Wednesday, 10 April 2019

WEDNESDAY, 10 APRIL 2019

WEDNESDAY, 10 APRIL 2019

The Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

Prayers.

Oral Questions

Questions to Ministers

Question No. 1—Prime Minister

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

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN (Prime Minister): Yes.

Hon Simon Bridges: Does she stand by her position last year that she “hopes her policies will not lead to higher rents”?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: As I’ve said in this House many times before, of course we want to make sure that housing in this country is affordable. We want to make sure it’s accessible. We know that when it comes to rent, supply is the biggest issue that we face, and we have had to start not from a standing start but, because of that last Government’s inaction, we have had to try and rebuild what has been an absolute crisis situation.

Hon Simon Bridges: How can she, hand on heart, criticise the last National-led Government when, under her Government, KiwiBuild has done a sum total of 33 new houses?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Well, I dispute those numbers, but unlike that last Government, that sold State houses, that did not do enough to expand the availability of affordable housing, and that did not do enough on the issue of homelessness, we are a Government who came in and put a stop to the sale of State houses and actually started building homes.

Hon Simon Bridges: If she disputes my number of the paltry 33 houses, can she tell us, as Prime Minister of New Zealand, just how many they have actually built?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Of course I dispute the member’s numbers, because they are very rarely correct. We have contracted over 10,000. [Interruption]

SPEAKER: Order! The members are more likely to hear the response if they’re quiet.

Hon Simon Bridges: In light of her comments on a capital gains tax, does she think a capital gains tax will increase rents?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: I do not believe that that will be the case, just like that member clearly didn’t think it would be an issue when he brought in a brightline test, which was a form of capital gains tax.

Hon Simon Bridges: How can she say that when the Tax Working Group itself stated that an extension of capital gains taxation will lead to “upward pressure on rents”?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: I can say that because the member himself probably would not have accepted that a brightline test would, in its own right, have that impact on rent and rental prices. I am not going to stand here and claim that we do not have an issue with affordable housing in New Zealand; we do. Unlike that Government, I do not have the blinkers on. We know that we have an issue, and I agree with the Governor of the Reserve Bank that the way to deal with that issue is to make sure that we build houses.

Hon Simon Bridges: Does she accept that the proposal of a capital gains tax is already having an effect on rent inflation?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: No, I do not. Again, the member has tried to claim that it’s everything from talk of capital gains tax to brightline tests, to the healthy homes guarantee—which, actually, comes in in full not until 2021. Yes, we have an issue with rental prices in New Zealand. I accept that. What I do not accept is the member’s assertion that it isn’t about supply—it is, and that’s why you see increases in the areas where we have a lack of houses.

Hon Simon Bridges: Given that she doesn’t accept what I’ve said, what then does she say about the Tax Working Group’s view that any effects of a capital gains tax, such as rent rises, “Could begin before implementation”—indeed, “it is likely that some consequences of implementing a capital gains tax have already begun.”?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Although, of course, I add the caveat that the Government is yet to make decisions on a capital gains tax, I do point out that the entire Tax Working Group, including representatives from business, recommended a capital gains tax applied to rental properties. However, again, as I’ve pointed out, we are a Government that has not yet made decisions, but nor do we have our blinkers on when it comes to the cost associated with housing in New Zealand. We are fixing your problems.

Hon Simon Bridges: If that’s true, and given she said there was a housing crisis when the National-led Government was in power, why have rents gone up three times more each year—that is, the last 18 months—under her watch?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: As I’ve pointed out before, the last time I looked at the statistics, they were actually not too far off the exact increases under the last Government, and that’s because it does take time to build houses. Again, I am not in denial—no one in this House is—that we are picking up the pieces of a housing crisis. Do we want rents to come down? Absolutely, but if that member thinks that not talking about a capital gains tax will make rental increases go away, that member is dreaming.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Did the Prime Minister truly hear that last question, which suggested that rental prices had gone up three times more? That’s 300 per cent. Did she hear that, and can she answer it?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: I absolutely refute that, and as I’ve said in the House before, on my last check—and, in fact, it wasn’t just me; he’s had those facts checked by others who have questioned his use of the data.

Hon Simon Bridges: Isn’t the proposed capital gains tax part of the reason why rents have risen $50 a week under her watch, and won’t the implementation of one see rents go significantly higher still?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Again, I put this issue to the member: under his watch when he was in Government, rentals increased by a rate not too dissimilar than we are continuing to see them increase now. So either the member accepts that we have a housing crisis and a lack of supply, or he doesn’t.

Hon Simon Bridges: What part of the following is incorrect in her view: rents going up $12 a week on average each year under National, and going up on an annualised basis on her watch by $33?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Again, there has been a breakdown of that member’s use of data, and the comparisons I have seen have questioned the way that he has used those comparisons. I can be forgiven for disputing what the member has said—

Hon Simon Bridges: Give me the real numbers.

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Again, I have acknowledged that there have been rental increases while we have been in office—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Massive.

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: —as there were under him—

SPEAKER: Order! Order! The Prime Minister will resume her seat. From his seat, the Leader of the Opposition asked for numbers. They are being given to him and at the same time he is shouting, and the Hon Mr Brownlee is shouting. Either they want answers to the questions—either those properly asked or those asked by way of interjection—or they don’t, but I actually find some of the answers interesting, and I’d like to be able to hear them, and I can’t when members keep on shouting.

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: If the member, as he claims, believes that rents have gone up across the board because of a debate on the Tax Working Group, why have rents gone down in Dunedin and have experienced absolutely no change in Palmerston North? I think the member will find the areas where we have seen increases are the areas where there are not enough houses.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: On the question of the supply of housing, is it not a fact that her Government is the first one to have built and matched the figure of house build in 1974—that is, a 45 year record?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Absolutely. The Deputy Prime Minister is right. No Government has built as many houses as we are since the 1970s, and that includes 1,600 more households in public housing since this Government took office, and that is something that we are very proud of.

Hon Simon Bridges: How will the Government’s well-being indicators help Kiwis pay their rising rents?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Well, of course we incorporate into well-being measures, including our child poverty indicators, the cost of housing, ability for people to get into homes, homeownership rates—these are all measures of well-being that if you took a strict view around simple measures like GDP, you wouldn’t factor in. So of course housing costs matter, which is why we are investing in housing, unlike that member who sold 6,000 public houses.

Hon Simon Bridges: How will the Government measure New Zealanders’ spiritual health?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Of course, if the member was critiquing me on something that we as a Government had endorsed as an individual indicator, I would answer that question. He’s asking me about Indicators Aotearoa and the Living Standards Framework. One is owned by Statistics and one is owned by Treasury.

Hon Simon Bridges: Why is she backing away from the well-being indicators, when just last week her Minister James Shaw wrote to me making it clear that these were coming in because of the confidence and supply agreement between the Labour Party and the Aotearoa New Zealand Green Party?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Again, the member is somewhat confused. This is not a new experience in this House, but let me explain again. Indicators Aotearoa is a framework owned by the Department of Statistics. It is a measure set, a data set, that is for them to create, for them to gather material on, and for them to distribute how they choose. What they were asked to do by the Government was simply factor in that well-being for New Zealanders matters, that we care whether people are in homes, we care whether or not people are in poverty, we care about the suicide rate in New Zealand and domestic violence, and it would be helpful to have some indicators around that. If the member doesn’t believe that that’s a useful data set, that is his problem, not mine.

Hon Simon Bridges: I seek leave to table a letter from James Shaw to myself about Indicators Aotearoa New Zealand.

SPEAKER: Is there any objection to that document being tabled? There appears to be none.

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

Hon Simon Bridges: Why, when there is a Budget next month, is Treasury more focused on attending a “compassion starter culture course”, which involves playing card games on well-being and talking about each other’s sun and moon feelings?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: I have absolutely nothing to do with the human resource management of Treasury.

Jami-Lee Ross: Has the Prime Minister seen any reports of the well-being of emotional junior staff members in her Government, or is that not a term she would use herself?

SPEAKER: Order! I’m absolutely certain the member knows that that question is out of order. He will withdraw and apologise.

Jami-Lee Ross: I withdraw and apologise.

Question No. 2—Forestry

2. JENNY MARCROFT (NZ First) to the Minister of Forestry: What recent announcements has he made regarding the One Billion Trees Programme?

Hon SHANE JONES (Minister of Forestry): This morning, I announced the first partnerships under the $240 million one billion tree fund, $120 million of which is reserved for partnership initiative. Briefly, the first one is in Otago—

SPEAKER: That would be your first time.

Hon SHANE JONES: I shall take that as a source of motivation. QEII Ngā Kākano Whakahau seedling trial, a Hawke’s Bay right tree, right place regional study, and a New Zealand Plant Producers industrial national native nursery strategy will enable the nursery sector—that is a big employer, a large earner—to prepare for the full roll-out of the billion trees strategy.

Jenny Marcroft: What are the benefits of supporting these initiatives?

Hon SHANE JONES: Naturally, the value of these initiatives will grow as the forests and the trees grow. If I could alert the House to invaluable stats: the nursery sector to New Zealand has a value of $600 million—the fifth-largest horticulture sector by value, grossly neglected over the last nine years. There are 595 nursery businesses. They have about 5,000 hectares of seedlings planted, and 3,400 people are employed in this sector. This sector, as a consequence of this partnership grant, will grow into a fit state to cope with the demands of a highly successful billion trees strategy.

Jenny Marcroft: How else is the Government progressing the one billion trees strategy?

Hon SHANE JONES: Last Friday, I made one of my infrequent announcements in Northland. We were invited into the Hokianga Harbour. We were—

SPEAKER: Order! Order! I am going to require the member to rephrase that. Irony is not allowed, either in questions or answers.

Hon SHANE JONES: Recently, I went back to the broad tūrangawaewae that a number of us MPs on this side of the House have a connection with: Hokianga Whakapau Karakia. Whilst we were there, we announced a 4 million tree planting strategy. It involves whenua located in the Kaipara Harbour. It also involves whenua called Tapuwae, where there is over 4,000 hectares—about 4 million trees, as I’ve said. Given that we are now working with young men coming out of the Ngawha Prison, through those trees being planted the devil will find less time for their idle hands.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: Does Stan Semenoff have any connection to Tapuwae Inc. or its associated companies?

SPEAKER: Order! That’s not a matter that the Minister has responsibility for.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. He just referred to an announcement that he made on Friday about giving funding to Tapuwae Inc., and was talking about all this progress that he’s making, and I’m asking him if there is a connection between a particular individual and that company.

SPEAKER: Yes, and what I’ve said is that the details of the connections of that organisation are not something that the Minister has responsibility for.

Question No. 3—Prime Minister

3. Hon PAULA BENNETT (Deputy Leader—National) to the Prime Minister: Does she stand by all her Government’s statements, policies, and actions?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN (Prime Minister): Yes.

Hon Paula Bennett: When will the cannabis referendum bill be introduced to the House?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: As I’ve outlined before, where legislation is certainly required is around the parameters for a referendum at the next election. We’ve already stated there will be a referendum on the legalisation of recreational cannabis. The question as to whether or not there would be a bill more broadly is something that will be announced once Cabinet has finalised its decisions.

Hon Paula Bennett: Can she confirm, then, that any cannabis referendum legislation must be passed before the referendum and contain the enacting provisions for any regulations for the sale and supply of marijuana in order for it to be binding, as we have been advised by the Office of the Clerk?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Again, as I have said in this House many times before, once Cabinet has finalised its decisions, we will be making announcements to the degree of detail that the member has asked. Happy birthday, by the way.

Hon Paula Bennett: Can the Prime Minister clarify, then—because there is, in my mind, some confusion between her first answer and her second. The first was quite clear that there does need to be legislation around what the referendum might look like, and I am clearly stating that there also needs to be legislation that lays out the regulations and everything else for how legalising marijuana will be implemented into New Zealand if it’s to be a binding referendum.

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Again, what I’m giving the member certainty over, of course, is that for the purposes of having a referendum, there’s a requirement to be clear in the law. That’s where I’m giving the member certainty. On the wider questions, as I’ve said before, I’m not making any announcements until Cabinet finalises its decisions around the nature of the referendum itself, the content of the question. Those details will be advised as soon as Cabinet has finalised its decisions.

Hon Paula Bennett: Does the Prime Minister accept that it’s not actually a decision for Cabinet as to whether or not there has to be legislation, which there does if it is to be a binding referendum, as they have told the public it will be?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Again, the member is putting to me definitional questions that she’s had from the Clerk of the House. What I’m saying is that until the Government has finalised its decisions, I am not going to pre-empt that with statements here in this House. Once the Cabinet has finalised its decisions, we will be releasing all of the details in that regard.

Question No. 4—Finance

4. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National) to the Minister of Finance: Is the Government focused on policies that will help grow the New Zealand economy and provide more opportunities for New Zealanders?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK (Acting Minister of Finance): On behalf of the Minister, yes.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: Does he accept that jobs, higher incomes, and opportunities mainly flow from someone somewhere making an investment?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: Yes, they do, and that’s why I’m pleased to note that GDP figures show that business investment rose 4.3 percent in 2018, when annual average GDP growth was 2.8 percent, so business investment is holding up.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: Interesting. Does he accept that the uncertainty around fundamental tax policy and many areas of regulation may at least partially explain the results in the latest New Zealand Institute of Economic Research survey on investment intentions, which showed investment intentions in plant and machinery fell negative for the first time since 2012?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: In terms of tax policy, the Government is carefully considering the independent Tax Working Group report, and our response will be released this month.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: Is it the Government’s plan to blame the zero growth per person in the past six months on international events?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: No. The member does need, though, to look at the New Zealand economy in the global context. The IMF overnight released revised forecasts for global growth, and the IMF forecasts for advanced economies to grow 1.8 percent in 2019 and 1.7 percent in 2020. In contrast, the IMF forecasts New Zealand’s economy to grow 2.5 percent in 2019 and 2.9 percent in 2020. The New Zealand economy is forecast to grow faster than Australia, faster than the US, faster than the euro area, faster than Japan, faster than Singapore, faster than the UK—

SPEAKER: Order! Thank you.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: How does he think the capital gains tax will help grow investment in New Zealand?

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: The Government is carefully considering the independent Tax Working Group’s report, and our response will be released this month.

Question No. 5—Social Development

5. PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour) to the Minister for Social Development: What recent announcements has the Government made to improve driver licensing for young people?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development): Today, the Prime Minister, along with the Associate Minister of Transport, Julie Anne Genter, and myself, announced a $5 million investment to support young people on youth benefits or in care to meet the costs of getting a driver’s licence. This investment will support approximately 2,500 young people to get their licence. We know that having a licence is important for accessing a range of different opportunities, including work and study. This Government is committed to supporting all that are able to be earning, learning, caring, or volunteering. Under this initiative, we’ll make it easier for young people to access these opportunities.

