Thursday, 27 July 2017
Volume 724
Sitting date: 27 July 2017
THURSDAY, 27 JULY 2017
THURSDAY, 27 JULY 2017
Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.
Prayers.
Business Statement
Business Statement
Hon SIMON BRIDGES (Leader of the House): When the House resumes on Tuesday, 1 August the Government will look to make progress on the Appropriation (2017/18 Estimates) Bill, the Land Transport Amendment Bill, the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Amendment Bill, the Employment (Pay Equity and Equal Pay) Bill, and a number of other bills on the Order Paper.
Oral Questions
Questions to Ministers
Export Sector—Performance
1. SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill) to the Minister of Finance: What reports has he received on New Zealand’s trade exports?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Finance): The overseas merchandise trade statistics were released yesterday and they show exports for the month of June increasing just under half a billion dollars, or 11 percent, to $4.7 billion when compared with June last year. This increase in exports resulted in a monthly surplus for goods of $242 million. That is the fourth consecutive surplus. The seasonally adjusted annual goods trade deficit for the year to June was $3.7 billion, slightly lower than the $3.8 billion for the year to May. New Zealand’s strong economic plan and pro-trade policies mean that Kiwi companies and entrepreneurs are competing and succeeding on the world stage.
Sarah Dowie: What particular sectors are driving this increase in value of New Zealand exports?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: June’s increase in exports was led by dairy product exports, particularly to China. Milk powder, butter, and cheese jumped just under $400 million in the month, or 45 percent, to $1.2 billion, due to increases in both value and volume. The re-emerging strength of our dairy sector was reflected in Fonterra’s announcement this morning, I see, lifting its forecast farm-gate milk price for the upcoming season to $6.75. That is a good start to the season for farmers and relevant regional economies, following a challenging period for a number of those regions.
Sarah Dowie: How are New Zealand services exports contributing to our trade balance?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The most recent quarterly figures for services exports are available for the March year and they show that New Zealand’s services surplus stood at $1 billion for that quarter in March. Services exports have increased by $33 million for the quarter, driven by spending on transportation services. Overall services exports have increased almost one-third over the 3 years. Of course, the biggest risk our service exporters face would be reversing policies that have given them the confidence to invest and grow—for example, turning skilled workers away at the border.
Sarah Dowie: How is the Government helping exporters compete internationally?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Minister Bridges and I released the refreshed Business Growth Agenda earlier this afternoon, which lays out the Government’s ongoing commitment, not just to responsible economic management but also continual microeconomic reform and investment in infrastructure, to create an environment that businesses can continue to grow and thrive in. Our key focus for exporters is delivering Trade Agenda 2030 to make New Zealand more internationally connected through trade and investment and people flows, and to take advantage of growth across the wider Asia-Pacific region.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: How will the Government reach its much-vaunted export target of $64 billion from primary industries by 2025, with primary exports growing at less than 1 percent, with well over 150—
Hon Nathan Guy: Ten percent next year.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: —it is 1 percent right now, sunshine—biosecurity incursions since 2008, and with biosecurity funding in real terms down, not up, since 2008?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Well, the Government will first be seeking to get re-elected to continue with its strong economic plan, which is delivering strong growth for New Zealanders, and I can tell the member that I will be happy to be in this Parliament alongside him in 2025, when we get the opportunity to celebrate the success.
Land Information New Zealand—Riversdale Flats and Proposed Sale of Mt White Station
2. EUGENIE SAGE (Green) to the Minister for Land Information: Has he asked Land Information New Zealand to withdraw the 997-hectare Riversdale Flats from the proposed sale of Mt White Station pastoral lease; if not, why not?
Hon NATHAN GUY (Minister for Primary Industries) on behalf of the Minister for Land Information: No; because Land Information New Zealand cannot do that, as the flats are included in the pastoral lease, which is legally binding. I acknowledge that there is conflicting legal status around the land. That is why the Commissioner of Crown Lands is working on options to resolve this very complicated issue.
Eugenie Sage: Is the Minister saying that he and Land Information New Zealand can ignore a 1901 Gazette notice, which set aside Riversdale Flats as a reserve for national park, and which should have seen the land become part of Arthur’s Pass National Park?
Hon NATHAN GUY: No, if the member had listened to the answer to the primary question, I said that this is a very complicated issue, and, indeed, if I refer to the letter that was sent to the member earlier this week from Land Information New Zealand, it said that the Commissioner of Crown Lands is currently investigating options to resolve the land known as Riversdale Flats.
Eugenie Sage: I seek leave to table a June 2002 report by McGregor Property Services, entitled Due Diligence Report for Tenure Review: Mt White, which refers to the land status of Riversdale Flats as reserved for national park.
Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that particular document. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.
Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.
Eugenie Sage: How will the Minister ensure that Riversdale Flats is included in Arthur’s Pass National Park, as they are supposed to be, to protect their native plants, wildlife, and landscape for their own sake and so that all New Zealanders can enjoy them?
Hon NATHAN GUY: Well, I think I have already alluded to the answer to that question by referring to the letter that was sent to the member that says that the commissioner is indeed investigating options.
Eugenie Sage: Does the Minister agree with botanist Sir Alan Mark that our native short tussock grassland ecosystems like this one in this picture are “best protected in public ownership and managed as a critically important public good resource.”?
Hon NATHAN GUY: I have some sympathy with New Zealanders who really adore the outdoors—and, indeed, I am one of those persons. But what I can say is that this issue is very complicated, the Commissioner of Crown Lands is looking at it, and we need to wait for that process to work its way through.
Eugenie Sage: Does it disturb him that real estate company Colliers International is promoting the Riversdale reserve land as having great scope for agricultural development, which risks seeing land that should have been part of the national park being destroyed?
Hon NATHAN GUY: I am aware that Colliers is promoting the lease. It is interesting that in the last 6 months there have been no applications through to the department from any foreign interest.
Eugenie Sage: Why has the Minister not taken notice of the 2007 Arthur’s Pass National Park Management Plan and the Department of Conservation’s 2016 Canterbury (Waitaha) Conservation Management Strategy, which both provide for Riversdale Flats reserve to be added to the national park; and why is he only now getting around to dealing with it?
Hon NATHAN GUY: Well, I think I have already addressed that question in some detail, and the letter refers to it. In fact, I seek leave to table a letter from Land Information New Zealand to the member, dated 25 July 2017.
Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that particular letter dated 25 July this year. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.
Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.
Eugenie Sage: Is he concerned that with the pastoral lease being sold, the new owner could block public access to the Hawdon and Andrews Valleys in the national park if he does not immediately correct this past mistake and ensure that Riversdale Flats becomes part of the park?
Hon NATHAN GUY: I know that the Commissioner of Crown Lands is well aware of the issue that the member is raising. He is working through a process and we need to wait for that process to conclude.
State and Social Housing—Emergency Housing and Supply of State and Social Housing
3. PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū) to the Minister for Social Housing: Will she confirm that as of 30 June the Government has only delivered 323 of the additional 1,400 emergency beds they promised at the start of November last year?
Hon PAULA BENNETT (Deputy Prime Minister) on behalf of the Minister for Social Housing: No, but what I will confirm is that in November last year we announced our goal to deliver 2,150 places by the end of this year, and as at 30 June we have delivered 1,123 of those places. We have also acquired a further 151, which are in the process of being readied for tenants. As of today, the number is 1,423 places supporting 5,700 families per year.
Phil Twyford: Will she confirm that the Government budgeted $2 million for emergency special needs grants to put people up in motels but spent $8 million in the first quarter, $9 million in the second quarter, $13 million in the third quarter, and at current rates will spend $50 million over the year?
Hon PAULA BENNETT: As was said about June last year—and, actually, by the member’s party itself: it was quite distressed that there were people who were going into motels, which had been happening, by the way, for decades in emergency situations, and those beneficiaries themselves were expected to pick up the bill, yeah? So we did do something about it. We are picking up the bill for those who go into those motels. Because we were the first Government to actually do something about people who needed emergency places, we did not know how much it would cost in total, but we are picking up the bill for those who are most disadvantaged.
Phil Twyford: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I genuinely asked the Minister to confirm some expenditure levels over those years. I was not sort of seeking a general narrative about the issue.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! No, and I appreciate that the member may have found it hard to hear the answer. I listened very carefully to the answer, and it addressed the question: because it is such a new initiative, it is difficult to establish the funding that might be required. If the member’s own colleague could cooperate and allow the member to hear the answer, I am sure he would have realised the question was addressed.
Phil Twyford: Will she confirm that when the Government came into office in 2008, it owned—
Hon Dr Nick Smith: House prices have doubled—house prices have just doubled.
Phil Twyford: It was a long time ago.
Mr SPEAKER: Order!
Phil Twyford: Will she confirm—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! No, I am going to invite the member to start his question again, and without interjection coming from my right.
Phil Twyford: Will she confirm that when the Government came into office in 2008, it owned 69,173 State houses and it now owns 64,068—a reduction of more than 5,000?
Hon PAULA BENNETT: I believe the number is more than that, but what I will say is that we also now have social housing community providers that own homes, which the Government has, on the whole, funded—has paid partly towards the capital and is picking up the rent each week. Actually, that member might like to go back to his own speech from a couple of years ago when he actually suggested that community housing providers get to have homes themselves and rent them out to poor people and that the Government picks up the bill. So he should be saying thank you—[Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! There is little point in carrying on with the answer now, because I cannot hear it.
Phil Twyford: I have got plenty of other good policies the Minister could have—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! Could we just have the supplementary question; otherwise, I am happy to move on.
Phil Twyford: Will she confirm that according to the Ministry of Social Development’s latest quarterly report, there are only 66,068 social houses, including those provided by community providers, which is some 3,000 fewer than the number of State houses when her Government came to office?
Hon PAULA BENNETT: There are more social houses; they are just not all owned by the Government. There are indications of that if you look at Tāmaki and what is happening there, and if you look at others that are going on. I think the numbers that the member has are out of date, but I am sure that if he puts down a written question, we can get all of those most up to date for him.
Phil Twyford: Will she confirm that her briefing as the incoming Minister said that the Government has, since 2008, taken $1.8 billion out of Housing New Zealand in dividends, tax, and interest payments?
Hon PAULA BENNETT: The incoming briefing may have said that, but what it should also have said, if it did not, was the billions of extra dollars beyond that that we have put into social housing, both through capital spend and, equally, through the income-related rents for those who need it most.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Why does the Minister not admit that this is the worst housing outcome under National, exacerbated by a record 73,000 net immigration, exacerbated by 226,000 work visas, and exacerbated by the fact that we have got the lowest house ownership in 63 years and Māori house ownership is down by 38 percent under her?
Hon PAULA BENNETT: No, I will not. I know that the member would like to take us back to some mythical good old days, but, actually, I will back this country where it is at, with the growth that is happening here, over that member any day.
Phil Twyford: Why will she not admit that she is spending $140,000 a day putting homeless people up in motels because her Government has sold off so much State housing, has failed to build enough new ones, and has allowed the housing crisis to get totally out of control?
Hon PAULA BENNETT: I know that that member would like to pretend that we have only had homelessness in the last few years, but, actually, just this week we look at the gentleman who is on the streets and says he has been there for 26 years—which, by the way, was through your Government’s time as well—and, unfortunately, he thinks he will be there a lot less. He is a man who has now got a home but was homeless for three decades. I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I think I am being quite generous in giving my answers, and I would appreciate it if I could at least do that without being constantly—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! That is not an unreasonable request. There is one particular person, who should know better, who continues to interject at a very loud level. If the member Phil Twyford is going to take the opportunity to ask a supplementary question, I think his own colleagues owe him the decency of allowing at least Phil Twyford to hear the answer.
Hon PAULA BENNETT: As I was saying, we have a man who has actually been, unfortunately, homeless for three decades but has now found a house under this Government. We also have another man who has been homeless for 33 years but, thanks to the help of this Government, now has a home. The reality is that we have had to pick up those who were left behind under a Labour Government many years ago.
Earthquake, Kaikōura—State Highway 1
4. STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura) to the Minister of Transport: What update can he provide on the reinstatement of State Highway 1 following the Kaikōura earthquakes?
Hon SIMON BRIDGES (Minister of Transport): While the reinstatement work is ongoing, the Government is also taking the opportunity to invest a further $231 million to improve a 60-kilometre stretch of State Highway 1 to the north of Kaikōura, between Clarence and Ōaro. The improvements will include wider shoulders, additional safety barriers, more passing opportunities, and improved access and stopping areas for motorists. A new separated cycleway and walkway between Ōkiwi Bay and Mangamaunu will also be built, which will provide a safer and more enjoyable way for people to experience this section of the iconic coastline on foot or by bike. These improvements will make the road better than it was before and enhance the experience of all motorists using this stretch of highway.
Stuart Smith: What recent reports has he received on progress on the reinstatement of State Highway 1 following the Kaikōura earthquakes?
Hon SIMON BRIDGES: The Government’s priority is to restore the pre-earthquake transport links to Kaikōura and its surrounding communities and ensure that these vital links are resilient long term. We are doing just that, and that is why we announced, as part of this year’s Budget, the $812 million that is being invested to restore State Highway 1. I am pleased to report to the House that the various crews of workers are making really good progress on getting State Highway 1 to the north and south fully reinstated, and that as recently as this week I have been advised that the road will be open before the end of this year.
Environment Protection Authority—Glyphosate Review
5. STEFFAN BROWNING (Green) to the Minister for the Environment: Does he have confidence in the Environmental Protection Authority’s review of glyphosate?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment): Yes. The Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) sought an independent scientific review of glyphosate last year. This was undertaken by Dr Wayne Temple, the former director of the National Poison Centre. It had input from other toxicologists and was properly peer reviewed. The report’s conclusion was that glyphosate is unlikely to be genotoxic or carcinogenic to humans and does not require classification under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act as a carcinogen or as a mutagen. I note that the member welcomed that report at the time.
Steffan Browning: Is he aware that the EPA review relied on unpublished research supplied by the industry, rather than the independent peer-reviewed and published research that the International Agency for Research on Cancer used, and which led the European Commission to recommend restricting the use of those toxic sprays that contain glyphosate?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: My problem is this: the member early last year demanded that the EPA review the registration of this chemical. It was independently done by one of New Zealand’s top toxicologists, who happened to be the head, previously, of the National Poison Centre. The report was peer reviewed. It came to a conclusion that the member does not like, and now he wants to dredge up some other evidence.
Steffan Browning: Can he confirm that the Ministry of Health refused to peer review the EPA’s work because it fundamentally disagreed with the EPA’s method and need?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: No.
Steffan Browning: Why did the New Zealand EPA spend time and money arguing against the International Agency for Research on Cancer about the dangers of glyphosate, the key ingredient in sprays like Roundup?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I note that the conclusion of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority concluded it was not a carcinogen in its review of September last year. I note that the Canadian authority, the Pest Management Regulatory Agency, came to the same decision. I note that was the decision of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, but to take a cautionary approach in response to the member’s concerns and others’, we asked for it to be independently reviewed. I would just hope that one day the Green Party might have a member of Parliament with some prior qualifications in science so that we might get a rational view to these issues.
Steffan Browning: I seek leave to table a research report prepared by my office titled “Public Health Concern: Why did the New Zealand EPA ignore the world authority on cancer?”, dated 27 July 2017. [Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I do not need any more assistance, but we do not by habit in this House publish papers that are prepared by members themselves.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I seek leave to table the Environmental Protection Authority’s review of the evidence relating to glyphosate and its carcinogenicity.
Mr SPEAKER: I just want an assurance that it is not readily available on the internet for members.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: No, it has been provided to me and, given the questions, I think it would be helpful for it to be tabled in the House.
Mr SPEAKER: I need the answer to the question that was asked. Is it readily available on the internet?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I am unsure of that.
Mr SPEAKER: Then I am not prepared to put the leave. I have pointed out to members many times that they will be asked that question, and it is expected that they should know the answer.
Canterbury District Health Board—Financial Review and Funding
6. Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North) to the Minister of Health: Does he support the establishment of a cross-agency working group with Canterbury District Health Board on their finances, funding, and facilities?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): At the same time as the Canterbury District Health Board (DHB) is providing excellent clinical services to the people of the region, there is a clear path forward on the financial front, as described in the PricewaterhouseCoopers report. A range of Government agencies have had input over a long period, and it would be redundant to establish a group to relitigate decisions. The Government has supported Canterbury DHB by increasing its funding in 2017-18 to almost $1.5 billion, an increase of $73 million on the previous year. In addition to this, the Government has provided an extra $106 million to support health services following the earthquakes. The Government has also significantly invested close to $1 billion in new or redeveloped facilities for the district health board.
Dr David Clark: In light of that answer, does he think that Canterbury DHB is adequately funded?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: The DHB is funded, just like every other district health board, according to the population-based funding formula. It is providing more appointments, more operations, and more doctors and nurses year by year.
Dr David Clark: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. That was a very simple, direct question, and I do not believe—
Mr SPEAKER: Can I refer the member—it would be helpful if he looked at Speaker’s ruling 195/6. When he asks for an opinion in a question like that, he is unlikely to get an exact answer that will satisfy the member who has asked the question. The question was definitely addressed.
Dr David Clark: On whose authority did his director-general tell Canterbury and other DHBs they could keep funding that was incorrectly allocated to them in Budget announcements?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: The director-general is responsible for his own statements, but, certainly, that was not my view. I am pretty clear about that, am I not?
Dr David Clark: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I did not hear what the Minister said—and there was silence, Mr Speaker.
Mr SPEAKER: Then can I suggest, when the member asks a question, that instead of interrupting, he listen to the answer. I heard the answer, but I am going to be generous to the member. I am going to ask him to ask his question again, to allow the Minister to reply. If he listens and does not have interjections from his colleagues, I am sure he will then hear the answer, and he will know that the question has been addressed. On this occasion, repeat the question.
Dr David Clark: On whose authority did his director-general tell Canterbury and other DHBs they could keep funding that was incorrectly allocated to them in Budget announcements?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Well, there is only me and him, so if it was not me, it must have been him.
Dr David Clark: Now that he has had a copy of Paula Rebstock’s draft performance report in his office for more than a month, can he tell the House what he expects its main findings to be?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: You will have to be specific about the report you are referring to; I am not sure what you have had leaked.
Dr David Clark: I seek leave to table a document where the Minister admits he has scanned, skimmed, and looked through the performance review in response to a question about precisely this, in Parliament. It is a transcript not available but prepared in my office in relation to his oral question on 21 June.
Mr SPEAKER: On the basis of the answer given, I will put the leave. The House will decide whether that transcript may be of use. Leave is sought to table that particular transcript. Is there any objection? There is objection.
