roskill, Phil, I say thank you for your service, and also thank you for our forthcoming discussion about paying for Dominion Road light rail.

Mount Roskill’s proud history of Labour representation extends back even further. Since 1931 our community has been represented by Labour MPs for all but 12 years, and every time by people of substance and conviction, including the pacifist Frank Langstone, who rebelled over peacetime conscription; the chief whip from the first Labour Government, Arthur S Richards; and third Labour Government Minister Arthur Faulkner.

Those members represented Mount Roskill during its great post-war expansion, when it was transformed from swamp and farm into New Zealand’s largest borough. It was a period when far-sighted central government and local government leaders invested in the infrastructure that a growing city needed. They recognised that growth requires investment if we are to provide a decent standard of living and realise the benefits of an expanded urban population.

Today, Mount Roskill, Auckland, and our other growing cities are at a juncture. We can either choke on our growth or realise our potential, by investing in modern, high-quality infrastructure, especially decent housing and quality public transport. In line with this, I intend to work within this House, as promised during my campaign, for the realisation of modern light rail on the Auckland isthmus—something we had until 1956, when one of the Southern Hemisphere’s most patronised tram networks was, foolishly, torn up.

Modern public transport in our cities is not just about moving people around our communities efficiently. It is about revitalising our local centres, reducing harmful emissions, and creating the right incentives for investment in high-quality, affordable, medium-density housing along our main streets. It is about Auckland and our other urban centres taking their place as grown-up, international cities, in which growth is an opportunity, not a millstone, and I hope to work with other open-minded members across this House who care about Auckland and our cities to make this a reality.

From the deeply practical matters of trams and tracks, I want to turn now to the importance of ideas in shaping what we do in this House. It has become strangely fashionable in political campaigning—and, in fact, almost de rigueur in local government—to declaim any actual interest in politics and political ideas. You know, mechanics are generally thought better of for knowing something about mechanics, and I do moderately value my general practitioner’s medical qualifications and expertise, but being “political” tends to be a term of derision, even for those we charge with making the most serious political decisions. And some of that is earned.

Political trust in this country was badly corroded in the 1980s and 1990s by Governments of both stripes that, regardless of what you might think about the contents of their programmes, fundamentally broke faith with their electors. Bad decisions are made by every Government, and across Western democracies there is no doubt that a range of economic and cultural factors have led to a greater disconnect between people and their Governments. Yet it is entirely the wrong response for those of us who have the privilege of sitting in this House to shrink back from the responsibility that we have to engage in serious political dialogue with our communities.

Repeating key lines, having fun with selfies, and hosing down problems—which come up from time to time, I am told—are a part of the job, but we also have a duty to engage with the real, long-term issues our country faces, to raise ideas, and to participate in meaningful debate with each other and the people of our country. If we do not, we leave an emaciated public sphere, in which public disengagement deepens and people lose faith in the capacity of democracy to provide solutions, and that lays the groundwork for cynicism, blame, and demagoguery.

I reject the notion that New Zealanders do not care about politics any more. Every day in Mt Roskill I meet people who care deeply about the issues, but who struggle to engage with our system beyond casting a ballot every 3 years. I say that if our systems are inaccessible and if our democratic institutions seem remote and technocratic, then it is up to us to change them, not to blame our voters—our citizens. I believe that people are hungry for ideas to solve problems and create opportunities. As parliamentarians we have to carry with us and communicate a set of values and a positive vision for what could be. But, more than that, I believe it is important to set out and develop a coherent set of ideas about how we get there. That is our task.

For my own part, my interest in politics and my commitment to the labour movement is an external expression of what I most deeply believe in. My Christian faith—I am an active Anglican—imbues me with a profound belief that every life has an essential dignity, that we flourish when we are connected to one another in community, and that the world we live in is a gift to be cared for, not exploited for the benefit of a few. Those are the values that I will always go back to in this House. But, as St Francis of Assisi once said: “Preach the gospel to all the world. Use words, if necessary.” Values alone, whether held in your heart, expressed in flowing prose, or brilliantly tweeted, are not enough in and of themselves; it is the doing that changes things for the better.

The people I draw special inspiration from are those who take their deep aroha for others and drive practical, real-world change—pulling down unjust structures, striving for peace, and building communities that enable people to truly flourish and reach their potential. They are people like the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who travelled a road from scholarship to activism protesting against the scourge of nuclear weapons in his late 90s; people like Michael Joseph Savage, who considered Labour’s peaceful political revolution to be “applied Christianity” as his Government changed New Zealand for the better; and people like Helen Kelly, one of the great New Zealanders of our time, and someone I was proud to serve alongside in the New Zealand trade union movement—a person who had a capacity to turn conviction into real-world change. In her courageous final year, Helen spoke simply of kindness, love, and decency. There was no divine driver for Helen, but different routes up the same hill, I think.

The progressive politics that I believe in picks up our values and works through our imperfect democratic systems to make life better for people. I believe in Government that shows vision and leadership and is always restless to solve problems and build on our strengths—the Government that recognises that change is constant but that we are not helpless in its face—and, as change happens, my party has a proud record of ensuring that there is a place at the table for all and that the interests of the many, not the few, are served. Coming out of 6 years working at the grassroots in local government, I also believe in Government that is more trusting of local communities and that is willing to devolve power, not as a smokescreen for walking away, but because partnering with and resourcing and giving power to local communities can build enduring solutions.

Finally, I want to speak about the value of balance in our society and our political system. Humans are complex, and the societies we live in even more so. If the needs and aspirations of some are given overwhelming weight over others, then resentment and discord are the result. In my view, then, one of the core tasks of Government is to ensure that balance is maintained—a fair balance of interests, power, and resources, recognising that an imbalance in any of these areas privileges some and inhibits others from achieving their potential and that such injustice will hurt us all in the end. I believe in a balance between having a clear world view and striving to achieve it, and being open to the ideas of others. I believe in the value of careful scepticism, but we should balance this against the temptation to become hard and cynical. And in our roles as representatives of the people of New Zealand in this House, we should seek to balance our strongly held beliefs with a bit of grace and decency towards people with alternative views.

During the Mt Roskill by-election campaign, I was cast as a pugilistic maniac by a certain media outlet one weekend, only to be labelled a boring machine politician by the same network a week later. In this House I will be aiming for balance and seeking a happy mid-point between those two extremes, and I look forward to working for positive change here, for however long I am privileged to serve. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. Thank you.

Sitting suspended from 5.57 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

Bills

Taxation (Business Tax, Exchange of Information, and Remedial Matters) Bill

In Committee

TIM MACINDOE (Senior Whip—National): With the agreement of the whips across the Committee I seek leave for the Committee to consider all parts of the Taxation (Business Tax, Exchange of Information, and Remedial Matters) Bill in one debate with the voting on the different parts to be taken separately.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought for that matter. Is there any objection? There is no objection. So the question is that Parts 1 to 3, the schedule, and clauses 1 and 2 stand part.

Parts 1 to 3, schedule, and clauses 1 and 2

Hon ALFRED NGARO (Minister for Pacific Peoples): I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. Under Standing Order 330, I move to rule out Supplementary Order Paper 259, as the amendment proposed to be moved appears to have more than a minor impact on the fiscal aggregates and 24 hours’ notice has not been given.

GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): It is a pleasure to be back in the House for 2017 debating a taxation bill, seeing some familiar faces around the—

Ron Mark: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. My sincere apologies to the honourable member for interrupting him. Can you enlighten me, Mr Chairman. Is there not a vote on that motion that the—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): No, it is the discretion of the Government, because the fiscal aggregates, in the Government’s view, are such that Supplementary Order Paper 259 is ruled out of order under Standing Order 330 and Speaker’s ruling 139/1. So there is no vote.

GRANT ROBERTSON: As I was saying, it is a great pleasure to be here debating a taxation bill again, with the familiar faces who are here, to pick our way through the detail of this bill. The Attorney-General has arrived—an expert on tax law, as I know he is, and a passionate person with a deep, passionate interest in the Tax Administration Act—so we look forward to his contribution as well.

This is a bill that the Labour Party in general supports. It does some quite useful things around making it easier for business to pay its taxes, it improves the flow of information, and it deals with—as we love to say in these tax bills—remedial matters of many shapes and forms, and Andrew Bayly will go through those, clause by clause, in the next hour or so as we go through them. But the bit that I want to focus my attention on in this first set of calls is around Part 1 and the amendments to the tax disclosure rules for foreign trusts. It probably is a good idea just to rehearse how we got to where we got to with those measures that are contained in Part 1 of the bill.

Everybody in the Committee will recall that Mr John Shewan was asked to conduct a review of foreign trusts by the Government last year. That did not happen because, shall we say, the Government wanted to do that, but rather because upon the release of the Panama Papers, the then Prime Minister, John Key, decided to tell the world that New Zealand’s trust regime was robust and did not need any change whatsoever, and that people who were saying that it did were effectively committing economic sabotage because they were undermining the $24 million foreign trust industry that we had in New Zealand. Perhaps—not unlike some other occasions during his tenure as Prime Minister—David Farrar did some polling and a focus group, and John Key came out a few days later and said “Well, perhaps we should have a look at this after all.”, and he appointed John Shewan to undertake the review.

The history of the foreign trust regime that is being amended here in Part 1 goes a little bit further back than that. It was firstly set up in 1988, and then altered again in 2006. But by 2013, as the number of foreign trusts operating in New Zealand increased rapidly—we now have 12,000; I think it was around about 6,000 in 2006, so there was a rapid increase in the number of foreign trusts—the very hard-working officials at the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) began to raise their concerns.

In August 2013 they told the Minister that they were concerned that New Zealand’s foreign trust regime and the way that it was being used ran the risk of damaging New Zealand’s excellent reputation for having a very robust tax regime. They said this in a paper to Ministers in August 2013.

By November 2013 the decision had been made by officials at the IRD to add to their work programme the drafting of some legislation around restricting foreign trusts. It was around this time—and, again, I am rehearsing this because it is relevant to Part 1 of the bill—that the Prime Minister’s lawyer, or then lawyer, Ken Whitney, got in contact with the then Minister of Revenue, Todd McClay, to ask him what was going on with this change in the regime and to say that the Prime Minister had suggested to Mr Whitney that he get in contact with Todd McClay to see whether they could stop this terrible change to the regime. And, lo and behold, that is precisely what happened.

So here we are in the House in February 2017, doing something that the officials of the Inland Revenue Department wanted done in August 2013, and in that time damage has been done to New Zealand’s reputation and we are considered by many people around the world as a tax haven. That is not the view of members opposite, but it is most certainly the view of many people who have exploited New Zealand’s foreign trust regime. In the wake of the Panama Papers, we saw New Zealand’s name associated with Mexican drug lords and people who were laundering money all over the world, and that is not good for New Zealand. It also had the effect of undermining the confidence of New Zealand taxpayers in their own system. As many people will want to say, they work hard, they pay their own taxes, and they do the right thing, and then they see that somebody is using our tax system to exploit another country to not pay their fair dues there.

So it was not just the Opposition parties; it was, in fact, the Australian Financial Review that produced a map of tax havens, and on that map sat New Zealand. That is something that we in this Parliament should not only be not proud of but should not allow to exist.

So the Government—finally, slowly, dragged to the table—decided that it would set up the review that John Shewan undertook. Mr Shewan, despite—what should I say—a controversial start to that review, managed to get it done in a way that I think most members of Parliament appreciated. It was a thorough review, and it made a sweeping set of recommendations, some of which we find contained in what begins as clause 10 of this bill, replacing section 59B of the income tax Act.

Fletcher Tabuteau: Oh, nice reference.

GRANT ROBERTSON: Thank you very much—I read that off here.

I want to run through the good bits and then, in the time remaining, the bits that are missing. The good bits are that we are finally able to identify the name of the trust—the name of a foreign trust that is set up—the date and detail of each settlement of the trust, and the name, email address, residential address, country of tax residence, and taxpayer identification number of not only the trustees but each settlor. This is a big and important development. It creates some sunlight on a practice that, as I say, has caused some real damage for New Zealand.

There is a range of issues covered in new sections 59B to 59E about the annual returns, time limits, and various penalties on trusts that do not actually put in place their returns. That is all good stuff, and on this side of the House we are happy to see that here and happy to support that. But we do feel that these clauses fall short in two particular regards.

The first of those is that, critically—and the Government could have done this. Alongside this, in a core recommendation of John Shewan’s report, was the extension of the anti - money-laundering (AML) rules to real estate agents, lawyers, and accountants, and the Government assured New Zealanders that legislation to put in place the second round of the AML changes would have been in this Parliament before the end of last year. That did not happen and we still have not seen them now, and we are not going to see them in a time that I believe will see them pass before we rise for the election in September.