Priyanca Radhakrishnan: How will the scheme work?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: The Ministry of Social Development’s Youth Service will deliver the scheme in partnership with community providers around the country for young people receiving the youth payment or young parent payment, or who are in Oranga Tamariki care. We know many of these young people might not have a car to learn in, they might not have suitable identification, or they might not have a family member or friend to help them learn to drive. The scheme will help cover costs like obtaining a birth certificate for identification where required, professional driving lessons, and test fees. It’s a small investment we are confident will take these young people a long way.

Priyanca Radhakrishnan: Why is this important?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: Over the last five years, young drivers who have never held a driver’s licence were involved in 165 fatal or serious injury crashes. Last year, 3,520 people were convicted for driving without a licence, and 1,509 of these people were aged under 25. Of these, 59 percent were Māori and 16 percent were Pacific peoples. For many, this was their first ever conviction. Helping this group of drivers through the restrictive driving-licensing process will make the roads safer for everyone and will enable these young people to take up opportunities to work and train.

Question No. 6—Education

6. Hon NIKKI KAYE (National—Auckland Central) to the Minister of Education: Does he have confidence in the entire process of the review of Tomorrow’s Schools, and how many submissions have the taskforce received on their report?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Yes. I am advised that as of 11 o’clock this morning, the task force secretariat has received 3,330 online surveys—including eight surveys completed by hand and provided by the honourable member—2,025 written submissions, 32 oral submissions via the 0800 number, and a petition with 618 signatures. They’ve also attended a number of meetings that they organised around the country and a number of meetings organised by the member.

Hon Nikki Kaye: Will he admit that his deadline for the Tomorrow’s Schools task force to report back to him within 3½ weeks of consultation closing was unreasonable?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: The task force asked for additional time to consider the volume of submissions that they received. I indicated fairly early on in the piece that I thought that was very reasonable, and I’m happy to tell the member that the Cabinet committee—the Cabinet appointments and honours committee, who are responsible for appointing the task force, or who are approving the appointment of the task force—signed off that extension this morning.

Hon Nikki Kaye: What is the date of the report back, given that they have extended it as of today?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: They’ve been given until the end of June.

Hon Nikki Kaye: Has he received any advice on the cost of the reforms, or is he aware of any estimates provided by any officials in Treasury, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, or across Government; if so, what are those estimates?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: We haven’t yet made any decisions on the task force’s final recommendations because they haven’t yet presented those to us. So I have not received any advice on the potential costs of those, because it’s difficult to finalise costs on something if you don’t know what it is. I’m not sure of what costing information the task force has accessed. My understanding is that the Ministry of Education has not provided them with detailed costing information. They may have got costing information from another source, but my understanding is that the Ministry of Education has not provided that to them.

Hon Nikki Kaye: Just to be absolutely clear: he is not aware of any Minister of any Government agency getting potential estimates on the cost of Tomorrow’s Schools, given that many principals and teachers have turned up and said they want to weigh up the benefits of potentially front-line education services, rather than investing in officials?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: No, I haven’t. In answer to the first part of the question, I can confirm that I haven’t received any of those costs, and I’m not aware of any Government department providing them, because at this point it’s unclear what the final proposals actually are, and you can’t provide costings on something if you don’t know what it is.

Question No. 7—Commerce and Consumer Affairs

7. JO LUXTON (Labour) to the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs: What progress has been made with the Government’s competition law reform programme?

Hon KRIS FAAFOI (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): Last week, we made significant progress with changes to the Commerce Act which criminalised cartel behaviour passing its third reading. This bill is an important element of the Government’s reform package to strengthen New Zealand’s competition law in line with some of our major trading partners. Cartel conduct involves agreements being made between competitors to fix prices, restrict output, and allocate markets, and such conduct can cause significant harm to consumers and businesses who are operating honestly. The criminalising of cartel behaviour is the second legislative step that the Government has taken since coming to office, with the first being the introduction of the market studies power, and the third will be the result of the review into section 36 of the Commerce Act.

Jo Luxton: Will criminalising cartel behaviour have a chilling effect on business?

Hon KRIS FAAFOI: No, nothing in this bill extends what is currently unlawful. It evens out the playing field to encourage competition while, at the same time, allowing for reasonable collaborative business activities. Honest business should not be concerned. I’m confident that the introduction of criminalising cartels has sufficient provisions to ensure legitimate business practices won’t be penalised while, at the same time, sending a strong disincentive for cartel conduct.

Jo Luxton: Why are these reforms necessary?

Hon KRIS FAAFOI: This Government supports honest business, and we’re committed to growing an economy that works for all New Zealanders. The criminalisation of cartels delivers on that by introducing a new criminal offence for serious cartel conduct that harms New Zealand business, consumers, and the productivity of the economy. It was necessary for the future integrity of the economy to bring back the criminal offence for cartel behaviour that was dropped by the previous Government.

Question No. 8—Regional Economic Development

8. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National) to the Minister for Regional Economic Development: Does he stand by all his statements and actions?

Hon SHANE JONES (Minister for Regional Economic Development): Āe.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: Does he accept that his conversation with the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) CEO was about the decisions and the methods of the prosecutor in the Semenoff logging case?

Hon SHANE JONES: No.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: Can he explain to the House how talking to the CEO about an element of how a case was put together is not inserting himself as a member of the executive into the case?

Hon SHANE JONES: As I understand, the decision made by NZTA to announce that they were going to revoke a decision was on 15 March. A court case, I think, might have been 22 March. I had a brief discussion 10 days after that independent authority made its decision, and I most certainly reject the assertion that talking about where Meredith Connell derived their authority from to offer to overseas Filipino migrant workers the opportunity to spy—no, I don’t think the two are connected at all.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: So can I confirm—just checking my maths—that the Minister is saying that his conversation with the CEO of NZTA was 10 days after 22 March?

Hon SHANE JONES: No, I identified that on 15 March—in my answer I’ve just given—an announcement was made about a licence. I had a brief discussion, when I returned from Hong Kong and Singapore, with Mr Ratcliffe related to where he thought the authority was coming from—under what legislation—to do this to migrant workers who are employed all over New Zealand.

Question No. 9—Prime Minister

9. DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT) to the Prime Minister: Does she stand by her statement in relation to gun law changes that “It is in the national interest and it is about safety”?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN (Prime Minister): Yes.

David Seymour: Does the Prime Minister believe that a gun buy-back in relation to these changes will be more successful than those in Australia, which are estimated to have bought back only 40 to 80 percent of the semi-automatic weapons in circulation?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: It would be very hard to assess the percentage of military-style semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles that we will be able to bring in as a result of the buy-back, because, of course, our gun laws as they are mean it is very hard for us to quantify just how many of those weapons precisely are in circulation.

David Seymour: Is the Prime Minister, then, conceding that one of the impacts of her gun law changes may be a larger black market of dangerous semi-automatic weapons outside any regulatory cordon whatsoever, and she just doesn’t know how many there are?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: No, what I’m pointing out is that our gun laws, historically, have been far too relaxed. Am I to take it from the member’s question that he’s implying that he would rather have us do nothing than do what we are doing today?

Hon Stuart Nash: Is it true, Prime Minister, that if someone is caught in possession of an illegal weapon, they face a jail term of five years?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Absolutely. Not only are we removing military-style semi-automatics from circulation in terms of the legal trade of them—which, up until now, has occurred—and assault rifles, we are also increasing the penalties for those who are in possession of these guns after the amnesty and buy-back has been in place.

Question No. 10—Pacific Peoples

10. ANAHILA KANONGATA’A-SUISUIKI (Labour) to the Minister for Pacific Peoples: What is the Government doing, if anything, to support Pacific peoples in the regions?

Hon AUPITO WILLIAM SIO (Minister for Pacific Peoples): The coalition Government announced—as part of the $82.4 million Te Ara Mahi employment skills initiative—that the Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) will invest $8.85 million to expand the Ministry for Pacific Peoples’ employment programme to regional New Zealand. The programme aims to reduce the number of Pacific NEETs, who are most at risk of long-term unemployment, by supporting them into employment or training. With the support of the Prime Minister and the Hon Shane Jones, “First Citizen of the Regions”, the PGF funding will see this programme expand into the surge regions of the Greater Waikato, Manawatū, Whangarei, Otago, Bay of Plenty, Hawke’s Bay, and Murihiku - Southland.

Anahila Kanongata’a-Suisuiki: Why is there a focus on the regions for this expansion?

Hon AUPITO WILLIAM SIO: The Pacific population is growing throughout regional New Zealand. Despite their positive contribution to New Zealand’s economy, there are high numbers of young people struggling with inequities and barriers in the areas of employment, education, and training. The regions themselves have challenges with unemployment and family socio-economic well-being. That is why we included Pacific people aged up to 39 years old, so that we can get more people into employment, education, and training. The PGF funding will enable the programme to support more Pacific people towards success, growing opportunities to lift skills and incomes.

Anahila Kanongata’a-Suisuiki: What outcomes have been delivered by the Ministry for Pacific Peoples’ employment programme in urban areas?

Hon AUPITO WILLIAM SIO: Since inception, the programme has seen success in urban areas, with over 2,200 participants, and has achieved over a thousand people placed in employment. In addition, more than 700 have gained training placements, and over 200 people have been in continuous employment for over 12 months. Others have pursued further tertiary education. With the new investment, the expansion will aim to grow opportunities to lift skills and income for Pacific peoples in regional New Zealand.

Question No. 11—Education

11. Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei) to the Minister of Education: Does he stand by all of his statements and actions regarding the tertiary sector and reform of vocational education?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Yes.

Dr Shane Reti: What does he say to vulnerable rural communities when St John says that under the reforms, “St John would not be able to deliver emergency ambulance services in rural communities.”?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I say, with all due respect to St John, they’re wrong and that those communities have nothing to worry about.

Dr Shane Reti: Does he absolutely refute that there will be 1,000 job losses due to the reforms after telling Newshub Nation on the weekend that the sector could have “significant job losses”?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I’ll repeat what I said to the member last time he asked me that question: we have never put a number on job losses. At this point, when the proposals have not yet been finalised, it would irresponsible to do so.

Dr Shane Reti: Does he stand by his answer to written questions confirming that neither Kelvin Davis, Willie Jackson, Jenny Salesa, nor anyone in the Labour Māori caucus has expressed concerns around the implications of the reforms for Māori or Pasifika?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Yes, I stand by the full answer I gave, which made it clear that the Ministers have engaged in discussion as part of the regular Cabinet process.

Dr Shane Reti: I seek leave to table written parliamentary questions—

SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. The member can’t table parliamentary question answers. Is the member saying that they haven’t been published?

Dr Shane Reti: Correct.

SPEAKER: Right. I was premature. I thought the member was being—carry on.

Dr Shane Reti: I seek leave to table written parliamentary question 12868, sequential questions 12876 to 12880, and sequential questions 12883 to 12887. They’re not available on the parliamentary website.

SPEAKER: Is there any objection to the early publication of those documents? There appears to be none.

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

Jan Tinetti: What feedback has the Minister seen in regards to the Government’s actions on vocational education reform?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: There’s been a lot of feedback on the Government’s reforms. Yesterday, for example, I saw the Hutt Valley Chamber of Commerce’s statement, who have taken the time to survey their local businesses and show that their businesses are struggling to get the skilled work-ready employees that they need. WelTec, alongside the Hutt Valley Chamber of Commerce, said, “This is a once in a generation opportunity to reboot our vocational education system [to] ensure it is flexible, relevant, and future focused.”

Question No. 12—Building and Construction

12. ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua) to the Minister for Building and Construction: Should there be two technical seismic guidelines covering pre-cast flooring systems, such as concrete hollowcore, operating at the same time; and, if so, why is this necessary?

Hon JENNY SALESA (Minister for Building and Construction): There is only one mandatory technical guideline for the assessment of buildings with pre-cast concrete floors: this is the 2017 engineering assessment guidelines, known as the “Red Book”. The proposed technical revision issued in November 2018, referred to as the “Yellow Book”, reflects what engineers have learnt from the investigation into the partial collapse of Statistics House following the Kaikōura earthquake. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) requires evidence before it considers a change to the engineering assessment guidelines. MBIE is testing the revised engineering guidelines, and that information will inform an assessment about whether it’s appropriate to change the earthquake-prone building (EPB) regime. MBIE is working with Engineering New Zealand on this.

Andrew Bayly: How can it be reasonable for her ministry to take up to two years to complete an impact assessment report on comparing the two technical seismic guidelines?

Hon JENNY SALESA: The engineering guidelines that we have right now are robust. It took several years to have it confirmed and to have it enshrined in our legislation. MBIE is currently working in partnership with Engineering New Zealand and the sector on the yellow guidelines, and it is to inform us as to whether or not we should update the current guidelines that we have. The public consultation began on the assessment in March of 2012. Policy decisions were made in August of 2013. The legislation, including the assessment, was introduced to the House in December of 2013, enacted in May 2016, and came into force in July of 2017. That was a five-year process. What I’m saying at the moment is MBIE is working on these yellow guidelines—two years—because we must have evidence before we come through with new technical guidelines.

Andrew Bayly: Does she believe it’s fair on owners of buildings to be in a situation where there are two technical guidelines with conflicting requirements and they must somehow navigate how they meet both requirements?

Hon JENNY SALESA: There is only one mandatory guideline: the “Red Book” assessment guidelines that we have. The yellow guidelines are currently being tested by Engineering New Zealand and MBIE. There are no two guidelines; there is one mandatory, which is enshrined in our law, and we’re currently working on possible updates to that.

Andrew Bayly: Why has she not instructed MBIE to use some of the $43 million surplus sitting in the memorandum account, funded by the building levy, to fast track this impact assessment?

Hon JENNY SALESA: The member should probably read the details of the Building Act 2004. When he does, he will get to see that there are only certain things that the levy fund could be utilised in. We are about to come through and have public discussions, including the building levy. The member is most welcome to give us his opinion then.

Kieran McAnulty: Why weren’t pre-cast or hollowcore flooring incorporated into the EPB regime?

Hon JENNY SALESA: When the earthquake-prone building regime was developed, it was focused on those buildings and parts of the buildings that posed the greatest risk to public safety in a moderate earthquake event. The regime has a particular focus on, first, unreinforced masonry buildings—URM buildings—second, certain pre-1935 buildings; and, third, other pre-1976 multi-storey concrete buildings. Pre-cast concrete floors were not included by the last Government when the law was passed in 2016. [Interruption]

SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! If people want a supplementary, they stand up.