Hon Michael Woodhouse: What other reports has he had on the provision of health services in the South Island?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I had a report yesterday in the House from a Dr David Clark, stating that at one point on the afternoon of 25 July, “there was not a single ICU bed available in the whole of the South Island”. Naturally concerned, I sought to verify this very serious claim. Officials ran around and came back to me in double quick time to assure me that, in fact, South Canterbury and Canterbury both had ICU beds available on that date, and there was capacity in the South Island to take transfers from other DHBs if required. Of course, a parliamentary colleague would never make figures up, so, sadly, it seems—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I do not think I need to hear any more of that answer.
Dr David Clark: Does he have confidence in the Director-General of Health?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Yes, I do, but I have no confidence in—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! We do not need that. We do not need the latter part.
Dr David Clark: In light of that answer, is he aware that in half an hour’s time, the leadership of the Canterbury DHB is preparing to meet with the State Services Commissioner in relation to a formal complaint about his director-general?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I am aware of that, but I would not believe it if the only source of that statement was you.
Cancer Services—Intraoperative Radiotherapy
7. DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT) to the Minister of Health: Does he stand by all his answers to Oral Question No. 6 on 6 June regarding intraoperative radiotherapy for breast cancer?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): Yes, I do, especially the statement “This is essentially a debate between clinicians and scientists as to the most effective treatment, and that the best advice is that the evidence around IORT is still emerging.”, and also the bit where I said that “We have to take the best expert advice, and that is what I am going on.”
David Seymour: If the best advice is required, why then did the Ministry of Health not provide the tier 3 report on the benefits of intraoperative radiotherapy to Deloitte when it commissioned Deloitte to carry out a health economics report on the practice, and that seems to be the advice the Minister is relying on?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I receive a range of advice, including advice, actually, that I had today at the opening of the new cancer centre here in Wellington, where I spoke to a medical oncologist. I said to her: “What’s your view on IORT?”. This doctor said to me: “Well, the evidence is very much out, but what I can tell you is that the radiation oncologists here in Wellington are not in favour of it, on the basis of the evidence.” I can give you the person’s name if you would like to go and meet them.
David Seymour: Is the Minister really saying that the way he makes policy is through a collection of anecdotes from talking to random doctors as he goes about his business?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: No, what I am saying is that I rely on the best expert advice, I read the clinical papers—the scientific papers—and then, of course, I go out and talk to people working the front line. That would be a great thing for the member to do too—it might help him in Epsom.
David Seymour: Do not let it get to you, Jonathan. Why then did the Ministry of Health’s tier 3 report on the benefits of intraoperative radiotherapy say that “The TARGIT-A trial provided sufficient evidence to carry out work on the National Health Committee’s other domains, and there is reasonably good evidence that the follow-up period is sufficient and that non-inferiority has been demonstrated.”? Why then, if that report has vindicated the treatment, is the Minister saying, in his answers to my last oral question on this topic, that he is waiting for 2020, when Australia, Canada, the UK, the US, and China are already successfully using this treatment?
Mr SPEAKER: There are at least two questions in that one supplementary question.
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Look, the reason is the member is taking a small slice about that report and not quoting it in its full context. My advice to him would be to get out of the weeds and the details, and focus on the wider issue, which is the excellent performance of the health system in regard to cancer treatment. That is what the people in Epsom are really going to be concerned about. They are not focusing on these niche issues from some of your sponsors.
David Seymour: Is the Minister of Health saying to the women of New Zealand that breast cancer and the best treatment for it is a “niche issue”?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: No, the member knows I am not saying that. It is an absolutely very important issue, and that is why we are focused on providing the best-available evidence-backed treatment. That is why we have made massive investment in cancer services. That is why we have a very clear cancer strategy. That is why we have a cancer target that shows and strives for 90 percent of patients receiving their treatment within 62 days of being referred. That is the gold standard, that is what we are aiming for, and that is what we are hitting. That is what the member should focus on, not all this detail—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! What does the member wish to do?
David Seymour: Supplementary question, Mr Speaker.
Mr SPEAKER: No, I am afraid the member has used all of his supplementary questions.
Immigration Policy—Skilled Migrant Category
8. BARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country) to the Minister of Immigration: What recent announcements has he made in relation to immigration settings?
Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister of Immigration): Today I confirmed changes to essential skills work visa conditions, which will be introduced on 28 August. These changes were first proposed in April, following which there was extensive and valuable consultation. The policies consulted on have been largely confirmed, with broad support for the Government’s goals of clarity for temporary visa holders, ensuring only higher-skilled and higher-paid migrants can stay longer, and ensuring Kiwis are at the front of the queue for those jobs.
Barbara Kuriger: What changes have been confirmed that differ from the initial proposal?
Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: We have amended the remuneration threshold for the mid-skilled migrant category, which will now be set at 85 percent of the median income. That figure will be $41,538, instead of the $48,859 that was proposed in consultation. The new threshold recognises the fact that migrant workers in this band are filling genuine shortages and are more likely to progress with further skills acquisition, work experience, and consequent pay increases. It provides more certainty for employers in planning and training their workforce.
Barbara Kuriger: What was some of the key feedback he heard during the consultation period?
Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Some of the feedback revealed a misunderstanding—that roles paying less than the minimum wage would no longer be filled by overseas workers. That was not correct, and may have been influenced by regressive policies being announced by other parties at that time. Overseas workers can still be recruited when there is a genuine need. I would like every single one of the more than 10,000 jobs being created each month to be filled by Kiwis, and the Government will work with businesses to that end, but it will not throw business under a political bus with regressive immigration policies.
Iain Lees-Galloway: Why on earth did he not consult on these policy changes before he announced them, rather than putting himself through this embarrassing back-down?
Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: This policy has been the culmination of 2½ years of consultation with business and ethnic groups. There has been a plethora of briefings and about a dozen Cabinet papers—that member has got a copy of each one, so he knows that that question is just not true.
Iain Lees-Galloway: Why has he not adopted Labour’s policy of regionalising the skill shortage lists—[Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member has a right to ask his question. He can start his question again.
Iain Lees-Galloway: Why has he not adopted Labour’s policy of regionalising the skill shortage lists, given that—[Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! The Hon Gerry Brownlee, I ask you to cease your interjections. If I need to take stronger action, I will do so. The member can start his question again, and I do not want any interjection whatsoever from my right-hand side.
Iain Lees-Galloway: All right—third time lucky. Why has he not adopted Labour’s policy of regionalising the skill shortage lists, given that Federated Farmers was “heartened” by the Labour Party’s proposal to create regional skill shortage lists that place emphasis on the settlement of skilled workers in the provinces?
Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: That member needs to do a great deal more work than he clearly has, because the immediate skill shortage list is regionalised.
Iain Lees-Galloway: Oh no it’s not—one region.
Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Every occupation is targeted—that member needs to do more work. The Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme is regionalised. The skilled migrant points are focused on the regions. Here is what we will not do: cut tens of thousands of visas just for a political imperative, which is Labour’s policy.
Darroch Ball: When there are almost 91,000 youth who are not in employment, education, or training, how will these changes ensure that the Government is adopting a New Zealanders - first policy, given the increase of 17,000 in the number of work visa approvals in 2016-17 to 226,000?
Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: I think the Minister for Social Development has very eloquently destroyed that “neets” number as being simply incorrect when it is portrayed as 90,000 young people ready, willing, and able to do jobs that they cannot get. That is simply not right. I would also point out to the member that the category of visa that we have just made changes to had about 38,000 visas issued in the last year. When that member’s leader was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, it was 57,000, and in a much smaller economy. This Government does more than any to make sure New Zealanders are put at the front of the queue.
Treaty of Waitangi Settlements—Pare Hauraki Collective Settlement
9. Hon NANAIA MAHUTA (Labour—Hauraki-Waikato) to the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations: Does he believe that the signing of the Pare Hauraki Collective Settlement with the inclusion of redress disputed by Tauranga Moana iwi is a breach of Te Tiriti o Waitangi?
Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations): Let me emphasise that no deed of settlement has been signed. There is no secret deal. There are difficult overlapping issues that the Minister for Māori Development and I are seeking to address at the present time.
Hon Nanaia Mahuta: What advice did he receive to determine that Pare Hauraki historical interests, as set out in a Waitangi Tribunal report, equated to contemporary rights under a Treaty settlement process; and might that advice lead to further contentious precedents?
Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: I am very conscious of the desire not to have any overlapping interests lead to further contention. The starting point was the 2004 tribunal report that referred to the interests of some of the Hauraki iwi in the Te Puna - Katikati blocks, and that is the issue that I am trying to address at the present time.
Hon Nanaia Mahuta: Is it reasonable for Tauranga Moana to request a tikanga-based approach with Pare Hauraki to determine matters of whakapapa, ahi kā, mana whenua, mana moana, and kaitiakitanga to determine a durable outcome for settlement redress options?
Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: Yes, most definitely it is, and that is exactly the kind of approach I am very keen, along with the Minister for Māori Development, to progress, because I cannot deal with those matters. I do not have the expertise. I think a tikanga-based approach is an excellent one.
Hon Nanaia Mahuta: Will the Minister support the position of the Minister of Māori Development to not sign the Hauraki settlement until all issues currently in dispute with Tauranga Moana iwi are resolved?
Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: Yes, I will, because I think these are difficult issues. The last thing I want to do through a Treaty settlement, or rushing through a Treaty settlement, is to create further grievances. These matters need to be handled sensitively, and the Minister for Māori Development is doing an excellent job in assisting me in that regard.
Hon Nanaia Mahuta: Will he give an undertaking to revisit the Tauranga Moana framework, seeking fresh terms of reference, to assure the Tauranga Moana Iwi Collective that their mana whenua, mana moana rights have primacy in the planning and decision-making regime for Tauranga Moana?
Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: If it helps bring a just and durable conclusion to these difficult issues I will certainly look at the framework with my colleagues from the Tauranga Moana iwi. These, as I say, are difficult issues, and I can see that it is the subject of deep feeling, which is why I am treading very warily at this time.
Schools, Buildings—Wellington
10. CHRIS BISHOP (National) to the Associate Minister of Education: What recent announcements have the Government made on school property in the Wellington region?
Hon TIM MACINDOE (Associate Minister of Education): This morning the member who is asking the question, Chris Bishop, and I visited Wainuiōmata High School to announce that the Government will be investing around $12 million in a major redevelopment to address issues with ageing and leaky buildings. The member and I also visited Maungaraki School to announce that Budget 2017 will provide an additional $1 million for new classrooms at Maungaraki and Berhampore schools. I have also recently announced that Houghton Valley School will receive $500,000 in funding from this year’s Budget for a new classroom to accommodate roll growth.
Chris Bishop: What will this $12 million investment in Wainuiōmata High School mean for the school?
Hon TIM MACINDOE: This considerable $12 million investment will go towards weathertightness remediation, modernisation of existing facilities, and building new flexible learning spaces. Despite the constant interjections from members opposite, the Ministry of Education will work closely with the school in the planning phase, which is about to commence, to ensure that their new and improved teaching spaces are not only fit for purpose but also support the school’s vision for learning and raising student achievement. Work is already under way to upgrade electrical infrastructure and fire protection systems. We will also conduct work on the student bathrooms and canteen to ensure that they are comfortable and suitable to use while the redevelopment progresses.
Chris Bishop: How will these Wellington schools benefit from the $1.5 million in roll growth funding?
Hon TIM MACINDOE: So far, Budget 2017 has, as I have mentioned, provided three new classrooms in the Wellington region. This investment will see one new classroom each for Maungaraki, Berhampore, and Houghton Valley schools to accommodate their increasing rolls. As with the Wainuiomata High School redevelopment that we announced this morning, these three new classrooms will be designed alongside the school authorities, working with them to ensure they meet the unique requirements of each of the three schools. Maungaraki School, in the Hutt South electorate, where the member asking the question is based and extraordinarily active, has been recognised for its stimulating learning environments and impressive student achievement, which, alongside population growth, has seen this school’s roll increase rapidly. This new classroom will give the school the opportunity to help even more children in the area to reach the very best of their potential.
Māori Development—Homelessness and Housing
11. PITA PARAONE (NZ First) to the Minister for Māori Development: Does he stand by all his statements; if so, why?
Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL (Minister for Māori Development): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Āe; i roto i te horopaki o te wā.
[Thank you, Mr Speaker. Yes; in the context of the moment.]
Pita Paraone: When he said he wanted to improve “housing outcomes for Māori”, why has he failed to deliver for his own constituents in Rotorua, where homelessness is second to Auckland and not one house has been built through the Māori Housing Network?
Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: Pēnā ka titiro ki ngā take whare me titiro whānui—koina te mate o tērā kōrero. Kaua e titiro ki te wāhi ki a au i te mea; he pakupaku rawa te wāhi ki a au, ngā Minitā mō Ngā Take Māori, arā anō ngā Minita. Me titiro whānui i te tuatahi. Ka rua i roto o Rotorua, e hoa, kua tata 40 pea ngā whare hōu ka hangaia ā taihoa ake nei. Nō reira, ko te tīmatanga mai tērā o ngā mahi nui kai mua i te aroaro.
[When looking at housing matters look widely—that is the problem with that talk. Do not look at the part that concerns me; it is only a really small part to those Ministers dealing with Māori matters. In the first instance, look broadly. Secondly, in Rotorua, gee mate, perhaps nearly 40 new houses are to be built by and by. Therefore, that is the beginning of that, one of the important tasks in the future.]
Pita Paraone: Sounds like passing the buck.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! We will just have the supplementary question; otherwise, I am very happy to move on.
Pita Paraone: When Rotorua-based volunteer organisation Love Soup has housed over 100 families in Rotorua last year compared with Whānau Ora housing only 15 families in the same year, why was its application to the Māori Housing Network declined?
Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: Ka waiho ake mā Te Puni Kōkiri tērā e whakautu engari, i tōna mutunga mai, kua noho au i te taha o te Love Soup, te hunga nei e kōrerohia ake nei, i kaha nei rātau ki te āwhina i te hunga kore kāinga. I te tau kua hipa ake nāku anō rā rātau i karanga mai, kia noho ki te tēpu mē ētahi atu o te hapori o Rotorua, he hiahia nōku ki te whakakao mai i ngā rōpū o te kāwanatanga, otirā, ngā mea e noho nā i roto i te hapori, ko Love Soup tētahi. Nā, ko te mahi nui ko te whakakao i ngā pūkenga, ngā pūmanawa, ngā pūtea, ki te āwhina i tērā hunga e kōrerohia ake nei.
[That will be left specifically for Te Puni Kōkiri to respond to, but eventually I will sit alongside Love Soup, the ones alluded to here, who work hard to help the homeless. In the year just past, they called me personally to sit at the table with some of the other Rotorua communities because of my desire to gather together Government groups but at the same time the ones based in the community, and Love Soup is one. The important task was to gather together the skilled, the talented, and the funding to assist that lot mentioned earlier.]
Pita Paraone: If not one house has been built in Rotorua through the Māori Housing Network, would he agree with Rau Hoskins, chair of Māori housing advocacy group Te Matapihi, that there have been “nine years of political inactivity around Māori … housing”; if not, why not?
Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: Ko tāna, ko tā Rau Hoskins tuatahi, ko te mahi o Te Māori Housing Network ēhara i te mea ko te hanga whare—ka tahi—ko tāna mahi ko te āwhina i ngā hapori ki te whai i ō ratau wawata i roto i ngā mahi, ā, i ngā take whare. Tuarua, hei āwhina i te mema. Kua tata eke ki te 379 pea ngā whānau kua āwhinatia e Te Housing Network, kōrerohia ake nei, ā, ka mutu, i muri mai o tērā kōrero, i mihi te tangata nei a Rau Hoskins i ahau, otirā, Te Puni Kōkiri mō ngā mea kua oti nei i a mātau.
[Firstly, to what Rau Hoskins offered, the Māori Housing Network is not responsible for building houses—that is one—but rather to assist communities to pursue their aspirations through their jobs, and in matters concerning housing. Secondly, and to help the member along, nearly 379 families, perhaps, have been assisted by the Housing Network, referred to earlier, and, finally, after that discussion, this Rau Hoskins complimented me, in other words Te Puni Kōkiri, for the things we accomplished.]
Pita Paraone: When homeownership rates for Māori have dropped by almost 40 percent in Rotorua since 1986 and it is also the second-largest centre for homelessness, why have he and his Māori Housing Network failed them?
Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: Tuatahi, kāre au i te whakaae atu ki tērā momo kōrero ēhara i te mea, kai roto i ōku ake ringaringa ngā rongoā katoa mō te ao whānui tonu. E ngana nei ahau ā-Minita ki te āwhina i ērā hunga e rongo nei i te ngau o te pōhara, e te kore kāinga. Ēhara i te mea, tērā take he mea pai ki te ngākau o tēnei Minita, o tēnei Māori, nō reira, koinei au e kaha nei ki te āwhina i tērā hunga kua taea e rātau te noho kia āhurutia i roto i tētahi whare mahana, i tētahi whare ora, i tētahi whare tiaki i ngā tamariki, i ngā mokopuna.
[Firstly, I do not agree to that kind of talk, not because all the remedies for the whole world are personally in my own hands. As a Minister, I endeavour to help those who experience the nip of poverty and the lack of a home. That is not to say that that matter is a good feel to this Minister, this Māori, and so here I am working hard to help that lot and to enable them to live comfortably in a warm, healthy home, to protect the children and grandchildren.]
Teachers—Supply, National and Auckland
12. JENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East) to the Minister of Education: Is she satisfied that the Government is doing all that it can to ensure an adequate supply of teachers, particularly in Auckland?
Hon TIM MACINDOE (Associate Minister of Education) on behalf of the Minister of Education: I understand that for any school that does not have the full range of staff that they want, this will be a difficult time. That is why we are working hard to increase teachers, in the areas and subjects where they are needed, through the diverse range of programmes available, including more funding for Teach First NZ, a $1 million package to encourage more teachers to stay in the profession and mentoring support, and attracting new and innovative initial teacher training programmes by lifting the 17-year moratorium on new courses. The Education Council is also working to reduce the cost of teacher education refresher courses. All of these initiatives build on the $9 million package from 2016, which included the Bring a Kiwi Home campaign, 100 extra TeachNZ scholarships, a social media campaign promoting teaching to STEM graduates, and a UK recruitment campaign to identify UK teachers interested in moving here to fill vacancies when a New Zealand teacher cannot be found. In Auckland specifically, we have targeted the Beginning Teachers Project and extended the assistance of recruitment services.