That means there is still a giant hole in our regime. There is still a giant hole because the very people who are responsible for establishing these trusts are the lawyers, they are the accountants, and they are the real estate agents. New Zealand is lagging behind here. The rest of the world is getting ahead of us on making sure that their tax systems can robustly stand up. We need that anti - money-laundering legislation passed and, on this side of the House, I can say to the Government that we are here to help in this regard. We would like to see that legislation introduced.

The Government has dragged its feet. There are all kinds of stories and rumours around Wellington about why that might be, and about the influence of those real estate agents, lawyers, and accountants.

Let us not repeat the mistake that happened in August 2013, when the Inland Revenue Department wanted to push ahead on a reform of foreign trusts, but was pulled back because of the Government’s mates. Let us not do that again; let us see that in. So that is a real weakness for us in this bill.

The other weakness, for us, was actually not a recommendation of Mr Shewan but one that we on this side of the House believe should be here. We need transparency; we need sunlight. We are on our way here. This register now exists, and people will be able to search it, but the people who can search it—the people who know about it—are, effectively, limited to being the Inland Revenue Department, the Department of Internal Affairs, and the police.

In our view, we have a publicly searchable register for companies and we have a publicly searchable register for charitable trusts, so why do we not have that register for foreign trusts? Of course we can make exceptions where somebody’s safety may be at risk. That is an obvious exception to make. But on this side of the House we believe the Government has stopped short of the level of transparency that would give New Zealanders confidence that the tax system is robust and that would ensure that we could not be seen internationally as a safe tax haven.

And if anyone thinks that this is dead and buried now the Panama Papers have gone away, we have just in the last few weeks had the story of a Malaysian businessman who is being prosecuted at the moment. He was choosing where to hide his money. He chose two places in the world to do that: the Cayman Islands and New Zealand. That is not the company that we want to keep.

We should be doing absolutely everything in our power to have a robust foreign trust regime, and one that is transparent enough so that anyone who needs to see that information can see that information. Unfortunately, this part does not do that.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this legislation this evening. I want to go straight into some technical questions for the Minister in the chair, Alfred Ngaro, and I speak specifically about Part 2, clauses 36, 37, and 38, if memory serves. I apologise, I do not have the reference straight in front of me, but—37, 38, and 39, actually. I make specific reference to the facility of tax pooling for companies. My question to the Minister arises from some submissions and conversations with business out there, because what we are seeing with this legislation at the moment is a kind of barrier set in place around the $5 million mark for businesses in terms of the new accounting income method (AIM) procedures, in terms of the new accounting reporting systems available to business, which New Zealand First wholeheartedly supports, by the way.

But what my question is—and if you will forgive me, Mr Chair, I will read some quotes here. What we are talking about when we refer to pooling is that it enables clients who have not paid enough provisional tax to purchase an overpayment from another taxpayer who has paid too much provisional tax, and, in so doing, there is this balancing mechanism used by these pooling firms to meet the obligation of tax companies and their requirements to the IRD. What this new legislation does at this stage—I understand IRD is in conversations to extend this out and have conversations with business about extending this cap, but there is a cap at the moment. So the feedback to New Zealand First is that, actually, this undermines some really good and sensible tax practice for some large firms in New Zealand that want to meet their tax obligations, that want to meet their requirements—in fact, some of them are so earnest in their efforts they are overpaying, obviously, while others have underestimated their contribution commitments, but in so doing, being part of this pooling system, they have the flexibility to use this function to meet their commitments.

So to the Minister this evening, please, can you explain why there is this cap and what the function is that the ministry believes it serves. Perhaps we are mistaken in believing that, actually, it does facilitate good tax practice and good commitment to tax obligations and their timely payment. Why is there that cap, and why are we cutting out a significant size of large businesses in New Zealand being able to comply with their tax requirements?

I went through that a lot quicker than I thought I would, so I would like to acknowledge the words of the previous speaker, Grant Robertson—

Grant Robertson: Oh, that’s a good idea.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Yeah, yeah—exactly. He spoke most eloquently and encapsulated my thinking on the current tax situation in New Zealand. I would just like to iterate a few of those points.

The Government, in this legislation, in Part 1, has brought us to a point where we are meeting our obligations as outlined by the Shewan report. New Zealand First had some difficulty with the history that got us to the point, but, as has so eloquently been pointed out, we are here now, and the Government has made a sincere move in the right direction to ensure that foreign trusts meet their obligations in terms of transparency and reporting.

Andrew Bayly: I agree, totally.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: I do look forward to Mr Bayly’s contribution elucidating and elaborating in great, great detail. But the AIM section of this legislation is something that New Zealand First has been advocating for quite a few years now, and it is actually sincerely with great excitement that we do see this in this legislation.

Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Excitement?

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Yeah, sincerely—excitement. You talk to small business, and they love it.

So we are pleased to support all parts of this legislation going forward, and I do look forward to further contributions this evening. Thank you.

ALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa): Mr Chair—

Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Who? Oh, the deputy chair! Oh!

ALASTAIR SCOTT: Thank you for noting that, Mr Cosgrove. I would also like to rise and reiterate a little bit of what Fletcher Tabuteau has just spoken about—

Fletcher Tabuteau: No—no!

ALASTAIR SCOTT: Believe it or not—believe it or not. That is, discussing—

Andrew Bayly: Professor.

ALASTAIR SCOTT: —the professor—and to discuss the accounting income method as being very, very welcome by the small to medium sized enterprise (SME) community, by small business people, and by anyone who has had to pay and estimate provisional tax. On this side of the Chamber, at least, I know there are a lot of people who have had to estimate provisional tax because they come from a small business background—

Andrew Bayly: And even pay it.

ALASTAIR SCOTT: —and even pay it—and I am looking forward to hearing from people on that side of the Chamber, and I know there are some, who have had to estimate their provisional tax and have had to pay it. And there is a hand going up there from Mr Cosgrove, and I accept that he is a very strong advocate of this pay-as-you-go—if you want to call it that—system. But I would be very interested to see others who have never paid or had to assess provisional tax discuss the matter with some empathy, at least, for those who have had to do so, because it really has been a pain in the neck.

Provisional tax is, and has been for a long time, a very difficult and cumbersome and—actually, my main point is that it has been a stressful method and regime of estimating and paying tax. We talk about removing compliance costs. We talk about simplifying the tax collection system, which is true. But the main thing and the reason why people come to me and say that, other than the extra police and other than the ultra-fast broadband (UFB) roll-out—this piece of legislation is the most supported by my constituents that I have seen go through this House.

Hon Clayton Cosgrove: It’s going to be huge!

ALASTAIR SCOTT: It is. It is, really. Fletcher Tabuteau said he was excited. I know there a lot of SMEs out there that are totally relieved. Let us face it, there is enough going on in the lives of small businessmen and women to not have to be concerned about the bloody tax bill. They have got more things to worry about: they have got customers, they have got interest rates, they have got the foreign exchange rate, and they have got global economic conditions. They have got the marketplace to be concerned about. They have got their cost of labour and cost of production, and having to be concerned about paying their tax—or estimating accurately and then having to find the cash to pay their provisional tax—is really a burden that should not be there in the first place.

Mr Coates mentioned it in the second reading: it is all about cash flow. Cash flow is king. Cash is king. To have someone have to pay a provisional tax payment because they did well last year but not so well this year just screws up that whole cash flow system, and that is what can really bury a small business operator. There is no need for that to happen, and that is why this pay-as-you-go method of calculating your tax is a very, very welcome improvement to the tax system. I cannot overstate that. As I say, many people have come to me to say that it was a fantastic announcement—I think it was by Minister Foss at the time—and they are looking forward to not having to deal with that stress of having to estimate and find the cash to pay tax from last year that is now going to be due the following year. Thank you for this opportunity to contribute to this debate this evening.

STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): I would like to elaborate a little bit on the accounting income method (AIM), but before I do I would actually like to just look at the commencement date for some of these clauses. The reason I do that is if you look at clause 2(2C), this talks about the brightline test. The reason I would like to talk about this—so we are talking about page 47, clause 55B, this amends the Income Tax Act. We were in this House less than 12 months ago talking about a bit of legislation that the IRD itself admitted would not work. It did not want it. There were actually three bills going through the House at one time and we had the unusual situation in the Finance and Expenditure Committee where, in fact, we had submitters coming in and submitting on the wrong bill because they thought it was the next bill. We were all a little bit confused, and the officials were sitting there rubbing their heads going—well, you could almost hear them say, even though they were too polite to do that—“We told you this would happen.”

So we are back here again. This is not the fault of the officials. I do not blame them for amendments within 12 months to something like this.

Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Not the chair of the FEC.

STUART NASH: Yes, I would probably blame him. I do not blame the officials. I do not even blame parliamentarians or even our expert adviser. What I do say is this actually is the result of rather sloppy, rushed legislation because this was in effect poll-driven legislation where, as mentioned, it went against all the officials’ advice. I remember in speeches—55B. We said at the time: “This legislation is not robust and I will guarantee we’ll be back here within 12 months amending it.” Well—

Grant Robertson: We are.

STUART NASH: —we are. We are. I suspect that in the next tax bill and the one after that—and there are a lot coming through the pipeline—we will continue to amend this because it is imperfect legislation and it is not the way to make tax law. The other thing also about retrospective tax law is you have got to be very, very careful with this because people make decisions based on the law at the time. If, in fact, it is retrospective, then often people may say: “Well, I wouldn’t have made that decision if in fact I had known that that was the rule at the time.” Part of the problem with this is—it is fixing a loophole; there is no doubt about that. But it was still the law and people still made decisions. The problem of course that parliamentarians have is that some of the sharpest minds in the country, like the Attorney-General over there, who is working very hard—oh no, he is awake. Some of the sharpest minds in the country—

Hon Christopher Finlayson: I’m reading the Boston Globe.

STUART NASH: Ha, ha! Some of the sharpest minds in the country are engaged in pointing out and finding holes and loopholes in our tax legislation. We often joke about this. We often say if they concentrated their vast intellectual effort improving the tax system and working in a positive way, then we would all be better off. But, of course, they would not be able to generate the huge fees they do in finding these loopholes for their clients. But we just have to be aware that retrospective tax legislation is quite difficult and it does create precedents that can be quite dangerous.

If I may say so, I did find the speech from the last member—Alastair Scott, who is now I understand the deputy chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee—rather enlightening. The reason I say that is he stood up here and said that estimating provisional tax can be a real pain for small-business owners. It is a real problem—I am talking about Part 2 of the bill here—it is a headache, and they have got all of these things to worry about. Well, the surprising thing for me is—there are two things. First of all, the small-business owners have had to estimate provisional tax for the 8 years that that member has actually been in Government. So for 8 years the Government did nothing about it. The other thing is, in fact, this does not come into being until 2018.

We talked about this at the Finance and Expenditure Committee, and we said to the officials: “Why are you waiting so long to bring this into force?”, when normally with a bill, as the chair was well aware, the bill receives Royal assent and then away we go. But this is pushed out even longer because it was felt that it would take some software companies a while to get used to this, or it would take companies a while to order their affairs, etc., which we found a little strange.

So what this actually means is that from the time that that member was in Parliament all the way through to when this actually diminishes as a “pain to small businesses” is going to be over 10 years. The member is right. The member is very right. It is an impost on small-business owners when they have a whole lot of things to consider, yet it has taken the Government 10 years to do it.

The other thing is there are now a range of software packages, like Xero for one. I mean the reason I quote Xero is that the guy who is the main driver behind this, the main owner, is from Hawke’s Bay—a Napier Boys’ High School boy, fantastic school that it is. These software packages have actually diminished the angst faced by a lot of these small-business owners. The removal of provisional tax—well, provisional tax still exists, actually. The provision of another option is all very well, but the angst faced 8 years ago when that member was in Parliament is nowhere near as bad as it is now, because these software packages have made it so much easier for small-business owners to actually plan with the degree of certainty.

Andrew Bayly: No.

STUART NASH: Yes. That is absolutely true—absolutely true. I challenge that member to give Mr Rod Drury a call and ask him whether in fact I am right. Now let us be clear about one thing: what this is doing is not replacing provisional tax; this is providing another option. So if small-business owners still want to pay provisional tax in the way that they are doing at the moment, then they are still able to do that. In fact there are currently three methods of assessing provisional tax: standard uplift method, the GST method, and now we have got this.

But there are some interesting things about this. First and foremost, in order for a small-business owner to use the accounting income method they must use a software package that has been approved by the commissioner and certified as an AIM—look it is easier if we use the acronym AIM now, which stands for accounting income method—approved software package. In order to become an AIM-approved software package, they must get permission from the commissioner.