General Debate

General Debate

Hon KELVIN DAVIS (Minister of Corrections): I move, That the House take note of miscellaneous business.

I think it’s apt to acknowledge the leadership of this country. When we look at the example that our Prime Minister has displayed, not just since 15 March but in her whole time as the Prime Minister, what we are seeing is somebody who leads with care and compassion and is getting the results.

What this Government is doing is focusing on the issues that matter most to New Zealanders. The things that matter most are health, housing, education, mental health. As Minister of Corrections, I’m in the position where I see up close and personal the results of a system, of a Government, over the previous nine years that neglected those very areas that are most meaningful to New Zealanders. I get to see those people in prison who didn’t have the best of educations, who weren’t cared for by the Government, who the mental health system missed out. They missed out on what they needed, and, unfortunately, under the previous Government, despite a declining crime rate, the prison population was skyrocketing, and that was mainly because they simply didn’t believe that there was anything that they could do.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Lock them up—that’s how you get crime down.

Hon KELVIN DAVIS: We’re focusing on a strong economy and we’re focusing on surpluses. Now, I hear Mr Brownlee is shouting out there “Lock them up—lock them up.” That’s exactly the mentality that proves that the previous Government absolutely didn’t care about New Zealanders. The reality is that when people end up in prison, it’s often because things have gone wrong in their lives in these areas where Governments could have intervened earlier to make sure that New Zealand is a safer, better place.

The Minister of Health, my colleague David Clark—he inherited a mess. He inherited a system that was rundown. The infrastructure was rundown, the system was rundown, health was under-resourced, and now he’s having to patch up the mess that was left over the previous nine years. Then I think of my colleague here, the Hon Chris Hipkins, who also inherited a mess in the education system—a demoralised teaching workforce, under-resourced. Mr Hipkins has now set in place a plan that is going to address the issues that he’s inherited. Teachers were leaving the profession at a great rate of knots. We’re now having to undo that mess that they left behind.

But mental health is one of the big things that we’re really having to address, and I have to acknowledge the work of Jan Logie, the under-secretary. She’s doing fantastic work around family and sexual violence. Now, I was talking to Mike King, New Zealander of the Year, and he’s been doing a lot of work around mental health, and I’ve got to acknowledge the work that he’s done. I said to him, “Mike, just what exactly is the link between family and sexual violence and suicide?” He said to me that it is the number one cause. It wasn’t until this Government came along that we actually started to address the number one cause of youth suicide and mental health issues in our young people. It’s long overdue, and I’d just like to acknowledge again the work of Jan Logie and the fact that this Government is putting an emphasis on these very areas.

So, what else has this Government done? The minimum wage went up on 1 April. It’s now increased to $17.70 an hour. A couple will be $100 better off because of the decisions that this Government has made. So $100—what are people going to spend that $100 on?

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Ten thousand more job seekers.

Hon KELVIN DAVIS: On their bills. They’re going to spend it on food for their families—and I don’t know why Mr Brownlee is opposed to families having a bit more money to spend on food for their family, or for clothes for their children. Mr Brownlee there is calling out. He doesn’t care about the impact that his previous Government’s policies had on families and on young people. So the winter energy payment is something that this Government has come up with. Now, I was talking to a kaumātua up north—this was last year—and I said, “Did you get the first winter energy payment?” And they said, “Yes.” “What did you spend it on?” “Power bills.” That’s the very reason that we have the winter energy payment. Kia ora.

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA (Minister for Māori Development): There are so many things that this Government is doing that are making a practical difference to the lives of everyday New Zealanders which they can feel and know that we’re a Government that are doing the things that really matter. Take the well-being of our people, the security of our people, and also ensuring that there are greater opportunities within all our communities.

I just want to focus on the legislation that is about to follow. We will be taking those practical steps—

SPEAKER: Order! The member won’t, because the member can’t anticipate an order of the day.

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: We have already had debates in this House about what it will take to make our society safer. Removing semi-automatic guns out of our society will ensure that practical steps will be taken by this Government to realise that aspiration.

I want to come back to the types of initiatives that people can feel and know that we’re making a very practical difference. Just on 1 April, changes to the minimum wage—lifting it to $17.70—will, in many pockets, deliver approximately $48 a week, and that will make a huge difference to address the cost of living issues that on a day-to-day basis, people know that this matters.

We’re also removing secondary tax for those modest- to low-income families who are working two jobs to make ends meet. Removing secondary tax will make a practical difference to their lives. In fact, we understand that it is important to have an economy that is thriving so that everybody can participate in it, and we want it to work for everybody, especially the modest- and low-income people.

That is the difference between what this Government is doing and what the Opposition criticises. We know that by continuing along this pathway, more and more New Zealanders can realise the benefits, but it looks something like this: we understand that as we address those important things, people have to feel that they really know what we stand for. We do stand for families. If we consider the range of changes that have impacted on families: the Best Start payment to help those families with those costs of having children, especially in their early years; the winter energy payment for our old people on fixed incomes—the ability to have a little bit extra during those winter months to pay the power bill will make a difference; ensuring that we have extended paid parental leave for mothers who are anxious about how much time they spend before they go back into the workforce—that will matter; ensuring that we’re increasing the rate of the orphans benefit and the unsupported child’s benefit is something, very early on, we realised needed to be rectified; also the foster care allowance, because, sadly, far too many of our children are in foster care, and those good families that are looking after our children do need support. These are the practical things that make a difference to the lives of people that we represent and that we will continue to represent.

Overall, what does that look like? We’re really keen to ensure that the issues around child poverty are addressed in ways that we can see a material difference in the lifetime well-being of our children, our most vulnerable. That’s why the range of changes in the Working for Families package will, indeed, ensure that approximately 384,000 families on average will get a little bit more in their pocket, and more children will be able to be more secure.

I’d like to come back to an issue that my colleague Kelvin Davis raised, because, fundamentally, what the signal is is that we’re a Government that’s prepared to tackle some really difficult issues so that people can feel the benefit of where our focus will go. Just last week, I attended the justice law reform hui with Māori, and they are very encouraged by the direction this Government is going in, because they want to partner and be a part of the solution. They know things need to change. They are looking for solutions within their community—

Hon Andrew Little: They had a voice.

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: They have a voice, when, previously, under the last Government, they had nothing. They are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel and a way in which they can participate, which I believe will lead to lifetime outcomes for those who are most vulnerable in our society.

It all comes back to that. All of this is about how people feel the changes that this Government is making. I would say that because we are continuing along the track that we have been, the 100-day plan, continuing with the types of reforms that build a safer society and care about people and their well-being and ensure greater security in old age, they will feel the difference and know this is a very different Government.

GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora, Mr Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. March 15th this year was the best and the worst side of modern New Zealand. We all know about the terrible atrocity—that hateful crime that we saw—but also that morning we saw the best of New Zealand. I was in Aotea Square in Auckland, where, in 20 years working as an environmentalist, I’ve never felt so optimistic, so hopeful, so energised, so proud of our young New Zealanders who were part of the climate strike, who stood up and showed leadership in action. I’ve never been so optimistic in all my time as an environmentalist.

Yet I was also reminded of the Greta Thunberg quote, who kicked off the climate strike movement globally. She told us, “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to act as if the house is on fire.” The house—our home, our planet—is on fire. It’s burning. It’s warming. It’s drying. It’s acidifying. It’s flooding. It’s drowning. Frankly, it’s dying as a place for these kids and their future. Yet, today, it was announced by OMV, the Austrian oil and gas giant, that they want to embark on one of the most ambitious, largest oil-drilling programmes in New Zealand’s entire history. Over 11 years, they want to drill up to 10 wells, costing $300 million.

In an age of climate crisis, looking for more oil we can’t afford to burn is like your neighbour’s house being on fire and you don’t give them a hose; you pour petrol on it. In fact, that’s exactly what it’s like. Looking for more oil in an age of climate crisis is like pouring petrol on to the fire, because it’s fossil fuels like oil and gas that are responsible for climate change. People every day are told to switch off the lights, to turn the thermostat down a degree, to eat one less meal of meat, yet it is just a hundred companies like OMV that are responsible for 71 percent of the world’s climate change pollution.

New Zealand’s future isn’t more drilling. It’s not more rigs off our coast, threatening our beaches; it’s more clean energy. Yet National wants more of it. This was the party that was quite happy to give tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies and tax breaks, that gave away free Crown data, that funded conferences for the oil industry, that hosted lavish junkets for oil executives, that passed under urgency the Anadarko amendment that took away people’s human rights, that spied on people trying to keep fossil fuels in the ground, that literally called the navy out on hapū protesters.

Now, fossil fuel extraction and the question of it is the litmus test of your climate change integrity. Thousands of well-meaning actions by individuals are rendered meaningless if companies like OMV can drill more fossil fuels and release that pollution. The Greens know this, and that’s why we stand against deep-sea oil drilling, more fracking in New Zealand, ending fossil fuel subsidies, and why we’re for clean energy. We want to see solar panels, insulation, and more clean energy.

In my last minute, I want to speak to those climate change strikers. I was so proud as a dad that my two kids were out there joining them, and as a grandfather, I want to be able to look those grandkids in the eye and say that I did something about the greatest crisis of our generation. I want to tell those climate strikers—the tens of thousands of them—that the Green Party is listening to you. I want to tell you that, in Government, the Green Party is acting. We’re going to pass the zero carbon Act. We’ve got a 100 percent renewables target, and we’re acting and we’ve stopped offshore oil exploration permits. We stand with you when it comes to the defining question of keeping fossil fuels underground.

A quote that stayed in my mind at the time of the strikes was from Judith Collins. Do you know what she told the climate change strikers? Their little march won’t achieve anything. But do you know what? People like her said exactly the same thing when women said, “We would like the right to vote.” People like her said the same thing when people said, “We want to be able to marry the person we love, even if they’re the same gender.” It’s people like her who said the same thing when New Zealand dared to stand up to nuclear madness.

They’re wrong. Those people are dinosaurs, and if they’re not going to be part of the solution, then just get out of the way. The only thing we know for sure is that when we do nothing—when we allow more pollution like this, when we allow more fossil fuels and a climate crisis—nothing will change. But when we say yes to saving our home, to saving our planet, we can change the world.

Hon NIKKI KAYE (National—Auckland Central): I’m pleased to speak in this general debate. I want to reference what we heard from the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Kelvin Davis—that it’s all about focusing on the issues that matter to New Zealand. Well, after doing 70 meetings across the country, and after discussions on education, I’ll tell Mr Davis what people told me about the issues that matter to this country: it’s the teachers that are on their third strike—the first strike in 24 years, and they haven’t got settlement. The issues that matter to them are workload, and pay, and additional learning support. That’s what they care about. The fact that this Government—and this Prime Minister, frankly—are refusing to deal with the stalemate is very worrying. That matters to teachers and it matters to parents.

I know what we’ll hear from the other side. The other side will say that it was us that created this. The reality is that in every point in history, we are handed a different set of circumstances. Under our Government—the National-led Government—we dealt with the global financial recession and we dealt with the Canterbury earthquakes. This Government has billions of dollars of choices, and let’s talk about what they’ve chosen to spend their money on. They’ve chosen to spend their money on good-looking race horses. They’ve chosen to spend their money on $10 million for Westland Milk Products. They’ve chosen to spend their money on their fees-free policy for students instead of dealing with the real issues in our classrooms. There are many additional learning needs and there are real cost of living issues.

Then the other thing I want to talk about is that the reality is you have a certain amount of time in Government. The Minister is halfway through his term, and he is undertaking huge reforms in education—vocational reforms, Tomorrow’s Schools. I’ll tell you what I heard from the people of New Zealand. They said, “Nikki, we want you to support reasonable and pragmatic changes in education.” Actually, they said, “We want to strengthen our education system.” National passionately believes that we need to do this, but what they also said is that if we want to have enduring reform in education, we cannot go at breakneck speed. We cannot know what the cost of this is. We cannot know what the detail of this is. It is totally unreasonable to be merging every polytechnic in the country and to be doing that at breakneck speed. It is totally unreasonable to be transferring all of industry training to polytechnics and to be doing that at breakneck speed.

It is totally unreasonable to be restructuring the jobs of 2,500 boards of trustees in New Zealand, of literally tens of thousands of teachers, at breakneck speed. I am pleased that today the Minister has acknowledged that there are about 6,000 submissions around Tomorrow’s Schools. I am pleased that he has acknowledged that he will extend the deadline on that. Please, Minister, if we want to get enduring education reform, then we need to work together and we cannot go at that breakneck speed.

It is about priority, and the reality is there are choices here in the budget, and we will hold this Government to account for the broken promises that they made, and the high expectations that they raised when they were campaigning. I want to give an example of that. Tomorrow, on the steps of Parliament, regardless of what political parties’ policies are, we are held to account for the promises that we made, and what we heard was around the postgraduate allowances. The Minister said today that regardless of it being in Labour’s manifesto, it will not be delivered until next term. The reality is that a manifesto is about this term. We know there are more than 18 broken promises. [Interruption] Well, what I say to the Minister there is, actually, that that Government has never been transparent and released exactly what the coalition agreement is. So the reality is Chlöe Swarbrick is going to be turning up on the steps of Parliament and arguing for those postgraduate allowances, and the reality is New Zealand First have run the cash.

We are very clear: we need transparency around costings. I’ve got principals and teachers turning up to my meetings saying, “Nikki, not one more dollar spent on officials. We want it spent on front-line education services.” So you will hear from our speakers about priority, Mr Davis. Yes, Kelvin Davis, this is a question of priority. Yes, Kelvin Davis, this is a question about the fact that this Government has been handed opportunities that we didn’t have, and we will hold you to account for what is an ideological, centralised system in both vocational education reforms and Tomorrow’s Schools.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Deputy Prime Minister): Why does the National Party pick these special debates to humiliate themselves? Why do they think they will get away with it? What we just heard is from a former Minister in the education circles, and she said the National Party—and these words were incredulous—are passionate about this. Unbelievable. She talked about the teaching profession that, apparently, all of a sudden now have discovered her when they hadn’t known her for the last nine years and think that she’s the harbinger of salary rises when, over the last nine years, they failed to deliver what this Government promised in the first year. Those are the facts. We promised in the first year to deliver teachers what they hadn’t got in nine years. So if their salvation lies in one Nikki Kaye, then I kind of think that these teachers need a bit more education, especially when it comes to realpolitik.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Why are they striking?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Can I just say—well, look, Gerry, we’d give you a going-away present but you’ve got to do your part first. I mean, why did Gerry come along to this House for a start—

SPEAKER: Order!

