Tuesday, 10 April 2018

TUESDAY, 10 APRIL 2018

TUESDAY, 10 APRIL 2018

The Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

Karakia.

Visitors

United Kingdom—House of Lords and House of Commons

SPEAKER: I’m sure that members would wish to welcome Rt Hon Lord Foulkes, Vice Chair of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association United Kingdom, and members of his delegation from the House of Lords and the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, who are present in the gallery.

Switzerland—Swiss Council of States, Foreign Affairs Committee

SPEAKER: I’m sure that members would also wish to welcome Mr Filippo Lombardi and his delegation from the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Swiss Council of States, who are present in the gallery.

Motions

Wahine Disaster—50th Anniversary

Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Transport): I seek leave to move a motion without notice and without debate on the sinking of the Wahine.

SPEAKER: Is there any objection to that process? There appears to be none.

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: I move, That this House note that today marks the 50th anniversary of the foundering at the entrance to Wellington Harbour of the interisland ferry Wahine with the loss of 53 lives, and that the House mark this solemn occasion with a moment’s silence in their honour.

Motion agreed to.

Members stood as a mark of respect.

SPEAKER: Thank you, members.

Oral Questions

Questions to Ministers

Public Services—Investment

1. MARAMA DAVIDSON (Co-Leader—Green) to the Prime Minister: Ka tū a ia i runga i tana kōrero mō te iti rawa o te mahi haumi i roto ratonga tūmataiti, ā, nā runga i tērā, “we didn’t know it would be this bad” ā, mēnā kua pēnei rawa, ka pēhea te nui o te iti rawa o te mahi haumi nei?

[Does she stand by her statement on under-investment in public services that “we didn’t know it would be this bad”, and if so, how significant is this under-investment?]

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN (Prime Minister): Yes, absolutely, and much of that we could see from Opposition, as could New Zealanders in everyday life, as they saw individuals sleeping in cars or being unable to access health services. But what we are seeing now is in almost every portfolio I can find other signs of under-investment.

Marama Davidson: Does she agree that the state of the books she inherited from National represents a moral and fiscal deficit, which we see every day in our homeless and unemployed, in our impoverished families, and in our threatened species?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Yes, and being in Government obviously is about making choices and about priorities. The last Government decided that the priority, rather than investing in issues around unemployment and homelessness, was tax cuts—a huge amount of which went to the top 10 percent of income earners. This Government has different priorities.

Marama Davidson: How significant is the under-investment in health in light of revelations that there is sewage and mould running through the walls of Middlemore Hospital, as a direct result of it?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: I would say Middlemore Hospital is emblematic of a much wider problem. District health boards are telling us that 19 percent of their assets are either in a poor or a very poor state. If you add to that the fact that they’re running what will be an estimated up to $200 million deficit, I think it’s fair to say New Zealanders in every walk of life will be experiencing issues with their health services.

Marama Davidson: Has there been significant under-investment in other areas of Government spending, and has that impacted on core services, as we have seen in our health system?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: As I say, health, I think, is emblematic of what’s gone on in other areas. You’ll hear today, for instance, the Minister of Education talking a little bit more about the under-investment in early childhood education, which, essentially, has meant that parents have been picking up the tab from a lack of investment from the last Government. I’m happy to share the numbers.

Marama Davidson: What plans does she have, if any, to restore investment in public services to urgently help those who are struggling the most, such as the 10 to 20 homeless people I spoke with who were sleeping outside the City Mission yesterday morning?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: As I say, we identified from Opposition that this was an issue. We made a very deliberate decision to cancel the tax cuts. The second decision that we made was to run a slightly longer debt track than the last Government, because we wanted to prioritise investing in housing and making sure that there wasn’t the scale of homelessness we saw under the last Government. As I say, Government is all about priorities, and ours are very different to the last Government.

Marama Davidson: Will the Government consider any new taxes in the future to help solve these problems, given that it has ruled out any new revenue streams this term?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: As we’ve said, there will be no new tax regimes in this term of office, from this Government. Of course, we do have the Tax Working Group under way, but they may very well produce an outcome that could be fiscally neutral as well. Ultimately, we have budgeted and set out a debt track that allows us to make the investment that is the priority, and we did things like cancel tax cuts, so we could reinvest in health, education, and housing.

Transport Infrastructure—Fuel Taxes and Funding Priorities

2. Hon SIMON BRIDGES (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Does she stand by all her Government’s policies and actions?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN (Prime Minister): Yes, including the priorities we’re placing around investing back in core services so we don’t have situations like Middlemore.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. You were very fast last week to prevent people from adding little bits to the end of a question. You made the point—if you’ve asked the question, that’s it. What we just saw from the Prime Minister was something you pulled other Ministers up for last week, which was answering the question and then going on with a little bit more. So a little bit of consistency would be something that would be helpful to the order of the House.

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

SPEAKER: I’m going to ask the Prime Minister: is she really going to add to the order in the House, or is she going to cause a further problem?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: It depends which way you’re going to rule, Mr Speaker.

SPEAKER: Well, what I’m going to ask is for the Hon Gerry Brownlee to be just a little bit more tolerant. That was a short answer with a very mild flick to an Opposition question, not a Government patsy. Therefore, I think it was well within the bounds of what all my predecessors would have accepted.

Hon Simon Bridges: How will someone living and working in South Auckland benefit from the 25c a litre petrol tax for their petrol?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: I’m assuming that’s a reference to the Government Policy Statement on Land Transport, which we’re consulting on whether or not the investment we want to make off the back of 3c—up to around 3c a year, something which I understand the Opposition has said that they would maintain. I’m happy to speak to how they would benefit, because under this Government they’re likely to be a family that, on average, would get $75 a week once our Working for Families changes come in in July.

Hon Simon Bridges: Does she agree that the majority of the upwards of 25c a litre tax increase over the next decade will go to the tram to Auckland Airport?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: As I have said in this House previously, the kind of example that that member is using is a family who currently doesn’t have choices around how they move around their city. We need to give them choices, and we also need to invest in that household as well. They need higher incomes, better wages, and they need decent transport. Under that Opposition, apparently they would keep that same excise that we’re planning.

Hon Simon Bridges: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I asked a very clear question about whether the majority of that tax would go to the tram to Auckland Airport. She didn’t even address that.

SPEAKER: No, I’m ruling she did. She certainly referred to giving Aucklanders choices as to their methods of moving around Auckland. I think that’s close enough.

Hon Simon Bridges: So will the majority of that petrol tax over the next decade go to the tram to Auckland Airport?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: No.

Hon Simon Bridges: Does she agree that there’s been a $5 billion transfer from roading to public transport, in particular trams, under that proposed Government policy statement (GPS)?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: No, I do not. As I’ve pointed out in this House, we are increasing the amount of funding that is going into regional transport and also local transport and also transport safety. That’s because that’s what we’ve prioritised, while at the same time having only an 11 percent decrease in State highway improvements.

Hon Simon Bridges: How can she possibly say that, when her transport Minister, just last week, in this House, accepted that $5 billion is being reduced from State highway improvements?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Because we are also putting more back into regional and local roads. Would the member like me to reiterate the cuts that that last Government made to those very same transport areas?

SPEAKER: Order! The Prime Minister, I think, knows that she shouldn’t be asking questions of the Opposition. [Interruption] Order!

Hon Simon Bridges: What use is the tram to the airport to someone living and working nowhere near it in Auckland?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Again, that’s taking a very narrow view of what is a comprehensive plan to improve public transport across the Auckland network. As I say, that is only part of what the GPS was about. It was also about making sure that we are increasing regional and local road improvements to the tune of $1.2 billion.

Hon Simon Bridges: How will the several-billion-dollar City Rail Link be paid for, does she think?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: I’m assuming he’s talking about the City Rail Link which he was very late coming to the party to support. We continue to support it and did from the very beginning.

Hon Simon Bridges: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I asked how it would be paid for.

SPEAKER: I will ask the Prime Minister to have another shot at that. How will it be paid for?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: I imagine in the same way that the last Government pretended they were going to pay for it as well.

SPEAKER: Question number—

Hon Phil Twyford: Supplementary.

Hon Simon Bridges: No, no—I apologise, Mr Speaker. I’m still going.

SPEAKER: A point of order, the Hon Simon Bridges.

Hon Simon Bridges: No, no—I’ve got further supplementaries. I’m sorry.

Hon Phil Twyford: Does the Prime Minister believe that investing in a modern rapid transit system gives people transport choices enabling some people to leave their car at home during peak hour, thereby allowing the roads to move more freely for everybody else?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Absolutely. That is our aspiration. Some will continue to choose to move by car, but currently they are losing in productivity because of the excessive congestion in Auckland. We need more transport options, and that’s what this Government is focused on whilst also dealing with the regional neglect of the last Government.

Hon Simon Bridges: How will someone in Manurewa, in the North Shore, or in west Auckland be able to leave their car at home when they’re definitely not getting any mass rapid transit any time in the next decade, and probably longer.

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: And we do have plans to extend the public transport network. The ability—[Interruption]

SPEAKER: Order! Order! I’m going to ask members of the Opposition just to settle down. I had some hopes, with a bit of a reshuffle, that there’d be a little bit less noise from my immediate left; unfortunately, that hasn’t quite worked.

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: May I finish the question, Mr Speaker. To finish the question, what the member seems to be forgetting, in pointing out the lack of transport options, is that this is a Government that has been in for five months; that last Government, for nine years, neglected their lack of transport options.

Hon Simon Bridges: What is the Prime Minister’s position on the Ōtaki to Levin section of the lower North Island road of national significance?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: As we said when we made the announcement, those projects remain on the same track they’re on now, and the New Zealand Transport Agency, at the moment, is still consulting on the route option—and consulting with the public.

Hon Simon Bridges: Does she accept that $5 billion will come out of the State highway improvements class on her proposed Government policy statement?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: As I said last week in the House, in the next three years State highway funding reduces by $500 million—or 11 percent—and regional and local road improvements increase by $1.2 billion.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Do any of the Prime Minister’s comments or statements on transport include building 10 bridges that were promised by a certain gentleman—none of which have even been started?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Thank you for the question. In my understanding, that may have actually been one of the oral questions that the Leader of the Opposition had to correct in this House, for the very reason that they haven’t been delivered.

Hon Simon Bridges: Will she commit to the road of national significance from Ōtaki to Levin happening, given its pre-existing status?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: As we said, with everything that had that pre-existing status, it’s still going through the same process. And that is a decision for the board, as it was three weeks ago before we announced this policy.

Economy—Crown Debt Target and Government Financial Position

3. Hon AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn) to the Minister of Finance: Is he committed to reducing core Crown net debt to 20 percent of GDP by 30 June 2022?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): This Government is committed to reducing core Crown net debt to 20 percent of GDP within five years of taking office, as indicated in the Speech from the Throne. In the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update (HYEFU), core Crown net debt is forecast to reach 19.3 percent of GDP by 30 June 2022.

Hon Shane Jones: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I saw you use a two fingered gesture. Was that to subtract two questions from us, and, if so, when did laughing at a joke become a parliamentary sin?

SPEAKER: The answer to your question is yes. A further point is that I’ve made very clear that interjecting or making noises while people are asking questions results in a loss of supplementary questions, or a gain for the side that wishes to have it run that way—which is the case as far as the National Party—and the member is exceptionally lucky that I do not compound that loss because of his approach to this point of order.

Hon Amy Adams: If the Minister is committed to his debt-to-GDP target, why did he rule out public-private partnerships that the previous Government had used successfully across many years for schools, hospitals, and prisons, before claiming the fact that he can’t pay for everything outright is a symptom of under-investment?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: We’ve been very clear over an extended period of time that we simply don’t believe in the privatisation of health and education, as the previous Government did.

Hon Amy Adams: So to maintain his debt-to-GDP anchor, why won’t he tell New Zealand which of the Government’s stated commitments and expectations he has raised around teachers’ and nurses’ pay will now have to be dialled back because he’s now simply realised that he’s already run out of money?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: The member will just have to wait until 17 May, but what I can be absolutely clear about is that this Government understands the importance of a balance between a prudent fiscal approach and making the investments we need to undo the social and infrastructure deficits left to us by the previous Government.

Hon Amy Adams: Can he confirm that the additional Government revenue available to him for the current year alone, tracked from the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update projections to the Crown accounts to the end of February, is in fact an additional $700 million?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: The member has been paying attention to the monthly statements from Treasury. The final forecasts are still to be done. What’s important to remember, though, is it’s not so much about how much extra revenue might be available to this Government; it’s about what the last Government didn’t do with the revenue that it had.

Hon Amy Adams: Can he also confirm that the HYEFU shows additional tax revenue over the next four years from that which was predicted in the pre-election update is $6.6 billion more?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: There is indeed money available to be spent, and this Government will invest that wisely in making sure that we invest in health and education and housing, not the priorities of the previous Government, which were tax cuts slanted towards the most wealthy.

Hon Amy Adams: So if the Crown accounts in fact show the Government has inherited an even stronger economy than previously thought, creating more revenue from the Government than was predicted pre-election, aren’t his claims of things being worse than he had allowed for just a realisation that his numbers were never going to stand up to the realities of being Government?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: No. What it is is a realisation of the fact that the previous Government, in an attempt to look good, create artificial surpluses, and put tax cuts that went to the wealthy, under-invested in critical public services. This Government is going to make sure that we invest in the services New Zealanders need.

Economy—Reports

4. Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn) to the Minister of Finance: What recent reports has he seen on the state of the New Zealand economy?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): Last week, credit rating agency Moody’s released its latest annual credit analysis, awarding New Zealand an Aaa stable credit rating. It said its rating reflects New Zealand’s very high economic resilience, very strong institutions and policy effectiveness, and strong fiscal position. Moody’s said that New Zealand’s economic profile supports the newly elected coalition Government’s credit-positive commitment to preserving surpluses and reducing Government debt as a percentage of GDP over the next five years.

Dr Deborah Russell: What does the Moody’s report say about the Government’s fiscal policy?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Moody’s makes the point that the Government’s commitment to preserving strong public finances provides room to pursue expansionary fiscal policy. This Government is committed to managing our finances carefully, including delivering sustainable surpluses and reducing net debt to 20 percent of GDP within five years of taking office, but, at the same time, making investments, such as our Families Package, and increased investment in health and education, that are so desperately needed to address the social and infrastructure deficits facing New Zealand.

Dr Deborah Russell: What do recent reports he has seen say about the need for infrastructure investment?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Moody’s highlight the fact that the Government will spend more on road, rail, and housing infrastructure. These are important investments to meet the infrastructure deficit that has been left to this Government. As highlighted in Treasury’s investment statement released last month, 19 percent of district health board assets are in poor or very poor condition, 38 percent of school buildings are at least 50 years old, and 40 percent of social housing assets are over 50 years old. It will take more than one Budget to undo nine years of neglect, but this Government has a plan to deliver social and public services that New Zealanders deserve.

David Seymour: Why is this Government working so hard to lower expectations?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: What this Government is doing is working extremely hard to make sure that New Zealanders get the public services that they deserve. I think the member might be better off lowering expectations about his dancing.

David Seymour: Is it not the case that his colleagues have already been housetrained by the bureaucrats and don’t know how to manage them—there actually are no problems?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I wouldn’t want to speak about the housetraining or otherwise of my colleagues, but what I can say is this Government is committed to making the balance that New Zealanders want, which is between an economy that’s carefully managed and making the investments that are needed to correct the social and infrastructure deficits we’ve been left with.

Health Services—Middlemore Hospital Buildings

5. Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National) to the Minister of Health: Does he stand by all his statements and actions?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK (Minister of Health): Yes, in the context in which they were made and undertaken.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: On what date was the Minister first informed of the nature and extent of the building issues at Middlemore Hospital that are the subject of recent media attention, and what action did he take?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: I was informed about the Scott Building when I visited about one month ago, roughly. In the days that followed, I signed off funding to repair that. I’ve had many subsequent conversations with the district health board (DHB) in which they’ve assured me that patient safety is not at risk and have alerted me to further issues with their buildings that are a result of nine years of neglect by the previous Government.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Is the funding mentioned by the Minister in addition to the $17 million already approved by the previous Government for the reclad of the Scott Building—the one issue that was raised with, and quickly addressed by, the previous Government?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: If the previous Government raised and addressed one issue, effectively that’s one more than I’ve been aware of up till now. But I’d also make the point that if the member is still fixated on deficits, I wonder where he’s been for the past couple of weeks, because he’s obviously missed the fact that the public are aware now of rot, sewage, and mould in the walls, which has required additional funding to fix, and the public really want to know that the—

SPEAKER: Order! That’s enough. Thank you.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Is the Minister aware that the issue of the state of the buildings at Counties Manukau District Health Board was not even raised with the Health Committee during the review of the Auckland District Health Board on 21 February, the very forum within such issues should be raised?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: If the member is trying to repeat the message that the acting chief executive has delivered about the district health board being afraid to raise issues about the buildings because they were expected to run surpluses, I’m not sure how that is in his political advantage.

Hon Members: Answer the question.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: No attempt to answer the question.

SPEAKER: Order! I am reflecting on that. I am going to ask the Minister to address the supplementary asked. Does he want it repeated?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: Repeat.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Is the Minister aware that the issue of the state of the buildings at Counties Manukau District Health Board was not even raised with the Health Committee during the review of the Auckland District Health Board on 21 February?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: That has been brought to my attention.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Is he aware that the Counties Manukau District Health Board were fully briefed on the building problems at Middlemore at their meeting 25 October 2017, and is he concerned that they were not brought to the attention of the select committee at all, or to his attention earlier?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: Sorry. Mr Speaker, could the member please repeat the question.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Is he aware that the Counties Manukau District Health Board were fully briefed on the building problems at Middlemore at their meeting 25 October 2017, and is he concerned that they were not brought to the attention of the select committee at all, or to his attention earlier?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: I think the member is referring to a select committee that happened prior to that briefing—if I’m not mistaken. [Interruption]

Hon Michael Woodhouse: No; 25 October last year, 21 February this year.

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: This year? OK. Am I concerned about that? I am concerned that these issues have taken some while to come to light, but I think that that speaks to a culture where people were afraid to raise the issues. And I think that this Government is going to do something about it. We have been unashamed—[Interruption]

SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The member will resume his seat. No, I couldn’t hear that, and I have trouble ruling things in or out if I can’t hear it. I’ll ask the member to wind back a little way and to repeat it, and I’m going to require silence from my left while that happens.

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: So, as a consequence, this Government is going to address the issue. We have determined that we will actually ask for a full report, a comprehensive understanding of the assets across this country, so that we can address the neglect of our infrastructure and social settings, because we believe New Zealanders deserve decent healthcare, and we intend to make sure that over time we address that historic neglect.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I’d ask you just to reflect on the little exchange that’s just happened. The answer that Dr David Clark just gave is perfectly reasonable. It’s what Governments do. It’s what everyone would expect, and there’s no trouble maintaining a high degree of respect while he’s answering. It was the comments he made in the answer that you asked to be repeated that caused the problem, and I’d ask that you have a look at that on the tapes tonight to just better understand why there was such an adverse reaction on this side of the House.

SPEAKER: I’ll do that.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Is the Minister aware that the costs, serious though the issues are at Middlemore Hospital, of remedies comprise about 0.006 of 1 percent, and if he reacts in this way to one issue, how is he going to perform over a $17 billion Health vote?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: To be honest, I’m not sure why the member wants to keep raising the failures of the previous Government. The previous health Minister hasn’t even given his valedictory. We on this side have signalled clearly that we intend to address the historic neglect of our health system.

Transport Infrastructure—Fuel Taxes and Funding Priorities

6. JAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany) to the Minister of Transport: What is the total increased level of funding for the Public Transport activity class for the next 10 years if the mid-point level of funding proposed in the draft Government Policy Statement in the 2018/19 year continues at that level for 10 years without increase; and can he confirm that when that increased funding is added together with mid-point level funding for the new Rapid Transit and Transitional Rail activity classes over 10 years, the total new and increased funding for these three activity classes is $5.398 billion?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Transport): As to the first part of the member’s question, if the mid-point level of funding in the draft Government policy statement (GPS) for 2018-19 continues for 10 years, the amount that the public transport activity class will increase is zero. The question is a confused hypothetical and a contradiction in terms, and for the same reason I cannot confirm the second part of the member’s question.

Jami-Lee Ross: I seek leave to table a table prepared by the Parliamentary Library earlier today which does exactly the calculation the Minister says he can’t do, which gives an answer of—

SPEAKER: Order! That’s it. Leave is sought to table a document alleging to do that calculation. Is there any objection to that? There appears to be none. It will be tabled.

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

Jami-Lee Ross: Why is he prepared to cut $5 billion from the State highway improvement category to fund $5 billion of new public transport funding, and expecting the rest of the country to pay more in tax for that privilege?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: Well, I reject the member’s assertion. Even with the investments into public transport and rapid transit in our three biggest cities and investment in freight and passenger rail adopting the mid-point, as the member does, our GPS spends on average only $90 million less per year than the former Government did on roads, because we are increasing spending on local roads, regional roads, State highway improvements, and road policing. We are spending only 2 percent less on roads than National did in their last GPS. The member is scaremongering, and if he thinks that public transport is so unpopular, he may want to know that the ridership in the Auckland public transport system has increased by 29.5 percent, and rail has nearly doubled in the last five years. The only thing that has increased faster than that is congestion under that Government’s policies.

Jami-Lee Ross: Why does he expect taxpayers in Cambridge, Ōtaki, and Invercargill, to have to pay more in petrol taxes—up to 25c a litre—to fund trams in Auckland?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: Well, I completely reject the member’s assertion or implication that we are spending less in the regions than he would have. Over the nine years of the last National—

SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. I’m going to ask that member to repeat his question, because I’m not sure that the Minister heard him.

Jami-Lee Ross: Why should taxpayers in Cambridge, in Ōtaki, and in Invercargill have to pay more in petrol taxes—up to 25c a litre—to fund trams in Auckland?

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Before the Minister is required to answer this question, could we have some sort of understanding that jeering and shouting from the other side is not adequate in this Parliament, and they should be asked by you to desist.

SPEAKER: Well, I—[Interruption] Order! I will listen more carefully, and maybe the member could talk to some of the people behind him as well, because there has been quite a lot of noise from—[Interruption] Because there has been quite a lot of noise from both sides today. Now, I think we’re at the point where—[Interruption] That’s all right. We’re now at the point where we will have the question repeated for the second time in order for the Minister to address it.

Jami-Lee Ross: Why should taxpayers in Cambridge and Ōtaki and Invercargill have to pay more in petrol taxes—up to 25c a litre more—to fund trams in Auckland?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: Well, the member is quite wrong to say that. The good people of Cambridge and Ōtaki and Invercargill are not being asked by anyone to pay up to 25c extra a litre. Our Government is consulting on three consecutive—

SPEAKER: Order! The member’s finished answering the question.

Jami-Lee Ross: Is the Minister telling us that the 3c to 4c a litre petrol tax over three years added together, plus GST, plus the regional fuel tax, which he’s legislating for in legislation this year, does not add up to 25c a litre?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: The people of Cambridge, Ōtaki, and Invercargill are not being asked to pay a regional fuel tax.

Jami-Lee Ross: Why is he passing legislation to allow regional fuel taxes around the country when he claimed at the election that he would only allow it to happen in Auckland?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: Our legislation only allows Auckland Council to put in place a regional fuel tax in the next three years. [Interruption]

SPEAKER: OK, I’m now going to ask both sides to settle down once again. Is the member finished?

Earthquake Commission—Cost of Remedial Repairs in Canterbury

7. Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central) to the Minister responsible for the Earthquake Commission: What reports has she seen about the financial impact of remedial repairs in Canterbury by EQC?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister responsible for the Earthquake Commission): Last week, I asked the Earthquake Commission (EQC) to prepare urgent advice to me on the total, actual cost to date of remedial repairs for both cash settlements and managed repairs in Canterbury. I was advised that this figure has reached $270 million, up substantially from the 2016 estimate of $60 million to $70 million provided by the previous Government. This is a mess the Government inherited and is committed to cleaning up.

Dr Duncan Webb: What action has she taken to help resolve outstanding EQC claims?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: I have asked Treasury to urgently forecast the parameters of the ongoing liability on remaining remedial claims. On top of the specific work to help resolve the wider concern about outstanding claims, I’ve appointed an independent ministerial adviser to look at EQC’s current processes and to report back to me in the coming weeks. I’ve also appointed a new interim chair, Dame Annette King, to bring a different perspective to the resolution of claims. A claims management system is also being implemented to ensure claimants have a single point of contact when dealing with the commission. I anticipate there will be further changes following the report of the independent ministerial adviser.

Dr Duncan Webb: Will this blowout in remedial costs mean that some people will not be able to have their homes re-repaired?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: No, not at all. The Crown guarantee ensures that people can have faith that there are sufficient funds for their re-repairs. I have asked Treasury for advice on the parameters of this liability, as this Government are prudent financial managers that will not wilfully ignore liabilities that may be facing us.

Irrigation—Government Funding Priorities

8. Hon NATHAN GUY (National—Ōtaki) to the Minister of Agriculture: Does he stand by all his Government’s actions in the agricultural sector?

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Minister of Agriculture): Yes.

Hon Nathan Guy: Did winding back Government support for irrigation go through his rural proofing test, and what impact does it have on rural communities?

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Rural proofing is not in place yet, but it will be within the next few months.

Hon Nathan Guy: When the Minister praised the Ashburton Lyndhurst irrigation scheme at its opening on Friday by saying, “This has got to be the best value for money that politicians have made.”, why—

SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. Unfortunately, there’s a couple of members with quite loud laughs which are coming through the system—through the open microphone of Nathan Guy. I think, to be consistent, I would have to deduct supplementaries. I’m not going to be consistent but just issue a warning to the member, who knows he is responsible. Start again.

Hon Nathan Guy: Thank you, Mr Speaker. When he stated on Friday, at the opening of the Ashburton Lyndhurst irrigation scheme, that the benefits will flow in multiples, all through Canterbury and the rest of the country, why is he not supporting the Hunter Downs scheme, given that that has been farmer-led, with them raising almost $40 million of capital to support the project?

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: The Government has said we always support irrigation, but we have stated quite clearly that we will not ask pensioners and paperboys to contribute to private large-scale schemes. This Government has prioritised quite openly the fix-up of hospitals, of schools that have been run down because of nine years of Government neglect, and if that previous Minister hadn’t wasted over $350 million in Primary Growth Partnership grants, there’d be more money for hospitals and homes and schools.

Hon Nathan Guy: When the Minister praised the Ashburton Lyndhurst irrigation scheme at its opening just on Friday by saying, “This has got to be the best value for money investment that politicians have made.”, why does he support winding down irrigation projects?

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: As I’ve stated before, the Government has better priorities for the money that Crown Irrigation Investments Limited has spent. Can I say that for less than $1 million of assistance, $150 million of farmer money went into that scheme. I have on record here the fact that the Hunter Downs project will proceed without taxpayers’ funding. We will spend that money on hospitals and homes and schools because our priorities are the priorities that will give New Zealanders a fairer chance.

Hon Nathan Guy: Has the Minister met Crown Irrigation officials since becoming a Minister; if not, why not?

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: I have met with a couple of officials from Crown Irrigation and we have sent letters to them and informed them and given them a heads up on this change from the time we became Government. This is no surprise to them and it shouldn’t be to that member.

Minimum Wage—Increase and Fuel Tax Changes

9. Hon PAULA BENNETT (Deputy Leader—National) to the Minister of Employment: Does he stand by all his policies, statements, and actions?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON (Minister of Employment): Yes, in the context in which they were made.

Hon Paula Bennett: Does the Minister have concerns from a Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment report that warns that 3,000 jobs are in jeopardy due to minimum wage increases?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: We are very committed to workers in this country, and in terms of concerns, we are not overly concerned at the moment. We think there’s a lot of scaremongering being done from the Opposition.

Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern: Supplementary.

SPEAKER: Supplementary—no, well, if Paula Bennett wants one, she gets it first.

Hon Paula Bennett: How many additional hours per week will an Aucklander on the minimum wage need to work to offset his Government’s increase in fuel taxes?

SPEAKER: Not an area of responsibility for that member.

Hon Paula Bennett: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I’m sorry, it’s about minimum wage, and I’m speaking to the Minister of Employment, and asking how many additional hours they would need to work.

SPEAKER: Yes, and the responsibility for the minimum wage is not with that Minister.

Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern: Can he confirm that in the nine occasions that the last Labour Government increased the minimum wage, they too received advice that it would lead to an increase in unemployment, and they maintained, at that time, some of the lowest unemployment rates in the OECD?

SPEAKER: No, the member will resume his seat. That Minister also doesn’t have responsibility for reports to the previous Government.

Hon Paula Bennett: Is the Government quick to increase the minimum wage because it is covered by employers, and then take that off workers through fuel taxes, leaving workers no better off?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: That’s an assumption, and I don’t agree with that statement.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Can the Minister confirm that he received advice that suggested that the rumour that unemployment would rise if the wages of workers were picked up—did he receive advice that such talk is classical neo-liberal nonsense?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Yes, I can confirm that.

Paul Eagle: What are the Government’s policies to support employment and workers?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: The Government’s policies to support employment and workers are investment in our regions, we’re investing in our young people with He Poutama Rangatahi, we’re providing dignified job assurance, and we’ve just increased the minimum wage to $16.50 as a start to ensure that all people benefit from a strong economy.

Hon Paula Bennett: Has the Minister discussed minimum wage increases and jobs at the Mangere Bridge Tavern, and did it cause a kerfuffle?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: I haven’t been to the Mangere Bridge Tavern for about 12 months, but you might want to talk to my colleague Peeni Henare, who frequents it every Saturday.

SPEAKER: Right. I think I’ll leave the obvious comment.

Early Childhood Education—Funding

10. JAN TINETTI (Labour) to the Minister of Education: What funding challenges does the early child education sector face?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): The early childhood education (ECE) sector is facing a number of challenges, one of which has been caused by the lack of any universal funding increase to early childhood education to meet inflation for over a decade. Minuscule adjustments were made to the non-salary component over that time. However, 70 to 80 percent of teacher-led early childhood centres’ costs are salaries, for which there has been no increase in funding over the past decade. This means that for centres with mainly qualified teachers, their funding rate has declined by 12 percent in real terms since 2009, and the decline is 14 percent for kindergartens.

Jan Tinetti: What implications does ECE funding not keeping pace with inflation mean for the affordability of early childhood education?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Statistics New Zealand’s Consumers Price Index shows that between June 2009 and June 2017, early childhood education fees increased by 30 percent whilst over that time New Zealanders’ earnings only increased by 21 percent. I have asked the Ministry of Education to do more work on the data that we record about early childhood education affordability and fees.