We did have a slight concern about this. The concern we had is that it is almost forcing small-business owners who use one of the, let us say, smaller accounting software packages to move to one of the larger ones, or what it will do is it will buy the level of compliance to that small software package to go through the process of becoming AIM-certified. This is easy for Xero and Mind Your Own Business (MYOB). You could argue that Xero and MYOB, but mainly Xero, are up to date with this anyway. But for a lot of the smaller ones, this could be the death knell of their business. This is in clauses 32, 34, and 36. So it has to be certified software.

The other thing is that there are actually exclusions, so there are reasons why a company might not be able to use this method. They are quite logical, if you go through the bill, but we have to be a little bit careful when we say that no longer can a small to medium sized business use the AIM methodology when, in fact, that person or that business has had to go through the software package that is AIM-certified.

So it sounds a little bit counterintuitive, and I get the impression that this could become a little bit complicated. What will happen, and this is one of the unintended consequences, is that small and medium sized business owners will become so reliant on their software providers that they themselves may in fact lose a level of accountability, or certainly lose the day-to-day feel of running their own businesses.

The one thing I also must talk about is—when the last speaker talked about cash flow, of course there is that old adage that cash flow is king, but of course it is about profit as well. You do not pay tax on cash flow; you pay tax on profit. I remember one of the first headlines I got, ever—one of the few—was when the sub-editor on the Dominion Post got it wrong and I talked about how much tax farmers had not paid, due to record cash flows. They apologised in the end, but we were talking about profit. So we have got to be a little bit conscious of the fact that you do not pay tax on your income; you pay tax on your profit. There is a big difference there. So we are calling this the accounting income methodology, but let us not lose sight of the fact that we want these companies to pay profit, and we want them to get it sorted.

The previous speaker, Mr Tabuteau, was right: the tax-pooling method actually worked very well. The tax-pooling industry is quite sophisticated and it has done a very good job of—I would say, again—mitigating the effects of underpayment or overpayment. The problem with the tax-pooling system is you had to understand how it worked. You had to be keyed into a tax expert who actually knew how to take advantage of the tax-pooling regime. That was not always the case for your plumber who employs two or three people. It did add a level of complexity.

I am not saying this is a bad thing. What I am saying is that there was actually a far better method of doing this, and I am assuming the next speaker will probably talk about that in much greater detail. This is not the be-all and end-all, by any stretch of the imagination.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): Thank you for this second opportunity to stand and speak to this legislation. Again, I have a question to the Minister in the chair, Alfred Ngaro. I am referencing now, Minister, clause 55B in Part 3, which amends section CB 6A, and the edited version in new subsection (1)(4B). I would read it to you. In fact, I will read it to you, because I challenge you to tell me what it means. The question relates to the brightline part of the legislation. For example, subsection (1)(4B)(a) states: “(ii) the first date following the intervening transfer, if there has been an intervening transfer to a person who is not a trustee: … (b)(i) the earliest date (the undivided date) on which an instrument to transfer the undivided land to a trustee of the trust was registered …” I could continue, but I will not.

Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Oh, no, go on.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: No—it highlights, Mr Cosgrove, the ludicrous nature of the brightline section and the brightline legislation that this Committee and this House has had to deal with in the past.

One of the great concerns and one of the great issues New Zealand First had on this side of the House was that the brightline test was ill-conceived, it was poorly written, and in this legislation tonight we have yet more evidence of a confused, convoluted piece of legislation that needs continuous rewriting of policy to make it work. I do not believe it will.

So the brightline test was speaking about a 2-year period, and within that period, if you sold a property and made what we will call a capital gain, although I am sure I will be argued against on that—and I am still waiting for Mr Bayly to stand up and make his much-anticipated contribution.

We were told by nearly every submitter that the brightline test would not work, that it would need continuous fixing—

Hon Clayton Cosgrove: All of the accountants.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Yes, all the experts and all the accountants. I think Mr Cosgrove is right when he literally says: “All of the accountants.” Not most of them, but all of them, told the Finance and Expenditure Committee that the brightline test would not work. I do take this opportunity tonight to reference that clause and those parts to highlight—I do not know—the naivety of the Government in suggesting that this is a solution to the Auckland housing crisis. It is not. It will not be, and it will not make one iota of difference.

If this Government was concerned about generating more revenue, we were told that even then it would generate no income for the Government. In fact, it might be cost-positive in its implementation. That is not naive; that is bordering on—well, I am not sure whether I can get away with saying it, so I am not going to say it, with that particular Chair in the seat, and respecting the House this evening. But it beggars belief.

I chose those particular clauses to highlight the problem that New Zealand First has with the brightline test, the implementation of it being continued in this legislation, and our frustration that the Government believes—and, to be completely honest with you, not just believes, but uses it to pitch to the public that it is some kind of a solution to the Auckland housing crisis, which it absolutely is not.

I am giving forewarning to my colleagues on this side of the Chamber: I am about to sit down, gentlemen. Thank you.

Hon ALFRED NGARO (Minister for Pacific Peoples): It is an honour to sit in the chair and to be able to take a call in the Committee stage of this bill. I just want to acknowledge the Minister of Revenue in her role in her work, and also with the officials.

I want, first of all, to comment on the first speaker of the night, who was Grant Robertson. Actually, it was a good speech. However, what people may not know is that Grant Robertson had a major in theatrics at university and so there was a little bit of embellishment in his criticism of New Zealand and the view that it is now being viewed as a tax haven. I have to question that because Mr Robertson will know that the Corruption Perceptions Index of 2016 found that New Zealand was No. 2 internationally, OK, behind Denmark. Then there was New Zealand. So the view internationally, that we are a tax haven, and that there is some concern, I think has to be questioned, OK, when we think about that index. It is an international index.

Anyway, let us go straight to some of the challenges, I suppose, that have been put forward. First of all, I want to address some of the issues that Mr Robertson raised because I think they are worthy of some comment and some response as well—in particular, in regard to the public register of foreign trusts. I know that was raised. It was in the minority report from Labour, the Greens, and New Zealand First.

The response to that is quite clear. The amendments in this bill follow the recommendations of the inquiry. The inquiry considered whether a public register of information from foreign trusts was necessary in the context of maintaining New Zealand’s international reputation. As I indicated, the Corruption Perceptions Index was quite clear. There is not that concern internationally, and we believe that this strikes the right balance. Trusts are generally, as we know, asset management vehicles controlled by family units. So I think that is critically important as well.

What is also important is that Mr Robertson also raised the issue around—

Hon Ruth Dyson: Are you just reading the highlighted bit?

Hon ALFRED NGARO: It is good to have highlights, because they help to focus you. That is what they do.

Hon Ruth Dyson: It shows you what to read.

Hon ALFRED NGARO: Well, it does. That is very good. That is what a highlighter was designed for, and that is a great thing. It is a great thing. I love them. They are really good.

The question that was raised by Mr Robertson was why the bill does not adopt all of the inquiry recommendations, and why the timing of the anti – money-laundering phase was not brought forward. Mr Robertson will know that there is work that is being done at the moment. The Minister of Justice is currently working through this issue, so it has been taken into consideration as well.

My friend and colleague over there, Mr Fletcher Tabuteau, who got quite technical and wanted to bring forth two issues—

Fletcher Tabuteau: I just wanted an answer—I just wanted an answer.

Hon ALFRED NGARO: I know he just wanted an answer. One of the issues that he raised was in regard to pooling. He talked about why cannot taxpayers use—

Hon Clayton Cosgrove: This has come from Judith’s office directly.

Hon ALFRED NGARO: Well, it is important. We have got to get the technical aspects of it right, do we not, gentlemen? That is critically important.

Grant Robertson: Use a highlighter.

Hon ALFRED NGARO: No highlighter on that. Look at that. That is quite good. Just a black circle—just a black circle. OK?

So, just in regards to this, pooling is designed to remove—I am sure the member will know—the uncertainty. The accounting income method (AIM)—there is no underpayment or overpayment, and no exposure to the use of money interest. But in regards to why AIM is limited to businesses with under $5 million turnover, above this turnover level businesses tend to have in-house professional advice and bespoke accounting systems. The Government will consider how AIM could be applied to large businesses in future work.

The last question—and I will round off my comments because they really do comment on it—is the brightline test. That was quite good that you read that through. Why have the changes to the brightline test been made and why are they retrospective? Good question. The amendment ensures that the brightline test does not apply when there is a change of trustees for a trust holding residential property. The amendment is taxpayer-friendly and is retrospective as the brightline test was not intended to apply in these circumstances. So that is the technical advice that we have got. But I do appreciate the comments that were made, and also, too, the collegiality of the debate so far. Thank you.

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour): I thank the Minister Alfred Ngaro for reading those notes from the Hon Judith Collins. I am sure she may be sending some amendments down as we speak.

Can I touch on a couple of things—the brightline test. I have got to say, Minister, the brightline test is a cracker. You will recall, in the days before you assumed the lofty heights of Cabinet—the most exclusive club in New Zealand—that the recommendation from Treasury was that the brightline test be 5 years. The argument that Treasury put forward, and I think that the Labour Party and other parties put forward, was “2 years, too short”—not referring to “Barnum & Bailey” over there, who will take a call very soon—because at the time the brightline test was being put in the average return for an Auckland property was, I think, in the 20-point range. So if you were going to buy a property and get 20 points a year, which Mr Bayly will know is probably the best investment in New Zealand, you would have to be the local village idiot not to hold it for 2 years and then consider flicking it, right? But, oh no, 2 years will do the trick. That was the argument that was put forward by the Government; it was window dressing.

In terms of the register, the Minister said: “No, no. The register is OK. It’s fine.” So here is the detail about the register that other colleagues have talked about. The register is accessible by the Police, the Department of Internal Affairs, and the IRD. No one else can do it—no member of this Parliament, not even the Minister for IRD. If a foreign Government—say, the Mexican Government or Seychelles or some other, like the Cayman Islands Government, perhaps—wanted to look at it, to penetrate it, to look after tax affairs or see whether there was evasion or corruption, it could not do it.

The argument the Minister has put forward is transparency cut asunder—there is no need for transparency. Foreign governments would not know to look at the register. Foreign governments could not get penetration to the register, so how is a lack of transparency aiding the process? Where is the solid argument against a publicly available register? Where is the negative impact on the beneficiaries or trustees of a foreign trust if it is a publicly available register? That is something that no Minister of Revenue has ever, to my knowledge on the committee—of course, that great genius of our time when it comes to matters of tax, the former chairman of the Finance and Expenditure Committee (FEC), David Bennett.

David Bennett presided over the most inadequate process I have ever seen in terms of a tax bill—completely shambolic. For his great deeds he was promoted to the outer ministry. I have to say, for those of us who are retained on the FEC, we are extremely grateful and indebted to Bill English for that promotion and that removal to the sort of outer reaches, the extraterrestrial areas of the outer Cabinet. It has freed us up as parliamentarians on the FEC to actually do our job unhindered and unabated. I know Mr Robertson, particularly, is gratified for that because he was challenged and his questions pre-Christmas were cauterised because the chair did not like “his tone”—not the questions, his tone. In another place I would ask the Chairman of the Committee to give me advice on where in the Standing Orders it is covered if there is some difficulty in one’s tone. I might be in jeopardy myself if Mr Bennett were ever to take the Chair, God help us.

I also want to ask the Minister about the failure of one of the core recommendations that his own Government inquiry put forward, in respect of foreign trust disclosure rules, to immediately implement phase two of the anti – money- laundering law changes. I remember when some of these came in, because I implemented them. I was Associate Minister of Justice at the time. Why is it that you would not include in the reporting requirements lawyers—no disrespect to the Attorney-General—accountants, and real estate agents? That was a core recommendation of the Government’s own inquiry. So I would not mind an answer to that.

I have got to say, the doozy from the Minister was this corruption—what was it? Which index? What was the name of it?

Grant Robertson: Perceptions index.

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: The Corruption Perceptions Index, which he quoted. So now we have a track record of the Government—

Dr David Clark: Also known as the “Oravida index”.

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: Indeed. So now we have a Government that said there was no problem. Then it said, as the opinion polls went south, that it had better appoint Mr Shewan and others to have a look at it, and it said there might be a problem. As the opinion polls on the issue went south again, the then Prime Minister and the then finance Minister said: “Hey, we’d better do a bit of window dressing. There is a problem.” Then we have the Minister who got up tonight and said that because of this index that placed us at No. 2 that somehow there is not really a problem. So my question would be: what is it? What are we doing here if there is not a problem, if the index is saying we are so rosy and we are not a tax haven?

Grant Robertson: A focus group, Clayton.