Jenny Salesa: What is the number of teacher vacancies across the country, and how many schools are currently short staffed?
Hon TIM MACINDOE: That has moved beyond the bounds of the original question, so I do not have the exact information that the member is asking for, but if she would like to put down a written question, I will certainly have a look at it for her. However, we are certainly, as I have mentioned in a very comprehensive answer, utilising a range of different measures to tackle the problem that she is addressing.
Jenny Salesa: Given the Minister cannot answer that question, what does she think of the fact that over two-thirds of Auckland teachers are thinking about or actively planning to leave Auckland as a result of the housing crisis, and what is she doing to ensure that Auckland schools can find and retain the teachers that they need right now?
Hon TIM MACINDOE: I reject the initial assertion there, but I would just make the point that there are two initiatives that have already been announced that will be of assistance to Auckland schools. The Beginning Teachers Project is a 2-year project between the Auckland Primary Principals’ Association and the ministry, supporting 40 provisionally certified primary teachers to gain the skills—[Interruption] It is interesting that they ask the question, but they are not interested in listening to the answer. The project is designed to enable these provisionally certified primary teachers to gain the skills needed to teach junior classes, particularly new-entrant classes, and the ministry has also extended access to specialist—[Interruption] They are not remotely interested in listening.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I think the problem is that the answer is going on for quite a long time.
Jenny Salesa: Does she think it is acceptable that one in five schools has already had to cancel classes or transfer to distance learning because a suitable specialist teacher could not be found; and does this not show that the Government’s response is nothing more than an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff?
Hon TIM MACINDOE: As I mentioned in my primary answer, we appreciate the fact that for any school facing a shortage this is a difficult time, but we are taking action. We are actively working on the problem, we are implementing a range of initiatives, and this is the sort of support that the schools are welcoming.
Jenny Salesa: Does she think her Government’s delayed response is enough, given the Auckland Primary Principals’ Association president stated this is the worst shortage she had seen in 30 years, and is it not time New Zealanders were offered a fresh approach to actually solve these problems?
Hon TIM MACINDOE: I have just identified a whole range of initiatives that are being taken. This is not a delayed response. Rolls fluctuate, the numbers of teachers fluctuate, and people move within cities and around the country all of the time. All sorts of initiatives are under way and I welcome those, as do the schools.
Urgent Debates Declined
Disability Issues—Human Rights Commission Report on the Experiences of Disabled Children and Adults in State Care
Mr SPEAKER: I have received a letter from Poto Williams seeking to debate under Standing Order 389 the Human Rights Commission’s report “Institutions are places of abuse”: The experiences of disabled children and adults in State care. This is a particular case of recent occurrence; the report was released today. The purpose of an urgent debate is to hold the Government to account for an action for which it is responsible—Speakers’ ruling 207/2. Several previous Speakers have ruled that the absence of an action on the part of the Government is not a particular case of recent occurrence and I refer members to Speakers’ ruling 212/2. The Government has not yet responded to the release of the report. It may be that an urgent debate would be warranted if a new Government policy or action is subsequently announced. In the meantime I note that the House is holding the Estimates debate, which is an opportunity to debate the Government’s future spending plans. The health and social development sectors have not yet been debated. The member may wish to use that opportunity to debate this matter—Speaker’s ruling 215/1. The application today is, therefore, declined.
Estimates Debate
In Committee
Debate resumed from 25 July.
External Sector (continued)
RINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): Just continuing on with my contribution regarding Vote Customs, the New Zealand Customs Service—one of its key roles is to protect our borders and to keep our community and our country safe from illicit drugs and other harmful materials. To its credit, the Customs Service last year did: it seized 292 kilograms of methamphetamine, and 1.1 tonnes of precursor were seized by the Customs Service. So it is doing a good job in that area.
If you look at the wider picture though, there is P epidemic in our country. It is seen through the countless cases of addictions and damaged families wreaking havoc up and down the country. So much so that my whanaunga Peeni Henare said that up in Tai Tokerau, Kaitāia has now got the name “Kaifryer” due to the amount of P that is flooding that community and promoting the illicit black market. When I posed this very question about how much P or its precursor are actually crossing by the border—i.e., that Customs is missing at the border—to the Comptroller of Customs and her vast team of lawyers, policy analysts, senior managers, and the lot, I was absolutely aghast at the answer, because they could not give an answer. All I asked was for an estimate—an estimate of how much P, how much drugs they are missing at the border. They all looked at each other and they could not come up with an answer. They said: “Oh, because it’s impossible for us to know.”
Well, we know that there is an absolute proliferation of P through our health system, through the police. P addiction is the No. 1 reason why parents can no longer look after their children, who go to their grandparents. It is a huge problem across our society. We are getting only half the picture from the Customs Service. It is great for it to try to laud how great it is with what it is intercepting at the border, but it is really what it is missing—that is really what counts when it comes to Estimates. We are dealing with an Estimates bill and it cannot even estimate the amount of drugs and P and precursor that it misses. I think that is an indictment on the Customs Service.
But it is no surprise, really, because under this Government it is all about making the numbers look good. It is all about giving half the story. It is great for them to say “Oh yes, but we intercepted X amount at the border. It’s going up every year.”, but we cannot estimate actually what is out there in society at the moment, even though we know that there is a flood. There is a flood of P coming across the border, so much so that it is called the “quiet tsunami”. That is why this Government is failing. We have had 9 long years of it giving doctored numbers, giving us half the story, whether it is in the health system, whether it is in employment figures, whether it is in the P numbers themselves. [Bell rung] We are being disserved by this Government and we need to have a change, because we know we want to get the full picture.
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Order! In this debate, when you get the bell, you sit down or you seek another call. I just remind members that in this debate, we are debating the report, so members should limit—
Rino Tirikatene: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson.
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Well, I am actually speaking at the moment, so you will have to wait. During the course of this debate, we are debating the report. So if members want to wax lyrical and jump into a campaign speech, they will be pulled up, as other speakers have been. Members are reminded that this is a debate on the report.
RINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I just want to draw your attention to the fact that the timer in the Chamber is all over the place. So if you could send a message to your Clerks that—
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Well, by way of explanation, the timer was going up because you were told you had 3 minutes and 55 seconds. It is easier to calculate if we set the timer from zero going up, so that when it hits 3.55, we can press a button and make you sit down—albeit it has not been that effective in doing that—and now you will notice that the time will start from 5 minutes and count down to zero.
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister of Foreign Affairs): Well, that 3 minutes and 25 seconds just was not quite long enough to cure incurable insomnia, but it came close. This is a debate about the Estimates under the topic external sector, and it is the first time that the Committee has formally debated the Estimates grouped under topics. The topics that are included for consideration in today’s debate are, of course, defence, the Defence Force itself, foreign affairs, and customs, and then we have trade and Vote Official Development Assistance as well. In each of those, there is a very good story to tell in New Zealand’s favour.
Particularly, I want to refute and rebuke Rino Tirikatene, the member who just spoke, who suggested that somehow the plague of P in this country was entirely the responsibility of the Customs Service. It is not. Rather than blame the criminals who are out there deceiving the borders of this country day by day, I think it is somewhat sad that the Labour Party simply says that it must be the good guys’ fault that the bad guys are inflicting such damage on our society. So I hope that those who were getting a little persuaded by Mr Tirikatene’s speech will just think about the hard work that those customs officers do. The border security responsibilities taken by them and by the Ministry for Primary Industries are seriously considered and are very well exercised. There will always, unfortunately, be criminals out there who find some other way to bring this evil product into the country, but that does not mean there is any less vigilance or any less attention paid to the problem by those who are charged with protecting our borders, and I support them strongly in their work.
I just want to speak for a couple of moments, if I could, about New Zealand’s official foreign aid budget. It is my intention to encourage the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to start referring to this aspect of the Budget from this point on as development and humanitarian assistance, because I think the term “aid”, particularly when it comes to the Pacific, underestimates and undercalculates the capacity of those nations to make a difference for themselves in the long run. So “development” is a far better term to be used for the assistance that New Zealand gives to some of those economies.
It is very interesting to note that if you look at something as simple as solar energy—which is obviously something that the Pacific can avail itself of quite freely—some years ago it was a difficult technology to install and to ensure that you had a sustainable supply. Technology has caught up with that now, and over the last X number of years—I think around about 6 to 7 years—New Zealand has invested over $400 million in Pacific-based solar energy projects. The consequence of that has been an annual reduction in the cost of diesel that almost meets that on a parity basis. More importantly, that $400 million has been partnered alongside the EU and various other donors in the Pacific to see a development project, on a combined basis, worth over $2 billion. So that, of course, has had a great effect in a positive sense on greenhouse emissions, as well.
So we do think that in the future we will be doing away with that word “aid”, and focusing on development—
Grant Robertson: You know it’s not in here, don’t you? You know it’s not called “aid” in the report?
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: —and then recognising that there will be occasional tsunamis and hurricanes and cyclones, etc., that do require humanitarian assistance. We will be there for that as well. The member over there points out that it is not called that in the Estimates. I did start by saying that “from this point on” I hoped that the department will start referring to it in that way, and I think that is what happens when you get a change in a ministry and a change in direction. Thank you.
Votes agreed to.
Finance and Government Administration Sector
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Members, we come now to the votes in the finance and Government administration sector—volume B.5 and volume 5. The question is that Vote Audit, Vote Communications Security and Intelligence, Vote Finance, Vote Office of the Clerk, Vote Ombudsmen, Vote Parliamentary Service, Vote Prime Minister and Cabinet, Vote Revenue, Vote Security Intelligence, and Vote State Services stand part of the schedules.
Hon RUTH DYSON (Chairperson of the Government Administration Committee): Mr Chairman, your introduction to this series of debates reminded me of Tim Macindoe’s answer to a question. I am taking this call as the chair of the Government Administration Committee and, unfortunately, unlike most of my other contributions in this House, this is likely to be politically neutral because that is the appropriate thing—[Interruption]—and I am glad that the Minister in the chair, Judith Collins, is so warmly endorsing of that approach.
I want to begin by acknowledging the other members of the committee, some of whom are no longer permanent members, but in the year of this Appropriation (2017/18 Estimates) Bill they were members previously—Mojo Mathers, the Hon Mark Mitchell, and Brett Hudson—and acknowledge the current members of the committee, Paul Foster-Bell, Matt Doocey, the Hon Scott Simpson, the Hon Nanaia Mahuta, and Barry Coates. You will know, if you reflect on the membership, that that is a small number. There are only six on the Government Administration Committee but they are all members who pull their weight and take a lot of interest in the debates that we have.
We have a very broad range of topics, and I want to thank the Finance and Expenditure Committee for the referral of those votes. A lot of them have a lot of complexity in them. For example, we have Vote Parliamentary Service—a very broad range of considerations within that vote. We have Vote Arts, Culture and Heritage, which also includes part of broadcasting. We have Vote Internal Affairs, which sort of sometimes feels like the Government department that gets jobs that people do not know where else to put. It has got a lot of little things in it, but a lot of really interesting things in it as well.
Our committee considers the vote for Office of the Clerk and the Ombudsmen. This year we had the Ministry for Pacific Peoples and the new Minister before us. I guess I could say that we were disappointed in the performance of the Minister on that particular occasion. We had the Minister—
Hon Nathan Guy: You just said you weren’t going to get political.
Hon RUTH DYSON: Oh, no, I am just stating facts, actually. That was not political; that was factual.
We had the vote for sport and recreation and, of course, there was a lot of excitement around that after the America’s Cup. I think our committee claimed total credit for the result, given that we have Vote Sport and Recreation. We have State services and statistics. We had the new Minister of Statistics before the committee, and I have to say that he impressed as being very well briefed on his portfolio and answered a lot of questions that other new Ministers deferred to the chief executive. So I want to commend the Hon Scott Simpson for his performance. And we have the vote for the Ministry for Women.
As well as the members of the committee, whom I have acknowledged, I would also like to say that, having been on a number of select committees in this Parliament, I think that we have the benefit of some of the most conscientious staff. They are responsive, they are helpful, they are thoughtful, and they are very diligent in the work they do. So Ciara and Brenna and Matt also deserve a particular tribute during this debate.
We have only got 58 days or something to go until the next election, and while it has been a privilege for me to chair the Government Administration Committee for the last two terms, I am not planning on doing that in the forthcoming term of Parliament, because it is a role that is traditionally reserved for an Opposition member. So I am looking forward to a National Party person taking up that role as chair of the Government Administration Committee. I am happy to give them any support that I can.
It is a committee that has, as I said, a wide range of consideration in terms of the votes that are referred to it. We have done a lot of legislation, and interesting legislation, on top of the consideration of those votes, and I am really looking forward to the change of Government, the appointment of a National Party member as the chair of the Government Administration Committee—
Chris Bishop: Ha, ha! You’ve got to win your seat first, Ruth.
Hon RUTH DYSON: —and hearing Chris Bishop report from that—oh, no, he might not get back in; one of the other National MPs reporting back on the votes in the coming term.
FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): It is a pleasure to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak specifically to the revenue component of the appropriations here today. I want to touch on two things, if time allows. The first is the issue around fiscal drag, which was one of the major legislative changes that came about with the Budget earlier this year, and was touched on in appropriations in this bill.
The point I would like to make is that it has been 7 years—2010 was the last time the tax thresholds were addressed, and so for 7 years the National Government has done nothing about those thresholds. And for a party—
Chris Bishop: That’s not true. We cut taxes in 2010.
FLETCHER TABUTEAU: —that claims to be tax friendly—you can come back at me in your turn, Mr Bishop—it has done nothing. And so, in that time, people’s real incomes have decreased, and it is has put a lot of pressure on households.
I would like to make the point, actually, that these Government members have been, in their contributions of late, very proud of the fact that middle- to high-income earners have been burdened with the bulk of the Government’s tax revenue receipts. It seems to be absolutely contrary to the Government’s stance on tax and tax revenue.
And then I would like to make the point, actually, further—if I can find my notes in quick-step time; yes, I can—that even with the Budget changes, the Government changed the second threshold and they raised it from $48,000 to $52,000. I would like to point out that, actually, those changes, after 7 years, do not even bring that threshold in alignment with the inflation rate over that same period of time. So even now, after a Budget and these appropriations here, we have middle-income earners who are still paying more tax than they were in 2010.
The next point I would like to make is very much directly related to the numbers in the appropriations, and I speak specifically to the investigations appropriations, which is $173 million, which is a significantly high number. It is about IRD investigating tax and non-tax compliance, and so we think that speaks, at least on the surface, to an IRD that is well funded to undertake those investigations. And then you couple that, actually, with about $400 million—just under $400 million—tied to IRD’s business of ensuring that people comply with or meet their obligations to pay their tax.
So now we are getting up to half a billion dollars in Government spending in terms of investigations and people meeting their obligations. It does not seem to reconcile well with the announcement, and certainly the latest turmoil, coming out of IRD around the 1,500 staff being laid off over the next 5 years. It certainly has not started well. It does not bode well for the process. It seems to have been fear that concerns have been shown in the way that the staff are already being treated in this process, but it speaks to a Government that seems to be spending a lot of money on making sure that people meet their obligations, and investigations. And yet, in this Budget and in these appropriations, we have a Government that talks about a $100 million windfall if it enforces or undertakes to meet the obligations of the new OECD tax compliance regime around multinationals and base erosion and profit shifting.
I only have a very short period of time but I would like to point out to the Government members in these last few seconds that the tax experts in New Zealand have spoken to a sum of at least $7 billion to $11 billion of tax not being paid by New Zealand and international multinational corporates here in New Zealand. We are spending a lot of money on that, but I suggest that it is going in the wrong direction and the Government needs to do more. Thank you.
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Revenue): Mr Chair, thanks for the opportunity. I must say, I did enjoy the contribution from the Hon Ruth Dyson. She has an excellent sense of humour; you have just got to know where to find it. It is in there somewhere.
But I think I have to address a couple of the issues raised by Mr Tabuteau. First off, let us have a look at revenue. Revenue is, I think, one of the most important of all portfolios. As members will know, I think all of my portfolios are the most important portfolios, and that is because they should all be treated extremely seriously and have a huge effort put in. But, actually, the appropriations sought by Vote Revenue for this financial year total $6,728 million dollars—that is an increase of 11 percent on last year. That is primarily around the Business Transformation programme, which is, essentially, a $1.9 billion programme over several years that is modernising the inland revenue system—the tax system—in the way it interacts with New Zealand taxpayers, and also those who are receiving social benefits such as child support and things like student loans. It is an extremely important part of Government because without revenue functioning well, then, actually, nobody has got any money to spend on anything. So it is very important.
At the same time, I will just address the issue that Mr Tabuteau mentioned. He said something about 1,500 people being sacked, and whatever, from the Inland Revenue Department. What is actually happening with Inland Revenue is, because it is moving into the world of online everything—and digital, and real-time payment and calculation of tax—it is having to retrain so many of its staff. So it is looking to take its 6,000-odd staff, and take 4,200 of them and actually help to upskill and retrain them in areas where they can be of best value to not only Inland Revenue but also to the people of New Zealand, and they can have skills that otherwise they would not have. In addition to that, Inland Revenue is increasing the number of tax specialists it has, which I think is an excellent idea, and it should do that.
Ultimately, over the next 5 or 6 years it is going to have, with attrition, a reduction in numbers because of the fact that, actually, the systems are becoming so much more real-time, so much more friendly to taxpayers, that there will not be quite the same sort of pen and paper work that has had to be done in the past. There is no decrease in the number of people who are available to talk to taxpayers; in fact, quite the opposite.
I am very much aware of this as an issue, and I think most people would be—that we need to modernise, that we need to do all these sorts of things we are doing around GST. But, actually, you cannot do what we are doing in the modernisation area without the computer grunt and the huge back-end work that has to happen, and that is what is happening now.
Coming forward into this year, on 1 April next year we will have the AIM system in place. I am just going to explain that for members, because I think it is one of the best things that Inland Revenue can do for any small business. Essentially, we all know about PAYE. As salary and wage earners, our tax is taken from us as PAYE every fortnight when we are paid—we all understand that. That actually means that sometimes we are going to end up with having some tax that is owed to us at the end of the year, and, occasionally, there is some that we owe.
For small businesses and businesses generally, there is another thing, called provisional terminal tax. That is the bane of every business owner’s life, particularly in small business, where there is often not the capital and often not the resources to actually suddenly pull in large amounts of money that you need to pay to IRD. It also requires that you be able to guess ahead for what you are going to be earning in a year, and, actually, that is pretty impossible for most people to do. They either over-guess or they under-guess; whatever way, it is not good.