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Well, Mr Brownlee has long had a use-by date, and some of his colleagues know it. Can I tell you that when I heard the Hon Nikki Kaye talking about the politics, there was one glaring thing missing, and you probably will not be surprised to know that it was missing, because the party over there that poses as the good managers of Government can’t even count. They can’t even do the mathematics. What was the debt of politics that we inherited? Come on, please tell me. What was the debt, pray tell me, ladies and gentlemen—the debt that the present Government inherited where politics were concerned? It was $100 million—just like that. But to think that somebody can go through speech training school and talk about being passionate and hope to get away with it—just unbelievable.

Can I just say, this is the image, of course, they’re portraying from the Opposition benches. I say New Zealand First does not start at shadows, and that’s the reason why, when we listen to half these public polls carried out by some of these flighty people upstairs here, which don’t stack up against the tandem of history, so to speak, we just ignore them. We know those polls for 26 years have been absolute rubbish. What’s my evidence for that, if I’m talking to the press gallery? Well, my evidence for that is me and my colleagues. What on earth are we doing here if your polls are so right? And now the National Party, the wise old guys, know that. They know just to ignore the polls, but one thing they do not ignore is what is being internally told to them in their polls and, dare I say it, in our polls as well. The National Party is in the 30s—the National Party is in the 30s. Despite going out there and screaming about the capital gains tax and every worst nightmare about to befall the country, they’re in the 20s, and when the 20s—this is what’s going to happen now. The Hon Nikki Kaye, can I just say—I happen to know more about politics than she does. And can I just say this: you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out they’re not going to come for Mr Bridges first. No, no—they’re going to come for poor Paula. She’s just turned 50.

SPEAKER: Order!

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: She’s doing her best.

SPEAKER: Order!

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Oh, the Hon Paula Bennett. She’s turned 50. She’s done her best to get ready for the new challenge, and all of a sudden it’s goodnight nurse, because that’s how hyenas and jackals act. They never go for the biggest one. No, no—they go for the weakest one. The second reason is because the other one they’re going for, the “Crusher”, can’t run with a female No. 2 in the party. Just work it out. If you ever get in trouble and you can’t work it out, give me a phone call and I’ll tell you how it goes. This is a business I know something about.

So they’re going to go for poor Paula and then it’ll be all on for young and old, and they’re going to go for someone whose business and commercial background just does not bear investigation. These people know it. Mind you, if you’re Mr Brownlee and you used to be running an illegal casino for five weeks, you kind of think anything is legal. But it won’t wash, Mr Brownlee, and we intend to make it very, very clear.

In terms of what we do here, New Zealand First, of course, is the voice of common sense and practicality. We’ve ensured an equitable balance between the employers of this country and the workforce of this country. We’ve provided enormous stimulus out in the provinces and the regions where so much of our wealth is created, and we’ve restored, dare I say, integrity on the global stage both diplomatically and strategically. Now countries listen to us. Now we go and talk to all of Islam and they salute us. What did they do? They left there to pass a motion that United Nations supported unanimously. Guess why? Because our diplomatic interventions are successful.

Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to have a slot in the general debate here today, and I want to primarily turn my attention to the tumultuous reforms of vocational education. I want to cover a couple of topics. I want to cover the disrespectfully short consultation period, implications for Māori. I want to cover job losses and the damning Office of the Auditor-General (OAG) report from yesterday.

Let’s start with the consultation period. No one is happy with a six-plus-one-week consultation period—absolutely no one. The Minister tells us that there are some who are pleased, that actually they want to speed up the consultation, but when I ask him in written questions, “Who are these people? Can he identify them, even organisations?”, he declines. He declines because they don’t exist. It’s a fiction in his mind. There are no people who are pleased with the six-week consultation period. I think it needs some explanation that the Minister declined the Victoria University name change and is on record with one of the reasons being that the four-week consultation period was too short. Really? One institution, and four weeks is too short? Sixteen institutes of technology and polytechnics, 11 industry training organisations (ITOs)—that’s 27. That’s 27 institutions, and six weeks is OK? How does that work? How do we explain that? It’s disrespectful.

Māori at a recent hui at Hopuhopu, a hui led by Des Rātima NZOM, confirmed that this is a disgracefully short consultation period, that in no shape or form is it consistent with Treaty of Waitangi protocols for consultation. What they did was—the hui and, indeed, other constituents around the country—they looked for their Māori representatives to express their concerns to Minister Hipkins. They asked for their elected representatives to express their concerns—their concerns for the short consultation period, their concerns for Māori and Pasifika training, and their concerns that industry training is not broken. The polytechnic sector may have some work to do, and, indeed, there could be some stuff that’s done around the industry training sector, but, fundamentally, industry training is not broken. It’s being thrown at the polytech sector as the fix and the band-aid.

We know that the Minister is disparaging to the industry training organisations, because we know from a meeting with Skills Active Aotearoa last week, a medium-sized ITO, that the Minister said to them, “I took something from the polytechs and so I had to give them something back, so I gave them the ITOs.” What did you take from the polytechs, Minister, and how comfortable are you horse-trading apprentices across the sector? I am very uncomfortable with that.

Anyway, the constituents—they all asked in the sector. They asked their Māori representatives in Government, their Labour Māori representatives, to express their concern to the Minister, and what do we get in written questions? Did Māori Labour MPs stand up for Māori in these reforms? No, they did not. The roll call of shame that Minister Hipkins answered to me in written questions included Kelvin Davis, included Willie Jackson, included Jenny Salesa, and the whole Labour Māori caucus. Not one of them, as Minister Hipkins wrote to me, expressed their concerns. Why was that? How could they fail to carry their elected representatives’ mandate to the Minister and at least express their concerns? They weren’t asking for money. This wasn’t a contentious Treaty settlement. It was just “Can you please convey our concerns?” All I can surmise is that we know the Labour Māori caucus is already afraid of Grant Robertson. We know that from the last Budget. Now they’re afraid of Chris Hipkins—afraid of Chris Hipkins, afraid of everyone. That’s what we’re seeing from the Labour Māori caucus—afraid—and I have concerns for them.

I have concerns for the sector. I’m concerned for the loss of our rural ambulances. St John—I didn’t make this up—wrote in as a submission saying, “We’re funded in what’s called an indirect group, called Direct Funding Scheme, direct to the Industry Training Fund, one of three, and we have every reason to think that our funding will disappear and we will not be able to provide emergency rural ambulance services.”

I’m concerned for job losses. In February, I came out saying there would be a thousand job losses in these reforms, and I stand by that statement. On Newshub Nation on Sunday, the Minister said there could be significant job losses. He’s danced around the word “significant”; I’ll stand by a thousand and keep on going. I’m concerned that tomorrow, as my colleague Nikki Kaye has said, the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations will appear with a campaign promise which will not be delivered around postgraduate student allowances. I’m also concerned for what the OAG wrote in their damning report yesterday, that the reforms, as they’re detailed, will not generate financial improvement—a key reason to do the reforms—and that the time frame is absolutely impossible. Slow this down, Minister. We want to work with you. We’re happy to work with you. You cannot deliver this by 1 January. Take it to the campaign trail, slow it down—

SPEAKER: Order! Order! The member’s time has expired.

Hon MEKA WHAITIRI (Labour—Ikaroa-Rāwhiti): E Te Māngai o Te Whare, tēnā koe. Ngā mema o Te Whare nei, tēnā tātou katoa. This Government is demonstrating a new kind of leadership: a leadership that is both a very good manager of the economy but also showing the values of care, compassion, and empathy. I’m really proud to be associated with a Government that is a good manager of this economy, as well as ensuring that we are delivering outcomes for all in New Zealand.

There are two topics I want to talk about in this year of delivery. One is housing, and one is the opportunity to expand our trade, including indigenous people’s trade. The question is, “What have we been doing here on this side of the House?” Well, let me share what this Government’s done around housing. We’ve stopped the sale of State houses—we have stopped the sale. We have invested $100 million into ending homelessness. We’re making rentals fairer, and have announced 6,400 new public housing spaces across the motu. This side of the House is committed to having warm, dry, affordable homes for every Kiwi.

But we also know that for some of our communities, Māori particularly, that is a dream yet to be realised. So I stand and celebrate the Hon Nanaia Mahuta’s work in the papakāinga space. Papakāinga is a policy started under a Labour Government—$20 million to ensure that we are utilising underutilised Māori whenua to build houses for Māori. Let’s share some of the success stories in this Government in the years that we have taken control. I want to acknowledge the whānau of Tākou Bay from Whangaroa, Northland, who received a $2.3 million investment to ensure that we’ve got affordable homes in the Far North. I want to congratulate the Rapihana Hawaikirangi Ahu Whenua Trust, in my own electorate, for the new papakāinga development through an investment by Te Puni Kōkiri for $995,000. I want to acknowledge the Lemuel whānau of the small town of Raupunga, just south of Wairoa, who received $1.2 million from this Government to build on papakāinga.

You see, this Government is committed to ensuring that we are utilising Māori land where it is, and working in partnership with whānau, hapū, and iwi. That’s what this side’s doing to address the housing crisis we inherited from that side of the House. But I want to touch on the economic growth opportunity to regions through acknowledging Māori iwi ownership of $50 billion in assets: fishing, forestry, and farming. There is huge potential in the regions, and just the other day—I want to acknowledge Ngāti Kahungunu Iwi Inc. for buying out Hawke’s Bay Seafood, now known as Takitimu Seafoods, to go alongside their deep-water fishing vessel which processes fish out at sea. But now we have onshore fish processing. With King Tūheitia there to open it and every iwi around the motu, it is real that iwi want to partner with the Crown to explore more economic opportunities in the region.

Therefore, the trade opportunities—because at that opening, we also had the Pacific people there. We have a shared whakapapa to Asia, to China, to Taiwan, because our people say we came from those parts of the world and we journeyed across the Pacific into South America and right through the Pacific. There are relationships already happening that iwi are leading with nations like the United Arab Emirates, because they believe that there is an opportunity here, leveraging off the assets, creating those relationships based on whakapapa relations to bring economic benefit for their own here in Aotearoa New Zealand.

It’s an exciting time to be Māori right now, with this coalition Government. They want to work with us. As I travel up and down the country, there’s a sense of excitement that at least this Government is prepared to listen, that this side of the House is prepared to act as an enabler, to open the doors so that we can realise the economic potential that iwi can play and are playing in partnership with local government in regions. So I commend and I support this Government’s programme. Kia ora.

JO HAYES (National): Thank you, Mr Speaker. An exciting time to be Māori in New Zealand, is it? Well, tell those people that are in the Māori education sector that it’s an exciting time to be in New Zealand. Tell the Māori educationalists that had their Aspire Scholarships taken away from their rangatahi, so they couldn’t attend high schools that the whānau couldn’t afford. Tell them whether or not they feel excited about being a Māori in New Zealand today. Talk to the partnership schools, the kura hourua—are they excited to be in New Zealand today as Māori? I don’t think so. That’s why there’s a Waitangi claim that’s gone forward. Pūhoro science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programme, the academy programme—ask the students that go to the Pūhoro STEM Academy at Massey University whether they feel fortunate to be Māori in New Zealand today, because I can say, confidently, that they do not feel happy and lucky to be a Māori in New Zealand today.

This Government has turned its back on Pūhoro, a STEM programme that has helped a number of Māori students get through science, technology, engineering, and mathematics programmes within their schools. Their actual academic results were higher than the normal average results that came through NCEA last year, and we expect to see more of that happening this year. So do those students feel lucky? I don’t think so.

Let’s look at the Māori and Pacific trade training and the changes that are going on with vocational education in this country right now. Will they feel lucky? From where I stand, from what I’ve heard, they don’t feel lucky at all. They’ve actually called the Minister to have a meeting with them so they can voice their concerns, like every other educationalist, about the Tomorrow’s Schools, vocational education, NCEA reviews—all the other reviews within the education sector that are going on. People are concerned. They are concerned about the future of their rangatahi and where their rangatahi are going to end up.

The vocational education review around the 16 polytechs going into one—the industry training organisations (ITOs) have been closed down. I worked in an ITO. I worked in the seafood ITO, actually, and there we engaged directly with the employers. It was on-the-job workforce training. Is that going to be afforded to the students of the future? One polytech, the engagement of—I’m sorry, not the engagement but, I suppose, we call it a little Pac-Man - type environment where one polytech is expected to take over all the ITOs. I don’t think many of those people are going to feel lucky to be Māori in New Zealand.

Then we’ve got the Tomorrow’s Schools review—Tomorrow’s Schools. A lot of the people I’ve been talking to within the Māori education sector are saying to me that it’s backward. It is backward. It is going to send Māori education back to the boondocks. There is nothing in there for Māori education. Twenty education hubs are going to look after or manage all of these schools, made up of Government officials that have no idea what is required within a kura kaupapa Māori, rumaki reo, or kōhanga reo. It is a damnation on this country to see the education of Māori go through this terrible—well, I suppose it’s a crash-down of the current education system as we know it.

Employment of principals: that is a big concern for our kura kaupapa. They do not want their principals to be engaged by an education hub full of Government officials. They want to be able to have their tino rangatiratanga as part and parcel of looking after their schools.

There are so many things this Government is doing to ruin Māori, to ruin Māori education, and so many times the Māori members on the opposite side, on the Government benches, have had opportunity after opportunity to have their say, and they have kept silent. The Māori people of New Zealand are saying, “Where are they? Where are those Māori Ministers? Why aren’t they standing up for us in this education sector?” That is because they’re in hiding. They are taking what is given to them and saying, “Oh, thank you, thank you,”—cap in hand—“we thank you, we thank you.” But they haven’t thought about the reverberations that are going to be happening within the Māori education sector.

It is shameful. It is a damnation on our education system. I am proud to back Nicky Wagner as our spokesperson for education. I’m proud to stand here as a spokesperson for Māori education, and I say to everybody—

SPEAKER: Order! Order! The member’s time has expired.

KIERAN McANULTY (Labour): I’m bitterly disappointed. You know, you don’t get many general debate opportunities with a caucus our size. It might come along every three months, and normally when you get the chance, you get the opportunity to sit down here, to listen to what the National Party have to say—because, by golly, there’s always some low fruits to pick. But when morale is that low and they’re not offering anything up, I am blowed if I know where I’m going to get my energy from, because when you come after a speech like that, there’s one clear message: they’re starting to panic. They are starting to panic. Morale is so low, because for the first time in my life I have something in common with the National Party: we’re both in the 30s—we are both in the 30s. I have seen their internal polling. The National Party leaks more than my ute, and it doesn’t have a back door. The National Party, for the first time since the election, are in the 30s, and we all know what that means. That means, with Easter coming up, even though we’re in autumn, it’s going to be barbecue season once again.

