Wednesday, 26 July 2017

WEDNESDAY, 26 JULY 2017

WEDNESDAY, 26 JULY 2017

Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

Prayers.

Speaker’s Rulings

Written Questions—Interim Answers

Mr SPEAKER: Honourable members, yesterday, Chris Hipkins asked that I consider the use of interim answers to written parliamentary questions. He was concerned that Ministers are giving interim answers to a wide range of written parliamentary questions and, potentially, deferring the obligation to provide an answer until after the Parliament is dissolved.

Interim replies should be used only in exceptional cases. Every endeavour must be made to provide a full reply within the period specified in the Standing Orders. They are not to be used as a matter of course or just because a Minister has a large volume of questions to answer. Answering questions is a duty of office for Ministers and, if they give an interim reply, they are under an obligation to follow up with a full reply as soon as possible. A question is not regarded as being answered until the final response is receive—Speakers’ rulings 201/3-5. If an interim response is to be provided, the Minister should not routinely wait until the due date to provide it. Usually, it will be apparent to the Minister’s office, when it receives a question, whether an interim reply will be required.

I would be concerned if Ministers ever used interim replies to avoid providing answers to questions. There is now only a short amount of time left to lodge written questions, since they may be only lodged up until the time the Parliament is dissolved. It is my expectation that written questions lodged 6 or more working days before the dissolution of this Parliament will receive a substantive reply unless doing so requires an exceptional amount of collation and research. If members feel that they have received an interim reply when it is not justified, they should raise it with the Minister immediately and, if still not satisfied, bring it to my attention.

I intend to circulate a copy of this ruling to all Ministers.

Oral Questions

Questions to Ministers

Housing Affordability—Household Incomes Report

1. JACINDA ARDERN (Deputy Leader—Labour) to the Minister for Social Development: Does she stand by her statement yesterday that the Ministry of Social Development Household Incomes report shows “both lower and higher income households are getting the benefit of a strong and growing economy”; if so, does that statement take into account rising housing costs?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development): Yes. As I said in the House yesterday, the report shows that the net improvement at the top of each income decile has been reasonably even across the board, which means that the 11 percent increase above inflation since 2008 is fairly evenly distributed. I refer the member to figure D.10 on page 76 of the incomes report, which shows the real equivalised household incomes after housing costs changes for the top of deciles from 2008-09 to 2015-16, which shows households have growing income across the spectrum.

Jacinda Ardern: Can the Minister confirm that after housing costs, real mean household incomes in fact fell last year? And for that, I refer the Minister to page 76.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: No; I dispute the member’s reading of the figures. The good news from this report—which, as I said yesterday, is only up to year 2015-16—shows an 11 percent increase in incomes above inflation, and that is reasonably evenly distributed across all deciles.

Jacinda Ardern: Can the Minister confirm that the number of households that are now paying more than 30 percent of their income in housing costs, and are therefore in housing stress, is at a record high? And for that, I refer the Minister to page 61.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I agree that the report shows that as at 2015-16 we were seeing an increased number of people who were paying more for housing costs than anyone in this House would like to see. That is why this Government has a comprehensive housing plan. It is the first Government ever to invest in emergency housing. It is increasing the supply of social housing. It has a huge programme with councils, and, in fact, just on Sunday we announced another $600 million fund to help local councils provide housing.

Jacinda Ardern: Can the Minister confirm that after 9 years in Government, the poorest are now spending 51 percent of their incomes on housing costs, also a record high? And for that I refer the Minister to page 62.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: As I have stated in all my answers, that is 2015-16 data that we are looking at, and it does not take into account the child hardship package that came into effect. This is the first Government in over 40 years to increase benefit levels for some of our poorest families, and, of course, in Budget 2017 this Government announced a $2 billion Family Incomes Package, which also increases the accommodation supplement. That will change the lives of many of those New Zealanders.

Jacinda Ardern: Given rents have increased by 5 percent in just 1 year, will her benefit increase of $25, which abates, make any lasting difference, as she has claimed?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: As I have said, this annual report does not take into account the effect of that increase in benefits. But, as I have also said, the $2 billion package that was announced in Budget 2017 does take account of the fact that rents are increasing and that housing costs are increasing for some of the families who are in the most difficult financial circumstances. Because of the strong economic growth that this Government has overseen, we are now able to make those sorts of choices to invest in some of our most vulnerable families.

Jacinda Ardern: Can the Minister confirm that after 9 years, 75,000 children now live in homes that are cold and report major problems with dampness and mould, given the report states this on page 23?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I am delighted to report to the House that this report shows that the number of children in poverty, using the after housing cost, anchored 50 percent of median line or the 60 percent of median line income relations, is now below where it was when Labour was last in Government.

Jacinda Ardern: How can she possibly call this report good news, given it shows that after 9 years her Government has not made a dent in inequality, more families are in poverty, and housing costs are having a massive impact on people’s quality of life? How is that possibly good news?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Because the member is wrong. She is wrong on so many counts. This report does show that after the global financial crisis (GFC) when the numbers rose, we are now, in most areas, below GFC figures. As I have said, for children in hardship, we are actually now below, as a percentage, where the last Labour Government dealt with them.

Wage Rates—Household Incomes Report

2. CHRIS BISHOP (National) to the Minister of Finance: What reports has he received on New Zealanders’ rising incomes?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Finance): The annual Ministry of Social Development report Household incomes in New Zealand, written by Bryan Perry, was released yesterday. The report demonstrates that incomes have risen over the last 9 years across the income spectrum. In fact, the number of children living in households with material hardship has dropped by one-third between 2011 and 2016. This is one of the real benefits New Zealanders get from having a Government focused on growing the economy, driving job growth, supporting vulnerable children, getting the books into surplus, and paying down debt.

Chris Bishop: How much have wages risen by since the global financial crisis (GFC)?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The Perry report finds that median household incomes have risen around 11 to 13 percent in real terms from the period before the start of the GFC to 2015-16. In addition, Statistics New Zealand data shows average after-tax wages have gone up 19 percent in real terms since December 2008. The equivalent figure, by the way, for the 1999 to 2008 period was only 5 percent. The Budget Economic and Fiscal Update forecasts that by 2021 the average wage will rise to $64,300 a year, which is $17,000 a year more than when National first came into office.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: It’s not a speech time.

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: So our strong economic plan is delivering, Mr Peters, increasing wages. I know you do not care about it.

Mr SPEAKER: Before I call Mr Bishop, I need substantially less interjection from one particular quarter.

Chris Bishop: What additional measures are there in recent Budgets to boost New Zealanders’ take-home pay?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The Perry report is based on data from the 2015-16 household economic survey. That means both the Budget 2015 Child Material Hardship Package and Budget 2017’s Family Incomes Package are not yet reflected in the numbers. Together, these initiatives increase main benefit levels above inflation for the first time in 40 years and deliver a $2 billion boost to the family tax credit, accommodation supplement, and income tax thresholds. The Family Incomes Package alone reduces the number of children living in families with less than half of the median income by around 50,000, or about one-third—something that those who did not vote for this package obviously did not understand.

Grant Robertson: Can the Minister confirm that there has been an increase of 125,300 more people living in poverty since 2008, as is referenced on page 121 of the Perry report?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: No, I cannot. I can, though, confirm for the member that over the last 5 years the number of children living in households with material hardship has dropped by one-third, over the period 2011-16. I have good news for the member: the Family Incomes Package, which will deliver more to those families, comes into effect on 1 April next year, where 75,000 benefit-dependent families, for example, will get an increase in the accommodation supplement of an average of $30 a week.

Chris Bishop: What other evidence has the Minister seen on the improving well-being of New Zealanders?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: New research released by Statistics New Zealand last week showed that most New Zealanders are positive about their life, with around 83 percent rating it as 7 percent or above on a nought-to-10 scale. The regions were particularly strong, with people in the Bay of Plenty, Gisborne, and Northland having higher positive ratings about their lives than the average New Zealander, and with almost one-third of people in these regions rating it 10 out of 10. New Zealanders’ increasing positivity is partly due to the improved economic situation. Statistics New Zealand notes that the economy was shrinking in 2008, with unemployment rising, compared with last year when the economy grew by more than 3 percent.

Beneficiaries—Homelessness and Outcomes for People Leaving Benefits

3. METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) to the Minister for Social Development: How many people on benefits are currently homeless?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development): I am advised that the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) does not record whether people are homeless, because you do not need an address to get a benefit. Of course, if someone was to present to Work and Income and tell it they were homeless, it would work with them to address their situation. As I said in the House yesterday, Work and Income staff are absolutely passionate about helping people get back on their feet and live successful lives.

Metiria Turei: How many of the 60,000 children who she says are no longer on benefits are homeless?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: We do not know. We do not keep track of where those children are living. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! [Interruption] Order! I am now very quickly losing patience with the considerable interjection and conversation occurring across the aisle.

Metiria Turei: How many beneficiaries who have been subject to financial sanctions are now homeless?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: As I said in my answer to the primary question, I am advised that MSD does not record whether people are homeless, because they do not need an address to collect a benefit.

David Seymour: Would it be easier to collect those statistics if beneficiaries accurately reported where they were living and with whom?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Work and Income does require some information, particularly from sole parents. It wants to know whom they are living with in order to establish whether or not they are sole parents.

Metiria Turei: Why does she not instruct MSD to keep records of beneficiaries and their children who are homeless when she knows that poverty and homelessness are two of the most pressing social issues facing New Zealand today?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: The member is assuming that because we do not have figures, Work and Income does not deal with people who have those issues. Of course, working with a case manager, if a client declares that they have nowhere to live and they are in dire financial circumstances, the staff at Work and Income will work with that person in order to help them get good accommodation and live a successful life. It does not necessarily report those numbers through to the Minister.

Metiria Turei: How many of the 60,000 children she says are no longer in benefit-dependent households are now in households that live above the poverty line?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I have said before, in answer both to questions in the House and to written questions, of course people leave the benefit and go into employment, they go overseas, some of them go on to be superannuitants, some of them go into jail, and some of them die. We do not necessarily follow them as they leave a benefit. However, I have conducted some research pre-welfare, for the 2 years prior to the welfare reforms, and I am awaiting a further update on that research for a cohort for the 2 years following the welfare reform to see exactly what happens to people who leave the benefit. It is clear, even at this early stage, that well over a third of the people who leave the benefit are still in work 2 years later.

Metiria Turei: So the Minister does accept the social policy evaluation and research unit’s (SuPERU) analysis that shows that 2 years after coming off a benefit only 33 percent of those beneficiaries are now in paid employment?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Yes, that was right. The SuPERU research also showed, as I have said, that there is a whole variety of things that people go on to do in their lives. Some of them go into work. Some of them go into a different household situation where they do not have to work and are supported by someone else. As I say, some go overseas and some go into training. There is a whole variety of things that people do.

Metiria Turei: Is the Minister concerned that, after housing costs, the population poverty rate in 2016 is exactly the same as it was at the time of the global financial crisis and has not changed during the time of the National Government?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I would have to look at the figures that the member is referring to.

Emergency Housing—Motel Use

4. PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū) to the Minister for Social Housing: Does she agree with the Prime Minister’s statement about the Government spending $140,000 a day on putting homeless people into motels “I don’t know why people are complaining about this”?

Hon AMY ADAMS (Minister for Social Housing): The Prime Minister was making the comment that we are more than comfortable spending money to ensure that no one in genuine hardship should have to sleep rough on our streets, and of course I agree with that. I also agree with the Prime Minister that the member cannot have it both ways—criticising the Government for not doing enough and criticising the Government for spending too much.

Phil Twyford: Why is it so hard for her and the Prime Minister to understand that people are complaining not because the Government is putting people up in motels, but because the Government has so mismanaged the housing crisis that so many people need to be put up in motels?

Hon AMY ADAMS: What the member fails to appreciate is that this is not a new issue, and I can point to countless reports during the Labour Government of people sleeping in cars and in motels. What is different is that this Government, for the first time, has been prepared to step up and do something about it. We are very proud that we are not going to turn our backs on these people, and we will provide solutions. If that means a motel in the short term while we get them into something more sustainable, that is what we will do.

Phil Twyford: Why, 9 months after she promised an extra 1,400 additional emergency housing beds, has she delivered only 300?

Hon AMY ADAMS: I can tell that member that we do have more than 1,400 emergency housing beds available right now. That is more than New Zealand has ever had, and it is part of our plan to deliver 2,150, which is 2,150 more than Labour ever delivered.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Before I call the member to ask his supplementary question, I would be grateful if his own colleagues would at least listen to the answer.

Phil Twyford: How can the Government be so out of touch that the Deputy Prime Minister now says that she had no idea how much the motel grants were going to cost, and after last year’s winter of misery only budgeted $2 million, but now expects to spend $50 million on motels?

Hon AMY ADAMS: When a Government provides a solution that has never been provided before for the first time, it is not possible to exactly and accurately estimate what will be provided. What we said is that we will meet the cost, whatever that cost is, and we are doing that. This is a Government that is ensuring that there are options for people, and that if they go to the Ministry of Social Development, we will find them a solution.

Phil Twyford: Why will she not admit that she is spending $140,000 a day putting homeless New Zealanders up in motels because her Government has reduced the number of State houses by 5,000 and reduced the numbers of social houses, which includes community housing - provider dwellings, by 3,000?

Hon AMY ADAMS: The member is absolutely and utterly wrong. Those numbers are not correct, and we are in the process of delivering 6,000 more social houses while we are delivering transitional houses and while we are supporting transitional care, something that that party never did.

Emissions Trading Scheme—Changes

5. STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura) to the Minister for Climate Change Issues: What announcements has she made about changes to the Emissions Trading Scheme?

Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Climate Change Issues): Today I have announced a package of changes that the Government will make to the emissions trading scheme (ETS) to ensure it puts us in the best possible position to achieve our 2030 target. We are committed to the ETS being our key tool to reduce our emissions, and that is why we have begun a review of the scheme in 2015 to ensure it is fit for purpose. The proposals announced today will provide businesses with the clarity they need about the future direction of the ETS.

Stuart Smith: Can she elaborate on the specific changes being made?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: I can. The changes that are being made are to set up a more predictable and transparent process for ETS decision-making. We are going to introduce the auctioning of units to align the ETS to our climate change targets, limit participants’ use of international units when the ETS reopens to international carbon markets, develop a different price ceiling to eventually replace the current $25 fixed-price option, and coordinate decisions on the supply settings in the ETS over a rolling 5-year period.

Dr Megan Woods: Why is she continuing to ignore 49 percent of emissions and the advice of the OECD by failing to set a date for the inclusion of agriculture in the ETS?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: Because we value the actual contribution both economically and internationally that our agricultural sets, and they are trade exposed. They are some of the most efficient farmers in the world. Our country’s population of 4.5 million people actually feeds about 40 million people around the world. We value that, and, as a consequence of it, we will not be bringing them into the ETS at this time. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! I need substantially less conversation between the two members.

Stuart Smith: What reaction has there been to today’s announcement?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: I have got to say that the businesses around New Zealand are very pleased about this announcement, because what they have been calling for more than anything else is certainty, and that is what today’s measures give them, and it gives them a lot of notice, which is really important to them. So signalling these changes well in advance means that they can prepare for them and be part of how they are implemented.

Transpower—Possible Sale

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

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Finance): Yes; by standing and speaking into this microphone.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Well, right now, standing and speaking into the microphone, can he confirm that he said on 18 November 2013, regarding asset sales: “We will be transparent.”; so why has he not told New Zealanders that the Government is moving to sell Transpower?

Mr SPEAKER: There are two supplementary questions there. The Hon Steven Joyce can address one or either.

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Well, by speaking into the microphone and stating to the member: it is not.

Mr SPEAKER: Supplementary question—the Rt Hon Winston Peters. [Interruption] Order!

Hon Member: Sounds like Cook Strait ferries again!

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Order!

Hon Gerry Brownlee: That will not scrape the bottom.

Mr SPEAKER: Can I have less interjection from my immediate right.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I know whose bottom could be struck shortly; about three axe handles wide.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! We will just have the question.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Can he confirm the contents of a requested presentation by UBS AG, a Swiss investment bank giant, which details options to sell our national grid, worth billions of dollars—this document, marked confidential.

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Well, maybe the member has requested it but, certainly, I have not.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: How has this Government been transparent, when there is clearly a detailed business case requested from UBS AG outlining options on the potential sale of Transpower’s national grid, with no advice to the New Zealand taxpayer owners whatsoever?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Well, I invite the member to table his document. All I can say is that it has not been requested by, or provided to, me.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Is it not a fact that former National Minister for State Owned Enterprises Tony Ryall was appointed to Transpower’s board in May 2016, and then rapidly elevated within 4 months to the board’s chairmanship, in September, against Treasury’s advice, all to expedite this sale?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: No.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Do the Ministers, who are in the ownership role for the New Zealand taxpayer, not acknowledge that his colleagues have been planning the sale of further State assets, which is why the Government, ignoring Treasury’s advice, appointed their old mate Tony Ryall to the board so that he can facilitate the entire sale operation outlined in this document?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: No, but I do note that the member, once upon a time, used to be the MP for the seat next to Tony Ryall, so possibly he is on this conspiracy. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Order! I need to be able to hear the supplementary question. Supplementary question—the Rt Hon Winston Peters.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: They won’t be laughing out there, mate. When, in late 2013, there was a referendum held by the New Zealand people on power company sales showing a massive opposition to it, why is he again in this document going behind the people’s backs before the election?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Sadly for the member, we are not.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I seek leave to table this confidential document that I have referred to in my questions, which some enlightened New Zealander made sure I got. Thank you very much.

Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table this particular confidential document. Is there any objection to it being tabled? There is not.

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

Youth Unemployment—Youth Employment Pathways Programme and Government Support for Young People

Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): What announcements has she made recently—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! Sorry, there is too much conversation, so it very hard to hear the question. The member can start the question again.

7. Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei) to the Minister for Social Development: What announcements has she made recently regarding support for young people who are not in education, employment, or training?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development): Earlier this month, along with the Prime Minister and other Ministers, we announced a $50 million youth employment pathways programme: a comprehensive strategy to reduce the number of at-risk young people not in employment, education, and training in regional New Zealand. As part of the Regional Growth Programme, central and local government will partner with iwi, businesses, and support agencies to develop tailored intervention approaches. The strategy will be rolled out in the four regions of Northland, Eastern Bay of Plenty, East Coast, and Hawke’s Bay, and target young people who have high and complex needs and are at risk of long-term unemployment and welfare dependency. It follows on from successful trials, such as Kaikohe Growing Regional Opportunities through Work in Northland, and Project 1000 in Hawke’s Bay.

Dr Shane Reti: How many young people will this programme work with, to help them into jobs? [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order!

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: We will work intensively with just over 5,000 of the most at-risk unemployed young people in the four regions. I know that that does not sound like a lot to some people in this House, who try to say there are 90,000 young people out there looking for work. Well, I am sorry to tell the House that this just is not true. What they do not say is that many of those young people are caring for others, whether it is a child or an elderly relative. There are kids on a gap year or an OE, they are transitioning between training and employment, or there are some people with a health condition or disability that stops them from working. There are around 18,000 young people on a benefit—one-eight-thousand—who are in a position to start work, which is a long way from 90,000, and some of them will be on a benefit for only a short time before they do find work. We are focused on those who need the extra help, and that is what this programme is aimed at doing.

Dr Shane Reti: Why, then, is the Government focusing on young people? [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! I am now putting up with miles too many interjections, from one person particularly. I will not name her. She knows exactly who she is. If she continues to interject, she will not be in the House for the balance of question time and for most of the afternoon.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: We know that those who go on to a benefit before the age of 20 are much more likely to stay on a benefit long term—14 years or more. Not only this, we know that almost half of all children who grow up in a largely benefit-dependent household end up on a benefit themselves before the age of 23. This Government’s strong economic plan is delivering growth and jobs in regional New Zealand, and we are keen to see all New Zealand Kiwis benefit from this growth. So we are absolutely committed to breaking the cycle of welfare dependency, and helping those young people live independent and successful lives.

Darroch Ball: How can she say that “neets” should be “the highest priority for any Government” when one region she has identified, Hawke’s Bay, has a 22 percent “neets” rate, which has been constantly high for 9 years, but only now, 3 months out from an election, is she embarrassed enough to do something about it?

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: That is absolutely not true, and I categorically deny that that is what this Government is doing. What we have been doing over a long period of time, since the global financial crisis, is focusing on young people. But there are a number of young people in some parts of New Zealand who represent too high a percentage of the young people—and these particular young people have very high and complex needs. So, for instance, in Northland where we are targeting about just over 2,000 of them, 1,500 are Māori and they represent about 70 percent of the at-risk population. So we are picking on the hardest young people to work with, and we are working alongside employers, alongside iwi, and alongside a range of agencies in order to get good solutions for them.

Darroch Ball: When is she going to prioritise the young people in areas ignored in her plan—those living in the West Coast, Canterbury, Waikato, Southland, Auckland, Manawatū, Wellington, and Taranaki—which have “neet” rates of 9, 10, 12, 14, and up to 16 percent; or does she agree with the Prime Minister that they are just “pretty damn hopeless”.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Well, first of all, the Prime Minister has never said that, and I do not think—[Interruption] No, I do not think anyone in this House wants to ignore any young person. We want them to go on and get good, sustainable employment, and we want them to live good lives. What we are doing is focusing on these regions that have the highest percentage of these at-risk young people where we have structures already in place through our regional economic development programme working alongside local councils, working alongside local iwi, and working alongside local businesses. If we are successful with these young people, we will then look at expanding out the programme, but because it is such intensive work—$50 million for just on 5,000 young people—this is long-term work. We want to be sure that we have got it right before we expand it out.

Iain Lees-Galloway: I seek leave to table a transcript of a speech made by Bill English to a meeting of Federated Farmers—

Mr SPEAKER: No. Order! You do not need to seek leave because that transcript will be freely available if members wanted to source it.

Iain Lees-Galloway: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

Mr SPEAKER: A fresh point of order?

Iain Lees-Galloway: Well, it is speaking to that point of order. That transcript is not freely available.

Mr SPEAKER: It is freely available. Question No.—[Interruption] Order! And now I identify another member who knows who he is. If he continues to interject and behave like that, he will be leaving very shortly.

Māori Development—Homelessness and Housing

8. KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau) to the Minister for Māori Development: Does he stand by all his statements?

Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL (Minister for Māori Development): Āe, nā runga i te āhuatanga o te wā.

[In terms of the situation currently, yes.]

Kelvin Davis: Does he stand by his statement on the Marae programme a week or so ago that he has “got no idea” how homelessness got so bad in Waiariki, despite being the MP since 2005 and a member of the Government since 2008?

Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: I runga i te āhuatanga o te pātai, i pērā rawa te rere o te kōrero. I mārama tonu au, ēhara i te mea ko te mea kotahi e patu nei i Te Ao Māori me tana kore whiwhi kāinga. Ko tāku ko te kī atu, arā anō ngā take e pā ana ki tērā o ngā kōrero.

[Based on the circumstances of the question, the flow of the conversation was somewhat like that. I was certainly clear about it, it was not as though it was really one aspect that impacted on Māoridom and its ability to have a house. I assert that there are other matters relating to the aspect of the statements.]

Kelvin Davis: In light of that terrible answer—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Order! If the member does that again, he will not be having any chance to ask further supplementary questions.

Kelvin Davis: Does he regret supporting the sell-off of State houses, which he described as rangatiratanga, given the fact that Māori are five times more likely to be homeless than Pākehā, and Māori make up 44 percent of the wait list for State housing?

Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: Ko tā Te Kāwanatanga, ko te whakaae kia riro ki ētahi atu, Māori mai, Iwi māi, kamupene mai, kia āhei rātau ki te hoko i ngā whare kai roto i te pūkoro o Te Kāwanatanga. Ko tā mātau ko te kī atu, pai kē tērā ki tērā o tēnei wā tonu nei, ngā uauatanga kua pā mai ki te hiahia o Te Ao Māori ki te ruku ki roto i te āhuatanga o tēnei mea o te whare.

[The Government’s view is to allow others such as Māori, tribes, and companies to take responsibility so that they are able to buy houses in the pockets of the Government. We say that is better than that currently happening at this very moment in terms of the difficulties that impact on the desire of Māoridom to delve into the nature concerning this thing about a house.]

Mr SPEAKER: Supplementary question, Kelvin Davis.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Stop hiding behind the Māori language.

Kelvin Davis: Might one of the reasons Māori housing—

Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I puta te kōrero o Te Hōnore Winston Peters: “Stop hiding behind the Māori language.” Kai te pā tērā āhuatanga ki a au, me tū atu ia ki te tuku i tētahi whakapāha ki tēnei Whare. E whakaiti nei i te wā āhuatanga o Te Reo Māori i roto i tēnei Whare.

[The Rt Hon Winston Peters made a statement: “Stop hiding behind the Māori language.” I am offended by that situation, he must apologise to this House. It belittles the moments that the Māori language has in this House.]

Mr SPEAKER: I did not hear the interjection but if the member, the Rt Hon Winston Peters, suggested that a member was hiding behind answering this House because that member spoke in Te Reo, that is absolutely out of order and the member will stand, withdraw, and apologise for that remark.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! First of all, before I take the point of order, I require the member to stand, withdraw, and apologise.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I withdraw and apologise. I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. How are the people of this country out there, this close to the election, going to know what the answer was from a broadcast from this House to tens of thousands of people on a critical issue?

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Mr Speaker, I am sure you will want to tell the member that, should they be listening or should they be watching, there will be interpretation provided.

Mr SPEAKER: That is exactly the point I would have made if Mr Brownlee had not done so.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a further point of order, Mr Speaker.

Mr SPEAKER: No, it does not need anything further. We will now revert back to supplementary questions.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

Mr SPEAKER: Before I hear from the member, it had better be a fresh point of order, not relitigation.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: It is a fresh point of order; it always is. When I was talking about communicating with the tens of thousands of people out there I was also talking about the radio, for which there is not an interpretation.

Mr SPEAKER: The member is now continuing to relitigate what has already been raised. It is an official language. It can be used and will be used by members who choose to do so. Are there further supplementary questions?

Kelvin Davis: Might one of the reasons that Māori housing outcomes are so bad be that his Māori housing network has managed to get consents for only 11 houses, despite spending $37.5 million, as detailed in his supplementary answers to the Estimates questions?

Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: Kāo, kāo. E kino rawa nā te kore whakaaetanga o Te Rōpū Reipa ki te tautoko i te Kings development i Tāmaki, i Point England, i pērā rawa te kore o Te Reipa ki te tautoko i ērā kaupapa, koianā i kino ai.

[No, no. The absolute refusal of the Labour Party to endorse the Kings development in Auckland, and in Point England, as to why Labour’s refusal to support those initiatives is like that, that is why it is so harmful, that is it.]

Kelvin Davis: I runga i tēnā whakautu pōrangi [Based on that deranged response], why did Treasury state in March this year, regarding Budget 2017, about funding bids he submitted, “Eight initiatives have no supporting information. We cannot be confident that TPK has the capacity to deliver these initiatives.”, and is this why his Māori housing initiatives are a mess?

Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: Hei whakautu i tērā pātai pōrangi, ko te whakautu ki tērā momo pātai e pēnei ana. I te tau kua hipa ake, i kaha nei Te Māori Housing Network ki te tautoko i ngā whānau huri nei Te Motu, i roto i ngā uauatanga, arā, pēnei i te āhuatanga ki tana rohe ki roto i Te Tai Tokerau, ā, i kōrerohia i roto i tēnei Whare inā tatanei. Ricky Houghton, ko ia te tangata i tae atu ki te tautoko i a Ricky Houghton, me tana hiahia ki te hanga whare hai āwhina i te hapori o Kaikohe. Nō reira, koinei ēnei, tētahi paku wāhanga mō ngā tangata e hiahia i tēnei mō te āhuatanga o ngā take—

[In response to that insane question, the response to that type of question goes like this. In the year just gone, the Māori Housing Network worked strenuously to support families around the country with difficulties; in other words, like this situation concerning his region in North Auckland and was commented on in this House just recently. Ricky Houghton, he was the person who arrived there in support of Ricky Houghton, with his desire to build a house to assist the community of Kaikohe. Therefore, these then are some, a teeny morsel for individuals wanting this situation relating to matters—]

Kelvin Davis: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The question was about eight initiatives that Treasury said Te Puni Kōkiri did not have the capacity for. The member did not address that in his answer whatsoever.