Jan Tinetti: What difference will New Zealanders notice in this Government’s approach to the early childhood sector?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: This Government is absolutely resolved that we must focus on quality as well as participation when it comes to early childhood education. We recognise that the near funding freeze that early childhood services have been under for the last decade is unsustainable. However, we also have to balance that against a number of other cost pressures in the education system that have been caused by underfunding over the last decade.

Digital Services—Chief Technology Officer

11. BRETT HUDSON (National) to the Minister for Government Digital Services: Does she agree with the comment made by ICT veteran and expert in the industry, Ian Apperley, who said “when you read the Government’s chief technology officer job description it occurs to me that making the role effective is provably impossible. It is largely waffly which means the Government may not know what it wants”; if not, why not?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education) on behalf of the Minister for Government Digital Services: No, because the Government has clearly articulated what it expects from the chief technology officer.

Brett Hudson: Does she agree with the comments of Mr Apperley, who said, “Creating an environment where the industry can flourish is simple: normalise the procurement processes, speed up the legislative process, open overseas markets, stop thinking you know best, stop thinking you’re the leader, and start thinking about how to create an environment in which the technology business can flourish—and we don’t need a $500,000 person to tell us that.”?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: No. The Government does believe that there is a role for leadership in this space, and that is why we’re employing a chief technology officer.

Brett Hudson: If she doesn’t agree with the comments of Mr Apperley, a 25-year veteran of the industry, can she confirm that she is now holding meetings, both formal and informal, that could be construed as the Minister headhunting for this position?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: In respect to the first part of the question I can say that there are a number of people who would disagree, including Rod Drury, who’s made comments in favour of it; Don Christie, who’s made comments in favour of it; the McGuiness Institute; Chris Kiehl; Craig Walker; and many others who are in favour of the Government’s decision to employ a chief technology officer. I also note that a previous Minister proposed a chief technology officer role: that was one Simon Bridges.

Brett Hudson: Has she held any meetings, formal or informal, breakfast or otherwise, with Carol Hirschfeld regarding the position?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Clearly, no.

Question No. 6 to Minister

JAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany): I seek leave to table a document that shows the Minister of Transport can put regional fuel taxes outside of Auckland after 2021. [Interruption] The source of it is his own bill, the regional fuel tax amendment—

SPEAKER: Order!

JAMI-LEE ROSS: Well, it’s there! [Holds up printed sheet of paper]

SPEAKER: Order! The member is—I’m assuming it’s a bill that’s either introduced to the House or it’s been on the Table?

Jami-Lee Ross: Schedule 1.

SPEAKER: I’m trying to work out how to deal with the member, who I think is being deliberately, deliberately mischievous. My view is that he got a very clear answer from the Minister on the question, especially one which related to timing. He is now seeking to use a point of order process to relitigate that, and, worse still, he’s doing it with something which is already on the Table of the House and has been introduced to the House. I’m giving the member a pretty serious warning that further behaviour of that sort by him—and I’ll ask Mr Brownlee to impose some discipline on his colleagues—is likely to result in something pretty serious.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Speaking to the point of order.

SPEAKER: Well, I don’t think—I’ve just made a ruling, Mr Brownlee.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Yes, you did.

SPEAKER: Are you going to make a new point of order?

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Well, you made a ruling and a request, so it’s natural I would respond to that request.

SPEAKER: No, the request was that you respond to your colleagues, not to me.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: That’s right, and I’m indicating to you that I will not be telling my colleagues to let Ministers away with making statements in the House—

SPEAKER: Order!

Hon Gerry Brownlee: —that are not true.

SPEAKER: Order! The Opposition just lost five supplementaries from tomorrow.

Health Services—District Health Board Deficit Levels

12. Dr LIZ CRAIG (Labour) to the Minister of Health: What advice has he received about DHB deficit levels?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK (Minister of Health): The majority of district health boards (DHBs) are struggling to live within their current level of funding. I’m advised that DHB financial results for the year to the end of February showed a combined deficit of $189 million. I’m further advised the Ministry of Health is forecasting a total DHB deficit of $209 million or more by the end of the financial year.

Dr Liz Craig: Why have DHB deficits grown to their current levels?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: To put it bluntly, the health service has been underfunded, as everyone can see from the state of Middlemore Hospital. As Minister of Health, DHB chairs know my expectation, that DHBs be careful stewards of health funding, but this is not, as was claimed on Morning Report yesterday, just an accounting issue you deal with. That was what the—

SPEAKER: Order! Order!

Dr Liz Craig: So what will the Government do to address DHB deficits?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: As the Prime Minister indicated yesterday, the focus of Budget 2018 will outline the first steps in rebuilding quality public services that keep our nation strong. I expect DHBs will see the benefit of this focus in the upcoming Budget. However, after nine years of underfunding and neglect, it will not be possible—

SPEAKER: Order! Order!

Hon Michael Woodhouse: I seek leave to table a document compiled by the Parliamentary Library entitled Combined DHB Deficits 2000 to 2017.

SPEAKER: Is there any objection to that? There is objection. It will not be tabled.

Urgent Debates Declined

Crown Irrigation Investments Ltd—Winding Down of Public Funding for Large-scale Irrigation

SPEAKER: I have received a letter from the Hon Nathan Guy seeking to debate under Standing Order 389 the announcement of the Government’s intention to wind down public funding for large-scale irrigation through Crown Irrigation Investments Ltd. This announcement was made last Thursday. This is a case of recent occurrence that involves ministerial responsibility. The application does not set out reasons why the House should be set aside to debate the matter. Successive Speakers have held that it is for the member making the application to make out a case for an urgent debate. It is not for the Speaker to discover one—Speakers’ rulings 190(3), Speakers Hunt and Smith. On the information presented to me, I’m not persuaded that the matter requires the urgent attention of the House. It is a matter that could be raised in the annual review debate today or in the upcoming Budget debate. The application is therefore declined.

Annual Review Debate

In Committee

Debate resumed from 3 April on the Appropriation (2016/17 Confirmation and Validation) Bill.

External Sector (continued)

Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for Trade and Export Growth): I rise to talk to the external votes. Of course, trade is one of the areas that’s covered by this appropriation and, as Minister for Trade and Export Growth, I’m keenly interested in the Estimates. The sad reality is that the last Government oversaw an objective for nine years, which was to lift exports from 30 percent of GDP to 40 percent of GDP. After nine years of their attempts, they managed to drop exports to 27 percent of GDP and, to the end of the forecast period, they didn’t even get back to the 30 percent of GDP that they started at during their term of government. Sir, that shows, I think—Madam, sorry. Madam, that shows that—Mr Brownlee’s appearance has obviously confused me. That shows the failure of the economic policy of the last Government in a very, very important way.

I think everyone in New Zealand knows that in order to pay for our mobile phones, for our computers, for some of the medicines we import, for our cars—for a lot of the things that we rely upon for a good standard of living—we’ve got to sell a lot of things to the rest of the world. What we export to the world is largely a determinant of what it is that we can afford to import, and therefore goes to the quality of living and to the debt levels that we carry with the rest of the world. The last Government thought that they had the policy package to remedy what they said, when they came to office, was a dismal export performance, and then took it backwards. I think that we now know that their policy prescription was wrong.

I want to talk to two aspects of it. One is the important work that the Minister of Finance is leading. That is the subject of an inquiry led by former Minister of Finance Sir Michael Cullen. That inquiry is looking at what we need to do to change the tax signal in New Zealand. I’m acutely interested in their recommendations, because I know that the Minister of Finance and I both share the view that one of the problems that we have in New Zealand is that we misallocate capital, too much of which goes into speculative investment classes and not enough goes into the productive sectors that we need to expand.

Now the Government has got a number of measures to address that, in addition to the tax inquiry, but I suspect that when we look back on history of this period of government, the work that Sir Michael Cullen is doing will be amongst the most important—

Hon Maggie Barry: Urgh!

Hon DAVID PARKER: —in terms of growing the strength of the economy. I heard Maggie Barry groan there; well, you know, the flip side of the under-investment in productivity—because although the last Government said that they had a high growth rate, their last growth rate was effectively based on more inputs of people, more power, more cows, more people, and more tourists. When you adjust growth rates for population growth, per capita growth rates in New Zealand for some time now have only been about 1 percent per annum. We’re not going to remedy that unless we invest more as a country in growing new points of comparative advantage with the rest of the world, so that we can grow the diversity of our exports as well as spread the breadth of the markets into whom we sell those goods and services. In addition to that, the work that’s been led by Dr Megan Woods in respect of the research and development tax credit will also assist.

In the time I’ve got left, I want to make reference to free-trade agreements. Free-trade agreements were oversold by the last Government as being the key to export growth. We already have the best trade agreement in the world with Australia, one of the best free-trade agreements in the world in terms of our arrangements with China, and despite those agreements, we’ve had dropping exports. It proves the point that important though free-trade agreements are, they are not the key to export growth; that lies in better economic settings that drive financial capital, and then the people follow the money and put their efforts into growing new points of advantage.

Having said that, we are proud to have got the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership across the line, to have rebuilt public support by trade, by protecting New Zealanders from some of the excesses of globalisation, including by restricting who buys our homes.

Hon Mark Mitchell: Madam Chair. [Interruption]

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): I call Mark Mitchell. I’m sorry; I’m on several things at the moment.

Hon MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): Thank you, Madam Chair. I can live with that. I remember one time, a previous Speaker referred to me as Grant Robertson. It took me a long time to get over that. It took me a long time to recover from that one.

Look, I just wanted to open by saying that I found it very interesting, and I’m disappointed—actually, I can’t refer to a member that’s not in the House. But I found it very interesting in the general debate last week, and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it where you had a Government Cabinet Minister get up and spend his whole general debate speech talking about the Opposition member. That was Ron Mark talking about myself. I was very honoured—I was very honoured that Ron gave me that much attention. It was obvious that he’s still pretty sensitive about his Uber habits, but I found it interesting that you had a Cabinet Minister get up and, instead of actually talking about the things that are actually going on inside his portfolio—namely, defence, and the great work that our people are doing around the world, or the procurement that he’s working on, or the issues of the day—he got up and he spoke about the Opposition spokesperson for five minutes.

I just want to talk a little bit about one of the big issues that he’s been talking about—and it’s good to see the Minister of Finance in the House, too, because maybe he may like to take a call and respond to one of the issues that I’m about to talk to now. That’s about procurement, because a big part of what’s going to happen inside New Zealand defence forces this year is going to be procurement. Namely, immediately first off the block is going to be the P-8 Poseidon, which, of course, our RNZAF needs to replace our surveillance and intelligence capability, which historically—or for the last 52 years—has been delivered through the extremely reliable, outstanding P3 Orion.

But it’s time to retire them. They are 52 years old. Our air force does an amazing job of maintaining them and keeping them flying, but, fundamentally, it’s time to invest in some new aircraft to close the capability gap, to make sure that we are reliant and we are interoperable with our partners, and to give them a new aircraft, in the P-8 Poseidon. One of the reasons, and one of the issues that’s been raised, in terms of why this could be an issue or the reason why the decision has been delayed—or, as the Minister says, why he’s kicking the can down the road—is because of our procurement system and the fact that they want to make sure that we’re actually getting the best value for money. And that’s a good thing; that’s something that a Government should be doing. But I just want to highlight something about our procurement system through the Ministry of Defence, and I’m just going to make these comments, from the last review, in relation to procurement: “This has included reviewing its project management disciplines, procedures, policies, and practices according to international best [standard].

The ministry previously employed eight permanent project management staff in its capability delivery division. It now has 57 … staff. We heard that this has enabled the ministry to build specialist expertise in commercial project management, financial management, and risk management. The ministry’s leaders now also have commercial experience.

The ministry has introduced project teams that integrate ministry and [New Zealand Defence Force] staff, and it has strengthened its governance and assurance functions. The Secretary of Defence said all of these changes have been implemented in partnership with the [New Zealand Defence Force].”—under a National Government.

So you can see that there’ve already been some major changes, some major focus, and some major investment into making sure that we get our procurement right. We recognise and understand that, as a small nation, as a relatively small defence force, when we do procure the new equipment—and we’ve had some hard lessons along the way. The NH90 is a very good example that was tough to bring into service, and we had some big issues to deal with—but I would highlight and point out that that procurement decision was taken under the last Labour Government, not the National Government.

The National Government moved to make sure that our procurement system is world standard and that we don’t continue to make the same mistakes that we have made in the past. So my point is this: I’m very interested for either the Minister of Finance or the Minister of Defence to come down and take a call and tell us what exactly they’ve done to improve our procurement system—what new measures have they captured, or what new measures have they implemented, that have improved our procurement system, which mean that they don’t have to purchase or procure the P-8 Poseidon, which means that they’re going to be able to delay decisions on important procurement decisions through the defence capability paper.

Unfortunately, I’ve run out of time, but I’d invite the Minister of Finance to stand and take a call and explain to us what changes they’re going to make.

Hon MEKA WHAITIRI (Minister of Customs): Madam Chair, thank you very much for the opportunity to take a call in support of the Appropriation (2016/17 Confirmation and Validation) Bill, as the proud Minister of Customs. Customs comes within the ambit of this particular theme. I just want to acknowledge the work of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee. It’s very few reports that come back to the House where a select committee like the one in question starts the report with saying, “Our congratulations to Customs for its work. We would like to congratulate Customs for its work at the border to protect New Zealanders, in particular its work to intercept and disrupt the supply of illicit drugs.”

I’ve been the Minister of Customs for not quite six months. So I do want to acknowledge the former Ministers, the Hon Tim Macindoe and, of course, the Hon Nicky Wagner, who were also really key in the work that customs does.

Can I just acknowledge and talk briefly in terms of the annual review on three areas, and one is, obviously, travel. So, just to remind the House, the three broad functions of customs are to protect New Zealand’s borders, to promote and facilitate secure and efficient trade and travel, and, of course, to collect Crown revenue. In terms of collecting revenue, it might be of interest to members of the House that customs collects around 18 percent—18 percent—of the core Crown tax revenue annually. That’s approximately $13.2 billion that customs collects on behalf of the Government. It’s not a light fee, but it’s important to acknowledge customs’ role, and I think they do an absolutely good job in that respect.

I also want to touch on the success of some recent initiatives, particularly around the use of SmartGates, and to acknowledge that our visitor rates to this country have increased by approximately 9.3 percent on the previous year. That equates to approximately 13.27 million passengers that have come through our gates in the year that’s under review—like I said, an increase of 9.3 percent. Of those 13 million, approximately 5.8 million use the SmartGates. The SmartGates—many of those that travel in and out of New Zealand will recall that if you’ve got an electronic passport, it facilitates both your entry to and exit from the country in a lot more seamless way. So 6 million passengers use the SmartGates and, just so members know, the recent additions in the year under question include passengers from China, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Ireland who have taken up the opportunity, if they’ve got e-passports, to use that particular facility.

But it’s the protecting of New Zealand borders—the interception of illicit drugs at the border—that I do want to turn the House’s attention to, to acknowledge the work that customs do in, obviously, keeping our borders safe. Recently, and last year, particularly—2017—approximately $1 billion was captured at the border that we believed would have led to harm. It’s important that we acknowledge that by preventing the movement of drugs across our border, it’s not then ending up going into our social services’ laps in terms of dealing with it.

However, the point I want to make here is having international officers in the countries from where we know that drugs are coming in is really critical to the border security system. I do a nod to the Minister of Finance that we have to ensure that the services at those borders internationally are really critical if we’re going to maintain that record. Having said that, I know customs is also very instrumental in some of the tariff work that’s going on in terms of potential trade partners. Again, that is something that we need to make sure that we’re improving and that we are resourcing them appropriately.

In the time I’ve got left, I want to acknowledge the modernisation of the Customs and Excise Act that this House recently passed. It’s an acknowledgment of several years of hard work not only by officials in customs but also by the stakeholders—the businesses that engage with customs—to ensure that we’ve got a modern Act that reflects the needs of businesses today, going forward. I believe it’s a tool that’s going to be well received by stakeholders and businesses throughout New Zealand and, of course, our trading partners, who realise that our Act to enable that is healthy and is modern. I commend this bill to the House.

Hon TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West): Thank you, Madam Chair. May I begin by acknowledging that envy is not a particularly attractive quality in anybody, but I am suffering deeply from envy on two counts. One is that my successor as the Minister of Customs has what the Hon Maurice Williamson, another former Minister, once said to me was, without doubt, the best portfolio of the lot. In fact, his language was far more colourful in describing how fortunate I was to have been allocated that, but I did very quickly come to acknowledge that. I also want to say how envious I am of the current Minister for the fact that she has been able to see the Customs and Excise Bill become an Act, because the whole time that I was a Minister it was stuck on the Order Paper, not quite able to get up to that level of priority required for progress. But, as we have seen, the current Government, having no legislation of its own, was only too pleased to be able to pick up such an outstanding bill, and I do congratulate the new Minister in being able to get it over the line.

I was delighted that yesterday they had a formal acknowledgment of that, and I was very sorry I wasn’t able to attend, but I sincerely thank you, and I sincerely wish the Minister well in that portfolio. Could I also just quickly acknowledge the very fine men and women of the New Zealand Customs Service: it was my great privilege to be their Minister—for too short a time, I have to say. They do an outstanding job in protecting our borders—and never underestimate how significant a challenge that is—but, also, as is perhaps not as often acknowledged, in facilitating trade in this country. The Minister has just touched on some of the reasons for that, and, again, I thank them. They are an outstanding group of men and women, and they serve our country extraordinarily well.

When we were last debating this particular external relations theme of the Appropriation Bill, news came through of the decision of Lieutenant General Tim Keating to stand down from his position as Chief of the New Zealand Defence Force. I just want to say quickly how grateful we should all be to Lieutenant General Keating for the service he has rendered to this country since 36 years ago, when he first joined the New Zealand Army as an officer cadet. He rose through the ranks. In February 2011 he was appointed Chief of Army, in December 2012 he was appointed the Vice Chief of the Defence Force, and since January 2014 he has served as Chief of the Defence Force.

I think that most of us would acknowledge the fact that we are very proud of all our armed service personnel, who serve us with courage and distinction, both at home and abroad. All New Zealanders, I think, have reason to be grateful for the valour with which our Defence Force personnel undertake a myriad of important roles—and one of them, of course, has just been alluded to by the Minister of Customs: they back up their work. But, also, whether it’s in peacekeeping, military training, back-up for conservation, civil defence operations—it crosses just about the whole gamut of important aspects of protecting our country. So I wish the Lieutenant General well, and all who have served under him, and I thank him for his exemplary service.

Of course, we have under consideration at the moment foreign affairs. Now, traditionally in New Zealand, foreign affairs has been something that has largely operated in a bipartisan manner, and I think that that is a good thing. However, it is deeply disturbing—and I say this as the National Party’s new associate spokesperson for foreign affairs and trade—that at the moment you’d have to say New Zealand’s foreign policy, at least in regard to the recent Russian nerve agent attack in Salisbury in the United Kingdom but also on related trade issues, has been incoherent and, frankly, deeply disturbing. All other countries with which we would normally associate ourselves very quickly responded to the considerable weight of evidence in that particular issue and supported our strongest allies—the UK, and also the United States, the Australians, the European Union, and many others with whom we are traditionally associated—in condemning that attack and coming to the support of the United Kingdom; but not New Zealand, for a very long time.

And when we finally did, we had the extraordinary position of seeing the New Zealand Government’s website being altered, mysteriously, after an initial press release had been issued in which the Foreign Minister’s comments were completely absent. It was only some days later that this press release was doctored. We are yet to hear why and who was responsible for that, but it does show that things are deeply incoherent at the moment. In his obsession with pursuing a trade agreement with Russia, we have a Foreign Minister who seems to be going off on his own in ways that I’m quite sure his coalition partners are not at all comfortable with.

I wish that there was more time. I would like to talk a little bit more about the customs portfolio, but, again, I close, as I did at the beginning, by saying what an honour it was to be their Minister and to thank them for the way in which they have served our country.

Hon SHANE JONES (Minister of Forestry): Tēnā koe, Madam Chair. Nine long years, and—

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Good years.

Hon SHANE JONES: Ah, there’s the eye of Nelson. The eye of Nelson has spoken, some sort of local dragonfly. I want the House to know that when a dragonfly is in its earliest stages of life, it lives under the water and survives because of rectal gills. There we have the evidence sitting before us.

I should continue. Nine long years: exports decreasing, water quality diminishing, people—especially in that targeted area, our young men and women in the forgotten regions—languishing under the unhelpful term of “neets”. And then what do we find? What do we find? Total denial—total denial—that when they led trade policy, it led to one of the greatest protest marches, virtually closed down the Auckland motorway. It required David Parker to ride forward, with his usual southern frugality, aided a little by some Northland fecklessness, and deliver the deal, the trans-Pacific deal.

Now, what did they do on the other side of the House? They made these petty, silly remarks that we hadn’t brought forward certain historical things that were associated with them. They couldn’t get the deal done. That is the legacy. They could not get the deal done. It required a change of Government. But I need to look backwards to enable that we don’t, as we move forward with the billion-dollar fund, make the mistakes of the past. Now, let me just focus for a—

Matt King: Roll on 2020, mate.

Hon SHANE JONES: Ah, we’ve now heard from the farmer from Northland, Mr King. Of course, I’ve said on earlier occasions that when you’re a farmer, you usually see gumboots at the front door, reflective of farm work. The only Skellerup we see is “foot in mouth” in the House from time to time. But I won’t attack Skellerup—a great export brand. I’m here to talk about the upside of exports.

Fletcher Tabuteau: Don’t disparage Skellerup.

Hon SHANE JONES: I’m sorry, Skellerup. If I owe you an apology that I’ve created this inverse relationship with the member from Northland and your fine product, I apologise to all and sundry.

Matt King: Keep saying my name—keep saying my name.

Hon SHANE JONES: But—no. We’ve heard enough about rectal glands, thank you very much.

I want to continue as to what also was not achieved. What was not achieved was enabling infrastructure development and investment, which is why at the moment we are addressing all of those areas of neglect. There was a lot of rhetoric and a lot of plans and trees cut down and ink spilt, but it required a change of Government in order for it to be accelerated and fuelled. But more about that once the great Budget is passed by our senior colleague in the not too distant future. But let’s just talk a little bit about the ongoing neglect, and I want to focus on the provinces.

Inadequate training opportunities—

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): I’d quite like you to focus—

Hon SHANE JONES: I am talking about historical neglect in terms of export growth.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): Yes. I would like you to focus on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, if you’re talking about—

Hon SHANE JONES: Yes, but trade divorced from economic growth is piffle. But I will take your advice—

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): You can make that point, but bring it together.

Hon SHANE JONES: I will take your advice. I will take your advice, as befits me as the champion of the provinces—suitably modest. You cannot have trade out of the provinces, the generators of vast amounts of foreign exchange earnings, unless you have enabling infrastructure. We did not see that infrastructure, so necessary for transport. I could talk to you about the apocryphal ten bridge failure. I could talk to you about the deterioration of roads. How can you increase trade in the absence of continually investing for economic purposes in infrastructure in the provinces?

But I want to—I have wound up? [Looks at clock] No I haven’t; I’ve got more to say. I want to support Mr Parker and have every single farmer and every single participant in these debates know that we stood up, we picked up the reins, and we’re the Government who brought forward the unfinished trade agenda and passed it. We have delivered it to the satisfaction of New Zealanders. That is why our writ runs very strong throughout the provinces, not because of our very judicious allocation of funding—more on that very soon, more on that very soon. Now, Mr Parker has taken, unfortunately, some cruel taunts from the other side of the House. Mr Parker, do not pay any attention. The longer they’re in the oppositional desert, the worse their language will become. Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

CHRIS PENK (National—Helensville): Thank you, Madam Chair. In speaking in the appropriation debate, regarding the external sector, I’d like to focus on the defence realm. It seems to me that the New Zealand Defence Force is a great institution of our great nation and should be supported in many ways, not least of all in the appropriations space. Before I go on to talk about some specifics in relation to that, following on from my colleague Mark Mitchell’s discussion of the procurement process and the signals but not, so far, apparent changes in relation to that, I did want to pay tribute to the hard-working women and men of our Defence Force.

Anzac Day is coming up shortly, of course, and that will not be an occasion for political discussion, and I’m sure that no member of this House on either side will treat it as such. But I did just want to acknowledge that in this House before moving on to, perhaps, the more political realm whereby we talk about the things that are needed to support our troops.

They have always been ready to support us, and for that reason we must always be ready to support them. Whether at home—for example, most recently in relation to the Kaikōura earthquakes—or abroad, they are doing great things with and for us, and, accordingly, we must fund their operations properly. We will expend more blood if we expend less treasure on them, to use the old characterisation of the things that are inevitably spent in meeting the aims of a defence force. So I make the point quite explicitly that we must support them, and I call upon and challenge the Government, indeed, to support them not only in terms of capital expenditure on new items, and, as I say, my colleague Mark Mitchell—the Hon Mark Mitchell, no less, former defence Minister—has talked about that. But I want focus a bit more on some of the operations that the defence force is currently undertaking.

I think it’s important that we set out clearly for the record the things that they are doing so that we know that these things are valuable and, therefore, worth our time, attention, and, indeed, Government revenue. I’ve taken the opportunity to speak before in this House about the Royal New Zealand Navy. I’m somewhat self-indulgent because of my previous occupation as a member of that service. I’ll pass on quickly to mention—again, somewhat in passing, because I have spoken of them before—the Royal New Zealand Navy Air Force and the base at Whenuapai, which is within my electorate of Helensville. So it’s with great pleasure that I observe their activities, again, at home and abroad, and, indeed, in that local community with good relationships, for example, with the local school, Whenuapai School.

I’ll instead pass on to mention a few of the undertakings of our New Zealand Army. Community support, international engagements, exercises, and deployments are all part of their remit, and I’ll just take a brief amount of time, if I may, to cast my eye, and, therefore, the collective eye of the House, over a few of those deployments, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I refer to a few notes as I do so, Madam Chair Tolley. The detail obviously is important.

So in Afghanistan, the New Zealand Army is providing mentoring roles to officers of that nation’s military. In the Sinai, as with many such operations in conjunction with New Zealand Defence Force members of the other services, they are implementing the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty. In the Middle East, more generally, the UN Truce Supervision Organisation is doing work to support that. In Iraq, along with Australian Defence Force members, they are building partner capability mission. In the South Sudan, the newest nation of planet Earth, they are supporting the UN mission there—a modest contribution by way of numbers, but an important one, none the less. In the Republic of Korea, they are monitoring the compliance of that Armistice agreement—a part of the world that is, in particular, in international headlines recently. Finally, they are in the Antarctica, supporting the work of Antarctica New Zealand, of a scientific and other nature down there.

I come to the end of my time but just to reiterate my challenge, as I do so, to the Government to put our money—New Zealanders’ money—where their mouth is in terms of supporting our troops for all the good work that they do on our behalf.

Reports relevant to the External Sector noted.

Finance and Government Administration Sector

BRETT HUDSON (Chairperson of the Governance and Administration Committee): Thank you, Madam Chair. It’s a pleasure to speak on this debate because, after all, what we’re really talking about here, as we review the financial performance of Government entities from the previous financial year, is that essential bedrock and extremely high-performing economy and set of public services that the outgoing National-led Government has left for the incoming coalition Government. Already we’ve seen in the media in the last day or so a feeble attempt by this Government—

Kiritapu Allan: I raise a point of order, Madam Chairperson.

BRETT HUDSON: —to create crises where none such exist—

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): I’m sorry to interrupt the member. A point of order—Kiritapu Allan.

Kiritapu Allan: Madam Chair, pursuant to your commentary in the introductory remarks of this section, it was noted that the comments from the chairs of select committees were not to be overtly political, and I just ask for some guidance in respect of the comments being made by the current speaker.

BRETT HUDSON: Speaking to the point of order, Madam Chair—

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): I don’t need any help. The member is absolutely correct. This is a report from the Governance and Administration Committee, and it should be reporting the findings and the discussions of the select committee. It should be absolutely non-political.

BRETT HUDSON: Thank you, Madam Chair. So what the committee was able to report, across the entities that it looked at, is a reflection of the solid state of the accounting, the books, the handling of their accounts, and, indeed, the services that our Government agencies are delivering to New Zealanders.

One I’d like to touch on to begin with, please, is the Department of Internal Affairs. It’s a bit of a department about everything, actually, in New Zealand. It has an extraordinarily broad remit, and with it comes a great responsibility across huge areas of interest to the public, a responsibility that it takes very seriously. One of such areas, one of the challenges it has and which it spoke with us about, is the ability to keep each of the silos—they may not like them to be referred to as such, but just for ease of understanding—of the services it provides. Each one of them has to be accounted as very much, almost, an independent entity. They can’t be in deficit in one and in surplus in another. They’re meant to manage each of them effectively, and they have done a very, very good job in the year in question.

They’ve actually achieved a small surplus, a surplus of almost $30 million, which they have advised us is a necessary buffer because, as they forecast into both the current financial year and years ahead, there will be some pressures that come, particularly as a result of the change in the validity of passports which was made by the previous Government. Whereas for some years we had operated with passports that would be valid for five years, all new passports will be valid for 10, and the department spoke to us about how that will impact revenue flows around the delivery of those services over the coming years. They also highlighted for us at the same time, of course, that some of their costs—in fact, many of their costs—around technology are quite fixed. So they’ll see quite a flat to moderately increasing cost base, but a revenue line, particularly around passports, that will vary quite differently from where it’s been in recent years. So they did highlight to us that although—and we agreed—they have done a very, very good job in managing the services against the budget that they have had, it isn’t going to be without its challenges in the coming years.

When we spoke to them about passports, too, we were very interested to get a sense from them about how the extended validity period may or may not compromise the security of the passports of New Zealand, which are held in very high regard around the world—one of the highest-regarded countries, actually, if you use the measure of visa-free entry into other countries. Their view is that once you get to around seven or eight years there is a challenge around the embedded security elements within passports, but they remain very confident that the work they continue to do to improve in that area will continue to keep us in good stead, despite that change in passport validity.

The other area we spoke to them quite a great deal about was the delivery of digital services through what used to be the Government Chief Information Officer office but now is the Government Chief Digital Officer. One area which we did raise some concern about is the identification or log-on verification service the Government runs, called RealMe. Consistently over the years the uptake in that service falls well, well behind projections, and it’s something that we have encouraged the department to put a great deal of emphasis on: creating extra value to grow that number of logins. Thank you, Madam Chair.

MICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m very pleased to speak in the finance and Government administration sector of the annual review debate. I want to kick off just by acknowledging the work of select committee members across the committee on the two committees which make up the sector. On my own Finance and Expenditure Committee can I acknowledge especially Fletcher Tabuteau, the deputy chair, and the senior Opposition member, who at the time of the annual review was the Hon Steven Joyce and who is now the Hon Amy Adams. It’s a committee which deals with some crunchy issues, but does tend to work together as constructively as the times allow. Can I also acknowledge the other chair, of the Governance and Administration Committee, in this debate, Brett Hudson, and, as they say behind every successful man is a surprised woman, the deputy chair of that committee, Ginny Andersen, as well. These committees cover a very wide array of the Government’s activities. The finance committee, of course, covers fiscal and economic policy and revenue; the Governance and Administration Committee covers a huge range of areas—Parliament and legislative services, the Prime Minister and Cabinet, emergency management, and local government.

One thing that stuck out for me when I read my way through the annual reviews is the outstanding work of New Zealand’s public services and public servants. I don’t think in this House we often enough acknowledge that. In fact, sometimes in this House we give them a good kicking, because it’s good on the political side, but actually we’re extraordinary blessed in this country by our non-corrupt, highly professional, good quality Public Service. One thing that absolutely stood out for me, and this was in the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) annual review—Mr Hudson made some reference to this, and it just spoke to me about the value of our public services—was commentary in the report about the New Zealand passport. It’s something that we take for granted. It allows us visa-free access to, I think, something like 140 countries around the world. Here’s why: because we have a passport that’s made up of 140 different plates. They’re held in secure, vaulted sites. The passport itself undergoes major review every two years, along with very regular changes. There are over 100 checks of individual pieces of data before any passport is issued—a highly complex system that sits behind something that New Zealanders draw enormous value out of, and that’s incredibly important for this committee to take account of.

What was noted in that annual review, and I think it’s important for this Parliament to note, is that if we expect those public services for the benefit of New Zealanders, we do have to pay for them. It was noted in this annual review that the DIA has been working with basically flat revenue over the past eight years while it fulfils those very, very complex tasks. I think this Parliament needs to take note of that. If we want the good quality public services, we’ve got to put the funding in.

In the time I have, the other area that I really want to draw attention to came through in the annual review of Treasury and the Financial Statements of the Government of New Zealand. This section of the annual review refers to the development of the Living Standards Framework. This is going to be, I think, one of the major directions that the Government takes over the next few years, and it was of significant interest to members on both sides of the committee. Treasury reported to us about their current work on the Living Standards Framework. It’s not an entirely new concept; it’s something Treasury has been developing for a number of years, and what it’s about is about saying that the quality of life for New Zealanders is measured in more than just a measurement of whether the Government reaches a fiscal surplus or a deficit and in more than the single figure of GDP growth.

The quality of life for New Zealanders is about things like whether you can swim in your local river or stream, about whether our kids are growing up in poverty or not, and the way Treasury wants to measure these things is by looking at a broader range of capitals. Yes, they say—and they confirmed this in the annual review—it’s still really important to look at the fiscal bottom lines. It’s still really important to run a tight ship and to have surpluses, so that we can make the investments that we need and so that we’re ready for the tough times. But that shouldn’t be the only thing that we as Government and we as a Parliament look at. We should also be looking at the other capitals—the fiscal capitals, the human capitals, the social capitals, and the natural capitals—because, in the end, those are the things that actually make life worth living and make this a good place for all New Zealanders, which is what I know all members in this Parliament would want.

So that was an area I just really wanted to draw attention to that is in the annual review of Treasury and the Financial Statements of the Government. It’s a significant priority for the Government, but I know from conversations on the committee that members across that committee really want to understand the potential benefits of the Living Standards Framework and to make sure that it is an effective tool to make sure that the Government and the Parliament are delivering for all New Zealanders.

I think that the annual reviews that we have before us give real testament to the work of our Public Service and our public servants. They set out some of the key challenges for Government, going forward, and I look forward to the rest of this debate. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Hon AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn): Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m pleased to take a call in this annual review debate, where we are once again approaching the annual reviews through the sector approach, which I must say for myself I have found as one of the good innovations of recent years, where we can group together votes with a similar theme and address them as one global debate. This House will know that I am a relative newcomer, at least this time round, to the Finance and Expenditure Committee, but this is a bit of a groundhog day for me. I was there nine years ago, and it’s good to return to familiar territory and look at some of the reports we’re seeing from Treasury and the like as we go through that annual review process. Of course, in terms of the change of Government, the period of review largely is the period that related to the National-led Government. Of course, it is also looking into what is termed current operations—so the current year under the new coalition Government.

I think the clear take away, when you look at that period that Treasury have been reporting to us on in their annual review and covering—it really is a story of a very strong economy, actually. I think all parties in this House would acknowledge that New Zealand has been served remarkably well by the strength of our economy in recent years, at a time when the international trends have been uncertainty, and some of our comparator countries have been seeing quite stagnant and lumpy growth, if at all, we have had an economy that has been held up under various monikers, one of which of course—perhaps most well-known—being a rock star economy. Actually, what we’ve had and seen developed during that period—and this is important when we look forward into the current year and years ahead—is a very sustainable, solid rate of growth in the New Zealand economy that has allowed us, as respective Governments, to have the certainty of a reliable and actually growing revenue stream, and has allowed Governments to make choices.

The reason that’s worth highlighting is because that cannot be taken for granted. One of Treasury’s core functions that we test them on in the annual review process is their ability to properly study and understand and reflect the risks to that economic performance and the criticality of any small deviation in those growth tracks. One of the things that I’ve been interested to read through in recent weeks has been the, sort of, weighty tome that Treasury has put out, their investment statement. My colleague Michael Wood, who has just resumed his seat, has spoken about the fact that this reflected the Living Standards Framework that Treasury are very interested in, and which I want to return to, but the investment statement itself is an interesting four-year document, which does go through and stress test or resilience test how well our economy would respond to various shocks. This is important, because when you’re looking at the resilience of our economy to something like a major Wellington earthquake or foot and mouth disease, it really tells us that it wouldn’t take much at all to considerably derail the projections that the new Government is working with. When you are looking, therefore, at hardwiring in significant increases in spending at the same time that reforms could seriously weaken that performance of our economy, I think New Zealand has real reason to be concerned.

I do just want to touch on the Living Standards Framework, because Treasury did spend a bit of time talking about this in their examination before the committee. I don’t disagree at all, and I don’t think anyone on this side of the House would disagree, that of course there is more to a standard of living and the things that we value in this country than the books. No one would doubt that, and I think it would be a very brave politician or member of society who would suggest that. Of course we care about a far wider range of indicators than simply the financials. But the question for me in Treasury’s role is the extent to which Treasury is the right agency to do that and whether in doing it they risk losing their focus on the criticality of understanding those very, very finely weighted calls at the margin around the impact on our economy. One of the concerns that I have that I would have put to Treasury, certainly given that opportunity, is the fact that we’re hearing from public agencies throughout this annual review process that they simply have no idea how they’re supposed to apply this Living Standards Framework.

So it’s a lovely sounding ideal, and of course New Zealanders all care about a range of indicators, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that Treasury must remain our central and our centrally focused agency looking at the criticality of those economic settings, understanding how vitally important it is. Because let’s not kid ourselves that anybody will have a good standard of living and a strong health system and a good education system and a clean environment and swimmable rivers and safe communities unless we have an economy that can pay for it. Anything that risks taking that focus away is of concern. So we’ll watch it and we’ll watch it with interest.

TAMATI COFFEY (Labour—Waiariki): Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m pleased to take a very short call on this Appropriation (2016/17 Confirmation and Validation) Bill. As a person that’s new to the select committee process and having to pore through some of the annual reports, especially that one of Treasury, it was an interesting process to go through. One thing that I’ve learnt is that across the political spectrum we do have to work together; however, our lenses are a little bit different and the way that we see things is a little bit different.

So when Treasury came to us and they gave us the numbers and we heard the rhetoric about the strong, stable economy, we realised very quickly that the strong, stable economy that the Opposition talk of was actually achieved by not paying the bills. What happened was that because they failed to pay the bills at Middlemore Hospital, we’ve had to actually sweep in and clean up the mess. Because they haven’t stepped in and helped the teachers out and paid them, we have to step in and fix that up. Because they haven’t paid the nurses, we have to step in and fix all of that up. Because we have unsafe roads around the country that have been neglected for the last nine years, we have had to step in and try and fix all of that up. So it’s a happy job sitting there poring over the annual reviews and thinking about the kinds of things that we’re going to do to turn the situation around.

What we’ve decided to do is face up to the facts that our people out there are really struggling and put in place some things that are going to help out there. Right now there are big discussions happening on the Whakatāne side of the electorate, which I’m sure you’re very familiar with, about the homelessness problem. It’s because the Opposition, when they were in Government, didn’t pay the bills when it came to housing. They didn’t build any houses, and as a result we’ve got a homelessness problem in places like Whakatāne and just starting to burgeon in small towns like Ōpōtiki as well. In Rotorua, we’re still facing that homelessness crisis, and again it’s up to us to fix that up.

When it comes to our families, who are the central operational unit of the country, we’ve also had to dip deep into our pockets too and invest $5.5 billion. That is all with the aim of lifting the income of 384,000 families, of which a very certain percentage are Māori, and they will be lifted out of their situations due to some good decision-making by this Government.

Let me also talk about the provincial growth fund as well—

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): Can I just interrupt the member. He has actually had almost three minutes. At some stage during this, he has to refer to the period under review—right?—not just gloss over it and talk about the future. I refer you to Speaker’s ruling 131/3. You do actually have to talk about the review.

TAMATI COFFEY: Thank you for that—thank you for that, Madam Chair. Let’s dig down into it then. Let’s get into what was previously mentioned about the way that we’re going to be looking at our economy and we’re going to move away from things like GDP growth as just being the sole indicator. We’re going to be looking at these well-being budgets, which the previous speaker, Amy Adams, identified as being a bit airy-fairy, not really knowing what that’s all about. But, in fact, what it’s doing and what it is going to be doing, which is what we’ve talked about in our annual reviews, is we’re moving to a situation where we’re not just talking about the dollars and cents; we’re actually talking about the well-being of the community. That is how Treasury, going forward, is going to be reporting back in its annual Budget and its annual reporting statements.

This Government has also, through the annual review process, highlighted the fact that we have set up this Tax Working Group. That’s been a very contentious issue out there in the public, but actually the Tax Working Group is something that we’ve talked about, along with our Budget responsibility rules too. The Budget responsibility rules are something that we’ve talked about at great length, and it’s something that we’ve put in place to make sure that when Treasury is reporting back, we’ve got a framework to work towards. What I managed to do, through sitting through things like the Financial Stability Report and the annual review from Treasury, was just ascertain a general picture of what has been done and what we are going to be doing, looking into the future. It was a very hard process at times, sitting there listening to officials and poring over numbers, especially when you’re not an accountant or a financial adviser. Times like that can be a little bit rough, but we made it through, and I’m happy to stand and make a contribution on this particular bill. Thank you.

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): Thank you very much, Madam Chair. It’s a pleasure to take a call in this debate and to pick up some of the themes that we’ve heard this afternoon around the matters covered by this theme in the finance and Government administration sector.

I want to particularly pick up the comments of Amy Adams around what we learnt in this process about the strength of the New Zealand economy, and that was delivered through the financial statements that are covered by this section, and also the review of Treasury. The former Minister is correct when she says that there are some high-level indicators that were delivered to us that looked good. We had growth rates that were looking around 3 to 3.5 percent, GDP growth of that rate. Indeed, many countries in the world would look at that with some envy—some solid statistics around the decline in unemployment—but what Amy Adams said says it all about that period of time, because, for her, that’s declaring success.

Now, the fact is that, at the same time that those growth rates were occurring, the OECD said we had the worst homelessness in the world.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Rubbish!

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Our rivers became more and more polluted, Dr Smith; labour productivity was almost flat; per capita GDP growth never rose above 1 percent during that period.

So, actually, when we decide that a country is a success, we can’t just look at one indicator like that. On this side of the Chamber, we are not satisfied by saying “We’ve managed to run a surplus.”, if we haven’t paid the bills. If we haven’t actually done the things that are required to make sure our public services are operating at the level that New Zealanders not only need but deserve, then that is not success.

So when we take a look at the Government’s financial statements, it’s very easy to look at them and say, “This is a Government that has led the economy well.” Well, actually, what those financial statements say about the last Government is that they relied upon population growth and people selling houses to one another as an economic strategy to prop up those GDP numbers. That is not sustainable. What we need are long-term investments in lifting the productivity, sustainability, and inclusivity of our economy, and we will only do that if we actually take a longer-term view about what should happen in our economy.

I noted that Amy Adams talked about the idea of this rock star economy that the last Government had left us. Well, I used to be the manager of a couple of bands when I was at university, and it looks a whole lot more like a roadie economy to me than a rock star economy, because, actually, for a lot of people, it’s a hand to mouth existence. Working people in New Zealand did not receive the benefits of that growth rate that we saw then, and that happens when people are not included in the decision-making process, and not included in—

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Of course they were.

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Dr Smith says, “Of course they were.” How can that be, Dr Smith, when labour’s share of the economy is among the lowest that it’s ever been? Working people did not benefit from the economic growth that occurred. It did not happen, and Dr Smith can continue to deny it, but he won’t get far.

So that’s why this Government is focused on developing the Living Standards Framework approach, and I absolutely acknowledge that work has been under way in Treasury for some time, but what we have decided to do is make it core to our Budgets. I am very proud of the fact that Budget 2019 will be New Zealand’s, and possibly the world’s, first well-being Budget, where we actually take that Living Standards Framework and we say we will measure our success on the basis of not just GDP growth—and we will continue to measure that—but also the health of our environment; how our people are going; what skills and knowledge do they have; are they well; are they actually safe and secure; our social capital; the strength of our communities, not just the rampant individualism of the last Government but actually understanding the way in which a community works—these are important indicators of our success.

These are important indicators of our success, our human capital—how are our people going getting the skills and the knowledge that they need to succeed in a rapidly changing world of work. So this Government will actually take the Living Standards Framework and make that into a real part of how we decide where our spending goes and how we measure our success. And at that point, not only will we have a prosperous economy but we’ll have one where people get a fair share in that prosperity.

Rt Hon DAVID CARTER (National): Thank you, Madam Chair. I do want to bring my brief contribution back to the actual purpose of the debate, which is the annual reviews of 2016/17.

If I could start by just giving a bit of advice to the member Tamati Coffey, who acknowledged that he’s a freshman in this place, and I accept that. But can I tell him, having studied many democracies around the world, the scrutiny and the accountability and the way any Government books are presented are as good in this country as anywhere else in the world. There is not a chance to hide the real position of any Government, and, therefore, I think it is doubtful whether the Government’s position over the last 24 hours of trying to run this sort of agenda and presentation prior to their Budget—that, in actual fact, things have not been left the way they really are—will not ride with New Zealand people. They know the scrutiny that it has received by the fiscal disciplines imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1994 and they will not be fooled by the Government’s attempt to reposition itself as it delivers its first Budget, because, of course, we all know it is out of resource because it spent too much money delivering free education to first-year students.

Can I make some specific comments, first of all, on page 315, Parliamentary Service. I note that the select committee, the Governance and Administration Committee, as it is now called, did not call Parliamentary Service before it. I think it should have done. I think there is an issue there whereby the Government needs to take note of the additional cost that is going to be imposed on this Government by Mr Peters’ refusal to carry on with the plans accepted by every other political party in the last Parliament to build a new building out the back. We are now committed to go back to the landlord of Bowen House after negotiating our way out of that particular lease. It will cost, and it will cost a lot of money, and I implore the Governance and Administration Committee to have a look at that next time.

The next one I wanted to refer to was Animal Control Products, page 566. This comes before the Primary Production Committee. I was subbed on to that on that particular day, not knowing that that would be the particular company that would come forward. But as the report in these documents said, it is a company that has performed exceptionally well in a difficult area—and I want to take this opportunity of recording this in the Chamber—under the chairmanship of Terrence Murdoch, under the general manager William—and I’ve forgotten his surname, I must admit. But they have done an exceptional job in what is a difficult area.

The next one I want to mention is Crown Irrigation Investments Ltd, page 573, and the contribution from Grant Robertson saying they cut out all further support of irrigation in this country because it was leading to environmental damage. Have a look at the report and have a look—there it is mentioned that, in actual fact, a project like Central Plains Water has delivered better environmental outcomes because we now have a substantial area of storage. We’re not drawing out of wells that were unsustainable, and all of those people who have received irrigation water onto their properties are having to file strict environmental plans. The environmental outcomes are greatly improved.

Can I then take note of the Office of the Ombudsman, page 309, and take this opportunity of lending my congratulations to Peter Boshier as the Chief Ombudsman for the job he’s done in getting hold of a huge backlog of complaints. That office is performing substantially better than it was, and that is noted in the reports here.

Finally, can I talk briefly of the one that has no mention at all, and that is, of course, the provincial growth fund of the Hon Shane Jones. I met the chairman this morning. I met the chairman of the primary growth fund this morning as I was coming up. I told him it was a slush fund. He told me I shouldn’t refer to it as such. I told him I would continue, for as long as I’m in Opposition, labelling it as it truly is. It is nothing but a slush fund, and I can tell Mr Shane Jones, as he goes about giving money out to people he’s been advised not to give money to, that the people of New Zealand will not be fooled. They will not be fooled. This is their taxpayer money being splashed around in a vain attempt to save New Zealand First. It’s not going to work. New Zealanders are far brighter than that, and this slush fund will be shown up for what it is.

Hon JAMES SHAW (Associate Minister of Finance): I felt it encumbant to pick up at this particular point, starting off with the comments of the previous speaker, the Rt Hon David Carter, because I feel that I ought to, given that it has been brought into this debate, despite the fact that it is actually not part of the period of time being reviewed. But because it was brought into the debate by the previous speaker, actually, it is important to point out that the provincial growth fund that the Hon Shane Jones is responsible for is one of the most important tools that this Government has at its disposal to ensure the redevelopment and regeneration in the regions in the future.

As we seek to transition to a low-carbon economy, I want to point out that last week, the Hon Shane Jones was up in the Taranaki, putting in place a number of investments to help that region transition to a low-carbon economy. That is not a slush fund. That is the single-greatest investment in our regions in the last generation, and I just wanted to make that point to the previous speaker.

I’d also like to refer to some of the comments made earlier by the Hon Amy Adams. She referred to having left the economy in a strong state. She referred to an annual GDP growth rate of around 3 percent and a fiscal surplus of $1.5 billion, and then appealed to Treasury that it should not be engaging in any more work on the Living Standards Framework but, rather, to retain a narrow focus on a very few set of economic indicators and not to take account of the wider picture of what was going on in the New Zealand economy, in the environment, and in society. It is exactly that kind of thinking that has led to the parlous state of so much of our environment and our social deficit that this new Government is being presented with, and that is why—

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Who passed the environment reporting Act?

Hon JAMES SHAW: Given that Mr Smith is making an intervention about environmental reporting, Mr Smith, when I received that report, I went through it and said, “Well, this is very interesting information. Why is there, for example, nothing in here about waste? Surely, we have data about waste?”—

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Order! Order! Can we come back to the sector, please?

Hon JAMES SHAW: We may.

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Thank you.

Hon JAMES SHAW: I was merely responding to an intervention from the Opposition. I shall return to the finance and administration review debate.

My point was that the Hon Amy Adams was suggesting that Treasury should retain a narrow focus on a few set of economic indicators and not confuse itself with this airy-fairy social and environmental stuff that she seems to think is what the Living Standards Framework is all about. It is exactly that narrow kind of thinking that has led to the parlous state of our environment and a number of our key social areas today.

Only the other day, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that British Petroleum had suggested that an oil spill would be a great boon to regional economies in Western Australia if there was an oil spill as a result of its offshore activities, in a report in 2016, because of the amount of money that would have to go into the local economy to manage the clean-up costs. That is the kind of thinking that just focusing on GDP leads you to, because all GDP is is a measure of throughput. That’s all it is. It’s like saying that the point of life is blood, right—that the point of life, the reason for being, the reason for existence is to have blood flowing through your veins—because that’s what GDP is. It’s just throughput. It accounts for things that are bad, like oil spills, as well as things that are good. It makes no distinction between those two things. That is why it is important that at the centre of our economic thinking, we have a much more nuanced, a much more comprehensive, much more sophisticated way of looking at the economy—not as a narrow focus on just gross domestic product, but on a broader set of indicators that actually say what is actually going on here.

As the Associate Minister of Finance with the specific delegation for that project—for developing that set of measures—I am delighted to be able to pick up on the work that Treasury was speaking about at the review in front of select committee in recent weeks, because it is vitally important to this country’s future. It’s important because it gives us an early warning sign that says, “Actually, you might want to pay attention now to some things. Otherwise, you will be trying to clean up our rivers in 20 years’ time.” So I just wanted to make those points, because I think it is important in this debate not to lose sight of that.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU (Deputy Leader—NZ First): Kia ora, Madam Chair. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to this appropriations contribution this afternoon. I too would like to address some of the contributions made by the members opposite this afternoon and, first of all, and rightly so, to address the statements by the Hon Amy Adams. She spoke about handing over a rock star economy. She spoke about how, at the time, GDP was fantastic and, yes, and on the surface, 3 percent looks good. She spoke about—

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Big surplus.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: —wages and employment. Well, actually, Dr Nick Smith has spoken about employment. He spoke about the numbers, but what he’s failed to mention is the low wage rates of the time and the fact that people in our communities were not being able to share in the success of a few.

So what did that party do at the time? Well, they actually offered up tax cuts, and they delivered tax cuts—

Hon Dr Nick Smith: For the lowest band.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: No, Mr Nick Smith.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: It was for the lowest band.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: No, not at all. At the time, they made a decision to offer tax cuts when they knew that what we really needed was real spending in infrastructure, in the people of New Zealand, in the health sector, in the education sector—in meaningful investment in the people of New Zealand. Unfortunately, what we’re seeing now, Dr Nick Smith, is evidence of the choices that you deliberately—forgive me, Madam Chair—that that party deliberately made for superficial numbers on a page which spoke about surpluses. Those were the choices that party made to sell to the New Zealand public—numbers on a page.

What we knew at the time, and what New Zealand First, particularly, at this time said, in contrast to the appropriations that we’re looking at and debating this afternoon—in complete contrast to that—we said at the time that those surpluses were empty and meaningless. The Prime Minister now, in the last few days, has said in her own words—forgive me if I misquote, but an approximation—“We knew it was bad at the time, but we didn’t quite know how bad it was.” That’s what we’re dealing with now, Dr Nick Smith.

The Hon Amy Adams spoke about well-being, and then she kind of insinuated that “Be careful about how you look at well-being. If you look at the well-being of the people, you might somehow stuff up the books.” What? You know, that party was the one who stuffed up the books and who didn’t even want to look at the well-being of the people of New Zealand. They just wanted to sell numbers on a page—those surpluses.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Just rubbish; we care about jobs.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Dr Nick Smith adamantly stood up in front of the New Zealand public and spoke about the quality of the New Zealand water and the rivers and the lakes that we swim in. He told us how fantastic that was, and yet—

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Order! Order! I’ve already cautioned one member about straying from the topic.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Oh, I apologise.

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Thank you.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: I apologise, Madam Chair. I obviously didn’t hear you, in my furore.

Hon Shane Jones: Fury.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Fury. Ha, ha! Well, in that case, I apologise.

Perhaps I’ll just take this opportunity to speak to one of the examples of the appropriations, and Solid Energy comes to mind. One of the lines in the report spoke about—forgive me, but I think it was a $69 million write-off in these reports based on, essentially, the interference and the know-it-all nature of some of those members across the House. They thought they knew better. They thought they knew how to run a Government operation. And then, because of that interference, we found it—

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Order! We have actually already discussed that sector. Solid Energy is not within this particular finance and Government administration sector.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: So instead then, let me speak—oh, I’ve only got eight seconds left. I would’ve loved the opportunity to attack Dr Nick Smith some more, but life’s like that. Thank you, Madam Chair.

IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you, Madam Chair. Well, it’s a great pleasure to take a short call in the opportunity to review the finance and Government administration sector. It’s a new scene for me; I’m new on this committee and in this part of the administration of the country, and I think it’s a very exciting place to be.

I just want to comment very briefly on the previous speaker, Fletcher Tabuteau, who, clearly, from a Rangitīkei perspective—they would have had no idea what he was talking about. We’re pretty basic people in the Rangitīkei and we believe in pretty basic things. I want to go to a couple of factors that will prove that. I just want to talk briefly about the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation, and it’s probably a topic that’s dear to the heart of people of my age, actually—not necessarily this superannuation fund, but superannuation funds are.

I just wanted to talk about what happens in the course of, I guess, a time span in superannuation. I can assure the members of this House that superannuation funds don’t always make money. In my earlier life, I was the chairman of the superannuation fund of quite a big New Zealand company, and it was very difficult going to tell the recipients of that superannuation that they were no longer going to receive the money they thought they were going to receive on retirement, because the economy of this country wasn’t performing well. So, from a superannuation fund perspective, it’s not only important that our economy performs well; it’s important that the international economy performs well. It’s also important that in the developing of the criteria that operate those superannuation funds—in other words, in this case, they have a responsible investment criteria—it’s important that they’re adhered to.

One of the mysteries of that, of course, for the average New Zealander, is that it causes many of our investments, not only superannuation, to go offshore, because we have to have a balanced investment portfolio. One of the challenges for us as a country is that we need to send a fair proportion of that offshore to protect those people who’ve invested in it. So that’s the superannuation issue.

I want to talk briefly about the Inland Revenue Department, too, because we’re obviously looking at reviewing the way New Zealand operates its tax system. It’s gone through a Business Transformation programme in recent times. Like every Government department, it’s been challenged by what I think is a very big challenge, particularly for rural New Zealand, and that’s around the adoption of technology and the way we provide our Government services. I think that will be challenging for some years to come as we get through developing better systems—and also get through that age bracket, because people like myself are sometimes challenged by the use of technology. We need to get through that, and we will get through it in due course, but it will take some time, so I urge people like the Inland Revenue Department to have tolerance for that sort of thing.

The other thing I want to briefly mention about Inland Revenue is that I think it’s essential that we retain a simple tax system in New Zealand. It’s the absolute—because we’re such a small country, we have got such a small range of taxpayers. Whatever we do with the tax system it’s got to remain simple, because anything other than that will create huge cost for business, huge cost for the Government, and huge cost for Inland Revenue unravelling the schemes and other things that are put in place to deal with the tax system. So whatever happens in the future, I urge simplicity in this area. It’s absolutely essential.

I just want to move on now to the review of Treasury, and some of the issues that Treasury raised. I’ve always had difficulty with the way Government values their assets. I think if you look at KiwiRail, it’s a hugely challenging thing for anyone to value. It’s a hugely challenging thing for us to run as a country, and I think it’s essential that in the future running of the likes of KiwiRail, we’re cautious, and we put it in places where it will get the best bang for our dollar as a country. I’m not sure we’re always doing that.

The other thing I want to briefly touch on that came out of the Treasury review was the estimate that Auckland Transport is some $4 billion to $6 billion short of cash. I thought it was somewhat ironic that $5 billion is being plucked out of provincial New Zealand in the transport review and put into urban transport—pretty much the same figure that Treasury felt Auckland Transport was short of.

So that is also, I think, pretty challenging for us as a country, and I think it’s particularly challenging for provincial New Zealand, because I heard the Hon Shane Jones earlier in this debate talking about getting our exports to the port. The roads of national significance were, of course, all about getting our exports to the port, and for anyone who lives in the Rangitīkei or Manawatū area, just see the massive transformation that’s taken place as a result of the Kapiti Expressway, will take place as a result of Transmission Gully being finished, and will certainly take place as a result of the Ōtaki to north of Levin bypass. It makes a massive difference to our ability to get our exports to port and to the market very quickly. That’s one of the keys to any good Government policy, and I urge us to continue on with those projects in provincial New Zealand.

LAWRENCE YULE (National—Tukituki): Madam Chair, thank you for the opportunity. While I’m new to the Finance and Expenditure Committee, I do wish to comment and talk actually about the review rather than too much of the politics that we’ve heard, particularly from the New Zealand First MPs this afternoon. While they’re interesting and humorous, I’m not sure they actually added a lot to the debate. If you actually look at the fiscal position that was reported on 30 June 2017, it shows an improved Budget surplus of $4.1 billion, which was up $1.8 billion from the previous year. On anybody’s count, that is a wonderful result in terms of how the Government has run the economy.

Now, I accept there are always challenges—I accept that. But, equally, at the same time, 100,000 new jobs were created in New Zealand. That is all a sign of a prosperous and forward-moving economy. And, at the same time, the Government, which doesn’t always get the credit for things like this, was looking at things like the Living Standards Framework, Māori living standards, social housing reform programmes—all things that were being worked on, which, actually, the current Government seems to forget about.

Hon Dr David Clark: Nine long years.

LAWRENCE YULE: In your world, it might have been nine long years, but until the economy was sorted, we didn’t have a chance of sorting these things out. And I take you to the point where we looked at Auckland Transport as part of the review, and the Auckland funding issues for transport. And it’s actually really germane that, today, we had a bit of a debate in question time about Auckland Transport, because it was reported to the select committee that Auckland Transport needs between $4 billion and $6 billion more than originally agreed between the Government and the Auckland Council, and that regional fuel taxes and other things need to be looked at. It also said that the Auckland Council is at a debt ceiling. So it’s actually little wonder that this current Government is taking $5 billion off regional New Zealand and investing most of that in Auckland, because, actually, there’s not many other ways of doing that. I’ll come back to the Hon Shane Jones, because he’s going around the country—and I’m very grateful for parts of it—spending $3 billion, but he’s doing that only because there was a strong New Zealand economy under the National Government, which had the books in such a shape that they could make such choices.

I also want to speak, as Mr McKelvie did previously to me, on Inland Revenue, which also reported to the select committee. I also want to implore and ask the Minister of Revenue to continue a lot of the work, because I think most of the work that’s been done by Inland Revenue is actually in the transformational programme, is actually really value-add for New Zealanders. We were presented with the fact that 85 percent of all business customers now file online as an example, and that’s an increase of 9 percent from the previous year. I think significant progress has been made and continues to be made. Even for somebody that wants to question the numbers, Inland Revenue has underspent its budget over the last five years. It had $376 million to spend and has spent only $286 million; so that’s about $100 million up its sleeve, for want of a better word. I think that money needs to continue to be appropriated to this Business Transformation programme because, actually, as we move with technology, more and more people are going to file things online and it’s important they be able to do it from their home base.

Mr McKelvie spoke before, in the select committee, that one of the concerns that were expressed was about connectivity with electronic transactions, and I think that is a future thing that needs to be looked at to make sure that we don’t disadvantage people in New Zealand by their lack of access to the internet.