We know that the National Party is starting to panic because they realise that their leader, despite going all the way around the country and having “come and meet Simon Bridges” meetings, he’s gone backwards. He started at 12, he went to 10, he went to nine, he went to eight, and now he’s at five. That’s after people got to know him. I reckon he should go overseas, go over to Hawaii, follow John Key’s lead—it seemed to work for him.

But what we’ve found is that the Opposition, the National Party, are so much looking inwards that they are treating New Zealanders like fools. They think they’re dumb. They think that if they stand up and criticise this Government’s programmes, New Zealanders won’t realise that what they’re saying is actually the opposite of what they were saying when they were in Government. I’m sure my colleagues and even the other members on the other side of the House will remember that at the last election, the National Party promised a thousand dollars a year in tax cuts for them and us, at the highest end of the rates, and even after the last election, after they lost, they were still going on about it. We should have brought in a tax cut, they said. We should have cut taxes for the top end, because we all know what they believe in, and that, of course, is the trickle-down.

Now, today we’ve got Nikki Kaye standing up and saying, “If we”—as in them—“were in Government, we’d pay the teachers more.” You can’t have it both ways. That’s what I would put to them. On the one hand, they want to reduce taxes; on the other hand, they’re going around telling teachers that they would pay more. This is despite the fact that the offer that is on the table now from this coalition Government—from Labour, New Zealand First, and the Green Party—is three times higher than all of the offers combined under the National Party Government over the last nine years. What a joke. They think New Zealanders are dumb.

Well, we know that New Zealanders are not dumb, because after nine years, they’d had enough of that party and now they’re starting to see their true colours, and that is why they’re in the 30s. That is why many of the members over that side of the House are starting to take calls and yell out, because they know their days are numbered. They know their opportunity to speak in this House is limited, so “We may as well get up and speak about as much as we possibly can.”

Another area where they say one thing when they’re in Government and another when they’re in Opposition is the minimum wage. Every single year, the National Party in Government trumpeted the fact that they were increasing the minimum wage. Now what do they say? That it’s a bad idea. They’re saying that increasing the minimum wage is a bad idea. Why? Because it was our idea. That is the guts of it—they’re playing politics.

They are neglecting the fact that this is supposedly the party of the regions, but we know, here over this side, with New Zealand First, the Greens, and Labour, that there is only one side of this House that’s looking after the regions, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because in areas like those where I live in Masterton—in a small, rural economy, where the vast majority of businesses are dependent on people’s ability to spend—when real wages in real terms go down like we saw, and when workers’ share of productivity does not keep up with the cost of living, it’s actually the small businesses that depend on people’s capacity to spend money that suffer. And these are the businesses that that side of the House is supposed to look after. Well, I for one know for a fact that New Zealanders are sick of hearing about their rubbish—hearing about their internal issues and hearing about the nonsense that the National Party are talking about—and they know that this side of the House is actually delivering for everyone in this country.

SIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you, Mr Speaker, and it’s a pleasure to take a call in this general debate. I’d just like to reflect on Kieran McAnulty. He seemed to have a lot to talk about on the polls and polling numbers. Well, I’d like to just remind him that it’s not once that he’s lost the seat of Wairarapa; it’s twice that he’s lost the seat of Wairarapa, and guess what? Next year, it’ll be three times he’s lost the seat of Wairarapa. So if you want to give a lecture about polls, why don’t you go back to the Wairarapa—

SPEAKER: Order!

SIMEON BROWN: —and have a chat to them. Sorry, Mr Speaker.

I’d like to take a moment to talk a little bit about some of the reforms that this Government is putting through and to get back to some of the real issues which actually matter for New Zealanders. One of those issues is the issue of education. We’ve heard from our education spokesperson, Nikki Kaye, and our tertiary education spokesperson, Shane Reti, on the ideological reforms that this Government is pushing through in regards to our education policy.

I would like to put to the House that this Parliament has seen, I think, the most ideological Minister of Education in New Zealand’s history. Just last year, we saw national standards being scrapped and partnership schools being scrapped. We saw the fees-free scheme being put in place, which resulted in no increase in student numbers, and we saw 18 to 20 reviews being announced. This year, we now see some of those reviews coming forward and being worked through, and what we again see is more ideology coming through in the Government’s position.

We’re starting to see the outcomes of these reviews. I’d like to talk briefly about the vocational education review and the Tomorrow’s Schools review. Both of them have got common themes—that is, centralisation of core services to the Government. You just need to look at the review of vocational education. We’re seeing all 16 institutes of technology and polytechnics (ITPs) and all industry training organisations (ITOs) being wound into one.

In terms of our schools, we’re seeing our boards of trustees losing many of their legal mandates and being relegated to simply having an advisory role in regards to what they do and the function that they do in their schools. What we’re seeing here is a Minister of Education who is going out around the country and telling the thousands and thousands of board of trustees members that the work that they do is not valued. We’re seeing a Minister going out and talking to our ITPs and ITOs and saying, “The work that you’re doing is not valued.” “I think we can do it better if we just simply centralise it.”, is what the Minister of Education is saying. “Let’s centralise, let’s centralise, let’s centralise.”—that’s simply what the Minister of Education is saying.

When it comes to his consultation, I think it’s important for this House to note the extreme rush with which he is pushing these proposals through. The reform of vocational education was two reviews being merged together at the end of last year, and then, with the announcement being made early this year, it was only six weeks for the sector to be able to come to grips with the changes that were being proposed and to be able to come up with their response to that. The review of Tomorrow’s Schools had only three months for the whole, entire compulsory education sector to be able to understand what this means and to then be able to provide its feedback. I would like to acknowledge the work that Nikki Kaye and Shane Reti have done in getting out around the country and talking to thousands of people, to hundreds of school principals, and to our ITP sector, and our ITOs and to actually be able to be on the ground and understand what will actually work and what won’t.

I think that the Minister of Education needs to take serious note of what the Office of the Auditor-General said when he said about the review of vocational education that “there is not enough detail to assess whether the significant structural changes will improve financial sustainability and governance of the … sector.”

This is something which every single ITP up and down the country—the ITOs are saying that you can’t just announce changes which restructure the entire sector without actually doing the homework and doing the analysis before you put the announcement out there. What the Minister has put out there is reckless. It is putting out proposals which have not been thought through, have not had the thought and the detailed policy work done, and this is what we see from across this Government: a whole lot of reviews and a whole lot of announcements, but no real detailed policy work in terms of their position. That is not what New Zealanders expect, and we look forward to going to the vote next election and putting that to the New Zealand public. Thank you.

Hon KRIS FAAFOI (Minister of Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media): Before I start rubbishing everything that Simeon Brown, the previous speaker, said, can I just congratulate him on becoming a new father recently. It’s a big thing for a member of Parliament to take on while you’re sitting, so the very best wishes to you and for fatherhood.

I would like to talk numbers. I know they don’t want to talk numbers over there. There are some numbers over there that they don’t like, and there are some numbers probably being done over there that they don’t like, either. But I would like to talk about some numbers that are important to our Government and what we have achieved in our 18 months in Government.

The first numbers I want to talk about are $17.70, 200,000, and $48 a week, because they are the numbers that will matter to those who are on the lowest incomes in New Zealand. On 1 April, the minimum wage went to $17.70. That affects 200,000 New Zealanders, and that will see, for a single person, their pay before tax go up nearly $50 a week. Now, they are numbers, but the difference that that will make to some of our lowest-earning New Zealanders is huge. It will mean that the ability to put some food on the table will be easier for those families. It will mean the ability to pay bills like power is easier for those families. It will mean that if rents are harder to deal with, then they will be able to deal with those issues, as well. Some might be able to save for the first time. As a member of this Government who has even more aspirations to lift the minimum wage, I am extremely proud of those numbers.

The second number I would like to speak about is $130 per month, because that’s what people who are eligible for the winter energy payment are benefiting from as a result of this Government—$130 a month, with the express purpose from the Government to ensure that those families are safe and warm in their houses. For far too long, we have heard stories of the elderly and of beneficiaries who have made the choice not to turn on heaters because they can’t afford to do that. Their families have gone cold. Their houses have become damp as a result, their families get sick as a result, and the ability for those families who are on low incomes and for superannuitants to be able to not worry about that cost and to know that the Government is backing them to make sure that they have the simple thing of keeping warm is also something that I am extremely proud of.

Can I give a hat tip to my Green colleague who is also from Mana—Jan Logie—because her bill for greater support for the victims of domestic violence means another number coming up, which is that workers will now be eligible for 10 days’ domestic violence leave that wasn’t there before. I think that is one of the most humane things that this House has done in the last 18 months—to ensure that those people who are victims of domestic violence can have that time to make sure that they can look after themselves if they have had an episode of domestic violence. So can I take my hat off to Jan Logie for progressing that piece of legislation through.

Also another hat tip to my colleague the Hon Dr Megan Woods, who I think is gallivanting around Europe on behalf of the Government at the moment, because, also on 1 April, the R & D tax credits that she has introduced, a $1 billion investment from this Government, have come in to force to ensure there is innovation and to ensure that those businesses who do want to invest more in innovation, grow their businesses, and therefore grow the economy, have access to more support.

Can I also give a hat tip to my colleague the Hon Stuart Nash, because his work in and around a taxation bill now means that New Zealanders have more options in terms of contributions for their KiwiSaver. So the numbers we’re talking here now are that they can have contribution rates of 6 and 10 per cent as opposed to the limited amount of rates that they had before that. Those numbers, I think, and that ability to invest more and have more options in your KiwiSaver, I think, is a good thing. On 1 April too, superannuitants and veterans had their contributions go up by 2.6 percent, and I think, again, that is another example of this Government and the numbers backing up the compassionate way we are making sure that the most vulnerable in our community are looked after.

I’m extremely proud of those things that happened on 1 April. It’s ensuring that those New Zealanders who are cold and have been cold and have taken that choice to not turn the heater on can now do a simple thing of turn the heater on because they’ve got enough money to pay their electricity bills. That means those people who are on the lowest of wages now can have a little bit more in their pay packets to make sure they can pay the rent, they can get more food on the table, they can simply pay the power bill to support their families. For businesses who want to innovate, they are going to have more support from this Government through the likes of the R & D tax credit.

On 1 April, a lot of those things came into force, and on this side of the House we have been delivering and we will continue to deliver for Kiwis. Again, in health, housing, and education, whether it’s keeping people warm, whether it’s giving them enough money to buy food and pay the rent, we’re extremely proud of those efforts, and you can expect more about hard work and delivery of results for New Zealand over the next 18 months.

NICOLA WILLIS (National): Well, what an exercise in contrast this general debate has been. On that side of the House, we have Winston Peters talking about numbers, making spurious attacks on people and their personalities. We have Kieran McAnulty being a little rat for his party, and on this side of the House—

SPEAKER: Order! I think that’s out of order and the member will withdraw and apologise.

NICOLA WILLIS: I withdraw and apologise. I withdraw and apologise and I rephrase in a way that is far more parliamentary. We have Kieran McAnulty—

SPEAKER: Order! Order! No, the member withdraws and apologises—it’s unconditional, and she doesn’t tell us she’s going to say the same thing again.

NICOLA WILLIS: Mr Speaker, I certainly will not say the same thing again. The people of the Wairarapa—

SPEAKER: And the member will not comment on my rulings. The member actually knows a bit about this place.

NICOLA WILLIS: The people of the Wairarapa did not elect Kieran McAnulty to talk about the Opposition. They elected him to deliver on the promises he made on the campaign trail. [Interruption] I’m sorry, I misspeak again. This is becoming a habit. They did not necessarily do that.

But Government is not about what you promise. It is actually not about your good intentions. It is about—finally, in the end—what is delivered. It is about results. Here, in this Government, we have promises of the world in education, and we have the reality of the third teachers’ strike being scheduled. We have the reality of the massive disruption and uncertainty up and down the country as around $15 million worth of reviews are conducted. We have the Tomorrow’s Schools review, we have the NCEA review, we have the early learning strategic review, we have the cross- Government child well-being strategy review, we have the review of the institutes of technology and polytechnics sector, we have the review of the risk index funding—the list goes on, but those are not what people wanted the Government to be focused on. They simply believed that the Government would do what it promised.

So I’ve gone and I’ve looked at the manifesto and I’ve looked at the pledges, and here they are. I suggest that members opposite go and refamiliarise themselves with this, the education manifesto that Labour put out before the election, and that they refamiliarise themselves with the pledge that so many of them signed—the NZEI pledge for early childhood education. In that pledge, what Minister Hipkins and others said they would do is that they would fund 100 percent qualified teachers. They said that it would be there right from the start, it would be there from 1 July—it even made it into Grant Robertson’s fiscal plan. Was it there in their first Budget? No, it was not.

Let me make it clear for this House that the expectation of the early childhood sector in this Budget is that that promise will be delivered on, and that the promise to reduce teacher-child ratios and group sizes will be delivered on, and that the promise to increase funding for early childhood education will be delivered on, but so far, that has not been the case. Instead, we have had on-going quality issues and we have had on-going challenges.

What was also in the manifesto, which I pointed out to you, was all sorts of things that Labour rallied against. They rallied against relentless change to legislation and regulation “distracting attention from what really matters”. They rallied against “bureaucratic accountability requirements” and they said that creativity and innovation were being hampered by Government red tape and compliance. Yet there was no mention of a review of Tomorrow’s Schools. That was not in the manifesto. That was not flagged to anyone, and it is the reason why the people that we have spoken to, that Nikki Kaye has spent hours upon hours talking to, say that they are afraid, because no one flagged that this review was coming. They fear a loss of responsiveness to local communities. They fear bureaucratic paralysis. They fear that there will be a destruction of meaningful parental involvement. They fear another layer in the middle creating buck-passing. They fear that children will be forced to attend a local school.

What we have here is a party that promised many things, that is not delivering on them, and instead is bringing in a whole range of changes that no one wants, because actually what people want is pretty simple. They want teachers who are teaching well and who are happy. They want, Mr Hipkins, for you to drop the ideology, to get the basics right, and to put children and parents at the centre of what you do. You said you would do things—do them before you waste your time on additional reviews.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.