Mr SPEAKER: No, I think—it is difficult because I am certainly not fluent in Te Reo, but as I listened to the interpretation I think the question has been addressed. At that stage the answer was progressing and it was far too long, so I was about to interrupt the Minister on that count.

Health Services—Bowel Screening

9. SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki) to the Minister of Health: Can he confirm that the Government has invested $77.8 million into the roll-out of the national bowel screening programme to date, and that the first eligible residents are now being invited to take part?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): Yes, indeed. This week the first letters inviting people to take part in the screening programme are being sent to residents in the Hutt Valley District Health Board and the Wairarapa District Health Board areas. Over the next 2 years, approximately 30,000 residents in those district health board areas will be invited to do the bowel screening test. This is the first step in the phased implementation of the free National Bowel Cancer Screening Programme throughout New Zealand over the next 3 years. The Southern District Health Board and the Counties Manukau District Health Board will be the next to join the roll-out, and the nationwide roll-out will be completed by 2020.

Simon O’Connor: How will the bowel screening programme benefit New Zealanders?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Around 3,000 New Zealanders are diagnosed with bowel cancer each year, and it is the second most deadly form of cancer. The National Bowel Cancer Screening Programme will be New Zealand’s first national cancer screening programme for both men and women. Once implemented, it is expected to screen over 700,000 New Zealanders every 2 years. It is expected that 700 cancers will be detected each year during these early screening rounds. The Government has invested $77.8 million into the screening programme’s progressive roll-out to date, with a further $19 million invested into delivering more colonoscopies faster.

Public Transport, Auckland—Third Main Rail Line

10. JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green) to the Minister of Transport: Can he confirm that the business case for the Third Main Rail Line in Auckland says completing this project will take 400 heavy vehicles off the road each week, reduce travel times for 5 million rail passengers, and save 300 hours for freight services each year?

Hon SIMON BRIDGES (Minister of Transport): Yes. The draft business case identifies these benefits. I have always seen the third main line as a project of real merit, and that is why I asked officials to jointly work on the project, which has led to the development of a draft business case.

Julie Anne Genter: Given that he sees the project as one of real merit, why did his Government reject the Budget bid for $60 million for this critical new rail line when it is happy to spend nearly $2 billion on road freight on the uneconomic East-West Link motorway?

Hon SIMON BRIDGES: Well, it never, in fact, got to a political level, and that was simply because it was a draft. It was not fully prepared and had not been consulted on amongst the agencies it should have been. I note there is an irony, I suppose, in that this member insists on benefit-cost ratios and good economics and strong process on projects that suit her ends, but not all projects.

Julie Anne Genter: Will he commit to building this new rail line before the City Rail Link is complete, given the business case states that without it “the benefits of the Auckland City Rail Link will be constrained, as there will be no capacity to introduce more … trains” to the line?

Hon SIMON BRIDGES: As I say, it is a project of real merit, I think, but it has got to go through a proper process instead of a process that the member insists on for roading projects. What I would say to the member, though, is that it is in the Auckland Transport Alignment Project first decade, and I think that should give her some confidence about this project.

Julie Anne Genter: Given that rail patronage is growing at a much faster rate than his Government ever anticipated, does he not think that perhaps this project should be built sooner rather than later, because it will enable more people and more freight to move around Auckland?

Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I note that that patronage is growing in part because of this Government, because we have invested so strongly in the electrification of rail, and it is on the basis of those figures that we are continuing to invest more in rail than any other Government.

Julie Anne Genter: Ha, ha! Ha, ha!

Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I know the truth hurts, but those are the facts.

Health Services—Elective Surgery

11. Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North) to the Minister of Health: Does he stand by his statement in regards to elective surgeries, “we’ve been very transparent around the targets we are hitting those targets”?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): Absolutely; especially the statement that elective surgeries have risen by around 50,000 under National compared with only 10,000 under Labour.

Dr David Clark: Can he confirm that when you take out eye injections, skin lesion removals, and other surgeries that could have been performed outside of hospitals, the Auckland District Health Board and the Counties Manukau District Health Board, in 2015-16, despite a growing population, performed fewer surgeries compared with the previous year?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Well, I would not underrate those Avastin eye injections. They are for the treatment of macular degeneration, which leads to blindness. Also, that skin surgery is pretty complex, and I would not underrate that either, especially for patients who have a complex melanoma on their back and who might need it removed under general anaesthetic. But what I can confirm is that even if you were to take out the 20,000-odd eye injections and skin lesions from the total, which it would not be valid to do, we would still be doing a 20,000 increase on what Labour did.

Dr David Clark: Can he confirm that when you take out eye injections, skin lesion removals, and other surgeries that could have been performed outside of hospitals, the Bay of Plenty District Health Board and the Waikato District Health Board performed fewer surgeries compared with the previous year?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I am very surprised that, with the member’s party’s record on this, he wants to ask these questions. But what I can confirm is that if you take out every type of important surgery that we have done, we would not have done any.

Dr David Clark: Does he think that district health boards that are paying for half of the Government’s targets out of their own budgets are incentivised to focus on eye injections to meet targets instead of funding additional hospital beds, like in Dunedin Hospital?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: The member needs to understand that this is all public money, and, of course, there is another $888 million of money that went from the public to fund the health service last year. What I can say is that the numbers of elective surgeries have greatly exceeded the target—the 4,000 uplift—that we have set over time. Last year, we planned to deliver 186,000 surgeries; we actually delivered 200,000. That is unlike the year when Mrs King—I hate to criticise her, because she was a very good Opposition spokesperson—delivered 2,000 fewer surgeries.

Dr David Clark: What urgent action is he taking to ensure there are additional beds for surgery in Dunedin Hospital right now, so that patients do not keep having vital operations cancelled, like Amber Gibbs; Allan Sutton, cancelled three times; Merv Telfer, cancelled seven times; and Owen Glover, who did not make it to surgery and passed away in his home after four postponed appointments?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I am not familiar with those individuals, but of course it is important that surgeries are performed in a timely manner. That is why it is absolutely important that, over the last 8 years, we have increased the numbers of elective surgeries in Southern District Health Board by 2,700—

Grant Robertson: What’s going wrong then, Jonathan?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: What is going wrong is your spokesperson.

Dr David Clark: Does the Minister think it is acceptable that, at one point yesterday afternoon, there was not a single ICU bed available in the whole of the South Island?

Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: As per usual, I would have to check that member’s assertions.

Housing Supply—Housing Infrastructure Fund

12. Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National) to the Minister for Building and Construction: How many additional homes will be brought forward, and in what areas, as a consequence of the Government’s support for councils through the $1 billion Housing Infrastructure Fund?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for Building and Construction): The funding will be used to provide infrastructure for 60,000 homes across nine projects in five fast-growing urban areas. Auckland will receive $300 million to provide infrastructure for an additional 10,500 homes, Hamilton will receive $272 million for an additional 8,100 homes, Waikato will receive $37 million for 2,600 homes, Queenstown Lakes District will receive $50 million for 3,200 homes, and Tauranga will receive $230 million for infrastructure for 35,000 homes.

Dr Parmjeet Parmar: How does this work on housing infrastructure complement the fast-track zoning provided through the housing accords with councils across New Zealand?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The No. 1 problem with new housing supply has been the shortage of suitably zoned land, and that is why our Government’s top priority has been fast-tracking the additional space for housing. That has been successful, in that from when the Housing Accords and Special Housing Areas Act was passed, we have seen a lift from 15,000 homes a year being built to 30,000 homes. However, councils signalled to the Government last year that the constraint of how they funded the infrastructure to support the housing risked slowing that growth. That is why the billion-dollar injection to support council infrastructure, and the new Crown Infrastructure Partners initiative announced at the weekend, is about dealing with that new constraint and maintaining the momentum of growth.

Questions to Members

Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2)—Support

1. CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston) to the Member in charge of the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2): What indications of support has he received for the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2)?

Mr SPEAKER: Andrew Little.

ANDREW LITTLE (Member in charge of the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2)): I am obliged, Mr Speaker. Thirty thousand New Zealanders have signed an open letter calling on the Government to back the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2), and I would hope the Government would listen to that. This bill will make sure that children are not growing up in cold, damp, mouldy homes. I seek leave to table the open letter for healthy homes that has been presented to me recently and is signed by 30,000 New Zealanders.

Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that substantial information. 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.

Carmel Sepuloni: What indications of support has he received for the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) from experts on the effects of unhealthy housing?

ANDREW LITTLE: Yesterday I received a petition from no less an organisation than Medical Students for Global Awareness. That petition was signed by 1,000 New Zealanders, mostly from the medical community, calling on Parliament to pass the bill. That organisation is led by Josh Smith, a 6th year medical student who is working in paediatrics. I seek leave to table the petition from Medical Students for Global Awareness, carrying 1,000 signatures.

Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that particular information. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.

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

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Supplementary, Mr Speaker.

Mr SPEAKER: No, I refer the member to Speaker’s ruling 188/4. By convention, one supplementary question will be taken; it is always taken from the member who asked the question.

Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2)—Objectives

2. CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston) to the Member in charge of the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2): What are the main objectives of the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2)?

ANDREW LITTLE (Member in charge of the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2)): The objective of the bill is very clearly laid out, and is to improve the health of our people and to save lives. It is about ensuring that no child in New Zealand grows up in a damp, unhealthy, cold rental home, and it sets minimum standards for insulation, for heating, for ventilation, and for drainage.

Carmel Sepuloni: Does he intend to propose any changes to the bill to better meet those objectives?

ANDREW LITTLE: Yes. I intend to propose amendments to adopt the changes proposed at the select committee that the committee unfortunately could not reach unanimous agreement on. That includes the inspection regime by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to ensure that the standards are met, improved standards in the bill, and to ensure that it works with the existing rules for smoke alarms.

Urgent Debates Declined

Primary Industries—Discovery of Mycoplasma Bovis in South Canterbury

Mr SPEAKER: I have received a letter from the Hon Damien O’Connor seeking to debate under Standing Order 389 the discovery of the cattle disease Mycoplasma bovis in South Canterbury. This is a particular case of recent occurrence and there is ministerial responsibility for the response to the disease by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). The test for whether a particular case requires the immediate attention of the House is a high one. The risk to our primary sector from animal disease is an important matter. This outbreak has been responded to by MPI and is limited in its scope at present. I am not convinced that this matter is urgent enough to warrant setting aside the business of the House today; therefore the application is declined.

General Debate

General Debate

Hon SIMON BRIDGES (Minister for Economic Development): I move, That the House take note of miscellaneous business. The last fortnight has given us, over the adjournment, a foretaste of what a Labour - Green - New Zealand First coalition would look like, and it is ferocious. Metiria Turei has said that the New Zealand First Party is racist, and Barry Coates—well, he will not even go near them—

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. In the interests of exactitude, and being only 7 weeks out from the election, that Minister should not be allowed to make statements about coalitions that are demonstrably, palpably false.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! It is a wide-ranging general debate and nothing that the Minister has said so far is at all out of order.

Hon SIMON BRIDGES: Let me just be clear for the right honourable member—the last fortnight has given us a foretaste of what a Labour - Green - New Zealand First coalition would look like. What a shambles—what a shambles! Metiria Turei says New Zealand First is racist. Barry Coates will not even go near them. Andrew Little over here says Winston Peters is a blowhard with a big swinging something or other who is leaking against them—who is leaking against them. Winston does not even think Andrew Little is going to make it back into Parliament in the next Parliament, and he does not give a rat’s derrière what Little thinks in any event. I ask the House: does this sound like a future Government of New Zealand? It sounds like an omnishambles. What an omnishambles we have on the other side of the House.

Even if—and it is a very, very scary “if”—they could work together, it would be a collective recipe that would be bad for New Zealand. When we have got employment as high as anywhere in the Western World, when we have got unemployment falling, and when we have got growth again at the highest levels in the OECD, they want a breather. Andrew Little has not even started and he is puffed—he is puffed from what he is doing. They want a breather on the other side. They want to pull the handbrake on New Zealand and on the growth we are seeing.

Well, on this side of the House we are up for growth. We are up for the exciting, vibrant New Zealand that we are seeing at the moment. We are not tired or pessimistic. We are energised by the New Zealand that we see today—a New Zealand where anything is possible for New Zealanders, where New Zealanders on the world stage are taking it to the rest of the world and making us proud. There is excitement and innovation happening all over the place. Opportunities are coming from Emirates Team New Zealand—how proud we were—winning the America’s Cup, and Rocket Lab taking New Zealand to 11th in the world to go into space. We are backing that growth, we are providing for it, and we are also implementing our plan for New Zealand—our plan to grow the economy and to share the benefits and the dividends—[Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The interjection level is now too loud. I am sorry to interrupt the member.

Hon SIMON BRIDGES: It is good to see that one member of the Opposition is energised, because their leader clearly is not.

On this side, we are up for that growth. We are growing the economy. We are delivering for New Zealanders benefits and dividends. I think about some of the things that have happened literally this last week. We have confirmed a $230 extra investment in the Kaikōura road. We are able to do that because of the strong—

Iain Lees-Galloway: $230?

Hon SIMON BRIDGES: You know what I mean—a $230 million investment in upgrading and improving that road, which we can do only because the economy is growing. Also, in terms of the Manawatū Gorge we have confirmed this week that there will be an improved, permanent, and much more resilient route for the people of that area. We can invest those hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars—actually, billions of dollars—into New Zealand, in infrastructure and health and education, only because the economy is growing, because our plan is working. On this side of the House we are energised. We are up for the growth. We do not want a breather. We do not want to see the shambles of a Labour - Green - New Zealand First Government anytime soon in this country, and we will be working hard for New Zealanders to deliver another National Government.

Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): I admire the member Simon Bridges for his levity and for making the most of the situation. In a Government that seems content to manage decline, that was a pretty good effort he made at spinning the benefits of a growing economy. But we all know, and New Zealanders know, that where the economy has been growing, the benefits have not been shared fairly. We know that real wages have been dropping, that many New Zealanders are living in cars, that New Zealanders are not getting care in the hospitals, and that they cannot afford to pay the school fees or go on the school trips. We know that New Zealanders are missing out and that only very few are doing well under this Government. Most New Zealanders are working hard. They are working hard to get ahead, but, unfortunately, they are struggling to stand still.

That is why in this election there will be a very clear choice for New Zealanders. People can choose the tax cuts the Government is offering—that tax package that is targeted at the top 10 percent, who will get the $400 million that Steven Joyce is promising. He will get a thousand dollars a year in his pocket because of those tax cuts. He says everybody in this Parliament needs a thousand dollars a year, and that is the priority right now. That is where Government members’ heads are at right now. Well, those tax cuts are not a priority for most New Zealanders. Most New Zealanders want to be able to afford to go to the doctor. Most New Zealanders want their kids to have a world-class education at their local school. Most New Zealanders want to be able to have a dream of affording their own home, and we have the lowest homeownership rates in New Zealand since the 1950s.

Today in the House we saw where the Government’s exclusive focus on the short term leads. The elective surgeries that the Minister of Health was trumpeting turn out to be little more than eye injections and skin lesion removals that could be done outside of a hospital. The Minister had no answer for the fact that in Auckland, Counties Manukau, Bay of Plenty, and Waikato—in all of those growing populations, all of them—the actual number of surgeries being performed in hospitals is dropping, once you remove the eye injections and the skin lesion removals that could have been done outside of the hospital environment.

Healthcare is dropping in this country. The level of unmet need is growing. Last year 60,000 New Zealanders were sent back to their doctor because the district health board (DHB) did not have enough money to send them to a specialist that the GP requested. The GP did not send that letter as a joke. Saying “I think you are sick; you need a cancer scan.” or “I think you are sick; you need a hip operation. Go and see the specialist.”—it is not a joke. But the DHB said: “We don’t have the resource to even see you in the hospital. Go back to your doctor, and when things get worse come back again.” That is what is going on in this country. That is why the Labour Party in Government will focus on making sure that public services are funded adequately.

The amount of underfunding in the health system is $2.3 billion. It is not just about putting money in right, either. It is about putting money in, but it is also about making sure that money is well spent, and currently that exclusive focus on short-term targets is sending money in the wrong direction. It is making the DHBs focus on making the Government look good, like in The Wire, pumping up the statistics instead of getting on with meeting need where it presents.

We have also seen in the last 24 hours stories told of what is happening at Dunedin Hospital, where the ICU beds are limiting the availability of spaces for elective surgery patients to go through. We heard the stories of Amber Gibbs; Alan Sutton, whose surgery was cancelled three times; Merv Telfer, whose surgery was cancelled seven times; and Owen Glover, who died—died—waiting for surgery after having his surgery cancelled four times.

I have learnt since then that yesterday afternoon, at one point, there was not a single ICU bed available in the whole of the South Island of New Zealand. I put that to the Minister; he said he would have to check on that. He is not across his portfolio. If he does not know what is going on in our hospitals and in our health system, that is a Government seriously out of touch. It is crowing about what the Opposition may or may not be doing this week; it does not have any policies itself. It has lost its way. We need, instead of investing in tax cuts focused on the wealthy, a Government that focuses on making sure ordinary, regular, everyday Kiwis who are working hard can get their doctor’s appointment, can get the education their kids need, can afford to save for their retirement, and so on.

In closing, we need a hospital rebuild in Dunedin. That has been promised since before the last election. We do not even have a business case, and now we are told it will not be till midway through next year. We need some urgency on that matter.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Children): Well, it is certainly the age of alternative facts, and, if it was not for that member’s hairstyle, I would say he simply resembles Trump with some of his comments, because the fact is—the fact is—as released in the Ministry of Social Development’s annual report, that incomes for both before-housing costs and after-housing costs, right across the spectrum, have been growing. Real incomes in real terms have been growing for New Zealanders—that is, people on lower incomes, middle incomes, and higher incomes. What is more, that report also shows that the low income and material hardship trends for children are flat or falling. That is a terrific thing for this Government to have achieved. In fact, it shows that there are 30,000 fewer children now in poverty, under those two measures, than there were under the last years of Labour. So despite a global financial crisis, this Government has raised those families above the poverty line.

I want to talk today about infrastructure, because this Government is investing in infrastructure in a way that we have not seen for many, many decades. I was privileged on Sunday to travel through the new Waterview Connection tunnel. What a fantastic piece of engineering that is.

Dr David Clark: Thank you, Helen Clark.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Oh, yeah, right! Oh, yeah, right! If you also travel down State Highway 1, the Huntly bypass is under way and the Cambridge Bypass is completed. The Waikato Expressway, of course, is under construction, and in my own part of the world there is the Tauranga Eastern Link—absolutely fantastic pieces—

Hon Todd McClay: Te Puke bypass.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: The Te Puke bypass—the absolutely fantastic infrastructure that this Government has been investing in. And it continues. And it continues because this Government has a strong record of working with local councils.

Just on Sunday we stood with the Prime Minister, we stood with the Mayor of Auckland and the local MP, and we talked about how this Government was helping to lift the quality of life and enabling growth in those communities. Standing alongside council, this Government is co-investing up to $600 million to ensure that infrastructure can be built that will encourage and enable further growth. As we stood there in Auckland announcing the launch of the Crown Infrastructure Partnerships by the Auckland mayor, Auckland Council was really interested in taking up that opportunity because it has got two big projects, one in the north, which will see 5,500 new houses, and one in the south, which is looking at about 17,800 new houses. The first part of the plan there in Drury South—as we stood opposite the quarry there with the Stevenson Group, which is looking to invest $300 million itself in the investment, you could feel the excitement from the Auckland mayor. He was absolutely delighted with the work that the Government was doing with his council organisation, and really looking forward to putting in the projects that the Government was announcing.

Not a couple of weeks ago, my colleague the Hon Nathan Guy and I were with the Wellington regional mayors co-investing for water resilience, because Wellington and Porirua are almost unique in that they are cities that do not have their own water supplies. So, of course, being a high-risk area for earthquakes, this Government is working alongside those councils and saying we will help you ensure that there is water available—22 bores are being made available, and this Government is putting in $6 million alongside those councils to make sure that those cities, should there be an emergency, have adequate water supplies for their people.

I cannot go without finally talking about my electorate and the announcement that that bridge leading to the historic East Cape Lighthouse will be replaced. And just as important is the Mōtū Bridge. I drove through there the other day. That is coming on. I tell you, people in Gisborne cannot wait for that two-lane bridge to be completed. It has not come out of the transport fund; it has come out of this Government’s investment in regional roading plans, working alongside councils and delivering in infrastructure right across this country. This is a great Government.

DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): It has been a great 3 years in this Parliament, and for ACT it is just a new beginning. I am 16 points ahead in the Epsom electorate before anybody endorsed me, and I am going to be working hard for the next 8 weeks to earn the support of my neighbours to send me back here, to represent them in Parliament again.

But that is just the beginning, because with an electorate seat every single party vote for ACT counts; 1.2 percent of the vote brings Beth Houlbrooke into Parliament—an award-winning businesswoman, a mother of two, the elected chair of the Rodney Local Board—and what an outstanding MP she would make. Some people watched the Auckland mayoral election. Some people watched Chlöe Swarbrick and thought: “She is pretty good, but imagine if she had an economics degree.” Well, that is No. 3 on our list, Brooke Van Velden, and what an outstanding MP she would make.

Some people ask: what if you had an international cricketer and a renowned leader within his community of South Auckland? That is Bhupinder Singh, and with Epsom plus 2.8 percent, Bhupinder Singh becomes an ACT member of Parliament. What if you had a guy, a guy who left school at 16, started working at Countdown, and became “Mr Fix-it” in the organisation, one of Countdown’s top managers, whom they send in to fix their tough problems? That is Stephen Berry. Repeating our 2008 performance of 3.5 percent of the party vote plus Epsom, that is a team of MPs who would make this Parliament proud and who would represent New Zealanders well.

Why would we want to do that? Well, there are a lot of positive reasons to vote for ACT, but let us just focus on how bad the alternative is and how bad the Opposition is. The Labour Party is on course, as Richard Prebble recently said, for total destruction. It may be the first of the Labour parties in the Western World to completely implode. You only have to look at their dilemma when you see their position on ACT’s partnership schools, kura hourua. Half the caucus is in favour; half of them are against. The leader says they are going to be closed; Kelvin Davis says he will resign if they are closed. Which one is it? Does the Labour Party today represent poor, disadvantaged Māori children who want choice and opportunity in education, or does it represent adults with comfortable, well-paying jobs who happen to join teacher unions and support the Labour Party?

Then you come round to New Zealand First. What a disaster. There is Winston Peters. He has been sacked from Cabinet three times by three different Prime Ministers. He has been voted out of two electorates, and the third electorate has not had an opportunity to vote him out yet, but help is on its way. It is going to vote him out on 23 September. This is a guy who has more bottom lines than a 100-year-old elephant. He is now up to nine bottom lines. He has peaked too early in this election, and he is going to find out that the problem with Winston Peters’ politicking is eventually you run out of other people’s gullibility. He still has not paid back the $158,000—

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

DAVID SEYMOUR: —and frankly, the way he campaigns is racist.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! A point of order—the Rt Hon Winston Peters.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I will tolerate a fair bit from that member, but I will not tolerate him getting up and making deceptive, deceitful statements like that. I know what we paid back—all $158,000, in circumstances—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. [Interruption] Order! That is not a point of order. [Interruption] Order! That is not a point of order. That is very much a debating matter. The member can continue his speech, and if the member feels he has been misrepresented throughout the speech there is another means. It is not raised on the floor of the House. I refer the member to Standing Order 359.

DAVID SEYMOUR: If one ACT MP can get that far under Winston Peters’ thin skin, imagine how far five ACT MPs could get. He does not like it up him but the ACT Party has kept him out of power for the last three elections, and we are going to do it again. I understand his frustration, but he has got to stay there.

What about poor old James Shaw? You have got to hand it to Metiria Turei; she has won. I used to get business people coming up to me, saying: “You know, I saw that James Shaw. It seems like they’ve finally got someone sensible in the Greens.” Well, not any more, because the Green Party is now the party that says: “We’re gonna give you a 20 percent pay rise to stay at home, and don’t worry if you want to smoke drugs on the taxpayers’ expense, and don’t worry about looking for a job. If you do that, we’re gonna raise your taxes.” Those are not the values of New Zealand, and it is the end of an expansionist Green Party. What a tragedy for James Shaw.

There is a lot more to come, because people might start to ask the question: how deep did the fraud go? Were there children actually in the house when Metiria Turei was claiming the DPB, or were they actually living on the North Shore with Ann Hartley under a whāngai arrangement? We look forward to hearing that from Metiria Turei. Maybe she did not even have any kids in that flat where there were too many people, when she was claiming the DPB. Let us find out later in the debate.

A vote for ACT is a vote for stable, centre-right Government, keeping the other muppets out, and tackling the hard issues, such as housing, tax, education, and fairness between generations, that have been neglected for too long. Thank you.

Hon TIM MACINDOE (Minister of Customs): The Lion supporters have gone home, and I congratulate my excellent constituent Warren Gatland on bringing a talented squad and their entertaining, enthusiastic compatriots to our shores for a fabulous series. The America’s Cup is back where it belongs, and I also congratulate Emirates Team New Zealand and give them thanks for all the excitement that they brought us in recent weeks. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! Ron Mark, you have continued to interject right throughout question time and you are continuing now. If you interject again while I am in the Chair this afternoon, I will be asking you to leave the Chamber.

Ron Mark: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I wish to apologise to you, Mr Speaker, but I take offence to some of David Seymour’s behaviour.

Mr SPEAKER: Well, then, raise it at the time. I did not hear anything and the member did not take it. I am just fed up—the member will resume his seat. I am just fed up with the interjections that are occurring across the House. It has been continuous throughout question time, and it is continuing in the general debate. I have made my point. If the member wants to continue arguing, I can invite him to leave even earlier.

Hon TIM MACINDOE: Well done, Emirates Team New Zealand. Just make sure that you have a victory parade in Hamilton next time, please.

Lydia Ko is back on form. Our country is on a roll. The hoardings are going up, and we are off. So in less than 2 months, New Zealanders will have gone to the polls and chosen those who will be members of the 52nd Parliament. I would like to say that they will have chosen their Government, but according to that master of faux outrage, the member for Northland, that is his prerogative, and he will be informing the rest of us what his choice will be on 12 October. Well, what a bizarre gesture that is to the rest of New Zealand. Most of our compatriots would prefer him to let them know which way he might go before the election, because I am sure that that would have some bearing on the choices that they might make. But, apparently, he does not believe that they deserve that courtesy, so most will see through that puffery and contempt.

As the Hon Simon Bridges noted earlier in this debate, the prospect of a Labour/Greens/New Zealand First Government is looking shambolic and utterly unworkable. On one level, their infighting and contempt for each other is providing fodder for the cartoonists and entertainment for their growing band of opponents. But it is also disturbing to think of the damage that such an appalling combination would inflict upon our country.

That is why this morning Prime Minister Bill English made clear National’s gratitude to our existing confidence and supply partners, in the Māori Party, ACT, and United Future. They have played a constructive role in bringing good Government to this country in recent years. They have provided stability and clear focus on important issues that actually matter to New Zealanders and their determination to secure economic growth, better living standards, more jobs and opportunities have delivered major gains for our country, despite the incredible challenges that we have faced, especially through the global financial crisis, the domestic recession, and the Canterbury earthquakes. Those gains really are considerable.

Let us look at our recent report card. New Zealand’s economy grew 3 percent in the year to March, making us one of the top performing OECD countries, and that strong growth is expected to continue for the next few years. The average annual wage is up more than $17,000 since we came into office. Inflation remains low. The economy is diversifying. Interest rates in New Zealand are low. We were one of the first developed countries to get back to surplus after the global financial crisis, with a $1.8 billion surplus posted last year and growing surpluses projected for the years to come. We are on track to reduce Government debt to around 20 percent of GDP by 2020-21, and we are rated first in the world for prosperity and the ease of doing business. That is a tremendous record.

During the recent adjournment the Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, and building and construction Minister came to my electorate in Hamilton West to make announcements about the allocations to five councils of the fastest-growing towns and cities in New Zealand from the Housing Infrastructure Fund. For Hamilton, it is fantastic news. A $272 million loan will enable our council in Hamilton to fast track vital infrastructure that will finally see the Peacocke subdivision come to pass.