If I go back to what we’ve reported on, we have, in summary, a very strong set of Government accounts. We have international debt well under control. We do have some concerns with private sector debt, and this is reported to the select committee. So, in the select committee, the review announced—and I concur with this—that there is actually a lot of private sector debt, particularly in housing. If the world economy was to change and interest rates were to go up substantially, that would cause quite a lot of pain.

So, actually, as the Government moves forward with its programme and it talks about wanting to invest in infrastructure, it always requires a very strong, well-performing economy that is run in a disciplined way. It gives people choices. This Government has inherited the choices that were made by National.

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): I call the Hon Jacqui—Dean. I’m so sorry, Jacqui.

Hon JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki): Thank you, Madam Chair—it’s fine. I want to make a few comments, thanks very much, about the Department of Internal Affairs. I wasn’t represented on the committee at the time of the financial review, so I’m really going off the papers here. But I do have a strong interest in one or two of the items that were subject to the financial review—back in February, I think it was.

First of all, I’ve worked with the Department of Internal Affairs off and on, and have done for the time I’ve been in Parliament, and I was interested to read in the report that several recommendations were made, through the Office of the Auditor-General, around recommendations for improvement, including that the Department of Internal Affairs implement its planned system for recording and monitoring of passport fraud. It’s pretty dry, when you do read it in the papers, that comment, but it’s increasingly important to us as a sovereign State, New Zealand, that we do have secure borders. I am mindful that the previous Government put an additional $14.5 million, I think it was, for the Department of Internal Affairs in the change from a five-yearly to 10-yearly passport duration period.

Together with adding inconvenience for New Zealanders and others travelling across our borders with a New Zealand passport, it also invested significantly in 2015 and 2016 in enhancing passport security. I think that this Government should monitor, as has the select committee, the performance of the Department of Internal Affairs, to ensure that it does in fact implement its system for recording and monitoring of passport fraud. So that will be a red flag for me, for the financial review for next year. I think it’s an important issue for us in New Zealand.

It was also recommended by the Office of the Auditor-General that it refine its measures to report its performance against its strategic objectives. Well, this is Governance 101, isn’t it? Surely the Department of Internal Affairs should be very mindful of its strategic objectives. I would expect this Government, and certainly the Governance and Administration Committee, will be watching this closely in the next year.

I want now to turn to a couple of other issues: the uptake and development of RealMe, which is an online secure identity verification. Under our Government, RealMe came to be and we were continuing with the roll-out. My plea to this Government is that they do not take their eye off the further implementation of RealMe, because, just like the monitoring and enhancement of passport security, identity verification on an online platform for dealing with Government is not only very important for individuals, but also for small businesses who make up 97 percent of New Zealand business. So RealMe as an identity verification system is very important for the New Zealand economy.

Finally, Madam Chair, I want to make a few comments around Fire and Emergency New Zealand—formerly the Fire Service Commission—and make a plea to the Minister to watch closely the implementation of the new Fire and Emergency New Zealand. There are more than 13,000 people involved in Fire and Emergency New Zealand all around New Zealand, into its furthest corners—no doubt, the Chatham Islands included. Those people are firefighters but also volunteers—community volunteers. As the representative of a rural constituency, where there are fire stations in every little town and corner of that constituency, and indeed all around New Zealand, I know it’s those volunteers who are important to community cohesion. They’ve got to be ready to respond in a disaster. They’ve got to be ready to get out on the roads and increasingly deal with what they find, as their job. I plead with the Government to make sure that this new structure around Fire and Emergency New Zealand is rolled out properly.

BRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you, Madam Chair. Like my colleague who is just taking her seat, Jacqui Dean, I’d also like to reflect on a couple of elements of the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), before moving on. In my first contribution, I talked exclusively about the Department of Internal Affairs and I finished up by talking a little bit, too, about RealMe.

One of the challenges we’ve seen in this area consistently over the years is uptake in the verified RealMe accounts, which lags significantly behind projections, and I’ll move on to that. Before moving on to that challenge, I’d just like to reiterate for members of the Committee and the public that as we move more and more into looking to do transactions with Government via the internet, to make it easier for citizens to gain access to Government services from the convenience of how they live, work, and play, then not only how we deliver the services up to those citizens but how we enable them to access, through the security models and log-ins, into Government is critically important. It was also seen with some importance at the end of the last Parliament, as we passed the Electronic Interactions Reform Bill. Actually, I think we might have done the third reading at the beginning of this term. That was actually about taking steps too—about presenting more of those services electronically.

In order to access them, one has to be able to prove to the service provider—in this case the Government—that the person trying to access is indeed who they say they are. RealMe is a system that Government has been using for some years now to do that. It comes in a couple of forms. In its most vanilla form, for information-only general sort of access, it gets a huge amount of use. Around 77 million log-ins have been recorded over the years for those more informational purposes. That’s because it is a less onerous way to register. You simply put in your details online and you can access information.

But when it comes to accessing more private information and services, a verified log-in is required and that does require some actions on behalf of the citizen, to validate who they say they are. It started off with having to go to a New Zealand Post outlet, having your photo taken, and getting validated through their system. Pleasingly, it has moved ahead a little over the years since. But still, I think, it is an area which DIA would be well advised to spend a lot of effort in looking to streamline further, because there are only 400,000 validated RealMe accounts today and the projections say there should be about 1.4 million of them. So we’re well behind.

Now, Government being Government, one way it has to encourage the uptake of that sort of an account is to mandate it. Government has the power of compulsion, and the Government could simply restrict access to these services unless users got an account of that nature, and thereby force them into doing so. Well, I’d counsel the Government and the Department of Internal Affairs not to go down that track. As soon as you have what amounts to a monopoly provider suddenly using powers of compulsion to force people to do things their way, they lose, they break, the relationship between supplier and customer. They lose the sense of what it is to provide their service to the person that consumes it. Call them a citizen, call them a constituent, or call them a customer, it is important that Government, not just DIA, always recognises that the services we are providing electronically or otherwise are for the consumption of a citizen, a constituent, a customer. We don’t want to operate in a way like a monopoly, where we break the relationship between gearing our services to their needs and not just forcing them to operate in our model.

Now, fortunately, there were some questions to DIA around the time of the annual review, as well as the conversation, obviously, in select committee. I’m pleased to be able to report to the House that the Government Chief Digital Officer was quite clear that seeking to mandate compulsory use of services is not their aim, but it is something which we as a Parliament, and certainly we as a select committee, should remain vigilant about. That is a road to poorer service, poorer connection to our constituents, and poorer outcomes. If we simply use the power of compulsion through law—that, obviously, Parliament has the power to do—we will actually deliver worse outcomes for our citizens.

The Department of Internal Affairs, as I noted, do a phenomenal job given the constraints of the budgets they have. One of the things the committee did was take a tour of He Tohu and see our founding documents on display. It is a remarkably Kiwi thing that we store them inside the front door of our building. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Dr JIAN YANG (National): Madam Chair, thank you. I would like to speak on the Finance and Government Administration Sector of the appropriation bill. The Government accounts show that in eight months to the end of February, the Government surplus is $500 million above forecast. This highlights the work the previous National Government did in the past nine years. After nine years, the National-led Government left a very sound economy behind, and also we left a very sound fiscal position.

This did not come easily, because when National came to power in 2008, we experienced the global financial crisis, and then, later on, the Canterbury earthquakes, and then, later on, the Kaikōura earthquakes in 2016. I touch upon the Kaikōura earthquakes because that was in the financial year that we are looking at. A number of Government agencies were affected during the earthquakes, but it turned out that these agencies, or our public services, were very strong and resilient. They came up strongly.

Take Statistics New Zealand as an example. There was significant damage to the Statistics New Zealand Wellington headquarters, and also a shutdown—a shutdown—of their data centre. However, their backup system—their backup system—worked as planned and they quickly secured new and safe office accommodation. So this is just one of many agencies that experienced difficulties, but they were able to emerge strong and also to prove to be very resilient.

So this, as I said, did not come very easily. The previous National-led Government focused on the economy. Take tourism, for example—tourism came up very, very strongly. It became, later on, perhaps the largest exporter for New Zealand. So this is, again, an example of how the National-led Government managed our economy.

The current coalition Government tries to portray a picture that the previous National-led Government under-invested in the public sectors. They were claiming, for example, that district health boards (DHBs) were under-invested—lots of deficits. Interestingly, the Hon Michael Woodhouse today wanted to table a table basically to demonstrate the deficits from the year 2000 to the year 2017. That was declined by the coalition Government. That was interesting.

I would like to use this as an example to show some facts: the National-led Government did very well. While there is some—well, not misinformation, but some not accurate descriptions of the situation under the National-led Government.

From the year 2000 to the year 2008, under Labour, the combined DHB deficit was $601,220—

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Million.

Dr JIAN YANG: Right? A million—sorry.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: $601 million.

Dr JIAN YANG: Yeah, sorry. And then under the National-led Government—eight years under the National-led Government—the deficit is even smaller than—

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Order! Could I just bring the member back to the period we’re discussing, and also to look at the agencies that were reviewed. Thank you.

Dr JIAN YANG: Yes, I just use this as an example to demonstrate that we need to bring Labour’s description into perspective.

Finally, I will say that Statistics New Zealand needs to be independent. Late last year, the coalition Government wanted to review the measures of unemployment, but it’s important for us to understand that a Government Statistician needs to be independent. I’m quite pleased to see that in the committee hearing, Statistics New Zealand maintained that it will remain independent.

BRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you, Madam Chair. I rise to take another call in this appropriation debate. I want to talk briefly on Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ). It’s a very, very important part of the work that the Governance and Administration Committee was doing in this particular piece of work, but also as a member who sat on that committee for most of the previous term. I was present when the Minister of the time introduced the bill to talk about the bringing together of our urban and rural fire services and the planning around the transition for that.

It was a key topic of conversation for the chair, chief executive, and team at this annual review hearing because it was highlighted and crystallised somewhat last year during that rather large rural fire in Christchurch. It was quite poignant, because, at the time, the services knew they would be coming together, but they weren’t at that time, and, of course, there was a very tragic loss of life in the fighting of that fire. While no one would suggest nor claim that the two services being separate was in any way directly linked to that tragic unfolding of events, without question we were informed that one of the key items that they learnt from the review of that incident and the way it was addressed was that the communications between the emergency services remained a challenge for the effective and efficient fighting of that particular fire. It couldn’t be changed at the time, but at the time, because our urban and rural fire services were formed under different command and control and weren’t generally training and working together, that did hinder the absolute effectiveness of the way that they could respond to that emergency.

Of course, that made it even more relevant and poignant to question them about how the transition has been proceeding. It is a staged transition—it is never going to be a Pantene overnight thing—but the first stages are complete. They have reported that the two bodies, if you like, have embraced the idea that they are coming together. One area that was dear to the heart of rural firefighters in particular was that they had amassed, over the years, some very large pools of assets that had been bequeathed or otherwise donated to urban fire units from trusts and families who had particular interests in the area.

There was real concern, ahead of the transition, about how those assets would be treated, and, indeed, if they would, in a sense, be lost to those communities. Well, FENZ had assured us at the time—under a select committee interrogation of the bill—that that wouldn’t happen, and have further reassured us, as the transition has been progressing, that they are indeed responding with exactly that in mind. The rural asset pool remains untouched and is still in use and available so that the very generous donations those units have received over the years are still there to be used in those sorts of emergencies.

But also, now, because of the coming together of the two command and control systems, we’re going to see a better integration of firefighters and emergency responders able to share the knowledge and experience they have and to more efficiently and effectively respond to emergencies, whether they be in the heart of the urban area, on the fringe, or, indeed, in rural areas. And one of the reasons this becomes even more important is because the role of what was then the New Zealand Fire Service had evolved over the recent decades, where, instead of just responding to fire-type emergencies, firefighters or personnel were spending far more of their efforts responding to incidents such as road crashes. So it’s more a matter of importance that all fire service personnel are able to respond to the range of emergency incidents they might be called upon to. It’s also important, along with that, of course, that the levy that is paid by individuals, by businesses, and by households is adequately calculated to make sure that the service can respond to all of the different types of services it might provide.

There is still some way to go there. They have just begun the consultation round to do that. It’s important that they get that right. It will be important to the successful running of Fire and Emergency New Zealand into the future, and I commend them on the work they’ve done.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): Thank you, Madam Chair. It’s a pleasure to be talking in this debate. Being a member of Finance and Expenditure Committee, I thought I might just turn my mind to some of the financial aspects of this debate.

Of course, we were fortunate—and I think all New Zealanders were glad to hear—that during the course of 2016-17, New Zealand posted, through the counsel of the New Zealand Government, a large Budget surplus, commonly referred to as operating balance before gains and losses. That was $4.1 billion, up from $1.8 billion in the year before. When you actually look at the population, that means that for every person in New Zealand, $1,000 of Budget surplus was achieved by good, prudent management. At the same time, the net worth of the country went up by $25 billion and the levels of investment in places like health and education all went up by record levels. Stretching forward, we had $32 billion worth of infrastructure investment planned, and that is what good government is about.

It’s interesting to note that the eight months’ accounts to February this year show an operating balance before gains and losses of about $2.85 billion—again, much more, $500 million more, than was budgeted before that Government came into power. Also, at the same time, debt levels have gone down to just over 21 percent.

So what I find intriguing is that this Government has inherited the best set of books that we have seen for such a long period of time. Not only that, even before they came into power they didn’t even anticipate the extra $500 million that has flowed in from hard-working New Zealanders and corporations paying their fair share of tax.

So $500 million up, and yet what do we know? We know that this coalition Government wants to increase our net debt by 20 percent, from $59 billion to $69 billion, because even when they get this additional money, they don’t think it’s enough. They don’t think it’s enough even when, as I said before, we’ve invested these record amounts, and that’s what I find most disconcerting about this approach.

When I asked the Minister of Finance, who came to our select committee, about this issue about debt—because I seem to recall during the last term, the 51st Parliament, he was always crying about the level of debt in New Zealand. He was always saying, “It’s too high.”, “Our percentage is too high.”, and “The net amount is too high.”, and yet that same person, now the Minister of Finance, is saying, “No, let’s forget about that.”, even though we’ve got these record operating surpluses occurring. “No, we’re going to borrow another $10 billion.”—another $10 billion. Well, in my view, that is not required.

But the even worse thing is that now they’ve got this working party headed by Sir Michael Cullen and, of course, what’s his ambit? His ambit is to look at a whole range of new taxes—a whole range of new taxes. Even before he’s come out with his working party conclusions, what have we got? We’ve heard about the fuel tax, and in my electorate, south of Auckland, 23c it’s going to cost every time someone goes to the pump—23c a litre. That means, roughly, $15 every time someone in my area fills up their car so that they can get to work on a congested motorway, and we had those motorways—we wanted to create some new motorways to try and reduce some of that congestion, and yet they will be paying all that amount of money.

I’m deeply worried about the situation—why we need to have a Government that thinks they can tax and tax and tax hard-working New Zealanders, when they have inherited one of the best sets of books that this country has seen. I think it’s something that we’re going to hold their feet to the fire on over in the coming months.

Reports relevant to the Finance and Government Administration Sector noted.

Health Sector

LOUISA WALL (Chairperson of the Health Committee): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Thank you for the privilege of speaking at this debate about the annual review of the Health sector, and I do so as the chair of the Health Committee. Can I, firstly, acknowledge my deputy chair, Dr Shane Reti—and I want to put on record that I find him an incredibly good person to work with. I think that the committee itself is incredibly collegial. Can I also take this opportunity to say haere rā to Dr Jonathan Coleman and wish him all the best in his future endeavours.

So the annual review that we undertook included the Health Quality and Safety Commission, the New Zealand Blood Service, and the following district health boards (DHBs): Auckland DHB, Counties Manukau DHB, Waitematā DHB, Bay of Plenty DHB, Capital and Coast DHB, Canterbury DHB, Southern DHB, South Canterbury DHB, Hawke’s Bay DHB, and MidCentral DHB.

Can I say, our selection of those particular DHBs was based on those that we hadn’t seen for a while, and it also included, actually, a three-year plan that we have before the Health Committee to review all of our 20 DHBs in this term. I want to say that I think that’s an incredibly positive thing for us to have already agreed on.

I do want to highlight some of the issues from these reviews, in particular the Health Quality and Safety Commission. I want to note that under the ACC claims for medical injury subsection in our report back to the House, there was an issue about surgical mesh. The Health Quality and Safety Commission, in fact, spent a lot of time talking about surgical mesh. What they highlighted and what we’ve highlighted in our report—and I just want to quote from the report: “We asked whether the commission is satisfied that it has access to the information it needs from ACC to support its work in improving health outcomes. The commission said it would like easier access to the information it needs.” So, from our perspective, it has highlighted an access to information issue between the Health Quality and Safety Commission and ACC, and, in fact, we will write to that effect to both Ministers and provide a copy of our report, because we think it’s a significant issue.

I would also like to highlight, in the New Zealand Blood Service report, that, in fact, we’ve had a 10 percent decrease in active donors between—where are we?—2012-13 and current figures, but they’ve maintained collection volume. So, although we’ve had a 10 percent decrease, the people who are donating are giving a lot more, and I particularly want to highlight that they said that they were very pleased with donation numbers in new migrant communities, so they’re obviously being able to communicate how important blood is to new New Zealanders. There was an issue, however, about their behavioural criteria for donor referral, and these are people who are considered high-risk donors—sex workers and men who have sex with other men. Currently, in New Zealand, we have a one-year period before somebody can donate blood. In the UK, that has been reduced to three months. So we’ve asked that the New Zealand Blood Service report back to us about whether or not they’re intending to amend that particular policy.

Finally, I want to focus on Counties Manukau District Health Board (DHB), Waitematā, and Auckland and stress what they stressed, that there was very high demand for services for acute surgical services and there has been unprecedented demand, particularly in acute services. This is, from their perspective, a terrible situation. All of the DHBs are expecting a deficit, but the horror of their situation—they didn’t underestimate—was affecting staff. So the situation that staff are having to work in within our DHBs is actually putting our staff at risk. We don’t have enough staff, and staff are doing too much; so huge issues within our DHB sector.

Finally, I just want to highlight an issue before our committee, and it relates to the issue of asset management planning, and the fact that we as a select committee did not hear from the DHBs about the significance of the asset management planning and some of the issues that we have, and particularly at Counties Manukau District Health Board. I’ve got a feeling that it’s an issue right across all of our DHBs. Thank you.

Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you, Madam Chair. It’s a pleasure to speak to this annual review in the health theme, and I too want to acknowledge the chair of the Health Committee and fellow members who made our way through our delegated tasks. I want to focus across several topics, but I want to start initially by focusing on the National Oracle Solution programme, of which we heard a lot and received a lot of information from the Office of the Auditor-General (OAG).

I want to lead off by just focusing on one particular part of the Office of the Auditor-General’s concerns that were flagged to us. It reads as follows: “The NOS project has experienced delays and changes in scope. The original budget was $87.9 million, which we understand has been exhausted. NZ Health Partnerships are currently waiting on ministerial approval to obtain additional funds from DHBs to be able to complete the project.”—one small snippet of what the Office of the Auditor-General provided, amongst other information, to the annual review on this topic. Here’s what we know from the annual review from the Office of the Auditor-General and other sources. The National Oracle Solution programme—it’s a nationwide procurement solution. I want it to work. I want it to get over the line. We want it to get over the line. I think there are truly benefits to be made.

Now, it started around 2010 under Health Benefits Ltd, and in 2015 it was taken up by NZ Health Partnerships Ltd. The Minister agrees and tells us it’s challenged and needs an independent review. Here’s what we know: over the life of the project, Deloitte have been advisers to the project. Deloitte own the company Asparona, who have been implementation partners, and Deloitte have been paid to deliver the project. The summary statement, then, is this: Deloitte have been paid to deliver a failing $90 million IT project, and then they’re appointed as independent reviewers. How can it not be that Deloitte has a conflict of interest? They have to have a conflict of interest, surely.

Secondly, let’s look at that further. What else do we know? Well, we know from the annual review several things. First of all, what did the Minister do to ensure independence? He talks about the conflicts of interest statement, the declaration. He says that the declaration includes Asparona’s involvement, and here’s the key point, the quote: “I have been assured that no individual who had anything to do with Asparona’s involvement in the National Oracle Solution project has any involvement in the Deloitte review.” That’s really important.

So I’m going to make two predictions in this offering. The first is: I’ll predict that statement will come back to haunt the Minister. Does he really believe that declaring a conflict of interest removes the conflict of interest? I don’t think so, and neither does the sector, because what the sector’s telling me is that this is the fox looking after the chickens. So if the sector is believing that, what sort of credibility is this report going to have when it eventually comes out?

The Minister also said there’d been compliance with “all-of-Government procurement processes and conflict management procedures”. What are they? Where are they? Can you point to us them? Can you give us a document, a manual, a page number maybe? If they’re there, great; we’d like to look at them. I’d like to look at them. It would help us understand the process. The whole process actually gets a bit murkier, because I asked the Minister: has he updated the Prime Minister on issues in his portfolio? He told me he already did that. I actually made a small error of judgment then, because I talked about the independent reviewers that’d he appointed—in fact, the ministry had appointed, so he wriggled out of that question.

But I think the question stands, because I’ve got a suspicion here. I think he truly has kept his word and updated the Prime Minister on the Deloitte appointment. I think the Prime Minister does know, and I think the Prime Minister’s also involved in the appointment of Deloitte as an independent reviewer, and that David Clark has drawn the Prime Minister into this difficult mess—that’s what I think.

Let’s look at the scope of the conflict of interest. How big is it? Is it insignificant? Well, I’d suggest that Deloitte have probably been paid up to $20 million, and if we look through the amount of work that the OAG is suggesting in the annual review, it’s probably up to about that amount. That’s 20 million conflicts of interest, and I think what we really need is we need to know how much they’ve actually been paid. So let’s get to what needs to happen next. I think we need to see the conflicts of interest declaration, I think we need to know how much Deloitte has been paid, and I do still think that we need to refer this to the Office of the Auditor-General.

I said that I had a second prediction. Here’s my second prediction and final statement. I think that if I ask David Clark to give the names of the independent reviewers with Deloitte, he’s going to decline. I don’t think he’s going to tell us who taxpayers are paying to fund this independent review. I’ll make that a prediction. I will ask the Minister: name the reviewers—not just Deloitte, but name the reviewers that taxpayers are paying for the independent review of the National Oracle Solution project. And I’ll make a prediction here that he will decline. He will not name them, because he knows they’re conflicted—he knows they’re conflicted. If they’re not conflicted, name them. Make it the fourth statement. Name the reviewers to the independent review. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK (Minister of Health): I do want to address a couple of matters raised by that member Shane Reti’s speech. I’m not quite sure why he is spending so much time in that particular rabbit hole, but I do want to clarify one or two things for the committee.

Firstly, Deloitte was appointed by the previous Government. So he’s questioning the integrity of the appointment of his own Government, on the day before the former Minister of Health is set to give his valedictory. I think the irony is lost on no one. He asks how the all-of-Government process works. That is the process that that Government uses, and used when they were in power, to work through these kinds of contracts. I’m assured that all real, actual, and perceived conflicts in this case were notified before any contract was signed, and I don’t expect to micromanage every single contract that the ministry lets. There would be no point in having a Ministry of Health if I did. So I’m intrigued, and no doubt the member will continue to try and pursue this matter, but it is of some intrigue to me, I have to say. It’s not abundantly clear to me why he keeps attacking the very process that the Government that he was a member of set up and that, he claims, has spent $20 million so far and led nowhere. He claimed, at the beginning, that it might be up to $90 million, I think—$87 million—that the budget was for. And we all know it’s become a problem, and that’s why I have called for a review, because the previous Government has failed to deliver on the National Oracle Solution. There is a great irony in this whole situation, and that is a microcosm of what happened under that Government.

We all know that there has been nearly a decade of under-investment in the health sector. We have huge deficits in social and infrastructure spending from that previous Government. An estimate, commissioned by the former Labour Opposition, of an independent economic analysis agency confirmed that about $2.3 billion had been stripped out under their watch, and that means that services were cut. And emblematic of that is the situation at Counties Manukau that we find now. There is, literally, sewage in the walls. The last debate in this committee was on finance, and they avoided getting into the health debate for so long, I think, because they did not want to count the cost of those very few surpluses that they actually managed to deliver when they were in office. The cost is in the detriment to investment in our health sector, amongst other things. So we have that huge under-investment. We now have rot, mould, and sewage in the wall of one of our major hospitals, and that’s not to mention Dunedin, where people have to don hazmat suits to collect their medical records. That is the state of Dunedin Hospital. When it rains, they have had to cancel surgery because the operating theatres leak. That is the legacy of that former Government over there, and it is deeply ironic that they should then raise issues in this committee about the health system that we have inherited.

Well, I am determined to deal with what we have inherited from that Government. I’m determined that we will stand up and find a positive way forward. I have asked for a national asset management plan to be put together so that we do have a comprehensive assessment of the neglect under their watch, so that we have a plan to manage forward into the future to deliver the kind of healthcare that New Zealanders would expect and deserve. Shortly after I became health Minister, the Rebstock report was released—and it had taken a long time to get to that stage—which found that the Ministry of Health was in a parlous state, really, even worse than its review five years before; again, a sign of neglect by the previous Government. They did not want a highly functional health ministry, it seems. They refused to address capacity issues there. Well, the good news for New Zealand is that that health ministry is rebuilding. There are many good people there, despite the attacks of the Opposition. There are many good people there who want to do a good job and lead our health system into the future.

We’ve made a number of early, positive steps. We’ve launched an inquiry into mental health; we’ve taken steps to improve health support for Canterbury kids; we’ve invested in Maniototo Hospital, something that former Government opposite, in the Opposition benches, failed to do. They refused to give any money to Maniototo Hospital. We’ve also already announced extra funding for Middlemore Hospital to address the neglect there. I have got around all of the 20 district health boards to have my own look at what’s going on and to rebuild relationships that suffered under that Government’s watch. Shortly, I’m sure we’ll hear from the member Michael Woodhouse, who will try to defend that Government’s record. But I think the public knows that when we’ve got rot, mould, and sewage in our walls, that is a case of serious neglect.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): If there was any metaphor for the confusion of the Government and the Minister of Health, it was in that Minister’s intervention where he said that the previous Government had set up the review of the National Oracle Solution and then in the next breath he said he’d set up the review of the Oracle Solution. Well, I know what the answer is; he was right the second time. He did. He then declared a conflict of interest—where a company is 100 percent owner of the organisation that is the subject of the review, declaring the conflict of interest is simply not enough.

But it’s been really interesting to listen to the contributions of the Government members on the annual review debate, because the theme of this has been of a previous Government—heartless, mean-spirited, knows the value of the dollar but not of the importance of its investment, and, actually, I will refute that. I will refute that, because the previous Government, in the worst of times, supported people. They raised income support. They supported the people of Canterbury. They created nearly a quarter of a million jobs in the last two years of that administration. In that time of that Government, wages went up at twice the rate of inflation. The minimum wage, for which I was responsible, went up by even more. If that’s heartless and mean-spirited, that’s a moniker I’ll wear with pride.

But the confusion of the Minister, I think, is symblomatic of his panic at the profligate promises that he made in Opposition that he cannot keep. Now, the Health Committee heard from the combined Auckland district health boards (DHBs) in annual review, and it is very concerning, the revelations that are coming out about the state of the building at Middlemore Hospital. But I ask colleagues: what was it that the select committee heard from the combined Auckland district health boards in that annual review about the state of that building?

Hon Members: Silence. Nothing.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Not a whisper. Not a murmur. Not a dicky-bird was said by the members that came there and said, “This is the situation facing our district health boards.” In the northern regional district health board’s long-term plan—no mention. In the Counties Manukau District Health Board annual plan, there is mention of $17 million being required, which they got, to fix the Scott building, and the Minister has had to top that up to the tune of $11.5 million. He announced that, I think, on about 21 March this year—appropriate.

But we’ve since had this extraordinary hyperbole about the state of the asset stock because of three very concerning buildings in Auckland. Well, we know, and we heard through the annual reviews, Vote Health is $16.8 billion, and I think there are other reasons why the Minister is panicking. It’s probably more to do with the fact that he has brought back onto the Crown balance sheet the $1.4 billion commitment that the previous Government made for the rebuild of Dunedin Hospital. It’s because of the huge expectations that he has left the health workforce, and in particular our fantastic nurses, the 50,000-odd of them who work in the public sector and have very, very elevated expectations for a pay increase that the Minister sought to address in November when he told the DHBs to bump the offer up.

The reason we are now hearing stories about greater deficits in DHBs this year is a direct result of the Minister’s own failed attempt to settle the New Zealand Nurses Organisation’s pay negotiations, and we haven’t even started with junior doctors, with senior doctors, with allied health professionals—all of whom have had their pay expectations talked up by the Minister of Health, the Minister of Finance, and the Prime Minister, and they’re backing out of those commitments at 100 miles an hour and seeking to blame the previous Government.

Well, as Dr Yang mentioned, I have looked at deficits over a longitudinal period. In the nine years of the fourth Labour Government, there was over $600 million worth of deficits. Not including inflation, the combined deficits of the Key - English Government were 6 percent lower than that. We are going to see them go up and up, not because of anything the previous Government did or did not do but because that Minister and that Government have made promises they can’t keep.

Dr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you, Mr Chair. It’s a privilege to take a call on this year’s annual review debate on health. As Louisa Wall mentioned, our committee took in-depth reviews on a number of health agencies: the Ministry of Health, New Zealand Blood Service, Health Quality and Safety Commission, and 10 district health boards (DHBs). Sitting and listening to these organisations as they presented, I think, for me, there were three key themes that emerged. I think the first one was just the ubiquity of the deficits and the considerable strain that a lot of those DHBs were under financially, the second was this relentless increase in demand for acute services, and the third one was the challenges posed by the ageing and inadequate healthcare facilities. I want to talk to just each of those in turn.

Looking, firstly, at the DHBs’ financial situation, almost all of the DHBs that we listened to were either in deficit for the 2016-17 year or projecting a deficit for the current year. While some of the DHBs talked about plans for how they were going to break even in the next two or three years, not all were confident they could actually do that. We heard from one DHB who had to come up with $30 million in savings each year, and talking through what they could do, they weren’t that confident that those savings could be fully made.

The other one, though, on the other side of the equation was the ongoing increases in acute services demand. So what we were hearing was about A & Es being absolutely full and about hospital wards being at capacity and having all of their beds open in summer, which anybody working in the hospital wards knows is very unusual; you’d expect a peak demand in winter. But they were seeing this increasing demand right throughout the year.