Bills

Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines, and Parts) Amendment Bill

In Committee

Part 1 Amendments to principal Act

Hon STUART NASH (Minister of Police): Thank you very much, Mr Chairman. This is a bill that puts in place the Prime Minister’s promise made two days after the terror massacre on 15 March that killed 50 Kiwis and put another 50 Kiwis in hospital. At that point in time, the Prime Minister stood up and said to the nation, “Our gun laws will change.” That was 26 days ago. What happened during that time was Parliament came together. Every single MP except one acknowledged that things needed to change, and this is incredible. I read something from the Minister of Police in the 1990s, the Hon John Banks, after the Aramoana massacre, when he said he tried to get this form of legislation through and he couldn’t. He said it was the greatest political regret from the 1990s. The former Prime Minister Helen Clark said the same. So I’m so proud that as a Parliament, we can come together, put politics aside, and do the right thing for this country.

It is easy to stand up and say we are going to ban assault weapons and military-style semi-automatics, but putting this in place is, in fact, a lot more difficult. What we decided on when we looked at this was, basically, a risk-based approach. There were a number of models we could have looked at. We could have looked at the Australian model after Port Arthur. What they did was they banned all semi-automatics and then they put an exemption regime in place. We decided it was probably best to determine (a) where the risk lay but also (b) what are the sorts of weapons that are used as tools of the trade by men and women throughout our communities and (c) what the weapons are that are used for recreation by many, many men and women throughout our country.

That’s why we decided to exempt .22 rimfire semi-automatics that have a cartridge of 10 or fewer. The reason for this is we acknowledged that there are many farmers up and down this country that use .22s for pest control, for hunting, and for just doing what farmers do on their farms, so we decided to exempt that. In Australia, they didn’t exempt that, and let me give you an example: in New South Wales alone, there were over 16,000 exemptions granted for permits to procure a semi-automatic. We thought it was easier to go down the other way.

We looked at shotguns. We know that duck hunting is a sport undertaken by around about—well, I’m told—100,000 Kiwis. A substantial number of Kiwis go duck hunting, and the weapons they use are shotguns with internal magazines. The weapon that the terrorist used had an external magazine. So what we said—we took a pragmatic view of this—is we decided to exempt a shotgun with an internal tubular magazine with five shots or fewer, because this was a major tool for recreational duck hunters and we thought it was easier to exempt that. The police also said that when they’re facing guns, when they’re out there wearing their body armour and keeping us safe, those are not the guns that are presented to them. So we thought “Let’s exempt those.”, but everything else—every other semi-automatic—we thought was rid of this country.

Now, let me just put something into perspective. The weapon that the terrorist used was called an AR-15. The AR-15 is the civilian equivalent of the M16. The M16 is the weapon that the ground troops in Vietnam used. This is a weapon that was specifically designed to kill people. It’s not for deer hunting. You don’t shoot ducks with it, you don’t shoot rabbits with it; you kill people with it. We don’t need these guns in our communities. There are a number of other AK weapons that you used to be able to buy—you can’t now—with your stock standard licence, but then the glaring loophole was you could go out without any licence and buy a magazine that took 30 shots. Then what you could do is you could put that into your AR-15—by the way, you contravened the Arms Act at the point you did that. You put it in there and you had a killing machine—you had a weapon that was designed to kill a lot of people quickly.

This was a massive loophole in our arms legislation. We know we needed to close this down, and everyone came behind us—thank you to the National Party, New Zealand First, the Greens, and, of course, Labour. This is the right thing to do. It’s the right thing to do and I’m very proud to be part of it.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Members, before I give the next call, I want to make the following ruling. Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 202 in the name of Chris Bishop, to amend SOP 201, is out of order as the subject matter is outside the scope of the bill. Therefore, debate on the subject matter of that SOP is also out of order.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green): E Te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. I stand today, for the first time in this House, to directly address the terrorism targeted at our Muslim community while they were in prayer and peace at the Linwood Islamic Centre and Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on Friday, 15 March.

Words cannot heal the utter devastation and loss of Muslim brothers, sisters, and children—devastation driven by hatred and racism and white supremacy. New Zealand cannot and should not accept thoughts and prayers alone; we need action. Today, that action is removing weapons that never should have been in general circulation, as was noted by the Minister of Police.

Yesterday, today, tomorrow, and for ever more, our action must be to investigate our national identity. We must do more than give nothing to racism. We must utterly reject intolerance in all of its forms. We must move beyond mere tolerance as a goal and move instead towards inclusion, towards acceptance, and towards love. These are the values that we have seen in response to this terrorism that saturate the majority of Aotearoa. They are the values that we need to win, but, today, we act quickly and decisively on guns.

It’s estimated that there are somewhere between 1.5 million to 2 million guns in Aotearoa New Zealand—that is almost a gun for every second person in this country. But we’re not sure exactly how many of these weapons are in New Zealand, because we do not have a comprehensive gun register. Presently, the only firearms that are registered are pistols, military-style semi-automatics (MSSAs), and other restricted weapons. Records show that there are 65,000 of these weapons, owned by nearly 10,000 licensed owners. That’s an average of 6.5 high-powered guns owned by each of these people. But, importantly, these 65,000 registered guns are barely a dent in that approximate 2 million or so in this country. That means that in the majority of cases we do not know where these guns are, who’s using them, or how they’re used.

Between 1990 and 1992, former Minister of Police, the Hon John Banks, tried to convince his caucus colleagues to get on with reforms to rid the country of semi-automatic weapons after 13 people were killed in an atrocity at Aramoana, but political will power faded.

Then, again, more than 20 years ago—in 1997—Parliament received a report commissioned by the Minister of Police, telling MPs to create a gun registry and remove MSSAs from general circulation. The Thorp report is a nearly 300-page document of how to fix the loopholes in our gun laws, but, again, Parliament failed. Then, two years ago—in 2017—this Parliament received a report, this time from the Justice Committee, telling us how to fix the problem of too many guns out there with far too little regulation. Again, Parliament did not sufficiently act.

Our Parliament has been presented with the opportunity to fix these loopholes time and again, and the politicians in this place have failed to do so. In the words of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand’s Rehanna Ali, who came before the select committee on this legislation: “Whatever reasons may be brought to bear for not supporting this legislation can never outweigh the 50 reasons we carry with us today.”

Parliament has been having this debate on these gun law changes since before I was born. In that time, weapons have become more deadly and more guns have come into our country. We owe it to our Muslim community to remove the weapons that took the lives of their whānau. We owe it to New Zealand.

But we must also act to uproot and remove the evil from our country that took up these deadly weapons. We must look in the mirror. We must use our positions in rooms—whether they are online or in person—that discuss other people’s existence as different, as not deserving, or as lesser, to change that behaviour. We are all responsible for change. It will not be delivered by a lone hero.

The fine detail of this legislation has been combed over by the Finance and Expenditure Committee, that I was fortunate to sit on, alongside my colleagues in Government and Opposition. The Greens provided a minority view—[Bell rung] Mr Chair.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Before I give the member another call, I’d like the member—the member has actually spent quite a bit of time speaking about things that are not in the bill, and she really needs now to come to what is in the bill.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: I’m to speak to the minority view now, Mr Chair.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Chlöe Swarbrick.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: The Greens provided a minority view in support of the New Zealand Police Association’s submission that collector’s weapons should be rendered permanently inoperable. I note that the majority of the select committee came to a position to store the operable parts in another location. I accept that this is far better than the status quo, and the Greens accept that this is absolutely a step in the right direction, but because we would like to see these reforms go further, we provided our view in that select committee minority view. This reflects, of course, the pathway that Australia took in their reforms, and it would prevent a potential loophole for import and the increasing circulation of semi-automatic guns.

But, today, we applaud the coming together of the vast majority of this House to pass this first step in critical reform for public safety. There is more to come, and, indeed, more must come. Aroha mai, aroha nui e te whānau. Kia ora.

[Be loving, much love, family. Thank you.]

CHRIS BISHOP (National—Hutt South): Thank you very much, Mr Chair. The National Party supports this bill, and we’ve been working constructively with the Government as we worked our way through the very quick select committee process. We also support the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that’s been lodged in the Minister’s name two or three hours ago—SOP 201. Due to the exigency of the select committee process, the Finance and Expenditure Committee was not able to actually recommend any potential changes, as would normally happen through the committee process, so the SOP largely implements those changes.

I want to speak to the SOP in my name that hasn’t been ruled out of order, which is Supplementary Order Paper 203, around people who are bona fide competitors in target-shooting sports governed by legitimate international sporting bodies. While we generally agree that it’s important to reduce the number of semi-automatic weapons in circulation in New Zealand, we on this side of the House do have some sympathy for people who are members of shooting organisations and shooting clubs who will be negatively affected by this, who compete in international target shooting competitions. We believe that there is scope in the bill to make sure that a very small number of people can continue to participate in the sport that in many cases is their great love and great passion.

We draw the committee’s attention to the regime in the Arms Act that already exists around pistol clubs, who have very strict regulations placed on them. Essentially, what this SOP tries to do is to replicate the same sort of regime for semi-automatics and for rifle-shooting competitions as for pistol clubs. We believe that it’s something that can be done. The Government has signalled that it is something that could be looked at as part of phase two of the reforms to our firearms regime. But if it is indeed the case that we, through phase two, provide an exemption for international sporting shooters, we’ll be in the slightly strange situation where those who do legitimately compete internationally will have to give up their weapons as part of the amnesty and the buy-back over the next few months because those weapons will be illegal upon passage of this bill.

Once it comes into force and receives the Royal assent, possession of those weapons will be illegal. They’ll have to give them up through the buy-back and receive compensation. Then, if it so happens that down the line, post-June, once the Government’s introduced its bill, maybe in the first part of, potentially, next year when the bill passes—if it does pass, then those sports may be essentially legal again, and those people will have to go out and buy the guns all over again. So it’s going to be a slightly strange situation and I think, frankly, pretty ridiculous that people will have to give up their weapons, receive compensation, receive a chunk of money, feel pretty bad about life generally as they’re not able to participate in their chosen sport for six to nine months, and then, if it is essentially legalised again, they’ll have to go out and get all the weapons again, and they’ll be allowed to compete.

We can short-circuit all that, basically, which I think everyone would agree is a pretty silly process. We can short-circuit all that by essentially moving the changes that might be done in phase two into phase one, which is this bill. Frankly, we’re a bit disappointed on this side of the House that the Government didn’t see fit to include an exemption for sporting shooters in the bill that’s before us, and that’s why we’re putting forward the SOP.

Frankly, the argument that they don’t compete in the Olympics or in the Commonwealth Games is, you know, true, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really address anything. It’s just literally a statement of fact. It doesn’t deal with the fact that there are other sporting competitions—three-gun shooting competitions, for example—that are done internationally and that New Zealand competes very well at, actually. It’s something that New Zealand’s very good at, and there are lots of people around the country who receive enjoyment from doing that.

Frankly, we think that if you can construct a regime around pistol shooting that is highly regulated and highly safe and that allows for international competitions—and, actually, that the officials accepted during the select committee consideration; it worked very well, and that was what they told us—then I think—[Bell rung] Mr Chair.

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Chris Bishop.

CHRIS BISHOP: Thanks, Mr Chair. I’ll just finish off my remarks. If you can do it for pistol shooting, then we think it’s not beyond the competence and not beyond the wit of Parliament in order to do it for rifle shooting as well and for semi-automatic weapons.

It is true that the majority of shooting competitions don’t involve semi-automatic weapons. That is indeed true. It is true that they are not international Olympic sports. Those are other types of weapons. But it is also true that there are lots of people around New Zealand who enjoy these sports and participate in them, and, frankly, they are feeling pretty hurt about life. They quite rightly make the point—

Alastair Scott: Law-abiding.

CHRIS BISHOP: Exactly right, Mr Scott. They’re law-abiding citizens. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a single death from a firearm on a shooting range in New Zealand ever. That’s where these guns are used, under very, very strict conditions, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to replicate in the regime.

So we fully accept, on this side of the House, the need to reduce the number of semi-automatics and military-styles in circulation, but there’s an exemption regime already in the bill. The headlines have been “This is a ban on military-style semi-automatics and other semi-automatics”, and that’s true so far as it goes, except there’s an exemption regime. There’s an exemption regime for the Department of Conservation to use semi-automatics when controlling pests. There’s an exemption regime which we’re now introducing through the Minister’s SOP, as recommended by the committee, for commercial use for farmers. It’s not a general exemption for farmers. You can’t just rock up and use a military-style semi-automatic (MSSA) on any old plot of land. You’ve got to get a commercial user to do it for you, and we had a bit of a debate in the committee about whether or not Federated Farmers’ submissions would be accepted. So we’ve got an exemption regime for that.

There’s an exemption regime for mementos and for heirlooms and for historical artefacts. There’s an exemption regime for museums and theatrical performances and things like that—all perfectly legitimate, safe, and good reasons to allow very limited use of MSSAs and semi-automatics.

We just make the point on this side of the House that we think if you can design an exemption regime for all of those things, you can do one as well for international sporting shooters. So we put forward that SOP, and we implore the committee to give that due consideration. Thank you, Mr Chair.

Hon STUART NASH (Minister of Police): Thank you very much, Mr Chair. I think it’s probably wise that I stand up and address the honourable member’s Supplementary Order Paper and just give him a little bit of insight into why—well, the committee, obviously, voted it down, but I as a Minister didn’t think it was a good idea anyway.

There are two reasons. First of all, as Mr Bishop has highlighted, there are a number of exemptions in place at the moment, and we looked at those in terms of the ability for those with bona fide licensed and registered pest control businesses. We need to ensure that those who undertake pest control have the ability to do so with the best weapon possible. Now, in order to be able to get that exemption, they need to be able to prove that there is no other weapon better than one which we are prohibiting under this bill. If they can prove that, then they are allowed to do that.

In terms of bona fide collectors’ mementos, we are going to have a look at the collector regime in stage two, just to make sure we’ve got that right as well. We thought that at this stage, with the truncated select committee process, there was a lot there to consider. Keeping in mind this was about removing these guns from our community, we thought that’s best dealt with in stage two as well, and Mr Bishop mentioned a couple of other exemption regimes.

But the problem with any piece of legislation—whether it’s firearms, whether it’s tax, or whether it’s anything—is the more exemptions you put in place, the greater the number of loopholes that we provide for people to abuse the system. Now, what we do know, and what we learnt in the 2017 inquiry, is that gangs or organised crime tend to get the vast majority of their guns through theft—they’re stolen. Someone breaks into someone’s house and they break into their safe and they steal a gun. Now, the vast majority of the time it’s not because the person who owned the weapon has been irresponsible; it’s just because the thief knows the weapon is there or has fortuitously found this and got hold of the weapon. I feel that if we create an exemption for sports shooters, then we would create a whole lot more opportunity for people to own these weapons which we want to get out of our community.