I have long argued, as the MP for Hamilton West, that the growth in our city, which has been considerable, needed to be more balanced. I am absolutely delighted to see that investment going into the south and west of my electorate, where it will rejuvenate those suburbs and provide many jobs and opportunities for families for generations to come. There will be 1,000 new homes rolling out pretty quickly, and over the foreseeable future after that we will see more than another 7,000 homes.

This is a Government that is delivering the infrastructure that this country needs to ensure that we have further growth and further opportunities. As the Associate Minister of Education, I have had the great privilege of going around the country in recent weeks, announcing details of our roll-growth plans, which will bring 305 new classrooms to schools around the country. These are the things that matter to New Zealanders. We are very proud to deliver them.

METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Poverty is not a weapon to be used against the poor. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member can start her speech again. She does not need to be interrupted by those interjections.

METIRIA TUREI: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Poverty is not a weapon to be used against the poor. No Government should ever use poverty as a weapon against its own people. The safety net has become a poverty trap, but the Green Party will fix it, because everybody deserves a fair go in this country. It is the Kiwi way to look after each other, but our welfare system—the safety net that our grandparents weaved together for us—has been torn to shreds in the last two decades.

It is not right that a kid does not have a shot at a healthy future. That is an injustice that we all should be upset about. So the Greens will end poverty in New Zealand. Everyone who receives a benefit, every student on a student allowance, every person working minimum wage, and every family doing it tough is going to have more money in their back pocket from our mending the safety net package: more money to pay the rent, more money to put food on the table, and more money to pay the power bill for 350,000 New Zealanders and their children. With this, 350,000 New Zealanders and their 179,000 children will be lifted out of poverty. These kids will wake up in a bed, not in the backseat of a car. They will go to school with bellies full of breakfast, and lunchboxes full of lunch. They will spend their weekends playing sport and not in hospital with respiratory illness.

Our plan to mend the safety net makes sweeping changes to benefits, to Working for Families, to wages, and to taxes, to transform the poverty track that we have now into a genuine safety net. We will increase benefits and make it easier for people to earn more money and to secure more stable work. We will fix Working for Families, get rid of the discriminatory in-work tax credit, and create a children’s credit that will be available to beneficiary families, student families, and grandparents taking care of their grandbabies. We will raise the minimum wage so that by 2020 it will be over $20 an hour. We will remove the sexism and the discrimination from Work and Income New Zealand that allows it to hound and to persecute solo mums who are just trying to do the best for them and for their kids.

In the last week, I have been told so many heart-breaking stories about life on the benefit, and many are from the children of beneficiaries, who are now grown. They thank me for speaking out in defence of their mums and their dads. Many are disabled people who talk about how impossible it is to get their entitlement, let alone live with a disability, on a benefit, and with no clear pathway out.

So I am asking those of us here—those of us who have a stable home, who have a secure income, who have a decent life, who believe that every New Zealander should have the same, no matter what their circumstances—let us all reject any notion that poverty is acceptable at all in our country. Let us commit to ending poverty in New Zealand, and let us commit to creating a Government that has, at its heart, that same purpose: to end poverty in our country. Poverty should never be used as a weapon against the poor, and a Government of which the Greens are a part will never ever use poverty as a weapon against our people. Thank you.

MELISSA LEE (National): It is always a great pleasure and a joy to participate in the general debate and, particularly, as a member of the National Government, to talk about the amazing work that National has done to support New Zealand infrastructure across the country, support more jobs, grow the economy, and grow the aspirations and opportunities of Kiwi families under nearly 9 years—9 great years—of the National-led Government.

Under this Government, we have worked hard, despite natural disasters, global economic crises, and all manner of world political interest, to get our people into jobs, into the economy, and to build New Zealand as an international trading nation. That reminds me of a comment that a great leader once said to me. It was John Key, actually—the Rt Hon Sir John Key—who said: “We will never get rich as a country if we just trade within our own country.” If we just sell to each other, we will never get rich. We need to trade with the world, and we need to become a good and fantastic trading nation, and that is what we are doing.

It is a brave new world out there, and a fragile world, but our nation and our Government are up to the task of tackling it with the No. 8 fencing wire spirit that all Kiwis aspire to, as the innovative country that we are. A couple of days ago I was on a phone call to a friend of mine who lives overseas, and I had to try to explain what this No. 8 wire mentality was, because they did not understand that. I had to think that No. 8 wire is the kind of wire that can fix anything, that it was the most versatile of wires that can help farmers and help people who needed equipment that needed to be purchased, but when they live far away, they could not, and they used this No. 8 wire. They actually got that idea that New Zealand was, in fact, very innovative. When we live so far away from the rest of the world, we need that kind of innovative spirit and style and approach.

Our economy is forward-looking and is supporting Kiwi jobs and businesses. Our Innovative New Zealand package of $761 million for sciences, skills, and regional development initiatives is helping to grow, diversify, and reinvigorate different aspects of our economy. Our infrastructure packages are getting $2.1 billion into 21st century school buildings, fit for purpose roading projects, amazing ultra-fast broadband speeds, and, of course, better cities with safe and warm houses for our communities.

Our four key aims—better public services, infrastructure, reducing debt, and reducing the tax burden—will always be at the core of our values as a Government team. We know the hard work that goes into every tax dollar that the Government collects, and we will continue to deliver for New Zealand. Look at the amazing transport infrastructure that National is delivering right across New Zealand. The New Zealand roads of national significance project is driving urban and provincial industry, such as the recently opened Mackays to Peka Peka Expressway on the Kapiti Coast, making travel in the lower North Island fast and effective without compromising local community roading. The Auckland western ring route roading project and provincial projects such as the Whirokino bridge replacement in Manawatū-Wanganui are working to ease traffic and to provide long-term infrastructure for New Zealand’s community commuting and freighting needs.

In particular, the Waterview Connection in Auckland will help reduce traffic congestion and promote easier movement across Auckland regions. After the Waterview tunnel actually opened up, I had a Facebook message from someone who commutes all the time from Glen Innes to the North Shore. It took only 20 minutes, and they were absolutely amazed. They had been locked into a gridlock of traffic from Glen Innes to the North Shore, but after the traffic was diverted to the tunnel and people were using alternative routes, it actually cut time for travel from Glen Innes to the North Shore, and they were very, very happy that the National Government is, in fact, delivering for New Zealanders.

I know that members opposite try to sound enthusiastic and full of energy when they get up and try to sell their retreaded vision for the future of New Zealand. But, frankly, what I am thinking is that they must know, deep in their hearts, that they are not going to win this election. They are terribly disappointed in the performance of their leadership, and they are waiting for the election to be over so that they will have a brand new leader, and then, perhaps, in 2020 they might have a remote chance, a very remote chance, of taking over the Treasury benches. I do understand the Opposition’s feelings because I would also hate to be in Opposition for 9 years, let alone 12 years.

IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): In 4 weeks’ time, this Parliament will be dissolved, we will go back to our electorates, and we will go to the people and give them the opportunity to elect a Parliament and a Government that is fit to face the challenges that this country faces at this point in time. We have numerous challenges that we have to face. The people of New Zealand have a very, very clear decision to make. Do we carry on with a Government that has just one trick up its sleeve—giving tax cuts to the few at the top—or do we change to a Labour-led Government that will invest in housing, that will invest in healthcare, that will invest in education, that will invest in public transport, and that will make working people’s lives better? That is the choice we have—the one-trick National Government, with tax cuts for the rich, or we can sort out the problems that this country has and that have grown in an unrelenting fashion under the National Government.

New Zealand has the worst rate of homelessness of any developed nation in the world—the worst rate of homelessness of any developed nation in the world. The Government’s comprehensive emergency plan is to spend $140,000 a day on motel rooms. We can talk about the big numbers. We can talk about the percentages. I want to talk about a constituent of mine who approached my office just this morning. He will not be getting into a motel room, and he will not be getting into a State house either. He lives in a shed. He lives in a shed. He is on ACC, so he is getting a little bit of money, from one week to the next. But he is not in a dire enough situation to be offered emergency housing or a spot on the waiting list. He is living in a shed, and there is no place in the National Government’s system for him to get into a home. That is wrong. That is outrageous.

That is the state that we are in, in this country, after 9 long years of a National Government that does not care about people. All it cares about is figures and numbers and headline growth. What has pushed that growth? It is population growth. The truth is that, in real terms, person by person, we are no better off than we were when National first came to Government. Incomes are not rising in real terms. Housing costs are gobbling up what additional income people get. GDP per capita growth is sluggish. The only thing that is driving growth in this country is population growth, and that is at an astonishing rate because this Government has allowed immigration to go through the roof.

Immigration, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. In fact, it is a good thing for New Zealand. We rely on immigration. We need people to come from overseas to fill jobs here in New Zealand. But it does become a problem when the Government fails to plan for that growth, when the Government fails to build the houses that those people need to live in, when the Government fails to build the roads and the public transport that those people need to travel around on, and when the Government fails to invest in the hospitals that we need to provide healthcare for those people, or the schools to educate those people and their children.

It is not just the migrants who lose out when the Government fails to plan. It is everybody in New Zealand. Belatedly, the National Government decided, in April this year, that it would come up with a policy to maybe slow down the rate of population growth, slow down immigration. But it was such a half-baked plan, so poorly thought through, because the Government failed to engage with the debate and then came out with a knee-jerk reaction, which sounded like it had been dreamt up the night before, that now Bill English is overriding the immigration Minister and saying that those policies that were due to be implemented in 2 weeks’ time are not going to go ahead. What a shambles. What a shambles of a Government, after 9 years, that it cannot even get a straightforward policy like that sorted out.

This country needs a new Government—not just one that is prepared to invest in the public services and the infrastructure that we need, but one that has thought through its policies, that has a proper plan for the future of New Zealand, and that has a leader with integrity. We used to think Bill English had integrity, but then the Todd Barclay case came along, and he ducked and he weaved and he lied and he hid. It is time for a fresh approach, a new Government, led by Andrew Little.

Dr JIAN YANG (National): I would like to focus on infrastructure. Last weekend I attended the New Zealand Chinese Building Industry Association’s annual conference. I chaired a panel discussion regarding China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the opportunities for New Zealand. “Belt” refers to the economic belt of the Silk Road and also “Road” refers to the 21st century maritime Silk Road. New Zealand is on the maritime Silk Road. That is how New Zealand is related to the Belt and Road Initiative. This initiative is closely related to infrastructure, because infrastructure has been fundamental to economic growth. We all understand that the Chinese have focused on the building of infrastructure in the past 40 years. They say that if you want to get wealthy, build roads first, and that is what they have been doing for the past 40 years.

We all understand that infrastructure is particularly important to all economies, and similarly in New Zealand, so this Government is very proud to say that we are the infrastructure Government simply because we understand the importance of infrastructure and have invested heavily in infrastructure. I will give you an example: ultra-fast broadband. We have invested $2 billion in ultra-fast broadband. We understand our economy is global, and our e-commerce has been growing fast, globally and in New Zealand.

Many international businesses depend on the internet, so we have been investing heavily in this particular object. Combined with the Rural Broadband Initiative, this ultra-fast broadband programme is the biggest ever infrastructure project taken in New Zealand. Now we have 1,132,000 households and businesses that have access to fibre, and 370,000 schools, businesses, households, and hospitals are now connected to fibre—to ultra-fast broadband. We are a global connectivity leader, so New Zealanders should be very proud of that.

We also come to transport, because we know it has been a challenge. Of course there are reasons why we now have this particular transport challenge. We believe it is because our economy has been doing very well and has been very successful. We now have more jobs. People are economically active. They move around, and also people are staying in New Zealand and many people are moving back to New Zealand. So those are some reasons. But, nevertheless, we are facing a challenge. We are going to find solutions. We are investing billions of dollars in transport, including $436 million in Auckland’s City Rail Link, at just stage one.

So what is Labour’s solution? Well, basically, it is that people should not come to New Zealand—stop them from coming to New Zealand, and maybe ask people to leave—because we need to slow down the economy so that we can have a breather. So that is Labour’s solution, which is, basically, to slow down the economy and have people leave and not come to New Zealand. That is its solution. That is the difference between a united, hard-working, forward-looking Government and a lazy and also, of course, a lack-of-ideas Opposition. That is the difference.

I emphasise that in this Budget, Budget 2017, we are investing another $4 billion in infrastructure, and this is the single-biggest investment of new capital in infrastructure in one single Budget for decades. What is more, we are going to have another $7 billion—another $7 billion—in the next 3 years. So, in total, we are going to have $32.5 billion invested in new infrastructure in the next 4 years. That is how much we are going to invest in infrastructure, and that is how much attention we are paying to transport and to other infrastructure.

That is what this Government has been working hard on—that is, we are going to lay a solid infrastructure for all aspects including transport, our schools, and everything. So this is genuinely—genuinely—an infrastructure Government. Thank you.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): That was a message straight out of Beijing. In the Morrinsville RSA last night there was not a chair left as we launched our Waikato candidate, Stu Husband. The National Party members launched theirs of course and they got 25. So we are not giving any regard to “All Brylcreem and No Socks” who spoke here today. We have seen the last National Party polls—the most recent ones—and it is all bad news for them, for them and for a whole lot of parties here, but it is good news for one other party. Take a wild guess which party that is.

We do not care about Epsom’s three-quarters of a million dollars bludger and his cuckolded behaviour in this Parliament. The reality is, as the former American President Truman had on his sign, “The buck stops here”, but not in the New Zealand Government today. Look, it reminds me of the American showman P T Barnum when he ran a travelling circus menagerie and a museum of freaks—and that is whom we have heard from today. The cling-ons propping up this National Government, the cuckolded vassal, the political puppet, and racial separatists—that was the biggest subject that at Morrinsville last night concerned a packed hall, mainly of National Party farmers—[Interruption] You can laugh now, but they were down in Invercargill when we were down there, they were in Motueka, and all over the country. We are not suckers.

Take the Fuji Xerox scandal. For a year this Government over here said there was nothing in it, nothing to see. It was imploding around the world, a $500 million scandal, right under our face, and the Government is implicitly involved and has got school after school in these jack-up Ponzi schemes devised by their head of sales and now managing director, Gavin Pollard. Why, the Japanese came here last week and apologised to this country. The Japanese Government did, but not those people over there. They were caught out—said there was nothing there—and now we go to this Transpower utility sale. He gets up and makes out they know nothing about it. Could I just say this. In 2013 there was a referendum where 2:1 the New Zealand people were opposed to these power sales. But it does not stop these guys. Over $2 billion of assets, and quietly behind the people’s backs they have got this scheme being talked up—a four-way option to sell this huge asset. It is a disgrace.

Can you recall who UBS AG is? Well, it is the same Swiss investment banker, and I want to tell the journalists out there who do not seem to understand. It was involved, you will recall, in December 2003. It helped Transpower sell off the South Island transmission grid to an arm of—who and where—Wells Fargo United States. It was a complicated, smelly leaseback all the way through what country? The Cayman Islands. And it all went belly-up in 2009. That is how long the association is—a penny-bad privatisation with foreign investment bankers.

National is doing one thing and saying another. Remember what they said? Bill English said, back in 2013: “There won’t be any more asset sales, largely because everything that can be sold will have been by then.” Steven Joyce says: “We are going to be transparent about asset sales.” Transparent—that guy would not understand transparency if he fell over it. He showed it on the Fuji Xerox scandal. He is showing it over and over again, and on Novopay he is just a bungling incompetent.

In the next few weeks in this campaign we are going to expose what Tony Ryall has been doing. He got put on the board, and in the space of 4 months has been made the chairman. They booted off a guy that Treasury wanted to have retained there. No, they chose their man—all to do what? It was to get ready to facilitate a sale. This former—this is Tony Ryall—BNZ bank teller who was so behind the sale of the biggest bank in this country, BNZ. When it was sold it had six out of 10 New Zealand clients, and today 95 percent of our banking is foreign-owned. And these guys do nothing about it. They are globalists, and I am telling you why New Zealand First is packing the halls around this country. It is because they have had a gutsful of you. They have had enough. They want a change and they are going to get one, and no amount of character assassination is going to stop us on this great purpose.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): It is a pleasure to be talking in this debate and it is interesting, just sitting in the House, that you can almost feel the expectation of the Opposition members that they should be in Government. In fact, it is stronger than that. It is almost as if they feel they have the right to be in Government. But I have got to say I think there is a real arrogance in what I am hearing today—a real arrogance. In fact, there is even one member who thinks he is going to determine when we are going to be back in power and what date it is going to be—12 October. There is a sense of arrogance that permeates this place, which is rather off-putting.

But what I would like to say is that good government is more than that. Good government requires vision, it requires hard work, and it also requires an ability to implement. But, most importantly, it actually requires an ability to deliver, and all that requires a team that is collaborative and cohesive. When I look across this House I do not actually see that on the other side. I do not see that cohesion. Everyone will tell you, whether it is a sports team, whether it is a business, or whether it is a political party, that the single most important ingredient is having cohesion, and we do not see that.

After the long dark days following the global recession we finally have got this country back into a position where we are mightily proud of where we have got to. We have got one of the strongest economies in the world, growing at 3 percent, one of the fastest in the OECD. We have got more people working now than ever before—2.5 million hard-working New Zealanders working every day. There are 67 percent of our people who are working, which is great. And the average salary is going up too. It is going up from $59,000 to nearly just over $64,000.

The important thing is that we get more people in jobs. It is interesting that 10,000 new jobs are being created every month in this economy and that is because we have got people out there taking a risk, borrowing money, looking after people, hiring staff—and that is the thing that makes New Zealand great. As a result we are diversifying our economy. We have now got tourism, a bigger industry than dairy. We have got those high-growth sectors: ICT, construction, wine, international education—all huge sectors. International education is $4.5 billion. And we have also got those really exciting high tech ones—even the space industry that is currently evolving on the Māhia Peninsula. As a result of all the good hard work of all New Zealanders this Government has been able to deliver a surplus: $1.8 billion last year, $2.9 billion forecast this year, and $7.2 billion forecast for 2021. I can hear the Opposition. I can feel them slathering at the opportunity to try to spend these hard-fought gains that New Zealanders have fought for all through those dark days.

So what have we done with it? Well, this is a Government for infrastructure. It is a massive Government for infrastructure, and the recent Budget just showed that. There is an additional $11 billion set aside for infrastructure, with $9 billion of that going into roading and transport initiatives. Then there are all the other things that are going on. It is quite exciting. Over the next 4 years $32 billion is going to be spent on things like transport, schools, hospitals, defence, housing, prisons—and all of the stuff around rail, and all those good things that we are all so precious about.

But I would just remind you of something. Last year—what did we spend most of our money on? The big, crucial spending that we spent it on was the $800 million that we put towards making sure that all the welfare beneficiaries benefited by $25 per week—the first real increase in 43 years. That is something done with a social conscience. Again, there is the $2 billion Family Incomes Package this year—great things, looking after all our New Zealanders.

LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Finally, over the last adjournment break, we had an admission by the Deputy Prime Minister, Paula Bennett, that, in hindsight, the Government could have acted earlier to address the housing crisis that we have in our country.

I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge Haami Mānahi, also known as “Sam” and “Bonz”, who died on the steps of the Manurewa Methodist Church over the adjournment, and also Keith Johnson who died on a bench in St Peter’s Cemetery in Onehunga. Both these people were homeless New Zealanders—homeless Aucklanders—who were part of the over 750 Aucklanders living on the streets.

I think it is time that we reflected, because for Yale University to put out, over the adjournment, an international study that has given New Zealand the gold medal for homelessness is actually a disgusting situation for our country to be in. It is absolutely appalling that what we will be renowned for around the world is our rate of homelessness. I think it is really important that we reflect on that and try to understand where and why this has happened.

We know that when this National Government came into power, in 2008, we had 69,000 State houses, and today we have 64,000 State houses. So, over the last 9 years, the National Government has actively divested itself of State houses.

What are State houses for? State houses are there to meet the needs of the most vulnerable New Zealanders. Currently, we have 5,353 New Zealand families on the waiting list—3,700 have been deemed at risk by the Ministry of Social Development and, of those, 2,400 have children.

I want to highlight an incredible contributor to our community, a man called Major Campbell Roberts, who, in June this year, said that he had a conversation with now Prime Minister Bill English in 2010. At that time, Bill English was not only the finance Minister but also the Minister responsible for the Housing New Zealand Corporation. What did Bill English say to Major Campbell Roberts in 2010? He said that we had a looming housing crisis, and that in 2016 and 2017 we would feel the impact of that crisis. So it has become the prophesy of our now Prime Minister, Bill English, that we would have a looming housing crisis.

In October 2014, in response to questions from Simon Collins in the New Zealand Herald about the proceeds from selling State houses—what we are going to do with that money—Bill English said: “I mean, if we want less stock, there’s not much point in rebuilding stock with it.” So this National Government has actively divested itself of the responsibility of providing houses to those most in need, those most vulnerable New Zealanders. So what has it done since 2014? Actually, it has tried to sell State houses. It has tried to sell them to the Salvation Army. It has tried to sell them to the Methodist Mission. It has tried to sell them to Australians so that they could come over to New Zealand and administer that stock for the Government.

We should not forget that, in 2011, the mandate of the Housing New Zealand Corporation changed. It went from being a provider for our most vulnerable, integrated with the Ministry of Social Development, to being a landlord. So, essentially, this Government has chosen not to contribute to providing housing to those most vulnerable New Zealanders, which, actually, has resulted in the amazing levels of homelessness that we are seeing in New Zealand today.

People out there listening: this National Government has created homelessness. Over the 9 years that it has been in power, if it had invested what it should have, we should actually have 87,000 State houses in this country. We would not have people on waiting lists, we would not have people living homeless on our streets, and we would not have New Zealanders dying. We know that you lose 20 years of your life by living on the streets. This Government—it is its shame and its legacy that will live on in the name of Prime Minister Bill English.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.

Bills

Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill

In Committee

Part 1 Substantive amendments to principal Act

CHRIS BISHOP (National): So Part 1 of the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill—a catchy title, as my colleague Maggie Barry said during the second reading of this bill—deals with the substantive amendments to the principal Act, which is, of course, the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993. The Act has been amended a couple of times—I think probably more than a couple of times—over the last 24 years since it was passed. It is probably an Act that is in need of a bit more of a substantive review as we move into the internet age. But what this bill does is make a couple of very small but, I think, very useful changes to advance and improve freedom of expression in New Zealand.

In the first and second readings of this bill members in the House canvassed the issues around the book Into the River, which was the genesis for this bill, basically—the unfortunate events of 2015 around Into the River, the award-winning novel by Ted Dawe. What happened there—and I do not want to traverse again the potted history—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): No, that would be irrelevant.

CHRIS BISHOP: —because it takes about 6 minutes to explain and, as the Chair is pointing out, it would be irrelevant. But I do want to draw the Committee’s attention to the exact changes in Part 1 to try to remedy the situation, to try to make sure that does not happen again.

So what we have in clause 4 of Part 1 is the replacement of section 49 with a new and expanded new section 49, which will become section 49 of the Act, to basically expand the tool kit that the president of the board of review, and also the High Court, can use when considering interim restriction orders. Basically, what happened with Into the River was that Family First lodged an appeal—the second appeal, or the fourth time a body was going to classify the book Into the River. Family First lodged an appeal and used this little-known section of the Act we are talking about, which was the power for the president to order an interim restriction. What the president did in that situation was—they did decide to do that and, of course, we had the effect of the book not being available for 6 weeks before the board of review met. Basically, the president was placed in that position because of the binary nature of interim restrictions.

So what new section 49 in clause 4 of this bill does is expand the tool kit. In particular, I am talking about subsection (3), which allows—sorry, it is subsection (3)(d), or (b). It allows—I will start that again. Section 49, subsection (3), paragraph (b)—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Clause 4.

CHRIS BISHOP: No, no, paragraph—the Chair is pointing out that I mean clause 4, but I actually mean subsection (3)(b), which allows the president to issue an interim restriction order that is more appropriately calibrated to the specific harm that may or may not be, in the opinion of the president, occurring as a result of this order. So what it does is it allows the president to issue an order that is more closely calibrated to the specific harm.

In the case of Into the River, which had been at various points classified R18 or R14, rather than simply saying that this publication is objectionable pending further appeal, they could say, I suppose, “It is partially objectionable but we will maintain it to be available for people over the age of 18.”, or in the case—as you sometimes see going into things like the incredible film festival in Wellington in the early 2000s, you could also say it is available for film festival viewings or for tertiary study. I have a sort of objection in principle to the idea of restricting speech based on the fact that people are in tertiary education, or saying that a higher class of people go to film festivals. I tend to think that is a bit ridiculous, actually. But, regardless, that is in the Act, and that power, I suppose, to restrict to a specific audience is in the Act.

Clare Curran: I can feel another member’s bill coming on.

CHRIS BISHOP: So I am not going to traverse that. I did not hear that interjection, but—

Clare Curran: That’s your next member’s bill.

CHRIS BISHOP: Oh, that is my next member’s bill, says Clare Curran. Well, possibly—I mean, this Parliament has got only a short run of life left in it, but you never know. My next member’s bill is actually around celebrancy. I might get the third luck of the ballot on that one, but I highly doubt it—I do not think we can have another member’s day.

So, anyway, that is the substantive amendment advanced through new section 49. Then, of course, we come to clause 5 of the bill—[Bell rung] Mr Chair.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I will call the member again, but I will remind him that we are discussing three clauses: clauses 4, 5, and 6. The member might be talking about a section of another Act, and if that is the case—he is a lawyer. He should know.

CHRIS BISHOP: Thank you, Mr Chair. We come to clause 5, which deals with similar powers to do with interim restrictions to do with the High Court. It is a little-known section about the power to do with interim restrictions in that they can also be appealed to the High Court. What the bill does is, essentially, replicate the same powers as in clause 4 of the bill in new section 67 in clause 5 in relation to the High Court, and that is just a consequential change that has to be replicated in the appeals to the High Court as a result of the changes we are making in clause 4 to section 49 of the Act.

Clause 6 inserts new section 133A. Again, this is a change that is necessary in response to the changes we are making through clause 4, which is about the potential penalties for people who contravene an interim restriction order. What the bill proposes as a result of the changes made by the very hard-working Justice and Electoral Committee is in subsection (3), which will make people liable to conviction or a fine not exceeding $3,000 or, in the case of a body corporate, $10,000. We had a bit of debate in the select committee, I think it is fair to say, about the level of fines. You could probably argue they should be greater, but we have decided to go for the moderate option that is put forward in the bill. So, with those brief introductory remarks, I will leave it there.

CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I think Chris Bishop described this bill as small and useful, and the Labour Party would agree. We support it. It corrects an anomaly in legislation, and that is always an important thing to do. It stems—and I will not go into too much depth on this; obviously, it has been traversed before—from an outcry around the total restriction on Into the River, the book written by Ted Dawe in 2015. It corrects that anomaly around interim restriction orders made under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act.

In the Justice and Electoral Committee discussion—I did not sit on the select committee, but in reference to the commentary back from the select committee, there are, essentially, two changes that are being made. One is to the title, which does not relate to Part 1. The second is the insertion of new clause 6, which inserts new section 133A into the principal Act. The member Chris Bishop has just touched on that, around the introduction of new offence provisions for breaching interim restriction orders. Basically, what that appears to be saying, to me, is that the existing penalty for breaching an interim restriction order would also apply to breaching any of the new types of orders.

Because I did not sit on the select committee, I am not quite sure what the principal Act offence provisions are that are not envisaged by the more flexible interim restriction orders proposed in this bill, so maybe the chair might just like to answer that.

Kris Faafoi: The chair?

CLARE CURRAN: Oh, not the Chair. Mr Chair, my apologies go to you. I am sure that you could have a go and I am sure you could answer it. It would be a hands-tied-behind-the-back—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I might be the Chair; I’m not the member’s researcher.

CLARE CURRAN: But the member in charge of this bill, Mr Bishop, could answer it.