They also, a lot of them, talked about the increasing demands for mental health services. What that is doing is also impacting on the DHBs’ ability to recruit sufficient workforce. One DHB was talking about their mental health staff having trouble recruiting, having trouble retaining, and having their staff being absolutely exhausted because of trying to keep up with that demand and pressure.

One of the DHBs—we had to go back and I had to query it in the transcript—reported 3,326 days of psychiatry vacancies, so that’s actually nine full-time psychiatrists in a single DHB alone. Others were talking about their primary care being at capacity and some of the issues with DHBs not having affordable access to after-hours care. In some of the Auckland DHBs, what all these increases in demand were attributed to was just this massive population growth. They were seeing huge numbers of people moving into their areas, and their infrastructure and resourcing were struggling to keep up with that. But even some of the DHBs in regional centres where there wasn’t a lot of population growth were talking about the increasing demand because we have an ageing population—and also about unaddressed drivers in terms of social determinants.

So there were big issues with, you know, low-quality crowded housing and cold houses and the impact they were having on acute infectious and respiratory diseases. From my own experience working in child health and looking at the reporting on why kids are coming into hospital, you know, you’re seeing things like pneumonia, asthma. A lot of those are housing related. So there is a sense of having the impact of an unaddressed housing crisis, where we’ve got some families living in cars, in sheds, or in crowded boarding houses, and then, you know, those unaddressed factors turning into sick kids coming into A & E and causing excess demand there.

The third thing, which was sort of also related, was just district health boards talking about the challenges posed by inadequate or ageing infrastructure. One DHB in the Auckland region that was facing this increased demand for services just purely because of population growth—they were saying they needed about $500 million to rebuild and to expand some of the wards in one of their hospitals, but they also said they needed $110 million to expand their elective surgical unit, and another $30 to $40 million for their forensic psychiatry ward just to be able to keep up. Other DHBs not in that situation were also talking about their health infrastructure coming to the end of its life and needing either replacement or total refurbishment. So together we’ve had chronic under-resourcing coupled with increasing demand, and also a lack of strategic planning across asset management and also across workforce planning. And so this current Government has got a lot of challenges in addressing this, but we are up to the task, and, as the Minister said, we’ve got a lot of plans in place to address this. Thank you.

Hon NICKY WAGNER (National): Thank you, Mr Chair. My special focus on health is around disability issues, and so, in discussing the performance of district health boards (DHBs) over the last year, my questions have been around how they have managed their interaction with the disability sector. With one in four New Zealanders identifying with a disability, and with disability conditions being very variable and complex, it’s important that DHBs provide appropriate and tailored services to people with disabilities. I’m also really interested in the employment of people with disabilities within the health sector. As a past Minister for Disability Issues, I’ve been working with DHBs, as very large employers in the community, about how accessible their premises are and how proactive they are about employing disabled people.

The Health Committee learnt from our questioning of DHBs that most have an active disability strategy or at least are in the process of developing one, which I think is good progress. Most have a consumer advisory body which can reflect the voice of the disability community. There also seems to be a growing interest in and an awareness of delivering services well to disabled people. However, there is less progress in terms of employing people with disabilities. Despite international and local evidence that shows that disabled people give an important and valuable contribution to the organisations that employ them—they increase the diversity of the workplace and they provide a much more representative workforce—most DHBs haven’t taken much interest in this issue or taken up that opportunity, and I really do encourage DHBs to actively support and encourage the employment of disabled people. The Health Committee has developed a series of questions for DHBs to provide some baseline data on disability services and also on the employment of disabled people, which we can use in future to monitor progress and to benchmark DHBs’ performance. I really look forward to seeing improvements in strategies and employment.

I was particularly interested in the review of the MidCentral District Health Board in terms of their disability provision, because they were part of the planned roll-out of Enabling Good Lives. Now, Enabling Good Lives was National’s disability transformation programme, and it allows disabled people to have more choice, more control, and more opportunities in their lives. National had planned for that to be rolled out in Palmerston North this July. However, when we spoke to MidCentral District Health Board in February, they hadn’t received their funding envelope or detailed instructions about the Government’s priorities. They told me that they hoped they would be able to begin delivering Enabling Good Lives, but in the meantime they were just carrying on with business as usual.

I really urge the Government to continue the work that National and the disability sector had done on Enabling Good Lives—their vision, their ideas, and the roll-out across New Zealand. The programme is really important to the sector. It will make a huge difference to the lives of individuals who have a disability, and disabled people have told us time and time again that they do want more choice, they do want more control, and they do want opportunities in their lives. So this delivery of Enabling Good Lives, beginning in Palmerston North, is the beginning of a transformation of disability services that we want to see right through the country.

In conclusion, I was pleased with what I heard from the DHBs. They are aware of the work that needs to be done in the disability sector. Many of them have got an active disability strategy. Mostly they have a consumer group that gives the voice to the disabled people, and overall I think they’re trying to do their very best. I can assure them that the select committee has questions now to keep them on their toes and make sure that they are delivering for the disabled people of New Zealand. Kia ora.

ANAHILA KANONGATA’A-SUISUIKI (Labour): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. It’s a privilege to stand and take a call on this very important subject, health. My kōrero today is going to be based on leadership. Because Tongan is my first language, I want to define what leadership means to me. The chair of the Tongan Language Committee translates leadership into the Tongan language as Tauhi Kakai.

When you flip that into English, it says it’s about caring for people—so how you conduct the caring is how you lead. So for me, I want to acknowledge the leadership of all the district health boards (DHBs) that have come before the Health Committee. I want to highlight one thing that I liked in what they shared, and bring my concerns about the leadership of the last nine years.

I want to acknowledge the DHBs that reported to the Health Committee. The highest ranked target they reported on was the immunisation of the under-twos. Most DHBs actually were over 90 percent in achieving that immunisation. What concerned me, in terms of the workforce, was they then reported, “But we had to achieve year-on savings, which are significant.” The thing that worried me was that the majority of the DHBs had reported that their people were overworked. DHBs were overworked and they had to rely on the goodwill of people. They had to rely on the goodwill of their staff to continue working within their own DHB.

I want to note that somebody had said before that the past Government of the last nine years had given this Government the best set of books. I want to question that leadership in terms of what we have found out in Counties Manukau. The reports from the Auckland DHBs, Counties Manukau DHB and Waitematā DHB, talked about avoidable hospitalisations and they also talked about unprecedented demand, which the Health Committee chair, Louisa Wall, has highlighted also. Unprecedented demands on services, of course, had led to overworked staff in terms of the workforce.

I want to acknowledge the leadership of the Minister of Health, the Hon David Clark, because he has realised we are going to go into what we now know are unprecedented costs of neglect by the leadership of the last Government. We’ve found out that in Middlemore Hospital—the ordinary New Zealander listening to this would hear many millions and billions of figures being thrown in the air. To the ordinary New Zealander, what does that million look like?

Well, what it means is that we found out in Counties Manukau, at Middlemore Hospital, that seven buildings require maintenance. It didn’t just happen overnight. If you look at a boil—my analogy of this is like having a boil. You know, when you have a boil it sort of comes to the burst, and it doesn’t happen overnight. It comes to the burst because there was no attention; it was neglected.

Luckily, this Government came along, and we talked about having an inquiry for mental health. We talked about an inquiry because the leadership of this Government is about listening to the voice of experience. And the voice of experience is actually about listening before you make a decision.

Before you can say that we’ve had the best set of books, I want to question the leadership of the last nine years. Is Middlemore Hospital the best set of books you’ve left? Is Middlemore Hospital, which consists of the most socially deprived of our population—did you leave them with the best set of books? Well—[Interruption] I’m sorry to bring you into that, Mr Chair. Did the last Government? I say to you, no. The last Government didn’t do that. Luckily enough, the boil has burst in time where this Government is taking the leadership by caring for people. Leadership is about caring for people. It is not about caring for the books. That’s me for today.

MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): Thank you very much, Mr Chair—a very good call. This is the first time we’ve had an appropriation debate with the new Health Committee, so I want to wish my colleagues on both sides of the House all the best for the coming term. I’d like to take note of our new chair, Louisa Wall, who I think is doing a fantastic job, and our deputy chair, Shane Reti. I’d also like to acknowledge the new Minister of Health and wish him all the best for what’s ahead of him.

I must say, I was interested to read the national portrait on David Clark, the new health Minister, where he said, “I’d decided that I didn’t want to do medicine because it involved a lot of biology and chemistry, which I should have known.” Funny that! He possibly should have known that by the time you get into a medical career that possibly you’d be studying biology and chemistry. I’m a bit concerned that will be a theme that will run through his tenure as health Minister—that he’ll get into the job and say, “I should have known.” So I think what we’re talking about here is possibly the accidental health Minister, and that’s something that this Parliament is going to have to support over the coming term.

I think what we do have is a very good health system. I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked across two health systems, the British National Health Service and the New Zealand health system. When I came back from England to New Zealand, they were having efficiency savings of 5 percent a year. Basically, in the mental health field, where you don’t have a lot of consumables or technology, a reduction is basically a reduction in staff numbers. Now, we’ve never had to face that in New Zealand. In fact, when you look at two key health components, being efficiency and equity, you’d say that the New Zealand health system weighs up pretty well with both of them. We’ve got young people accessing GP care for free. We are doing more and more elective surgeries. So, overall, there is always room for improvement. But what I do want to say is to acknowledge the very hard-working staff, both clinical and non-clinical, who work every day at the front line, supporting the well-being of New Zealanders. I just want to applaud them. That pretty much came out as a theme of our annual reviews—the great work that district health boards (DHBs) are doing.

Now, I wanted to pick up, in my call, the subject of mental health. We spoke to a lot of the DHBs, around mental health, and it was quite rewarding to hear about some of the great work that’s happening in the mental health space within our DHBs. When we spoke to the Auckland DHB, they talked about the last three years they’d spent co-designing services. Basically, what they were doing was shifting services, not necessarily specifically looking at mental illness but at mental well-being as well. When we look at it, if we look at a graph—traditionally, I think, Governments haven’t always got it right because if you look at neurodevelopment it declines over age but the Government appropriations into mental health increase over age. So it’s in the inverse. Basically, what that is is DHBs traditionally fund the acute and severe mental health services, but now the acknowledgment is we have to do a lot more around mild and moderate and we have to do a lot more prevention. Because mental health is not just the absence of mental illness; it is in fact building psychological and emotional resilience in our communities. So it’s great to see these DHBs adapting, that they’re not only looking at focusing on their clinical pathways around mental illness but also around mental well-being as well.

We heard from Counties Manukau DHB, who were looking at piloting a place-based approach to services. Basically, in the mental health field we’ve got a recovery model, which basically puts the person at the centre of their care. With a place-based approach they’ll have navigators that will help them navigate through the services. You’re looking at peer-to-peer services where other people have had lived experience of mental health services and shared care as well. Because when you look at some of the budget spends, Waikato DHB spends 40 percent of their mental health funding, and this is what they told us in the review on the NGO sector. What that is about is—[Bell rung] Mr Chair?

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): I call Matt Doocey.

MATT DOOCEY: Thank you very much—good choice, Mr Chair. The 40 percent on the NGO sector—because when we go around doing our sector visits and engaging the mental health community, actually NGOs are saying they’re ready, they’re primed, they can actually do a lot more, and they can actually be more productive than our traditional DHB services. So I think one thing, looking forward, for either Government is to understand how we understand the funder/ provider model better for DHB services and how we can use some of that money to fund the NGO sector that will pick up community services for well-being as well.

There was a word of caution by one of the DHBs, the Bay of Plenty, that actually they were reluctant to continue or progress their work stream around mental health because of the upcoming Government inquiry. I think we should be well aware of this—that many DHBs will be waiting for the outcome of the inquiry. So there is a lot of pressure now on this Government to make sure the inquiry delivers at the level it says.

We already have a lot of mental health advocates not happy that out of a year-long inquiry, the actual time for oral submissions is only eight weeks, and we now have the chair of the inquiry saying that it’s just a policy advisory inquiry. We need to make sure that if DHBs are putting their work stream for mental health on hold, this inquiry will deliver what they need and not just kick for touch mental health for another year, another year and a half, for the 2019 Budget, because the concern is there will be no extra funding in the Budget that’s to be announced soon.

Another entity we had an annual review of was the Health Quality and Safety Commission. It was a very good discussion about our suicide rate in New Zealand—one of New Zealand’s biggest social problems. I think, quite rightly, they pointed to some of the issue around suicide is that we’re looking at a small window of the three-year political term. I think, for an issue like that and the wider issues of mental health, we actually need to be looking longer than three years.

We can always look at other jurisdictions for learning. In Scotland their devolved Parliament has a cross-party select committee, very similar to what we have in the New Zealand Parliament, called globe for climate change, that looks at a pilot policy direction over five, eight, 10, 15 years. I do hope that all the parties in this House will consider how maybe we might come together and depoliticise mental health somewhat. We would still want to have the adversarial approach in the House to hold each other to account, but ultimately if we could agree a policy direction, like we currently are doing around climate change in the New Zealand Parliament, for a longer period of time, I think the New Zealand public would welcome that and reward that as well.

Just in conclusion, one thing that also came out from the MidCentral DHB was looking at how we can deliver cross-Government services better. Now, they highlighted they’re partnering with St John’s. St John’s and even the Fire Service and the police would say they get a lot of callouts that are mental health - related. And, in fact, they mightn’t be the best emergency response service to go out in the first instance. So it’s great that they are developing new ways of working, and looking at partnering with mental health professionals to go out with St John’s and the police.

So, overall, I’ve highlighted a range of good work in the mental health space. It’s very clear there’s a huge demand; a lot of that’s to do with population growth, changing dynamics in the way we live, and also the breaking down of barriers and stigma, and more people are asking for help. Thank you very much, Mr Chair.

Hon JENNY SALESA (Associate Minister of Health): Thank you so much, Mr Chair, for this call on the annual review health appropriation. This debate is concerning for me for many reasons, but one of them is mainly because of what we see at Counties Manukau District Health Board (DHB), Middlemore Hospital, where thousands of our people from South Auckland are served.

When we look at page 335 of the annual review, it tells us that Counties Manukau serves a population of 546,000 people and that they expect to serve an extra 70,000 by the year 2025. We see that the total income for the DHB in 2016-17 was $1.78 billion. However, the deficit was close to $13 million. We also see the DHB tells us that the demand for acute surgical services usually ceases during the summer months; however, in the 2016-17 year, it went up and it stayed up. One of the reasons why, they tell us, they think the surge hasn’t actually come down is because of the population growth and because of the ageing population.

Middlemore Hospital, in my opinion, is a damning indictment on the previous National-led Government’s neglect and its underfunding of New Zealand’s health system. Among other things, we know now that Middlemore Hospital has not one, not two, but seven hospital buildings that have rot in their walls, that are leaking, that have asbestos through their walls, and, as you heard from the Minister of Health earlier on, that have sewage leaking through their walls. We cannot have the previous Government tell us that they are so proud of so many millions that they have apparently handed over to this current coalition Government when we see the manifestation of so much underfunding in Middlemore Hospital. That is the result of underfunding. That is the result of not looking after the public health system.

It is not the only DHB, though, that is experiencing underfunding. We know that when we look at Dunedin Hospital, it is also going through a number of issues. They have asbestos there as well. We are looking at, actually, a new rebuild of Dunedin Hospital as well. Over at Dunedin, when it rains heavily, it leaks in the operating theatre in Dunedin Hospital.

Hon Member: Do your job.

Hon JENNY SALESA: We hear people from the other side saying, “Do your job.” We have been here for a few months; the previous Government had been in Government for nine long years. These leaks, this rot in the walls, and the asbestos that we’re dealing with didn’t just happen over the last few months. We know now that we would need around about $14 billion—$14 billion—to deal with what is needed in terms of capital projects within the next 10 years in our DHBs. And yet, the previous Government, they put aside $600 million—$600 million they put aside—that they earmarked for capital costs. That was only for this year, 2018. When we look at the other years, how much did the previous Government put aside? Zero, absolutely zero, every year. We have around about 500,000 people that do not visit their general practices because they cannot afford the cost of seeing their doctors. We know that under the previous Government we saw a 30 percent increase under the last Government in costs for visiting their GPs. So many of our people, when they cannot afford to see their GPs, they go to our emergency departments at hospitals. Thank you, Mr Chair.

Reports relevant to the Health Sector noted.

Justice Sector

RAYMOND HUO (Chairperson of the Justice Committee): Thank you, Mr Chair. The Justice Committee has conducted annual reviews for 2016-2017 of 12 justice sector organisations, notably the Ministry of Justice, the New Zealand Police, the Serious Fraud Office, the Department of Corrections, as well as the Abortion Supervisory Committee.

The Abortion Supervisory Committee is constituted under the Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977. It is an independent supervisory body to oversee and govern the provision of abortion services in New Zealand. It is funded through Vote Justice and it is supported by the Ministry of Justice. In the year to December 2016, 12,823 abortions were performed on New Zealand women. Of those, 10,813 were surgical and 1,970 were medical. In its annual report and during the annual review process, the Abortion Supervisory Committee has reiterated its calls for review of the Act. The Act has not been reviewed since it was enacted in 1977. The Act needs some urgent attention to reflect the modern healthcare delivery, advances in technology, and to correct outdated language.

From the Department of Corrections we have learnt that the prison population has increased by 16.7 percent in the last two years. We have in New Zealand 10,200 prisoners as at 30 June 2017. Of the prisoners, 71 percent are serving a sentence and 29 percent are on remand awaiting a trial or sentencing. The prison population is forecast to reach 12,000 by 2026.

Mental health in prisons is one of the important issues, and we have learnt that on any given day more than 100 people would benefit from greater mental health treatment in our prisons.

Improving outcomes for Māori offenders is another important issue. Māori are overrepresented at every stage of the criminal justice system. Māori make up 15.8 percent of the New Zealand population, yet 51 percent of the New Zealand prison population are Māori.

From the annual review of the Ministry of Justice we have learnt that violent crime increased by 3 percent. The increase was largely driven by increases in burglary and assault offences recorded, which increased by 14 percent and 10 per cent respectively. Recent trends in crime were featured in the annual review of the New Zealand Police. The police have seen a rise in mental health incidents, with police officers attending 35,000 mental health calls for services.

Family violence is an operational priority area for the police, and cyber-crime investigations will continue to increase. The police are working with other agencies, such as the Computer Emergency Response Team, and across law enforcement internationally. We note the view expressed by the police that cyber-crime at the moment is a specialised area, but it is going to have to become a generalised area because technology will be a part of everyday life.

The Justice Committee is one of the busiest committees in Parliament. We have a number of bills before us, from the Trusts Bill to the End of Life Choice Bill—namely, the euthanasia bill—which is likely to become the most significant and controversial bill that this committee and, indeed, this Parliament will consider. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all committee members, particularly my previous deputy chair, the Hon Amy Adams, and the current deputy chair, the Hon Maggie Barry. Thank you very much.

Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): Thank you, Mr Chair. It’s a great pleasure to take a call on the Appropriation (2016/17 Confirmation and Validation) Bill and, in this case, on the theme of the justice sector. I just want to begin by saying how this new Government has inherited an absolute crisis in the criminal justice sector. There can be no question about that.

In one sense, the previous Government inherited problems that other Governments have had, and we’ve had 30 years of growing expenditure and growing problems in the criminal justice sector. But, actually, it reached a crisis point a long time ago, and what I charge the previous Government of is, having had the opportunity to actually do something meaningful about the challenges facing this sector, they did absolutely nothing. They talked long and hard about how they didn’t like prisons. They described them as “a moral and fiscal failure”, but did they do anything to reduce the rapidly growing prison population? Absolutely nothing, and they relished the opportunity to make it worse. They passed more and more laws to imprison more and more people for longer and longer periods of time—

Simeon Brown: Who are you going to release?

Hon ANDREW LITTLE: —and the real pity of it is that the apprentices who have come in in this season now want to add more and more crimes and extend more and more prison sentences for more and more people. No one on that side of the House wants to step up and face up to the problem, and, when you look at it, look at their legacy of failure.

So they set targets to reduce offending. They set a target to reduce violent crime offences in their last term of Government—to reduce them. They went up by nearly 5 percent. They set a target to reduce reoffending by prisoners. They said they’d have a target to reduce it by 25 percent. They reduced it by under 5 percent. No real effort at all—no real effort at all—and now we have the crisis we’ve got right now. Nearly 11,000 people in prison, and they’ve got no answers on how to deal with it. It is time for a shake-up, and this Government is committed to a programme of change that achieves the objectives that you would expect of a responsible, modern criminal justice system: to keep the innocent safe, and for those who offend, make them accountable but actually fix the problems that they’ve got so they can turn out of the system and be productive, responsible citizens again.

That side of the House turns people away, casts them aside, rejects them, and wants nothing more to do with them. That is not an expression of humanity. That’s not an expression of a criminal justice system that is doing its job of keeping people safe.

I want to mention, briefly, too one other aspect of the justice system that has turned out to be a complete and utter failure on their part, and that’s the Family Court. So they introduced all these changes on the basis that separating couples would quite happily cooperate with each other, work with a mediator, and sort out all their issues, and it hasn’t happened because that approach denies the fundamentals of humanity that when people are in disagreement with each other and when their emotional commitment falls apart and they want to sort it out, they cannot do it on their own. They cannot do it on their own. I am looking forward to the reforms to come through, because they will be shown up as the party that does not understand basic human endeavour, basic human emotions, basic human contact. They don’t get it—they don’t get it. They are the party of anti-humanity.

You know, the secret about most Tories is they don’t actually like people. They don’t like ordinary people. They like the privileged. They like the privileged, they like the elites, but they don’t like ordinary people—they hate them. So when people have the problems that ordinary people have, they do not know how to deal with it. So they kind of look at what works on a piece of paper and it saves a bit of money, and they go away and do it. Well, I can tell this committee, that is changing too, because we are going to have a justice system—whether it’s in criminal law, whether it’s in family law, or whether it’s in all aspects of civil law—that is humane, that understands people, and that gives people access to justice, so that we can, once again, claim to be a country that respects all people.

Hon MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): Thank you very much, Mr Chair. It is with pleasure I rise to talk about the annual reviews that have come before the Justice Committee, and following the tough guy of Labour, “Angry Andy”—“Oh So Angry Andy”. Family violence, which is one of the problems failing the justice system—

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Order!

Hon MAGGIE BARRY: —we have a Minister who is leading from the front—

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! When members are addressing other members, they are to use the correct form of their name. Thank you.

Hon MAGGIE BARRY: Thank you very much, Mr Chair. “Mr Angry Andy”, the person who is somebody who—

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Order! Second warning.

Hon MAGGIE BARRY: Thank you very much, Mr Chair. I guess, having listened to the diatribe of nonsense from the previous speaker, who used to be the leader of Labour until he wisely stepped down—and they all owe it to that member for where they are sitting today; that member and Winston Peters—we have tough talk from individuals who have done nothing and who are actually appalling when it comes to family violence.

So the Justice Committee has heard a number of annual reviews. One of them was the Department of Corrections. Now, with the Department of Corrections, you would have thought that a sensible Government with any kind of view to rehabilitation in the future would not have stopped the money and the resources going into drug and alcohol rehabilitation, but they did. Wonder why—what’s their problem? Why would you do something that absolutely will guarantee that people who have those sorts of difficulties would be able to get out of the problem?

I urge this Government not to continue its wilful ideology that will take us down the path of hardened criminals on the streets of New Zealand, preying on innocent New Zealanders. This idealistic nonsense from this chaotic Government—and this is a Government that’s very fond of the “c” word, isn’t it? The “c” word—“Crisis? What crisis?” There used to be one in manufacturing. Now, they’re drumming up some other nonsense, as well. The fact of the matter is they have overspent, overcommitted, and raised expectations, and they’re now desperately trying to distract, from the smoke-and-mirrors brigade, that there is no problem. We’ve been funding all of their unwise and unrealistic promises. They’ve dug their own grave, and they’re welcome to it.

So this is a hard-working committee, unlike the Minister who just sat down, who doesn’t appear to have much knowledge at all of his portfolio or anything that’s going on in it. The Justice Committee does have one of the heaviest workloads in Parliament, and there are, I think, 11 annual reviews.

I’d like to talk about family violence, because that was work that was begun under the National Government. It’s very good work, and I would hope that this ridiculous Government doesn’t try and undo the good work that we did. In family violence, it’s extremely important to note that as Governments operate, they didn’t used to share very much information. So, under the leadership of Amy Adams, who at that time was Minister of Justice—and what an outstanding Minister of Justice she was, especially compared to the incumbent. Amy Adams, and Minister Anne Tolley from the Ministry of Social Development as well, made it very clear that they expected officials and Ministers to work together. So when we looked at the way that family violence was being dealt with, and this is something that the Justice Committee looked at—the goal to reduce crime, victimisation, and harm. The Ministry of Justice prioritised that. I think they’ve done very well.

The Whānau Protect National Home Safety Service, which is one of the pilots around family violence, which began under National, I hope will continue on and that they don’t take the funding out of it to put into some other bright shiny new thing that won’t work, because that is a pilot that has been working.

In my own area, formerly of seniors, and being very concerned with elder abuse and family violence as it pertains to older members of families, the work that we were doing with ACC and police was extraordinary. It did change lives. The Integrated Safety Response—the two pilots that we set up are in Christchurch and Waikato. We put money into it last year—$22.4 million in funding—because we want those pilots to continue. And thank goodness we did, because otherwise they would have taken the money and spent it—squandered it—on something else. But we have put that through now until 30 June 2019, so that even this chaotic Government and it’s unfortunate Minister will not be able to undo the good work that we have done.

So, I urge this Government, with all of its foibles and strange ideas, to not go soft, to ensure that family violence is at the heart of the justice sector. Thank you, Mr Chair.

PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour): Thank you, Mr Chair. It’s an absolute honour to stand and take a call to contribute to this debate on the justice sector on what we’ve heard and what we’ve discovered through our annual reviews and that process. I must, however, address, firstly, some of the points, or lack of points, made by the member Maggie Barry, who just resumed her seat. She said, “What crisis?” Tell that to the hundreds of people who are suffering in rotten, mouldy hospitals and in prisons that keep being built that only serve to return hardened criminals to our streets, and to those who are living in cars and garages because the previous Government has left a legacy of under-resourcing and chronic dysfunction. Tell that to the people who are suffering, instead of chatting at the back of the Chamber and trivialising this issue by flinging insults around and name-calling, which, frankly, should be beneath any member in this House.

To carry on with the theme, really, of this whole debate and previous debates as well—which is actually really sad—is the fact that we can’t ignore that there has been an increase in demand in the justice sector, an increase in the complexity of the issues that are faced across the sector, and chronic under-resourcing coupled with a complete lack of planning, which has led to the issues that the Minister of Justice so eloquently laid out in his speech. This Government is focusing on fixing the issue, not on feel-good measures that actually won’t achieve anything, as we’ve seen over the last nine years.

So what exactly is happening? We’ve heard and we’ve seen the stats. Whichever way you look at it, it’s not good. We’ve seen that the total crime rate continues to increase. It has increased over the last two years. The main drivers of the increasing crime rate are burglaries and violent crime, we’re told. The Maungakiekie electorate, where I’m based, sees the capital of burglaries in Mount Wellington. Violent crime, which is driven largely by homicide and sexual assault, continues to rise. This is the legacy that the previous speaker talked about and is so proud about—is lauding? I see nothing to be proud about.

The Indian community, which I do a lot of work with, is often at the forefront of crime because many are small-business owners who run dairies—many who live in abject fear from day to day, wondering if that’s the day that the people who assaulted them will come back to finish the job. Is that the legacy that the previous Government is proud about?

Some of the measures that they put in place previously—which actually weren’t too bad when it comes to measures like fog cannons and security measures, which I admit were actually pretty good measures, but what was the take-up rate? It was something like three dairies at the end of last year that actually took it up. They couldn’t afford it. Fifty percent they had to pay—that’s up to $2,000 for dairy owners. That was too expensive.

What has this Government done? We’ve come in there and actually made it affordable, so that people who are working in high-risk dairies can actually afford to feel safe in their workplace. Isn’t that what we’re all working towards? Feeling safe wherever we are, whether it’s in the home, whether it’s on the streets, whether it’s at work—that’s a right. That’s a right that we all should be able to access.

But, thanks to the previous Government’s lack of—I don’t know what it is, actually. It’s definitely a lack of spending, but it’s also a lack of thinking about what really works. So it’s about flinging money at prisons. Our prisons are at capacity. We’ve seen that through the annual reviews. But what was the previous Government’s response? Lock them up. “We’ll lock more people up. We’ll lock them up for longer.”, because, yes, that’s worked so well, hasn’t it, for us in the last nine years?

Instead, look at what the evidence tells us. What does the evidence tell us? There’s a much higher rate of people not offending, or a deterrent effect of people not reoffending, if they’re actually caught. But what did the previous Government do? They didn’t put in enough police numbers, so people aren’t being caught. In Auckland in the last year, conviction rates or arrest rates—people actually being caught for the burglaries that they were committing—was woeful. It was under 10 percent. From memory, off the top of my head, it was something like 6 percent.

Look at the prison population that we have. Māori are disproportionately represented—50 percent of the prison population and 65 percent of youth in prisons. Look at the mental health statistics. Police were being called out for 35,000 mental health incidents in the last year alone—utterly shambles.

MATT KING (National—Northland): It’s a real pleasure to be able to take a call today on the justice sector review—[Interruption] I refer to page 461. What I’d normally like to do is throw some of those insults back at you—sorry, back at the coalition Government—

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! I wasn’t throwing any insults at you.

MATT KING: —yes, sorry, Mr Chairman—back at the coalition Government, because they provide so much material, but I’m going to actually be nice today, and I’m going to acknowledge the Justice Committee chair, Raymond Huo, again. He’s one of the nicer ones in that crew over there. I was only on the Justice Committee a short time, and I think during some of these reviews I was actually not there, but I was there for half of the police one, and I want to concentrate on the police one because that’s my background and also they don’t get enough acknowledgment. The police don’t get enough acknowledgment.

I want to acknowledge that they’ve had a successful and productive year, the New Zealand Police; they don’t get enough recognition. I’d like to acknowledge the Police Commissioner, Mike Bush, who, when I was in the police he was the detective senior sergeant on the North Shore. If you wanted a crime solved he was the man to have in charge of it. So it’s great to see that he has worked his way up to be commissioner. He started at the ground floor and he’s earned the right to be there. So I’d like to acknowledge him

Greg O’Connor: What happened to you?

MATT KING: I remained a detective and got out. I didn’t stay on as long as Greg O’Connor, 30 years. I stayed to 14 and I got out. It’s a tough job. It’s hard on the family, and it’s actually hard on your mental health. I describe policing as 80 percent routine, 15 percent action, and 5 percent terror.