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: It is called, as Mr Robertson put it—well, I want to be a bit more subtle, in the spirit of collegiality that the Minister showed me, but, hey, to hell with that. It is called a focus group. It is an opinion poll done lightly, brought to you by the National Party et al. to say: “Hey, feet put to the fire, we’d better try to do something about it.” That was the origin of the brightline test. That was the origin of the brightline test. For years and years and years National would not use the “c” word: crisis. It still refuses to use the “c” word: crisis. But it took some opinion polls—it is all right, relax—and the public said: “Actually, we believe there is a housing crisis. We believe we want a Government—we definitely want a Government—who will do something about that.”

So Steven Joyce got together with the cronies, with the pointy heads, and said: “Right, we actually don’t want to do anything because it’ll affect some of our mates, but we need to make it look good. We need to do a bit of window dressing. So, hey, presto, we come up with a brightline test that will actually do absolutely nothing.” You are still making—what, 10 or 15 points a year, I think, in respect of Auckland values. So, again, if you buy a property today you are making 10 or 15 points in year one and year two. Of course you are going to hold on to that property and flick it after year two. Treasury worked that out when it said 5 years.

The other point I want to make is about Mr Scott’s point about the “Come to Jesus” moment—the road to Damascus—after 7 years in office. He is an eminent business person. He runs a large enterprise, as I understand it. He challenged a few of us to say how many small-business people are over here. Well, I will put my hand up. Mr Nash, Mr O’Connor, others—Mr Parker—have all run businesses in our time. We have all—unlike Mr Bayly—had to pay our taxes and we have done it on time. But to say after 7½ years: “Oh my goodness, we ought to do something.”

The question, again, is: why was that? I will tell you why it was. When we announced our flexible tax policy—plagiarism is the greatest compliment you could pay somebody—I know this for a fact, because I know somebody who was in the room, the then Minister for Economic Development, Steven Joyce, called his officials in, and literally said to them: “How the hell do we deal with this? Do something.” So all the IRD officials scuttled away in rapid fire, desperately trying to put together a policy. Because we nailed it. I will tell you why we nailed it: because we got the former Deputy Commissioner of the IRD Robin Oliver to go through it. He vetted it and he said it was world class. Suddenly, after 7½ years of doing nothing—I remember John Banks and Banksie the Younger, Mr Seymour, get up every week talking about small business, how they were going to assist it, how they were going to help it. They did absolutely nothing about one of the critical things that small business has to deal with—Mr Scott is right—and that is provisional tax, in conjunction with cash flow.

Lots of words, lots of hot air, and then the Labour Party wheels out, you know, it puts the fast ball, a seamer, straight down—the old yorker—through the wickets, and nails it in the policy. The former Deputy Commissioner of the IRD says it is world class and suddenly they have a concern for small business and flexible tax. Well, I have to say, as a mate of mine used to say often: “A day late and a dollar short.” You know, arrive at the battle when the war is won.

But I am glad for those small-business folk out there that the Government has had a focus group, they have run a few opinion polls and they have got the message that the small-business folk need help and they want some practical measures in respect of tax so they can manage their cash flow and make the system work for them.

Dr David Clark: They just need to say: “Thank you, Clayton.”

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: Yes—well, no. They want the tax system to work for them, rather than being a slave to it.

So I just say: “Congratulations on being fast followers. Well done.” But let us get real about it, guys. Mr Scott and, as I say, Mr “Barnum and Bailey” over there, when you get up and have a crack—you know, it is too late. After 7½ years, leading into an election year, suddenly we are going to crow about what we do for small business. Give us a break. The one thing I know about small-business people is that they are not fools. They smell bull, they see bull: they know bull.

BARRY COATES (Green): I appreciate the call. I rise to talk about the Taxation (Business Tax, Exchange of Information, and Remedial Matters) Bill. The Green Party is continuing to support this bill, although I must confess we have severe reservations about certain parts of it. On balance, we think that there are some provisions in it that are well worth supporting.

We are pleased to see the tax streamlining for small business, in particular. It is important; we talked about that during the second reading debate—the importance of cash flow for small business. This will benefit 110,000 small businesses in New Zealand. The idea of pay-as-you-go tax, which works in conjunction with cloud-based accounting software, is a good move and we are happy to support that in the legislation. We are particularly happy to see some measures that would support small business rather than undermine small business, as we have seen in some recent legislation, for example, on anti-dumping, which the House has had to deal with, plus other things like trade agreements that are relentlessly in favour of big business and biased against small business, but will support small business in this particular case.

The second aspect that we support is the follow-up to the Shewan report on greater disclosure of information about foreign trusts—the amendment to section 59 of the Tax Administration Act. This, as previous speakers have said, introduces some sunlight as a disinfectant into the pervasive dodginess, should I say, of our foreign trust systems in the past. You know, we do not want to give a pat on the back for this legislation. This is legislation that has addressed, we think, a pretty shocking problem. It is 6 years since former leader of the Green Party Russel Norman pointed out the damage that foreign trusts were doing to New Zealand’s reputation. The Inland Revenue Department acknowledged that risk to our reputation: New Zealand got listed on the websites of companies that were doing dodgy deals, like Mossack Fonseca, as a good place for people to park their money and avoid paying tax. However, National Party members were lobbied, as we know, and the former Prime Minister’s personal lawyer got involved and no action was taken, even with the evidence of the problems. We are reminded, in looking through the history of this deal, of the former revenue Minister Peter Dunne, who talked about legitimate tax avoidance in 2012.

We are talking about 12,000 companies—a litany of dodgy companies. One of those exposés about the New Zealand foreign trusts came from an Australian Financial Review article on 6 May 2016 analysing the Panama Papers. It was shocking to see the depth to which New Zealand had fallen in terms of allowing practices that were clearly tax avoidance. I must say I am extremely disappointed that Alfred Ngaro does not seem to think that there is a problem here to solve and that New Zealand’s reputation has not been damaged. The particular methodology on the corruption index that he is talking about would not necessarily pick this issue up, and there should be no justification—no justification at all—for this kind of allowance of New Zealand acting as if we are a tax haven.

So in summary we are pleased to see the disclosure under the foreign trust disclosure rules. And just a reminder of how big a problem tax havens are—we are talking about a trillion-dollar industry. New Zealand has had billions of dollars squirreled away in foreign trusts, and the issue of tax havens is not only unjust to small companies and to wage earners and salary earners who have to bear an unfair burden of the tax; I think it is offensive to most New Zealanders to realise that the wealthier you are, the more places you have got to hide your money so that you do not have to pay tax.

We would like to raise four issues with regard to this bill. One, as mentioned by our Labour Party colleagues, is a lack of action on anti - money-laundering provisions. The Shewan report recommended that phase 2 of the anti - money-laundering provisions should be addressed by the end of last year. They were not. Lawyers, accountants, and real estate agents are still not covered in terms of anti - money-laundering. This is extremely important because of the flood of money internationally, most visibly because of impending regulation in China but also from other aspects. The OECD’s international action task force shows the need for New Zealand to pass this legislation quickly, otherwise we will be even further behind the actions of other countries. So that is the first issue: anti - money-laundering is not included.

The second issue is that there is no public register of foreign trusts. We have public registers of companies, we have public registers of other trusts, but we have no sunlight, we have no transparency, we have no searchability of a register of foreign trusts, and we do not think that is good enough. So that is a severe criticism we have of this bill: we do not think it goes nearly far enough in order to stop the kinds of practices that we have seen before.

The third issue is that the Government could have taken this opportunity to also start addressing the issues of multinationals operating in this country not paying their fair share of tax. Australia and the UK have forms of deferred tax. It is a way to start taxing multinationals while also we engage in the OECD’s process of base erosion and tax shifting. So we want to see rapid action on ensuring the large multinational companies who operate in New Zealand, who compete with small companies, are not adversely advantaged in doing so by getting away without paying tax.

There is a final issue, and the final issue comes from the details of the legislation itself. I was not part of the committee process. I have had reports from my colleagues who were, and they said that there were severe criticisms of the legislation from submitters. I quote from an article in the National Business Review by Rob Hosking, who said that the bill was slammed by almost every submitter as being sloppily written, rushed, and counter-productive.

The article also talks about criticism from the director of the Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand, Peter Vial, who said that he was appalled by the regulatory-making power that particularly the Supplementary Order Paper introduces. I think that this shows that, as colleagues have said—as Stuart Nash previously said—this is complex regulation but it is not robust and it is not well-thought-through and it is not well consulted upon.

So our recommendation for the Government would be that a review of this legislation would be planned within 2 years of its enactment, and that this process, rather than being accidentally finding out where it is not working and where it is causing problems, actually be planned as a process to improve the legislation as it gets implemented. Thank you, Mr Chairperson.

Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): I am very glad to take my first call on the Committee stage of this bill—

Grant Robertson: The first of many.

Dr DAVID CLARK: —the first of many, I hope—as I have some things to say that have not yet been said, and 20 minutes straight would no doubt be the ultimate in contributions. I do not think I have yet had the opportunity to do such a speech in this House. I rise to the occasion.

I want to just start out by commenting a little on my colleague Clayton Cosgrove’s earlier speech, where he talked about the Government’s fast follower status in terms of small business policy and provisional tax. That is one of the things that are being implemented here and it is one of the reasons, of course, that Labour supports this policy and will be supporting this bill through the House. There are things that we are worried about, there are things that we are concerned about, but, you will have noticed from Mr Cosgrove’s upbeat tone, we on this side of the Chamber will be supporting the legislation.

The one thing he did not comment on during his contribution—and perhaps it is an excess of modesty, which is his natural area of habitation, that prevented him talking about it—was his own work in producing that small-business tax policy and making sure that Labour really led on it. So I want to take my hat off to my colleague Clayton Cosgrove for his contribution to this policy outcome that we have here today. As I said, his modesty probably prevents him from claiming that himself, because he is indeed a modest man!

The big concern I have, of course, is that this bill does not go far enough. It is very reluctant window dressing that we have here. We know that this bill came hot on the heels of the Panama Papers, and the immediate response of the Prime Minister of the time was a concern about the damage they would do to the local tax industry—$24 million. He quoted that straight away—bang—before anything else. He was not worried about the tax-haven status—no. It was raised in the media, but he immediately said: “No, this could damage our tax industry in New Zealand.” And, in fact, that is true—true. It did not cost as much as the flag debacle, but $24 million was the number that sprang to his mind immediately.

Of course, ordinary New Zealanders are worried about our status as a fair dealer in the world. I disagree with the comment of the Minister in the chair, Alfred Ngaro, that we have got nothing to worry about—or the implication in his speech that we have got nothing to worry about. We do know that we slid down the Government Defence Anti-Corruption Index recently, off the back of a number of scandals in New Zealand, and one can only assume that there have been more scandals overseas that rearrange our place higher up the pecking order. It is something that we should never ever lose track of, because that reputation for being a fair dealer in the world is what brings New Zealand to the international-trade table. It is why we are an important player in international relations, far above what our size in terms of population would suggest. A big portion of that is our international reputation for fairness.

But we have here some loopholes in this legislation. There are some changes around anti - money-laundering, but there are some really, really serious exceptions that I think need to be patched up. The biggest, of course, is the exemption of real estate agents and lawyers. When we see an out-of-control housing market—and my colleague Clayton Cosgrove talked about the brightline test and the 2 years of capital gains that would accumulate and be easily cashed in on by those willing to wait out a 2-year period, as opposed to Treasury’s 5-year period recommendation. That is just the start, because here in this bill we have an exemption for real estate agents and lawyers.

If there was going to be a route for money-laundering, if there was going to be a way into hot money in the international scene in terms of avoiding tax, it would be in real estate. I do not think there is much debate around that. That is something the commentators broadly agree is a way that people park money offshore. People put it into real estate, they wait for the capital gain, and when they sell the asset it is the proceeds of a house sale and becomes clean money again. The lawyers involved in those transactions are exempt under the legislation that we are passing today. I would like the Minister to stand up and make a contribution as to why that exemption should still stand. I would like to hear the Minister explain just why real estate agents and lawyers should be exempt from the anti - money-laundering changes being put forward in this legislation.

The report that was put forward that examined all of these changes recommended much more widespread action. It recommended that anti - money-laundering legislation be upgraded and that we have legislation compliance across the whole range of sectors. Of course, the problem is huge. A few years ago—I think it was 2012—an ex-McKinsey chief economist estimated that the tax havens of the world were harbouring $21 trillion. That was in 2012—$21 trillion.