I would also just like to refer to the submission by the censor’s office, or the Office of Film and Literature Classification, which is an important office. It gave a considered submission. It referred to the unprecedented public outcry at the imposition of the interim restriction order, which the president of the film classification board had no option about. His hands were tied. He had to impose that total restriction during that period of time. But there was a considerable public outcry, and the chief censor’s office really said that, had this amendment been in place in August 2015, the president could have issued a more nuanced interim restriction order. Of course, there is no guarantee that that would have been done, but this anomaly being corrected allows for that to occur. For instance, it could have continued with the R14 classification, which means that libraries still could have issued the book and there would not have been the public outcry.

But I also note, in my closing remarks, that the member, in his various speeches on this bill, has raised the issue—and I think the censor sort of goes there to some extent as well, in his submission on this bill—of the concept of the interim restriction orders and asked whether it was timely for a review of those. Clearly, this bill does not go there, and he deals with just a small anomaly, which Labour supports. But I think that I would like to see the member bringing another member’s bill, maybe next year when he is in Opposition, to actually address the bigger issue of interim restriction orders and to see whether they could be reviewed, and to review the role of the film censorship board in actually carrying out those orders.

JONO NAYLOR (National): It is a pleasure to be able to stand and take a call on this bill and, particularly, I think that when you have got amendment bills of this nature, it is really important for us to look and ask what is broken that needs fixing. I think what we saw from the incident that led to the formulation of this bill—i.e., the issue around the Into the River book—was that we had only blunt instruments at the disposal of the president and the board when it came to looking at matters that are on appeal. And so I think it is very, very good that Mr Bishop has brought this forward so that we can actually fine-tune the types of things that are available and the tools that are available to deal with appeals to the board on issues of censorship around different forms of publication.

In clause 4, I think, there are some really good, pertinent words that actually have been brought out in the drafting of this legislation. For example, in subclause (2), it says that once the president has received a written submission from somebody regarding this, the precursor to what the president must do is in these keys words, for me: “The President must, as soon as practicable,—”. I think that is really important, because if you stick a specific time, like within 3 days or 5 days or something like that, that is not appropriate, either. But what we would not want is for it to be open-ended in such a way that it could be dragged out. Mr Bishop, in his opening remarks at this Committee stage, touched on this as well.

In particular circumstances, where there are either publications or film festivals or the like that are taking place—there is some time sensitivity attached to those festivals. For example, if somebody brought a film into the country for a festival where it had only a week-long screening, and then somebody asked for one of these restriction orders to be put in place because they did not like the classification the film had received, I think we would all agree that the promoters of the film—if, say, for example, the film had initially been given an R13 rating, if it was just completely withdrawn because of the blunt instruments that are available now, the promoters would be economically and realistically quite disadvantaged by the situation of not being able to show it during that one week of the film festival.

So for the president then to need to actually act quickly and to bear that in mind—that can mean that, actually, it is quite possible for that film to still be shown, albeit with a revised, temporary classification. The president, as we see in subclause (3), has an ability to put in place particular classifications. So that film that may originally have been rated R13 or R16, perhaps—the president can say, “Well, clearly it’s not so objectionable that it needs to be banned, and the worst possible scenario would be that it will be R18.” So he could perhaps change it to R18. That would allow the promoters of that said film festival to proceed anyway and be able to—perhaps, without the 13- to 18-year-olds attending it, they might have some economic disadvantage, but they would not be completely wiped out because they were unable to show the film.

I think, on balance, particularly around clause 4, it is very good that we have got this timing issue for the president to make his ruling. But what we also have is this sort of variation in the types of interim orders that can be put in place.

I will just skip over clause 5 at this point, but clause 6, I think, is also very important, because, actually, there needs to be some sort of disincentive for people who might breach those interim orders. What we do not want is, if the president has actually put in place something that says “Look, this is what we’re going to do now.”, people turning a blind eye to that. Clearly, there needs to be some ramifications for that, some consequences for that action.

In debating what level of fine would be put in place, it is, indeed, in a committee, something that you have to wrestle with, because any number that you pick is ultimately an arbitrary number. Obviously, when setting the level of fine, one has to be trying to figure out that balance between what is a reasonable response to a breach of this kind and also what would be a sufficient deterrent. In this case, obviously, as outlined in clause 6, what we have actually outlined as a committee was that in the case of an individual, $3,000 seemed to be an appropriate fine for that situation. It strikes that balance between—you would certainly have to be grossing a fair amount off some publication or film for it to be worth your while to simply thumb your nose at a $3,000 fine. Obviously, of course, in the case of a body corporate, there is the $10,000 fine.

I think, ultimately, in clauses 4, 5, and 6 in Part 1 of this piece of legislation, it has been clear to me, actually, that that balance, as I said earlier, between the timing and the flexibility available to the president in being able to put different classifications in place on an interim basis clearly shows, to me, that the current legislation is broken. It did need fixing, and this amendment bill goes a long way to fixing those issues.

SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): Thank you, Mr Chair, for this opportunity to speak in the Committee of the whole House on Part 1, which contains the substantive provisions on this Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill, of course brought in the name of Mr Chris Bishop. It is a very good little bill—a technical amendment—but one that is going to have great application in this area.

In respect of clause 4, which, of course, replaces section 49 of the principal Act, it does extend the tool box available to the films, videos, and publications classification team to be able to make more meaningful rulings in the interim in respect of publications. As the member rightly pointed out, this came about because of the situation with Into the River, where the president of the board of the review was left with very few options once an appeal was lodged. So the president had either the option of completely banning the publication or, of course, to—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to interrupt the member now and remind her that we are at the Committee stage debate. I think it becomes particularly apparent when the member is making a very similar speech to an earlier member, which I probably should have warned that member not to do, and it is also irrelevant. The member has got to talk to the Committee stage—the detail of these clauses—or not at all.

SARAH DOWIE: Yes, thank you. I was going to come back to clause 4, which does, of course, replace section 49 of the principal Act, in particular section 49(3)(b), and come back to the fact that the tool box has been widened and more flexibility given to the president in respect of interim orders. And if I just go through that here—there are two subsections to allow an interim order with more flexibility to apply to “(i) persons who have attained the age of 18 years or a specified younger age; or (ii) specified persons or classes of persons;”.

When we look at that, when we are talking about banning publications or restricting publications in the interim, when, as my colleague has noted, people have made an investment in a publication, if that is suddenly ripped from them, they need to have some sort of flexibility in the system—or we do; the classification team—to go back to earlier orders or to create parameters to protect people socially or economically, maintaining that balance between protection and freedom of speech.

I note that the member talked in particular about, in clause 4, the insertion of new section 49(3)(b)(ii), in respect of creating “specified persons or classes of persons”—talking about tertiary study—as a range of people who could be looking at studying a novel or a publication in some way, as part of their literature degree. So if they were somewhat through that, it may be appropriate that they continue throughout that study.

I do not think it necessarily applies just to tertiary institutions. We did have a discussion about this in the committee—that it could go wider. It could be high school children, in respect of certain novels. It could be any group of people who may have the need to have an interim order upheld for them so that they can study that particular piece of literature. I do not think it is an elitist thing; I think it is protecting a group of people in the interim to continue that study, all while the classification team balances freedom of speech versus the public interest. Thank you.

CHRIS BISHOP (National): Ms Curran made some remarks a few moments ago and asked a couple of questions that I do wish to respond to. The first was in relation to, if I understood her correctly—I think she was asking about what sections would be offended against if something was classified as objectionable. I think this is a reference to new section 49(3) inserted by clause 4 of the bill. She was referring to what section 123(1)(c) of the principal Act actually refers to, and what it refers to is, essentially, all of the things to do with dissemination of the potentially objectionable material—so the sale, the supply, the publication, the distribution; insert various verbs there.

What the interim restriction power allows the president to do—in fact, what the Act compels the president to do—is make an interim restriction order that prohibits the doing of any act or thing in relation to a publication that, if the publication were an objectionable publication, would be an offence against the dissemination, the distribution, the production, the sale, and the supply. That is replicated in various other sections, section 127 and section 129, as well. I think, if I understood what Ms Curran was saying correctly, that responds to that point.

Ms Curran also raised a point around whether or not there should be a wider review of interim restrictions, and she noted that during my first reading speech I did advert to that possibility. I have got to say, I think that there is, possibly, a case for the wholesale abolition of interim restrictions. There are a number of reasons one could advance for that proposition. First of all, they do not give enough recognition to freedom of expression, which is of course recognised in section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and is a paramount constitutional consideration within our system.

The courts and, indeed, New Zealand have traditionally viewed with distaste the possibility of what is known as prior restraint on speech. The courts will generally prioritise freedom of expression when it comes to cases of breach of confidence, breach of privacy, or defamation. There is a very high bar before the courts will intervene with things like interim injunctions, for example. They will generally prioritise and preference freedom of expression over those other values. There is a high bar that litigants must meet. So it seems very strange, in some ways, that if that is the case when it comes to interlocutory cases of prior restraint, we would preference the one judgment or one determination of one person—whoever happens to be the president of the board of review at the time—after a properly constituted body, the classification office, has made a determination.

It is worth remembering that this is on appeal, so there has been a classification office determination already. A group of experts appointed by the Minister have made a determination about the appropriate classification of a book or a publication—whether or not it should be objectionable, or whether or not it should be R18 or R16 or recommend to be M for mature audiences only, 15 years and above. There has already been a determination. This is on appeal, so it seems a bit strange that given the courts and New Zealand society generally do value and preference freedom of expression we would not do so when it comes to something like interim restrictions—that we would say that the president of the board of review has, you know, some sort of magic power over and above that of the properly constituted body in the first place. That is the first reason.

The second reason is that, actually, in some ways, they are just unnecessary. I got the library to go back and have a look at how many interim restrictions have actually been issued and how many times the board of review has altered the decision of the classification office. There were 101 appeals between 2005 and 2012, and only seven alterations to what the original classification decision was. That is a very small number—seven out of 101, that is just less than 7 percent—so you do have to wonder whether or not this power does actually need to be there.

Of course, it can be abused, and that is the third and final point—that it can be abused. In other remarks on this bill, I have talked about the frankly outrageous behaviour, I think, of groups like the Society for Promotion of Community Standards, which would wait right until the last minute before applying to the president of the board of review for an interim restriction in the early 2000s. It seems to have stopped that practice more recently, but it did of course lead to some disharmony at the time. Their intention was to disrupt 2-day film festivals and, having achieved that purpose, having the film festival go on without the showing of films like Baise-Moi and Bully and stuff like that—films that I would never go and see, but that, apparently, people do want to go and see.

So to respond to Clare Curran, I think there is a strong case for getting rid of interim restriction orders. Maybe that is my next member’s bill. This makes at least some steps in the right direction. We did canvass it at the Justice and Electoral Committee, but we decided that we would just go with this next step as a starting point, but let us wait and see where Parliament lands in a few months’ time.

MAUREEN PUGH (National): I too stand tonight in support of this, the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill in its Committee stage tonight. We are speaking about the meat of this bill, which is in clause 4, where it inserts new section 49. That provides a solution for the inflexibility that there is with the current law, and it does give a simple amendment—simple but effective—and it allows for the Film and Literature Board of Review to apply interim restrictions while a publication is under appeal.

We found that, with the book Into the River by Ted Dawe, this was a completely inflexible system that we were operating under, so this new section 49 provides for some very practical tools to apply these classifications—for instance, M in this classification would be restricted to mature audiences or a specific age group. In granting these applications, there is an opportunity to apply these restrictions across a variety of age groups or types, and also to decline the application if that is deemed appropriate.

The other part of this Part 1 is that it relates to interim restriction orders where the High Court or the judge must apply the same consideration to these restrictions on publications. The High Court or the judge also has the ability to apply the various restrictions to age groups or types, as in “mature” or an age bracket, or to decline the application.

As we have heard tonight, there is also the ability to impose sanctions for contravening these restriction orders and apply quite considerable fines to people who do intend to breach these rules—up to $3,000 for an individual and up to $10,000 for a corporate body. It is very clear that this was a gap in the law. It has been ably filled by these small amendments in the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill, and I commend it to the House.

Part 1 agreed to.

Part 2 Consequential amendments to principal Act

CHRIS BISHOP (National): We have dealt with the really chunky, meaty—insert synonym here—section of the—

Kris Faafoi: It wasn’t that chunky.

CHRIS BISHOP: Oh, no, that is unfair—come on. That is unfair. It was chunky in the context of the bill, which is a small bill. Part 2 just deals with the various consequential amendments to the principal Act, and a couple of remedial things, I suppose. There is an amendment to section 29 and an amendment to section 107, which just, essentially, inserts the two new sections that we inserted in Part 1—so amended section 133 and then new section 133A as well. Also, clause 10 just slightly amends the section of the Act around the Attorney-General’s consent being required for private prosecutions of certain publications—that is, of course, the two sections we have just inserted.

It is a funny old power, the power for the Attorney-General to order—well, not order prosecutions but to consent prosecutions. It is a strange old power, but it is a necessary one, in many ways, to, I suppose, prevent vexatious litigants, and one that is meant to be a bit of a check on vexatious behaviour. Sometimes, maybe, it is not. Maybe it could be used a touch more throughout our statute book. But it is an appropriate one when it comes to what we talking about here, for the various reasons that I have canvassed previously.

There is not a huge amount more to add in relation to this part. As I say, it is the consequential amendments to the principal Act, and they should be supported.

SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): It is a pleasure to rise in respect of Part 2 of the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill, talking about the consequential amendments to the principal Act, as brought about by this small but technical and very useful bill. I am talking about and drawing attention to clause 8 in respect of amending section 107, “Inspector may seize publications”—again, drawing our attention to the fact that there need to be tools in the tool box so that once we bring about interim restrictions, the monitors of this, the people who will bring about compliance with this, will have the tools in their tool box to be able to make sure that the interim orders are adhered to, which is of course extremely important. So that consequential amendment has occurred, in particular replacing the words “publication is being publicly displayed in contravention of [certain sections]” with “public display of the publication constitutes an offence …”. So it is just tidying that one up to make sure, again, that that tool box is full and complete.

Moving on to clause 9, “Section 133 replaced …”, in the “Consequential amendments to the principal Act”, in Part 2, which talks in subsection (2) about “A person who commits an offence against subsection (1) is liable on conviction to a fine … (a) in the case of an individual, $3,000; or (b) in the case of a body corporate [company], $10,000.” So, again, it is drawing our attention to the fact that if there is a breach there needs to be consequences. While some people may see this as a limited scope in fines, I think it is still very much a deterrent when you are a person or a retailer selling publications or somebody who is teaching certain literature, exploring certain literature, and not complying with an interim order. It is important to have those offences there to maintain the balance between, of course, freedom of speech and the public good, to make sure that certain classes of people are, of course, protected if there is something that is seen as offensive within the publication.

So I think that Part 2 is, obviously, of course, needed. When you start amending a principal Act there are always consequential amendments that require tidying up, and with the bringing in of this new regime—a more flexible regime of interim orders—there are, of course, consequential amendments that are required to make sure that the offences provisions make sense and that the interim restriction provisions make sense.

The way that the officials have worked on the structure of this bill has been exceptional—interestingly, bringing the parts into a more logical order. I think at one stage there were several parts, so we could have been debating this for much, much longer. They have brought it about and tidied it up so there are only two parts and then, of course, the title. So we thank the officials, and I thank the work and the debate that the Justice and Electoral Committee had on this fine, technical but small, bill.

JONO NAYLOR (National): I just want to actually fire a couple of questions, if I may, to the member in the chair, Chris Bishop, particularly when it comes to clause 8. One of the things I am always concerned about when we have legislation is that there is always clarity for people when they are reading through the legislation. Even though I have been privy to the legislation right through its course through the Parliament so far, when I first picked up this amendment bill—because, obviously, it is a little bit truncated, in the way that it does not always spell out what was in the parent bill in the first place. We are talking here in terms of what it is that the inspector may seize. Subclause (2) says: “In section 107(3)(b), replace ‘poster is being publicly displayed in contravention of section 130 or section 133’ with ‘public display of the poster constitutes an offence under section 130, 133, or 133A’.” Now, the thing with posters is that, for most people, if they are looking at that, they may be somewhat confused as to whether or not the poster itself is the publication that is under review or, perhaps, is subject to censorship or whether, in fact, the poster is actually simply advertising the publication itself.

So it would be useful for me, I think, and hopefully for the House too, if the member in charge of the bill was able to briefly just enlighten us with some clarity around that, whether or not we are actually looking at a poster as advertising the publication or whether, in fact, the poster itself is the publication. I think what is really important is that if an interim restriction has been put in place, say, at an R18, if the initial classification was R13 and there are still posters out there advertising it as R13, then, clearly, it needs to be put straight. So I think, for my mind, that is something that I would certainly like to see clarified, because, as I say, when people pick up legislation, it is important that they can understand it quickly and easily. Hopefully, I have not landed him too much in it and he is able to enlighten us on that if he is able to take another call.

That said, under clause 9—and I touched on this briefly when we were talking about Part 1, but I do also want to talk about the fact that there do need to be consequences in place for this type of breach. When we have a piece of legislation like this that has been put in place to ensure public safety, so that people can be free from being exposed to—if you will forgive the pun—certain material that they do not want to be exposed to, there are actually some responsibilities for the individuals and/or bodies corporate who have been putting this stuff out there.

Clearly, by actually causing an infringement through Part 1 of the Act, there needs to be, obviously, clarity around what the range of fine is. And I think what I did say in Part 1, which I just want to clarify further, because I talked about those fines being those specific amounts—that it would be $3,000 for an individual or $10,000 for a body corporate. Of course, what I should have said, because, in fact, that is how it is written within the legislation, is that it is liable for a conviction to a fine not exceeding that. So, of course, like in any legislation or any laws that we have in this country, these are maximum fines, not necessarily the specific fine—in much the same way, I guess, with traffic offences, those are spelt out specifically, but this one, obviously, is an up-to amount.

I just wanted to get some clarification around those things. Again, Part 2, obviously, is the consequential amendments to the principal Act, and I think, obviously, that is just what we are dealing with. When you make some changes, there are going to be consequential amendments to the principal Act, and Part 2 covers those off very well.

MAUREEN PUGH (National): I too will come back to the proposer of this bill, Chris Bishop, with a small question, but I just want to draw some attention to the clauses in Part 2, in particular to clause 9, which is a replacement of section 133 of the original Act. That deals with the fines that are imposed on people who are liable for a conviction under this proposed new bill. So for the case of an individual, a $3,000 fine is, in my opinion, extremely deterring for someone who may be in contravention of this bill, and, certainly, for a body corporate, $10,000 is a very appropriate sum. It is a very fair sum in protecting the public good.

One of the issues that has been taxing me with the restrictions on publications—and perhaps the proposer of the bill could enlighten me—is how the restrictions will be displayed on any particular publication, and how those restrictions will be monitored or policed. How do they come to the attention of the review board? So with that short contribution and that question, I have finished.

CHRIS BISHOP (National): I thank my good colleagues for some very good questions in relation to Part 2 of this bill.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): The member might be misleading the House, but go on.

CHRIS BISHOP: Ha, ha! Mr Naylor asked about clause 8 amending section 107 of the principal Act—in particular, the power of the inspector to seize publications—and he asked about subclauses (1) and (2) of that clause in the bill, in Part 2. This is an interesting section of the Act. The term “inspector” seems to have fallen out of favour a bit, but the Act still talks about the inspector in relation to films, videos, and publications. Section 107(2)(b)(ii) talks about publications generally, and it deals with the full ambit of publications, and the difference between clauses 8(1) and 8(2) is that clause 8(2), which refers to section 107(3)(b) of the principal Act, deals with film posters.

Again, it is a sort of curious—“oddity” is the wrong word—feature, I suppose you would say, of the principal Act that we have a specific section to do with film posters. And what it does, of course, is allows the inspector to seize posters that advertise publications—or film poster in relation to a film—that are in breach of an interim restriction order. So if there is an interim restriction order imposed, then publicising a film poster in relation to that film would be a breach. So section 107 is a consequential amendment based on the fact that we are amending the section of the Act to do with interim restrictions more generally. And then, of course, clause 8(1) in this bill deals with wider publications to do with the seizure of publications. So that deals with that.

Maureen Pugh’s question was in relation to serial publication orders. Again, this is something that is a curious part of the principal Act, and it is a section that is not widely used. Basically, without getting too into details, it is a section of the Act to do with repeated publications that have been found to be objectionable—that the classification office can then issue a serial publication order in relation to. Again, because of the changes we are making to do with interim restriction orders, there are consequential amendments to do with the serial publication orders that can be issued by the classification office, as well. They are not often used, to my limited knowledge, but it is a necessary amendment to that section of the Act because of the amendments we are making in Part 1 of the Act. I trust that that answers members’ questions.

Part 2 agreed to.

Clauses 1 to 3

CHRIS BISHOP (National): There are three clauses in this part of the debate. We did have some debate at the Justice and Electoral Committee about the title of this bill, which is in clause 1. We did have some debate—

Kris Faafoi: Ha! You changed it.

CHRIS BISHOP: Mr Faafoi says “Well, you changed it.”, and that is exactly right. We had a debate and then the committee recommended that it be changed, as well. So the original title was the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill, and we have changed it to the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill. The reason we made that change is that we felt it better reflected the actual—I mean, I accept it is a minor change; it is a small change, not one that is worthy of much comment, but I just draw the Committee’s attention to the fact that we have made that change in order to better reflect the purpose of the bill. It has slightly shortened the title.

We also had a bit of a debate about clause 2, which is the commencement clause, which is when the bill should come into force. There was a bit of debate about whether or not there should be a 6-month lead-in period or whether or not it should be 12 months after the date of Royal assent. That is a classic commencement clause, 12 months, which allows people time to transition to the new phase of classification office decisions. We decided in the end that that was not appropriate in this case, because such a minor change—and, actually, we are dealing with experts here, and we actually received a submission from the Office of Film and Literature Classification, and it said to us, I think I am recalling it correctly when I say it said it broadly supported the changes that were recommended by the bill and that it could bring them into force straight away.

This bill was introduced and received its first reading in December last year. It has been through the full select committee process, and we are pretty confident that the powers that be—the authorities—have the appropriate wherewithal and the appropriate expertise to bring it into force straight away. Therefore, we have decided that it will come into force on the day after it receives Royal assent, which I hope will be in a couple of weeks’ time.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): The question—

Maureen Pugh: Mr Chair?

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Oh, Maureen Pugh.

MAUREEN PUGH (National): Yes, Mr Chair, I am.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Sorry, I should not be showing hilarity; I am slightly surprised.

MAUREEN PUGH: I am a little bit surprised myself, Mr Chair.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): And this is not a walk-out.

MAUREEN PUGH: Was it something I said? I stand again tonight in this Committee stage to discuss and support the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill.

This bill, as we know, is in the name of Chris Bishop. In terms of publications of this bill, he is the hero of this story, from the mighty Hutt. Clause 1 of this bill is, of course, the title clause, and during the re-drafting of this bill there was an amendment, as we have heard from the proposer, to the title, and it does better reflect the content of the bill and its purpose, and it also shortens the name very slightly, for efficiency.

Clause 2 is the commencement clause, and this states that it will come into force the day after it receives its Royal assent, which is quite common for bills. The Royal assent comes from the Governor-General, of course—in our case, Dame Patsy Reddy. For clarification for the audience, and for my own benefit too, I did a little bit of research on what this actually means, because in the past I have tended to gloss over the commencement date of bills. What I found was that it is quite a lengthy and detailed process: when the House of Representatives passes a bill’s third reading, it does not become an Act until it has received this Royal assent from the Governor-General. The Governor-General can only act on the advice of the Government in these constitutional matters, and so there is an advice sheet prepared for the Governor-General, which is signed by the Clerk of the House. And then the Clerk of the House advises the Governor-General that there are no reasons why the Royal assent should not be granted. Then that is also signed by the Attorney-General—in our case, the Hon Chris Finlayson—and the Prime Minister, who, of course, is the Rt Hon Bill English, in this case.

Two copies of these are certified by the Clerk of the House, and they are sent with this advice sheet to the Governor-General, and they are signed. At that point the bill becomes an Act. The commencement date of this bill will be the day after it receives that Royal assent. This is, of course, done on behalf of our sovereign, Queen Elizabeth.

Clause 3 of this bill is, of course, the principal Act. As we know, it is amending the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act of 1993, and that is the principal Act that is being amended. We have heard already tonight that this is a very simple, effective bill that fills a gap in the legislation, and we are very happy to support it. Thank you.

SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): I join in the ranks of surprise to take another call in this debate on clauses 1, 2, and 3. I never thought that I would, of course, take orders from Mr Matt Doocey, but he is the whip and we will continue to make contributions on this bill, which, as my colleague has said, is a fine bill. It is a small but very technical bill, and of course the title has been slightly amended. It now reads Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill.

I think it is a very apt amendment to better reflect exactly the substance behind this bill. Again, it is one that increases the means and flexibility that the classification team and president, and the court, have to be able to make interim orders where they once were not able to. Of course, this transpires from Chris Bishop, the member in charge of the bill, thinking about the consequences from the publication Into the River, where the president was left with only two options when an appeal occurred, before this bill was thought about. If it comes into force, it will give the team more flexibility. But there were only two options that the president had, and they were to completely ban the publication or revert to the original classification. There were two of them prior to that—either mature audiences or R14.

So, as we have discussed before, this extends the tool box available to the president and the High Court, creating different criteria for consideration in the interim. Previously, when I was making a contribution on Part 1, I talked about this idea in clause 4, which replaces section 49, that allows specified persons or classes of persons to be considered, and I think this is a really good thing when it comes to education. It allows the president to consider what is going on, to balance the need for freedom of speech versus the protection of society. If a tertiary education provider or a high school or a certain group have already begun studying a publication and are in the depths of it, it may well ring true that the president or the High Court thinks it is appropriate to allow them to finish that study, and that it is not in the best interests to pull that book or that publication away from them while the more substantive consideration is going on after the initial appeal.

I think it is a really great thing to allow that flexibility, moving forward, and this is exactly what this bill—little, but effective—does. And, of course, the other part of the flexibility, in respect of allowing the age consideration movement, is that the president in issuing an interim order does not have to revert to the prior orders in that case. So they can make a judgment call as to whether they have got it right necessarily, notwithstanding that more substantive consideration will go on as the evidence is presented. But, again, it allows that flexibility to balance freedom of speech in respect of that public good, and I think that that more flexible system is more responsive and more suitable to our way of life here in New Zealand moving forward.

I commend Chris Bishop, the member in charge of the bill, for bringing the bill to the House. I reiterate that it is a small but technical and effective bill.

JONO NAYLOR (National): Actually, when I was looking at this bill, the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill, I stopped to think about how many bills that go through this Parliament have long titles that actually, at times, are almost more of a mouthful, and would there be a way that we could simplify the title of this bill to make it easier for people to get their mouths around—and I know we manage to reduce it down by one word through the select committee stage.

But, actually, I was thinking through what some of the alternative titles to this bill could possibly be. For example, I know that based on the way that people consider classifications they might have wanted to call it the “Keeping Dodgy Stuff Away From Teenagers Bill” or, particularly from other submitters, they might have wanted to call it something like the “Protecting Families From Being Exposed to Offensive Material Bill”. I realise then, of course, that those names for those bills would not necessarily be a whole lot shorter either. And, of course, coming from the other spectrum, as has been alluded to today—because in doing this it does restrict people’s ability for freedom of speech—it might have also potentially been called the “Inhibiting Freedom of Speech Bill”.

But when I look at those different options and those different alternatives that are out there, probably on balance the name and the title of this bill is, in fact, about the right one. It is, in fact, obviously, amending a parent Act, which talks about films, videos, and publications. I guess my concern, though, is that actually in the modern day, now, when we are talking about the terminology, like films or videos, for example—I know last time I spoke on this bill, I referred to a recording and Mr Faafoi suggested that perhaps it might have been done so long ago it would have been done on cassette. But what we did have is that, actually, the term video, for example, is a very broad term—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): My first record player had a handle.

JONO NAYLOR: —and I wonder whether or not we actually need to really revise our language sometimes to make sure it is a bit futureproofed. I know Mr Mallard still would like to play his LPs on his gramophone, it would appear, from the description he was giving.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): No, no. We did not have LPs in my time. They were 78s.

JONO NAYLOR: Of course, they would not have even been LPs—78s on a gramophone. Of course, if you are using a 78 you have to wind it a little bit faster of course, and it is a little bit more tiring.