I acknowledge that the police have attended and done really well at some major incidents: the Kaikōura earthquakes in November 2016, the Christchurch fires in February 2017, and the Bay of Plenty floods in April 2017. When the National Government was in, we were going to have 880 extra police and 245 support staff, and $388 million was going to go in to cover that over the next four years. I also note that the police have adopted the 47 specific recommendations from the commission of inquiry into police conduct. So I’m glad to hear that, because a sign of a good organisation is their ability to evolve and learn from the mistakes of the past. So that’s good to hear.

I see that in the 2016-17 year, $300 million worth of assets were seized or restrained, as in held back from criminal activity, and $168 million was forfeited from criminals. That’s the way you hurt them. You take their Harleys off them. You take their properties off them. That’s what happens. I’d also note that the organised crime unit, along with the customs and other groups, dismantled 10 significant trans-national crime groups—

Hon Scott Simpson: How many?

MATT KING: —10—and 394 kilograms of meth and 644 kilograms of precursors were seized. During the 2016-17 year, police responded to a million events, 900,000 triple-one calls, and conducted two million breath tests. So we’re not mucking around—or the police are not mucking around; I keep thinking of myself as still a police officer and I’m not. It’s been 10 years since I’ve been out. Total crimes dropped by 1 percent and there was a 20 percent reduction in house burglaries. I recall the days—

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): I’m sorry to interrupt the member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. I will resume the Chair at 7.30 p.m.

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

Hon RUTH DYSON (Senior Whip—Labour): I move, That the committee report progress.

House resumed.

Progress reported.

Report adopted.

Amended Answers to Oral Questions

Question No. 8 to Minister

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Minister of Agriculture): I wish to correct the record regarding a statement made in the House today, Tuesday, 10 April, in question time—question No. 8. I seek leave.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Is there any objection? There is no objection.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: I confirmed that I had met with Crown Irrigation Ltd officials during my time as the current Minister of Agriculture. I wish to correct this to “I met with Crown Irrigation Ltd officials in my time prior to becoming the current Minister of Agriculture, and I have met with officials from Irrigation New Zealand during my time as the current Minister of Agriculture.” Thank you.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you.

Bills

Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill

First Reading

Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): I move, That the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Māori Affairs Committee to consider the bill.

The bill implements part of the Government’s response to the Māori Affairs Committee’s report Inquiry into whānau access to and management of tūpāpaku. The bill will codify the current practice of coroners and ensure that all cultural beliefs, including tikanga Māori, continue to be recognised and supported in our coronial system.

Before I discuss the changes made by the bill, I’d first like to recognise the work of the Māori Affairs Committee in initiating and conducting their inquiry last Parliament. I’d also like to thank the submitters who took the time to share their views and experiences of the coronial system with the committee.

New Zealand is a culturally diverse country and so it’s fundamental that we continue to improve the experiences of whānau during what is an incredibly difficult time for all involved. An estimated 31,000 deaths occur in New Zealand each year, most of which are the result of natural causes. Approximately 20 percent of these deaths are referred to the coroner to be investigated, which is over 5,000 deaths being considered by coroners each year.

A coroner’s role is to investigate the cause and circumstances of sudden unexplained or suspicious deaths. Importantly, they identify lessons that can be learnt to prevent similar deaths in the future. I’d like to take this opportunity to commend the high standard of work carried out by our coroners and our coronial case managers every day.

The Māori Affairs Committee initiated their inquiry in 2016 to respond to concerns raised by whānau regarding their access to and management of the tūpāpaku of whānau members. The committee made eight recommendations to the Government, and the Government’s response was tabled in the House earlier this year.

The Coroners Act establishes the coronial framework in New Zealand and regulates whānau access to tūpāpaku. The Act seeks to balance the cultural and spiritual needs of family and those in a close relationship with the person who has died with the public good associated with a proper and timely understanding of the causes of death. The Government considers that the overall coronial system, extending from the police leading the response at the scene of an unexpected death through to collection of the deceased’s body by the family-nominated funeral director, responds well to cultural and religious needs. However, there are always opportunities to improve the responsiveness of the coronial system to cultural considerations, and it’s important that we listen to the views of the people in our society. We wanted to make sure that we carefully consider all opportunities for improvement in this area and make the necessary changes when required.

The Coroners Act sets out what coroners must consider when making decisions about who can view, touch, or remain near the body. Currently, section 26 provides that coroners can take tikanga Māori into account when making these decisions, but it is not an explicit requirement under the Act. One of the Māori Affairs Committee’s recommendations was to amend section 26 of the Act to provide an explicit requirement that coroners take account of cultural considerations when determining who can view, touch, or remain near the tūpāpaku. The Government accepted this recommendation, and this bill implements this recommendation.

The ability to stay with the deceased and carry out traditional cultural activities is an important feature of many cultures, religions, and ethnicities. It’s a traditional Māori cultural practice that immediate whānau do not leave the tūpāpaku until burial. As New Zealand is made up of many diverse cultures and people of different religions, we wanted to make sure that all cultural beliefs, including tikanga Māori, continued to be recognised and supported during what is a challenging time for whānau and all other parties involved.

Importantly, this bill does not aim to change the current practice of coroners. The bill codifies current practice, as coroners are already working closely with whānau to determine when it is appropriate for whānau to remain with the tūpāpaku. I’ve also invited the Chief Coroner to issue practice guidelines under the Act for coroners to follow when making decisions under section 26.

This Government is committed to ensuring that all cultures and religious beliefs continue to be recognised and respected in New Zealand, and I believe that this bill will help to achieve that commitment. I commend the bill to the House.

Hon MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I rise to talk to the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill at its first reading. This is a bill whose time has come. I recall chairing a working party into the care of people who were dying, back in the 1990s. The way that the coroner and the way that people were allowed to engage with dead bodies was considered a very difficult issue at that time, and was one that was needing an overhaul.

This piece of legislation, which has come out of the hard-working Māori Affairs Committee process, did make a recommendation on improving cultural considerations, and the way that people relate to bodies is a very important and perhaps overdue thing. Tūpāpaku is something that needs to happen, but I guess it’s a little bit hard to fathom why this Government didn’t just form it into a wider part of the reform of the coronial system. After all, there are many other aspects to the wider reforms that could have been brought into play with this. It is a little hard to understand why, for such a very narrowly focused piece of legislation—I mean, you could call it lightweight legislation from a lightweight Government—they didn’t just weave it into a wider piece of legislation.

I think that it will be a good thing for this Māori Affairs Committee, having recommended it, to make it go through. I think also it’s probably part of a wider discussion that New Zealanders need to have about death and the way we relate to dead bodies and the different cultural considerations—

Hon Member: Ha, ha!

Hon MAGGIE BARRY: —that each cultural group brings to it. The Government may laugh at this, but it is a serious issue. But, again, I do wonder why it is taking up so much House time. It implements recommendations that are sensible. It is very narrowly focused. It’s hard to fathom why you would not support it. It’s also hard to fathom why it is not part of a wider context. I won’t delay the timing of the House any longer on this. I think there is widespread support for it, and so be it. I commend this bill to the House.

RAYMOND HUO (Labour): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I rise to take a call to support this bill. This bill is about tikanga Māori. It’s about culture and religious needs in today’s multicultural Aotearoa. I thank the member who just resumed her seat, the Hon Maggie Barry, and take it that National will support this bill. This bill is in good spirit, as we witnessed last Tuesday when the House unanimously passed the legislation called Criminal Records (Expungement of Convictions for Historical Homosexual Offences) Bill. No longer would gay people in that situation be subject to specific offences under the Crimes Act 1961 or Crimes Act 1908.

This bill is exactly the same: a good spirit. I thank the Māori Affairs Committee for initiating and conducting the inquiry in the last Parliament. This bill implements the recommendation of the Māori Affairs Committee report, Inquiry into whānau access to and management of tūpāpaku, to improve cultural considerations in the coronial systems.

I would like to echo what the Minister Andrew Little just said: that this bill is about striking the right balance. Specifically, this bill will amend section 26 of the Coroners Act 2006 to provide a specific requirement for coroners to take cultural considerations into account. At the moment, there is no such kind of specific requirement, or specific statutory requirement, but, in practice, the coroners do take such considerations and do have such discretion to do so. So this bill will codify the good practice, and enshrines and acknowledges the best practice.

As the Minister said, the Minister of Justice also invited the Chief Coroner to issue practice guidelines under the Act for coroners to follow when making decisions under section 26. It is crucial that, to the extent possible, all cultural beliefs are recognised and supported. For many, at a time when a loved one has passed away, this is especially important.

So, again, this bill, by amending section 26, codifies and enshrines the best practice and it strikes a good balance. I commend this bill to the House.

NUK KORAKO (National): Ko te hau mua. Ko te hau muri. Ko te hau tamawahine. Ko te hau tamatāne. E tū mai rā te tokotoko a Tāne-nui-ā-Rangi. E tuturu mau kia whakamau kia tina (tina) haumi e, hui e, taiki e!

[The wind in front of us. The wind behind us. The female wind. The male wind. Let the staff of Tāne-nui-ā-Rangi stand tall. Let this prayer be made firm, be made fast, make it fast, all together, it is done!]

Ko tēnei pire ko te Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill. Ka hoki ki te pūrongo a te Komiti Whiriwhiri Take Māori; ko te uiui nā, ki te āhei atu me te whakahaere a te whānau i te tūpāpaku.

[This bill, the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill, takes us back to the report of the Māori Affairs Committee; that inquiry addresses the ability of the family to control what happens to a deceased person.]

The genesis of this bill was by way of an inquiry that was undertaken by the Māori Affairs Committee in the 51st Parliament. Tonight, I want to acknowledge, first of all, the honourable Metiria Turei, who was responsible for instigating this particular inquiry, and also another Pāti Kākāriki wahine, now the co-leader of the Green Party, who was also responsible for developing the terms of reference for the inquiry.

Also, it’s important to acknowledge parliamentarians that are not here any more, and particularly Marama Fox from the Pāti Māori and our own Chester Borrows, and also Pita Paraone, who gave us so much wise insight into Te Ao Māori. All of these former parliamentarians were instrumental in guiding this inquiry to its very successful, we believe, conclusion. Can I also acknowledge the Hon Andrew Little, who has brought this bill to the House, and our appreciation as to acknowledging one part of it, particularly the dignity that we have for the tūpāpaku.

In light of the Māori Affairs Committee inquiry, we now have a bill before us tonight that amends section 26 of the Coroners Act 2006. What it does is it improves the cultural considerations of the coronial system. Currently, the Act does not require coroners to take cultural considerations into account under section 26, but they also have a discretion to do so. Looking at it and listening to the submitters, a lot of that discretion wasn’t undertaken. A number of the submitters reported that the fact is that they felt there was a lot of cultural negativity during the management of a deceased person.

Can I also say that the inquiry was initiated in response to many whānau regarding access to, and management of, the tūpāpaku as culturally insensitive. So this particular bill, and part of it, goes quite a way to addressing some of those concerns.

I think it’s also important to note that while the Māori Affairs Committee concentrated on Māori cultural aspects under the terms of reference, the inquiry was not purely restricted just to Māori. We tried to cover all New Zealanders with an interest in these issues. So when the submitters did come, there were a number of ethnic communities that came to submit, and when we saw this—exactly what Māori were talking about was also what they were talking about and they were experiencing.

In regard, then, to the bill, I think this very much reflects the bill and, hopefully, the diversity, particularly, that is reflected in the over 200 ethnicities that are part of the New Zealand population. I think, though, more consideration will need to occur as we grapple with the component of the coroners’ work.

Can I, finally, just say that it was incredibly moving to hold this inquiry and actually listen not only to those that were whānau but also to the incredible work that is done by the coronial services; also, the police as well; medical; health—you know, all of that. They came with their stories, and to me this is a reflection of the success of that inquiry. For that reason, we support this bill to select committee and I commend this bill to the House.

Āpiti hono, tātai hono, rātou ki te hunga mate, ki te hunga mate, ki a rātou, āpiti hono, tātai hono, tātou ki te hunga ora, ki te hunga ora, ki a rātou.

[The deceased should be left to rest in peace while the living resume their business in the world of the living.]

Let the dead be the dead and the living be the living. Kia ora tātou katoa.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I call—[Interruption] Are you calling? I call Mark Patterson.

MARK PATTERSON (NZ First): Sorry—as I just organise myself here for this bill, the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill. As we have heard, this is to amend section 26 of the Coroners Act, the 2006 Act. It is to take into account cultural considerations within that particular piece of legislation. I note this is the response to the Māori Affairs Committee inquiry, and I note the names that were mentioned in the contribution of the previous speaker, Nuk Korako. He did neglect, I think—if I’m wrong—to say that he was the chairman of that committee that shepherded this through. So congratulations to you, Nuk, for shepherding this important piece of legislation.

It might not be something that is on everyone’s mind all the time, but for those people that are bereaved it is hugely important and it is genuinely significant, and I think it does behove us to take this piece of legislation and bring it forward so that it does allow the opportunity for comfort for those families that do find themselves in this situation. And we all do, eventually, from time to time.

This allows us to take into account ethnic considerations. We know that New Zealand is a much more multicultural society than what it was, you know, 20 years ago or 10 years ago. I think almost a quarter of our population were born overseas. We’ve got people here from almost every country of the world, and they’re not necessarily sharing the same cultures. Maybe, as the indigenous people or the Pākehā settlers—who maybe were more predominant in our previous times—we need to take their considerations into account too, and that was part of that submission process. Our social attitudes, of course, have changed, as well, over time, and I think that is something that we need to take into account.

But, of course, I think we’re particularly focusing here on the spiritual beliefs of Māori and tikanga Māori and tūpāpaku—that’s the Māori term for dead body, I understand. I’m a slightly unlikely champion for Māori spirituality. It’s not something that I’ve been around so much in my life, but I know matua Shane Jones and Jenny Marcroft, those that are immersed in that culture within our caucus and who are probably more appropriate to be speaking to this bill this evening, have certainly imparted upon me how important it is to the Māori culture to honour the body, to not just allow it to head off and maybe see it just before the funeral or whatever, as we may do in European culture. It is certainly something in their spiritual DNA that they wish to have a much more literally hands-on involvement, and this bill allows for—not only viewing—touching and remaining near the body for immediate family members only.

As we heard in Mr Little’s contribution to the bill, there are 5,000 coroner investigations, so this is not something that is rare at all—20 percent of deaths going to the coroner; I did not know that. So that shows that this is probably something that is more widespread in its importance than maybe, at first glance, we would think.

This bill does implement the recommendations of the select committee inquiry. There were 40 submissions. They included the Human Rights Commissioner, the Chief Coroner, some very credible advocates, and also individuals. There’s one here that I will read out which, I think, signifies what we’re talking about here. This is a lady of part-Samoan, part-Māori descent who had her husband—of only 43-years-old—go into the coroner’s process and found that that process lacked empathy. In it she quotes, “It is imperative that Cultural values are adhered to—whānau are in a state of tapu—in a place so dark not being able to even touch my husband and wipe the dirt off his face was horrific … very disrespectful. I left that night and could not go back because I couldn’t touch or clean him. My husband hated being dirty.” So you can just see the emotion dripping off that quote, and it just shows how important that is. And I know, even from my own recent experience of a bereavement, having gone through that, it is very therapeutic to be able to respect the body and sort of use that as part of the grieving in dealing with that process. I can actually empathise with that sentiment quite keenly.

So this looks to enshrine best practice. Of course, we know that it doesn’t—I think the coroner’s profession are working very hard to allow these things to happen anyway, so we’re sort of enshrining best practice, as has been said, but, as that last quote shows, that’s not always the case. It’s not consistent across all jurisdictions. So I think that this will help to bring this into a more formalised situation.

So, without further ado, I think, on behalf of New Zealand First we commend the Minister for bringing this forward. We support the bill, and we look forward to the select committee maybe looking at it a little bit in time, to make sure that it has enough breadth within its scope. I think we don’t want to maybe narrow it down to just Māori or Pasifika people—that all people have access, and even maybe the Scottish Presbyterians amongst us would get our time in to grieve as well, if we so wanted to go down that path. It might not necessarily be our cultural norm, but we may feel, in that moment, that that’s what we want to do and, hopefully, that allows that we wouldn’t be precluded from doing that either. The select committee will probably look at those parameters and how it can be tidied up, but I think the general principle is extremely sound. It will make our society a better place, and we commend this bill to the House.

JO HAYES (National): Madam Deputy Speaker, thank you. I stand to take a call on the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill. Just to give you a little bit of background, I was on the select committee the day that Metiria Turei came in and put the inquiry on to the table of the Māori Affairs Committee, where we were able to discuss it. So I want to acknowledge her for the work that she did in being instrumental in bringing this inquiry to the select committee, and I also want to congratulate and acknowledge Marama Davidson for your new role as co-leader of the Greens but also for carrying forward this inquiry on behalf of Metiria and the Greens.

I also want to set a few things straight. The actual focus of this bill was not spiritual; it was actually a cultural thing and it went across all ethnicities. It doesn’t just only identify Māori in this bill; it’s all ethnicities that have connection to their tūpāpaku, their loved one, the dead person. It is their ability to work with the coroner’s group to actually be able to care for their loved one, their tūpāpaku. That’s what the guts of this bill is all about. So I just wanted to make sure we got that pretty clear in the House as to why this bill is here and who it’s actually for: it’s for all New Zealanders.

A lot of the things that have been said today, I do thank you, especially with what my colleague Nuk Korako spoke about in the way that this bill came and the previous members—Metiria Turei, Marama Fox, and Chester Borrows—who were instrumental in making sure that a lot of the shaping around some of the information that would go into this inquiry would actually come forward on our side of the House.

The other thing is I also want to acknowledge those who came and shared their stories with us about their experience working with the coroner’s office and some of the coroners as well. Some of them were very heart-rending. On a personal side, I did not experience half of the things that I heard through the inquiry. However, I had that feeling deep inside about what they were going through.

So, without any further ado, many of the things that have needed to be said around this bill have been said. As I said, I just wanted to straighten out a few things that were actually said by the previous speaker, Mark Patterson. I want to acknowledge the Minister of Justice for bringing the bill in and sponsoring the bill through. So, without any further ado, I commend the bill to the House.

MARAMA DAVIDSON (Green): Tēnā koe, Madam Deputy Speaker. It’s really special and important, actually, to be standing on behalf of the Green Party to support the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill, for so many reasons that other members have outlined. I will absolutely start with a mihi of heartfelt thanks to former co-leader Metiria Turei of the Green Party, who brought this piece of work to the Māori Affairs Committee, borne from personal experience.

What I will say is that across the select committee—and this was, again, typical of the Māori Affairs Committee—this was a very collaborative, very united piece of work and approach, partly because across the Māori Affairs Committee members, we each had either personal experience of or knowledge of a person close to us who had experienced or undergone some challenges and difficulties when wanting to maintain some control and feeling of control of the dead person, of the tūpāpaku, at such a grief-stricken time. We were all able to relate personally in some way to the very problem at the core of what this piece of legislation is trying to address. That’s what drove this inquiry to be such a unified and cohesive inquiry across the select committee, because we all saw the heart issue at the core of what we were trying to address. So I have absolute appreciation for and am profoundly grateful to Metiria Turei, but I did want to acknowledge Nuk Korako, the chair of that Māori Affairs Committee, in the way that we took that process through.

As you can imagine, asking for people to come and talk to a formal room and, in the MPs, a bunch of mostly strangers about one of the most incredibly personal experiences that a human could ever go through, and pouring their experience out to a very formal room of MPs is a really generous thing to ask them to do, but they came, and they shared their stories with us, simply to try and help us do better as lawmakers, to try and help us make a decision about what needs to be changed.

Some of these stories were harrowing, and I want to particularly acknowledge—I did some travel to Parihaka, actually, to listen to their marae and the whānau at Parihaka about their stories of engaging with agencies around accessing tūpāpaku. One of the particular stories was about the loss of a baby. That is probably the most harrowing event that a human could ever go through. It was that particular story of the difficulties that a grieving mother, in a state of emotion that I personally cannot imagine nor do justice to with words, and how a baby was ripped from her arms after passing away.

So there needed to be an understanding that this is such an important issue, and for us, we have the opportunity as lawmakers to address this. Actually, I want to acknowledge those coroners. Most times, there is an incredible effort to try and cater to the needs of families and whānau. I want to acknowledge the efforts that coroners and various other agencies make when it comes to accessing the bodies of the dead person of the loved one. They are being innovative and going out of their way. Recently, for example, we lost our community leader in Manurewa, Damon Heke, and I understand that some incredible consideration was made to allow the whānau to stay with him when ordinarily that wouldn’t happen.

I mean, things like family being able to stay at the agency, things like family being able to travel with and stay with that tūpāpaku for as much as is practicably possible. If Madam Deputy Speaker would allow me somewhat, there was memory that came back to me tonight with this bill that I wouldn’t mind just putting on the floor of the House to indicate, again, the importance of feeling like you are in control of the process when your loved one has passed on and that you can be near. When my cousin passed away many years ago—he drowned in Lake Pupuke, and we didn’t find him for a night. He was diving, and he was on the bottom of the lake, and we stayed on the lake—slept under the stars—until he could be found, because such was the importance to remain as close as we possibly could to the tūpāpaku, as much as was practicably possible. That’s a night that I will never, ever forget, and the privilege of sleeping on the side of the lake, taking care of staying close. So, to get back to the bill, this is where this amendment bill has come from.

So what it actually is doing—because I too did want to pick up on the fact that in the actual legislation, it is very clear. It’s amending section 26, which provides a list of matters that a coroner must take into account when determining “whether to authorise a person … to view, touch, or remain with or near [a] body” and whether to impose any conditions, and then that list of matters to be taken into account. What this bill is doing is inserting a section that says what must be taken into account: “the ethnic origins, social attitudes or customs, or spiritual beliefs of the person who is, or of a person who is suspected to be, the dead person, or of an immediate family member of that person, that customarily require viewing, touching, or remaining with or near the body”.

So it’s very clear that it applies to all ethnicities, and not just ethnicities; it actually requires coroners to take into account social attitudes or customs, and that will apply to any person, no matter what your background or customs or practices are. So this is not just a bill of compassion and humanity but it’s also incredibly inclusive, and I’m really proud that this House is putting this through tonight for its first reading.

I think I’ve covered a lot of what I wanted to cover—oh, I wanted to note that under this legislation, my understanding is that the Minister of Justice will also consider whether a code of best practice balances cultural considerations with the public interest in finding the cause of death. And I just do have to mention—because it is relevant to this legislation and why this legislation is good is because there is discrepancy in the ethnicity of which deaths are referred to coroners. Nuk Korako will remember that that did come up before us, particularly in the death of babies. So, if that is the case, then we need to make sure—and, you know, looking at the systemic biases in the agency practice is a whole other thing. But if the case is that certain ethnicities—in this case, it is Māori—are going to be referred more than other ethnicities to coroners, then we need to make sure that the tikanga and cultural considerations are a requirement rather than just a discretionary choice of coroners, and the other stuff will have to be addressed as well.

I want to finish by saying this is just one of the recommendations that came through the inquiry into the management of tūpāpaku. Oh, by the way, I just want to commend all the members across the House. Tūpāpaku is probably one of the most difficult Te Reo words that you could ever have—

Hon Christopher Finlayson: Not really.

MARAMA DAVIDSON: —I think it is, Chris—but I think that everyone has been making a good effort—and it is hard. Tū-pā-paku—tūpāpaku. The inquiry—this is one of the recommendations but, in my view, possibly one of the more important ones. So it is a good opportunity that we are putting this through the House tonight. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

ERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I rise tonight to speak to the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill, at the first reading. This is a small bill—in fact, it’s a tiny bill—but it will have a rather significant impact for many Kiwis at a very, very difficult time in their lives. Around 31,000 deaths occur in New Zealand each year, of which 20 percent are referred to the coroner. That accounts for around 6,200 Kiwi families who are dealing with a death in their family, who are navigating a process that is necessary but is not always conducive to their way of grieving for their loved ones, and herein lies the issue that this bill attempts to deal with.

The bill implements one of the recommendations of the Māori Affairs Committee report, which looks into whānau access to, and management of, deceased bodies to improve cultural considerations in the coronial system. The background to this piece of work is that the coroner is not currently required by law to take into account cultural requirements of the deceased and their families. In practice, coroners use their discretion when considering such requests. My first question when looking at this bill was around whether or not there was actually a problem to be solved, given that this discretion by the coroner already exists. After speaking to my learned colleagues, I learnt, and quickly discovered, that, yes, in fact, there was a problem. This discretion was being used by some coroners to varying degrees, but, overall, cultural requirements were not been taken into account, and this was having a rather devastating impact on some families and whānau, as we just heard from Marama Davidson.

The Māori Affairs Committee listened to whānau and their concerns around access to, and freedom to make decisions about, their deceased loved ones. They heard situations where whānau were not able to be with their deceased loved ones when police referred cases to the coroner. Look, the ability to stay with a deceased person and carry out traditional activities is a really important feature of many cultures—as we’ve heard tonight—religions, and different ethnicities. In tikanga Māori, immediate family remain with their deceased loved one until that person is buried. In our increasingly multicultural society, it’s really important that we acknowledge these practices and that we ensure that during these really difficult times families are allowed to, within reason, carry them out.

To that end, as we’ve heard tonight, this bill amends section 26 of the Coroners Act to require the coroner, when determining whether a person’s whānau member should be allowed to view, touch, or remain with the deceased, to consider tikanga Māori and the expectation of other cultures. This bill takes that discretion that was available to the coroner and it makes cultural considerations a requirement. This bill, I think, strikes a really good balance between the cultural needs of whānau, with the requirement for a timely and proper understanding of the causes of death.

This is a good bill, be it a small bill, and a rather timely bill, I believe, given the internationally made statements from a well-known New Zealander regarding the state of New Zealand’s race relations. I wouldn’t repeat the exact statement that was made, because that might get me in trouble with you, Madam Deputy Speaker, of course, as the language was certainly not parliamentary. But the point is that this bill does go in some small way to addressing the concerns of that particular New Zealander. This bill recognises the lack of cultural acknowledgment in our coronial system, and it requires that tikanga Māori and other cultural practices are followed. I am happy to support this bill to the select committee, and I commend it to the House.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: This is now a split call—five minutes each. I call Liz Craig.

Dr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It’s a privilege to speak on the first reading of the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill. As we know, at the recommendation of the Māori Affairs Committee, this bill amends section 26 of the Coroners Act 2006 to provide the explicit requirement that coroners consider tikanga Māori and the expectations of other cultures when determining who can view, touch, or remain near a dead body in the custody of the coroner.

So why is this bill necessary? I just want to talk about a bit of background. In New Zealand, the majority of deaths are actually certified by a doctor, and then the body remains in the custody of the family, but in about 20 percent of cases, what happens if the death is unexpected or sudden, or if the doctor is unable to determine the cause of death? Then it gets referred by the police to the coroner. The coroner then makes an assessment about whether he or she does need to look into this further. If they do decide to look into the death, they need to confirm the identity of the person who’s passed away and also establish the cause of death. In doing so, what they also need to consider is whether a post-mortem is necessary to identify why the person died.

While this is quite a routine process from the police and the coronial point of view, from a whānau point of view, it’s a particularly devastating process, because it comes completely out of the blue and at a very, very difficult time. One of the areas that was particularly concerning that featured in a lot of the submissions to the select committee was in the case of sudden, unexpected death in infancy, or SUDI. What SUDI is, basically—as it says by the title—is a sudden, unexpected death of a baby who’s otherwise well. Often, these babies usually peak in the first few months of life; although, babies can pass away up to one year, and there’s a whole lot of known risk factors, but the essential fact of the death is that it’s unexpected. Usually, what happens is baby goes to bed and then is found by parents or caregivers at a later point and has passed away.

Between 2008 and 2016, of the 495 babies who did die from SUDI, 303 of those were Māori babies. Because of the sudden nature of these deaths, they were all referred to the coroners. For these families, it’s actually not routine; it’s a completely devastating process, to wake up and find your baby’s passed away, to not understand what’s happened, and then to turn up and have the police coming into your home and conducting what they think it is a routine investigation but asking some questions which are particularly traumatising for families. In that context, for families to not be able to stay with the baby’s body right through the process, it can make a bad situation worse.

I just want to read some of the comments from Whakawhetū, who’s the Māori sudden infant death syndrome prevention group—one of the groups that presented a submission to the select committee. They were talking about their experiences with families in this situation, and what they said is “Many families are often completely unaware or unable to comprehend what has happened to their pēpi. Additionally, many of these whānau are younger parents who feel they have already been judged as a result of them being simply, younger parents.” They went on to say, “Given the fact that Māori are significantly younger parents, the system must ensure these parents and whānau are provided with even more support and advice that is readily available, [and it’s] accessible and appropriate [so that] should they have to deal with [this] unfortunate situation … whether [it be] from SUDI or [for another cause].” So we really need to have a duty of care for families in this situation.

So what this bill does is it amends section 26 of the Act to require the coroner, when determining whether someone should stay with the body, to consider tikanga Māori and the expectations of other cultures. Currently, the Act doesn’t require the coroner to take these factors into account, but they do have the discretion to do so. In current practice, coroners do work with whānau to work out what the best practice is. What this bill, however, does, in the context of an increasingly multicultural society but also from a Treaty perspective, is it codifies best practice. I therefore commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

HARETE HIPANGO (National—Whanganui): I rise to take a brief call on this first reading of the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill. This bill requires lively engagement and debate on what is a deadly serious piece of proposed legislation. This bill, should it continue to sustain life and passage into law, will require more than Royal assent; it will require many Government cents and dollars and responsible sentiment and sensitivities to ensure that the intent of the amendment is met and satisfied. In other words, intent is all well and good. What is required to the amendment, and not simply discretionary, is the resourcing to enable and satisfy the intent giving an extended life to the efficacy of this amendment bill.

Whenever I stand to address this House, I shall, as a matter of practice, endeavour to reference that upon which I speak to those whom I know or am aware have another or greater knowledge base or experience and skill. So I stand and speak this evening premised on not only my own personal and professional experiences but those of my coronial colleagues, and when I say coronial colleagues—people I practised law with, but they have advanced and been elevated to the status of coroner, whilst I’ve still practised as a lawyer. Thus I speak and address this House in my capacity not only as National MP for Whanganui and a member of the Māori Affairs Committee, but also as mana w’enua, Māori of Whanganui, with cultural tikanga protocols to adhere to in the context of that which I am experiencing.