This is no trivial issue. This is no trivial issue on the world stage. It is the reason why economies are struggling to keep their infrastructure up. When we have big holes in tax systems—when people are hiding their money and not paying their fair share—we have the increasing inability of Governments in the modern world to be able to afford to keep their infrastructure in the state that it ought to be. So, of course, we support the measures in this bill as far as they go, because we believe in creating a fairer tax system and they go some way towards creating a fairer tax system. At least some of the people will be required to comply with anti - money-laundering legislation. But this Government does not want to take it further.

Another interesting point is—and I refer members to Part 1, subpart 2, clause 8, which amends section 3 of the Income Tax Act. There we see reference to the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) legislation that was passed through this House not so long ago. Members will recall that this was legislation we passed here through the House when Todd McClay was the responsible Minister. Now, of course, Judith Collins has taken over the revenue portfolio. That legislation required New Zealand banks, at the expense of their customers, to collect information on every customer so that they could ascertain whether they were a tax resident for US purposes. This was in order for the US to maximise its coverage of tax havens and to ensure that its taxable citizens were paying their fair share. In that piece of FATCA legislation, there were some reciprocal requirements, albeit weak—or, at least, language that talked about the opportunity for New Zealand to get similar information out of the US.

One thing I would also like to ask the Minister, once he has told us why lawyers and real estate agents should be exempt from anti - money-laundering provisions in this bill, is whether that FATCA legislation, as it is amended here, still means that New Zealand will be getting the same kind of information that was expected out of the US in future—in particular, in the context of a new President of the United States. I am very interested to know whether under the Trump administration the progress that was made on the FATCA legislation, limited though it was, will still stand. Will we still be able, as New Zealanders, to insist on tax disclosure out of the US, to show where New Zealand citizens are guilty of operating in a dishonest manner in respect of the world’s taxation systems? The Minister may well be able to tell us whether that legislation has been adequately amended in this bill to provide for our future.

The bigger issue, of course, is the “BEPS” work—the base erosion and profit shifting work—being done by the OECD. That piece of work, in my view, is moving far too slowly for New Zealand’s interests. It is designed so that we can minimise tax loopholes, so that we can reconstruct tax systems in the West to ensure that everybody pays their fair share. But, of course, in the meantime the US is doing stuff like the FATCA legislation, which ensures that its interests are served. It is demanding that Switzerland turn over tax records. It is demanding that European countries are transparent with information, or it will charge them for not doing so or will make life difficult for them. And we have a President in the United States who is making demands of many Western countries in future. I want to know what this Government is doing to make sure that that transparency is going two ways, because I do not think it goes far enough.

The keeping of a register, colleagues have already talked about. It is not being progressed in the way that it ought to be. We have exemptions for lawyers, we have exemptions for real estate agents, and I think the Minister needs to tell us whether the FATCA legislation—the small progress that was made—will stand under the new regime and with this legislation, and why these other parties should be exempt from anti - money-laundering legislation.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): It is a pleasure to be talking on this bill tonight. Just before we start, I think it is worthwhile going back and just reminding ourselves of what this bill is actually about. It is actually about four things. First of all, it is about making tax processes simpler, and my good colleague here, Alastair Scott, just spoke about that. Secondly, it is about implementing the automatic exchange of prudential accounting information on tax matters. Thirdly, it is about ensuring that stage 1 of the Business Transformation Programme for the IRD can be put in place. The fourth one, which we have had quite a bit of debate about, is around the Government Inquiry into Foreign Trust Disclosure Rules.

I just want to pick up on that last one, but the reason I am just highlighting those four issues—we have heard about the brightline test from our good colleague from across the way here. To be honest, that is a very, very small part. It has come into this bill only through a Supplementary Order Paper. This is nothing really to do with the four key elements of this bill, so the brightline test conversation is actually a bit of a sideshow.

Also, we have just been hearing a lot about tax structures from Dr David Clark, and all that sort of information. Newsflash—I have just got to correct you, Dr Clark. On 25 January New Zealand was ranked first equal as the least corrupt country in the world, so if there is any sort of aspersion that New Zealand is in a bad place, or whatever, that is just totally not right.

So, just turning to the issue that Mr Robertson started out by talking about tonight, which is foreign trusts, the Shewan report was actually quite revealing. Contrary to a lot of the rhetoric that we have heard tonight, the issue with New Zealand is that the system is not broken, but it could be substantially improved, and that is what this bill is about. It is not broken, but we can improve it, and this is what we are doing.

I heard members saying “Oh, we’re not going far enough.”, and all that sort of stuff. I thought we might just have a conversation around some of the detail of that. So the details that we discussed in the Finance and Expenditure Committee—first of all, the definition of a foreign trust. I am sure everyone knows this, but it is a trust that is settled by a foreigner. So the first amendment is that we require resident trustees to formally register. Previously, that actually was not required. Previously, it was not required; now they are required to do it.

Secondly, we require foreign trusts as part of a registration to declare that the person establishing the trust has made sure that the trustee, the settlor, or the protector has actually understood what they are signing up to. The rules and the laws that they have to be made aware of are the Tax Administration Act 1994, the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009, the regulations under the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act, etc. So all those things they are specifically now required to actually be informed of and to actually sign off on.

The third thing that they have to do is that—we have substantially increased the disclosure regime around when you register a trust. So that is all contained in new section 59B in clause 10, and it is interesting just looking at the level of detail we now require. We actually now require the name and other identity of the particulars of the trust; the date and detail of each settlement of the trust; the email address, the residential address, the country of tax residence, and the tax identification number—and I will come back to that—for the following persons: each settlor, each person with a power under the trust to control or dismiss a trustee or appoint a new trustee, and each person with a power under the trust to control a trustee. Those two categories are actually defined as a protector. For each trustee, we require all that information, and for a fixed trust, we require it for each beneficiary and nominee for the underlying beneficiary.

So those are the quite significant requirements required when you register a trust. When you look then, in terms of the annual filing stuff now—that has also been beefed up quite substantially under new section 59D. The specific changes are that during the 12-month period, if there has been any change in terms of information provided as part of the registration, the trust’s financial statements, the date and nature of each settlement, the name, email address, residential address, country of tax residence, tax identification number, the date and time of each distribution, the name and email—

MEKA WHAITIRI (Labour—Ikaroa-Rāwhiti): Tēnā koe, Mr Chair. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on the Taxation (Business Tax, Exchange of Information, and Remedial Matters) Bill in its Committee stage. There has been a lot of debate in this Chamber, from both sides of the Chamber, and in my small time I also want to congratulate the Hon Alfred Ngaro, the Minister in the chair, on your elevation—congratulations.

But I have a question, and it picks up on some of the debate that has occurred in this Committee tonight, and it is one around timeliness. There has been a lot of debate around how quickly the Government has acted in response to the Government Inquiry into Foreign Trust Disclosure Rules report, and perhaps the Minister can answer the question.

If I turn the Committee’s attention to Part 1, clauses 3 to 6, we are talking about clause 4B(a), and I will read out the particular clause. I am not a member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, but as a particular layperson and a former small-business owner, I read this particular clause in Part 1, under “Exchange of Information”, which goes like this: “(a) in the words before paragraph (a), replace ‘in relation to a distribution’ with ‘at a moment in time’:”—at a moment in time. So we are going from a particular clarity in legislation in relation to a distribution—and the Minister might clarify it for me if I have got this wrong, but that, to me, conjures up a particular transaction, so you actually know when that is happening—to “a moment in time”, and paragraph (b) does exactly the same thing. It replaces “on the date of distribution” with “with the moment in time”. Perhaps, again, I am asking: what is it? Is it the beginning of time, the middle of time, or the end of time? I think it is a legitimate question to ask the Minister in the chair, particularly when this bill is attempting to make it easier for small businesses. So I have picked up that particular clause, and perhaps the Minister can answer some questions on that.

I guess the other point I wanted to ask in relation, again, to Part 1, Subpart 2, clauses 7 to 26—and I will not go on, because I think there have been a lot of people talking against the publicly available register of foreign trusts and asking whether, in this piece of legislation, it has gone deep enough. We have had plenty of examples where people have addressed whether we are actually asking the right questions to ensure that we are meeting our international obligations to ensure that we are not perceived as a foreign tax haven. So those are two points I want to raise.

My last point is in relation to clause 104, where we talk about introducing a “Henry VIII” clause. I do note that the committee debated quite a bit on this particular clause. It had a dollar threshold that it agreed to remove, but the “Henry VIII” clause remains with the removal of the dollar threshold, which actually has an Order in Council, as opposed to legislation, to address the intention behind that clause. I guess, yet again, it is a question in my mind, and again the Minister may be able to answer why, after the debate in the select committee stage—when I guess many members asked for that particular clause to be removed—the Government felt that it was better for it to remain in this particular piece of legislation. I am really keen to hear the Minister’s response on that.

Lastly, Minister, is Part 2, “Business Tax: AIM provisional tax method”. Of course Labour wants to support making business in this country very, very easy and very efficient. My question to the Minister is: in relation to that particular part, in the Accounting Income Method (AIM) provision, is there going to be support for small businesses as we transition into the new AIM methodology? It is not obviously clear in there, but it may be something that the Government and the Minister in the chair could perhaps explain to the Committee, as to how small businesses are going to transition into this new AIM method, which is going to, apparently, make their lives easier in terms of paying tax. Thank you.

STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): There are just a couple of points I would like to make. First and foremost, Mr Andrew Bayly stood up and said that this bill is about four parts—four changes. Well, I actually think that that is belittling the bill. There are a whole lot of provisions in this piece of tax legislation. Some have wide consequences, some less so, but they are all important, and they all have consequences for business. To say this carries only four parts is quite untrue.

Alastair Scott: So how many parts are there? How many bits? How many bits would you like to say?

STUART NASH: Well, there is a 190-page regulatory impact statement. There is a 91-page bill, which contains over 100 clauses, and there is a 250-page officials report. I read them all, as our revenue spokesperson; I am sure that member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee did as well, so he will be well aware that this is quite complex.

There is one thing that Andrew Bayly talked about that I do not necessarily agree with, and I would like to challenge him based on what the IRD has said. He said that the system was not broken but that it could be improved. Well, what the IRD has actually said is—the IRD proposed three options around foreign trusts. (1) was the status quo, (2) was the one we have found here, and (3) was to repeal the tax exemption for foreign trusts. What it said is, and this is in the regulatory impact statement: “We do not recommend option 1 (the status quo) as that does not meet the stated objective to reduce the potential for misuse of foreign trusts in New Zealand (both actual and perceived) in respect of foreign tax avoidance or evasion and money laundering and other illicit purposes.”

The IRD, in that sentence there, acknowledged that there was the ability to engage in avoidance or evasion and money laundering, and, therefore, that is why they recommended moving to option 2. But the interesting thing about option 2—what we are debating at the moment—is that the IRD has actually said: “It may partially address the concerns relating to money-laundering and other illicit purposes. Accordingly, the recommended option … will meet the objective to reduce the potential for misuse”. It has not said “to eliminate the potential for misuse”, only “to reduce the potential for misuse”.

Option 3, which was considered by the IRD, which, obviously, is not being debated, was to repeal tax exemption for foreign trusts. The one thing I would perhaps disagree with the IRD on here is that there were five tests that they use: New Zealand’s reputation, open economy, fairness and integrity, coherency of the tax system, and compliance and administration, which is—there were five tests, anyway. New Zealand’s reputation normally sits outside the tax tests. It said that option 2 met the objective of upholding New Zealand’s reputation. I am not too sure whether that is the case. I would actually say that the only one of these three options that would actually enshrine New Zealand’s reputation as a country of integrity is option 3, and that is to repeal the exemption for foreign trusts. By just reducing the ability to engage in nefarious behaviour, it does not in fact address the problem that I think came to the House in the first place.

The second point I would like to make, briefly, is something that my colleague Meka Whaitiri talked about, and this was clause 104. This is actually quite important, because what this is about is a disclosure—it is really a change in business practice. It is about the disclosure of information to approved credit reporting agencies. That is, this is the IRD giving—Dun & Bradstreet, or whatever—an outside organisation details about a company’s tax affairs. We did debate this a lot, and we had concerns about this, because we think that, fundamentally, a business has got to be able to trust the IRD to keep its affairs confidential, but on the balance of things we thought that the benefits probably outweighed the minuses.