Finally, I just do want to touch on the commencement. Sometimes it is appropriate to have a lead-in time between Royal assent and when the bill comes into play. Given that the use of this legislation is usually reasonably rare—it does not happen very often—and given the expertise of the people who are involved in classifications, it seems very appropriate to me that they have actually had quite a lot of lead-in time. They have seen the support that this bill has got across the House, and will be able to even see with a level of surety now that this is the way things are heading, so they can start to gear up for it. So it seems to me that having a commencement date for the day after the Royal assent is entirely appropriate. I do want to thank the member Maureen Pugh for our constitutional lesson that we had about Royal assent a couple of speeches ago.

I think ultimately, as I said, we have settled on the right title for the bill. It does adequately describe what is contained in it. I commend Chris Bishop for championing this bill through the House and look forward to the third reading stage.

Clauses 1 to 3 agreed to.

Bill to be reported without amendment presently.

Bills

Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill

In Committee

Part 1 Preliminary provisions

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): This is debate on clauses 3 to 4, and schedule 1.

SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill, which was originally brought in the name of the Hon David Bennett, who then decided to pass it on to me. I often say that while I am not emotionally attached to this bill, it has grown on me. We have heard, in previous debates, about small, technical, but very effective bills, and this is, in my opinion, no different.

In discussing Part 1, with regard to the preliminary provisions—clauses 3A, 3B, and 4—I note that clause 3B, of course, sets out the interpretation. It defines applicable law, claim, and country. This relates to the substance of the bill, in that this is about tort law, of course. Tort is a civil wrong. Tort has been established over many, many years of common law and jurisprudence. It relates to those civil wrongs such as defamation, negligence, and, of course, personal injury. I note from the second reading speeches that I do have some questions to answer with regard to personal injury, so I will get to that in the debate on Part 2, the more substantive provisions of this bill.

We have dealt with a claim and the jurisprudence behind tort, but what this bill does in respect of the interpretation clause, clause 3B, with the definition of “country” is that we start talking about the jurisdiction of where a tort occurs and where a claim can be brought. So we are talking about a country in the sense of private international law, and what this bill does in substance, which relates back to that definition, is that where a tort or an injury occurs overseas what is happening here is that the rule of double actionability is actually being disposed of. So if a tort occurs overseas at the moment, a plaintiff would need to apply to the New Zealand court, and they would be heard only if the jurisdiction where that injury or tort occurred had similar rules, and then the plaintiff could actually bring the tort in New Zealand.

The double actionability rule is being disposed of, and in it its place we will be looking at the claim for the tort being brought in the country in which the tort occurred. So it is an important definition there, under clause 3B, and you can see that it relates very much to the substance of this bill.

The term “applicable law”, of course, means the law to be used for determining issues relating to the tort, and, again, that goes to the jurisdiction. We need these clauses going towards the interpretation of tort law so that we understand exactly where the tort occurs, which jurisdiction applies, and how that claim will be dealt with, moving forward.

The purpose of this bill, of course, as I have described, is, under clause 3: “to establish rules for choosing the law to be used for determining issues relating to tort.” It is very important to do that. It has been confusing in the past when bringing tort claims across jurisdictions. This little bill, while technical, will make a real difference in respect of tort law, moving forward. It is a pleasure to be the member in charge of this bill.

JONO NAYLOR (National): It is a pleasure to rise and take a call on the Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill. It was an interesting second reading debate, actually, on this issue. I was particularly enamoured with what the member Rino Tirikatene had to say, because he devoted so much of his speech to talking about me that it was just, you know, kind of quite flattering, really. Obviously, at this Committee stage I want to limit this contribution to the issues contained within Part 1, that being the preliminary provisions.

It has been an interesting learning curve for a number of us, actually, even getting our heads around what torts actually are—for those of us who are not legally trained. Clearly, what has really been going on is that, with this double actionability, there needed to be some revision, because it was becoming increasingly difficult, obviously, for people to be able to take action for things that had happened outside of New Zealand.

I think the interpretation of this is clearly very important. If we look under clause 3B, it is important that we get absolute clarity on what we are talking about, in terms of the jurisdiction that is in play. It would be quite easy for two New Zealanders who might have been overseas, for something to occur overseas, and for them to then try to say that there had been a tortious act committed, but, actually, it might be contravening New Zealand law, but not necessarily the laws of the country in which they were at the time. So there would be some confusion, I think, about whether or not a claim could be made.

What we have now is that actually it is important that in clause 3B we get this term “applicable law”, meaning “the law to be used for determining issues relating to tort”. And, of course, the applicable law in this instance is that jurisdiction in which the action or the injury took place—where it actually occurred. It is useful, at this stage, to have those clarifications. “Claim” clearly means “a claim in tort”, because it is the Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill. All the claims referred to within this legislation will be in relation to a tort, and not in relation to anything else. So it is good to have that spelt out, right at the beginning of the bill, so that people can have a clear understanding of what is in place.

Under clause 3B the term “country” is an interesting one. That word, in itself, clearly has different meanings. Often we will use the word “nation”, we will use the word “country”, and we will use the word “jurisdiction”. The word “country” sometimes is used in terms of the definition between town and country. But I think it is really important that again we are talking about this in the context of this bill, so that “country” does mean “a country in the sense of private international law”. It has got to be cleared up, so that when these claims are made, people can be very clear about what jurisdiction applies, where the act occurred, and what has gone on, and the lawyers and judges involved can be very clear on what process they need to do.

Finally, clause 4, in Part 1, is about the Act binding the Crown. Again, sometimes people think that the Crown is somehow above the law. Again, it is useful for this to be spelt out, that this is, in fact, actually binding on the Crown—that if somebody believes that they have been wronged by the Crown, they still have an ability to take a tort out, with regard to that.

So, again, clause 4(2) states that “Nothing in this Act limits or affects the application of the Crown Proceedings Act 1950 in respect of any claim in tort by or against the Crown.” Of course, while I have said that it is binding on the Crown, in case somebody believes the Crown has wronged them, it is also binding on the Crown, that if the Crown believes it has been wronged, it also can make a tortious claim under this bill.

I look forward to further parts, where we get into a bit more of the meaty stuff of this bill. I look forward, as we progress this through the Committee stage, to taking further calls with regard to that.

MAUREEN PUGH (National): I have pleasure in standing to discuss this Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill in its Committee stage here tonight. The bill is in the name of the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee, Sarah Dowie. As we know, the bill was first introduced by the now very honourable David Bennett.

Tonight we are discussing Part 1, which covers the preliminary provisions of this bill. We are talking about clauses 3, 3A, 3B, and 4(1) and (2). For clarification, just to clarify it for those who may be confused about what we are even talking about, a tort is a wrongful act that results in civil liability but it does not apply to breaches of contract. In common law jurisdictions, it is a civil wrong that unfairly causes someone else to suffer loss or harm that results in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act.

The transitional, savings, and related provisions are set out in schedule 1 and they, of course, have effect, according to their terms. But I would like to just point out some of the confusion that arises with tort law and why this bill is necessary for clarifying the jurisdiction for the case. For instance, if a couple is married overseas, in an overseas country, and they come to live in New Zealand and want to get divorced, what is the country that the law applies to and where is that case able to be heard?

The applicable law that is set out in clause 3B, in the interpretation clause of this bill, defines the law to be used for determining the issues relating to tort and the claims in tort. We have a very famous claim of tort law, which I have used in other readings of this bill, that sets out very clearly where the liability for certain cases lies. Of course, that is further simplified here, in New Zealand, with our ACC legislation.

As my colleague Jono Naylor has pointed out, clause 4 of this bill does bind the Crown and we would expect that to be the case. There is nothing that affects the application of the Crown’s ability to be prosecuted in cases of tort law that are brought against the Crown.

This is a very technical bill, and those of us not being of legal backgrounds have taken great advice from our legal advisers to the select committee. We certainly do look forward to further debate on this bill. At this point I will hand over to my colleagues. Thank you.

Part 1 agreed to.

Part 2 Substantive provisions

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I have a question in respect of clause 7 of the bill. The bill as it was introduced and went to the Justice and Electoral Committee said nothing specific around personal injury. The select committee has seen fit to recommend a change, through clause 7(2) of the bill, where it says: “Where elements of those events”—which constitute a tort—“occur in different countries, the applicable law under the general rule is …”, and they insert this new subclause (aa): “for a cause of action in respect of personal injury caused to an individual or death arising from personal injury, the law of the country where the individual was when he or she sustained the injury;”.

Now, if I read the commentary that came back from the select committee, this is because there were concerns, presumably, that with the bill as drafted we were creating some possible confusion around New Zealand’s law relating to the accident compensation system. Of course, in New Zealand—and this is unusual compared with most jurisdictions around the world—we have a system where you cannot sue for personal injury. We have given up the right to sue for personal injury, where it was, effectively, a lottery largely on the basis of whether your injury was able to be proven to be caused by someone negligently, and whether you could afford legal representation to prove your case. If you did bring an action for personal injury, it was of course a barren remedy if the person you were suing had no money.

Essentially, people in New Zealand—and, indeed, this continues to the day in a lot of other jurisdictions—were not compensated on the basis of need. There was a lot of luck involved as to whether you got compensation, and we in New Zealand, in the 1970s, changed that so that everyone has a right to medical care, earnings-related compensation, and, in some cases, some lump sums, on the basis of need rather than on the basis of fault. So we have got a no-fault accident compensation system that replaces the tortious right to claim for personal injury.

The select committee has seen fit to change the general rule that went to the select committee. The general rule just said simply that “Where elements for those events [constituting a tort] occur in different jurisdictions, the applicable law under the general rule is taken as being—(a) for a cause of action in respect of … property”—they said something that is irrelevant to this point—and then “(b) in any other case, the law of the jurisdiction in which the most significant element or elements … occurred.”

There was no definition of personal injury in the version as it went to select committee, and there was no specific reference to actions for personal injury; there was just that general proposition in respect of actions other than those that were damage to property. The select committee has inserted the specific reference to personal injury to say that it is the law of the country where the individual was when he or she sustained the injury. I think this is perhaps quite an important point to get right in this bill, and I would like the member in the chair, Sarah Dowie, to address whether she is confident that with the changes made there is absolutely no doubt that we are in any way interfering with the operation of the accident compensation scheme that we have in New Zealand.

SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): Thank you very much to the Hon David Parker for that contribution and those questions in relation to personal injury, under the Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill. I also have to take the opportunity to thank Dr Maria Hook of the University of Otago, who is one of the submitters who has taken a particular interest in this matter also—to thank her for her contribution and her consideration of clause 7 in respect of personal injury.

There are a couple of considerations to look at first. The first is where a personal injury has been suffered in New Zealand and, of course, meets the definition under the Accident Compensation Act. In that case the statutory bar will apply. If the injury meets the standards in the definition under the Accident Compensation Act, then the statutory bar will apply and the plaintiff will not be able to sue. The second consideration is where the personal injury suffered in New Zealand does not meet the definition of personal injury under the Accident Compensation Act or for some other reason is not covered. So in that case the statutory bar under the Accident Compensation Act will not apply and, of course, the plaintiff can look to tort law and sue.

The next one is when personal injury has been suffered overseas and the plaintiff in some of those cases may have cover. The foreign law will govern wherever that injury did occur and the statutory bar will not apply. If the plaintiff has suffered a personal injury overseas but is also covered under the Accident Compensation Act, then it gets somewhat a little bit more complicated. That situation is made possible because of section 22 of the Accident Compensation Act and it extends cover to injuries suffered by New Zealand residents overseas in certain circumstances.

I have to again acknowledge Dr Maria Hook from Otago University, who has given me an example of a New Zealander injured, for example, on a faulty bicycle provided, say, by a French tour operator in France—so somewhat straightforward in nature. In this situation, French law would apply on the face of it—prima facie—but because the injury was suffered in France, New Zealand law would be excluded and in those circumstances the statutory bar would apply only if it was a mandatory rule under the bill, and that would override the choice of law in tort.

So that sets out what we are considering there, in the way that this bill is drafted, and of course the definition of personal injury—the way that it is drafted—is deliberately wide. That is so that it covers various types of personal injuries that may occur that may not be included in the Accident Compensation Act. It can include mental injuries that are not associated with a physical injury, for example. That is the reason why the committee has chosen that. It is also on the advice of officials. Hopefully, that answers the question of the member.

CHRIS BISHOP (National): This is a fascinating bill, the Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill and I think Sarah Dowie, the member in charge of the bill, was doing herself a bit of a disservice when she commented with, basically, words to the effect that she sort of inherited the bill and she was not wildly enthusiastic about being the person in charge of it. But I think that is doing herself a disservice because I think she is actually very excited about this and I know that she has commented to me privately that a bill like this is really good. That is good because actually, as we know from her chairpersonship of the Justice and Electoral Committee, a legal background is very helpful.

I want to raise a question with the member about clause 10 in Part 2 of the bill, which is about the rule of double actionability and related common law rules being abolished. What this clause basically does is abolish rules of common law to the extent that they apply to a claim in tort. Clauses 10(a) and (b) are about actionability under both New Zealand law and the law of another country for the purpose of determining whether a tort was actionable. This is essentially part of the double actionability clause that we are abolishing, and then the exception rules are in clause 10(b). I guess all I am just asking is whether the member in charge of the bill is comfortable with abolishing wholesale common law rules, because traditionally the Parliament is very cautious about abolishing common law rules.

I mean, the common law is a creature of the courts. It is judge-made law, it has evolved through centuries—hundreds of years—particularly when it comes to tort law, which is essentially an invention of common law going back through to Donoghue v Stevenson and some of the cases before that. It is essentially an invention of common law and I think there is a point where the Parliament and the legislature should be a bit cautious and a bit sceptical about treading on to the realm of common law. Of course Parliament is sovereign, Parliament can do whatever it likes subject to the inherent rights and freedoms and, without getting into a debate about Lord Cooke’s famous dictum, I just raise the point for the member. [Interruption] Jono Naylor says: “No, come on.” But I am sure the Chair will encourage well back to the scope if I started talking about Lord Cooke and fundamental rights and law journal articles that I thought I had long forgotten from my law school days, but it turns out that apparently I have not.

I just raise the point about treading on to the path of the common law, because Parliament is traditionally a bit cautious about doing that and what we are doing here, through clause 10, is we are saying that the following rules of common law are abolished, which is starkly put in clause 10. It is very starkly put and we just need to be careful about doing that. I mean, to be fair, there is a fetter in clause 10 and it says the following rules of common law are abolished but “to the extent that they apply to a claim in tort”. So we would not want to get ahead of ourselves, we are not making some massively drastic wholesale change to the common law, but we are abolishing a couple of rules of common law. So I just raise that point with the member in charge of the bill to make sure that she is absolutely confident that it is the right path to go down and that we have got the wording of the clause exactly right.

JONO NAYLOR (National): I would just like to pick up where my colleague Chris Bishop has left off, which is around clause 10. I have some points around clause 10 that I would like to make that are different from the ones that he was looking for. The double actionability nature, where clause 10 is looking to remove the double actionability rule, is very important.

If anyone was paying attention, which they probably were not, to my second reading speech, we looked to where that double actionability rule first evolved from—it actually came from right back in 1870 when there was a rogue Jamaican governor who actually managed to then hide behind this double actionability rule, based on the fact that he had been engaged in some pretty outrageous acts of flogging, executing, and imprisoning people without, really, much cause. Of course, by the time he had retreated back to the UK he had managed to hide behind the laws of both countries. So it is clearly important to me that clause 10, in getting away from there needing to be an actionable legislation in both the country in which it occurred and back here in New Zealand for you to be able to take an action against somebody, is very important.

If, for example, there were two New Zealanders between whom something had gone down overseas, if it did not meet the threshold of double actionability, as is the case now, the only option available to that person, of course, would be to take legal action against the other person in the jurisdiction where it occurred. If you have got a New Zealander wanting to take action against another New Zealander in a foreign jurisdiction, that is entirely and completely difficult—not to mention the fact that that jurisdiction may not have an ability to apply anything to the offending party anyway. So that would always have been a long shot.

So I think by getting rid of the double actionability rule we are making is a very clear statement that, actually, if you are in a country and you contravene that country’s laws and you cause harm to another person, you can be liable for that in New Zealand, regardless of New Zealand law. I think a very useful part of this legislation is that it removes that double actionability rule.

Clause 7 is also particularly interesting, in that it establishes a general rule, which is focused on the place of wrongdoing. As I just mentioned when talking about clause 10, it is actually where that occurs. There are different elements involved in this. Clearly, it means that the law will be applied to the case where the law of the jurisdiction where it occurred will apply, and where the events that give rise to the claim occur. The difficulty, though, is where different elements of the questionable events may have occurred in different countries. So this new general rule is split into three parts. For personal injury, the law of the country where the personal injury or death occurred applies. I think it is important to note that this does not affect New Zealand’s ACC provisions.

Secondly, for actions that relate to damage to property, again, it is the law of the country where the property was when it was damaged. So the property does not need to be owned in that country. For example, if it was property that I owned here, whether it was some sort of—I do not know what it is you would take overseas; a camera or whatever it was. It is about where the property was at the time when the questionable event occurred.

The hazy part, I guess, also needed clarity. That is in the third part, where it talks about “in any other case, the law of the country in which the most significant element or elements of those events” that give rise to the action applies—that is, where the majority of the actionable behaviour occurred. It is the law within that jurisdiction that applies. So if there was something that was ongoing that occurred in multiple jurisdictions, then, of course, it would then be up to the court to determine where the majority of it had occurred—where most of it had occurred—in order to be able to ensure, ultimately, that there is an ability for that action to take place.

There is of course an exception to this general rule, because, of course, whenever you have a general rule there is always bound to be an exception somewhere along the line, and clause 8 actually provides for this. By virtue of clause 8 the court then is allowed to apply the law of another country where it is substantially more appropriate to do so. So what this does is it actually gives the judiciary some discretion to assess the merits of applying the law of a different country, on a case by case basis.

In the Committee stage debate on the previous bill, the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill, we talked about the importance of having flexibility. When things are simply done in a hard and fast way, particularly when it comes to tortious acts, there is always going to be a certain level of grey area. So it is important for the judiciary to be able to have some discretion to assess the merits of applying different law in the country on a case by case basis. So the courts, when doing this, obviously do not just have a carte blanche ability to do it at will or whenever they like, but they must consider that the significance of the factors that connect a tort with the country whose law would be the applicable law under the general law, and the significance of any factors connecting the tort with any other country. So it is not just a random thought—not that, I am sure, our judiciary ever just has random thoughts, because they are very well-considered people—what they have to do is actually weigh up the significance of any factors that they may have, if they want to apply this exception to the general rule.

So, ultimately, I think what we have is, again, a piece of legislation put together initially—we keep lauding the Hon David Bennett for his work on this, but I think Chris Auchinvole actually had a bit of a part to play in this as well before he left at the end of the 50th Parliament. The Hon Dave Bennett picked it up and, of course, Sarah Dowie has taken it through. We have got, I think, a piece of legislation that will make it easier for New Zealanders who have had wrongs done to them outside of New Zealand to be able to take action to actually rectify and bring some closure to them, and to bring some sort of remedial action through the courts to make up for any losses, any injuries, or any damage that they have had to property. So it is great to see that there has been such good support for this, and I look forward to the third reading of the bill.

MAUREEN PUGH (National): I stand tonight in the Committee stage of the Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill. At present we are discussing Part 2. Part 2, we have heard, contains the general rule. In the discussion and debate in the Justice and Electoral Committee around these parts of this bill, there were some changes made. One of those changes was to the use of the word “jurisdiction”, where “the applicable law is the law of the jurisdiction” was changed to differentiate between countries where they have state laws, such as in Australia or the US. So we now talk about “the law of the country in which the events constituting the tort in question occur.”

This Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill is very similar to the UK Act, and that Act was seen during the select committee stage to be a valuable resource in providing a body of case law, which has accrued in the UK, to help with the interpretation and the application of this legislation here in New Zealand.

As my colleague Jono Naylor has talked about previously, clause 7, “General rule”, talks about personal injury, and that does mean a physical or mental injury—even if the injury causes death. It also, in this clause, includes disease or infection, so even now we are including things that may be communicable diseases. They also fit into this general rule of this choice of law in tort.

The clarification around the countries where these general rules apply does have some examples that make it clear why these amendments and this bill are required here. Using the example of a New Zealand employee who is working overseas and is injured in his place of work in an unsafe workplace, what law should govern his claim of negligence against his employer in that case? For instance, is it the law of the country in which the event took place, is it New Zealand law as he is a New Zealander, or perhaps if the parent company is an Australian company, would that also qualify as the place where this case would be heard?

So this bill clarifies that. It becomes a bit of a nonsense in those situations where those arguments about the appropriateness of the country in which the cases will be heard actually consume probably more court time than actually getting on with the substance of the dispute would, and so people are spending all their time in court determining those sorts of matters, rather than the substance.

So these provisions are displacing the general rule. An example of that would be where two people are travelling in New Zealand and something happens while they are here. It is best that that is dealt with in their home country, and so there is an opportunity for the court to use its discretion and allow for that case to be heard in their home country.

As we have also heard, this bill has been around for quite some time. It is very reassuring to see it getting to the end of the debate on it in this Committee stage, and I commend it. Thank you.

Part 2 agreed to.

Schedule 1

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): The question now is that schedule 1 stand part. Those of that opinion will say Aye—

Jono Naylor: Mr Chair.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): There is no debate on this. We have already had the debate on the schedule. I am just putting the vote.

Schedule 1 agreed to.

Clauses 1 and 2

JONO NAYLOR (National): I apologise, Mr Chair. I am sorry for jumping the gun. I thought we were moving quickly on to this part. I do not want to take too long over this, because, obviously, we have only a couple of clauses, but, actually, when you look at the Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill—as I have already mentioned today on another bill—I think it can be tricky if the titles of our legislation are not understandable to somebody in terms of plain English. I think it was clearly outlined that there is not a lot of general understanding even around what a tort is. That was highlighted in the second reading speeches, when I think I admitted to having not a lot of knowledge about it. I recall also the member David Clendon, who was very frank in his own admission that he actually thought that perhaps a tort might be something that you would find in a German bakery. As tasty as that might be, provided there was some sort of actionability in Germany, that might make sense.

I think it is really important that, where we can, we make the titles of our bills easily understood, so that if any New Zealander picks up our statutes they can understand by looking at the title what it is that is trying to be addressed. I thought about that, so “Private International Law” in and of itself for the average person—if they looked at it, they might simply look and say: “I didn’t realise you could have your own private international laws. I thought international laws would be international laws and that laws are something that is public rather than private.” So that could create a little bit of ambiguity. “(Choice of Law in Tort)”—again, clearly, even if you did understand what a tort was, what does “(Choice of Law in Tort)” mean to the average punter?

However, having said all of that, I did really have to think about it and ask whether it was worth the effort of trying to change the title. What would we actually change the title to? Unlike the previous bill that we discussed, where I could think of a few alternatives, I have struggled to come up with any other alternative for this particular bill. Given that the only people who are likely to engage with this legislation are, in fact, people in the legal profession, it is highly likely that they will be able to understand what “Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Act”—as it will be then—actually refers to. So I guess, in hindsight, in having to explore whether or not this is the most appropriate title, I think that, ultimately, it probably is. It will still enable the very good provisions within it to be actioned within New Zealand and also by those in the legal profession, who are the ones who are most likely to engage with it.

Obviously, we had a bit of a change at the Justice and Electoral Committee around the time of commencement. Initially, the first draft of the bill had it coming into force on the day after which it received the Royal assent. Now the phrase “15 days” has been put in there, I guess, ultimately to allow the legal profession to make any adjustments that it needs to. So I think, ultimately, clauses 1 and 2 are in perfect condition as they are, and I am happy to support them.

SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): It is a pleasure to make a final contribution on the title and commencement of this bill, the Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill, which looks to codify the situation where tort claims span across jurisdictions. Of course, it looks to abolish the rule of double actionability and codify the situation moving forward.

I will just take the opportunity to answer Mr Bishop’s question, which he put to me earlier. He asked whether I was comfortable with the fact that we were moving to disestablish the rule of double actionability and looking to codify the situation where a civil wrong occurs and where perhaps two jurisdictions could possibly apply. The situation, of course, is that we are actually following suit. There are a number of other common law jurisdictions that have already made this change, one of them being the United Kingdom, to which we owe a lot of the development of our tortious law through common law. So I am quite confident that what we are doing here and what this bill will bring about has been well considered and will actually make claims in tort much easier when they do span across various jurisdictions.

Of course, my colleagues have noted correctly that clause 8 in this bill does still leave in place some discretion for the courts to consider various situations where it is perhaps not as clear-cut. It is important to build that discretion into the courts so that they have that room to manoeuvre.

So I am very pleased to be bringing in this bill. I think it is a good little bill. It is a technical bill. It has been endorsed by the legal sector, and I am sure that it is going to make things much simpler when bringing a claim in tort in a foreign jurisdiction or here in New Zealand. Thank you.

Clauses 1 and 2 agreed to.

Progress to be reported presently.

House resumed.

The Chairperson reported the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill and the Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill without amendment.

Report adopted.

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

Bills

Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2)

Second Reading

ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition): I move, That the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) be now read a second time. This is, as members on this side of the House will know, a very important bill. It is, at the very least, symbolic about the very important challenges that New Zealand faces today. On this bill, the Government Administration Committee received 85 submissions, but there have been expressions of support from a large number of people from a number of other quarters as well.

The submissions that the select committee received came from organisations and private individuals from the length and breadth of the country. I would like to thank all those who made submissions on the bill and those who made oral submissions, in particular, and brought their very compelling reasons for support for the bill.

There were many private individuals who took the time to support it, to express their support for it, and to make their valuable comments. The district health boards, the New Zealand Medical Association, and other medical associations have provided expert support for the bill. And I especially want to mention the Paediatric Society of New Zealand for the invaluable data that it included in its exhaustive The Health Status of Children and Young People in New Zealand. Strong support has been provided by local government, social agencies, church groups, and iwi trusts, and then, of course, those very determined campaigners for social justice and the ending of poverty: the Child Poverty Action Group, Community Housing Aotearoa, Housing Call to Action, and the Tenants Protection Association.

Yesterday, the Medical Students for Global Awareness, along with other medical professionals who are strong supporters of the bill, presented me with their expression of support. It was a petition from medical professionals with no fewer than a thousand signatures on it. A public petition supporting the bill, which I tabled today, attracted more than 30,000 signatures.

This is a bill whose time has come, and for which the issues in it need to be seriously addressed. This bill has wide support because the reality is that we have a housing crisis in New Zealand today. And we all know the dimensions of it. We have the worst homelessness rate in the OECD. The Government is today spending $50 million a year shunting homeless families from one motel to another. That budget has blown out by 1,500 percent. The Government is spending 25 times more than it budgeted, and the situation is spiralling out of control.

This bill will help thousands of people. It will change lives and it will save lives. There is a very simple principle behind this bill: no New Zealander should have to live in a house that makes them or their children sick. Every Kiwi child deserves to grow up in a house that is warm, safe, and dry. As a parent, I would not accept anything less for my son; I do not think there is a New Zealand parent who would accept anything less for their children, and this Parliament should not accept anything less for any citizen of New Zealand.

The Children’s Commissioner tells us that 42,000 children a year are turning up to the emergency departments in our hospitals with preventable respiratory conditions. This is what we are trying to fix. That number is intolerable, it is wrong, it can be fixed, and this bill can fix it.

Every rental property should be insulated, should be weathertight, and should have adequate heating. It is not too much to ask. You see, it is not just a problem for the poor. It is any tenant—anybody in a rental property. And here is the thing: there are thousands of landlords who are doing the right thing already and who know that it is the right thing to do as a landlord. We have got a housing crisis that is locking middle New Zealand and families out of homeownership, and that is why what this bill says is so important. It is about getting it right for those who have to rent. This bill is about standing up for those New Zealanders who have to rent.

And so the challenge for the Government is this—and we will see what way it votes tonight. The simple question for the Government is this: whose side is it on? Is it on the side of the slum landlords who do not care about their tenants—push them in, pull them out, put a new one in, and collect the rent—or is it on the side of New Zealanders who have a reasonable expectation that the place they end up renting is going to be safe and healthy for them to do so?

Carmel Sepuloni: Whose side are they on?

ANDREW LITTLE: And that will be the challenge tonight. Whose side is the Government on?