I also speak as a former lawyer and district health board governor with relationships to the police, iwi liaison personnel dealing with deceased persons and whānau, the coroner, the Coronial Services of New Zealand, health professionals, funeral directors, community leaders, and, most importantly, whānau of the deceased person. I also speak from my own personal experience, stricken with the death of loved ones and the desire to have immediate, hands-on contact with and access to our deceased person, tūpāpaku, and finding that compliance with the law necessarily restricts that. But in terms of that necessary intervention, there are ways of minimising the most harrowing, sorrowful, anguished moments in our life, and this amendment will enable that to occur.

The amendment to the law will aid in easing the passage of the deceased, the tūpāpaku, through the legal process, acknowledging and heeding cultural customs and practices in a timely and culturally appropriate sensitive-management way of releasing the body back to the whānau, but bearing in mind also from an evidential basis—I say as a lawyer—the importance, where there is a suspicious and sudden death, not to compromise the validity of the necessary evidence that’s required. Other members in this House have spoken about the inquiry into the whānau access, and particularly those of my colleagues who sat on the Māori Affairs Committee.

I wish to connect with you in the way that I have had a personal, enduring, collegial friendship and association with the now Deputy Chief Coroner, Brandt Shortland. Over the years and the times that we have reconnected, he’s talked about his duty and responsibility. He’s been a practising lawyer, like me, for 30 years, although he advanced into the coronial service of 11 years’ practice, and more recently has been New Zealand’s Deputy Chief Coroner for almost 3 years, the only Māori to ascend to this level of responsibility. Deputy Chief Coroner Shortland was one of the 27 submitters to the Māori Affairs Committee, and he’s spoken about his experiences not only as a coroner but as a Māori coroner navigating the relationships between whānau, and also many other ethnic groupings, associated with the sudden, unexpected death of their loved one. He has talked about the importance of building relationships of trust with those engaging with all those professional bodies and groupings that I spoke about, but, more importantly, the whānau relationships.

Time is of the essence. When this bill takes its passage to the second reading, I will talk further around the importance of resourcing this amendment, which to date has been discretionary. Also, my friend has indicated that coroners for many years, although not required to, have actually been implementing the practice that will be requisite under this legislation. I sense the cross-party support that’s in the House this evening. I sense that there will be many cents of the Government required to sustain this in terms of the resourcing and implementation of it. And, in conclusion, I commend that the bill is kept alive and that the body of it is given access and passage to the select committee. I commend this bill to the House. Kia ora.

JAN TINETTI (Labour): I am privileged to stand here to take a call on the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill. When I first saw, earlier this evening, that I was going to be taking a call on this bill, I wondered very hard about this particular topic, but the more I’ve researched into it over the last couple of hours the more privileged I feel to be actually standing here in front of the House talking about this particular bill. I’d like to thank the Māori Affairs Committee of the 51st Parliament for the work that they did in their inquiry into whānau access and into management of tūpāpaku. I’m almost embarrassed to say that word now that Marama’s said that it’s the most difficult word. I thought, “Oh, am I going to be able to get that out?” But a big thankyou to the submitters and the people that told their stories, because it is those stories that have helped form this bill and the importance of this bill. Thanks to the Hon Andrew Little for bringing this bill in front of the House.

The reason that I feel very privileged to be here talking to this particular piece of legislation is that it is bills such as this that help cultures understand, and it helps, particularly, other cultures understand Te Ao Māori. I think in this country that that is incredibly, incredibly, critically important, and becoming more so. The more we are able to stand here and talk about such practices, and such practices as the tikanga around death in Te Ao Māori, the more normal it becomes for all cultures.

I want to tell a couple of stories of my own experience around death and how working with Te Ao Māori and within Te Ao Māori completely changed the way that I saw that, saw death in the world. I was scared of death and I was scared of dead bodies for a long, long time. I remember as a preschooler seeing my first body, of my great-grandmother, and being really scared going into the funeral home, and nobody putting me at ease in that situation. That sense stayed with me for a long, long time, right through into my adulthood. I lost both my parents fairly soon, fairly young. I was in my early 20s when my parents passed, and I remember vividly—I was teaching in Invercargill at the time when I got news that my father had passed very suddenly, and I will never, ever forget when I got home to Christchurch the devastation of my mother. But part of that devastation was around the fact that she had no idea where my father was, what was happening to him, or who he was in care of at that particular time. Because it was a sudden death, there had been an autopsy, and my mother had no understanding of what was happening. That was a very tragic time for the family. It was harrowing, not only for the fact that we were wondering what was happening to Dad, as well, but for the fact that we were having to work through with Mum in that particular process.

Those feelings of negativity and the negativity around that whole natural part of life—because that’s what death is, a natural part of life—stayed with me for quite some time. But then, as I said, I was very privileged to work within Te Ao Māori in the last school that I was working at. Here was a school who had a demographic of—at one stage over 95 percent of the population were Māori. In that time I learnt so much about the process of death. I almost say this with apology, because I see it through a lens still as a Pākehā and still as the greatest learner, so I’m still looking at it from the outside, but I’m understanding the tikanga so much better, and it’s helped my understanding of death, as well. And that’s what Te Ao Māori does. The tikanga helps make sense for everyone.

Dansey talks about Māori understanding death and dying within a specific cultural context in which post-mortems remain a foreign and terrible act for Māori and that understanding. But for Māori, death is not an instantaneous event but a process of becoming, and that was the part for me that earlier on in my journey of understanding I never understood. That’s where my cultural outlook was very much a European, English outlook on life. I never understood that it was a process of becoming. So processes for Māori, and I guess for any culture—and that’s what I like about this bill: we’re not just talking about Te Ao Māori. That’s where this came from, but we’re talking about all cultures—all cultures—being respected. Processes such as the post-mortem can actually disrupt the wairua of the deceased, causing it to become lost.

Now, I’ve sat with parents of children that I’ve taught whose older children—there’s one particular story. An older son passed very, very suddenly. This is a few years ago, and this parent did not experience the best practices that we’re seeing happening with our wonderful coroners now. This particular parent was separated from her son, from the tūpāpaku, and couldn’t be with him during that time. I remember her telling me that she felt that his wairua was becoming lost because they were not able to be there with him through the whole process. The observance of tikanga and performance of required rituals and practices such as sitting with the dead are absolutely critically important to those people. And to that particular mum, it was absolutely critical that she stayed, or somebody stayed, with her boy the whole time. The fact that that was taken from her was a terrible wrench to her, but also part of her cultural understanding that her boy’s wairua was completely lost.

This is where this bill is really, really important, because we are able to have those conversations. This is what’s so strong about what we’re doing here. Just changing the law allows people the opportunity to speak about the practice, to speak about the cultural norms, and to speak about what it is important to the cultures, and, hopefully, the experiences that that mother found during that time will never happen again, because we here are tonight, starting to make that change to that law so that we’re given permission to have the conversations that all people of all cultures will understand.

We’ve heard here tonight that the bill enshrines good practice. We’ve heard that it codifies current practice, but we also know that the good practice is current, but it’s not everybody. We need to overcome the fact that not all of the coroners are showing good practice. It’s only a minimum, but we need to overcome that minimum as well.

In conclusion, I am thoroughly honoured to be standing here tonight. I thoroughly commend this bill to the House, but I’d like to finish with this quote from Selket, Glover and Palmer, who in 2014 said this, “At the heart of these discussions are the observations that such practices [in the coronary process] are embedded within a Western scientific approach; that these values are often at odds with Māori cultural norms; and that the legal infrastructure typically favours Western science over Māori values.” Well, tonight, I’m really proud to say that we’re overcoming that legal infrastructure that typically favours Western science. We’re giving value to our Māori tikanga, and we’re holding it up there, saying this is important and we honour and value you as Māori. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

MAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Tonight we’ve heard many people pay tribute to the Māori Affairs Committee—and I would like to add my voice to those people—who initiated this inquiry two years ago. That’s led us to a recommendation and that recommendation was for a change to the coronial system, and that has us here tonight, discussing the Coroners (Access to Body of Dead Person) Amendment Bill in its first reading. I know that for people on those select committees, it is a very trying time to be hearing heartfelt submissions, and it’s never easy. I’ve been involved in select committees where we have had those heartfelt submissions being presented, and it is hard, so I do acknowledge the time and the compassion that was shown to those submitters and the hearing that they got.

As we’ve also heard tonight, over 6,000 deaths are referred to the coroner each year, but, currently, there is no requirement for the coroner to take those cultural considerations into account. This bill does now change those discretionary objectives of the coroner and makes it a requirement that he must determine whether a person should be allowed to remain with the body, and also to consider the tikanga Māori and the expectations of other cultures.

At the most emotional and traumatic time for a family, it is totally appropriate that they have the ability to stay with the deceased and carry out traditional activities. In the processes of our diverse cultural nation with our many cultures, our religions, our ethnicities, it’s a vital part of the grieving and the healing at this difficult time. Even though this is a very small bill—it contains only four clauses and there’s a total of only four lines of text—it will make a difference to those people who are involved with the coronial system.

I have to pay tribute to Mark Patterson on the other side of the House. I sat down just in time to see him do his interpretive dance to the dead, which was quite entertaining in the House tonight.

I do support this bill in its first reading through to select committee and I have pleasure in commending it to the House. Thank you.

GREG O’CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): Tax and death: the two certainties in life—and, of course, none of us are going to escape the latter. It’s how we deal with that death that really determines so much about how we are judged as a society. This is a very simple bill, as many of the speakers have spoken about, but the simplicity of the bill underlies just how important it is to get it right at this most vital time. One thing that has been somewhat overlooked in the debate is the why.

When you’re a young police officer, as I once was, far too many years ago, one thing you learn on beginning is that those things that may have attracted you into the police—the fast car chases or the other things that appear nightly on our TV screens—it’s not about that at all. It’s about dealing with people. In fact, the most important thing is dealing with sudden deaths. That, many have spoken about tonight. The understanding—we talk about the coroner—as to why we actually have that percentage of around 20 to 30 percent of deaths that, unfortunately, a medical practitioner does not offer a certificate as to cause. When you’re a young police officer and you turn up, the thing that you always hope for is that you will get from a GP a certificate as to cause of death. Of course, what that means is that the authorities—from the coroner and police—are no longer involved, and the body can then be handed over to the family, and then all those matters that we’ve spoken of tonight, all the needs, the cultural needs, can be met.

However, what this bill is about is those other cases that become coronial cases. Now, it’s often not quite understood what the role of the coroner is. Essentially, the role of the coroner is to establish when, where, how, and why that death occurred. Obviously, these are all things that are covered by the certificate as to cause, which means that the attending practitioner has seen—there are stipulations here: they need to have seen them in a recent period of time and be prepared to actually execute that certificate as to cause. However, establishing the circumstances of the death—ensuring that that when, where, why, and how are ascertained—is where the aggravation, frustration, and other emotions of the family become involved.

Certainly, one of the things you learn when you start dealing with these sudden deaths is that your job is to maintain that balance, and that balance is between the requirements of the coroner to establish those very things that I’ve discussed—which he or she must, because that is their job; that is their task—and the needs of the family.

One learns very early in the piece that it’s not the easiest thing to do, certainly—turning up at a family home where a life has just been turned on its head as a result of the death, in what does become something of a form-filling exercise. At the end of it, the body is actually removed—right in the middle of all this emotion, the body is removed. And that is in the case where there, on the surface of it, don’t appear to be any suspicious circumstances, but, of course, again, the role of those attending police officers and those first attending is to ensure, in fact, what they see is actually what has occurred.

The ABC of policing is to accept nothing, believe no one, and corroborate everything, because there have been many cases—and many, I’m sure, have resulted in criticism and questions in this House—where, subsequently, those that have been, what we say, written off as a sudden death did turn out to be the result of foul play. And that is why we come to the absolute need to ensure that we get that balance right, while it is incredibly important, as all speakers have touched on tonight, to make sure that the cultural requirements, the cultural necessities, and just the cultural deserves of those we’re dealing with are actually met.

So when we say, “the when”, I think of my own personal experience of the starkness of perhaps the different culture in the way we deal with death. There was a case I was involved in in Castlepoint, when I was working in the Wairarapa, where a body was discovered during the weekend. It would appear it was a mother and daughter, and it certainly would appear that that body had been a result of an incident that had occurred post-European times—just, in fact, in the last 30 or 40 years. So it was wound up. We had basically, essentially, the beginnings of a homicide inquiry, until relatively early in the piece it was discovered, or was ascertained, that it was pre-European—the body was pre-European. Of course, at that stage, there was clearly no—the cause of death was natural. At that stage, of course, a whole new cultural norm came in.

I remember being particularly impressed with how quickly the word got around and that, in fact, within the culture and with the memory of the local iwi, they did remember and were able to place this particular person who we’d found. And instead of this body being removed in a, say, European and a very controlled way, which it would have been to preserve the evidence, of course, it was a very different way in which it was treated. And that was a very stark reminder to me of the different way things are dealt with.

Of course, there is also establishing where the death had occurred. And this again is why it’s really incredibly important that that work is done at the time, because often bodies are moved, particularly where there are suspicious circumstances. So, again, it’s important to establish the “where”—what occurred and where it is—and that when we’re reporting back the coroner we have got it right.

Again, at the risk of standing here telling war stories, I recall another case where I was involved where bodies—it was, again, a Sunday afternoon—a number of bodies, kept turning up in the river, and it started out looking incredibly suspicious as to what had happened. We were very quickly able to go back and establish that it was a tragedy: a father and two sons were actually crossing a river when there had been a cloudburst and a flash flood through this river, which had, tragically, carried them away. So it was something that on the surface of it—in fact, because of the river, the force of the river, two of the three of them had ended up losing all their clothing—was going to take a lot of explanation, but by reconstructing and being able to work out exactly where things occurred, we were able to go back to the coroner.

Again, all these things happened with grieving families watching—making sure that we treated them with a sensitivity but, again, making sure that we got the details necessary. If you look at the bill, that is why the balance is right in making sure we do treat it with cultural sensitivity.

Of course, how it occurred—this is the crux of why—[Bell rung] I’m only at three war stories and I’m already near at the end of my time. But how this occurred, again, is exactly why the crux of this bill—so why the coroner still must be involved. The coroner must with all confidence be able to, at the end of this exercise, ascertain exactly what did occur—of course, with the why, which is the motive.

In fact, the situation has become more complicated with the DNA. In fact, now there’s a necessity to ensure there’s absolutely no chance that there will be any contamination of the body in any other way. Actually, what also adds on to, I suppose, the family who may be watching is not only police officers turning up but turning up the way they are clad, where there’s no chance of any contamination of any more DNA, which, again, adds to that.

This legislation even becomes more relevant to actually enshrine this in legislation, to ensure that as the advances in science, as the way we treat—particularly, again, I’m referring always to coroner’s cases, but mostly to those cases of suspicious death. It becomes more relevant to ensure that in those cases, as we require more and more, shall we say, preservation of the scene, we do take note of the absolute necessity to keep the cultural requirements and the family requirements intact.

So I do commend this bill to the House, and I believe it is a bill that has its time. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Bill read a first time.

Bill referred to the Māori Affairs Committee.

Bills

Privacy Bill

First Reading

Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): I move, That the Privacy Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Justice Committee to consider the bill.

The purpose of this bill—

Hon Christopher Finlayson: Well done on moving the motion.

Hon ANDREW LITTLE: I’d be tempted to sit down now, but I know Mr Finlayson will have much to contribute to this very important debate, since this bill goes back to its initial preparation in 2012, which was only six years ago.

The purpose of the bill is to promote and protect people’s privacy—that’s self-evident—and to give them confidence that their personal information is properly protected. The Privacy Act, the current one, was enacted 25 years ago. Since then, information technology has revolutionised how we deal with personal information. We are collecting, storing, and disclosing more personal information than ever before, using social media, e-commerce, interconnected devices, cloud storage, and other new technologies—all familiar to Mr Finlayson.

Nowadays, personal information can be easily distributed around the world and large quantities of data are readily stored, retrieved, and disclosed. This creates new challenges for protecting personal information. A regime that is focused on early identification and prevention of privacy risks, rather than after-the-fact remedies, is required. In 2011, the Law Commission called for the Privacy Act to be repealed and replaced with a modernised law. This Privacy Bill largely achieves that purpose. It will strengthen privacy protections and better address the challenges of the digital age. It also modernises the language of the Act to make it more accessible.

As the Law Commission suggested, the Privacy Bill retains the existing Act’s 12 information privacy principles—or IPPs, as they are apparently known. The IPPs apply to public- and private-sector agencies. They provide a framework for handling personal information at all points of its life cycle, from collection to destruction. They provide important protections, such as a right for people to access and correct personal information about themselves, and a requirement for agencies to collect personal information from the person concerned directly. Agencies also must ensure there are reasonable safeguards against loss, misuse, or disclosure of personal information, and they must not use or disclose personal information for purposes other than for which it was collected. The Privacy Bill introduces new mechanisms to promote early intervention and risk management by agencies, rather than relying on people making complaints after a privacy breach has already happened. The bill’s reforms will also enhance the role of the Privacy Commissioner.

One of the key reforms in the Privacy Bill is a new requirement for agencies to report privacy breaches. A privacy breach is any unauthorised access to or disclosure, loss, or destruction of personal information. It can also include a ransomware attack. Privacy breaches that pose a risk of harm to people must be notified to affected individuals and to the Privacy Commissioner. There are some exceptions to the requirement to notify people about privacy breaches, such as when this would prejudice New Zealand’s security, prejudice the maintenance of law, or endanger someone’s safety.

Privacy breaches can affect people significantly. It’s important people are aware of what has happened to their personal information so they can take steps to prevent any harm. Requiring agencies to notify affected people and the Privacy Commissioner of privacy breaches brings New Zealand law into the digital era and aligns it with overseas best practice.

The Privacy Bill also gives the Privacy Commissioner new powers. It allows the commissioner to issue compliance notices, which will require an agency to do something or stop doing something in accordance with the bill. For example, if an agency frequently experiences notifiable privacy breaches without taking any steps to change their practice, the commissioner will be able to issue a compliance notice to require them to act. This power will enable the commissioner to take more proactive steps to address privacy concerns. Currently, compliance relies on an individual bringing a complaint, rather than allowing the commissioner to address systemic privacy risks and repeated breaches. Issuing compliance notices will fill the gap in the current legislation.

The Privacy Commissioner will also be given the power to make access directions requiring agencies to provide people with access to personal information held about them. Currently, the commissioner can only mediate and make recommendations regarding access. This will streamline the existing complaints resolution process so that people can access their personal information quickly.

In the digital age, personal information can be easily distributed around the world. We are all aware of the adage—and I paraphrase it now—that lies in: social media can be halfway around the world while truth is still strapping its shoes on. To strengthen privacy protections, New Zealand agencies will now be accountable for ensuring that acceptable safeguards will apply to personal information that is sent overseas. Cross-border disclosures of personal information can generally be made if the information is subject to comparable privacy protections overseas as apply in New Zealand, or the person concerned consents to the disclosure.

The bill also clarifies an agency’s obligations when they send the personal information offshore for storage or processing. It provides that personal information is still treated as being held by a New Zealand agency when it is held by another agency for storage or processing. This is the case, even if that other agency is outside New Zealand or holds the information offshore.

The bill enhances the Privacy Commissioner’s existing investigation powers by allowing him or her to limit the time frame for an agency to comply with a requirement to provide information and by increasing the penalty for non-compliance. Furthermore, it would be an offence to mislead an agency and to destroy documents containing personal information where a request has been made for it. The maximum penalty is a fine of up to $10,000.

Over the last few years, international privacy frameworks have been updated to reflect developments. The OECD privacy guidelines, which our Privacy Act gives effect to, were updated in 2013 to include new accountability mechanisms such as requiring data breach notifications. The European Union has also passed a new general data protection regulation—or the GDPR—which includes similar new privacy protections. The GDPR comes into force in May this year. New Zealand is one of the few countries in the world to have obtained adequacy status with the EU’s privacy law. This means that EU countries can provide personal information to New Zealand for processing without needing to provide extra privacy safeguards. The reforms in the Privacy Bill will better align New Zealand’s law with the GDPR and the OECD privacy guidelines. This will assist New Zealand’s case for maintaining its adequacy status.

In an increasingly digital and data-rich society, the measures in place to protect people’s privacy interests are vitally important. By maintaining the flexible, principles-based framework of the current Act and making key reforms, the Privacy Bill will ensure that our privacy law is up to date, accessible, and has the right safeguards to protect people’s privacy in the digital age.

The bill is not perfect, and even though it had been languishing around for the best part of five or six years and more work could have been done on it, I felt that it was important to bring the bill to the House now so that there will be plenty of opportunity to change and to improve it. The select committee process is very important, and I urge all New Zealanders with an interest in privacy as an issue to come forward and to have their say on the bill, and let’s make this a more perfect piece of legislation to cover this very vital and important area. The new privacy protections that it provides are important, and it will be important for the bill to have maximum scrutiny, not just from members of this House but from all citizens as it works its way through. On that note, I commend this bill to the House.

Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (National): I feel it’s appropriate to begin by acknowledging Wahine day. Most people in the House won’t probably believe this, but I was alive in 1968. I couldn’t go to St Benedict’s School that day because of the weather, but I did go round to Seatoun Heights, and—I think I was probably the only person in the House who actually did this—looked down on that beautiful ship after she had foundered in front of Steeple Rock, and looked with horror on the news that night as we learnt that 53 people had died. It was a dreadful day in the history of New Zealand, which is why it was appropriate that the Minister of Transport moved a motion in the House earlier today.

I agree with most of what the Minister of Justice has said. Obviously, I don’t agree with the partisan sniping about delay but I agree that this is very important legislation and it is ripe for review. I go to 1993, when the first Privacy Act was passed—1993 was an interesting year. Jim Bolger was Prime Minister of our great country. Mike Moore was Leader of the Opposition. Helen Clark knifed him a couple of months later. And, of course, bearing in mind that some things change and other things never change, guess who was a failed Minister at that time? None other than Mr Peters. He had been booted out of Mr Bolger’s Cabinet for incompetence toward the end of 1991, and was languishing on the backbenches. As I say, some things change and some things never change.

But the 1993 Privacy Act was a very—

Hon Tracey Martin: Is there anything to do with the bill at all? Got any information about it at all?

Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: I hear “Eliza Doolittle” over there coming to the aid of Mr Peters, and nothing surprises me. But the 1993 Act was passed, and it really was very important legislation because it introduced, for the first time, certain key privacy principles. It established the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, and I acknowledge at once the current commissioner, John Edwards, who I think is doing a very good job. In my dealings with him when I was Minister in charge of the intelligence services—

Hon Andrew Little: He comes from New Plymouth—of course he does.

Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: —which portfolio the Minister of Justice is now holding with great distinction—I found Mr Edwards excellent to deal with when it came to a review of the intelligence legislation.

But the Act, as the Minister said, has been operating for 25 years, and in that time, we have seen the enormous exponential growth in the internet—the rise of the digital economy—and that has simply transformed Government and, as the Minister said, the use of private information.

That is why, 25 years on, it is entirely right and proper that this House should be reviewing this legislation and doing so very carefully indeed. That is why the previous Government asked the Law Commission to review the privacy legislation. In 2011, the Law Commission published its excellent report and suggested that what needed to happen was modernisation of the legislation and replacement by legislation that reflects the fact that we live in a completely different age from the age we were living in, when Mr Peters was the failed Minister and the legislation was first passed, in 1993.

Hon Tracey Martin: Oh, you just hate the fact that he’s the Deputy Prime Minister, don’t you?

Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: Oh, there she’s at it again. She is such a loyal little Chihuahua. New technologies have rapidly advanced the type, the quality, and the quantity of personal information available to Governments and businesses, and so I think this bill is—

Hon Tracey Martin: We’ll miss you—we’ll miss you!

Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: Oh, what is she saying? I don’t know what she’s had for dinner, but she’s certainly weirder than usual tonight.

This bill is going to go some way to modernising our privacy legislation and will reflect these technological changes. What I like about this bill is that, by and large, it implements most of the Law Commission’s recommendations, along with some additional recommendations from the Privacy Commissioner’s reports. So I agree with the Minister that the best thing we can do is get this away to the select committee, and it’s going to require a very careful analysis.

For example, I’m very interested in the information privacy principles. I think it’s very important that we take a good look at those and also that we look at the complaints system, because this is a hugely significant area and growing faster than most of us think. In fact, I can recall some years ago reading a report—I think it was produced by Shell—which said that one of the issues that societies around the world are going to have to consider over the next 15 to 20 years is actually the death of privacy and how we cope with that. So this is not some kind of incidental piece of legislation; it’s extremely important, and that is why it deserves very, very careful review.

I want to commend the previous Minister of Justice, Amy Adams, who supported these reforms with her customary energy and diligence. A lot of work was done by the previous Government between 2014 and 2017 getting this legislation prepared, and it’s a tribute to Ms Adams that the current Minister of Justice has, basically, introduced her work. So, in a sense, it’s really yet another piece of National Party legislation which has been introduced.

Hon Andrew Little: That you did nothing about.

Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: And I hear the—

Hon Andrew Little: Six years—six years!

Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: Well, takes a lot of time to get these things right, and, as L.V. Martin used to say, it’s the putting right that counts. Privacy reform was a huge priority of the previous Government and it was a very large and comprehensive piece of work—

Hon Chris Hipkins: So why didn’t you finish it?

Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: —which was undertaken by the Government, and I have to say, in answer to Mr Hipkins’ unpleasant and inappropriate comments, that as a result of the hard work that was done we’re now in a position where Mr Little can introduce this legislation.

Now, I think there are some substantial parts of work that need to be reviewed. I’d like to know, for example, how the reforms as to how the approved information-sharing agreement mechanisms work and whether or not we can improve on those—but I think the essence of this legislation is to update the 1993 legislation, recognising the new age that we are in and making sure that the legislation balances very strong and effective privacy provisions or protections for individuals with sensible use of data and data sharing by agencies. That was an issue that has come up time and time again: can agencies of the Crown share information; and, if so, on what sorts of terms? Again, that’s an issue that has come up in my time as Minister in charge of the intelligence agencies. I’m sure Mr Little would understand that. So, yes, I agree with Mr Little. It’s entirely appropriate for the legislation to go to the select committee. I hope that there will be good submissions on it and substantial submissions on it.

The select committee, under the excellent chairmanship of Mr Huo, is looking at the trusts bill at the moment. I have to say, one of the disappointments of the work that we’re doing is that there aren’t enough submissions from the law firms. I know the Law Society and some firms have made submissions, but I would have thought on the issue of trusts there would have been more submissions from the legal profession. I think this is a God-given opportunity now for a broad range of submitters—not just law firms but companies and other groups—to make submissions on the Privacy Bill.

As the Minister said, it’s a very good piece of work, but the submissions process will, hopefully, improve it, and so the sooner it gets away to the select committee, the better. We support this legislation and I commend it to the House.

Hon CLARE CURRAN (Minister of Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. It’s with huge relief that I stand tonight to talk to this reform of the Privacy Act 1993, as recommended by the Law Commission’s 2011 review of this Act. It’s with huge relief that I stand and congratulate the current Minister of Justice, the Hon Andrew Little, who has finally done what no justice Minister under the previous National Government could do or would do, introducing much-needed privacy reforms. Nine years they were in power—nine years. This review of the Privacy Act was completed by the Law Commission in 2011—three justice Ministers, no privacy reforms under the whole of their nine years.

It is a hallmark of this Government that it’s introduced this legislation as a priority. As the Minister mentioned, it’s not perfect; it still needs more work. Whether that work can be completely done in the select committee or whether it will need another iteration down the track, at least it’s in the Parliament, it will go to select committee, and it will get passed. It is a huge relief. It is much needed for our country. Privacy reforms are utterly, utterly fundamental to a healthy, functioning democracy.

I actually want to put the record straight on the time line around this piece of legislation: 25 years since its inception in 1993; 12 years actually, in 2006, since the Law Commission was asked by the previous Labour Government to undertake a review of the legislation; seven years since that report was released by the Law Commission; six years since that report was tabled in Parliament by the then Minister of Justice, Simon Power; four years since the then next Minister of Justice, Judith Collins, finally issued a press release, saying that there would be some reform—

Michael Wood: Press releases?

Hon CLARE CURRAN: —a press release, indeed, in 2014 just before the 2014 election—of the Privacy Act; and then silence, a deadly silence.

What happened in the interim? Well, what happened in the interim was that there were privacy breaches. There was a raft of privacy breaches, whether it was the Ministry of Social Development, ACC, district health boards—numerous other Government departments, including the Ministry of Justice, where there were privacy breaches, where public confidence in the Government’s ability to manage public data had sunk to an all-time low—no privacy reforms.

What else happened during that time? There was reform to our security legislation: the Search and Surveillance Act, the Government Communications Security Bureau Act, and the TICSA Act, which is the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Act. All of those things had a place, and there was a lot of public debate, but alongside that needed to go privacy law reform so that citizens would feel as if their rights were being protected, that their data and their ability to have their own personal information have a value put on it by the then Government—but no; silence. That’s what happened. That is the history of this piece of legislation, and it is a shameful history.

Thankfully, this Government is putting it right. We are putting into the select committee a piece of legislation that has a key purpose, to promote and protect people’s privacy and to give the Privacy Commissioner a stronger role. Obviously, it’s going to do a lot of other things as well, but these things are critical, and they’re much overdue. While this legislation may not go far enough, it will have the opportunity to be improved at select committee and there can be more work done on the modernisation, taking things forward in 2018—forward—which is work that this Government is undertaking.

Technology has revolutionised the way that we disclose, share, store, and release information. That revolution is only going to increase, and by their very nature, revolutions cause momentous disruption. The digital revolution that has occurred—and if you look back over, particularly, those last seven years, much has changed, but the protection of people’s privacy has not been modernised, has not had a value put on it, and that is why this is so important.

Having the individual and the importance of their personal data as the key purpose of this new Act is a very powerful statement for our citizens. It sends a clear message that this Government sees people as central to the business of Government, and keeping them safe is the point of the work that we’re doing.

The Privacy Act has historically sought to protect people’s privacy while allowing information use by legitimate users such as Government and businesses. But having people’s trust is vital for a democracy, and a key part of that trust is people knowing that the information that they provide to Government is being kept safe and being used for legitimate purposes and that there is a framework around that to deal with breaches, for there to be mandatory disclosure of breaches, and for there to be enforcement by our Privacy Commissioner when those rules are not being upheld. That, finally, is what this reform of this legislation is going to do.

People also have rights over their data. They should be informed when, how, and by whom their data is being collected and used, and that includes telling people when artificial intelligence or algorithms are making decisions on their data. This is a key piece of work that needs to be looked at closely in select committee. If there is a need for more reforms around this, this should occur as soon as possible. This Government is looking into doing this work.