AIM is best described as being PAYE for small business. I know that is how it is best described because that is what I decided to call it—“PAYE for small business”—and that is because that is exactly how it is going to work. It is an excellent idea. What it will basically mean is that as the businesses pay their own PAYE for their staff and everything else and they do their books every month, if they have approved accounting systems—which more and more businesses are moving on to or have moved on to—they will be able to actually pay their tax off the profit for that month. That means that some months they will have more tax to pay; some months they will have less tax to pay; some months they will have tax credits. There is liable to be a little bit of a washup at the end of the year, but it will not be the sort of terrible trouble that people get into with provisional and terminal tax now, so I think this is one of the best things we could do.
We cannot do this without the Business Transformation project, and I just think it is something that we need to take a really great amount of pride in. Once this gets going and it is going well, it will be great for New Zealanders.
CHRIS BISHOP (National): We have just had a contribution from the man who is popularly known around the place as “the Professor”—Mr Tabuteau, the revenue spokesperson for New Zealand First. You know, usually Mr Tabuteau’s speeches are reasonably factually accurate—I say “reasonably” because you always to have to put the caveat in that they are reasonable—but I have got to say that that one really took the cake. Within about 30 seconds of the start of his speech he made two completely factually inaccurate statements, and I do want to correct the record.
The first was that the Government has done nothing about tax thresholds since it came to office, which, of course, ignores the 2010 tax package that cut taxes—it raised GST but cut taxes in a revenue-neutral fashion for the Government. So it is not correct to say that the Government has done nothing about thresholds. And of course we do have the most recent package that Minister Collins recently outlined through Budget 2017.
The second factually inaccurate claim that he made at the start of his contribution was that real incomes have declined over the term of the National Government, and nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if you read, as I encourage him to do, the Household Incomes Report issued yesterday—popularly known around the precinct as the “Bryan Perry report”, or often just the “Perry compendium”, named after its author, Bryan Perry, from the Ministry of Social Development—you will find that real incomes are rising and have been rising consistently for the last 9 years. In the last year, household incomes rose by 3 percent in real terms, and that has been pretty consistent for the last 3 or 4 years at least.
Of course, the median wage is rising. Budget 2017 projects the median wage to rise even further, and, of course, real after-tax incomes have been well ahead of inflation over the last 8 years. It is not to say that we would not like them to go up further, it is not to say that we do not have challenges as a country, it is not to say that there are things that we can work on, but to say that real incomes have declined under National is just simply not accurate. It is not accurate on any measure, whether it is the household incomes measure or a Statistics New Zealand household labour force survey measure or, indeed, any official statistic that the Government points out.
The interesting thing about Mr Tabuteau’s contribution in the debate was his decrying of the Government for failure to move on tax cuts and failure to move on fiscal drag. It was curious, because it is usually the party that he represents that turns up in the House and anything you can find to spend money on, New Zealand First is in favour of it. Those members are all for big Government spending—basically, name a policy area and New Zealand First members thinks it is being underfunded; that has been a constant tenor and theme of their contributions in the House over the last 3 years or so—but then we have the revenue spokesperson coming down and saying: “Well, actually, you know, we need to cut taxes, we need to account for fiscal drag, we need to get the Government out of people’s lives, we need to support hard-working New Zealanders.”
Well, I just simply to say to Mr Tabuteau: you cannot have it both ways. You cannot come down here and argue all the time in favour of very large spending increases at the same time as arguing for reductions in taxation. You simply cannot do both at the same time, so he may want to go and reflect on that, and we undoubtedly will add it to the bottom line of Mr Peters and his colleagues, the many bottom lines—I think we are up to about 14, but we are counting; well, we are counting somewhat, anyway.
In terms of the actual revenue estimates, Minister Collins, I think, has done a very good job of outlining for the Committee what these estimates do and the Business Transformation programme. I have the privilege of chairing the Finance and Expenditure Committee, with my good colleague Mr Robertson opposite, who is the ranking member for the Labour Party on the committee. Honestly, we do operate in a collegial way when it comes to tax bills, and generally with the Business Transformation programme, too. Actually, both National and Labour—both the Government and the Opposition—want the Business Transformation programme to work. I have got to say that we are pretty rigorous about vigilating the commissioner and her team in order to make sure that the roll-out is going appropriately.
As you will see through the Estimates, there is a very large amount of money appropriated through these Estimates for Vote Revenue, and a big chunk of that is for the Business Transformation programme. We have got to make sure we get it right, and I have got to say that so far we are pretty confident, on the Finance and Expenditure Committee, that that roll-out is going reasonably smoothly. With any IT project—and fundamentally it is an IT project—there are going to be complications, there are going to be teething issues around the edges, but we are reasonably confident that it is going in the right direction. We are also pretty confident, I have got to say, about what it will deliver, and Minister Collins has adverted to some of those points.
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): It is a pleasure to follow on from the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, Chris Bishop. It is true that the committee—on taxation bills, particularly—works very well together. I am surprised, frankly, that Mr Bishop did not mention Andrew Bayly’s contribution in that regard to taxation bills, so I will take the opportunity to do that.
I am going to return to Vote Revenue and a couple of specific aspects of that, but I want to devote most of my contribution to Vote Finance and the Fiscal Strategy Report, which is covered, for the chair’s benefit, from page 120 of the Estimates. Within that, a big part of the discussion that took place at the committee centred on the fact that the Minister arrived at the committee, as Ministers are wont to do, and gave us a reasonably long spiel all about the importance of economic growth. Absolutely—we understood all about the wonderful achievements that the Government had by having economic growth sitting at around the 3 percent level.
He was then questioned by members of the committee about per capita GDP growth. I know sometimes that even with a phrase like “per capita GDP growth”, people will ask what you are really talking about. Per person, is New Zealand 3 percent more wealthy than it was last year? The answer is no, because what has happened is we have had large population growth. As a result of that, the real growth—the growth that actually is about per person wealth—has actually been below 1 percent, and continues to be below 1 percent. When New Zealanders say to themselves “Why don’t I really feel like we’re getting ahead?”, well, that is because, actually, per person we are not. We are struggling, and that is what New Zealanders are feeling.
So when Steven Joyce and the Government present Vote Finance and the Fiscal Strategy Report to the select committee, the reality, measuring on GDP—a limited measure in and of itself, but the one that the Government uses—is that, per person, growth is struggling. Subsequent to the Budget and the Estimates, we got the latest quarter’s growth, and once again GDP per capita fell—two quarters in a row of GDP per capita falling. So per person—and this is where Chris Bishop is wrong—New Zealand is going backwards, on that particular measure of the economy. Fletcher Tabuteau is actually right about that—on a per person basis, at the moment, we are going backwards.
The conversation then carried on to—OK, so per person growth is not going well; what is the point of growth? Why do we have growth in the economy? It is not an end in itself. It is about how we allow people to live lives of dignity, to have well-being. The Minister seemed to completely ignore that fact—as the National Government has—and to celebrate, somehow or other, that growth is the end, rather than recognising that there are still 128,000 more children in poverty today than there were when National took over. That is the population of the city that I grew up in, Dunedin—there are more in poverty than when National took over. How is that a good outcome of economic growth? What is the point of economic growth if that is what it delivers?
But the Minister persists in saying that this is all we need. Well, on this side of the House we do not believe that. We believe that, actually, in the future, when Vote Finance comes to the House, and when the Minister of Finance stands up and delivers the Budget Economic and Fiscal Update, what the Government should be doing is saying to New Zealanders: “Here’s how we have reduced child poverty. Here’s how we have improved sustainability. Here’s how we’ve improved the well-being of New Zealanders.” That is the point of the economy. It is not an end in itself; it is the means by which we deliver a good and decent life to New Zealanders. So it was very disappointing to see that when the Minister came to the committee, that was all he had. All he had was a number that, actually, in the end, does not mean much to everyday New Zealanders going about their business.
We then moved into a discussion in the select committee about productivity. I do not deny the fact that low productivity is a challenge that New Zealand has faced for many decades. The issue that we have is that in Vote Finance, and the related Budget documents that were put before us, there was so little to tell us how the Government would actually be lifting that productivity. There was so little to say that the Government recognised the scale of the challenge. The truth is that our productivity story is worsening—relative to Australia, we are going backwards. As a result, the thing that matters in productivity—how much output per hour New Zealanders manage to achieve—actually fell by 1.3 percent for the last year.
So we are going backwards on wages, we are going backwards on productivity, and we receive, in front of us, a Budget that does not actually deliver a plan for how we lift productivity. When we have Mr Joyce and others, who stand up in this House and say day after day that the economy is going gangbusters, the questions we found ourselves asking on the select committee were: “For whom?” and “Really, is that true?”. The answer is that it is not for those who are hard-working wage and salary earners—it may be for those at the top. Most certainly, we are going backwards.
I now do want to come to Vote Revenue—I am particularly conscious of the fact that the Minister Judith Collins is in the chair. I think the first thing I will say will be positive, though maybe she will not like the second thing. The first thing is that the Business Transformation programme is an important programme. It is probably the largest IT change New Zealand will actually ever see in terms of the public sector. Therefore, it requires very close stewardship—the select committee is looking closely at it; $1.9 billion is a huge amount of money. Thus far, we have seen and received excellent reports from the Inland Revenue Department in that regard. That is, I think, something that is going well.
My concern is around two aspects. The first of those is the matter that has already been raised—and it was raised in the committee—about the loss of staff. At the time we did not know the exact numbers; we now know it is somewhere between 1,500 and 1,600 staff. The concern that we have on this side of the House is that we are in a period of time where we want Inland Revenue to be doing more to ensure that New Zealanders are paying their fair share, and that ordinary taxpayers using the PAYE scheme know that they are doing their bit. But we know, and we were told at the committee, that avoidance, particularly by multinationals, is costing New Zealanders hundreds of millions of dollars, to the point that the Commissioner of Inland Revenue was very specific about the fact that the Inland Revenue Department had come to the conclusion that there was $300 million a year that New Zealanders were missing out on.
There are other estimates—much higher estimates—but let us just take the estimate that the Inland Revenue Department put in front of us. Mysteriously, in the Budget the Government is looking to get only an extra $50 million in revenue from multinationals in 2018-19, and $100 million in the following 2 years. Well, why is that? Why has the Government been so conservative in its assessment of what it thinks it can get? I would venture to suggest that it is because the Government is not prepared to put the effort in, because it is cutting 1,500 staff rather than saying: “We actually want more people, in terms of investigation.” We have been told by the IRD before at our committee that for every dollar the Government gives it, in terms of tax inspection and tax follow-up and investigation, it will get $7 back. But for some reason this Government does not appear to be interested in chasing down multinationals. We all acknowledge that there is a very important multilateral component to this. We need international agreements. Work has been done at the OECD. But right now New Zealanders are missing out. Ordinary taxpayers are being ripped off and, as a Parliament, we do not have in front of us today a Government that is ambitious enough to say: “You know what? We’re going to get that $300 million.” It is probably more—it is almost certainly more—but even at the Inland Revenue Department’s own estimate, there is $300 million being missed out.
So, on the Labour Party side, we are very happy to say “We will get that. We will chase down the multinationals that are not paying their fair share.”, because what they are doing is undermining the integrity of New Zealand’s tax system. And they are saying to other taxpayers who do the right thing: “We’re not going to do that.” Well, on this side of the House we think that is a rip-off. We think that is making ordinary taxpayers into fools, and we are not prepared to stand by and do that.
The Government has put out a discussion paper. It has kicked the can down the road, past the election, so it does not actually have to do anything about this. Well, we are not prepared to put up with that. New Zealanders deserve to know that the Inland Revenue Department is going after those multinationals and saying: “You will pay the right amount of tax, and if you don’t, there will be measures and ways to make sure that you’re penalised for that.” That is why we have put forward the idea of a diverted profit tax, because as New Zealanders we need to stand up on behalf of everybody to say: “Pay your fair share, multinationals.”
I think the real reason the Government has been so unambitious on chasing this down is because it does not want to. It does not want to offend those multinationals. Well, on this side of the House we would rather stand up for everyday New Zealanders who do pay their taxes, and chase down and get that at least $300 million a year so that it can be used on things like health and housing and education.
JAN LOGIE (Green): I rise to take a call on behalf of the Green Party in relation to the Vote Finance Estimates. I want to speak about the issue of women’s pay and the fact that in the Estimates I am struggling to find where the Government’s commitment to paying women fairly shows up. I see that there is an increase in unappropriated Budget initiatives identified in this vote, but it is not allocated and there is no transparency around it. I see there is discussion about a contingency for mental health, but I do not see a discussion around a contingency to pay women fairly.
This is a really, really important issue for us as a country. The fight for equal pay for work of equal value started over 124 years ago with the suffragettes. Next on their agenda after getting women into Parliament was to get women’s work fairly recognised and fairly paid. It is a struggle that continues. We have a gender pay imbalance now of between 12 and 14 percent between men’s and women’s hourly earnings. We know that traditional women’s work is undervalued.
This is something that requires a political solution and commitment. In front of the Government at the moment, I know of the community mental health pay equity claim; the early childhood teachers and staff pay equity claim; part-time secondary schools teachers’ pay equity claim; district health board (DHB) nurses, midwives, and healthcare assistants’ claim; education support workers’ claim; teacher aides’ claim; the DHB clerical admin staff in the South Island’s claim; and Oranga Tamariki social workers’ claim. I do not see this in the contingency or in any of the budget showing up in this vote, when there is significant financial liability that is surely coming and we know that these many thousands upon thousands of women are being significantly underpaid at the moment.
This has a real-life implication for these women, and I am concerned that it is actually not showing up in Vote Finance in explicit contingency because the Government introduced legislation yesterday that is going to make it so much harder for those women to get fairly paid for the work that they do and their contribution to our society. Yesterday the Government introduced legislation that raises the threshold to be able to establish the merit of a claim, and it will now require expert evidence about historic, socio-economic, and labour market factors before a claim can be heard. This will apply to these cases that I have listed, which have already been lodged. So the Government is changing the goalposts mid-game on women to make it harder for them to get paid fairly.
The labour market factors in there may just sound like a phrase, but my understanding is that the Government’s official understanding of that is that it means that a job that is not in the public sector, or not primarily funded by the Government, has had their pay rate set by the market so, therefore, it is not possible that they are undervalued, despite the experience of history proving that to be wrong. So New Zealand women really, really, really need to be paying attention to this, because it is rolling back our rights and our protections.
It will also create a restriction on access for women to get information to be able to establish a claim. You can only get access to information after you have already proven the merit—the threshold of which has been raised—to be able to take a claim. It will also give employers considerable discretion to delay responding and notifying claims—much tougher than our legal process at the moment. It will also then—the hierarchy of comparatives—overturns the court ruling in support of the Kristine Bartlett case and makes more hurdles for women to jump over. Now the legislation will create new numerical definitions of what is female-dominated and male-dominated, and, surprisingly, the ratios are different—ha, ha!—so it makes it just so much harder.
Then the legislation is also removing the right to back-pay if the case goes to court. It is removing a legal entitlement that is available for any other person. This is deeply, deeply worrying.
ALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa): Can I say at the outset what is obvious to me, at least: money does not grow on trees. It is not free. It is not readily available like the fresh air that we breathe. It is a limited resource. With that limitation, we need to grow the economy to produce greater revenues, and that is exactly what is happening here in this country—high worker participation; 10,000 new jobs every month. This is a demonstration of a growing economy, which allows the Minister of Revenue to collect more taxes—to collect more taxes directly, through PAYE, or through GST as the GDP grows.
With that collection comes responsibility on where to invest. That surplus—those growing surpluses that will eventuate and are in place today—allows us to spend more money on health, police, defence, and education. But, most importantly, it allows the Government of the day, this National Government, to return some of those taxes to the people who contributed the taxes to the Government, by way of changing the thresholds that were announced in the Budget recently—$48,000 to $52,000 and $14,000 to $22,000 are the brackets that were changed, which allow taxpayers to hold on to more of their money.
The other thing a growing economy allows us to do is invest in better infrastructure, and I want to talk about the Business Transformation programme. That is a project that will modernise the way we calculate tax, because tax has become more and more complex—Working for Families tax credits, housing allowances, income-related rent subsidies—and there are issues even now around parental payments and the obligations on parents, who avoid those obligations because the system that we have in calculating those parental obligations is too slow and clunky. So we are part-way through the Business Transformation programme. As has been mentioned already, it is progressing well, to date, and it will improve and make more efficient the way we collect tax. That, of course, puts the onus on those who somehow or other have been able to move quickly from job to job perhaps and avoid some of their obligations today and in the past.
The other thing I would like to mention is the accounting income method. It is very significant—very significant. This accounting income method is, as the Minister has already mentioned, like PAYE for small businesses. If there is one thing about which people have come to me and said “Good on the Government. This is a really major initiative. It’s going to affect me.”, it is this PAYE system that allows small businesses to pay as they go. Previously, provisional tax has been burdensome. A downturn in a business cycle will create cash-flow problems for small businesses because their assessment in the coming year is based on the previous year’s income.
This system allows that provisional tax to be paid as they go, based on the current business of the day in that business. That actually affects right now businesses in Woodville in my electorate. Due to the Manawatū Gorge closing, those businesses in Woodville have seen less traffic go through the town. But they are able to communicate with the Inland Revenue Department (IRD), to reassess and recalculate. The bad old days of the IRD where penalties were just compounded and re-compounded have gone. Those bad old days have gone. The IRD is doing an excellent job of working with its customers, the taxpayers.
I would also like to touch on the ongoing work that relates to base erosion and profit shifting. Mr Robertson suggested that he would like to see a diverted profit tax unilaterally initiated by the Opposition. He can say these things in an election year, but, unfortunately, that is not going to work. We need to have a multilateral agreement, and that is exactly what Minister Collins is working on with other OECD countries to continue—
CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I want to change the topic of conversation somewhat and improve the quality of the debate. My comments relate to Vote Prime Minister and Cabinet, and also Vote Ombudsmen. I want to address issues with regard to ethical behaviours, integrity, and transparency of government, which I would hope that anybody listening to this debate today would consider to be rather important.
I want to highlight what I believe is the insincerity and deceit of this Government between its statements and its actions. People do believe, and they expect, that Governments should behave in predictable, open, and transparent ways. When it comes to blockage of access to information, the demonising of whistleblowers, the neglect in ensuring that the privacy rights of citizens are in step with community expectations, and of course the lack of value and investment in public interest media—these are all symptoms of a democracy in decline.