You see, responsible landlords are telling us that this is a good bill. It will not impose big costs. When you look at the asset that this is about—a house, a private dwelling, a residential dwelling—and the life of that asset, the costs that this bill will impose on those who have not got their properties up to standard yet will be negligible. But they will be costs that will make a difference—make a difference for children, make a difference for adult tenants, and help to save lives.

Andrew King, from the New Zealand Property Investors Federation, called the bill sensible and pragmatic. And, as I said, most landlords are already doing this, because the cost is not high. So the question remains for National: whose side is it on? You see, Nick Smith hides behind the excuse that we cannot insulate homes fast enough. He says this will impose extra cost, but the landlords are telling us this is a reasonable cost to bear if you have not already done the work. You see, the Children’s Commissioner is calling National’s response to the situation shameful and a broken promise. So whose side is it going to be on tonight? Making rentals warm and dry is doable, affordable, and it is the right thing to do.

The select committee considered a number of amendments to this bill, and they are all worthy amendments: making the bill consistent with the Government’s smoke alarm requirements; increasing the transition time for landlords to comply—so compliance within 90 days of the new regulations coming into effect—giving landlords the right to enter a property on at least 24 hours’ notice to make sure things are in order; requiring the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to create an inspection regime to audit rental properties; specifying more detail on indoor temperatures, moisture, and humidity standards; and increasing the penalty for failure to meet the standards, from $3,000 to $4,000.

As I said before, this bill can make a real difference for thousands of Kiwis. I am very grateful for the support that I have had on this bill, from the many thousands of New Zealanders who have expressed their support and from the many members of this House. I want to particularly thank Peter Dunne from United Future, who has tonight expressed his continuing support for this bill because he knows that this is the right thing to do.

No Government should side with slum landlords in this country. No Government should put the interests of slum landlords over the interests of Kiwi kids. This is a bill that can help Kiwi kids who, at the moment, are in vulnerable, unsafe, unhealthy homes and stop them having to turn up to hospital with their preventable respiratory conditions.

We are in this Parliament to make a difference. We are all in this Parliament to act in the best interests of all New Zealanders, and this is a small, modest, reasonable step that can be taken that ought to make every member of Parliament supporting the bill proud to do so. I urge all MPs—and I urge my colleagues opposite—to do the right thing. Back those New Zealand families who have to rent and back their kids and stop them getting sick any more. It is with great pleasure that I commend the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) to the House.

Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for Building and Construction): There is absolutely no disagreement on this side of the House of the importance of our homes being insulated, of our homes being warm, of our homes being drained, of our homes being of a proper standard. But what the member introducing this bill, Andrew Little, has illustrated is that spin and waffle is no substitute for good law. This bill represents everything that is wrong about the Labour Party and its leadership. This bill is slow and late to the cause, and will actually slow down the legal requirements for insulating homes across New Zealand. It is a sloppy piece of legislation that is poorly drafted and impractical. If passed, it will not result in any—not a single healthier home than we have now. Like so much of Labour Party policy, when you look past the spin, when you look past the mush, they are hollow promises. Let me deal with a number of those issues.

Last year, this Parliament passed amendments to the Residential Tenancies Act. It specifically requires that every one of our 450,000 rental properties be insulated by 1 July 2019. What is the date in this bill? If the member bothered to look at the actual bill, it says that the insulation requirement will come into effect 5 years after it is enacted. That means that Labour is saying it is going to give landlords until the year 2022—3 years longer than what the current law requires in terms of insulation. I say to members opposite: how does that in any way make for healthier homes?

Then I come to the issues that the member claims—and let me say, there are six issues that are listed in respect of regulations that would be required. The regulations under this bill supposedly require methods of heating, ventilation, draught stopping, drainage, and for other standards in respect of ensuring that homes are warm and dry. But here is the problem: here are the existing housing regulations, which are the law of the land right now. Out of those six things, Mr Little, five of them are in the current law. Let me read them to the House from the Housing Improvement Regulations. If you look at clause 14: every home shall have “efficient drainage for the removal of storm water, surface water, and ground water. … Every house will be provided with gutters, downpipes, and drains for the removal of water … every house [will have] adequate space and vents to ensure proper ventilation,” to ensure that every house is free of dampness.” So five out of the six requirements that Mr Little’s bill wants to put in the law are already the law.

But then there is one that is not. There is one, I accept, that is not—that is that the member suggests that Parliament should regulate a minimum indoor temperature for landlords. Think about it. Is it really practical for the Parliament to say to the landlord: “You have got to ensure that your house is at a minimum temperature of 19 degrees.”? Any member of this House with even a tiny fraction of intelligence would know that, actually, whether you close the drapes, whether you turn the heater on, whether you close the windows and doors will affect the temperature. It is impractical and unworkable for the Parliament to say to the landlord: “You’ve got to maintain a minimum temperature.” Members on this side of the House do say that a landlord has got a responsibility to provide heating in a home, and that, again, is already in the regulations.

I am proud of this Government’s record on improving the standards of our rental properties. Do we know that they are improving? I think that most members of this House would expect that the Building Research Association of New Zealand is an independent organisation. For the last 30 years, it has done a survey every 5 years of the standard of our accommodation, and the latest survey shows that over the last 5 years there has been a marked improvement in the quality of our rental accommodation. In fact, it shows—and it sets out in this comprehensive report, which I would be happy to table—that over the period of the last 5 years, we have seen the number of properties that are rented and improved actually improved by a marked 10 percent. This Government is not saying it is good enough. We are wanting to do more, but it is headed in the right direction.

I want to deal specifically with the issue of insulation. Let us compare the record. During the last Labour Government’s 9 years it insulated 35,000 homes—35,000. The first thing we did when we came to Government is we said “The Government needs to get its own house in order, so every one of those 30,000 State houses that we own we are going to get on and insulate straight away.”, and we did so within a period of 2 years. We then brought in the subsidy scheme to rental homes, and do you know how many we have insulated? Over 300,000 homes—300,000 homes—have been insulated under that initiative. Then last year we passed that legislation that requires every home to be insulated by 1 July 2019, and that will insulate a further 180,000. I am happy to go to the electorate on 23 September and say: “Ignore the rhetoric. Compare the record.” There were 35,000 homes insulated under the last Labour Government in 9 years, and 380,000 insulated under this Government and a programme to get that number to 500,000.

The last point I want to make is this: let us be honest about the issues of the standards of our rental accommodation. The issue is not the law; the issue is the enforcement of the law—that is, every one of those slum properties that members opposite and on our side of the House find unacceptable in terms of leaking or moisture or drainage.

Peeni Henare: What are you doing about it?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The members opposite interject and say “What should you do?”. What you should do is enforce the law, and that is why this Government proudly introduced the compliance and investigation unit. Last year we provided it with a budget. There are over 400 cases of prosecutions before the Tenancy Tribunal as a consequence of that law change that our Government made, because it is our view that it is actually the enforcement of the standards that are already in the law that is the key to ensuring that we improve the standards of rental accommodation.

I say again: the issue here is not whether you care. The question here is not whether you understand the connection between healthy homes and our society doing better around all those issues that are being debated. The real issue is whether this bill makes any material difference, and the answer is that it takes us backwards. Why on earth would any member of this House want to not get homes insulated by 1 July 2019 and stretch it out to 2022? The reality is that Andrew Little is a johnny-come-lately. He has not been at the forefront, like on so many issues. On so many issues, this Government has the programmes in place to address the issues even before Mr Little is out of the starting blocks.

He is too busy having a breather to address the issues that New Zealand needs addressed. The right policy around improving the standards of our residential property is in the bill this Parliament passed over 1 year ago; in the enforcement that is now taking place with the new unit within the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment; and also with the further amendments that are proposed in the residential tenancy bill that is now before a select committee. Again, I say that this bill represents everything that is so shallow about the Labour Party and its leader.

Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): If only we could connect that Minister, the Minister for Building and Construction, to every rental property in New Zealand, because in the last 10 minutes he has expelled enough hot air to keep every single family in New Zealand in a rental property warm—every single family. It is a shame that we could not then add additional connections to the people who are sleeping in garages and who are sleeping in cars, because this winter, the Hon Nick Smith, they are cold as a result of your inaction to address housing issues for New Zealanders.

When I was a child, I knew that if we worked hard and saved hard, as adults we would be able to afford to buy a house. It would not be a flash house. It might be a house you had to do up, but it would be a house that you would turn into a home, and you would put a foot and a stake in your community. We had security as we got older and we were able to raise children as part of that community as well. This is the first Government that I have known in my lifetime that is leaving the next generation worse off than we were left. Which member of Parliament comes to this House to make the lives of their children and their grandchildren worse? That is the one legacy that John Key and Bill English will have when they are turfed out of this place—the memory of John Key and the reality of Bill English—in just over 60 days. I cannot wait till 23 September, when the vision and the passion and common sense of Andrew Little, as demonstrated in this bill, will be able to be put into reality with legislation across many portfolios.

It is 2017 and the National Government still says it is acceptable for children in our country to live in cold, damp homes—cold, damp homes that their parents can hardly afford to rent. Well, on this side of the House,—and thank you, also, to the support of Peter Dunne from United Future—we say it is unacceptable. Children are dying in our country from diseases that could be prevented. How can that be right, Mr Doocey? How can that be right, Barbara Kuriger? How can it be right that we have children going into hospital and dying from conditions that are preventable—preventable by actions that are delivered by this bill? It is not acceptable, and your names will be alongside opposing this bill for ever. You will put your name alongside opposition to this bill because of some petty party politics, instead of thinking about how important our children and our elderly, particularly, are—people who are vulnerable when they are living in cold, damp houses.

At the Government Administration Committee we heard a lot of submissions. They were all supportive. I want to say to Kris Faafoi that some secondary students who came from his electorate of Mana in support of this bill were some of the most impressive that I have ever seen at a select committee. They were actually from a high-income area—they told us that. Then they said: “We’re here to support this bill—not for ourselves. We live in warm, dry houses, but we know people who live 10 minutes down the road who are in a low-income area and who are in cold, damp houses, and we want them to live in warm, dry houses like we do.”

That is the spirit of New Zealanders that I love so much—that if we are doing all right we want other people to do all right as well. We do not want to see people who are doing poorly. Children who get sick, children who end up having medical treatment or being in hospital, kids who miss school because they are sick—all these things affect their outcomes as adults, and here is a chance to really make a difference. Here is a chance to make a positive contribution not just to the literal lives today of those children but to their future. We can make it better for them.

So we heard the submissions, and a lot of people gave us very constructive amendments to this bill. The select committee originally agreed that we would change the bill; we would put in those amendments. We agreed unanimously that we would change those amendments, and then on the very last day the National members said: “No, we’re not going to do that.” Mr Doocey will recall my surprise at the changed position. I usually take a member at her or his word when they give a commitment; I am learning not to do that so often now with National Party MPs. It is disappointing, because even if you disagree you should be able to take people at their word, in my view. So we ended up writing the amendments and putting them separately. We have got returned to this House a bill with amendments prepared that improve the bill and that could make a difference.

Nick Smith said this will take us back in time. When Nick Smith introduced the “new” insulation standards, he lowered the standard of insulation required in New Zealand homes to 1970s standards. He has got a bit of a pattern in this regard. It is like when he changed the water quality standards to say that we are now going to have swimmable water, but the new standard is wadeable, and it applies only to 15 percent of the waterways in our country. So 15 percent of 100 percent is going to be of lower quality than we have ever had in water in New Zealand before, in the same way as the insulation standards currently required are lower than we have ever had in New Zealand before.

This bill is not the answer to all our housing problems, nor was it ever intended to be. Andrew Little made that very clear when he introduced this legislation. This goes alongside other measures to fix the housing issue—for example, stopping overseas residents buying New Zealand homes. Let us house New Zealanders first.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Stick to the bill.

Hon RUTH DYSON: Instead of making money out of houses—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Come back to the bill.

Hon RUTH DYSON: —we should be making homes out of houses. It goes alongside the winter energy payment, so that we would give people on superannuation and on benefits additional cash to help them pay for their higher power bill in winter. Thirty thousand people signed an open letter in support of Andrew Little’s bill, which we are debating now—30,000 people. That is in addition to the 85 submissions overwhelmingly in support that we had at the select committee. New Zealanders want this change—not only New Zealanders who live in cold, damp houses but New Zealanders like the secondary school students I mentioned earlier who came to our select committee so strongly supportive of this bill, not for themselves but for other secondary school students who live down the road.

I just want to ask the National Party members: what is wrong with trying to give all New Zealanders an opportunity to live in a warm, dry home? We know the health outcomes are improved dramatically if that is the situation they live in. We know, as a result of that, that our health bill is lower. We know, as a result of that, that their overall health outcomes will be better. If you get rheumatic fever as a child you are likely to end up with a heart murmur, you are likely to have atrial fibrillation as a young adult, and that could affect you negatively for your entire life. Why would we want to do that? Why would we not want to do every single thing we can to make healthier homes for people so that the children and the elderly, particularly, who live in those homes have healthier outcomes? I do not understand how the National Party members and ACT can say “We will reject this.”, having heard from the select committee that we have made all these amendments after listening to the submitters. We made the bill better. The vision in it was good, the passion behind it was good, the common-sense approach to saying “If you’ve got a cold, damp house, how do we make it warmer and drier?”—the common-sense approach was excellent. We have made a very good bill even better.

But the National Party members’ petty political point-scoring means that children in New Zealand will die because they are living in cold, damp houses. I do not understand why any member would come to Parliament to make the lives of children worse than our lives were. That is what the opposition to this bill is doing. We have a chance to give people better health outcomes, better education outcomes, better employment outcomes. This is the time to do it. Make a stand against the petty political point-scoring of your party, Mr Doocey. Make a stand for young children in New Zealand. Say that you want them to all live in a warm, dry home in the same way as our families do. This is the opportunity. We can improve it further in the Committee stage, but we have to pass it at this stage.

MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): That speech was from Ruth Dyson, a member of Parliament and a Minister in the last Labour Government, which oversaw fewer than 50,000 houses insulated. Yet we get the lecture, when we have insulated 300,000 to date, and will go on to insulate another 200,000 in the coming couple of years. There is an old saying in rugby, “Look at the scoreboard”, and the scoreboard never lies.

I want to do something very unique tonight: I actually want to talk about the bill. We are in the second reading, so what I want to talk about is this bill going to the Government Administration Committee—some of the submissions that we heard, some of the debates that we had, and some of the issues that we identified and discussed that have led to this bill coming back to this House with the National Party not supporting it.

Can I first just talk about the submission process. We had 85 substantive submissions on the bill. Interestingly enough, we had 7,200 standard form submissions. What a standard form submission is is an auto-fill submission, where the submissions were filled automatically. These were sent to Labour Party offices from the Labour website. So what the committee looked at was identifying any of those that were unique and distinct. We identified that they were unique and distinct because the submission had additional text to it. We were able to identify 890 submitters. Out of those 890 submitters we heard 31 oral submissions. There was a fair range of submissions, as we have heard tonight, from local authorities, NGOs, church groups, unions, and student groups. I would just like to acknowledge the Hon Ruth Dyson for her chairpersonship through the select committee process, as well as the very able deputy chair, Paul Foster-Bell, for his leadership as deputy chair in steering this bill through the select committee process.

What I want to start with in my call tonight is talking about the initial briefing that we had from the advisers once this bill was passed from the first reading and went to the select committee. One of the key issues that came out as we digested this bill and got to the detail of it, one of the debates, was how much is already in existing Acts or existing amended Acts. When you look at the Residential Tenancies Act of 1986, currently the Act places a general obligation on landlords to maintain a reasonable state of cleanliness and repair. The Residential Tenancies Amendment Act 2016 requires landlords to ensure adequate insulation, as well as smoke alarms. This date has been identified for income-related rents as last year, actually—July 2016. So thanks to an Act passed by this National Government, renters in income-related rental properties have that standard already. For other, non-income related rental properties the standard will come into force on 1 July 2019.

But let us look at some of the other Acts that place requirements on landlords. Down here it says they have to comply with all requirements in respect of buildings, health and safety, and others under the enactment. So let us look at the Housing Improvement Regulations. Every living room should have an approved form of heating. Every bathroom should have one external window that can open and a means of ventilation. Every room must have an openable external window, natural light, and ventilation. I think we can already tick heating off, and ventilation. Every house must have efficient drainage. Every house should be provided with gutters and downpipes. Under every part of every house where the floor is timber there should be adequate space for vents for the protection from damp and decay. Every house must be free from dampness. So I suppose we can tick off, there, dampness—this is under the Housing Improvement Regulations. The materials of which each house is to be constructed must be sound, durable, and weatherproof where subject to the effects of the weather—so that is the one we can tick off under draughts. So when you look at this bill, the six clear standards it outlines—heating, insulation, ventilation, draughts, and drainage—are already covered by existing Acts, amended Acts, and regulations.

But there is one—there is one that has not been touched here, which talks about indoor temperatures. I think that was an interesting policy debate we got into on the select committee. We heard from the advisers about what would be an adequate indoor temperature. We looked at World Health Organization standards—18 degrees for fit adults; vulnerable and children at 21 degrees, as well. But what we landed on was that this is ultimately determined by tenant behaviour, yet this bill legislates or regulates the landlord, and not for tenant behaviour. The bill has a requirement for the landlord to comply with this bill, and not a corresponding requirement for tenants. What we also know is that tenants have a right to the quiet enjoyment of their property. Yet are we saying under this legislation that compliance will open up their property for people to come in at any time to test the indoor temperature? I do not think this has been thought through. What was also interesting is that this bill sets a fine of $3,000, and, interestingly enough, currently the fine for not meeting these is $4,000. So under this proposed bill the fine actually is reduced. So, as clearly outlined by the Hon Nick Smith, this bill is regressive.

But let us not just think of the advisers. Let us take the word of some of the submitters. They also talked about the standards for indoor temperature. They submitted that “Attempting to regulate the indoor temperature of a given property for a given tenant will be nearly impossible regardless of how standards are designed.” Many submitters also identified in the bill, about the outcome, that there was potential for wide disagreement around the standards, and an inability to land on agreement to the standards. What was clear from the submission process is there actually appears to be a lack of education about what currently is in the law and what currently is under regulation. I think we can use that as a platform on how we educate and how we understand why we have got to this position, and I think the Hon Nick Smith clearly outlined the Government’s response to compliance.

Before I finish, I just want to talk quickly about one issue that came up, as well, around the cost. We know the compliance could be costed at about $100 million, and there is always a fear that that cost will then be translated and transferred to the renter. I was at a Christchurch candidates’ evening last week for Christchurch East—the member of Parliament Poto Williams; the candidate for Wigram, David Hiatt; and I myself was there for National. That was in a room with 60 young people. It was an event organised for Pacific young people. A majority of them were trainee medical staff. That was their biggest concern. We did not raise that as a panel. The young people raised that as a panel—that they were not convinced that an unintended consequence of this bill would not then be the removal of some rental properties or the increase in price to renters.

Ultimately, this bill is already in law. There are some policy issues that clearly no one could answer, and there are clearly some unintended consequences, which is why this bill should not be passed.

METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Oh, Good Lord! I am so glad that is over.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: No. It is just the dear old Deputy Speaker.

METIRIA TUREI: Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. So it really is a bit rich listening to that member, Matt Doocey, lecture this House on the regulations on housing standards. I mean, this Government, of which he is a part, has had 9 years to enforce exactly those regulations, 9 years to put standards around those regulations so people know what it is that they have to do in order to meet them, and 9 years to enforce those regulations, so we do not have—what—600,000 homes in this country still uninsulated, still damp, and still causing their families sickness.

And it is “Poto Williams”, Mr Doocey—it is “Poto Williams”. It is not that hard to say.

We have had this debate in this House about housing standards for years and years. Last year we had that ridiculous bill from Nick Smith, who also decided to stand up here and lecture us all about it. It was a bill that put in place fire alarms—that is fine—and a 1978 standard of home insulation for—

Peeni Henare: When?

METIRIA TUREI: 1978. I was 8 years old in 1978—yes, I am that old.

Peeni Henare: 1978—Seymour wasn’t born.

METIRIA TUREI: Ha, ha! It was a 1978 standard of home insulation for homes that families are having to live in in 2017. I mean, it was an utter, utter disgrace. At the time that Nick Smith’s bill was going through the Social Services Committee, we had submission after submission from those involved in health and those involved in child advocacy saying: “This is wrong. This bill is wrong, because it will not save these children’s lives.” The Children’s Commissioner came to that select committee, and he said that Nick Smith’s 1978 standard was a broken promise to New Zealand’s children—a broken promise to New Zealand’s children. The Government had said that it would set the standard not only so that children’s lives would be saved but so that all children would have a decent, healthy standard of living in these rental homes. The Government, National, broke that promise.

I am here to support Andrew Little’s bill because Andrew Little’s bill restores some faith in the promise that New Zealand homes can be and should be insulated to a standard that protects those children, stops them from getting so sick that there are 40,000 hospitalisations every year, and protects those up to 15 children who will die every year because the homes that they live in are cold and damp and make them sick one time too many. That is what the Children’s Commissioner told us at the time that Nick Smith’s bill was going through select committee—that up to 15 children a year die because of illnesses that are caused by cold, damp homes.

We know—and my colleague Ruth Dyson has clearly articulated this as well this evening—how critical it is to every single family in this country that they have a home that is warm and dry and safe. I am very pleased that we are supporting Andrew Little’s bill, because it goes a long way towards putting in those standards to make that possible.

I would also note from the speech of that member who just spoke before me, when he was talking about those regulations and why they were not so necessary, that one of the biggest issues that was raised at the Government Administration Committee on Andrew Little’s bill was the fact that tenants were unable to enforce the existing regulations. They could not enforce them because access to the Tenancy Tribunal was too difficult, because access to the information about what the standards were and whether or not they were met was too difficult, and for fear that raising any issue around the standard of their housing would lead to them being evicted. They have no legal protection. Remember, a tenant has zero legal protection if they complain to a landlord, because a landlord can make up a reason for kicking them out and kick them out. They may try to take a case at the tribunal, but that does not mean that they have got anywhere to live.

So these tenants are unable to enforce even the poor standards that have been put in place, and that is an issue that this Government has known about now for a decade, nearly, and has still refused to do anything about it. So do not stand here and lecture us about those standards. We actually need real law that makes it very clear to landlords as to what their obligations are, and that means the standards that are set are set at a 2017 standard and not a 1978 one, that the regulations are clear about how those standards can be tested to ensure that they are met, and that there are good enforcement and protected rights for tenants, so that they are able to enforce those rights, even in a market where renting is very expensive and demand is high.

It is absolutely critical that this bill proceeds, because families’ health and children’s lives are dependent on it. So while we have talked in political terms about housing in this House, and we do so nearly every day—and that is part of the political discourse and the argument we have here—there are times when we need to just focus on what is important. What is important is that kids are living in homes that make them sick and sometimes lead some to die. We can fix that. We can help fix that tonight by getting this bill through to the next stage. I would strongly urge members to think first about those families and their kids. Thank you.

SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): Depending on where this bill goes, I will be interested to see the Supplementary Order Paper from that member, Metiria Turei, that allows landlords to exempt themselves from the law if they decide it, you know, sort of takes their fancy. I also notice around the whole talk of children and unhealthy homes that this is from a political party that supports the increase of smoke in homes through smoking cannabis—so I find, you know, contradictions, without even getting on to other sorts of moral issues, where children are just gotten rid of because it is inconvenient. But, you know, let us just not let that get in the way.

Can I acknowledge the member Andrew Little, who has put this bill forward. I think the intention is correct, and I think, listening to the various speeches in the House tonight, that there is no difference in the sense of the intention to try to do what is best to improve the housing quality. The problem is that good sentiments alone make bad law, and this is a very bad piece of proposed law—least of all is the fact that it actually takes up about a page and a half of paper. When you listen to everyone who has been standing up tonight, particularly those in support of it, you would think that this was some comprehensive approach to housing that would be reflected in the paperwork itself—and particularly when you listen to several members of the Opposition talking about standards.

I have flicked through these, I think, 900 words multiple times. There are no standards. This is a lazy member’s bill. I just want to point out that it is actually not so much an ad hominem on Andrew Little, but we are having a bit of a habit coming into this House of members’ bills, regardless of political sides, actually, that sort of expect that a little cursory bit of work should then be flicked on to a select committee to try to make substantive changes. That is lazy law-making, and this is a perfect example of it. So the standards are but sentiments—but sentiments.

It has been asked that officials go away and come up with a whole array of standards to do with heating, installation, indoor temperature, ventilation, draft stopping, and drainage. It was noted by my colleague Nick Smith, earlier on, that a number of those are already addressed in law and in regulations. One standard that is not addressed is around, of course, the indoor temperature. Maybe it is the geography background that I have. Temperatures in Invercargill are slightly different from what they are in Inglewood and slightly different from what they are in Rotorua and, perhaps, in Whangarei or, where some of my family are initially from, in Tangiterōria. How are we going to create regulations that are manageable for something like this?

I think about where I live in Auckland—effectively, in a dell. Drainage is a nightmare. I know that the council itself has spent millions and millions of dollars trying to fix the drainage. Regardless of that spend there are still major drainage problems. In fact, I and most of my neighbours almost got flooded the other day. How is that going to be written up into standards in a way that is feasible and applicable? And I think that for responsible lawmakers—and I would like to think of myself as one—I would like some greater sense of direction from the member of how these standards might look before I and others are asked to vote on it. That is not to take away from officials. We trust them in a whole range of areas to go away and write up regulations and to write up standards, but, by and large, good legal process provides some indication of where this is going to go. And I have just given two examples—again, around indoor temperature and around drainage—that I think begin to indicate some of complexities that are at work here.

Then we step into what is, effectively, a heavy-handed approach, and I just want to use indoor temperatures. We just have to step back for a second and imagine how this is going to look. Basically, we are saying there is going to be an inspectorate—well, I assume there is going to be an inspectorate—of people walking around into homes measuring temperatures. How on earth is that going to practically work if you forget to close the window and you all of a sudden drop under whatever the temperature is? What is going to happen, and are there appeal rights? You will come back again? Who is going to pay for that? So it is incredibly impracticable, right from the start.

It also is one of those occasions where—we heard it, unfortunately, from Andrew Little when he started—this sort of gets mired, ultimately, in sort of a rhetoric, a moralising, if you will. He started by saying: “Which side will you choose?”. Which side will you choose? Well, that fits very much into, I would argue, a progressive left-wing mentality because, actually, I choose both sides. I choose both sides in this, because actually this is not the simple, classic progressive stuff. It is so tiresome really, but it is the sense of every landlord is evil and every tenant is good, or on the reciprocal, in corollary, every tenant is bad and every landlord is good. That is simplistic nonsense. In fact, most tenants are fantastic. OK, I have been a tenant most of my life. I hope, with my landlord speaking, they will say the same to me.

Most landlords are good people, but listening to the rhetoric here tonight, you would think every person who is a landlord is a slum landlord, and that they could not give a tinker’s cuss about their landlords, because that is the argument that is required for people who want us to choose sides. But I choose both. I choose a Government that has actually worked to ensure that tenants are able to work with landlords to have homes that do have insulation. No one on the Opposition tonight has spoken about the agreement between National and the Greens, when we came to power in 2008, to insulate all of the State homes. I have heard nothing from the Opposition tonight about the Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes programme through the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, to enable landlords to take responsibility, along with Crown funds, to actually insulate their homes. There is none of that “both sides” cooperation. No, we have fallen back to the usual boring, jejune, even germane, rhetoric.

Kris Faafoi: Oh my God; we’ve got 3 minutes of more of this drivel to go.

SIMON O’CONNOR: I know. I will give you a dictionary afterwards so you can understand some of those basic words.

Dr Megan Woods: Oh my God, how patronising.

SIMON O’CONNOR: So, basically—oh yes, patronising. That is right. Once again, it is all about sides—good and bad.

Dr Megan Woods: Come on, you can do 10 minutes. Come on!

SIMON O’CONNOR: I could actually. I could probably switch into Latin for you.

So the ultimate element we have got here is simple sides: bad landlords and good tenants, and, actually, most are working and cooperating together. We also have heard very clearly that all the standards the Government has put into place, and actually—

Kris Faafoi: 2 minutes 40 to go.