The aim of this legislation is to remove as many of these guns as possible from our community. I acknowledge that if we were going to be pure about this, we would say, “Absolutely no exemptions whatsoever.” We would possibly follow the Australian model and say, “Nothing—every single semi-automatic is gone.” That would be the pure way to do it, but it would not be the pragmatic way to do it.

We looked at sporting competitions and we used the first test and we said, “OK, are there any Olympic or Commonwealth Games disciplines that require the sort of weapon that we are seeking to ban?” There are none. Then we dug a little deeper, and we found there is one discipline called three-gun discipline, and that’s one that’s brought up a lot. Then we found—and I understand that the select committee heard this—that a competitor can actually use a .22 to do this.

Chris Bishop: No, that’s not right.

Hon STUART NASH: Well, that’s what I’m told the select committee heard—that you can actually use a .22 to do this. So we thought, “OK.” The other thing we’re not doing is we’re not banning people from going offshore and competing in competitions. So—

Hon Member: How are they going to practise?

Hon STUART NASH: Absolutely—absolutely. But what we don’t want to do is we don’t want to have these weapons in our communities, and let’s be honest about this: if you get to the stage where you’re in the top 10 in the world, you’ve got to start down at the lowest level. No All Black starts playing rugby at the beginning of the season and ends up in the World Cup team. You start when you’re five. If you want to be a competitive three-gun shooter and you want to use a weapon that is not a .22—it’s one of these banned weapons—you’re going to have to start somewhere.

Chlöe Swarbrick: They’re not even the top 10; they’re the only 10.

Hon STUART NASH: Absolutely. That means that at some point in time you’re going to have to have access to these weapons. Now, where do we draw the line? Do we say, “OK, a 10-year-old whose father is an expert in this”—or no, let’s not be too glib. “A 16-year-old can have access to this because he or she wants to be a competitive three-gun shooter, and therefore we should allow it.”? Well, then, do we stagger it—do we say, “Well, if they pass a certain level then they can continue.”—or do we withdraw it?

The point I’m trying to make—and I’m not being glib in this—is the more exemptions we create, the more we water down the purpose of this legislation, and that is to remove these semi-automatic assault rifles and military-style semi-automatics from our community. I absolutely believe that a sporting exemption would be against the spirit of this legislation.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): Thank you, Mr Chair. I want to just talk on the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 203 in the name of Chris Bishop. I listened very closely to the Minister of Police there, and I’ve got to say I’m very disappointed to hear what he’s just spoken, so I just think it’s worthwhile recapping on what is in the SOP. It’s a new clause 8, which says that “a person who is a bona fide competitor in a target shooting sport that is—(i) governed by a legitimate international sporting body; … (ii) where the rules of the discipline provide for the use of semi-automatic firearms or shotguns;”—and the third condition is—“(iii) the person is a member of a target shooting club recognised by the Commissioner as a club where such target shooting disciplines are practised.” That is the SOP—very tight, very clear.

So my personal view is that, actually, we are doing a disservice to a group of shooters who are not in your main type of shooters. These are very highly trained, professional target shooters, who go about their business—in some cases, it’s their profession. But, at the very least, they are absolutely dedicated to achieving good outcomes in target-shooting competitions.

I just listened to the arguments there, and the first thing said was “Look, we had enough to do in a truncated position without trying to do this bill over the last few days. We didn’t have time to take this into account.” I think you’re underestimating the capability of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, Minister, because I think we could have done this. I think we could have done it very easily, and I’ll come back to why.

The second thing I heard about was the storage: “Oh, because if you allow this, then there’s the opportunity for theft.” Well, I’ve got to say to you, Minister, that the rifles that these target shooters use are normally worth thousands. They are not your run-of-the-mill rifle that you go down to your local Hunting & Fishing store and buy. These are normally very highly specified - calibre rifles, and the last thing that those competition shooters will want is to see those weapons stolen, because the next time they go to a competition, they won’t be able to use them. They will have as much incentive as the police to make sure that they are stored and stored very securely.

The third thing was: “There are a lot of opportunities for people to become involved in this sport.” Well, one of the things in the report that we noted—and these are figures provided by the police—was that there are actually only 80 of these people. Actually, there was a countervailing argument given that because there is such a small number of them, basically, we shouldn’t worry about them. So that’s actually contrary to what you’ve just suggested.

There are a small number of people. We’re not suggesting that this should be opened up to everyone; this was to deal with a very specific professional group. This concept that “If you want to be a professional target shooter, we’re not going to trust you. What you’re going to have to do is get on a plane and fly overseas.”—well, actually, the Australians have been doing that since they brought into place their regulations. They are failing dismally overseas in competitions, and they all talk about the difficulty of being able to compete, because when you want to be a target shooter, you want to be doing it regularly.

This brings me back to the next point, which is the calibre. This concept that you can use a .22 rifle to do your practice—well, actually, that’s not the case. In terms of pistols, they use 9-millimetre pistols. That’s actually greater than a .22 calibre, which means it is outside the issue of this bill. Often they have 9-millimetre pistols converted to a rifle type, and also they use slightly higher - calibre .223s and other calibres. You cannot think that you’re going to practise with a .22 when you’re firing a higher calibre and think you’re going to be able to compete at an international standard and be as good as the world-standard target shooters, who will probably be out firing every day, like all professionals—doing their 10,000 hours before they become true professionals. This concept that you can do that—I don’t think that it was difficult.

The rules around pistol clubs are very, very tight. You have to belong to them for at least six months before you can get a licence. You have to attend a minimum of 12 times a year. We could have very easily imposed very secure arrangements for the storage, like for dealers. It was an easy thing to do, and it’s a travesty.

Hon STUART NASH (Minister of Police): Thanks very much, Mr Chair. I would like to put this to bed once and for all, and there are a couple of points I’d like to make. First of all, as the previous member Andrew Bayly alluded to and the member introducing this Supplementary Order Paper 203, Chris Bishop, has articulated, if it was all about “All you need to do is join a club.”, then there is the great fear that these clubs would pop up everywhere—if you join a club, you can own a rifle. For me, that risk is too high.

The second thing is the National Rifle Association (NRA) could well become an international sporting organisation.

Chris Bishop: Oh, come on.

Hon STUART NASH: No, no, seriously—the NRA competition sporting division offers a wide range of competitions. They are, by all accounts, a legitimate sporting organisation, so that opens that up. So that’s the second thing.

The third thing is that there is no club oversight regime—at present, there is no club oversight regime. What happens is you get 10, 20, 40 of these guys all saying, “You know what? We’ve lost our weapons. Let’s form a club. We can get these back—all we need to do is set up a club. Let’s go and get a little bit of land and away we go.” It could be that easy.

Andrew Bayly: You think it’s that easy to get a permission, consent, to do a target range—really?

Hon STUART NASH: You set up the club and away you go. It is a loophole that you could drive a truck through, Mr Bayly.

The second thing is that international competitions need national and regional competitions. The reason the Australians come over here to compete is because the competitions were banned in Australia when they banned military-style semi-automatics and semi-automatics. That’s why they come here—because they’re not allowed to do it in their own country. Why are we the easybeat? Why should we allow those in Australia to come over here and compete when they don’t allow them to do it in Australia? There’s no reason—

Andrew Bayly: So it’s fine for them to go around the world, but they can’t come here?

Hon STUART NASH: —whatsoever why we should allow them to do it. There are some other niche sports that you need to travel overseas for that you can’t do here. There are others, so there are precedents. So we’re not saying that you can’t compete overseas. We’re not saying that as a Kiwi and a Kiwi passport holder, you can’t go and train in the States, if this is your livelihood and that’s what you really want to do and this is your passion.

The last thing I would say is that the pistol club ranges are developed around risk management for short-range targets, not for the long-range targets that these prohibited weapons are designed for. Keep in mind that the weapons we are looking to ban, the weapons we are banning, are designed to kill people—that’s what they are for. The purpose of this legislation is to remove them from our communities; to get rid of as many of them as possible from our communities. If we have an exemption that you can drive a truck through, then we begin to defeat the purpose of the legislation. It’s the reason why I am so against the sporting exemption.

IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you, Mr Chair. I just want to take a brief call on a couple of things that, I guess, concern me about the unspoken, not the spoken, bit of this bill. One of these concerns is clause 49, new sections 50A to 50D, and the link of that to new sections 59A and 59B in clause 58, and that, of course, is the unlawful possession of a prohibited firearm. I guess the thing that worried me—and did at the time of the previous inquiry into firearms in New Zealand—was that there are numerous firearms owned throughout New Zealand by people who probably don’t even know they own them. I don’t want to use my mother, but my mother could easily own one of these and she wouldn’t even know she owned it. The problem with it is that they’re sitting in these houses and places around New Zealand, they’re now going to become illegally owned, and these people aren’t going to know they own them. They’re then going to hand them in—and I accept that there’s an amnesty on that and that the police will use their own prerogative as to whether they prosecute it or not. The issue is that everyone else who hands these guns in is going to get paid for them, and these people aren’t.

I guess the gun underworld in New Zealand is big enough now. I know the amnesty is part of this bill but I know the buy-back is not, but I need to link this discussion to that buy-back, because my concern is that if a legal gun owner is going to get paid for these guns and an ostensibly illegal gun owner is not, then those guns could very easily fall into the hands of those same people we’re trying to preclude from getting their hands on these guns. I guess the issue that I’ve got with this is that—and I think it also applies to parts, but I mentioned that last night and I won’t do it again today. I think the real concern is that there will be a large number of these guns around New Zealand, and they will be in the hands of people who probably don’t know that they own an illegal weapon and probably will do nothing about it initially. But, eventually, that will be discovered, and they could easily fall into the wrong hands.

The buy-back provisions of this amnesty need to be considered seriously, because I think it would be worth having a look at buying back illegally owned guns as well, just simply to get them out of the process, because we’re not going to get them out of the process unless we find some way of dealing with them that’s more widely spread than an amnesty. I accept that that won’t be part of this bill—it wouldn’t be possible to be part of this. But I think it needs to be seriously considered as we go forward, as to how we get these guns that are illegally owned in New Zealand—and there will be many more of them as a result of this—out of circulation. That’s my first concern.

My second one, I guess, goes back to the issue of the Federated Farmers submission and the issue they had with the destruction of pests. I’ve listened to the Minister, and I accept his view on this. I think the issue that I’ve got with this is that a lot of these pests—and, again, it’s something that needs to be considered later, not now—are very mobile. They’re only there for only a minute or two and gone the next. I think the challenge of having to deal with contractors and having to get contractors in means it will be very difficult to track these pests down. So I think, in the future, we need to revisit this piece of the law. I also listened to the Minister, and I agree with him that the less of these things we’ve got in the less hands in New Zealand the better off we are, but there might be a way in the future that we can find of enabling this type of thing to be used by a broader spread of people than perhaps just licensed contractors, or otherwise we need to license a broader spread of people to become licensed contractors. I think there needs to be a way of looking at that and how we might do that. I have no answer to that.

So those were the only two issues that I was really keen to bring to the attention of the Minister today. I do have, as I said, quite significant concerns about how we get those prohibited—or what will become prohibited on the passing of this law this afternoon—firearms out of the hands of people who are unlicensed who are inadvertently unlicensed because it won’t be intentional. There will be many people who have never had a gun licence in New Zealand who have owned guns all their lives, and I’d like to think that there’s a way that we could get those guns out of their hands. I think it’s much more likely we’ll get them out of their hands by including them in any buy-back scheme if it’s possible, and I realise there’s difficulties with that. But I do think we’re going to have to look at that, and I think if we don’t, we will end up with a larger black market than we currently have. So those were the two issues I wanted to talk about briefly, Mr Chair, so thank you for that.

MICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): Thank you, Mr Chair. I rise to speak to Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 201, and I do this having chaired the Finance and Expenditure Committee—and acknowledging colleagues who participated in the deliberations of the committee—because, as has been noted, this has been a slightly unusual process. Effectively, what we have in SOP 201 are the recommendations of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, which were expressed in the report that was tabled at select committee yesterday and put into the legislation. So I’d just like to take a few minutes to touch on some of the key changes and how these are translated into the wording of the bill that we have before us.

The hearings that we held were very substantial hearings. We heard from a wide range of submitters both for and against the bill, but almost exclusively from people who wanted to assist the committee to make the bill as effective and as fair as possible. The changes that I want to speak to that are in SOP 201 are changes that have been made in response to those submissions.

As has been noted, one of the important areas of this bill is the tight set of exemptions that are in there. This is one of the areas that the committee did focus on, to make sure that the exemptions that do exist are appropriate and are managed as tightly as possible to meet the fundamental purpose of the bill, which is to remove these weapons from general circulation.

We considered very strongly the submissions we received from Federated Farmers and a couple of other groups about the issue of wild animal and pest control. The changes which have been brought into the legislation are captured in new section 4A(1)(h), in clause 8. In response to the submissions that we have received, we have made changes to the bill to ensure control of certain types of wild animal and pest species that can, in some cases, require the use of prohibited weapons. Whereas the original bill allowed for that control through the use of prohibited weapons to take place on Department of Conservation (DOC) land, we have clarified in new section 4A(1)(h) that this control may take place on private land. So this is a way that the committee has seen through this challenge that was identified by Federated Farmers and some submitters that there are certain types of species in quite limited situations, and most commonly these were described as being on high-country stations where the use of these weapons may be required.

There were some arguments put up to create a more general exemption which would allow for the exemption to apply to farmers themselves. The judgment of the committee was that this would be one of those steps that would take us beyond the intent of the bill and would allow general circulation, which is what we are trying to avoid. So it’s quite a tight exemption. It means that these weapons will be in the control either of DOC or of organisations or companies which are very highly regulated by police. That is a mechanism whereby certain species can be controlled, and, if you beg my indulgence, Part 2 does reference some of those species and some changes have been made there to ensure that those species—particularly Canada geese, that were referenced in submissions—are captured as well.

Carrying on with the exemptions section, one of the submissions we received from the Police Association raised the concern that in respect of the exemption for collectors—which was in the original bill, and I think most people understand the purpose of that—if the bill is going to take these weapons out of general circulation, then one of the largest stocks of the weapons will continue to be held by collectors. The submission of the Police Association was to draw our attention to the fact that this may create something of a risk that they would become the source of weapons which could be stolen for criminal activity.