What happened is that the bill initially proposed a series of conditions that would have to be met before the commissioner could disclose information to credit agencies. Included in that was a dollar threshold, so it provided a level of certainty to business. What the committee did, against the Labour Party’s—and, I think, the Green Party’s—recommendations and advice is that it removed that dollar figure. What it did is it actually failed, we believe, to provide any indication, and, therefore, any certainty or guidance to taxpayers, as to when their information would be shared, or may be shared—it is not a must—with an approved credit reporting agency. What happened is it retained the “Henry VIII” provision. What the “Henry VIII” provision is is when a statutory instrument—i.e., a secondary piece of legislation—actually changes the primary legislation. The reason why I have concerns about a “Henry VIII” provision, and—give me 2 seconds: this was a quote from a Lord Judge who spoke strongly against such clauses while he was Lord Chief Justice, so quite a learned figure. He was probably even more learned than the Attorney-General, but anyway. He said: “You can be sure that when these “Henry VIII” clauses are introduced, they will always be said to be necessary. William Pitt warned us how to treat such a plea with disdain. Necessity is the justification for every infringement of human liberty: ‘It is the argument of tyrants and the creed of slaves.’ ” Thank you very much.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 258 in the name of the Hon Judith Collins to Part 1 be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

Part 1 as amended agreed to.

Part 2 agreed to.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 258 in the name of the Hon Judith Collins to Part 3 be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

Part 3 as amended agreed to.

Schedule agreed to.

Clause 1 agreed to.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 258 in the name of the Hon Judith Collins to clause 2 be agreed to.

Amendment agreed to.

Clause 2 as amended agreed to.

House resumed.

Bill reported with amendment.

Report adopted.

Bills

Wildlife (Powers) Amendment Bill

Third Reading

Debate resumed from 6 December 2016.

MOJO MATHERS (Green): Good evening. It is a pleasure to be able to resume my call on this bill. It has been a while—nearly 2 months—since I started speaking on this, so I think I will just repeat some of the key points that I made back then. As I said then, the Green Party members are pleased to be supporting this bill, but we are also frustrated. We are frustrated because it ignores the elephant in the room. Of course the enforcement powers for our wildlife officers and for Department of Conservation (DOC) rangers will be helpful in some situations, but it is frustrating that National continues to ignore the fact that it is absolutely starving DOC of funds. DOC is underfunded and under-resourced. DOC’s budget is down by nearly $55 million a year since National came into power in 2008, and that is a serious amount of money. We have seen massive job cuts right across DOC, which the Government claims are part of moving to a partnership model. That is just a fancy way of saying that it is not going to fund DOC properly to do its core work.

Basically, pest control and maintenance of huts and tracks have suffered as a result. We have already seen that with the Inland Pack Track on the West Coast of the South Island, which has been closed since Cyclone Ita, and it appears that there are no plans to reopen it, because it would take too much work to reopen the track. That is a serious loss to the people of the coast and to the visitors going there. If we do not have enough rangers on the ground, making sure that we have got pests under control, making sure that our facilities are well maintained, then we are going to risk tarnishing the reputation that brings people there.

The Government has made a wonderful, ambitious goal of eradicating all possums, rats, and stoats by 2050, which is laudable, but the fact remains that it has not developed a plan to properly fund that work. How is DOC supposed to support the goal of pest eradication when it has lost more than 40 of its skilled, highly trained rangers in the last 5 years? It cannot. It is increasingly reliant on volunteers and private funding to do this core work, which is the wrong way around. The pressure on the remaining DOC staff is enormous. They are constantly being asked to do more with less, and that is not OK. Our species and our natural environment are suffering as a result.

If you do not have enough rangers on the ground, monitoring and checking what is going on, then all the enforcement power in the world is not going to be enough. It is not going to be enough, because there simply will not be people there on the ground to witness the offences, so giving them more power to do anything about it is kind of beside the point. We know that smuggling is happening, but it is going to take far more to protect our native wildlife than chucking a handful of extra enforcement powers at DOC.

The Green Party is absolutely committed to restoring and increasing funding for DOC as a first step towards ensuring that our native species thrive and survive. Without sufficient rangers and people on the ground, the basic work of conservation does not happen. Thank you.

CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): At one point through Mojo Mathers’ speech I thought she had actually taken my notes to speak from, because I pretty much have exactly the same thing to say. It is not very often that we actually see eye to eye, the Green Party and New Zealand First, on a number of matters, and I have to say that on this one we are in complete alignment. That was very well articulated by Mojo Mathers in saying that.

New Zealand First will be supporting this bill as it goes through the final reading. We see this as a big step forward, the first major step of legislative change within the Wildlife Act 1953 in 60 years. It is a step in the right direction, and, certainly, in empowering our Department of Conservation (DOC) rangers to do the job that they have been tasked to do—and it is not an easy job; it is a huge task—we have to give them all the tools in their tool box that they can actually utilise to ensure the safety, security, and longevity of our natural flora and fauna.

On a positive note, we are seeing record numbers of tourists coming to New Zealand. It has now topped $13 billion and rising. This is the No. 1 driver of our GDP now, and in just 8 years they are predicting that number to increase by 67 percent, to blow out to around $40 billion by 2025. You only have to ask yourself a simple question: what is driving tourists to come to the motherland? Why would they want to come to this beautiful country of ours? It is underlined: it is a beautiful country. There are so many wonderful sights to see, so many tracks to go down, and so much natural beauty that people around the world who do not have access to that want to come here. Yet we are seriously, seriously underfunding the Department of Conservation.

We have seen massive job cuts and tracks shut, and we are getting the volunteer sector to go out there and liberate some of these huts and cabins to make sure that they stay open, with volunteer man-hours doing all the repairs and maintenance because the money from the Department of Conservation is just not there. We are, on the one hand, saying we are going to ensure that our DOC rangers have got all the tools, but, on the other hand, we are expecting them to do more for less. We have gone from 809 DOC workers in 2009 down to 637.

Surely this is a contradiction in what we are trying to achieve with the health and safety reforms that we put through last year. Putting fewer of our qualified, ready-for-work, battle-hardened DOC rangers out there—with more tools to arrest, surveil, stop, and prevent, and ensure that our nature is looked after, yet getting fewer of them to do the job—is certainly putting their lives and their health and well-being at serious risk. It is a complete and utter contradiction. On the one hand, this Government has pushed through legislation that enforces health and safety regulations but, on the other hand, we are putting people into the barrel, if you like, of serious potential harm by allowing them to go out there without the support that they require, which is, obviously, plainly and simply, more people on the ground.

This bill does four basic things—well, you could say five, but the fifth thing we will talk about loosely. The first one is the power to seize a wide range of evidence, particularly when we have got DOC rangers out there who are looking to prosecute these people who are looking to poach, plunder, and steal our natural wildlife and sell it on the open market internationally—on the black market. They can now seize phones and cameras and laptops and a range of other equipment to actually build a case against these organised crime syndicates.

The second thing that this bill enables our rangers to do is to stop a person. Ironically, back in 1953 when the Wildlife Act was implemented DOC rangers had the power to stop a vessel, a vehicle, or a bag in transit but they did not have the power to stop an actual person. You know what it is like to tell somebody to stop and to have no power to stop them. They will just say: “Nod off. I’m going on.” So this bill enables them to be able to stop a person, to actually engage with them, and to get further evidence.

The third thing this bill does is empower DOC rangers to be able to intervene to prevent an injustice taking place or to prevent a crime from happening if there is cause for reasonable certainty that an offence is about to occur, or if an offence is occurring, and, of course, DOC rangers can involve themselves and prevent that from going forward by intervening. Probably the most simple thing—yet it has taken so many years to come through—is the simple power to enable DOC rangers to ask for somebody’s date of birth.

You cannot prosecute somebody if you do not know that that is the person that you are prosecuting. The way that the police do that is by checking identification to make sure that they say they are who they are, and, of course, by making sure that their date of birth matches up with who they have got in front of them. That is absolutely key. It is vital. It seems so simple and ridiculous that we have not been able to do this until now. But those four basic steps are a huge change in the way that we have been allowing our DOC rangers around the country to operate.

There is one more thing that this bill really does, essentially. It does give very, very limited powers to Fish and Game rangers. Of course, all those powers that I have just talked about above are to do with full-time DOC rangers and not people who have been given a warrant or have been honourably given the title to go and do it. It is only for full-time engaged DOC rangers. But Fish and Game rangers who are now full-time employees can also ask for proof of identification and date of birth. So that is another great step forward.

However, when you read through the bill—and I have to go to that section because it does jump out as just being a little bit ridiculous when we talk about it. The commentary on the bill states: “We understand from the New Zealand Fish and Game Council that its rangers are currently limited in their ability to perform their statutory role of enforcing game hunting because they are unable to require date-of-birth information from suspected offenders. Fish and Game cannot prosecute offenders unless they give this information voluntarily.” Of course, that is now tidied up. It goes on to say: “it would not be necessary to extend the power to honorary Fish and Game rangers. This is because honorary rangers are”—underline this—“generally accompanied by full-time Fish and Game rangers.”, but not always and not definitively.

We have got a massive loophole when you have got the volunteer Fish and Game rangers out there doing their work, which many of them do because many of them are active with their hunting, fishing, and gathering of sorts. When they see things going down in front of them they have no power to engage and no power to ask for identification, and that just seems absolutely an opportunity lost in this bill, although it has been pushed hard. Supplementary Order Paper 243 was put through by Labour to try to allow this to happen and it was blocked by the Government, which is absolute lunacy according to New Zealand First.

The commentary on the bill goes on to say: “We were advised that Fish and Game rangers should not be granted the proposed new powers because the focus of the bill is primarily on protected wildlife, not game birds.” But the reality is the species from the Department of Conservation that are protected are protected because they have been plundered in the past. If we do not put strong restrictions on the fishing and game industries, then we will find ourselves coming back to address this problem because so too will those stocks be plundered if we do not put enforcement into place. We are talking about putting the ambulance at the top of the cliff not at the bottom, which this legislation clearly does not fix.

We are seriously concerned over the lack of funding of the Department of Conservation, and over the past 9 years since this Government has been in power we have seen around about $97 million annually at the high point to the lowest point in reduction to DOC, yet when you look at the current spending in the Department of Conservation—and this is where we probably differ largely from the Greens—35 percent of the current budget is spent on the 1080 dropping. They are absolutely hell-bent on bombing and napalming our forests with 1080 pellets, but we are asking for that to be reviewed to make sure we are investing in better ways to control our predators in New Zealand. Thank you.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): It is a pleasure to be talking on the third reading of the Wildlife (Powers) Amendment Bill. Unfortunately, I was not a member of the committee at the stage that this bill passed through the very hard-working Local Government and Environment Committee, chaired by my friend beside me here, Mr Scott Simpson. Of course, this is a very important piece of legislation because in New Zealand we all value our diversity of wildlife, and this is really dealing with the heart of that matter. Even in my electorate, which is Hunua, I have got the wonderful Hunua Ranges, where we have got the beautiful kokako, wekas, and a whole lot of bird life. The thought of people going up there and basically taking these birds or animals and stuffing them down underpants, inside map rolls, or whatever and illegally transporting them overseas is just abhorrent, and I think passing this legislation is a great thing to be doing.

As we have just heard from my colleague just across the road, we are updating this Wildlife Act. It has not been updated for 60 years. The first of the five key areas is really around granting to warranted Department of Conservation (DOC) officers—and I heard the discussion around those who are not warranted, but it is limited to warranted officers—to take the action to stop an offence when it is actually happening. We saw that case in point just very recently, with the pāua—600 undersized pāua—that were seized just outside Napier. The bill is providing for the ability to stop people at the scene and actually stop an offence happening at that moment. That is the best time—that preventative action, as well as dealing with people right on the scene.

The second aspect is the temporary stop to persons when they are suspected of an offence. At the moment you can stop and ask a whole lot of details, but the ability to actually retain or stop that person leaving the site while you bring in other people to help get that evidence is actually a crucial piece of this power that has been addressed in this bill. I think that is really, really important.

The third is in terms of the evidence that can be gained. Obviously when this Act was put together 60 years ago laptops were not in existence and modern-day cameras were not in existence. This bill just modernises all that and makes sure that if there is any circumstantial evidence on the machine, or whatever, it can be actually used in any future prosecutions.

The fourth one, as my colleague Clayton Mitchell mentioned just before: the key aspect is that when you want to make a prosecution you need to have the identity. So the old Act allowed you to ask for the name and address but did not allow any further identification, particularly around birth date. This bill again modernises that so the prosecution process is so much easier. That is contained in clause 6 of the bill.

The fifth element is really just limiting very serious offences, which actually protect really precious wildlife. That is an important clause where there is a wholesale process going on, such as with the pāua, where you are getting so many animals involved in being, basically, taken from a place.

Finally, this bill is dealing with the language in the Act, just updating it, so that is a good piece of work. On that basis I have got to commend the bill.

EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you. The Green Party certainly wants to close the loopholes in the Wildlife Act that make it difficult for the Department of Conservation (DOC) to take action against smugglers of our native birds and geckos and to investigate offences, so we are supporting the Wildlife (Powers) Amendment Bill. It contains useful enforcement powers for conservation officers to intervene and to prevent offending.