SIMON O’CONNOR: Thank you very much. Are you sure you do not want to give me another minute?

Dr Megan Woods: Yep! Positive!

Kris Faafoi: Sit down!

SIMON O’CONNOR: No, not at all. So there is already a number of great initiatives that the Government has put in. We have already touched on a couple of those. There is also the whole changes that are coming through in a bill that the Government has at the moment, which is addressing this step by step—enabling, particularly, the landlords to come on board. What is proposed here, other than being incredibly light and without substance, is a heavy-handed approach that is demanding of landlords, for no other reason—and of course, what is going to happen? It does not take a genius. I suggest even some on the other side—

Kris Faafoi: No, you’re not one. That’s right. You’re no genius!

SIMON O’CONNOR: I have 2 minutes to go. No, I am definitely not a genius; usually geniuses are mad. There is a cost to this, and all costs come with consequences. I for one can see that, actually, we will see homes close. I have seen that in my own electorate. Look, rightly, those places closed, which is fantastic. Actually, they should be closed down, but the consequence of that, which the Opposition ignores, is that when they close, there is therefore a change in supply, and this piece of legislation is going to facilitate that further. And, of course, we would have had more moralising from the other side about what should be done, because, of course, coming back to the usual element, the Opposition feel that only it knows what is best. Everyone else is wrong; only it is right.

The irony of all of this, coming right back to the start, is a page and a half of supposed legislation that is then couched in moralising terms, and we are hearing some of it here. We actually have not had a debate tonight from the other side. We have had ad hominems, we have had the usual rhetoric, we have had moralising, shallow attempts, and we have had the playing the “child” card. As I said at the start, if we want to start talking about children, why is it that Opposition parties in this House want to support the likes of cannabis smoking and other drugs in homes, and they moralise about children?

Marama Davidson: Oh my goodness! Really?

SIMON O’CONNOR: Really.

Marama Davidson: Really?

SIMON O’CONNOR: Yeah, really. Because that is a contradiction.

Marama Davidson: Seriously? Those are the children? Really?

SIMON O’CONNOR: Those are the children, yes. Those are the children, because, when you work in the community and voluntary sector, that is where the harm is done. And I think we can be very proud in this Government for actually holding a consistent line, including in my own electorate, when you look at the likes of Glen Innes, where, actually, someone mentioned State houses earlier—2,500 old damp State homes are being transformed, as we speak, into 8,000 new homes; some in the private sector, some in the social sector. What an amazing situation there, and I would just like to point out that this was opposed by the other side.

Kris Faafoi: Sit down. You’ve wasted 10 minutes of my life.

SIMON O’CONNOR: You will get it back.

DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): If the last member who spoke, Simon O’Connor, was ever to become a Minister, I think he should be allocated the “Ministry of Awful Attitudes”, because that is all we heard from him throughout the entirety of his speech. It is those awful attitudes that have resulted in one of the most disappointing approaches to any subject that this Government has pursued. And it is especially disappointing that the Government and the ACT member as well, David Seymour, have blocked this bill from making any real progress through the select committee process. That is in the face of hundreds of submissions, and, yes, we should include the standard form submissions, because they are from real people. And the fact that they have the same—

Simon O’Connor: Really?

DENIS O’ROURKE: Yes. Really, Mr O’Connor, really—real people with good attitudes, as distinct from your awful attitudes. And those people had a right, whether they use a standard form or not, to express their views, and those views are diametrically opposed to National’s attitudes and policies in this area. They have been ignored by National, they have been ignored by Mr O’Connor, and National should be ashamed of itself.

Those people made submissions because, like most people in New Zealand society, whether they rent properties or not, they do want to see an improvement in the quality of rental properties so that they are warm and dry and healthy, by being required to be adequately heated and well ventilated and insulated up to modern-day standards. That is really all this bill is about—nothing fancier than that. Tenants, and the Government itself through the accommodation supplement payments, deserve a product in terms of a liveable tenancy that is fit for purpose. Far, far too many of them these days are not. And the stories about that have been on TV. They have been in the news media many, many times. It proves that it is just the tip of the iceberg, and that this is a huge problem that this Government has not even begun to address. I do not believe for one moment the speeches I heard from Matt Doocey and from the other members opposite, as though the current regulations actually achieve anything in this area. Demonstrably, clearly, and unmistakably they do not. But it does not need to be that way—it does not need to be that way.

We in New Zealand First agree with this bill because it fairly requires landlords to upgrade properties, over a reasonable period of time, to acceptable standards. These are not sentiments, as Mr O’Connor said of them. They are simply good and proper standards that should actually already be required, and we now need regulation to do that, and that is what this bill does.

The bill requires the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to objectively set minimum standards for both heating and insulation, and there is nothing wrong with a bill requiring that to be done in the future, in an objective way, by a Government department. All of that work can be properly done and brought forward as a result of this bill. I think it is a good way of going about it, rather than us, as MPs, trying to do so comprehensively in a member’s bill. I think it is a very good way of going about it.

All of that is, of course, what is missing in current legislation. It is precisely what the Government failed to do in its residential tenancies legislation. It had the opportunity then to do it. When you look at the arguments that were then put forward by Government members as to why they were not done, they were rather pathetic arguments. They did not amount to any genuine reason why landlords should not, within a reasonable period of time, be required to come up to properly established standards. That is actually all the bill does. In fact, it effectively gives 5 years for that to happen.

I think that would be a very effective way of achieving the objective. It provides landlords with a reasonable period of time to comply. Good landlords would have no difficulty in doing so. Good landlords would be happy to do so. They want to provide a good product, and those who do not should either get out of the market or come up to the standards that are required.

It cannot be overstated how important the need for those standards is, because of the need to drastically improve health outcomes and provide for much better use of energy. By the way, if Mr O’Connor was still here I would point out that those are costs—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, the member is not allowed to make reference to a person’s presence or otherwise in the House.

DENIS O’ROURKE: I understand—I understand that. I would say to Mr O’Connor that he should look at this as an opportunity for savings, in terms of energy, not as a cost, as he thought it exclusively was. In addition to all of that, of course, this is one of the ways in which a contribution can be made to our Paris climate change commitments.

I would like to also just add this, at this stage. There are already many community organisations and commercial companies that are working for the same objectives. I would like to mention a couple. I recently visited Community Energy Action in Christchurch. That organisation provides free advice for tenants, homeowners, and landlords on heating and insulation. It has a huge storage facility for good quality used drapes and curtains. It provides a repair and alterations service. It also tests properties for heat loss and gives advice on how to make a home warmer and drier.

I also recently visited the opening of Pro Clima, a factory in Auckland, which is going to be providing, in the New Zealand market, for new properties and much better high-tech insulation systems for new homes using advanced membranes and fittings to hermetically seal homes, together with an advanced system for heating. It also provides training for people to install those systems.

All of these new technologies are there. They are cost-effective, they save energy, and they are brilliant when it comes to heating homes and providing for insulation. That applies to both new and existing properties. All of these technologies are arriving—more and more every day. They are the sorts of technologies that landlords would be able to afford, and they would find that it is well worthwhile them doing so, because in doing so they are also improving the value of their properties. Any landlord would be interested in that.

What is actually missing here is genuine Government leadership. The Government could be doing things like, for example, providing some tax breaks for landlords who invest in those systems. It could, for example, allow landlords to write off, for tax, the full amount in any year—the amount incurred in insulating homes and bringing homes up to an adequate standard of heating. Landlords would then get a financial boost as well, and why not? If they are going to invest, why does the Government not encourage them in those sorts of ways?

But, most of all, there does need to be a firm regulatory regime to establish a level playing field and a workable set of effective standards so that all landlords know the level to which they need to provide good insulation and good, healthy, dry, warm homes.

If there was a message for the Government to come out of all this, it is that most people do not think that it is doing nearly enough. After all, for so many people these days, homeownership is out of the question and they are going to end up living for very long terms in rental properties. They need those to be good quality warm, dry properties. The vast majority of New Zealanders do want to see the Government do more, and I am flabbergasted that it is simply not willing to listen to them or to anybody else, and to do a lot more, when it is so easily done. This bill is a good start. The Government should be supporting it, instead of trying to knock it out.

IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): The last speaker, Denis O’Rourke, talked about what the Government does not do. I am not going to talk about what we do do because we have done quite a bit in this field, interestingly. What I want to talk about is why we have some challenges in New Zealand around the types of homes we have here. If you look at the history of homes in New Zealand, we have built homes out of wood, with very little inside them. In other words, if you live in a house like mine, there is a bit of scrim stuck on a bit of wood inside the house, and it is a wooden house, with single pane windows. They give all sorts of trouble. The reason they give trouble is that we have got such a varied climate in New Zealand.

If you look at housing stocks around the rest of the world, not many places have used wood to build their houses. So we have some challenges in New Zealand around our housing stock, which many other countries do not have. When the houses get to an age—many of our wooden houses are in excess of 100 years old. Many of the rental houses we are talking about, in the course of this bill, are over 100 years old. When they get to that stage, it is extremely difficult—particularly if they are low to the ground, with a very small ceiling area—to change the structure of those houses and the nature of them.

We do have some significant challenges in New Zealand around the type of housing stock that we have historically had here. I think if you look at my own electorate, you get to a place like Taumarunui, where you have extremes of temperature. It is extremely cold in the winter and sometimes it is extraordinarily hot in the summer. There are a lot of very old wooden houses because Taumarunui is one of those very early settled places in New Zealand. It is extremely difficult to get those houses and bring them up to scratch today.

So one of the challenges we have—

Denis O’Rourke: Look at the new technologies. Has the member done that?

IAN McKELVIE: Yes, Christchurch—the great technology they used in Christchurch was pretty simple. If we could do that in Taumarunui it would solve all our problems. The issue we have got with houses in a place like that is how we bring them up to the standard, and bring them up to the standard at a rate that both the landlords can afford to do it at, and that the tenants can then afford to rent them at, at the same time. I am not making excuses for it. That is just how we are in New Zealand, and it is different from the rest of the world. So there are some very big challenges in that area.

So what then tends to happen, as landlords do better, is that they sell those houses and upgrade their own stock. So rather than upgrading the house, they upgrade the stock. Sure, upgrading the stock achieves the same thing, but they sell those houses to first-home buyers, and so then the first-home buyers have got, effectively, the same problem that the landlord had initially. If you looked at the insulation programme that we have had for the last 6 years running in New Zealand, some of those houses have been the beneficiaries of that and it has done a great job for New Zealand. So this is a vexing challenge for us in New Zealand—much more difficult, I think, than almost any other country in the world faces, and that is for the reasons I have outlined.

If you think about the context of this bill, there is a proposal in this bill that there will be an inspectorate put in place to inspect those houses, and one of the problems that we have with all Government inspectorates is that they cost a whole lot of money. If you think about the proposal that may be in place for this—may be, because we do not know, and I will get on to that in a minute. The proposal that may be in place to administer this bill could cost as much as $225 a house a year. I do not know of any landlord who is going to carry that cost without passing it on, so straight away we have this large cost passed on to the tenants of those houses.

I think the other issue that we have got with these inspectorates—or with publicly owned, Government owned, or council-owned housing, for that matter—is that they are never as well run as the privately owned operation. So once you put a regime in place to inspect those houses, they will tend to be let go by the landlords, and that is, effectively, what will happen. I take my own case where the Manawatū District Council had a stock of 207 community houses, which it ran pretty badly, to be fair. It then put those houses into a trust. That trust was able to bring those houses up to speed, and they are very pleasant places to live now. So the community trust, which, effectively, is a community-owned organisation, has brought those houses up to speed, and by insulating them, by rebuilding them to some extent, and by using some money from outside of the system to upgrade those houses, it has done a great job of it.

So I think there are some challenges around the way we structure the ownership of some of these houses. Sure, this bill is designed to deal with tenanted houses, but it is also deals with community housing and deals with Government housing, and all other types of housing that we put together. So it does create some challenges, and I think that the moment that you put an inspectorate in place you have created a bureaucracy, which creates a whole lot of problems of its own.

I want to talk a little bit about the need to have homes be warm and dry, because clearly it is important that we do have warm, dry homes. But, again, as with many members’ bill that come to this House, this bill does not lay out clearly the conditions on which it is anticipated this will be implemented. So there is no real guide for us when we discuss this bill as to how it will be implemented in due course. So, for example, there is a proposal that a house should be set at a certain temperature. There is no way you are going to get a house to run at the same temperature in a place like Taumarunui as you are in a place like Hastings or somewhere else. It is almost impossible to do that. Of course those people who live in those places are going to live in a very different environment and will consequently operate at a very different temperature.

So I think one of the difficulties that we face as a Parliament with members’ bills is that there is no clear guidance as to how it is anticipated that those members’ bills will be implemented; nor is there any clear guidance, nor has there been any clear consultation other than the opportunity to submit to the Government Administration Committee as to what impact that might have on the total housing market, on the tenancy agreements, or on the rental property market throughout New Zealand. I think that is quite a challenge for this House as well.

We have seen a number of members’ bills coming into Parliament in recent times where the ability of the community to comment on the bill as it gets made up has a very big impact on what happens when the bill gets here, because suddenly they are panicked into thinking: “Well, this is going to be implemented and how’s it going to be implemented.” Of course no one really knows how it is going to be implemented when it comes to the House, and so I think these members’ bills often create some very interesting—or difficult, I guess—challenges for Parliament, but they also create some very difficult challenges for the Government departments, which have to then try to put together a set of regulations around how this might be implemented.

So whilst I congratulate the member, Andrew Little, on having his bill drawn—and this is the first time I have had a look at this bill because, clearly, I was not part of the select committee process that brought this bill to the House—it does create a whole lot of challenges, I think, which are interesting for us to try to resolve. It creates some pretty big challenges for the Government department that has got to implement the legislation and to get it in place.

As I said, I did not have the opportunity to listen to the submissions or take part in the select committee process, so it is a little difficult to comment on how we got to some of these conclusions that have come back to the Parliament. I think there is merit in a lot of the proposals that come to the House in members’ bills. There is merit in a lot of proposals in this bill. But, as has been said by earlier speakers on this side of the House, many of the issues that are touched on in this bill have already been touched on in the course of Government legislation and things like the Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes initiative, which in my part of New Zealand has made quite a contribution to a large number of houses in a small town like Taumarunui, where there has been help with upgrading house insulation and things like that, so it does a pretty good job.

I can see why a bill like this would come to the House, but I can also see that the Government has done a lot of work on getting some of the issues raised in this bill to the point it has, and I can also see the difficulty in trying to implement a bill like this without having had a very clear pathway and a very good discussion amongst all those people who have gone down the path of implementing the bill. With all that, I am opting to oppose the bill, so thank you.

MARAMA DAVIDSON (Green): The Green Party will support the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) from my colleague Andrew Little. This bill is to amend the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 because the standards are just not good enough. It is quite clear that this Government, which has been in power, which has had the tools available to it to fix the current situation, did not fix the current situation. The standards have not been good enough for far too long, and that is why so many of our rental properties today have been making children sick over and over again and have been responsible for causing annual winter deaths of our people. We need to do better and Andrew Little’s bill, the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2), proposes exactly that.

I want to enforce what my colleague Metiria Turei has said. She said: “How dare the Government lecture us? How dare the Government lecture us that they are doing a good job to fix things?”. It is 2017. You have been in power for 9 years and last year you finally decided to put a bill through Parliament, and it is a stink one. You finally decided to put some standards through, and the standards—

Hon Member: A stink one—what?

MARAMA DAVIDSON: Actually, it is a stink one because mould in rental properties is stinky and smelly, and more rental properties have mould than private properties—surprise, surprise. So it is a stink bill that you have put through because the standards that the Minister Nick Smith put through went back to the 1970s. I mean, we all like to go back to the 1970s but not when it comes to making sure our homes are healthy. The standards need to be 2017, not 1978.

I did come to Parliament on an understanding that we would do everything we can. The standard has to be that our people, our children, our elderly people, our citizens can live in rental properties and their health is not at all compromised, and we in Aotearoa New Zealand can afford that. We have enough. We have enough to make sure that our people are adequately housed. We cannot afford to continue with standards that keep making our children sick. We actually cannot afford that. So I do take some offence at the constant raising of the issue from the Government side of the House, where members keep saying: “How will we afford it?”. We cannot afford the current situation, not financially and not morally.

Oh gosh, there are just too many things. We know what is happening: the admission of 42,000 children to hospital with preventable diseases. What country is this? There have been 1,600 deaths caused by inadequate housing. What country is this? The Government has had 9 years to fix this—9 years—and last year it put through a shoddy bill.

Our standards need to be better, and this bill is a good start. Also, the standards need better enforcement. I want to go back to one of the submissions—and it does relate to this bill—on the Government’s bill, where the standards are not good enough. It was for the residential tenancies amendment stuff that the Government put through last year. One of the submissions that will stay with me was from the Sisters of Mercy Wiri, from Sister Anne Hurley, who was very, very clear that the families that she advocates for—when it comes to poor properties and poor rental housing—are afraid of making a noise. They are afraid of taking anything to the Tenancy Tribunal. They are afraid of raising an issue with the landlord. Now do we understand why? Do we here, in this privileged House, understand why? It is too much living on the edge, knowing that you could be kicked out just for raising the issue.

We will be supporting this bill. We need to have standards that save lives and stop sickness, and we need better enforcement of the standards. Standards are nothing if tenants feel afraid to say anything about the mould that is coming through the wall. Come on, Government; come on, this House of Representatives—let us represent. Thank you.

Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): I rise in support of this bill. When the member who introduced this bill, Andrew Little, took the first call on this tonight, he asked a very simple question for members in this House, and it was: “Whose side are you on?”.

It is as simple as that. We have seen spinning on the head of a pin by Government members. First of all, the argument was: “We do not need this bill, because we are doing it anyway.” Then we had: “This is an unsophisticated one and a half pages, which we do not need.” And then, finally, we got to the crux of the matter when we heard from the previous National speaker, Ian McKelvie, and that was: “It is too expensive.”

Well, at what price? Every year, 42,000 children are admitted to hospital because they live in cold, damp, and mouldy houses. We have 15 children a year who die because their houses are not of an adequate standard. On this side of the House, we make no apology for asking people to choose which side they are on. To hear members saying that it would be too difficult to put in place an inspectorate to make sure we do not have homes that are a threat to our children’s lives is simply galling. It simply shows which side this Government is on, and it is not on the side of the children who are being admitted to hospital.

What we have at the moment is a piece of legislation—a Residential Tenancies Act—that says landlords have to insulate to a 1978 standard. I remember growing up in the 1970s. I remember seeing my breath in my bedroom. I remember ice on the inside of my windows. I remember a cold house. I think we can do better, and that is exactly what this bill of Andrew Little does.

We have heard—again, the dancing on the pin—“It doesn’t specify what the standard will be.” It is very simple, and I will reiterate it: we have made it clear, all the way through, that the standard would be set by regulation so that it could be adjusted as it was necessary without having to come back to this House to make those amendments. It is not unheard of to do that by regulation, and we have been very clear that it would be the 2008 standard. This would result in some huge benefits in terms of our houses and their healthiness and whether or not people get sick in them.

We have seen the evidence come in. We have seen, from the Children’s Commissioner, the number of people who get sick, but also we have seen evidence of the number of hospital days that would be saved by insulating to this higher standard. But not only is it insulating, because you do not keep warm in an insulated house—even the best-insulated house—if there is no efficient way to heat that house. If you are on a low income, you actually need an ability to heat that house. What this bill does is make a requirement to have efficient and clean sources of heating in those homes, so these can be homes that can be heated. To say that you cannot measure how warm that is is just nonsense. This is managed all around the world, and if we cannot manage it here, then there is something that is seriously deficient. It is something that we cannot contemplate or accept.

Then, for the Government to claim that it has done more than Labour did is simply nonsense. What we had was a National Government that came into power in 2008 and scrapped a scheme that, if it was still running today, would have seen more homes better insulated than we currently have. This is a Government that is content for our children to be admitted to hospital or to die, because it thinks it is too expensive for us to insulate and heat our homes adequately. That is not the side the Labour Party is on, and it is not a side that we are willing to accept. That is why Andrew Little’s bill should proceed.

JONO NAYLOR (National): Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, and I apologise for jumping the gun 5 minutes ago. I do want to start this contribution by just clarifying a couple of things, because I have heard it said a lot of times this evening—and I heard it a year ago when we were passing the amendment to the Residential Tenancies Act—that, actually, the Government is only enforcing a 1978 insulation standard. The way that is described by Opposition members is that that is the only standard that someone actually has to comply with. That is fundamentally not true.

Yes, if a house was built after 1978 and if it is compliant with those 1978 standards, under the residential tenancies legislation passed last year it does not require further insulation. But if the house was built prior to 1978, then landlords will be required, by July of 2019, to actually insulate those properties up to the 2008 standard. It is not just a simple carte blanche 1978 as has been described by a number of speakers this evening—and I have heard it bandied around at other times as well. There actually is an aim and a goal, particularly for houses post 2008, of course, but those prior to 1978 need to comply with the 2008 standard.

I have got to say that when I picked up this bill I saw, for a start, the title, and I thought “Yes. Yes, I can commit to healthy homes. I can commit to us wanting to have young people in New Zealand growing up in houses that are warm and dry. Yes, we do want to have people growing up in places that are healthy.”

Carmel Sepuloni: Cross the floor then, Jono—the only way you’re going to get it.

JONO NAYLOR: Do we accept that 42,000 being admitted to hospital each year is acceptable? No, it is not. So we have got to take measured steps to ensure that we do bring that down, and that is exactly what we did last year with the residential tenancies legislation.

What I have had, just at the moment, though, is some people from across the House calling out to me, saying: “So cross the floor and vote for this bill.” I could be tempted to do that, I have to say, if I thought this bill was actually going to do what those members say it is going to do. The difficulty is that when you draft a bill and it is 3 pages long, like this one, it is a little bit light on detail.

This is the third member’s bill this evening that I have spoken on. The first one was the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment Bill from Chris Bishop—a very good bill. It was very well drafted. It is very easy to comprehend exactly—

Carmel Sepuloni: What’s that got to do with this?

JONO NAYLOR: Wait—just wait. I am getting to it. Be patient. With that bill, it was very clear what the expectations of people to comply with that bill would be. It was very clear what the law would be going forward and what would be the standard that was acceptable. With this bill it is very short on some of those details. We had the same with the Private International Law (Choice of Law in Tort) Bill. It had very clear guidelines.

So when I hear people saying “Well, they are members’ bills. We cannot expect them to necessarily have all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, and we can sort that out during the select committee process or otherwise.”, I do not think that is required. I could see from the members’ bills put forward by Government members tonight that it is indeed possible to have precise, well-drafted, and good law for us to be able to follow.

When we did the Residential Tenancies Amendment Act 2016 a year ago, it was very clear that the new type of smoke alarms would have to be installed in every rental property by July 2016. That date has come and gone, and those now need to be in place. There we go. Compliance—easy. We knew, as members of this House, what we were voting on when those standards were put in place. We knew that those standards of insulation would need to be in place by July 2019. We knew what the regime would be for enforcement. It was very clear.

However, in this bill, the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2), I am not even sure what standard I am voting for. New section 132A, in clause 6, is headed “Function of Ensuring Healthy Homes”, and what is being said here is: “(a) the standards must describe what constitutes adequate—(i) methods of heating;”. Well, I know there are very many ways to heat a house. I know of houses that have got heat pumps in them—that is a pretty effective one. I know of houses that have got fireplaces in them. Those can be effective. But what I do not know from this legislation is what is going to be deemed to be acceptable.

So what I am being asked to vote for tonight is some sort of blank cheque that says: “We’d like things to be better.” What Andrew Little has said in this bill is: “I’d like things to be better. Just don’t ask me how good they should be, because I don’t know, because I haven’t put it in my bill. I’d just like them to be better. Can you please vote for it to be better, and then we’ll find some people to run away and figure out what those standards may or may not be.” I do not think that is good ins—well, it is not insulation. It is not good legislation, and it is not good for us as a Parliament to be going round voting for things when we do not know what we are voting for.

There is no description of what the standard will be for methods of insulation, yet we had in the Residential Tenancies Amendment Act very clear guidelines on what those standards would be and what would need to be done to enforce them.

The idea of indoor temperatures has been well canvassed. On any given day you could walk into my house and it may or may not be at the appropriate temperature because someone forgot to turn the gas heater on or otherwise, or one of the kids has gone out and left the back door open, or whatever it is. It certainly happens a lot at our place—well, it used to happen when the kids were at home, to be fair. Now there is just me to blame.

But what can happen when you get to this bill is that you say: “What’s the minimum temperature? What’s the right temperature?”. Well, there are all sorts of world safety guidelines, and, actually, we would have a chance if there was a number in here. If the Government Administration Committee had received information telling it what the right temperature would be, or if someone had done some research prior to drafting the bill—there is a novel thought—and had actually proposed a number and given a rationale for it, I might have been tempted to vote for it. But at the moment I have got this one line that says: “(a) the standards must describe what constitutes adequate … indoor temperatures;”. Well, I do not see anything fixed on there that I can actually pin that to and say that I will vote for this or otherwise. Ventilation, draught stopping, drainage—I could go on and on and on. There are no minimum standards and nothing for us to point to and vote on.

There are a number of issues that lead to houses falling into a state of disrepair—into mould-growing or otherwise. I was talking to a landlord recently, who had a—

Carmel Sepuloni: Try talking to a tenant.

JONO NAYLOR: Well, I talk to tenants, as well. Anyway, on this particular occasion I happened to be talking to the landlord—and I have spoken to plenty of tenants as well—who said that 5 years earlier, they had completely redone the bathroom in this property. It was all in good condition. They had installed a heat pump for the tenants, and it could be adequately warmed. For the first 3½ years, there were no issues with mould whatsoever in the bathroom, so clearly the design of the house was adequate. The landlord had done what was necessary to ensure that there would be no mould. Miraculously, in the last year and a half, mould had become an issue in the property. The house is probably—I do not know—a 1980s-built house. There was no evidence of mould beforehand, but in the last 18 months, yes there is. So what had probably been happening was that somebody had been using the bathroom and not opening the windows afterwards or not turning the fan on while it was occurring—

Carmel Sepuloni: Oh, those silly tenants!

JONO NAYLOR: No, well, actually, on that particular occasion—

Carmel Sepuloni: That’s what he’s saying—those silly tenants. It’s all their fault they’re getting mould.

JONO NAYLOR: I am saying that on this occasion, actually, the landlord had done everything they could to ensure that the house was in the right condition to be able to be lived in well.

So the problem I have with this bill is that it is actually looking to try to hold landlords accountable for some things that they cannot actually be held accountable for. Indoor temperature is one of them. Whether a house is being adequately ventilated is another. So as much as my heart says that there is a lot of good intention in this bill—and good on Andrew Little for having some good intention in bringing it forward—unfortunately, though, either he or the people who have been helping him out forgot to do the research before putting the bill together. They forgot to actually do some work. They left a bunch of generalities and left the setting of the standards to somebody else, to be done at a later date. Nice idea; poor execution. I cannot support it.

JENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Thank you for this opportunity to speak on Andrew Little’s Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2). This bill is vitally important for thousands and thousands of New Zealanders. We are here to debate the principles of this bill. The basic approach of Andrew Little’s bill is simple and clear, Jono Naylor. It will bring into law a bottom line that we in this House should defend on behalf of the people who brought us here to Parliament. We are here to represent and be the voice of the people who elect us to be here. For those members on the opposite side of this House, I say that no New Zealand adult or child should have to live in a house that makes them sick or makes their children sick.

But can I just address the member Jono Naylor, because he said that this bill is unclear. Well, this Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) will amend the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 and has the purpose of ensuring that every rental home in Aotearoa New Zealand meets minimum standards of heating and insulation. At the moment, landlords already have obligations under the Residential Tenancies Act—that is true—but there is no guidance about the specific standards that they must meet to ensure that every house is warm and dry. This bill—Andrew Little’s bill—will amend the Residential Tenancies Act to require the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to ensure that there are minimum standards that are set for heating and insulation within 6 months. This bill also amends the Act to require that all landlords must meet those standards.