I want to refer to the transcript in the Estimates for Vote Prime Minister and Cabinet. Andrew Kibblewhite, the chief executive of the department, said that the Cabinet Office was “busy working on implementing the refreshed Cabinet Manual, which the Prime Minister launched last night.” He referred to the principles in the manual representing “the best of our system of executive Government: robust decision-making processes, respect for the law, integrity, effectiveness and efficiency, openness and accountability.”
With reference to respect for the law, when you look at the very top of our Government, there are questions around the respect for the law regarding our own Prime Minister in relation to the Todd Barclay debacle, where at its best the answers that have been given to the public and to this very Parliament can be described as being economical with the truth, and, at its very worst, as having the potential to be lying to the people of New Zealand and assisting with an illegal cover-up.
This is extremely serious, and it is something that the people of New Zealand do take seriously. And with regard to—
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I just want to warn the member that she needs to be very careful that what she is speaking to is this report, and the assertions that she might make may well fall outside of the bounds of what is allowable in the House.
CLARE CURRAN: Thank you, Mr Chair. Well, I am addressing an updated Cabinet Manual that was referred to in the Estimates discussion at a select committee, which went right to the way that the integrity of government can be measured and upheld. So it is a valid area for debate, and it is valid that members in this House can raise these matters. What we are hearing consistently in answers from the Prime Minister to oral questions is that “I have no responsibility for that, as the Prime Minister.”, or “I’ve given all the answers I’m going to give on that.”, and other such answers, which, in my view at least—and in the view of this part of the House—shows a decline in integrity and a decline in standards that should be considered very worrying.
In the time I have left I want to acknowledge the role that the Office of the Ombudsmen plays, the integrity of the Ombudsman, Peter Boshier, and the work that he is doing on trying to get the huge backlog of complaints on the refusal to release information by this Government—to get those complaints through and to get that information released. This is a critical area where the effectiveness of Government can be measured. If people are going to vote in this election they have to be assured that the Government does have integrity.
Votes agreed to.
Health Sector
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Members, we now come to the vote in the health sector—volume B.5, volume 6. The question is that Vote Health stand part of the schedules.
SIMON O’CONNOR (Chairperson of the Health Committee): I am delighted to take this call in the Estimates debate on the appropriations around health. It is one of the simpler ones in terms of these Estimates and appropriations debates, in so far as it is a singular theme, but that should not lull us into a false sense of security in so far as health is massive. This is probably “the portfolio”, and I want to acknowledge the Minister in the chair, Jonathan Coleman, for the work that he has done not just this year but in recent years to lead the health service. I have often said in this House—and I did so through the Estimates debate—that health is a lot more than simply hospitals. It is very easy for us to think of health as simply the management of hospitals, but, in fact, it is much, much bigger than that. We can think of everything from doctors to nurses to care workers to those in ambulances to those who are doing research right through into elements of primary care. So, in acknowledging the Minister, can I, through him as well, say thanks to the Director-General of Health, all those at the Ministry of Health, and, most importantly, those who work on the front line every day.
The Budget saw an announcement of $16.8 billion to be spent in health—$16.8 billion, the largest ever spend in health. That is just over $3.9 billion more money into the health system. Why I am really stressing that is that we have had a little bit of mischief, for want of a better word, from the Opposition, which has been saying that there have been funding cuts, and I think that absolutely needs to be addressed, first and foremost, as an absolute. You cannot increase the Budget by $3.9 billion and consequently cut—that is an inherent contradiction, which goes without saying. What the Opposition often comes up with is figures from a utopia of what it would like spent. It would like $1.7 billion more spent, or $2.5 billion, and, as I have pointed out in the House before, I am a bit surprised that the Opposition is not more ambitious in these figures and saying there is a $10 billion, $20 billion, $30 billion, or $100 billion underspend, because, actually, health is one of those areas where you can constantly put money in and you will still always need more. Again, I want to pay tribute to the Minister and his team for actually doing the balance that is required in what is a very complicated system.
To touch on some of the key announcements that were made within health, probably the most notable is what is known as the TerraNova settlement—over $2 billion to support around about 50,000 hard-working New Zealanders in the care sector. These are the people who go round to homes, help with the tidying up, the cleaning—look, anything you can think of, really. These are the people who go out often and have been at minimum wage, and what Dr Jonathan Coleman and others have led, along with cooperative work with the unions and others, has come to an agreement where those salaries will actually rise considerably. Really importantly, and what I think is most fundamental—beside the wage increase, of course—is a pathway of training, and the Crown is covering those expenses. So my thanks to everyone involved with that. I think it is a really positive announcement.
We have seen extra funding of about $888 million into our district health boards (DHBs). I think it is critically important to understand that DHBs are the primary vehicle in which Vote Health is spent. Often people will ask me what has gone into primary care. You will not necessarily find many specific lines for, say, primary care in the health budget. There are some, of course, but I am stressing that because, actually, the extra money that goes into primary, secondary, and tertiary care is through the vehicle of DHBs. So, as I said, $888 million is going there, and if I might be semi-selfish for a moment, that is about $44 million to the Auckland DHB in which my electorate of Tāmaki resides, so I think that is absolutely fantastic.
Some of the other announcements we have made: about $224 million more into mental health. It is a topic that is out there at the moment. There are a lot who will talk about it and say that we need to talk more of the talk. I think, fundamentally, this Government is about listening and acting, and I think it is really good to see that that spend is there. Really importantly, too, I see there is some money—I think it is about $100 million; the Minister may correct me later—that is sort of a ring-fenced fund where he will be able to work with other Ministers in the social and health space to work out what is best for New Zealanders by responding to what New Zealanders have to say.
A couple of the other elements that have come forward—[Bell rung]
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Simon O’Connor.
SIMON O’CONNOR: Oh, was that my time over? Is that the 5 minutes, is it?
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Yes.
SIMON O’CONNOR: Oh, I do apologise; I was using that clock.
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Oh, sure, and I do apologise that we did not set the clock at the right time, so you can have an extra call—
SIMON O’CONNOR: No, I will not; I am nearly finished.
Hon Annette King: Mr Chair?
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): No, no—the thing about it is that it is a mistake on my part. This is a time-limited debate, anyway, so—
SIMON O’CONNOR: I am happy to cede the call.
Hon ANNETTE KING (Labour—Rongotai): It is an unexpected pleasure that I am speaking in the health Estimates debate today. I had said that my colleagues might like to take my call, but, of course, being given the opportunity and seeing the Minister in the chair, Jonathan Coleman, and his smiling face once again, has given me renewed energy to speak about health in the House during the Estimates debate.
Can I say to the Minister that the issue that has been in the media over the last few months has been the issue of cancer services in New Zealand. I would like to ask the Minister what changes this Budget has made to the warning that was given to him in 2014, not long after he became the Minister—well, actually, just before he became the Minister, but he would have received the warning. The warning was given by the Ministry of Health around the shortage of cancer specialists that was looming. The Ministry of Health said that by 2022 there would be a shortfall across the country of seven radiation oncologists, 30 medical physicists, and 25 radiation therapists. These medical physicists are the ones they are very worried about, because although we are training them—about six a year—they are going straight overseas. This warning was given to this Government not long before Jonathan Coleman became the Minister. What I would like to know is what has been put aside in this Budget to address the warning that was given about the shortage of cancer specialists in New Zealand.
I think you have got a lot of those specialists and people working in the cancer area, particularly the Cancer Society, who are already worried and have raised the issue of postcode access to cancer services. The Minister has said that he has put in place a cancer treatment plan, but, unfortunately, the services are falling short of the plan, Minister. Perhaps the Minister has forgotten what he said the plan would be, but he said that he would make sure that every patient—this is what you said, Minister: you would make sure every patient is treated within 2 months. That is not happening, Minister. This was a commitment you gave, and I have got your statement here. The Cancer Society said at the time: “Well, it’s very aspirational, but it provides very few details as to how the goals would be met.” So, Minister, in the funding—and you like to talk about how much funding health is receiving—I want to know how much has been put in to actually meet the targets set for your cancer treatment plan.
And what about a few more details to the plan? I think New Zealanders should have that, because it is worrying when you read and see the differences that exist between different regions of New Zealand when it comes to access, and it actually comes to those people who are dying of cancer. In fact, we now know that people who are living in the Far North, in Northland, are 1.3 times more likely to die of cancer than Kiwis living in the Minister’s own electorate. That is not a fair system in New Zealand. In fact, what it shows is that for every 100,000 Northlanders, there are 33 extra cancer deaths. For some of those “big four” cancers—the big killer cancers: lung, breast, prostate, and bowel—the variation is even greater across New Zealand.
Now, the Minister, to his credit, has actually started the roll-out of the bowel screening programme—started it. It could have started in 2007, Minister—not your fault; your predecessor had his head in the sand, or somewhere else, but he did not start a roll-out when he could have. It is now happening, but I have to say, Minister, I am surprised that it did not start where the highest death rate was. We can now see that the highest death rate for bowel cancer is in the southern part of New Zealand.
With the roll-out, the question I would like the Minister to answer is why he is expecting district health boards (DHBs), in the funding they receive in their annual budgets, to pick up the treatment costs. That has not been factored into their budgets. The Minister may remember that I asked this question at the Health Committee a few months ago and was told by the ministry that it did not factor in the cost—DHBs must absorb them.
Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): The Estimates hearings were a lively affair this year but, before I speak about them, I just want to acknowledge the Hon Annette King, my predecessor, and her huge contribution to health in this country, as one of the best health Ministers this country has ever had. I want to say that as I go around the country and discuss health, as a relatively new member in the portfolio—although I have been associate health spokesperson with Annette King for 3 years before that—the feedback I am consistently getting is that in the sector, people miss the engagement they had with the Hon Annette King. They felt like they had a Minister who listened, and now they express despair that the current Minister is so disengaged with the sector. In fact, his disengagement is such that they are now starting to claim, and believe, that Tony Ryall was a fantastic Minister of Health, because the contrast is so strong. At least Tony Ryall was on the phone, he was regularly following up, and he cared about what was going on in the sector, and now they have an absentee Minister and they are frustrated.
This came through in the hearings. The Minister, in the hearings—and this was the most shocking thing of all; it was widely reported in the media because they could not believe it either—said he would have to check my figures when I suggested that there were 533,000 people who could not afford to go to the GP in the previous year: 533,000 people. The Minister said: “I’d have to check the member’s figures. I have never heard of that figure before. That’s new to me.” That is the Minister’s own figure. That comes out of his ministry. The Minister does not read his papers. That is one of the major things that is going wrong in this sector. Well, it is the kindest explanation for the blunders that are happening in the sector currently.
I think we will see more to come. For example, on the Budget blunder that was, the Minister announced the wrong funding on Budget day. The Minister announced the wrong funding. I think this is unprecedented. I would challenge the Minister to give another example of a Minister announcing the wrong health funding on Budget day. I do not think it has ever happened. I think we will find out—I think there is still evidence that will come to light that will tell us that the Minister knew about this well before the Budget day and still chose to announce the wrong amount on Budget day. That is frightening.
In this country, if we have a Minister prepared to mislead the country about how many health dollars have been allocated and to whom—
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! You cannot infer that someone has misled, so just be careful of what you are saying. You can use other words but not “misled”.
Dr DAVID CLARK: Well, I will not repeat what I just said, but I have a deep concern that the false amount of money was announced to the public on Budget day, in terms of the allocations to district health boards (DHBs). The fact that the Minister did not know how many New Zealanders could not afford to go to the GP, even though it is in the major survey that his ministry publishes, I think speaks volumes.
In the hearing itself, we asked questions of the Minister around mental health. We asked why the Government had failed to act to intervene when we have a growing crisis in mental health. We raised the issue of a 60 percent increase in the number of people taking up mental health services in New Zealand in the past decade, and the fact that funding had increased only by 28 percent in the same period. The Minister, when asked about funding increases in the mental health sector, consistently says he does not know what the figure is. We have done the calculation. We can tell the Minister it is less than half the percentage increase in the demand for mental health services.
He was prepared, I will say, in that hearing to answer questions on the failures of acute services in mental health, because there had been a damning Auditor-General report recently released that showed that many people—mental health patients—are being released into the community without a plan in place to look after them. They were being released on the basis of least need—not that they were fit to go out again, not that they were ready to go back into the community, but that there were more patients desperately in need and that plans were not in place. They were going out, in some cases, into caravan parks, and the DHBs concerned had no idea where they were going. So the Minister came prepared to answer questions on acute need in this sector, but he did not have an answer as to when the solutions would be put in place.
We have had ministry officials before select committee since, and there will be more on that to come, because, I am afraid, the answers that we are getting are not satisfactory in terms of acute care and they are not satisfactory in terms of providing a service where people with mild to moderate mental health needs can get the care that they need in the community, unless they are wealthy and can independently access private services. We know that there is a huge gap there. That is widely acknowledged in the sector.
The Minister, however, talked about a $25 million contingency that he had launched. He launched that, we know, a week before the Budget. He made a speech, a speech that announced a review—which was not called a review, which was going to be reviewed in 3 years’ time, if I remember rightly—around the quality of services. That was his only announcement a week before the Budget. This was because we know that he had been told he could not make an announcement about the mental health funding contingency and he said that he would make an announcement about that in due course; he was going to put a paper to Cabinet soon. Well, the embarrassing thing that happened on Budget day was that the Minister got up again and delivered out these press releases saying he was going to deliver a Cabinet paper to Cabinet soon. It is the same story: the dog ate his homework. He has not prepared anything on a response to the growing mental health crisis.
That Minister has not got any answers. He has got a contingency fund and we still do not know. The Budget was on 25 May and we still do not know any one thing that he is doing in the mental health area. That is outrageous. It is absolutely outrageous in a growing crisis in this country that the Minister has no plan, and it speaks to 9 years of a Government that, if it had any ideas, it has run out of them or been convinced that they were too bold or too scary or something, because there is no action on mental health.
The Minister does not know his facts and figures. We assessed that in terms of the over half a million people—over half a million people—who could not access their GP. There have been studies, of course, since, and I raised these with the Minister, which show that one in four adults now cannot access the primary healthcare they need in New Zealand. That includes oral care, that includes picking up their scripts, and so on. That is the growing inequality under this Minister’s watch.
We have the primary health sector now in revolt as it is concerned about the lack of funding Budget after Budget after Budget, and this Budget was no different. The sector got $9 million this year, and 2 years in a row it has asked for more than double that because it knows there is a desperate need to fund primary care to keep people out of hospitals. Of course, since then we have heard more about the injections and the skin lesion removals that are being used by the Government to pump up its elective surgery statistics, instead of investing in the long-term care in the way that the Hon Annette King did when she was health Minister—long-term strategies to make sure that New Zealanders were getting the services they need, that money was being invested in prevention rather than in meeting the short-term elective surgery targets that are made to try to make it look like the Government is doing something when we know it has cut money.
This was another challenge I put to the Minister, and I have to say he spent a lot of his prepared speech talking about the Labour Party’s analysis of the shortage of money he has put in the system. He spent a huge amount of his time there trying to rebuff what he knows is a very challenging truth, and that is that when an independent economic agency went and looked at the Treasury figures it found that $2.3 billion has been taken out of the health system and that is the money that would have been required to deliver the existing level of services in the health system. That $2.3 billion—that is what more would have needed to be put in since 2009 just to retain existing service levels.
Of course, in this story about the injections, the eye injections, and the skin lesion removals, there we have the proof in the pudding. Case-weighted discharges, as they are called, are dropping—you know, the number of surgeries being performed at that high end is not keeping up in many DHBs. We have seen a drop-off. If you take away the skin lesions, if you take away the eye injections, and if you take away those surgeries that could have been performed outside of the hospital, there were actually fewer surgeries—fewer surgeries performed in the Auckland DHB, fewer surgeries performed in the Counties Manukau DHB, fewer surgeries performed in the Bay of Plenty DHB, fewer surgeries performed in the Waikato DHB, fewer surgeries performed in the Northland DHB. These are growing populations and year on year there are fewer surgeries being performed, and that is because this Minister seems content to watch the demise of the Health Sector—
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): Well, we have just had two very contrasting speeches from two Labour member. We had Mrs King. Look, she was an excellent Labour spokesperson. She talked about questions and surprises, and the biggest question she will have had in the past year or so would actually be why the Labour Party members would stab her in the back and get rid of her. It has replaced her with the previous speaker, the retired existential philosopher Dr David Clark. Dr Clark asked me why I query his facts and figures, and why I queried them during the select committee hearing. I know Mrs King will be enjoying this because, Mrs King, revenge is a dish best eaten cold—and she is having a laugh at that now because David Clark is up there constantly giving stupid people a bad name with his daily utterances.
In his latest effort yesterday in the House here, he got up and told the House that on 25 July—so that was just 2 days ago—there were no intensive care unit (ICU) beds left in the South Island of New Zealand. That would be extremely concerning, and that is a serious claim to make in the House—very concerning. So I went straight from here, I rang up the officials, and I said: “Look, David Clark—you know, I think he’s a credible member. He has made this claim.” So they ran around, and we had people all around New Zealand ringing up and trying to find out what was happening in the South Island. Within an hour we got the advice back. Much to my surprise, do you know what? They had spare capacity in the South Island. They had beds for ICU in Canterbury, in South Canterbury, and on the West Coast.
I know that David Clark would not make anything up—
Hon Member: No, you would think not.
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: No, well he would not make anything up. So it is clearly good old-fashioned, sloppy Labour Party incompetence. All I would say is God defend New Zealand if Dr David Clark—the man who wanted to ban Google from New Zealand—ever gets to run the New Zealand health system.
Look, Mrs King was an excellent health spokesperson. I enjoyed the intellectual debate with her. She knew her subject. She was able to go out, as David Clark said, and engage with the public of New Zealand. She was great to work with. You know, we had great collegial chats because she had a wealth of information and a lot of experience, and yet David Clark—he struggles to find two neurons to run together to generate an electrical cerebral impulse. I mean, you hear this guy’s daily utterances—those members cannot seriously be serious about having him as their health spokesperson.
Do you know what? They were out there last Saturday or Sunday—it was Andrew Little and David Clark. They said: “You know, we’re going to put an extra $2 billion into the health system. In our first year in Government, we’re going to pump in $856 million.” But the existential philosopher had not done his homework, because, actually, that was going to be less than this Government put in this year. We put in $888 million. So, quite seriously, you cannot be credible when you cannot be trusted to get up and make statements that the House can take at face value. I have to check everything this guy says, and, actually, so does his leader, because Andrew Little is not going to be seriously exposed and made a fool of by his health spokesperson again.
Actually, I have heard rumours of secret talks to bring Annette King back, and I actually think that for the good of intellectual debate around health in New Zealand, we need to get Annette back into the Chamber. The Labour Party needs her. I mean, look, we do not like debating against such a weak Opposition on a daily basis. We want people who are going to give us a run for our money. Annette King used to do this.