But the Wildlife Act was passed in 1953. It is more than 60 years old, and National’s changes to the Act in this bill and in the member’s bill in the name of the Hon Jacqui Dean, which increased the penalties for offending, are mere tinkering around the edges. We need a much more substantial overhaul of the Wildlife Act and a major updating of it. The Green Party in Government would be much more ambitious than the National Party is and increase its efforts to protect the future for wildlife in Aotearoa. We would be much more ambitious, whether it is the tiny rock wren or the much larger rāpoka or New Zealand sea lion. They are species that have lived in these islands for millennia. Now, 60 years on from when the Wildlife Act was passed, we understand the seriousness of the biodiversity crisis and the extinction risk that many of our indigenous species are facing. So we need a sweeping review of the Wildlife Act, not just the useful but small changes that we have in this bill.

We need a Wildlife Act that protects species in the places where they live, and protects the habitat of our native birds, invertebrates, bats, and fish, especially when so many of them are staring extinction in the face. The Resource Management Act (RMA) has utterly failed to protect the habitat of native wildlife on private land, and, often, on conservation land. We need a Wildlife Act that gives priority to safeguarding the places that our native species live, not legislation that allows, as has happened under the RMA, a coal mining company to open-cast the Denniston Plateau, which is habitat for great spotted kiwi. We need law that protects river systems like Hawke’s Bay’s Tukituki River, which is home to at least 18 species of native fish, not law like the Wildlife Act and the RMA, which is allowing that river to be dammed, blocking passage to the sea of native fish and preventing their ability to breed. When we have got 74 percent of our native fish species threatened with extinction, we need law that protects their habitat, yet this bill, which is amending the principal Wildlife Act, does absolutely nothing to protect native fish. There is a total ban in our law on the sale of trout. They are an introduced species. But there is nothing in our law that protects native fish and their habitat.

So not just the little changes, the useful changes, that this bill is making, but a much more comprehensive review is needed, and that is what the Green Party, as part of a new, progressive Government in September, would do. We are committed to improving the prospects for whitebait and all of our other native fish. We have got a commitment to clean water and investing in conservation, not starving the Department of Conservation (DOC) of funds, as the National Government is doing. We would increase the funding for predator control on conservation land and not force DOC to steal funds away from other programmes in order to slightly increase the amount of predator control it is doing. We would wind up the subsidies for irrigation that lead to more water pollution and further loss of habitat for our native fish species. We would amend the Wildlife Act to put a moratorium on commercial fishing of long-finned eel and to give protection for the banded kōkopu, the giant kōkopu, the kōaro, and all of our native fish species, seeing as their continued existence is so precarious. And we would put in place law that protects our wild rivers in a similar way to the legislation that protects our national parks. We want to protect the habitat for our indigenous species and improve their prospects, not let them further decline, as the National Government is doing.

MEKA WHAITIRI (Labour—Ikaroa-Rāwhiti): E Te Māngai o Te Whare, tēnā koe. We have been talking about a particular bill tonight, the Wildlife (Powers) Amendment Bill, which is geared towards, I guess, supporting and maintaining our pristine conservation estate. The current endangered species—this is occurring in this country right now—is actually Department of Conservation (DOC) officers. For my electorate of Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, particularly around the Gwavas Forest, which is about 30 minutes south of Hastings, we used to have one based there, but now you have to go into Hastings itself or a further 10 minutes down the road to Napier if you want to access the services of a Department of Conservation officer. Labour, though supporting this bill, wants to acknowledge the fine work those Department of Conservation officers currently perform under the lack of funding from this particular Government.

It has been expressed that the bill is attempting to give extended powers to our conservation officers, and I would like to just again highlight the powers that this particular bill will enable. It will enable officers to intervene and stop offenders. It will allow rangers, particularly, to obtain information from those who may be undertaking illegal acts in our estate. It will also allow rangers to seize evidence such as laptops, cameras, and mobile phones.

When you think about the extra powers that these DOC rangers will be given under this particular piece of legislation, what occurs is that we are immediately going to put those particular rangers in a space of risk. As we notice in this country, we get more and more people coming into New Zealand and, I guess, helping themselves to some of our native species, and so then, of course, this bill is not only going to empower the officers but is going to be seeking that these rangers place themselves in a situation of risk. This was raised at the Local Government and Environment Committee, around how we ensure that those rangers—who are often by themselves in places like forest, away from anybody else, if they come across somebody who is committing some illegal activity.

I do want to join with many members on this side in commenting around the resourcing that our rangers and the Department of Conservation have seen withered away under this Government. On one hand, we are modernising an Act and we are enabling rangers to do and carry out what we want them to do, but, actually, we are starving them of the tools and the resources to do it properly. That, I think, is the unfortunate part of this particular bill. But we do support what the intent is here and we hope that, in terms of this side and the Government side, we actually meet the commitment of what this bill is intending to do, in empowering our rangers with the support and the resources that are required to undertake that task.

I just want to raise a point in terms of the departmental disclosure statement, just briefly, and talk about page 7 there, where we touch on consistency with the Government’s Treaty of Waitangi obligations. I just want to note, again—and I have raised this time and time again in this House—that officials consulted with Ngāi Tahu. They clearly have a piece of settlement legislation, which is quite right in terms of the South Island, but we have many more iwi throughout the country that deserve the same kind of consultation that Ngāi Tahu had. When I read that, it threw up that I need to make that point that we have iwi overseeing mass forests and mass maunga that would welcome the opportunity to also be consulted, as well as Ngāi Tahu themselves were. And, of course, there is concern that Te Puni Kōkiri found that there were no issues whatsoever in relation to Māori in terms of this proposal. When you have a cash-strapped department—

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

MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): It is an honour and a pleasure to rise in support of the Wildlife (Powers) Amendment Bill in its third reading. It is a bill that seeks to reduce offending against wildlife, and when you look at some of the statistics, offending against wildlife seems to be very much a persistent problem. From 2004 to 2011 there were 19 prosecutions for the illegal hunting and killing of our endangered and protected wildlife. Also, alarmingly, since 2010 seven foreign nationals have been convicted for the attempted smuggling of our wildlife.

When you think about that, for us on this side of the House, engaging in a globalised world is very much an opportunity and a strength, but some of the limitations, threats, and weaknesses are about whom we expose our wildlife to. In the days of internet and international air travel, the link between smuggler and customer becomes greatly reduced, and there are far fewer obstacles in their way to committing these crimes. So this bill is very much about supporting our wildlife.

Many of the speakers tonight around the House have talked about the unique wildlife we have in New Zealand, whether it be the kiwi or the tuatara. Being a North Canterbury resident and a proud Cantabrian, I am a big fan of our cheeky kea, but what we must do is always look to give the Department of Conservation rangers the tools they need. This bill is about enabling them to have the tools they need to succeed but very much about listening to them. All of the improvements that have been talked about tonight are based on consultation, feedback, and listening to the people on the front line for the tools they need.

Before I finish, I just want to take note of Scott Simpson, our Local Government and Environment Committee chair, and his promotion to be a PPS, or a parliamentary—a private parliamentary secretary for the environment and conservation. So I did not manage to get that right, but I think everyone knows what I mean. So congratulations to him, and I wholeheartedly support this bill.

Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my absolute pleasure to take a call on this bill. There is not a lot left to say. There has been a lot said through the course of some very fine speeches in this House about what this bill does.

I did not have the experience of sitting on the Local Government and Environment Committee and hearing submissions, but from what I see in front of me it seems like we have some important amendments to a piece of legislation that has a very important job. That job is around protecting and providing for the management of New Zealand’s land, fresh water, and marine species and making sure that we do provide the right provisions to ensure that we can protect our biodiversity and that we have a safe haven for these very important species. This bill absolutely protects most native birds—and I think that is one of the important things—all native reptiles, frogs, bats, some specified native land and marine vertebrates, and eight marine fish species. That is absolutely important.

Mr Assistant Speaker Mallard, you may also be very interested to know that the bill also provides for the management of game birds—mallard ducks being on that list, along with grey ducks and pukeko. They are all managed through this legislation and through the New Zealand Fish and Game Council. It is illegal to hunt or kill game birds in a closed season without a licence. It may give you, Mr Assistant Speaker, some reassurance to know that there is only a season in which that can be done.

What this piece of legislation does is put in place powers for Department of Conservation (DOC) officers—a really needed increased power for our DOC officers to be able to enforce these laws. What it does not do in any way is change the kinds of powers that the Fish and Game officers have. My colleague the Hon David Parker put up a very fine amendment asking that there be some changes to the information that Fish and Game officers would be able to collect when someone was apprehended, and that was the date of birth. Other people in their contributions in the House have explained why this is necessary. This is the kind of information that is required to lead on to a prosecution for the kinds of offences that those officers, who are working really hard and doing a fine job of protecting our natural environment, are seeing being committed. Date of birth is the information that is required.

What other contributors to this debate have spoken about is that these are sorely needed provisions. We need to ensure that we have got the right kind of powers for our DOC officers to be able to do their job.

But when we give increased powers to a group of people, we also need to make sure that they have the requisite funding and the requisite resourcing to be able to do that. This is our reservation: that we are asking DOC officers to do more, and we are not putting in place increased resourcing for them to be able to do it. We know that DOC already struggles with its funding. It has been a massive job. In December 2015 University of Auckland biological sciences senior lecturer James Russell stated that DOC’s funding over the past few years had affected the amount of land it could look after to the appropriate standard. When we have the critics and consciences of our society who are charged with looking at such things sounding a warning about the levels of resourcing that we are putting into this, we should really be listening to them.

We already know that DOC staff are overworked. Last year 1,500 DOC staff took work-to-rule industrial action after being offered pitiful pay rises. They are being asked to do more and more, and no one is meeting that. In 2009 there were 803 DOC rangers; now there are only 637. This is not the level of resourcing that needs to sit beside the fine rhetoric that we have been hearing from the Government benches about how it is that we need to protect our wildlife and our natural environment. The members opposite need to ensure that the Government and the party they are in actually put money where their mouths are and ensure that adequate funding and resourcing are in place. Labour members are happy to support this legislation, but we are also eager to see the appropriate resourcing sit beside the new functions. Thank you.

Bill read a third time.

Bills

Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill

Third Reading

Hon NICKY WAGNER (Associate Minister of Health) on behalf of the Hon Peter Dunne (Associate Minister of Health): I move, That the Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill be now read a third time. I am pleased to see that the bill has now reached this stage in its progress. The change to the legislation is long overdue. People with addictions have formerly been regarded as criminals or at least less deserving of health services than other members of New Zealand society. Our approach to treatment has tended towards the punitive, and people with addictions are often subject to considerable stigma and discrimination.

The cohort of people who will come within the scope of the new legislation are people who are very unwell. They repeatedly present at emergency departments with a range of serious medical conditions. They are often unreported victims of offences, have chronic medical conditions, are often estranged from their family and whānau. It is not an exaggeration to say that without treatment we are looking at a group of people who are suffering significant hardship and for whom serious illness and death are likely.

The current legislation governing compulsory treatment for addiction, namely the Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Act 1966, is focused on detention rather than on comprehensive treatment and recovery. Furthermore, people detained under the Act do not have recourse to the same avenues of appeal and rights protection as those provided for people undergoing compulsory treatment for mental disorder. Most people with an addiction cannot and should not be forced to undergo treatment against their will. Indeed, the imposition of compulsory treatment can be ineffective. People who abuse alcohol or drugs, including those who have an addiction, will, for the most part, choose to engage in treatment when they are ready to do so. On a related topic, those of my colleagues who have tried to stop smoking will know that it might take several attempts, and it is about a range of social and personal dynamics, rather than simply abstaining from a particular substance.

To detain people without their consent is a decision that should never be taken lightly. In 2010 the Law Commission considered whether New Zealand needs to have legislation governing the compulsory treatment of people with substance addiction and concluded that such legislation was necessary, but it should be narrow in focus. The conclusions reached by the Law Commission were reflected in the bill. Those conclusions include the need for compulsory treatment to be applied only to people who have severe substance addiction and have severely impaired capacity to consent to the treatment for that addiction, the need for treatment to be applied for a limited period of time, the importance of the protection of rights of patients, and the preference for compulsory treatment to be an option of the last resort.

Not everyone with severe substance addiction will be appropriately treated under this new legislation. Some people will be so unwell that they are in need of palliative care. Other individuals may choose not to engage voluntarily with treatment services, even after having undergone compulsory assessment and treatment on more than one occasion.