It is very clear that most New Zealanders do not think it is acceptable that our children continue to be sick and that in some instances some of our children die as a result of poor housing. Too many of our children are dying, and I want to just remind this House that one of those kids—a toddler who was just over 2 years old—was from Ōtara in my electorate of Manukau East in South Auckland. The mother of this child went to the landlord many, many times, asking and begging the landlord to maintain the house that they lived in. This was a house that was cold, freezing, and mouldy, and it was not healthy. It was not just this child who was a toddler who was sick many times and who was in hospital for various conditions. Her older brother, who was 6 years old, had previously been diagnosed with rheumatic fever. So you would think that if the system actually worked, those two combined—and in this instance, the landlord was the Government: Housing New Zealand—should have actually done something to ensure that this family lived in a healthy condition. But it was not until this child had passed away—and we know from the coroner that one of the main reasons why she died was the poor condition of the house that they lived in.

It is not good enough that this continues to happen. We know from doctors and the statistics they have quoted, that they have told us to date, that we have at least up to 15 children die from respiratory conditions, and it is mainly to do with the poor condition of the houses that they live in. We also know from statistics that the hospital admissions for children across Aotearoa New Zealand—over 40,000 people are admitted to hospital. We will not only save lives when we pass a bill like this that Andrew Little has put through to the House but we will also be saving taxpayers’ money, because as people are admitted to hospital many times over, especially during the winter, it is us—all of us as taxpayers—who actually pay for that.

There are many reasons, but one of them is that New Zealand is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Pursuant to article 27 of the UN convention, every child—every single child—has the right to an adequate standard of living. This includes housing. This National Government has an obligation to uphold its commitment to this convention. It should take this obligation seriously. When we see the effects of poor quality housing on our children, on our tamariki—and it includes our children dying—we should, for legislation like this, which could save lives, put aside our political differences and actually agree that it is important to save people’s lives.

According to the submission from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner on Andrew Little’s bill, more than half of all New Zealand children—especially those living in poverty—are living in private rental houses. We know that one of the reasons why the Children’s Commissioner supports this bill is that it actually goes further than the current standards for insulation. This bill—Andrew Little’s bill—includes rigorous standards for heating and ventilation.

The Government, as I said earlier on, is obligated under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and various other conventions. Meeting the health and safety obligations is actually considered a normal cost of doing business in most industries. Why is it that we are not providing a place that is healthy for tenants, for people to live in? Why is it that we are not ensuring that the normal cost of doing business, for property owners, is also something that we should consider, that we should pass into legislation?

New Zealand is currently facing a housing crisis, and this housing crisis is most acutely felt and experienced especially by those who are low income, and especially those who live in Auckland. We know that there are many families who are living in substandard conditions, and one of the things that the honourable Minister Nick Smith said earlier on is that currently the Government’s regulations are already dealing with some of these issues and that there is a compliance obligation and a department at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment that is already enforcing standards.

But why is it that there are so many boarding houses, why is it that there are so many rental houses in my electorate in South Auckland and Manukau East where these regulations are not actually enforced? Why is it that when we go visiting some of these boarding houses there are so many houses that do not even have glass in the windows and so many houses where it is actually more freezing inside the house than it is outside the house? So the question is this—it is not whether the current obligation is being adhered to. The question is whether this National Government actually cares enough to ensure that we are saving people’s lives, that we are making sure that the current regulations are being complied with?

Just yesterday, the Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Little, received a petition from medical students and from those who are working in the medical profession. These are people who are seeing, on the front line, our children and our families who are coming to seek assistance. One of the things they stated in their submission—over a thousand people signed this—is that “together we can make a difference in ensuring that New Zealand homes are warm and insulated—that they improve the health of our children and families.” As I said earlier on, this is one bill that will save lives.

Another submission was from a resident here in Wellington, Jenny Ritchie, “that New Zealand has had a proud history of caring for its children.”, but it is now “an embarrassment to find … the differential between rich and poor is so extreme, and that there are many families who are struggling to house and nourish their children.” We need to make a stand. We need to make a commitment to do everything that we can as a nation to ensure the well-being of our young children. We in this House, as members of Parliament, can make this stand, and I urge members of the opposite side of this House to agree with us, to pass this bill, and to make sure that we are saving as many lives as possible. Thank you.

MAUREEN PUGH (National): It is my pleasure tonight to stand and support my colleagues on this side of the House in opposing the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) in its second reading. This does not mean that I am opposed to healthy homes—no. In fact, what it means, from this side of the House, is that we support healthy homes but in a very practical sense that is achievable and does not impose added cost to the tenants of those homes.

I do note that this bill was referred to the Government Administration Committee on 4 May 2016. That may explain why it has fallen behind and has not kept up with where the Government actually is at the present point in time. But it is clear that things have moved substantially in the intervening period, thanks to this National-led Government. Under this progressive and responsible Government, substantially more is already being done than this bill seeks to deliver. We are already doing it.

We have already insulated 30,000 State homes. We are walking the talk with our own housing stock as responsible landlords—more than any Government in our country’s history. We have subsidised ceiling and underfloor insulation for 290,000 private sector homes through the Warm Up New Zealand programme. Further to that, changes to residential tenancies legislation will see the retrofitting of insulation for a further 180,000 homes by 1 July 2019—not 2023, as proposed by this bill. Altogether, it will be for 500,000 homes—10 times what the previous Labour Government achieved. That amounts to a total investment in insulation of $116 million for Housing New Zealand stock and $450 million for Warm Up New Zealand grants—a total of $566 million invested into insulation.

Another programme under way is the Healthy Homes Initiatives, led by the Minister of Health, the Hon Jonathan Coleman. We have seen 11 district health boards across New Zealand refer 2,838 people for insulated drapes, floor coverings, beds, ventilation, and heating, and this programme on its own is credited with the 45 percent drop in rheumatic fever since 2012. We know that investing in warm, dry, safe homes is absolutely essential and vital to the health of Kiwis, especially their children, and we will continue to ensure that they get our support.

The difference between the two programmes is that one funds insulation and the other funds a bit of insulation but a whole lot of bureaucracy and diverts funds into inspectors, who will then be able to go into people’s homes to take the temperatures, and that will most certainly increase the costs. I know one couple—and I have had this debate with them in the past, because one likes their room really warm and the other one likes their room very cool. How is an inspector going to equalise that problem for that couple? Whether they as tenants wish to pull the drapes, whether they turn on the heater or close the doors is entirely up to them, not a temperature inspector.

Mr Little, when he introduced his bill earlier tonight, called it “symbolic”, and it is symbolic. It is symbolic of the approach that will most certainly increase costs for tenants. There is no way that you can increase the bureaucracy in something like this without imposing costs. That will inevitably be passed on to the tenants. That, in turn, will put pressure on already pressurised housing stock. But we are focused and determined that that will not happen. In fact, this Government actually did consider a full warrant of fitness scheme back in 2013 and trialled that experiment on its own Housing New Zealand Corporation stock. But the cost of that programme was, back then, $100 million a year. It was very clear that that cost would have had to be passed back on to the tenants, so that programme was abandoned for that reason.

I would like to quote from the New Zealand Property Investors Federation executive officer, Andrew King, who noted during the discussion on this bill: “We have been saying for years that a full rental property Warrant of Fitness actually isn’t in the best interest of tenants. It is expensive to administer and comply with and would no doubt be added to over time with the potential to take some properties out of the rental pool.” That is not an outcome that this side of the House supports, and, as a result, we will not be increasing costs to our tenants.

We have already moved to provide hundreds of thousands of tenants with greater protection through strengthened protection. We have provided for smoke alarms, which are estimated to save an average of three lives a year. We are in agreement that Kiwi families deserve warm, dry, safe home—no one disagrees with that—but we must do it in a way that does not have negative consequences.

In a former role—and I note tonight that the last three speakers from this side of the House as former mayors have all had the same role—we would have all participated with the Crown entity the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA). I know from my own personal experience in dealing with EECA through its very enthusiastic advocates—I am sure my one, Mike, will remember coming to the West Coast—that EECA promotes these packages that support home insulation.

There is very clear data now that supports the home insulation packages, and the biggest beneficiaries of those are in the health sector, with absolute reduced numbers of admissions for respiratory illnesses, and that is a direct result of insulating homes and making them warmer and drier. That data is absolutely stark, so there is no question about the impact of that. But EECA is actually running those programmes on behalf of the Government, and the Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes programme, which I have referred to earlier, offers the grants for insulation and retrofitting to make those homes warmer, drier, and healthier.

As a matter of interest to people who hear us talking about these insulation programmes but may not know how to actually access them, the grants are available for homeowners and landlords, and grants of 50 percent of the cost of insulation are now available as well for low-income earners and landlords with low-income tenants. These Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes grants are limited and will finish by the end of June next year, so I do encourage not only tenants to encourage their landlords but people on low incomes and landlords with low-income tenants to take the best advantage of these grants, as they are available right now. If the house was built before the year 2000, and if you own the home and have a community services card, or your tenant has a community services card, then these grants are available. But, also, if you have high health needs you are also eligible for these insulation packages. If you simply have high health needs—yes.

Yes, in summary, my colleague Matt Doocey earlier tonight gave a very inspiring speech and used the rugby analogy of looking at the scoreboard. That is what I would like to finish on—looking on the scoreboard—and the numbers do speak for themselves: 500,000 homes insulated, $566 million invested in warm, dry, safe homes. Numbers speak for themselves.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2) be now read a second time.

Ayes 60

New Zealand Labour 31; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12; Māori Party 2; United Future 1.

Noes 59

New Zealand National 58; ACT New Zealand 1.

Bill read a second time.

Bills

Rates Rebate (Retirement Village Residents) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I move, That the Rates Rebate (Retirement Village Residents) Amendment Bill be now read a second time. Early in the 1970s a great Prime Minister Norman Kirk looked at the situation that low-income earners found themselves in after they purchased a house and were, obviously, faced with an annual rates bill, which, for people then and now, is big. There is no way of avoiding it—it is not an option. You cannot say: “Oh, I’ll do without the rates so I won’t pay my rates.” It is not like food or clothes or travel; you have to pay it. So he decided to introduce a rates rebate scheme—that was central government money that was passed through to homeowners via local government. It was on a sliding scale, so the higher your rates and the lower your income, the more money you got. It is a very straightforward scheme based on an important principle: that people on low incomes who have high expenses not of their choosing deserve some financial support.

In those days, there was no such thing as licence to occupy; there was just freehold title or leasehold title. There was no such thing as licence to occupy. In fact, even now, within retirement villages—which are what this bill seeks to address—there is a mix of freehold title, unit title, and licence to occupy. This bill wants to extend the eligibility for applications for rates rebate to those in retirement villages who have a licence to occupy. Those people pay rates. They pay them to the retirement village owner, and the retirement village owner then passes them over to the city council or district council.

The owners of villages support this legislation because they know it would advantage their residents. The retirement village residents support this because, again, they know it will advantage the residents who find it difficult—if they are solely dependent on superannuation, particularly—to pay their rates bill. It is exactly the same situation that Norman Kirk saw in the 1970s that we are facing now; it is just that the nature of the relationship between the person who lives in the unit in the retirement village and the village owner has changed. We no longer have as many unit titles.

I had an email from a woman today who lives in a retirement village in Mosgiel. She said “I really hope your bill gets passed, because when I bought my unit in the retirement village I had no option but to buy under a licence to occupy regime.”—so you pay a big deposit and then you pay ongoing fees. You have a licence to occupy; you do not have ownership. But she said that people who were also in exactly the same village, in exactly the same type of unit, had purchased 20 years ago and have got a unit title. They get a rates rebate; she does not. She thinks that is not fair, and I do not think it is fair either. I think she should get a rates rebate.

When I introduced this bill to the House and explained it in that way, every single member of this Parliament supported the bill to go to the Local Government and Environment Committee. I was delighted. It is not very often that that happens. It is not very often that legislation is passed without exception. It is not very often that I agree with David Seymour, actually, but on this occasion I am delighted that he and I agree. The bill went to the select committee, and the submissions that we got were thoughtful and helpful. A lot proposed amendments. A lot said to make sure that this system works as efficiently as the rates rebate does for homeowners. The Retirement Villages Association, the organisation that represents the owners of retirement villages, came along very early and put its hand up and said: “We can help make this work for the owners. We can help make this work.” Local Government New Zealand came along and put its hand up: “We can make this work.” The Residents Association said: “We can make this work. We can help make it work efficiently.” Everyone is onside.

The committee asked for an extension of 2 months. I did not think they needed it. It is a small bill; it does something very straightforward. There is no complexity about this, actually. Anyone who thinks this is complex is simple. I granted the 2 months’ extension when the Hon Scott Simpson—who was not honourable at that stage but has since been appointed to the executive. I granted the 2 months’ extension, and in that time the select committee did nothing—did nothing—to engage with those three organisations that had come along and put their hands up, saying: “We’ll help make this work.”

I went to the last deliberation of the select committee, and the chairperson of the select committee—it would have made you laugh if it had not been such an important issue for so many of our senior citizen residents—said this is a complex issue. No it is not; it is extending the rates rebate to people in a licence to occupy—no complexity about it. He said there will be some other forms of homeownership other than what is already covered by the rates rebate and what this extends to, so there will be another anomaly. Good—introduce a member’s bill, Mr Bayly, and fix that, if you can find one, but you know you cannot. If you can find another anomaly, introduce a member’s bill and fix it.

Then the committee said this could cost money. Well, that is rocket science, is it not? That is very good. The members of that committee may not know that every year there is an appropriation in the Budget for rates rebates, and not 1 year since 1973 when it was introduced has that full appropriation been used, so there is money in the bank sitting there ready to be spent. I think residents of retirement villages should be the recipients of that money.

Then the chairman, Mr Bayly, said: “Oh, this is going to be so difficult for councils to administer.” You know, Auckland Council does it now. To be honest, and I do not want to offend Aucklanders—oh, yes, there are a few Aucklanders; actually, I am surrounded by Aucklanders, I will make no comment. Auckland Council administers a rates rebate scheme for residents of retirement villages who have a licence to occupy. It does it. It thought it was fair, but it uses ratepayers’ money, not taxpayers’ money. Kāpitī does it; other councils are looking at doing the same thing, because they think it is fair.

So having gone through a great process at the first reading and gone through what I think was a very engaged and—receiving offers of help from organisations that know this stuff far better than any members of Parliament; the Retirement Villages Association, the Retirement Village Residents Association of New Zealand, and Local Government New Zealand, all offering help. The National Government then says: “Oh, what a good idea, but we’re not going to support it.” It is the second example of petty party politics getting in the way of just doing some good for people who deserve support.

Those people in Mosgiel, in the retirement village, will be listening to this debate. They know that five units down from them on the same street there is somebody getting a rates rebate because they bought over 20 years ago and have a unit title, and they are not getting a rates rebate because they did not plan ahead well enough. They should have bought long before they needed to so they did not end up with a licence to occupy.

It is stupid, but it is not stupid deliberately; it is stupid because our legislation did not keep up with the changing nature of occupancy in retirement villages. They are expanding, we know. Every time you turn around there is another retirement village. We should take this opportunity to support legislation that will give additional financial support to those who meet the criteria and are eligible for a rates rebate. It is a very small measure, but I think it would be something good that we could progress before the election for the benefit of those people. Rates bills are big. If you are on superannuation, they are really big. This is the chance for us to help those people.

Before I finish, I want to acknowledge those organisations that I said came along to offer their help. I also want to offer my thanks to Grey Power New Zealand branches all over the country, which have debated this bill and totally support it. It is a good measure. We are not going to get to vote on it tonight because we do not have enough time for 12 speeches, but we have got another member’s day before we rise for the election, and we have other members’ days after that. I certainly know that this bill will be continued. It is time the rates rebate—such a visionary idea from Norman Kirk—was extended to people who are eligible for it but not eligible to apply because they are in a licence to occupy. It is time to address that anomaly.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): It is a pleasure to be talking on the Rates Rebate (Retirement Village Residents) Amendment Bill. First of all, I would like to congratulate the member the Hon Ruth Dyson on actually introducing this member’s bill. The purpose of the bill is laudable, understandable, and, on the face of it, fair. This bill was considered by the Local Government and Environment Committee, and, as noted before, we have spent considerable time looking at its merits.

By way of context, it is worthwhile just noting that at the moment it is estimated that there are about 34,000 retirement residents living in about 360 villages around New Zealand. I am, in fact, very conscious of the residents living in retirement villages in my own electorate, particularly the four in Pukekohe, although not exclusively there, including the very exciting new development of Ryman Healthcare, which has now got over 600 residents and is growing rapidly as it further expands.

The purpose of the bill is to provide financial support to those low-income retirees living in retirement homes. Under section 6 of the Retirement Villages Act 2003, a retirement village is defined as a part of a property that contains two or more residential accommodation units, predominantly used by or housing retired people who have also paid a capital sum to live in those villages. The rebate scheme was actually introduced back in 1973 to allow the residents living in these retirement villages to receive a rebate. Since then, as the member has just noted previously, there has been an absolute proliferation in what is called licence to occupy agreements. Previously, when the Rates Rebate Act came in in 1973, there were very simple property ownership structures. Now it is estimated that approximately 80 percent of all people living in retirement villages actually live there under a licence to occupy agreement.

In the case of licence to occupy agreements, the liability to make the rate payment rests with the owner or operator of the retirement village. It is standard that the owner or the operator of the retirement village charges the retiree living in the village a fee that covers not only the rates but also insurance and property maintenance fees. As such, most residents end up paying a rate of a sort, but, in most cases, a direct payment is not made to the council. The amount of the rebate possible for a household is actually based on income levels, the level of the rates, and also the number of dependants. The current maximum rebate at the moment is $610, with an income threshold of $24,470.

Whilst, as I said before, the aims of this bill are to be applauded, the work of the advisers showed that it is actually a very complicated bill to implement. I may be simple. However, the first issue with the bill in its present state—and I would comment that the bill has only five clauses to it—is that it does not accommodate these varied property arrangements that I referred to before. By way of example, at the moment we have freehold title, we have leasehold title, we have cross-lease, we have licence to occupy, we have lease arrangements, we have residential tenancy arrangements—to name but a few. The bill does not anticipate these arrangements. It is very simplistic in its assumptions.

The second thing related to that is that the bill proposes to amend the Rates Rebate Act of 1973 to ensure that the residents of retirement villages are considered to be ratepayers for the purposes of the Act. But in order to be to defined as a ratepayer, apart from meeting those income thresholds that I specified before, a person must be a ratepayer, and, secondly, a ratepayer in relation to the property in question. The issue with the Local Government (Rating) Act of 2002 is that for the purposes of determining the ratepayer, this is defined as the person who was nominated on the rating information database and on the district valuation roll. Here is the rub. To be named on the database, the person must be the owner of the village—of the property in the village—and licence to occupy arrangements do not mean that the person owns the property. What this bill is seeking to do is to provide a connection between the resident and the ownership of the property, which at the moment is broken because of the licence to occupy arrangement.

The next thing that the bill raises is what the apportioned rates cost is. The second issue is that it is not always easy to ascertain this. For example, it is estimated that about a third of all village operators agree with their new tenants or residents on a fixed fee at the outset of going into that village, and at that point it is a set fee for the rest of the term of the licence to occupy that has no relation to the actual increase in rates that may occur over time. It is also common that village operators link the payment, which may include property maintenance and insurance, as I referred to, to the increase in superannuation. There is no direct link to the actual increase in the rate or, in fact, a direct link to the rate itself. As such, how you calculate what is appropriate is a real, substantial issue.

The other thing about this is that the bill does not comprehend that there actually may be a different range of rates. For example, there could be a rate on the land that the normal council rate would apply to. There could be a charge for water and waste water, and in the case of Auckland, as was referred to before, Watercare Services has a separate rate that, actually, for the purposes of rating, can possibly not be regarded as a levy, in fact. And there may be, in fact, a third rate, which is a regional council rate. Again, this bill offers no clarity on how those three rates would be interpreted or calculated or assessed. It is very simplistic in its nature.

The next issue with the bill is the administrative costs to the village owner and operator. We know that it is going to be complicated, because it requires an assessment for each of the residents. However, if a village operator wants to do it, it gives rise to an issue of privacy because to be entitled to receive a rebate, by definition you need to be on a low income, and what this does is it will require the resident to disclose to the owner of that property, that village, their straitened financial circumstances. For some that may be a barrier too far. That privacy issue is a significant issue, which, again, has not been contemplated in the bill.

The other issue with the bill is that, at the moment, we give about $56 million in rebates annually, which is paid by the Government. The increased costs associated with this bill are estimated to be between $3 million and $5 million. It is actually a very, very small number. The issue is not about money, as asserted previously by the previous member. It is not about the money; it is actually about how you implement this system, this scheme, to make sure that it is appropriate and can be implemented.

We asked for more time to work through these issues. The officials actually identified some other options that may work and that may be able to take into account these complexities that have been raised by officials and noted by members at the Local Government and Environment Committee. We sought one extension, which was granted, but, unfortunately, the second extension was not granted. I was very disappointed that the member did not choose to support that extension, because if she had, we probably would have had the time to work through and actually come up with a bill that actually works. But this bill, in its present state, is simplistic, it is poorly formulated, and on that basis we cannot support it, even though we strongly support the intent of the bill.

Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is always interesting to watch crocodile tears in this House. To say “If only we’d had more time, we would’ve supported it.” is absolute nonsense. This bill was sitting before the Local Government and Environment Committee. There were organisations that were more than prepared to answer any of the very fragile excuses that National members put up as the reasons why they could not support this bill. The real reason that the Government members wanted more time on this bill was so they did not have to go to a vote before an election when they were not going to vote in the best interests of thousands of New Zealanders.

Let us have a look at the reasons that the members opposite are putting up as to why they cannot vote for it. They are saying that it is just administratively too difficult, that it is too hard to administer, and how would you do it? Well, there are several answers to the “how”. We actually had the Retirement Villages Association saying it would work through that with the committee. But, more importantly, we can point to local authorities around the country that are already paying rates rebates to people in retirement villages. That is the most important thing. It is not too difficult; it is being done.

This original scheme was introduced in 1973 by the Rt Hon Norman Kirk. And, like most things that Norman Kirk did, it was a very pragmatic solution to an identified problem. What Norman Kirk saw was that there were a whole lot of people who were asset rich and income restrained, and that in your retirement years paying rates to the local authority on your property could be a stretch when all you had was your pension to pay for it. I think that that was a laudable scheme. It was a laudable scheme in 1973 and it certainly is a laudable scheme in 2017. I congratulate my colleague the Hon Ruth Dyson for continuing that legacy.

Both Ruth and I can trace lineage to the Rt Hon Norman Kirk in the seats that we hold.

Matt Doocey: So can I.

Dr MEGAN WOODS: That this is the kind of pragmatic solution that—well, it is a pity that Mr Doocey will not vote for it because, actually, the former member for Kaiapoi certainly saw that there were ways to help people and that there were ways to support people. So I congratulate my colleague the Hon Ruth Dyson for doing this. When this scheme was instituted in 1973, no one could have imagined the kinds of property arrangements we now have for people in their retirement years—the kinds of titles or ownership arrangements that would exist—and licence to occupy is by far and away the most common way in which people purchase a home and the type of ownership arrangement that they have. That simply is not eligible under the current legislation.

I have in my electorate some very early retirement villages; one in Hornby is one of the first retirement villages. Within that village there are about four or five different types of title. So we have the anomaly with some residents, who hold title to their villas and who can claim the rates rebate, and we have others, who are more recent purchasers of villas in that village, and they are not entitled. They live right next door. The determining factor is when they bought it and the type of title they had. I do not think this is fair, I do not think this is equitable, and I do not think that this is what the 1973 legislation was aiming to do—to discriminate against a group of people based on the type of ownership package that they had around their home.

It is a type of ownership package that we are seeing increasing numbers of New Zealanders take up as they enter their retirement years, and it is becoming far more common. So to hear the previous speaker, the chair of the select committee, Mr Bayly, who has just taken his seat, talk about there being privacy issues for this—another excuse that the Government has to not support a huge group of New Zealanders who will benefit from this legislation.

Mr Bayly’s argument is that there are privacy issues and that people would have to reveal that they are on a low income. Well, Mr Bayly needs to get out his front door a little bit more often. Fifty percent of residents in retirement villages rely solely on national superannuation as their form of income. If your only form of income is the pension, then you are eligible for the rates rebate. Mr Bayly needs to get out of his ivory tower and see that 50 percent of the people living in those villages are in this situation. That is the way most New Zealanders who are retired live; they rely on the pension, and we do not have to see that as a low income that they should be embarrassed to reveal. It is the reality for most retired people.

That is why the Labour Party, through Ruth Dyson’s bill, wants to extend that same support to those people who are living in licence to occupy villas in retirement villages, where they need that support. The very same conditions exist that existed in 1973 when Norman Kirk introduced the original legislation. So that is something that has not been adequately addressed by the Government. So we have the fact that it is too hard administratively—that is clearly nonsense. Other Governments did it. To say that they did not have time—again, nonsense. The committee had an extension and did not utilise it.

The reality is that the Government members did not want this bill coming back to the House before the election because they were not going to support it, and they know that it is bad politics to not be supporting such a group of New Zealanders who will benefit from this legislation. They can see that this is not something that they want to front up to a few weeks before an election and explain to thousands of New Zealanders why it is that they are going to deny them assistance in the way that people who only live a couple of doors down the road might receive. That is not something that can be applauded at all.

The other arguments we have heard from the National Government just do not stack up. This is a good piece of legislation. It is a piece of legislation that the National Government has bought—hook, line, and sinker. Some of the objections from officials just did not stack up. The Government did not listen to the evidence. It did not listen to the evidence of the officials who came and talked about the ways around any objection that was raised about this legislation.

By the end of the select committee process—if Government members had actually been listening; if Government members had actually been engaged in the process—none of their very flimsy arguments against the bill were left standing. It can be done; we just need to look around the country. It is not that administratively difficult. We had the time. We had the offers of help to address any concerns that were in there. We had a member, whose name this bill is in, who was more than willing to listen to advice and make any changes that resulted in better legislation as it came along.

What we have is a group of people who just failed to see that there is a group of New Zealanders who need this assistance. I think the speech from Mr Bayly made it quite clear tonight why that is. Government members just have not got their heads around the fact that for most New Zealanders relying on Government superannuation is the reality. It is the way most people live their lives. And, actually, as we did in 1973, we need to help this group of people who have moved into retirement villages.

The way in which licences to occupy operate is akin to homeownership, and more akin than in terms of people who are renting a property. There is a huge capital investment that goes into the property. It may actually be the same price for a retired person as selling their house and choosing to move into a retirement village. They may use all the capital that they had in their home, and may reinvest it in a villa in a retirement village. This is not the case as it is with someone who is renting a home.

So to discriminate against this group of people was not the intent of the original legislation in 1973. It was just that this category did not exist when the original legislation was passed. I applaud my colleague Ruth Dyson, who is trying to bring this important piece of legislation that makes a real difference in people’s lives—fast-forwarding it to 2017 and making sure that it is fit for purpose, for the reality of how an increasing number of retired people are living their lives. This is legislation that I am more than happy to support.

MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): I rise in opposition to the Rates Rebate (Retirement Village Residents) Amendment Bill in its second reading. I must say I have learnt something new. I did not know that “the Tōtara”, the big man himself, Norman Kirk, was responsible for rates rebates. He is a man who spent part of his time in my electorate of Kaiapoi—well, it was his electorate at the time, I suppose, but he was living in Kaiapoi. It is great to see another strong member of the North Canterbury community. I must say, potentially not agreeing with every point of view of his, that you would have to respect his life.

What I want to raise as a point, in the short time I have for this bill, is that we agree with the intent of the bill. That is why we supported it for the first reading. Unfortunately it was disappointing that we were not allowed further time to work through the complexity of this bill.

When you look at one key issue—so I have got a new retirement village in my electorate. I will not say the name because there are a range of providers. But they offered lifetime service fees. So, as you can imagine, it sold out pretty much straight away. There are 350 residents. So there will be some residents in there for 10, 15, or 25 years. Their service fee is capped.

One of the issues that has come out through the select committee process—and that is exactly what we are discussing here today, at the second reading: what the arguments were, what we debated, and what we learnt through that process—is that in fact a lot of retirement village residents are not, or will not be, paying their full rates because their service fee is capped. So then, how do you go through the apportionment of what percentage of the rates they are paying and what they can receive back, through the rebate?

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.