But, anyway, on to the serious stuff of the Budget. This was a great Budget. We are at record levels of health expenditure—$16.8 billion, and $3.9 billion over the next 4 years. What is that going to fund? It is going to be more doctors and nurses and more services across the country, and you would struggle to find one single service out of the hundreds across New Zealand that has not improved over that time. We have got a great health system.
Look, next year Dr Clark should come along—he can come and carry the luggage—when we go to the World Health Organization, because he needs to get out and get a wider perspective. He needs to talk to health Ministers from across the world. I am quite prepared to take him under my wing and actually introduce him to a few people, because what they would tell him is that New Zealand has a fantastic health system. I think Dr Clark could make a positive contribution to the debate in New Zealand, but, really, he has got to do a lot more reading and learn a lot more.
JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): One thing I have noticed while listening to contributions from Ministers just like that last contribution is that when the National members have no argument, they spend all their time in their speeches insulting and being condescending towards Opposition members. What I would like to hear from that Minister is an actual acknowledgment of the challenges that are out there in the Health Sector, and what his plan is to do something about it, because we have heard nothing but calm assurances that everything is well and would it not be a disaster if anyone was in charge besides National. Nobody else could possibly, possibly do a better job than this National Government, and yet, Minister Coleman, you know so little about what is going on in your own sector. I go out and I talk to doctors and I talk to people in the hospitals, and I have yet to hear a single one who thinks you are doing a good job.
One of the key statements made by National members is that we are spending more on health than ever before, and they say: “How could there be cuts, when we are spending more on health than ever before?”. Well, it is obviously true that we are spending more on health than ever before, because our population is larger than it has ever been before, and it does not matter whether we have put more money into it if it is not enough to cover the needs of our population. That is what is happening, and that is why it is a cut. We have had record population growth and the National Government has failed to invest in the services and infrastructure that are necessary to meet the needs of the community. That is why when you go out and talk to pretty much anyone working in the Health Sector, they say that they are facing enormous challenges.
I rate New Zealand’s health system. I think it has been fantastic. But we are in danger of losing that after 8½ years of a National Government that has failed to properly raise revenue and invest in the services that benefit all New Zealanders. It may well be that the top 10 percent—like you, Minister Coleman—are doing very well, and I am sure that in your little bubble on the North Shore you do not see what people are actually dealing with. But down at Middlemore Hospital, that hospital is 115 percent full, and there are other hospitals facing the same thing.
In mental health we hear over and over again that, basically, nobody in New Zealand—oh, wait. Sorry, one out of 10 New Zealanders—that must include Minister Coleman—believe the Government is doing enough on mental health. The $100 million that was announced this year—we do not even yet know what it is going to be spend on, and what we do know is that the people who are engaged in actually delivering mental health services for unwell New Zealanders are struggling with understaffing and struggling with a lack of resources, and the people who need help are struggling to get the help that they need. That is probably why we have made no progress in reducing our shockingly high youth suicide rate.
I admit that it is not all Minister Coleman’s fault. I mean, 80 percent of the determinants of health are outside the health budget. So, really, it is the National Government’s failure on housing, it is the National Government’s failure on incomes, and it is the National Government’s failure to do anything about child poverty that is leading to a number of health problems in this country, and they will not all be fixed by putting more money into the health system. But at the very least we should put in the money that is needed to meet the need that is out there now, and we should start planning with a smart public health approach for how we can solve multiple problems with the same policies—like, for example, the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill (No 2), which passed its second reading last night, no thanks to this Government, which voted against it. If you want to have healthy homes, you have to require landlords to actually keep their rental properties up to standard, and that is the evidence from overseas.
If you want affordable housing and you want to end homelessness, you need to build more homes. You need to put more money into public housing, and that is entirely possible if you do not prioritise tax cuts for the rich. If you want to solve the childhood obesity problem and the myriad of health challenges that are related to it, then you need a completely different approach to transport policy and food policy, and you need to look at the actual evidence.
This Minister, unbelievably, opposes intelligent transport solutions in his own neighbourhood, like a cycleway and bus lanes. But, actually, if we invested in walking, cycling, and public transport, we would do a lot to solve the problems of inactivity. And, of course, we should have a tax on sugary drinks. I know that Minister will be waiting a hundred years to see the evidence that it reduces obesity, but we have all the evidence we need right now that the approach your Government is taking is not working.
Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): It is a pleasure to rise and support the Estimates. In this contribution, I would like to focus on what was a substantive discussion in the Estimates, which was around mental health—
Dr David Clark: Mental health.
Dr SHANE RETI: —indeed, mental health—and talk about some of the initiatives that we are undertaking with the $224 million that is being appropriated in this Budget. The $224 million is looking to deal with the increasing burden of mental health. We know that 50 percent of all New Zealanders at some point in their lifetime will have a mental health issue, and that in any one year 25 percent will have a diagnosable mental health condition.
If we break that $224 million down, we see $100 million going to district health boards (DHBs), ring-fenced, like the old Mason money used to be. There is $100 million to the social investment programme and $24 million to cross-agency initiatives, which includes the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), Corrections, and the Ministry of Māori Development. Some of the mental health targets that are important and that we are focusing on include acute assessment. For non-urgent cases, we are looking to have 80 percent seen in the first 3 weeks and 95 percent seen in 8 weeks. Another target we are focusing on is the post-discharge follow-up, and that target is 90 percent in 7 days.
And, to be fair, the Office of the Auditor-General (OAG) report did come out and say: “Look, we’ve got some work to do there.” It was not quite where we wanted it to be, and so I am going to talk about how we are applying ourselves to get there. In fact, the main finding of the OAG report was all around collaboration, particularly that primary to secondary care transition.
I want to talk to each of these three appropriations in a bit more detail, then. The $100 million to the DHBs: well, what the Minister has done here is make mental health a very clear priority. How do you do that? Well, you do that by setting out a letter of expectation to the DHBs saying exactly that. Mental health is a high priority for this Minister and for this Government.
What you also do is you make it a key performance indicator reportable in the Ministry of Health’s annual reports. That also focuses the attention of the DHBs. Inside of the social investment programme and the $100 million that is being appropriated there, we have the national depression index, which is an IT-based model with two core websites and the National Telehealth Service wrapping around it. The service for youth is called thelowdown.co.nz and for adults, depression.org.nz.
Technology is very important in some of the push into the mental health domain. We know from international jurisdictions that people who have suicidal ideation and are feeling depressed are more inclined and more likely to deal with computerised interviews than with personal interviews. That is what the international space is telling us but, you know, some of our local researchers have also found that. Professor Felicity Goodyear-Smith from the Auckland Goodfellow Unit has an application called eCHAT, which uses iPads as a self-assessment tool in a waiting room to look at depression and other mental health illnesses. It is a wonderful project. She published it in The Journal of the American Medical Association, I think it was, and it is another good indication of technology being useful in this domain.
The second initiative inside the social investment programme comes from the document Rising to the Challenge: The Mental Health and Addiction Service Development Plan 2012-2017. This outlined four key parts to a framework around how we might address mental health. The first was Activating our existing resources—I called it “ABCD”. B was Building integration—here we are again, coming back to that transition between primary and secondary care—Covering high needs; and, fourthly, Delivering increased access. So that is the second initiative.
The third thing I want to talk to is the national quality improvement programme managed by the Health Quality and Safety Commission—7.5 million over 5 years, reviewed in 3 years. It set itself five priorities. Those five priorities are, firstly, minimising restrictive care, and I would note that the legislation we passed earlier this year, the Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Act, did exactly that. Second is maximising physical health. We can easily be distracted in mental health on the mental health issue. Let us remember they have other physiological conditions that are often distracting and need attention also. Third is improving medication management. It is always a challenge in mental health. When you are not at your best you are more inclined to say, “I don’t need to take this medicine because I’m doing well.”, when, in fact, you may not be. Recording adverse events—and here we are again, their fifth priority is improving service transitions. See, all the focus across these frameworks is the really important integration between services.
So, I think, as we can see here, there are a number of initiatives at several levels—DHB level, the social investment level. I have not even—and probably will not have time to—spoken to the collaborations between MSD, Corrections, and Māori Development, but I think we have made the point that we recognise the challenge of mental health, we are applying it, and here is, actually, what we are doing. Thank you.
RIA BOND (NZ First): Again, when you come down to the Chamber, you come with a lot of notes that you just actually want to talk to, on this specific subject. But following on from the member Julie Anne Genter, I was actually quite horrified to sit here and listen to the Minister of Health bag David Clark, bag the Labour Party, and not actually address the problem that is out there in New Zealand.
The GPs have been telling that Minister that they have been short of funding. They are so fed up with the way the Minister has been arrogant in not listening to them that they launched a campaign yesterday, which I am assuming the Minister received, and it was a postcard launch. It was to actually itemise out how GPs are suffering around this country: how GPs cannot get a toilet break after working a solid 10 hours; how GPs go out to car accidents, watch someone die, come right back to their surgery, and have to do paperwork—paperwork—because of the bureaucratic rubbish that they have got to put up with; how GPs are so exhausted, so fatigued, and they get no help themselves; and how GPs cannot actually see children because they have got too many patients and a lack of actual GPs filling in for them. That is a real problem. And to sit here and listen to the Minister bark on about David Clark for 4 minutes was shocking. I would have thought the Minister would have been a bit more responsible and answered some of the clear questions that members in our communities are asking us. You can sit there and pull a face Dr Coleman—I do not care.
What I want to address is actually the district health boards (DHBs). We know that our DHBs have been massively underfunded. We know—for instance, in Southland, just recently—that our waiting list for elective eye surgery caused partial blinding and blinding to 38 patients across Southland and Dunedin, and that is an absolute issue. I know for a fact that just last month Dunedin Hospital actually had to bring in specialists, and it saw over 114 patients in 1 day. Some of these people had to actually sit on the floor because they had to wait for their treatment. Elderly people were sitting on the floor at that hospital because the hospital was so overwhelmed. If our hospitals were not massively underfunded, then why did it take Minister Coleman and the DHB to bring in specialists for 1 day to try to clear the backlog? I think that is pretty telling in itself—that we do not have enough funding in our healthcare system. Dr Coleman can still continue to pull faces—that is fine.
I want to say, too, that just a fortnight ago at Southland Hospital, we had more than 10 patients who actually had to wait overnight at the hospital because there were no beds—there were no beds because the hospital was filled to full capacity. I am saying that the Southern DHB had over 100 percent capacity in that hospital, and that is shocking. That is absolutely unacceptable.
I also want to talk about the fact that the New Zealand Nurses Organisation has actually sent open letters to the Minister of Health telling him that it does not have enough funding, telling him that its graduate nurses are not actually getting positions because working-visa nurses from overseas are actually taking their jobs. Those graduates have been so loyal to their sector and they are finding it really hard that they cannot get a job, and that is a shock. That is shocking. That tells me also that the Minister does not care. He simply does not care that the students and graduates are actually being overlooked by DHBs, and foreigners can come in and take their jobs. That is a problem and that needs to be addressed.
I also want to talk about the fact that nurses do not get time to have breaks. They do not get time to have breaks. What they are worried about is actually that the fatigue they are finding is going to impact on patient care. We are seeing that in our communities. We are seeing that out on the street, and when they come into our offices we are actually seeing in their distraught nature that the nurses are suffering at the moment because of the lack of funding.
I want to talk too about the fact that there is an issue around mental health that we have all said is a crisis, and this Government refuses to admit that. I actually want to talk about the fact that we have the highest suicide rate in the OECD. No one in this House—not one member—should actually think that we should be very proud of that statistic, at all. We need to urgently inject the sector with some money. We need to make sure that we are actually giving our nurses and our doctors in mental health enough adequate funding to make sure that they can actually do the job that we need them to do. I think it is a sad day—it is a sad day—when we get mums bringing their children into our offices who have got depression, and who actually want to take their lives, and they cannot get access. I actually listened to Mike King when he said—and it is true, because people are coming and telling us this—they have to actually basically try to commit suicide right at that front door before it is accepted that they have an issue. That is actually a damning indictment on a Government that has ignored the facts and ignored the statistics. I think it is a shocking Budget, and New Zealand First will definitely not be supporting the Estimates.
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): I want to thank the last member, Ria Bond, for her thoughtful, measured, and intellectual contribution, and for the various issues she has highlighted. One of the issues that the member did speak of was the arrival yesterday of the GPs with their messages for me, and I have taken those home and read them all. There are some valid issues that they raise, and I am very committed to working with the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners to address those. We had a very constructive meeting in my office with Dr Tim Malloy, and afterwards we issued a joint statement to that effect.
General practice is at the very heart of the medical system in New Zealand, and I know the member will have read the New Zealand Health Strategy. I know also that the speaker before Ria Bond, Julie Anne Genter—I think she was the member for Minnesota—will be also be very familiar with the plan that we have laid out around the challenges that the New Zealand health system faces.
As you know, we have got a growing population and we have got an ageing population, but there is also more and more that we can do for people in terms of new and expensive drugs and technology. This Government has put a huge emphasis on preventative care and on early intervention. Measures like cutting the rate of smoking across the country by 20 percent through progressive taxation—that has a huge downstream effect on the health of the country. So I want to assure the very concerned Opposition members who want to know what the plan is—go and read that New Zealand Health Strategy. It is all laid out there; it is all very, very clear.
One of the things that I am actually proudest of that this Government has delivered is the $2 billion pay equity settlement that was announced in the Budget. That is going to raise the incomes of 55,000 of the hardest-working, most deserving people in New Zealand: care and support workers. They are doing work that, frankly, you would have to be a saint to deliver. The vast majority of them are on, or are on about, the average wage. From 1 July those women had a pay increase of between 21 and 49 percent. So if you are on the minimum wage and you are working in a rest home, you are now going to be taking home an extra $106 a week in the hand—over $5,000 per year. Personally, I feel very proud of this Government’s delivery of that, because, really, you would think that it would be the left-wing complainers over there who would have done something about it. But, as with free under-13s visits for children, as with raising benefit rates for the first time in real terms since 1973, it has actually taken a National Government to deliver it. So we are not about complaint and bluster and all that stuff; we actually get on and deliver it.
If you look at all the achievements across the health portfolio, hundreds of services—you would struggle to find a single one that has not improved. We have got 7,000 more doctors and nurse across the system. We are doing an extra 50,000 operations per year, and an extra 150,000 appointments. You know, those are huge achievements. We are bringing waiting times down for elective surgery. We are making sure that more people are seen. Despite the constant litany of complaint from the other side, in actual fact, waiting times of mental health services have decreased, and we have put more and more money into the drugs budget. The Pharmac budget has gone up by over $200 million under this Government—$60 million this year. I can tell you that 3.5 million New Zealanders received a funded medicine in the last year. That is incredible, and that $60 million in the Budget directly benefits 33,000 New Zealanders. If you look at low-cost GP visits—800,000 under-13 children are getting free visits to the doctor. That is a real, tangible achievement. It aligns with the strategy of taking pressure off our hospitals, but also, very importantly, of improving the health of children.
One of the most interesting bits of research I read this year was the fact that our emergency department (ED) health targets—so making sure that 95 percent of patients are in and out of the ED within 6 hours—literally save 700 lives a year. That is incredible. This week the first letters are going out for the National Bowel Screening Programme. That is also going to save 500 to 700 lives per year.
Look at the big picture—record funding level, every service is better, and there are record numbers of doctors, operations, and appointments. The whole system is on the right track.
KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I did not want to interrupt the Minister’s lack of flow in his speech, but I just wanted to remind him that when we address members of Parliament in this House, we do it by their name or their seat. The Minister attempted humour in that speech, and did not do that with one particular member.
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I hear what you say, and I should have picked it up at the time. I think it was done in a friendly sort of way, as opposed to an—[Interruption] No, I am on my feet. I am just ruling on this. I hear what you say, and the Minister has just commented that he also agrees, so thank you for bringing it up.
JENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): This National Government has failed to give the Health Sector the funding that it needs in Budget 2017. District Health Boards (DHBs) needed up to $650 million per year in additional support just to cover their current costs, but they received only just over $400 million, which leaves them with a shortfall of $211 million. There is unmet need for at least 60,000 people who are needing elective surgery, and what the DHBs have to do is they have to actually go and find the extra funds to make sure that folks get their elective surgeries.
Let us just look at some of the examples across the country of where we see that DHBs are currently underfunded. Look at what the junior doctors have done over the last couple of years or so—they went on strike three times because they were working such long hours. They were telling us that one of the main reasons why they were working such long hours is because of the under-resourcing that they were actually experiencing over at the DHBs. Just a couple of months ago the Waikato DHB sent out a note saying that only if you are experiencing a life and death - type situation should you be allowing new patients to be enrolled. In the last couple of days in the Southern DHB several patients have had surgeries delayed multiple times, and one 68-year-old father who had been waiting—and had his surgery delayed four different times—died before his surgery was even performed.
This is not a sign of DHBs and a health system that is well funded. Yes, we hear the honourable Minister going on about millions and millions of dollars going into the health system, but why is it that we have so many complaints from people from right across New Zealand that they are not getting the services that they need—500,000 people not being able to afford to see their GPs, and the unfolding crisis in mental health? We know that mental health is in crisis. This is something you cannot just put a bandage on, and a Labour Government would make mental health a priority.
I want to talk about our young people. Just 2 weeks ago I attended an event over in Auckland where over 10 high schools came together. The theme was love, and these high school students were asked to utilise spoken word, dance, drama, and multimedia to express this word. They were really, really good at doing all of this drama and multimedia, but what really hit me was that what most of these high schools from across Auckland were actually doing, in terms of their spoken word and drama, was focused on one issue: suicide.
It is so sad to see so many of our young people, even when they are actually doing a drama on a word called “love”, focus on suicide. Why? Because our suicide rate is so high. One in six New Zealanders will be diagnosed with a mental health problem in their lifetime, and we know that there has been a 60 percent increase in accessing mental health. However, since this National Government came into power in 2008, there has been only a 28 percent increase going into mental health services although we have seen an increase of 60 percent in terms of accessing mental health services.
This is unsustainable. This is a Government that has failed to recognise mental health as a big issue; to address our youth suicide rate, being one of the highest in the OECD; or actually to fund health services in general to an adequate level. I heard one of the speakers from the other side talking about the increase in funding for mental health, but what he did not actually say is that most of the millions that the current Government, in its Budget, is saying is going to mental health is actually going to the DHBs—the DHBs that are going to be short by $211 million. They are going to be asked to find the extra millions to fund mental health services. They are already underfunded. Where are they going to find that extra funding to make up for this Government’s underfunding of health services? Thank you.
BARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): It is a pleasure to speak this afternoon, and I also want, as others have done, to acknowledge Mrs King. Mrs King spent a lot of time on our Health Committee this Parliament, and it was good for her to come back in a couple of weeks ago, and good to have her in the room again. So I want to acknowledge what she has brought to it.
We have talked a lot today around—this is, really, around the appropriations and the money. Dr Coleman, our Minister, mentioned before—$888 million extra that is being invested into health in 2017 and 2018. It is actually the biggest increase in 11 years. We heard a member over there talking before about the Southern District Health Board. It is, actually, going to get another $31 million. I want to mention two health boards that are connected with my own electorate. The Taranaki District Health Board will be getting another $12 million and the Waikato District Health Board will be getting another $42 million. So the health budget is increasing.
One of the things that have grabbed a lot of attention this afternoon is around mental health. There is an extra $224 million for mental health. And, look, no one is proud of the suicide rate—one suicide is too many. It really is one of those issues that we have got to grapple with, but we are not going to grapple with it by, you know, blasting people with it. We have got to sit down and listen. Only a matter of a couple of days ago, this week, I saw a young constituent of mine who was really keen to talk to Dr Coleman about his experience. So we sat down—and it is about listening, and it is about working these things out.
I can tell you that the money that has gone in—not only last year and the year before but the promised money, which totals up to $1.6 million for rural mental health, which has been put into the Fieldays—is being put into actually helping people out in the community who can understand what to do when somebody is stressed.
We talk a lot about what goes on in the hospital, but, actually, it is about having our community people prepared. What was really cool this year was to see the Fieldays Health Hub going on and everyone being able to visit that health hub. Farmers were coming in for their wellness check. It was not only about prostate cancer, breast cancer, blood checks, diabetes checks, blood pressure checks—which are all really, really important—but the other part of it was the wellness check: “How are you feeling?”, “What are you up to?”, and having people in there who can recognise that.
I think we have to recognise that a lot of people in our community have not historically been equipped to even pick it up, so to get all of those people out there who can recognise—I have to say it has made a huge difference to what has gone on in our rural communities over the dairy downturn.
While we are talking about appropriations, I just want to put a call out to dairy farmers today, because we have had a very good announcement about forecast payout, which now has a seven in front of it instead of a three. But having said that, mental health is not all about money—people have lives, they have marriage breakups, and they have things that go wrong. It is good to have those out in the community who can front-line it. So really it is about listening, not about thinking that we know all the answers around it. We have got to find out from people what is concerning them.
I was really pleased to be on the Health Committee when we went through the process of doing the legislation around the settlement for the care workers. I cannot think of a better bunch of people to be paid out this extra money, because, as the Minister mentioned before, they really do work that is extremely important in our community. They are looking after our most vulnerable, our most disabled. It means our elderly people can stay in their homes for much longer than they ever used to.
I just wanted to touch on one more subject, and that is around double-crewing for ambulances, which is accounted for here as well. I think that is pretty important everywhere, but when you work in a very remote area and you have people in ambulances by themselves, not only is it a danger in case they come across one of those patients who does not particularly want their services and gets a bit aggressive but also someone often has to drive while the other person takes care of the patient. So I think that is a really, really good move. It is going to add to the safety of the drivers and the patients. It has been a pleasure to take a call this afternoon, thank you.
RIA BOND (NZ First): After listening to Minister Coleman’s response—it motivated me to get back up and take another call. I do want to talk about the fact that I feel very lucky that I get to meet with many professionals within the healthcare sector. They tell me that they are desperately trying to work within the system, and they tell me they simply do not have resources to deal with mental health.
I want to pick up from where Barbara Kuriger talked about the Budget, and I want to say that on 25 May the Government members crowed over how great this Budget was for mental health. We got told that there would be a spend of $224 million in mental health, and it sounded like a pretty impressive number. It sounded like a pretty impressive Budget—that is, until you actually went through the fine print of that Budget. What we know is that the Budget is going to be spent over a 4-year period, so that means that each district health board (DHB) will get $56 million a year. The Government also announced that it is going to ring-fence $100 million into mental health, yet, again, that is spread over 4 years. That is $25 million per year through DHBs.
But what was actually quite glaringly obvious, when the Government laid out this great Budget, was that that $100 million was money that was already allocated to DHBs—already allocated to DHBs. So that Budget is going to force DHBs to try to find additional funding to actually fund mental health through the DHBs. I think it is no secret—DHBs are telling us themselves. They know that, overall, they are over $200 million short in this Budget.
Mental health, as I have said, was given $100 million as part of the social investment budget, and that is to target new initiatives. Again, I looked at it, and that is $25 million per year. That will boil down to community groups, which will end up having to fight over $1 million per group so that they can try to find innovative ways to actually help alleviate the mental health crisis. Again—again—when I looked through that Budget, and I pored over it, it was a Budget that had big flashing numbers but really under-delivered to mental health. I think that we, as a country, know that this is a crisis. We know mental health is in crisis. What we want to see, though, is a Government that is more ambitious and ready to back itself.
What I was disappointed about, and what New Zealand First was actually disappointed about, was the fact that the Minister of Health recently reduced the suicide targets. What was quite alarming was that members of our families, members out there in the community, are having to deal with suicide and the tragedy within their families, and it is a shocking tragedy. We need to actually make sure that when we are dealing with suicide and trying to put funding around that, we actually do it with, I guess, some backing—more backing than what we are seeing right now through this Budget.
What I and New Zealand First were also disappointed about—because Dr Coleman did actually reduce the suicide rate by 20 percent over a 2-year period. He vetoed that target because he was too scared that it would make this Government look bad in an election year. What was evidential was that if we look at the number of people per year who could be saved by that target, that is 12 people. That is 12 people per year whom that target equates to, and that is 12 people too many.
What I want to see is the Government actually setting some measures and goals so that we can see that things are actually working and policy is actually working. The last thing that members in this House want to see is this Budget and the appropriations that affect the lives out there in our communities—we actually want to see the Health Sector do better, and we must do better as MPs in this House. We have to stop with the cosmetic coverage that this Government has been applying to funding when we are dealing with mental health.
I want to just touch back a little bit again on the fact that when I listened to Mike King talk about mental health and youth suicide—yes, we have the highest rate of youth suicide in the OECD, and we have to actually do something about this. Something urgently needs to be done. It is no good that we just sit here and listen to the same rhetoric, the same thing, all the time, saying that we have got a plan. That mental health strategy was not worth the paper that it was written on. I have gone through it, and I have listened to people actually out there on the street, asking me: “Why can’t they see what we’re going through? Why can’t they listen to us? Why can’t they hear our voices when we are asking for help? Why can’t the Government sit down around a table and put some common-sense policy around suicide prevention?”.
I think, too, New Zealand First has been calling for an urgent and independent review into mental health care. In the Health Committee the Minister of Health said that he did not think that that is actually needed, and that he and his groups and his director-general were working through things and knew that things were not good at the moment and they were going to make it better. Well, I can tell members of the public that this Budget is not going to do that.
Vote agreed to.
Justice Sector
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Members, we now come to the votes in the justice sector, volume B.5, volume 7. The question is that Vote Attorney-General, Vote Corrections, Vote Courts, Vote Justice, Vote Parliamentary Counsel, Vote Police, and Vote Serious Fraud stand part of the schedules.
SARAH DOWIE (Chairperson of the Justice and Electoral Committee): I am absolutely delighted to take this call and lead off the debate for the Appropriation (2017/18 Estimates) Bill in the justice sector. I am so proud of this Government’s record in respect of the justice portfolios. I am so pleased with our record in respect of investing in justice and law and order measures, to bring about New Zealand being the fourth-safest country—
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member will resume her seat. I think the member might misunderstand her role now. She has a special extra call as chair of the select committee to report back on the activities of the select committee. It is not one that is a normal Government call; therefore, she has to pretend that she is neutral—at least for the next 5 minutes.
SARAH DOWIE: Ha, ha! Well, I will pretend. Thank you for that, Mr Chair. But I was setting the scene—I am setting the scene to move on to further initiatives that Vote Justice and Vote Police and the other votes under this justice sector are going to invest in moving forward. We are proud of the record, but we can do better, and that is where I was going with that. We need to continue to invest so that we do not leave any New Zealander behind, even those who have had a brush with the law.
In praising and acknowledging the Ministers for their leadership in this area, I need to talk about the research that they have done and their relentless need to look at the drivers of crime, and therefore put in place initiatives to deal with them. So it is about supporting victims—making sure that we are supporting victims in a number of different ways—making sure that we are holding perpetrators to account, and making sure, as I said before, that we are understanding the drivers of crime. When we look at the analytics behind it—and especially in Vote Justice and Vote Police—there are about three things that feature quite significantly in the lives of people who have had a brush with the law. Those are drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, and exposure to family violence. That is certainly what features in the drivers for the initiatives that are occurring moving forward in the justice sector.
So if we look at some of the statistics that were investigated in the Law and Order Committee and in the Justice and Electoral Committee, when we were looking at offenders it was found that nine out of 10 prisoners actually experience mental illness in their lifetime. So we needed to do something about that, because, of course, we need to invest in these people to make sure that they are well, moving forward, so that when they are reintegrated into the community they can make a difference and they can lead productive lives.
I have visited Invercargill Prison, and I am really impressed with the initiatives there that have been put in place, which are reflective across the entire country. When offenders come into the prison they are assessed. In some cases it is the first medical assessment that they have actually ever received.
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am now going to ask the member to stop. Unless she can give me an assurance that her visits to Invercargill Prison were part of the Minister’s evidence or the questioning at the select committee, then she is just so far off her responsibilities that we will not go on. Were they discussed at the select committee?
SARAH DOWIE: Yes—yes, they were. They were mentioned.
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): They were. OK. Well, if you had said that at the beginning, it would have helped.
SARAH DOWIE: MPs’ visits were mentioned in the vote.
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): No—your visit to Invercargill Prison and what they do there.
SARAH DOWIE: Yes, it was one of the visits.
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Very good. As long as it was mentioned at the committee, that is fine. I will take the member’s word.
SARAH DOWIE: Thank you, Mr Chair. What happens is that prisoners are assessed upon their entry. As part of that, they are assessed for mental health. Twenty percent of those offenders are actually referred for treatment. We are looking at an investment of $11.6 million over 4 years to make sure that offenders—
AUPITO WILLIAM SIO (Labour—Māngere): That contribution was a disgrace. I just want to say to the member Sarah Dowie that here is a paper written by the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference—bishops from Auckland, Dunedin, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch, and Palmerston North—that describes our justice system in these words: “It is a national disgrace.” And they are deeply disturbed by the growing prison population in New Zealand.
Our justice sector is a critical sector—
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am going to get the member to sit down, so that I can explain to the member Sarah Dowie, again, that as chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee she gets an extra call that does not count against her party’s calls. It is meant to be, as far as possible, neutral and non-partisan. And then, later on, if she wants to make a call that is broader on justice issues, she is able to do that. I will thank her not to give me further guidance.
Kris Faafoi: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I just noticed that during your ruling the clock was still continuing.
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I will make an adjustment for that. I did not make an adjustment in the previous speech. But as I do it, at some stage, fairly soon, it would be good if the speaker on his feet could also tie what he is saying—it will not be that hard—into the Estimates. Thank you.
AUPITO WILLIAM SIO: Thank you for the intervention. I am a little bit calmed down now. Our justice sector is a critical sector, alongside housing, health, and education. It is a sector that New Zealanders rely upon when things get worse. But I want to say, at the outset, that National has utterly failed to properly resource our Justice Sector.
These are not just my words. They are the words that are also described in the number of reports with Corrections and with the prisons that our select committee underwent. Once upon a time it used to be that if you got into an accident—if somebody got hit by a car or crashed—when you called for the police to be present, you could rely that they would be there. Today the feedback that I constantly get, and no doubt many members of this House get, is that when you call the police they will not be able to turn up. If there is a burglary, they will not be able to turn up.
We have had a spate of dairy break-ins and robberies in South Auckland, and one of the biggest complaints from dairy owners is that when they call for police, they do not turn up. We automatically, as a community, blame the police. But I want to make it absolutely clear—and these are not just my words; they are the words of the committee—that the reason why our police are unable to cope with the amount of call-ins from the general public is the severe underfunding by this Government. It is a direct consequence of the budget cuts that the Government introduced when it first came into power, and it will continue to be this way. It is not confined just to the police. There has been ample evidence provided, through the select committees and through the reports that have been tabled in this House, that there has been underfunding right through the main core elements of society, including the justice sector.
Let me point out a few things that this report on the Police says. On page 239 it states: “Some of us are concerned that, if the Police do not have the resources they need, they will not be able to get on top of crime that saw 11,000 more victimisations last year than the previous year, mental health to the fore, and methamphetamine out of control.” That is a direct quote of what was discussed at the select committee.
When this Opposition party raised with the Government that we need more police on the ground, it was the recommendation by the police themselves that they needed 1,165 sworn officers. What did this Government do? It provided 880—880, which is 285 fewer than requested by the police.
To this date we in South Auckland continue to ask where our number of sworn officers is, out of the 880 who were promised. That is still not forthcoming. In the meantime, total victimisations have risen 3 percent, assaults have risen 4 percent, sexual assaults have risen 3 percent, robberies have risen 23 percent, and burglaries have risen 10 percent, including a 29 percent increase in the eastern districts.
It is a shambles and it is a national disgrace, as the bishops conference of New Zealand has deemed our deep concern about what is happening in our justice sector, but this Government fails to recognise it. The manifestation of the Government’s failure to recognise that we are in crisis mode is its continuing to underfund these things. That will have rippling effects in the years ahead.
I want to finish off by saying, with Corrections, that housing is a big issue for those who are released and who have public protection orders against them. We saw that when the people of Māngere put a petition through to this Government. I am disappointed. Whilst I have deep respect for the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee, I am disappointed that the members of that committee did not want to hear those submitters personally.
KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National): I would like to start from where my colleague left, about mental health. Before I touch upon the mental health part I would like to give the good news to my friend Aupito William Sio that the Government has allocated more than $500 million for the justice sector, and particularly for increasing police numbers. That was discussed in the select committee at length. My good friend was at the select committee, where the Ministers the Hon Paula Bennett and the Hon Louise Upston explained their ambitions and what they want to achieve as Ministers in both votes.
It is very important to understand that if there is a problem, it cannot be fixed overnight; it takes a while. But we are getting 880 extra police officers on the front line, and, out of those, more than 250 will be allocated to Auckland. Another piece of good news for my friend Aupito William Sio is that recently, from the last graduation, we had 26 extra police officers who came to Counties Manukau.
The police are doing an excellent job, and we should appreciate them. I also do not agree with the assertion made by the previous speaker, Aupito William Sio, that the police are not responding. Police told us at the Law and Order Committee that they are responding, and the expectation from the Government to the police while allocating the extra funding is that within 48 hours they will respond to every burglary. That was mentioned by the Commissioner of Police during the select committee hearings.
Darroch Ball: Forty-eight hours?
KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI: My friend from New Zealand First is shouting. Forty-eight hours for minor crimes is not bad.
Darroch Ball: What are serious crimes?
KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI: Serious crimes are attended immediately, for your knowledge. You should go and talk to the police and see, and ask your good friend Mahesh Bindra, who is sitting with you. He can brief you that the police are doing an excellent job.
Here I would like to also mention that the police are going to get 20 extra ethnic officers who will be dealing with small businesses about their issues. Recently in Auckland they ran an operation known as Operation Dukan to support small businesses in terms of how they can prevent the recent burglaries that they have been facing. After visiting a thousand shops and businesses, the police commissioner said that they asked for some extra funding, and the Minister was generous in allocating $1.8 million to help these small businesses so that they can take extra precautions like installing extra security measures. That will help those businesses.
Recently I attended a public meeting in Hamilton where the shopkeepers mentioned that they were very pleased that this money has been allocated. I would also like to mention that the other area where the police are focusing—and it was mentioned in the select committee—is the P epidemic, which is really hurting our youth. We want to address that. That is why extra funding is being allocated to the police to deal with the gangs and deal with this problem.
I would also like to touch upon Vote Corrections, which was also part of the Law and Order Committee consideration. Sarah Dowie was trying to mention that mental health was one of the issues that was mentioned and dealt with in the select committee. Thirty percent of offenders develop mental health issues while they are in prison. That is because they are in isolation. They do not get much of the freedom that they require. But, overall, prisons and the corrections system are putting in extra resources to deal with this. We also asked during the investigation at the select committee how they deal with it when parole is granted. They mentioned that the Parole Board takes into consideration whether to have that assessment, but they also mentioned the challenge that once the prisoner is released from prison, it is up to the prisoner whether they come for their counselling or not; they cannot make sure they come back and deal with it.
KRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): Unfortunately, women and men in the police force are not immune, like other public-facing public servants in our country, in having to do more with less. We have just heard a 5-minute speech from the Government member Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi about apparent good news for the justice sector and for our police, but it is apparent to anyone who can do basic maths that this Government has underfunded the police for the entire time it has been in Government.
I think it is fair that you should do a little bit more work in this, so I went and asked the Minister of Police about the number of police in my area, the Kāpiti-Mana area—the district that takes in Porirua and most of the Kāpiti Coast—as to how many sworn police officers were serving that area when the Government took office and how many sworn police officers are servicing that area now. Back in 2008, when the Government came into power, 146 police officers were serving the Kāpiti-Mana area. If the Government was true to its word on investing in law and order and talking tough on criminals, you would think that maybe more police officers would be serving in the area now. I assumed that maybe that might be the case, but when the Minister’s own figures came back to me via written questions, via this Parliament, the number had reduced from 146 in 2008 to just a little over 100 currently. So my community of Mana has been stiffed of nearly 40 police officers over the last 9 years.
But that is not what I am hearing from the Government. I want to make sense of the rhetoric coming from the Government and the reality that is actually happening on the front line, because there are two losers here: the public and the police. If you have fewer officers servicing that same-sized area, with an increase in population over time, they have to do more with less. And that is what we have been saying for some time.
When you look at some of the crime statistics nationally and locally, you have to wonder how much we are stretching those officers on the front line. I did look and I did ask the Minister about crime statistics locally. Victimisations between 2016 and 2017 have gone up 6 percent in that area—up 6 percent, in an area where we have roughly 40 fewer police officers. Burglaries in that time have gone up 22 percent, between 2016 and 2017, in a community where we have 40 fewer police officers.