I am aware that the addiction treatment sector has been waiting for this legislation for a long time. There are inevitably some challenges around the implementation of the legislation and the need for services to operate in a different way. There has been some concern from the services about the impact of the new legislation. But the Ministry of Health has been working with the sector for over 6 months, to assist services to accurately define the ways in which the legislation will impact on services and on the addictions workforce. The addictions workforce will need to operate with a different legislative base, and need to develop a model of care that encompasses compulsory assessment and treatment.

I understand that the addiction treatment sector has embraced the challenge of implementing the new legislation, with a changed model of care, and that services are working to ensure that they are able to effectively implement the legislation. I find it particularly heartening that the sector’s focus on the legislation is not limited to statutory processes and procedures. Rather, addiction treatment services appreciate that compulsory treatment is part of a comprehensive treatment pathway, and that compulsory treatment inevitably fits within a far wider scope of voluntary treatment. It is only in compulsory assessment and treatment, one part of a wider treatment pathway. It is also a feature of the legislation that the treatment for addiction is part of a focus on the social and physical dynamics of well-being.

The bill also reflects and respects the importance of the family and the whānau in the individual’s journey to recovery. The bill has the potential to reduce the overall costs of addiction to society, to families and whānau, hapū, and iwi, to people suffering from addiction, and to a group of people who are gravely ill as a result of their addiction.

This is an important and an effective piece of legislation. It has been a long time coming, and has been the subject of rigorous scrutiny by the Health Committee. I commend it to the House.

Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): Can I join the Minister who has just resumed her seat, Nicky Wagner, in welcoming this bill. It is long overdue, as she mentioned, and I am pleased to be able to support it on behalf of Labour.

It is a really difficult balancing act, and I want to commend the Health Committee for what appears to be very strong consideration of that balancing act. You need a very high threshold for compulsory assessment and you have to balance that with the rights of patients, even though those patients might not be in a fit state to make decisions on their own behalf. It appears, from the report and the comments from the submitters, that the select committee took that process really seriously, and I think that is to be commended.

I also want to acknowledge the Minister who is responsible for bringing the bill to the House, the Hon Peter Dunne. He has clearly done a lot of work on this. The legislation that it is replacing is over 50 years old, and in a sector as fast moving as the health sector it clearly indicates the need, but it also indicates a much more modern approach to compulsion within the health sector and also to treatment for addiction.

As I said, the threshold for this legislation to be triggered, so that somebody is detained and compulsorily treated, needs to be really high. The person has to have a very serious addiction and they have to be in an unfit state to make a decision for themselves. So that is a pretty high threshold.

So, although supporting this bill, I also want to reflect the concerns that Labour has and also that were reflected in the submissions that were made. They are about the imposition of this number of additional patients on a system that is already clearly stressed. We have heard the tragic stories about the pressures that people with mental illness are facing because they are not able to get the treatment that they need. I do not think that we have seen this sort of situation in New Zealand in the mental health services since the 1990s. I really urge the Minister, Jonathan Coleman, and his Associate Ministers to not let our mental health services get, once again, to the point of tragedy before they say: “We need additional resourcing in this sector.” That is what happened in the 1990s. We had some terrible cases where people who were mentally unwell took other people’s lives, because they could not get the help they needed. Do not let that happen again in our country. We do not need to let it happen, and we should not let it happen.

In a severely overstretched system, let us not just impose a greater load without recognising that somewhere in that system there will have to be some give. We are putting a significant number of new patients into the system under this compulsory treatment regime. Where are the other patients going to fall out? I do not think it is good enough that we are layering on more work without layering on the additional resources at the same time. The Ministry of Health estimated that we might get 60 to 70 new patients under this regime, but it could be as high as 200. In a country the size of New Zealand that is actually a significant new imposition. Of course we should do everything that we can to offer the people who need this support and treatment access to those services, but it should not be at the cost of other people trying to access health services. That is a basic fairness: if you are going to add in additional responsibilities, you have to put in additional resources.

At the Health Committee we had staff from district health boards expressing their concern. That is not a common occurrence. Most public servants do not make a submission and then speak up about an issue that they are involved with in the workforce; they tend to just maintain a silence and cop the flak. But in this case they were so concerned about it that they felt they had to raise their voices. I do not have confidence that the current Government understands the situation, or that it is prepared to back the Ministry of Health and the district health boards with the extra resources they need. But I really implore it to think about the situations that we have had in New Zealand in the past, and for members of the Government to take their responsibility so seriously and ensure that that does not happen again.

The other concern that was again raised by submitters, and that Labour shares, is the concern that was raised by the Office of the Ombudsmen—the potential for this legislation to be breaching the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. As the Minister at the time who was responsible for New Zealand signing up to that convention, I would be the last one to want us to be passing legislation that breached it.

As I said at the beginning, I think there is a careful balancing act to go through, a very high threshold before the criteria for compulsory treatment are triggered; balancing those with the rights of the individual person who needs these services. So that is the balancing act. If the balance is not right, then we could, as a nation, be in breach of that United Nations convention. So we have supported a review within 6 months of this legislation coming into force so that all aspects of its operation can be considered, but in particular whether or not there is a breach of that convention. If there is, I would imagine that the whole of Parliament would want to rebalance the criteria to make sure that we still provide that opportunity for compulsory treatment for the people who actually are not able to determine that they need treatment and, therefore, access it, but make sure that we do not breach the United Nations convention.

I just want to conclude my comments on this bill by talking a little more broadly about the mental health services in New Zealand. I remember being hugely impressed with the Rt Hon Jenny Shipley and the Rt Hon Helen Clark—she was not “Rt Hon” at the time, but of course is now. They had what seemed to me to be a very mature agreement—which may have been reached behind closed doors, certainly not in the full glare of Parliament—to really take mental health patients out of being the political football that they had been previously. I had heard debates in this House about behaviour of people with mental illness that did nothing at all to improve our attitude towards people with mental illness, let alone improve support for them and their families, and access to services. It was the leadership of Jenny Shipley and Helen Clark that changed that in this Parliament, and that should be a gold star beside both their names for ever.

We then, of course, had the mental health campaign and, more recently, we have had people like John Kirwan speaking out about depression. New Zealanders as a result of that have changed their attitudes towards mental health and towards people with mental illness. We are one of the most mature countries in the world, except for the Scandinavian countries, in this regard and I think that is something we should be really proud of.

So we must not take this step lightly. We must not fall back into the pre-1990s days when mental health funding, mental health resourcing, and our attitudes to mental health were something that were really swept under the carpet and nobody talked about them. We must not revert to those very dark days, because it makes having a hard illness a lot harder, and we should not be doing that. We should be making it easier for people to say “I’ve got a mental illness.”, to get the support they need, to have the support for their families, and, obviously, to get the treatment.

It is outlined in the bill in very good terms. It talks about protecting people from harm. It talks about facilitating their assessment. It talks about stabilising their health. It talks about protecting and enhancing their mana and dignity, and restoring their capacity to make informed decisions. They are the sorts of goals and ambitions that, as a Parliament, I think we should all be very proud of and we should be very proud of supporting. That is what we should want for every member of New Zealand society and particularly those people who, because of their illness, are not in a position to make decisions for themselves.

So I think we have got the balance of this legislation right, through the good work of the Health Committee, who paid attention to submitters and advisers. It seems they worked pretty collaboratively together and as a result we have got something that should enhance people’s opportunities in their lives to get better and contribute in society. It needs funding and it needs reviewing to make sure that we have got that balance right, but I certainly commend its progress to the House.

SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I am very pleased to take a call on the Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill now in its third reading. I just want to actually acknowledge the member who has just taken her seat, the Hon Ruth Dyson, for her contribution. I think it actually represents, along with the Minister’s words, the collegiality that has occurred around this bill.

I think it is right—perhaps I am slightly prejudiced as the chair of the Health Committee—to say we worked incredibly well together, but it was a robust discussion on a number of issues, particularly around the rights of the individual, because, as has been highlighted briefly tonight and certainly in other contributions, this is forcing an individual into a situation that they are probably not keen on for a variety of reasons. It is where society, in this particular instance, believes it is in that person’s best interest, and so there is a paternalistic quality there, and when that is enacted—infrequently, hopefully, in this liberal society—it has to be done very cautiously and with a number of safeguards. I will revisit that briefly later on in my contribution.

I want to acknowledge, once again, Minister Dunne for bringing this bill to the House, sponsoring it, and seeing it through. I think there is a lesson today that as he has made some adjustment around cannabis access we are also reflecting at the other end of the spectrum on the dangers of drugs, be they legitimate or not. So I thank the Minister for bringing it to the House, and I thank, once again, all the members of the committee for their hard work.

This is an update of a bill from 1966. It has been a long time, but also a long time in terms of medical practice, so this is bringing it up to best practice, but there is the challenge still that although we can pass legislation, we can also set down new guidelines of what is expected for compulsory treatment. There is a requirement on us as a House and certainly as a Government to make sure that resources are available to look after people, because one of the elements here is that—and you will see as you read through the bill that the word “detention” is used quite a bit—a New Zealander could be put into detention in order to compulsorily assure they get the services required.

I think it is really important to emphasise that detention is not so much about locking someone up, and it is not about bolts on doors, as much as it is a treatment pathway that ensures that they get the services they need. Detention in these sorts of circumstances can be as much as the encouragement of those providing the treatment to have the person stay. So it is a small point, but a relevant one, and I just hope that the public listening, and certainly the House, appreciate that we are not talking about locking people up into rooms for the sake of it; we are trying to detain them in the broader sense of the word to ensure that they get the treatment needed.

So the second point within that, as I have stressed in previous times, is we are talking about people with incredibly high needs. We are not talking about your, I think, stereotypical alcoholic or perhaps some with a high-level drug addiction, of course. We are talking about someone who has serious, serious addiction issues: perhaps that unfortunate soul whom you have seen on the street who is—let us say, going back to the alcohol thing—drinking from dawn to dusk. They cannot help themselves, are forever falling down, tripping up. They are in fact as much a harm to themselves as to others, and because of that high level of need, intervention is required. More often than not that will come from an individual in the family. Why I mention that is this bill protects not only that person but the person who has sought that help. They are provided with the information necessary to understand the treatment journey that is about to begin.

The seriousness often comes first and foremost from what they call the neuro adaptation to the disease. Any of those in this House alongside me who have worked in this field will know that if you are at this level of addiction, you just cannot separate yourself from it. Your whole body and mind has become completely dependent on the substance, and the craving—probably well beyond what, hopefully, any of us have experienced personally. Importantly, too, these orders for compulsory treatment cannot be brought about until other avenues have been brought forward. Again, the person whom we are trying to help is denied treatment so many times that now we have to intervene.

I have noted in other contributions that there is layer upon layer—the guy sounds like a Sara Lee pastry ad—of support here, including judicial review, where required, and various delegations through the Ministry of Health. So I think it has been well-thought-through and well balanced.

I really just want to end my contribution by in some ways addressing those whom we seek to help. I think there is a much greater appreciation in medicine today and in the general public of the nature of disease around addiction, and it is certainly our intention, I think, as a select committee to do our best to help these people as our fellow Kiwis so that we can restore them to some normality and that they can be full participants in society beside us and alongside us. So I commend this bill to the House.

IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): As my colleague Ruth Dyson has already said, Labour supports this bill. The Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill is a much-needed update to the Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Act 1966, which has become completely outdated, outmoded, and reflects the attitudes of the time. It reflects the knowledge of addiction of the time and was in desperate need of being brought into the 21st century, which this legislation does.

We certainly acknowledge the sensitivities that need to be addressed with this type of legislation. This is legislation that does allow for people’s freedom to be taken from them, for people to be compulsorily taken into treatment—perhaps, in some cases, against their will; often, perhaps, against their will—so there has to be a very, very high bar. There has to be an extremely high threshold for the application of this legislation. In fact, the advice that members had at the select committee was that it should lead to, or is likely to lead to, around 200 orders per year. That is an increase on the number of people who are usually taken in for compulsory treatment of addiction and, as has been pointed out, that requires some resource to go alongside it.

I guess the concern on this side of the House is that not only is the overall health sector underfunded—we know that because of the Government’s failure to keep pace with inflationary costs and the growth in population, there is about $1.7 billion missing from the health sector overall—but also the fact is that for the entire 8 years of this Government, mental health and addictions have not been one of its health priorities. That has meant that district health boards (DHBs) have focused on the priority areas—the ones that are published in the newspapers with those big glossy advertisements—and have not been able to put the focus that they want to into mental health and addiction services, because they are starved for cash, they have to prioritise, the Government has made it clear what its priorities are, and mental health and addictions have not been a priority for this Government.

So it is one thing to change the law—we applaud the Government for changing the law and we support changing the law—but, for this law to be effective, the Government has got to ensure that DHBs have the resources that they need.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.