Ensuring that we’ve got a robust digital rights framework is one of my priorities as the Minister for Government Digital Services and the Associate Minister of State Services (Open Government). That is a piece of work that is being done in parallel with this legislation, along with six other countries, the Digital 7 countries, around looking at a digital rights framework, which will take this privacy reform even further, to modernise it and to give the public of New Zealand comfort that we consider that their human rights should be considered in a digital context and should be valued.

This is a world-leading piece of work that is being undertaken. It will provide further reforms around our privacy regime, and it’s something that we can be proud of. This is a much-needed, long-overdue piece of legislation. It’s something that I’m very proud to be standing and talking to finally, after having stood on the other side for nine years calling for it, along with many others in civil society and along with the Privacy Commissioners that have been active in the last 10 years. It goes back to a previous Labour Government that instituted a review of the primary piece of legislation in 2006. It’s taken 12 years to get to this point—12 years. Why is it that that previous Government was silent on privacy law reform? Why is it that they couldn’t get it to the House? I thank them tonight for their support to select committee. I hope that the Justice Committee will treat this piece of legislation with the rigour that it deserves and that it does receive full support across the House. I commend this bill to the House.

Hon MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. I rise with pleasure to speak to this first reading of the Privacy Bill. This Privacy Bill, of course, repeals and replaces a now outdated piece of legislation, the Privacy Act 1993. It did form a very large piece of work which was undertaken by the former justice Minister, Amy Adams. Privacy reform was something that she took very seriously, and this is a very significant piece of work that has taken a long time to get to this place.

That is why, even by the Government’s standards, it is a little curious to hear their chorus of amazement that it’s taken this long. Things take time, as they’re just starting to find out, because, of course, they’ve done no work in nine years, not thinking they’d ever be in Government. They haven’t got very much—although, of course, there was that little four-line bill earlier that they churned out. But they’re not capable of putting the level of work and intellectual rigour into a piece of legislation like this.

So, naturally, National will be supporting the bill because we did all the work on it.

Hon Tracey Martin: Has this person actually read it?

Hon MAGGIE BARRY: There’s that Chihuahua again. There might be a little bit of water in the pipes; shall we call in the maintenance people? There’s an unfortunate yapping sound, which we will just ignore—nothing very private about that member’s mental health issues.

So we support the Privacy Bill because this is a piece of legislation that after 25 years—and, as other speakers have noted, the technological advances have been extraordinary. We needed to get up to date with what was happening.

I recall a piece of work, I suppose it was: Hosking v Runting. That was where the tort of privacy was first developed in the way that we’ve come to understand it now. In those days, in the 1990s, breaches of privacy and issues around privacy were more to do with individuals, because that was the nature of the way we used to operate as a country. These days, of course, with the huge technological advances, which most of us enjoy and benefit from on a daily basis, there is now a large amount of personal data that can be stored and transmitted digitally. We need look no further than today, seeing Zuckerberg of Facebook come before committees and explain about Cambridge Analytica.

Our New Zealand Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards, has already taken Facebook to task for breaching our Privacy Act, and I’m really pleased to see enshrined in this legislation that the Privacy Commissioner will have more additional powers than they have currently. So binding decisions, for example, on access requests will be there. At the moment, the process is clunky: the Privacy Commissioner has to refer complaints to the tribunal; it takes a long time. We need to be nimble; we need to move quickly. I mean, if an agency refuses an individual’s request to access their personal information, then, again, the Privacy Commissioner will be able to direct the agency to make that information available.

I think strengthening the Privacy Commissioner’s information-gathering powers is extremely important and, I think, will serve democracy very well. So those additional powers are a very good thing. I think, too, that when we look at the range of activities that this particular piece of legislation, which was widely consulted on—something like 80 submissions.

Of course, there are disappointments. It is disappointing and bewildering, actually, to see why the Government has removed some of the very good work that Amy Adams and the team put into it, in the last Government, around reforms to how the approved information sharing agreement operates. The agreement has needed modernising for some time. It ought to be in this bill because enforcement information—who owns it, what informs it, and how accessible it is are all issues that we need to grapple with. Perhaps this is part of their cunning ploy to get more legislation of a small and tailored nature to pad out their extremely thin legislative programme.

This bill has a number of disappointments that are not included that have come out of the Privacy Commissioner’s February last year report on the Privacy Act, including increasing the fines to up to $1 million, the issues around the data portability, compliance monitoring, and controls on the re-identification of data, which is all part of, I suppose, trying to find out exactly where it goes, because people are very clever indeed about hiding their traces. Adjustments to existing criminal offences—this also has been left out—and reforming the public register on privacy principles. So, unfortunately, this Government has not quite gone all the way. That’s what they do, I guess—we’ll probably need to get used to that—but at least they’ve made some effort, and that builds on the great work by Amy Adams in the last Government. It is with pleasure that I commend this bill to the House.

DARROCH BALL (NZ First): Madam Deputy Speaker, it’s a pleasure to rise on behalf of New Zealand First in support of this Privacy Bill. It’s always a pleasure to rise after the Hon Maggie Barry, because anyone who does always sounds very, very good.

Hon Maggie Barry: Try harder.

DARROCH BALL: There’s the reaction I was after—there’s the reaction I was after. Apparently, as Maggie Barry said, Amy Adams has been working very, very hard on this bill for the last six years and couldn’t get it through to this House. You know, it’s—

Hon Maggie Barry: That’s because we were busy with other stuff.

DARROCH BALL: Well, I was going to say it surprised me, but it doesn’t surprise me that, after six months, all of a sudden the National Party decides to figure everything out. They’ve got all the answers to crime, because now crime’s an issue; they’ve got all the answers to youth crime, because now youth crime’s an issue—it wasn’t for the last nine years. They’ve got a solution to all the prison number problems, too, because that wasn’t a problem over the last nine years, and now they’ve got a solution to the Privacy Act. Now they’ve got a solution to the Privacy Act that they said they’d been working very hard on for the last six years. Well, perhaps the Hon Amy Adams was working hard, or perhaps she was hardly working—I don’t know.

Chris Bishop: Urgh!

DARROCH BALL: Did you like that one, Mr Bishop?

Look, I’d like to thank the current Minister, Andrew Little, for bringing this piece of legislation through to the House finally. His speech was quite detailed in its outline of the process and the intent of what this bill is trying to achieve, and the common-sense reasons why.

I’d just like to reiterate a few key points on why New Zealand First will be supporting this bill. As has already been stated, the Privacy Bill repeals and replaces the Privacy Act of 1993, which was 25 years ago, and it brings into play some of the recommendations by the Law Commission in 2011 when it reviewed the Act. As has been mentioned, 25 years is a very, very long time for this Act not to have been overhauled in any significant way, and just the developments in the technology that everybody uses, whether they be individuals or organisations, have been absolutely comprehensive and phenomenal in their exponential move. Twenty-five years ago—I don’t think that anyone had a cellphone in 1993. We certainly didn’t use the internet on the regular basis that we do now, we didn’t have any smart phones, and the organisations worked in a completely different way in regard to dealing with people’s information, whether they’re banks or whether they be other organisations and institutions.

The use of that data, too, is the most important thing, I think. If we don’t have the laws and the regulations that can govern how, what for, and why people can share or use other people’s information—individual private citizens’ information—then those private citizens would be less likely to freely give up that information and trust organisations with their information, and personal information at that.

This bill sets out to modernise the privacy legislation within New Zealand, and, I think, importantly, too, it sets out to align New Zealand’s privacy legislation with other legislation overseas. It’s good that we’re getting there now—it’s a little bit of a catch-up—but it’s better late than never. It details and regulates the collection, use, and disclosure of information about individuals, and gives the Privacy Commissioner adequate tools to mitigate the privacy risks.

One of the two main things that needs to be addressed in any piece of legislation is detailing what is the “what” of the bill—so what is it trying to achieve?—and the “why”. There are a number of changes, but the key changes in the legislation—there are six of them. The first is that it will deal with mandatory reporting of privacy breaches. Obviously, privacy breaches that are unauthorised or accidental and that pose a risk of harm to people must be notified to the Privacy Commissioner and to the affected individuals. It seems like a basic thing, but it has been identified by the Privacy Commissioner and needs to be addressed.

The second is compliance notices. The commissioner, importantly, with a great deal of common sense, will be able to issue compliance notices that require an agency to do something or not do something in regard to the privacy law, and is able to enforce compliance notices and hear appeals as well. The third is strengthening cross-border data flow protections—that is one of the important things in the globalisation of technology, communication, and data sharing—and the bill also clarifies the application of our law when a New Zealand agency operates overseas in a different jurisdiction.

The fourth: it introduces new criminal offences. It will be an offence to mislead an agency in a way that affects someone else’s information, and to knowingly destroy documents containing personal information where a request has been made for it. The next is the commissioner making binding decisions on access requests. This reform will enable the commissioner to make decisions on complaints relating to access to information, rather than the Human Rights Review Tribunal. And the last key change will be strengthening the Privacy Commissioner’s information-gathering power. The commissioner’s existing investigation power—

Barbara Kuriger: Very good reading.

DARROCH BALL: —is strengthened by allowing—well, if that member wants to know why I’m reading, quite obviously the member hasn’t been listening. There are six key changes that this legislation is incurring, and I’ll be very impressed if that member stands up next and can say it off the top of her head. It’s very important that this House and the public can understand why New Zealand First is supporting this bill, and these are six of the key changes. I was on the last one—member interrupted me, and I’ll carry on. The commissioner’s existing investigation power is strengthened by allowing him or her to shorten the time frame within which an agency must comply and by increasing the penalty for non-compliance.

So that’s the “what”—that’s the intent of what this bill is trying to achieve and what the changes are. The second most important is the “why” and the justification. Like I mentioned before, it’s very important in today’s technological age that private individuals and private citizens have a lot of trust in all of the organisations that they work with. All those organisations are very key to the running of the modern world today. Whether they be banking or other institutions, online is being used more and more, and that data needs to be protected and there need to be updated laws to be able to back that up. The cost of not dealing with the legislation, both on an individual and on an organisational level, will obviously be that loss of trust, the loss of dignity, and doubts when any organisation is dealing with sensitive information.

So although it’s a very simple bill and it’s not the most exciting, Christopher Finlayson did mention that it was a very, very important bill, and I do agree with him on that. I think that the most important stage in this whole process, as has been mentioned by, I think, all of the speakers so far, is the select committee stage. I do encourage all who are interested in keeping their private information very private to come through and to submit on that, and especially the larger organisations as well, so we can have a very thorough select committee stage and we can iron out any of the kinks that there are and make sure that it is very workable moving forward into the future. New Zealand First will be supporting this bill.

CHRIS BISHOP (National—Hutt South): Thank you very much, Madam Assistant Speaker. I do just want to pick up on the gratuitous insults that Mr Ball just made in regards to the Hon Amy Adams, who was the former Minister of Justice. “Hardly working or working hard?” is what he put to the House as a question. Well, the rich irony of a member of a Government party that has spent the last six months setting up working-groups to create legislation and things for them to do—the deep irony of hearing something from Mr Ball about that.

The reality is Amy Adams did an outstanding job as Minister of Justice. In fact, this Privacy Bill that we’re debating, like many of the bills that we’ve spent the spent the last six months debating, originated from its time in the last Government’s legislative process. You can’t get around to everything; it was a very busy and active Government, as my colleague Gerry Brownlee knows. Amy Adams did an outstanding job.

So this bill, I think, is going to receive the unanimous support of the House, and it’s going to go to the Justice Committee. There’s a bit of a saying being developed in the Parliament: if you want something done, give it to the Justice Committee. In fact, the only thing this new Government seems to be able to do is to give it to the Justice Committee. We’ve got the Legislation Bill; we’ve got the Arbitration Amendment Bill, which I know my colleague Andrew Bayly’s very interested in; we’ve got the Trusts Bill—we’re reforming the law of trusts, and I see a beaming Raymond Huo over the other side of the House; he’s looking forward to shepherding that one through. We’ve got domestic violence law reform; we’ve got court consent to minors getting married; we’ve got the Crimes Amendment Bill; we’re going to get rid of blasphemous libel; we’ve got the End of Life Choice Bill—30,000 submissions on that—and, of course, we’ve got the inquiry into the general election. So we’re a pretty busy committee—and Madam Assistant Speaker is giving me the flick to move on.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Is any of that Government work?

CHRIS BISHOP: Some of that is Government work. Gerry Brownlee asks, “Is that Government work?” Some of it is Government work; most of it’s the previous Government’s work.

Privacy is one of those things where anyone who’s studied law—particularly in the last 15 years—has sort of come to have a love-hate relationship with it, because it’s sort of like the new black. It’s the thing that every law student and every developing lawyer comes to study, particularly Hosking v Runting. I think Maggie Barry, my colleague, made mention of Mr Hosking. I know members opposite in this House love Mr Hosking. But, of course, Mike Hosking has made an interesting contribution to New Zealand in a number of respects, mainly in the broadcasting realm—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: And accurate.

CHRIS BISHOP: —and “accurate”, says Gerry Brownlee—and mainly in the news media realm. He’s most recently made a contribution to the auto-repair industry, as I understand it, so that’s good for the Mercedes-Benz dealerships in Auckland. But, particularly in the legal sense, Mike Hosking has made an outstanding contribution in developing the tort of privacy and developing the rules around the unreasonable interference of people’s “private facts”—as they’re known in the legal parlance—and the interference with them and the publication in an offensive or unreasonable way. Mike Hosking sued a photographer called Simon Runting after Runting had taken photographs of his children, I believe—

Dr Shane Reti: That’s right, the twins.

CHRIS BISHOP: —that’s right; “twins”, says Shane Reti—

Chlöe Swarbrick: Newmarket in Auckland.

CHRIS BISHOP: —on a public street in Newmarket, I think—Chlöe Swarbrick’s rohe, in Newmarket. The question before the court was: is it a breach of privacy to take a photograph of someone’s children in a public place? The court decided that there was a tort but that it was not a breach of privacy.

One of the things that I’m going to be interested to look at in the select committee is how this Act interfaces with that tort and how the Act covers some of the things that have been developed through the tort—so things in public and private facts. We have a very technical piece of legislation that’s going to deal with a lot of the technological changes that have come about in the last 25 years, and that is very important because the Act was passed in 1993. I think that Darroch Ball, in one of the more worthy contributions to the debate, said, “Well, no one had cellphones back in 1993.” I didn’t get my first cellphone until 2001.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Winston had one.

CHRIS BISHOP: “Winston had one”, says Mr Brownlee. He probably had one of those big bricks. But very few members had cellphones. So things have changed now with Facebook and Uber and the tech economy and the rise of the gig economy and things like that, so it’s very worthwhile. So that’s why the review has been very thorough-going. The Law Commission’s been involved—it’s highly appropriate on things like this, and we’re going to examine the bill at the committee and make the changes.

I’ve got to say, we’re doing a lot of bills on the Justice Committee at the moment that have been through that Law Commission process, but it is still very helpful to have that oversight of the Justice Committee. It’s still very, very helpful because, despite the fact that, I think, 80 organisations have been consulted on, in the development of this, there are always going to be mistakes in the drafting. We’re going to pick them up.

Look, this is fundamentally a good bill. It’s a sound proposition that we update our privacy laws for the 21st century. We’ll look forward to examining it in the very, very hard-working Justice Committee in due course.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): It’s a pleasure to rise in support of this bill. In an age of mass data collection; in an age of Facebook leaks that affect the outcomes of elections, Facebook leaks that affect thousands of New Zealanders right here, and mass spying by our own Government agencies under the previous Government, as we’ve found out; in an age where even anonymous data can be re-identified because there is just so much of our information—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. That’s a completely unacceptable statement for anyone to have made in this House, and I think it should be withdrawn and apologised for. The previous Government was not mass spying on New Zealanders. That is not something that’s been found out, because it never existed. It never happened. It’s a fiction put about by the Green Party.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Thank you for your intervention. It is a debating point, and I will allow the member to continue with her contribution.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: With all due respect, it cannot be a debating point when someone says something that is so outrageously offensive and dishonest as that.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): You are now calling the member’s veracity into question. I had ruled that it was a debating point, and I had called the member to continue with her contribution. Now, Mr Brownlee, if you have an issue with that, you can take it up in another way, but the member will continue. Thank you.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Thank you. So in an age where there’s so much of our data out there on the internet that it’s impossible to even keep it anonymous, in an age where our phones contain some of our most intimate data—in this digital age, privacy may be one of our most precious rights. It affects, in fact, our ability to realise most of our other rights, which is why I think most New Zealanders would be shocked to find that New Zealand doesn’t, in fact, enshrine the right to privacy in law. Neither our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act or our Human Rights Act contain the right to privacy. So I think most of us, in light of that, would also be shocked to find that the Privacy Act, in the ad hoc but, so far, only way we have to protect our privacy rights, hasn’t been updated since 1993—before the internet existed, at least in the way that we now know it to exist, and before Chlöe Swarbrick here was even born, as she’s pointed out.

This makes safeguarding our privacy rights all the more important and the outdated nature of this privacy framework all the more dangerous. We are vulnerable to corporate breaches and to governmental breaches, whether deliberate or accidental. Updating this law has been so overdue, and I’m so pleased that this Government has put it on the agenda so urgently. Even in the last two weeks since this bill was introduced, privacy breaches have overtaken news. There’s been 63,000 New Zealanders affected by the Facebook breach—a breach that that corporation believes falls outside our Privacy Act. We’ve had a Government agency—in this case, Immigration New Zealand—using a risk assessment tool that may have been discriminatory and may have been misusing data.

Privacy rights are a passion of mine. I came into this House as a human rights lawyer with this on my agenda, so I was pleased that I was able to raise this issue with the Minister of Justice, the Hon Andrew Little, who has now brought this bill, and I am confident that this bill goes some way to fill the existing holes in our law when it comes to protecting our privacy.

It empowers the Privacy Commissioner to actually deal with privacy complaints—something that the Human Rights Review Tribunal was so overburdened with that it now faces two-year delays in dealing with any human rights complaints. I’ve spoken to the commission; they’re delighted that the watchdog mandate of the Privacy Commissioner is extended in this way, and privacy complaints can now be much more urgently dealt with and expediently settled.

The bill introduces additional ways to enforce information privacy principles—for example, the Privacy Commissioner will now be able to make binding decisions on complaints about access to information, where that’s needed. It can require agencies that hold our private information to actually issue notices letting the Office of the Privacy Commissioner know when a breach has occurred before harm ensues. Up until now, people affected would have to wait until there was harm before they even found out that there had been a privacy breach. The bill requires this kind of notice, putting an onus on agencies holding our private information—essentially, emphasising the right to privacy in a binding way. It also, finally, strengthens cross-border data flow protection. It clarifies the application of our law when New Zealand agencies use offshore services to hold our data. It’s astounding to me that that wasn’t something that was clear in our law until now.

These are all great first steps. I’ll be working hard to introduce further steps. One of those will be protection against discrimination in risk assessment algorithms. This is something that most Western nations actually have; it’s not radical at all. The EU protects against the use of discriminatory identifiers like race, age, gender, disability, and sexual orientation in algorithms that assess risk—in algorithms that are then used to decide who gets resourced, who gets opportunities in law. This is something that we do need to work on, and I do hope that either the select committee process or another piece of legislative work that we can initiate in this Government will actually address that.

In the human rights sector, we’ve known for quite some time that algorithms are in use by Government agencies in New Zealand that determine whether someone—often a child—is at risk of underachieving in a certain area and so doesn’t deserve resource. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, in our last reporting cycle, actually asked that New Zealand introduce legislation to protect against this. It found that it was a breach of our children’s rights. It is a breach of our children’s rights if we’re going to misuse their data to determine that they’re more likely to drop out of school and to double down on whatever discrimination might have led that demographic to underachieve in school, or if we determine that they’re more likely to be at risk of abuse or neglect and they should be removed based on these discriminatory identifiers. So doubling down on discrimination is one of the ways that our data is being used, or misused, and I want all data to be finally secured against that.

Mass data collection now does determine what information we can see on our Facebook feeds, on the internet, whenever we’re online. Who might be a criminal or a terrorist—it determines who might get health insurance and who might get a job. These questions used to be answered by human beings, and now they’re being answered, increasingly, by automated decision-making systems. We need protections against our data to acknowledge this.

The Green Party would like to see safeguards in place that will protect our human rights and our human dignity in the face of this kind of misuse. The right to free elections, workers’ rights, and the rights to healthcare, freedom of expression, privacy, and even the rule of law itself are at stake, and that isn’t a radical ask, because internationally these rights are protected, including the legal prohibition against discriminatory algorithms.

So I’m concerned that we do this work and that we do it soon—that we do it before the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement kicks in, where we did give away our ability to regulate any future unknown technologies. I’ll be working closely with the Minister of Justice and our own Green Party Minister of Statistics to bring New Zealand’s privacy laws into the 21st century and to futureproof them. But, for now, the protections contained in this bill are necessary, they are urgent, and I’m pleased to commend this bill to the House.

Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. It’s a pleasure to speak to this bill. I have a particular interest in data and cyber security, and I certainly will be supporting this bill. I would like to start by noting, first of all, a few key moments and a few key people in the life of privacy legislation in New Zealand.

I want to start with the late Sir Bruce Slane—a man I called a friend and the first Privacy Commissioner. In the third and final reading of the Privacy Act 1993 on 5 May, Minister of Justice Doug Graham said this about Sir Bruce: “I also [want] to thank, and to place on record the appreciation of, the Privacy Commissioner, Bruce Slane—not only for myself but also, I am sure, on behalf of the members of the select committee. He was given the task of suddenly becoming an expert on privacy law, and of going around the business community to settle down any problems, … he did that with consummate skill. He reported to the select committee as I asked him to do. His advice was sound, it was reasonable, and it was carefully planned, and that reflects great credit on him.” I also want to acknowledge the late Elisabeth Harding—a lady I called a friend and legal counsel to Sir Bruce when the Privacy Act was enacted. I say to both of them—now they are both deceased—haere ki te kāinga tūturu o tō tātou Matua i te Rangi. Moe mai, moe mai, moe mai.

[Farewell to the home of our Heavenly Father. Rest in peace, rest in peace, rest in peace.]

Privacy issues started taking shape in the late 1960s and 1970s as large computer databases started to be formed. This culminated in the 1976 Wanganui Computer Centre Act. Now, the Wanganui computer is detailed as “New Zealand’s first centralised electronic database … It was also the first time a New Zealand computer had its own Act of Parliament. It was set up by the State Services Commission and the information it amassed was initially available to and shared by the police, … Land Transport … and the Department of Justice. The mighty Sperry mainframe needed its own multi-storey building to accommodate it.” It goes on: “The computer was [actually] little more than a glorified mail handler, steaming open virtual envelopes in order to peruse their contents. Police and others wanting to access others on the database had to do so through terminals located in their stations and offices.” That was the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1980s, it was the OECD. Their privacy legislation was the most applicable to us. We can read here from a presentation made to Australia from the New Zealand Privacy Commissioner at the time: “At the time that we enacted our Privacy Act, the OECD guidelines were the only applicable international instrument for New Zealand. Unlike the majority of OECD members, the European instruments just didn’t apply. Only much later did APEC develop its privacy framework.”

In the 1990s, further regulatory reforms and globalisation led to some of the early legislation. The 1991 information legislation was introduced by a National Government and two years later it became the 1993 Privacy Act. Why did it take so long? We can see here, if we read through some of the notes: “On 5 August 1991, the National Government introduced the Privacy of Information Bill as a consequence of its first budget. There was resistance to applying the proposed [legislation] to the private sector,”—we heard this; this was one of the struggles for Sir Bruce to get the Privacy Act through—“and the Select Committee to which the bill as amended was referred did not report the Bill back until [two years later].”

Clearly, 25 years later, which brings us to today, the Act is needing reform. I acknowledge the body of work that the Law Commission did over 2010 and 2013—I think it’s actually three large volumes, as I recall looking at it, a very detailed work on reviewing the Privacy Act from the Law Commission. Why then does the Act need modernisation? Well, the advent of social media, social services, and the reach of international jurisdictions into the lives of New Zealanders. In my view, it’s very important that the privacy laws in this area be strengthened, as this bill will do. The international data community, while touting the principles of sovereignty, conveniently cower behind their own jurisdictions when it suits, particularly as it applies to New Zealand data. We’ve already heard mentioned Uber New Zealand data breaches, Facebook—and ticketing site Viagogo hiding behind their Switzerland presence, and others.

I think it’s also important to reflect on trade. If we believe that here in New Zealand we are good stewards of overseas data, we expect others to do the same with our data. To that end, New Zealand is required to be certified as good data stewards by many of our large trading partners before we can do business with them. We expect exactly the same care and respect. The EU is a good example. We export $8.2 billion to the EU each year. For many services, New Zealand needs to be certified by the EU as having adequate data protection mechanisms, and, in fact, in December 2012, New Zealand received data protection certification with the EU.

I think at another point in time I want to talk about data breaches, because there is a lot of stuff happening, particularly in the EU and Britain and Australia, particularly in 2018. But I think at this point, I will leave what I have to say until another time. I commend this bill to select committee.

Hon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. It’s a pleasure to join others in the introduction of this Privacy Bill. I think I’m actually the only member who was in the House at the time when the Privacy Act was passed in 1993, in a very different technological age, but I would say with some pride from the National benches that the hard yards around improving New Zealand’s law to protect Kiwis’ privacy have been taken by our party. I particularly want to acknowledge the hard work that Amy Adams, the former Minister of Justice, put in over two years to the provisions that are in this bill.

The most important issue that Parliament needs to address in this legislation is the huge revolution in technologies over the last 25 years that pose far greater challenges to the way in which we deal with people’s personal information. But I also want to stress, particularly in the context of the Green Party’s contribution to this law, that we equally need to be balanced and ensure that our privacy law is not turning into a bureaucratic nightmare for everyday New Zealanders out there that are doing good stuff in our community.

I don’t think there will be a constituency MP in this Parliament who’s not dealt with some sort of crisis in the area of mental health, where the Privacy Act has got in the way of common-sense sharing of information that will actually better protect New Zealanders from harm in areas as complex as mental health and crime. So the real challenge that we have to get right as a Parliament with this legislation is laws that properly protect the privacy of information that is sensitive but which do not go so far that they make the basic administration of core public services more difficult for New Zealanders to navigate their way through.

I, for instance, believe that the sharing of information between Government agencies is critical to get right. There wouldn’t be an MP in this Parliament who would not want to tear strips off those Government services that allowed a child molester and murderer like Phillip Smith to get on a plane and fly to Brazil because our information-sharing services did not allow corrections to be able to pass the information on to an agency like customs and our airport to ensure that he was blocked and not allowed out of our country. So I commend the work that Amy Adams has done in bringing this very complex bill to the House.

It’s absolutely crucial that our privacy laws do take into account the massive amounts of information that are available on information technology. But I’d also urge the select committee, in putting this bill through the parliamentary system, to give it a great deal of scrutiny to make sure it is practical and workable in the real world so that those people that work in those services, whether they work in crime, whether they work in health services, or whether they work in our education services—to ensure that they do not drive a culture in the public sector of siloisation of public services that actually holds us back on key issues like helping children that are at risk and dealing with those sorts of social issues. It is a good bill—a bill that National will support, but a bill in which we must be identified on the detail to get it right.

PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. It is indeed a pleasure to rise and take a call on the Privacy Bill. It is a straightforward bill, but, as has been said before by previous speakers, it’s an important one. It fulfils some very important functions. What it does, basically, is it replaces the Privacy Act, which is 25 years old.

Things have changed in the interim over those 25 years. We are living in a digital age. The way that businesses and Governments operate has changed. It has actually transformed dramatically over that time period. There are new technologies that we see every day. There are new benefits, but there are also some threats and some challenges that need to be dealt with, and that’s what this bill does. It basically regulates the collection, the use, and the disclosure of individual information. It modernises our legislation, and it does so in a way that brings it into line with international recommendations—for example, by the OECD—as well.

So it tweaks a few things. It makes some changes. It retains some parts of the current Act—for example, the complaints system—but it modifies it. So, for example, under this particular bill, if someone’s privacy is breached, they can complain to the Privacy Commissioner. The change that this bill will bring about is that the Privacy Commissioner’s role, I guess, is strengthened. It gives the role a bit more teeth because the commissioner, who then attempts to resolve the dispute, can actually come to a decision—make a decision. If the person is not happy with the decision that’s made, it can be appealed to the Human Rights Review Tribunal.

The crux of this bill is that it promotes people’s confidence in their personal information being used in a way that is secure and it ensures that it’s treated properly. It will allow for privacy breaches to be addressed earlier, for them to be addressed quicker, and it gives, as I mentioned previously, the Privacy Commissioner a stronger role.

I did want to go into a little bit about the specific changes that this bill suggests, but I thought I’d also jump to what constitutes a privacy breach. We’ve heard a little bit about the types of privacy breaches, so individuals’ information being used or, basically, unauthorised or accidental access to or disclosure or destruction of someone’s personal information. Quite recently on the Justice Committee, we discussed the expungement bill that came before this House and that was passed by this House just a couple of weeks ago, if I’m not mistaken. We had quite an in-depth discussion at the select committee level to make sure that people who might have access to criminal records of homosexual men who have historical convictions could not then use that information in a way that would be detrimental to those people, because we know that breaches of privacy can cause a lot of harm to people and can actually affect their quality of life significantly. So it’s those sorts of breaches that this bill, once it is passed, will address as well.

It also includes ransomware attacks. There is quite a lot of evidence. I was having a look at the detrimental effects, or how much we’ve suffered from ransomware attacks across the world, and it’s significant. It’s actually cybercrime. So it’s about people who have been, basically, extorting money from companies. It’s become quite a significant issue of electronic security around the world. It’s become a lucrative business, where people then use personal information to commit identity fraud—highly sensitive research that is compromised. A recent survey in—I think it was—Australia found that about 20 percent of attacks were motivated by espionage. Then there are those who just do it for fun rather than financial gain.

So all sorts of security breaches have come with a complete change in circumstances over the last 25 years, and this bill will go a long way to modernise legislation to address those privacy breaches, whether it compromises the information of individuals or companies. As I said earlier as well, it actually brings our legislation into line with international legislation. So I commend this bill to the House. Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.

RAYMOND HUO (Labour): In the era of big data, this bill has been brought in and introduced in a timely manner—perhaps more so is the fact that we can reflect on the recent news reports concerning the UK investigations in relation to the alleged breaches by the firm Cambridge Analytica, potentially affecting millions of Facebook users.

Before we go to the details of this bill, I recall the annual review session we had with the New Zealand Police recently, with the Justice Committee. I certainly learnt from the Police that cybercrime investigations will continue to increase and that, at the moment, cybercrime investigations are a specialised area but in the foreseeable future cybercrime investigations will become a generalised area.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.