So I want to make some sense during this debate—when the Government is saying that it has poured more and is pouring more into Police in this Budget, why does that not marry up with the reality? Because if it has, over the last 9 years, then I think the basic maths is that I should have more police on the front line in my area. But the Minister’s own responses say that I have 40 fewer. Someone on that side of the House should stand up and tell me how that maths works, but I do not think they will. How does that maths work when you say that you are funding police and giving them more money, yet the people in my area have to have 40 fewer police officers, and crimes like burglaries and victimisations are actually going up?
The other loser is the public, because this Government is saying one thing about how they are safer, but they are not. If burglaries are going up, they are not safer. If victimisations are going up, they are not safer. And if we have got fewer police tending to those kinds of issues in our communities, then I think that the public can do that maths. I think that they will read through the rhetoric and bolshiness of this Government that it is on the side of law and order. In reality, it is not, because it has underfunded police, who are frustrated with this Government.
I would like to see 1,000 more police on our front line, and that is what this party over here, the Labour Party, is promising. The bonus for me in that is that I have the Royal New Zealand Police College in my electorate. I would love to see 1,000 more new police trained under a Labour Government.
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Children): Well, if you listen to some of the speeches in the House, you would think that the country is going to hell in a handbasket, but the reality is there may well have been an increase this year but, actually, that comes after successive years of decreases in crime. So yes, you have had a bit of a blip, but the good news is that this country is the fourth-safest country in the world—the fourth safest—and that is not good enough for this Government. We want to make it the safest country in the world. We want to make it the safest country.
So Budget 2017, which is what we are supposed to be addressing now, invests $1.2 billion in new operating expenditure over the next 4 years. There is $785.6 million of capital expenditure for law and order—the half-billion dollar Safer Communities package for police. I tell you, we are getting three new constables in Ōpōtiki, and we cannot wait. We cannot wait.
We are boosting the police staff by 10 percent. I have been a Minister of Police and I can tell that member Kris Faafoi, who has just resumed his seat, we did not underfund police. We did not underfund the police. We have supported the New Zealand Police. We should all be very proud of our police service. We have the best in the world, I think, and they do a great job.
In Budget 2017 there is a payment of just under $50 million over the next 4 years in operating funding particularly focused on two areas. The first is burglary. When you look at the burglary statistics, what we see is that we have a large number of people who become repeat victims of burglary and we have a small core of young people who are committing petty crime and small burglaries. So there is $32.9 million—just under $33 million—to provide some rehabilitation and reintegration services for those young burglars. It is aimed particularly at those who are under the age of 25. If we can get them while they are still young—before they, as they often do in the justice system, go on to “better and bolder” things—and get them some good rehabilitation, before the age of 25, we have got a good chance of halting that criminal activity and getting them back on the straight and narrow.
So we are aiming at young people, under the age of 25, whose cognitive development is still happening, and who are most at risk of committing those long-term crimes. In addition to that, part of that money is, of course, to provide assistance to their victims, to make sure that they can stop themselves from being re-victimised. I am talking about things like window locks, security lights, bolt locks, etc., etc. Just under $14 million of that fund is to provide professional youth mentoring, which, again, is focused on that group under the age of 25. What we have seen have a really good response is cognitive behaviour therapy. So Budget 2017 invests a great deal more funding into providing that cognitive behaviour therapy for those young youth offenders.
It pays to think carefully about our youth justice sector, because the principle of it is to keep young people out of the court system. The worst thing we can do for young people is send them off to prison where they mix with quite hardened criminals who inhabit our prisons these days, and they learn how to be better criminals. The whole youth justice system is predicated on keeping young people out of the system and helping them get back on the straight and narrow.
Again, the good news is that under this Government, we have had a 45 percent reduction in the number of young offenders who have to go in front of the Youth Court—a 45 percent reduction. They are dealt with by family group conferences. They are dealt with by police diversion. There is community work—there is a whole range of things that we do with young people who have committed some of those petty crimes at the less serious end of offending. An important part of that, of course, is restorative justice—making sure that they understand what the consequences are.
DARROCH BALL (NZ First): I am glad that the Minister just finished speaking about the youth justice system and how great it is. She must know that she is being so totally disingenuous when she is talking about the reduction in youth crime. She knows that the measurement of youth crime changed in 2014. What a surprise!
From 2014, no longer does the youth crime rate include apprehensions, or arrests, or offences. What does it include? It includes the Youth Court appearances. The Minister just stood there and said that the youth justice system aims to keep them out of the court. So what a young person is doing in police diversion, like the Minister mentioned, is offend and offend and offend, and not once be measured by the youth crime rate—until they offend 10, 15, 20 times before they get to court, before they get to the Youth Court. That is why the Minister can stand up with smoke and mirrors and say the youth crime rate has decreased. It absolutely has not, and that is why the Minister is being disingenuous.
She also said that the police were being fully funded. I know in my central districts region and police district that they could not afford a wreath for Anzac Day for Feilding. That is how funded they are. I have been told that at the Palmerston North police station they could not afford to replace a light bulb, because they are so broke. We had a case a couple of months ago in Palmerston North—an individual who got shot during duck hunting could not get a proper prosecution because the Crown prosecutor could not get the evidence from the police, because the police did not have enough funding through the Institute of Environmental Science and Research to get the specialist evidence. That is the state of an apparently fully funded police force.
There are a couple of things in this Budget—that this Government has added to this Budget—around crime and around youth offending. Police numbers, it is talking about. There are 800 new police—not even nearly enough. It is not even nearly enough. Security for dairies—and it is talking about new prisons as well. It is talking about a billion dollar spend on new prisons. Oh, and it is also talking about extending the youth residence beds as well. All of those four things have one thing in common: they were all reactive policies. They were all reactive approaches to dealing with the issues of crime.
It is no surprise that the Government has a reactive approach to youth crime because it has got a reactive approach to pretty much everything else here that it deals with—the reactive approach to the 90,000 young unemployed people, the reactive approach to the immigration issue, the reactive approach to emergency housing for homeless. But there is a difference between being proactive and stopping crime in the first place and where the funds should go versus being reactive and where this Government is putting its funds into.
The cause of all of this—a major cause of all of the crime—which I have been talking about for a very long time, is the failing youth justice system. There is no real funding going into the youth justice system at all throughout this Budget. Sarah Dowie mentioned the drivers of crime. If this Government cannot see that the main driver of crime is the youth justice system—or perhaps it is a Government that does not want to see that the driver of crime is the failing youth justice system. The fact of the matter is that all of those robberies that we have been hearing about—the aggravated robberies in the dairies, half of them are being committed by 15- to 19-year-olds. It is half of them. That is the failing youth justice system.
In New Zealand over 1 year in the last 2 measurable calendar years, 2015-16, there has been an increase in the serious offending by youth offenders up by 12 percent. Burglaries are up by 13 percent, robberies are up by 40 percent—in just 1 year. Homicides are up by 40 percent in just 1 year. But, apparently, this is a justice system that is working, that is fully funded. It demonstrably is not.
But you see, I have mentioned that the serious offences by young people have increased by a substantial amount. So you would think that an accountable justice system would have a corresponding increase in the number of convictions. But, no, there is a decrease in the number of convictions of young people. This is a justice system that is not working.
MAHESH BINDRA (NZ First): For the last 3 years—the nearly 3 years that I have been here—Corrections has been in the news far too frequently, almost always for the wrong reasons. One of the most important aspects of a front-line corrections officer’s job is to assess the newly arrived prisoners into the prison system. They get the first 4 hours to assess a prisoner before the prisoner is judged as non-compliant by the prison auditors. That is the most important aspect of a prisoner’s stay in prison: that he or she is assessed as either being mainstream—as in a normal-placement prisoner—or, if they are assessed as being at risk of self-harm or suicide, they are then placed in at-risk units, which are popularly known as ARUs.
The ARU system is in 14 out of 18 prisons in New Zealand, which means that four prisons do not have those units. The 14 prisons that have the at-risk units have dedicated staff allocated for those units. However, that does not mean that they are specially trained staff. They are front-line corrections officers who either show their willingness to work in those high-risk areas or are allocated those high-risk units.
On 1 March this year the Chief Ombudsman released this report, which focuses only on the at-risk unit management of our prisons. This report is scathing, it is very revealing, and it is very, very damning, in my view. I would like to actually quote some of the findings the Chief Ombudsman has documented. One of the first things that he mentions is that “Training for staff working in ARUs is basic.” That is a fact, because the officers working in at-risk units do not get specialised training. The training is very basic and it is not adequate. It is not adequate to enable them to assess the prisoners correctly and efficiently. The second thing that he mentions is that “Staff interactions with At-Risk prisoners are limited.” These are things about only the at-risk units. However, this report actually goes beyond that. It also covers the restraining system, which is used very sparingly, for prisoners who are at a really high risk of self-harm and who cannot be managed in normal units.
One of the most important recommendations that the Ombudsman has made is that we must “Ensure all officers are provided with adequate training; and … Audit the healthcare needs in institutions and ensure adequate access to mental health services.” Then he goes on to say: “review … the level of training and support that custodial staff receive in working with prisoners at risk of suicide and self-harm.”
These are only two aspects that I am mentioning. I do not think I will have the time to go through the other points that I have taken down, but when we come to these Estimates, there is nothing at all allocated for prisoners at risk of self-harm and suicide. Even in the pilot projects, there is not a mention of the dollar amount that will be allocated to this pilot project. Although it is a good beginning, without resources, I have a doubt—and a very strong one at that—that this project will be able to achieve what it is setting out to achieve. At-risk prisoners will remain at risk without resources, which are wanting, and without the resources that they need and without the specialised training that those front-line staff deserve and need. Thank you.
MAUREEN PUGH (National): It is my pleasure to stand today and speak on the Appropriations (2017/18 Estimates) Bill in its Committee stage. We are focused here on the justice sector. I will follow up on the comments made by the Hon Anne Tolley earlier on, who did say to us that New Zealand is the fourth-safest country in the world. That is not our rating; that is international ratings. So we are actually doing quite well, but we certainly want to be No. 1, and that is why we are heavily investing in new money for this sector.
As mentioned, we have got close to $2 billion worth of new money going into the justice sector, and out of that, $1.2 billion is actually new funding for the operating expenditure of the justice sector, and over $700 million is going into capital expenditure. One of my favourite things that I was involved in as part of the Justice and Electoral Committee was a visit that we made to the drug and alcohol treatment courts, which is a pilot programme initially run for 5 years out of Auckland. Two courts are operating up there, and so successful have they been, and so intrinsic in terms of the rehabilitation of the people whom they are dealing with, that this Budget actually sees those being extended for a further 2 years. That will give us some extremely good data on which to base further decision-making.
Those courts, one by one, are wrapping services around an individual. It is a very intense programme, and a very expensive programme, but that investment, front on in the front line of those offenders, is having an absolutely dramatic impact on their lives and on the quality of their lives but also on the quality of their families’ lives as well, as they all learn how to rehabilitate and find a new life, get education, and find employment and independence away from their peers, which once saw them leading a life of crime. I am very pleased that the Budget this year will see an extension of that programme.
Justice is a huge winner out of this Budget, and the Department of Corrections will also be receiving added funding—$225 million, to be exact—to deliver some of the services around its core services but also to reduce offending. This will have a further $765 million invested into capital, and the reason for that is that we are managing the capacity within our prisons and the safety of the prisoners, the staff, and also the public.
Community corrections—although this might sound a bit odd, community corrections is probably one of my favourites, because we see the interaction that people who are serving community sentences have within their communities. In the past, I have had a few projects where I have experienced the value of that community service—places like the Woodstock lookout, which was a very rundown, overgrown area with historical value. We had a community services programme running there that has turned it into a fabulous little stop-off point, with a shelter and historical panels and interpretation panels. The interesting thing about that project was that community services workers were working on it and their sentence ran out before the project was finished, but such was the ownership that they had of that project, they continued to work on it, and that is the value of having them integrate back into the community, working with organisations like councils and small community groups and other volunteers. This is the value that it has to these people, because they are now part of the wider community where, once before, they were quite isolated into their group of people who had led them into this life of crime.
I would also like to talk about policing. As we know—and we have heard much about this over the last few weeks—in the increase in the Budget for policing, which is going to see 1,125 new police staff, 880 of those are going to be front-line police. Of those 880 front-line police, we are very happy in West Coast - Tasman to have 24 of those in the Tasman policing district. So the Tasman policing district is the West and all of the top of the South Island, including Marlborough, Nelson, the West Coast, and Tasman. Of those 24 police, we are going to have one of those officers on patrol 24/7, which means a patrolling officer will be patrolling all day every day. That is great news for those small rural communities to know that they have got that oversight of the police all day. We know too that the first tranche of those new recruits entered the Police College this month, on 10 July, the 40th anniversary of decimal currency, as it turned out. They will be graduating in 3 months and taking up the beginning of those new positions around the country. All of the 12 policing districts across New Zealand are receiving extra policing staff.
But one of the things that I would like to note about these Estimates is that it is this Government that is now able to allocate more to each of the votes, because of the outstanding performance not only of this Government and its financial management but also the hard-working Kiwis who are out there and have played their part in our economic success. Because of their efforts in innovating, in producing more, in buying more, and in helping make us one of the best-performing countries in the OECD, we can now invest in more things that New Zealanders deserve, like justice. Thank you very much.
PAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): Tēnā koe, Mr Chair. It is a great pleasure to make a brief contribution in this Estimates debate Committee stage. Making particular reference to page 230 of the Estimates report, Vote Justice and Vote Courts, I just wanted to begin my contribution by noting how supportive many members of the LGBTIQ community in New Zealand are of the recently announced initiative, which will require funding through Vote Justice, to expunge the criminal record of gay men who, before 1986, were wrongly criminalised in this country.
There are many other, arguably bigger, issues to deal with in the justice system. There is the extra funding that we are putting into the court, corrections, and policing systems. But I do think that this investment of a relatively small amount of funding is important, and on a symbolic level it is sending a message that we are righting a previous injustice, that the contributions of all New Zealanders to our society are valued, and that we as a country believe very strongly in treating all parts of our community equally. So I think this is a small but symbolically important measure.
Turning to perhaps the more substantive areas of investment, I think the estimates that we heard on the Justice and Electoral Committee detailed some very impressive levels of support for additional services going into our justice system. This builds on, I think, the excellent work done by previous Ministers of Corrections, and I want to particularly congratulate colleagues such as Sam Lotu-Iiga, the Hon Judith Collins, and Anne Tolley, who, I think, really did have a drive towards rehabilitation and redemption at the heart of what they did in previous years. And I think that we should actually believe very strongly in the redemptive and rehabilitative power of the corrections system to transform lives and to make sure that people do not reoffend.
Building on that previous quadrupling of literacy training in prisons, and building on that previous quadrupling of drug rehabilitation in prisons, I am delighted to see that in this Budget there is an extra $255.9 million in operating funding alongside the three-quarters of a billion dollars in capital investment into our prisons to make sure that offenders are better managed, and that the chances of them being successfully rehabilitated are significantly increased not only inside the prisons but also through the parole process.
In particular, I wanted to highlight the $30.2 million that has been dedicated towards prisoners who are at risk of self-harm or even suicide. As a civilised and decent country and with, I think, a population of Kiwis who are a very decent society, decreasing the levels of self-harm and suicide in our correctional institutions is important if we are really to achieve that rehabilitative and redemptive outcome that I am sure we would all wish to see. So I want to particularly commend that measure.
Other members have talked about policing. There was a comment made in a previous speech by Aupito William Sio, who said that the Police had bid for a whole lot of extra additional staff beyond what was actually finally arrived at in the vote.
I have to say, as a previous public servant, I do not know any Government department that does not ask for more than it thinks it is going to get. This is a simple part of the bargaining that goes on, where a department will bid for as much as it can. I think this significant boost of police numbers, of over 1,000 extra staff—880 of whom will be sworn front-line police officers—will go down in history as one of the bigger increases we have ever seen into our public security and safety in New Zealand.
For an example, in the Wellington region, where I know my friend Nicola Willis is campaigning very hard and knocking on doors—and it is an area that I have spent a little bit of time on in the last few years—there are 62 extra police officers who will be joining that already very fine body of men and women who are doing such a good job of protecting the New Zealand public. So I think this is an excellent investment, and it adds to previous successes.
DARROCH BALL (NZ First): I just want to take a quick call to cover a few of the points that I did not manage to in my first 5 minutes, and to actually respond to a couple of things that have been said in the meantime. Paul Foster-Bell just mentioned the biggest boost in funding for numbers in the Police. I would just like to remind him that in 2008 John Key made a pledge of keeping the police-to-population ratio at 1:500, and this Government has totally underfunded, and continues to underfund, the police to get to a ratio of, I think it is, 1:520. The simple fact is that no matter what the Government says, or what Mr Paul Foster-Bell says, this increase in police numbers will not get that ratio to 1:500. That is why New Zealand First has a policy to increase police numbers not by 800 or 1,000 or 1,200, but by 1,800 police to get to that 1:500 ratio. It is the same ratio that the Australian police force has, and it is the ratio that has been understood for a long while in New Zealand to be needed to be maintained in order to ensure that police can do their job properly and are properly resourced. So no matter what the Government spits out about this being the biggest increase in the numbers, it just is not enough.
I think that one of the most important things—and, you know, I talk about the youth justice system and youth crime all the time—that the Government has not actually stated is this: of the 800 front-line police, how many will be youth aid officers? The Government knows that youth crime, especially serious youth crime, has increased—and we are talking about aggravated robberies, and that half of them are committed by 15- to 19-year-olds. Logic dictates that we need to have those youth aid officers who look after those youth offenders properly resourced. Right now, the fact of the matter is that those numbers of youth aid officers are not enough.
I know in Palmerston North we have got four youth aid officers, and they do not leave their office. There is no proactive nature in stopping youth crime, and, in fact, they are more like youth offending prosecutors, because they just channel countless numbers of offences committed by youth. Bear in mind that those youth offences do not get counted by the youth crime measurement because they are not going into the court. So they get a pile—a stack—of youth offences committed by young people, but they are not counted. And the youth aid officers cannot do anything with it, because they are not resourced enough.
Another fact that I would just like to state—I mentioned it earlier—is that there was a billion dollars going to be spent on a youth prison. Half of all of the current adult prison population have been through the youth justice system. If the youth justice system was working, we would not have to be spending a billion dollars on new prisons. I think it was last year—
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I apologise for interrupting the member, but the time has come for me to leave the Chair. I will report progress.
House resumed.
Progress reported.
Report adopted.
The House adjourned at 5.56 p.m.