So what the select committee has done in the bill to address that particular concern has been to strengthen the provision which removes what’s called a vital part of the weapon. This is captured in new section 4A(1)(ba) in clause 8. In the original bill, the vital part was to be stored at a separate location. The select committee has strengthened that to ensure that the vital part will now be kept, actually, at a fully separate address. We believe this substantially meets that objective, as identified by the Police Association.

One of the other key exemptions relates to heirlooms and mementoes. This is a very, very specific exemption, and, again, what the select committee has done is ensure that it is very, very tight also, with the provision in respect of a vital part being stored at a separate address. So while we’ve recognised that submission, we are ensuring that that weapon—while not being permanently disabled—effectively, cannot be used if it is simply picked up because the vital part is stored elsewhere.

I’ll just leave my comments there for the moment. That’s a summary of some of the key changes that were made at select committee, and I thank my colleagues on that select committee for that work.

CHRIS BISHOP (National—Hutt South): Thank you very much, Mr Chair. I just want to respond to some of the Minister’s comments around my Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 203, around the exemptions for international sporting shooting competitions. The Minister’s comments ranged from the, I suppose, reasonable but wrong through to the stupid and ridiculous, and I want to go through some of those comments.

The first thing he said was that international three-gun competitors could just use .22s, and he said that that was the advice to the committee. I don’t remember that advice being given to the committee, and in the event that that advice was given—

Michael Wood: Yes, it was given by police.

CHRIS BISHOP: OK, well, the chair is saying that’s correct. The chair is saying that that advice was received. My point to the committee is that I’m advised by those in the international sporting shooting community that that is categorically wrong and that .22s are incapable of being used for the international competitions we are talking about. They’re not effective on the ranges, they’re not used internationally, and also you need shotguns with more than five rounds. So that’s the first point.

The second point the Minister made was that people could still use them overseas in competitions, which is true, I suppose, but of course neglects the fact that people are unable to practise with the very weapons they’re going to use overseas. So we get this silly scenario—which, actually, Australia is in as well, to be fair—where people would be able to travel overseas and use weapons in countries where the prohibited weapons we’re talking about are legal, but because they’re illegal in New Zealand, they’re not able to practise with them. I think that is a strange scenario.

Then we heard the third point—that there are very few people affected by this—and Chlöe Swarbrick yelled out, “It’s just 10 people.” Well, again, that’s wrong. My understanding is that there are about a thousand people affected—[Interruption] Well, I’m just responding to what your Government member said, Mr Nash. Chlöe says there are 10 people affected. Actually, it’s more like 1,000, and even if in the best case scenario it was 10 people affected by the provision, firstly—

Andrew Bayly: Why should they be affected?

CHRIS BISHOP: Exactly—the quantum, in some ways, is irrelevant. Ms Deborah Russell, during the select committee process, was very concerned about the quantum of people affected, as if the gravity of the harm done depends on the number of people—but, anyway.

So the number of people affected is in some ways irrelevant, but, secondly, even if it is relevant, 10 people being affected is an argument for my SOP, because it affects such a slim number of people. That’s actually an argument for the amendment. It’s for the SOP. It’s not an argument against it by simply saying “Oh, it’s just 10 people.”, as if these 10 people are the only people affected by it. Firstly, as I say, that is wrong—it’s far more than that. It’s actually 100 times that number. It’s 1,000 people, give or take a few, and, secondly, even if that is correct—if Ms Swarbrick is correct—that’s an argument for the SOP because the whole genesis of this bill and the whole genesis of the Government SOP towards the bill is to reduce the number of guns in circulation. If it’s true that it’s just 10 people, that’s certainly better than 1,000, so that’s an argument for my amendment, not against it.

The fourth point is to say that the Government went through some careful process around working out what competitions would be affected and what wouldn’t. The Commonwealth Games didn’t have these three-gun competitions, and neither did the Olympic Games. As I already made the rebuttal to that point in my contribution earlier on, that is true but irrelevant.

Then, the fifth point from the Minister was—and this is the really ridiculous one—that you could drive a truck through the regime proposed, and that the National Rifle Association are going to come down here and set up some fake sporting competition to allow all the American gun nuts to go around and use these military-style weapons.

Hon Stuart Nash: That’s not what I said.

CHRIS BISHOP: It’s literally—don’t frown your face at me. That’s literally what you said.

Hon Stuart Nash: The NRA is—

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! The Minister in the chair does not interject from the chair. That is to cease.

CHRIS BISHOP: Thank you, Mr Chair. The Minister can get upset about stupid remarks that he makes, but he shouldn’t be upset when members decide to call out Ministers on absurd things they say. So that’s not the regime, that’s not what we were proposing, and, actually, that’s rebutted by the official advice that was given to the committee around pistol clubs. What we’re seeking to do is, essentially, replicate the exact same regime that exists around pistol clubs, and if it is correct, as the Minister says, that you can drive a truck through all the exemption regimes around regulated sporting shooting clubs, if that is correct that any old Jo Schmo can come down and set up a shooting club and, essentially, get around—[Time expired]

Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you, Mr Chair. I just want really to talk about the principles underlying this major Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 201. In particular, there seems to be a suggestion there that, in fact, this is a licensing regime, and it’s not. We’ve changed direction entirely in respect of these weapons. In fact, what we have is a blanket prohibition on these semi-automatic weapons with some very narrow exemptions, which need to be thoroughly justified. Those exemptions, which are in the SOP, are justified—such as the pest control exemption—but a broad-ranging justification for sports in terms of economic benefit or in terms of personal welfare and enjoyment simply isn’t justified.

So that’s really all I wanted to say about that. This is a prohibition regime, not a licensing regime, and that’s how we need to approach this question.

MARK PATTERSON (NZ First): Thank you, Mr Chairman. I’d just like to rise to take the opportunity to ask a very specific question of the Minister. I note, in new section 4A in clause 8, the exemptions. I actually commend you on the very pragmatic approach you’ve taken, particularly around the vintage weapons and the collectors category. This is history, and it could have been crushed if you had taken that heavy-handed attitude. You have been very pragmatic about that, but we also know that there is some risk with that. By taking all these other weapons out of circulation, we have actually made, potentially, the collectors’ weapons more of a target.

So within this select committee process, what we have done is be quite clear, and I refer, actually, to new section 33A(1)(c)(iii) in clause 31, where you say, “ensure that the removed vital part is kept at a separate address from the prohibited firearm;”. We have changed that wording from “location” to “address”, so you’ve actually got to have it on a separate property.

Now, my question is—and apologies if I drifted off for this part of the select committee—does the person for whom that address is have to have a special licence to hold that extra part? So you can’t just take it down to your neighbours and the appropriate safe and drop it off, or will it be specified that it has to go to a police station? What are the provisions? What are the technical provisions around storing those disabling parts at a separate address? Thank you.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): Thank you, Mr Chair. I want to pick up on a new issue which is related to shotguns. So we had quite a discussion about shotguns in the select committee and, if I recall correctly, the advice we got back was that the vast majority of shotguns could hold five cartridges or less. In fact, I think the figure of 10 percent was for those shotguns that could hold six or seven rounds in their tubular magazine. On the back of that, we came to a view as a committee that we would limit it to five cartridges—full-size cartridges, because there is obviously the complication of using smaller cartridges—or less. What appears to have come to light since then is, actually, that the number of shotguns with tubular magazines greater than five is actually closer to 30 percent, based on some information that I’ve been made aware of.

So my question to you—and this is one of the questions that arose in the committee—is can you confirm that if you have a seven- or six-round - capacity shotgun, you’ll be able to hand that shotgun back and the Government will pay for the shotgun to be converted so that it can have a maximum capacity of five? Therefore, would that weapon be able to be passed back to the owner of that and, therefore, would that do away with the unnecessary destruction of that weapon that, obviously, would be made safe and meet the requirements of the bill? So that’s the first thing I wanted to ask.

The second thing, I just want to ask a little bit more about the rights of pest control agencies. In Schedule 3, on Supplementary Order Paper 201—and I’m sorry, Mr Chair, for going to the back, but it was referenced earlier—we added “Canada goose” as one of the pests that should be on the list. But one of the other pests that farmers face a lot is, actually, increasing flocks of paradise ducks, who mob very substantially and, with the declining numbers of duck shooters, are actually becoming quite an issue. They are very crafty and cunning to shoot, and I just wanted to make sure in Schedule 3, new regulation 2C, whether or not paradise ducks are under that definition.

Just traversing back to new section 4A in clause 8, it brings me to the wider issue where we made the change that we would allow pest control agencies to undertake, effectively, the pest control work that many high-country farmers and many farmers in different areas—it doesn’t necessarily have to be high-country farmers, but those farmers who have land that is subject to a lot of pests. They have to go through a specialist regime—and, actually, we’ve created a specialist regime for them, so that’s amazing—to allow them to have access to semi-automatics for the specific purpose of killing and dealing with those pests. Now, that’s all covered under new section 4A(1)(h).

First of all, Minister, I’d like you to confirm that if farmers want to get together—and they may not be high-country farmers, but if a group of farmers wanted to get together—and create a business with the substantial purpose of that business being for dealing with and killing pests, they would they able to go through the process of forming such a company and, therefore, be in a situation where they could readily have access to pest control agencies at the time when they’re required, because often pests arrive at certain times and you don’t have people from agencies who are going to deal with them available on tap. They have to pre-plan it. This would give the capability to those farmers to work collaboratively and responsibly but still meet the requirements of this Act. I think it’s very important that some guidance to this is actually provided by you.

I think those are crucial parts of, I think, the changes we made around that. I think we should not underestimate the impact of pest control on non-conservation land, as we defined it, and private land. Thank you very much.

Hon MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): Thank you, Mr Chair. I’ll just take a very short call. I just want to address the Minister of Police and say that I think that the debate in the committee this evening has been good. But I think that Duncan Webb made a very good point: this legislation is about prohibition, and what we’re saying as a country is that we don’t want the general public having access to military-style weapons.

What I’m concerned about, with some of the language that I’ve heard in the Chamber tonight, is that we’re starting to demonise Kiwis that have got legitimate firearms licences for legitimate reasons. We should make sure that the debate remains fully focused on the fact that we’re saying as a nation that we don’t want military-style weapons readily available. I think that Chris Bishop’s Supplementary Order Paper was an important one, and I’d appeal to the Minister to pick that up in the second tranche of the work that’s being done.

Although we’re sending a very clear message as a Parliament and as a nation around what we think about military-style weapons, we also have to protect the rights of law-abiding Kiwis that are actually just wanting to participate in things that they’ve probably done for a long time. I don’t accept the argument that was put up around the fact that it’s very easy to form a gun club and a range. It’s actually extremely difficult in New Zealand. Even the police would tell you that sometimes they struggle to find places that they can get signed off as being used as a range. It’s very, very hard.

So I’d just appeal to the Minister and to the House—because I think we’ve got the third reading debate in the House tonight as well—to let’s stay focused on the prohibition side of the bill and let’s not start to demonise Kiwis that actually hold a firearms licence and have got very legitimate uses for having those firearms and using them. Thank you, Mr Chairman.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): I just want to talk about some of the other issues in this bill around what we are trying to achieve. I think the point that Mr Mark Mitchell was making before is a very important one. As of right this moment, there are many, many—248,000—people who are legitimate owners of these types of weapons. Once we pass this bill, obviously, that becomes illegal. I think it’s very important that we don’t demonise them, and that’s why striking the right balance between what we are doing and what we’re seeking to achieve is very, very important.

I think the other issue that relates to this is the issue around compensation and amnesty, and we heard a very good submission from the chief of staff to the Minister in New South Wales who was responsible for the buy-back of guns in Australia. One of the most important things that came through in that discussion with him was the importance of having very fair and reasonable compensation provisions for these weapons. I know that there’s been discussion and a Supplementary Order Paper that you’ve talked about, Minister, regarding this, but I just think it’s absolutely very important that you, as the Minister sponsoring this bill, provide comfort to those legitimate gun owners who will be forced to return these weapons and hand them in that the compensation that they’re going to receive is fair.

I think that’s important because that will mean that people feel fairly treated by these changed circumstances, but I think it also strikes at the whole issue of whether this gun law that we’ve all been part of is actually going to work. The issue is around the number of people who choose—and I use that word advisedly—to comply with this voluntarily in the time that’s permitted. To do it quickly is of vital importance to Parliament, and I think what you do, what you propose around those terms, and how you go about addressing it is vitally important.

I think there is an assumption that we’re going to have an amnesty period for six months that ends on 30 September and that everything’s going to be fine and dandy. I don’t, unfortunately, think that’s going to be the case. When you look at the example in Australia, I don’t have the exact number, but I think that I saw quoted somewhere that they’ve had 30 amnesty periods.

We do not want to be in a situation where this country goes through multiple amnesty periods to try to get to the point where we actually achieve the outcome that all of Parliament is seeking to achieve, and a lot of that rests with you, as the Minister, being explicit about those terms. I urge you to do that as soon as possible, because every day you delay will create uncertainty in the minds of those gun owners but also will potentially put at risk the whole success of this. I just urge you because we all want to achieve a good outcome but also we will want to actually rely on the good nature of those gun owners who will voluntarily do what Parliament requests in this bill. I just say to you again, please act speedily to make sure that we achieve the outcome that Parliament wants.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 203 in the name of Chris Bishop to the proposed amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 201 in the name of the Hon Stuart Nash to Part 1 be agreed to.

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

Ayes 56

New Zealand National 55; Ross.

Noes 63

New Zealand Labour 46; New Zealand First 9; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 8.

Amendments to the amendments not agreed to.

The question was put that the following amendment in the name of the Hon Stuart Nash to the proposed amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 201 in his name to clause 64 be agreed to:

in the amendment to section 73(1), replace “prohibited part, ammunition, or explosive” with “prohibited part, ammunition, or an explosive”.

Amendment to the amendment agreed to.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 201 as amended in the name of the Hon Stuart Nash to Part 1 be agreed to.

Amendments as amended agreed to.

Part 1 as amended agreed to.

Part 2 agreed to.

Schedule 1

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 201 in the name of the Hon Stuart Nash to Schedule 1 be agreed to.

Amendment agreed to.

Schedule 1 as amended agreed to.

Schedule 2

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 201 in the name of the Hon Stuart Nash to Schedule 2 be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

Schedule 2 as amended agreed to.

Schedule 3

The question was put that the following amendments in the name of the Hon Stuart Nash to the proposed amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 201 in his name to Schedule 3 be agreed to:

in the item relating to cross-heading above regulation 20A, after “firearms”, insert “prohibited”;

after the item relating to regulation 28, insert:

Cross-heading above regulation 28D

Revoke the cross-heading above regulation 28D.;

replace the heading to the item relating to regulation 28D and the cross-heading above regulation 28E with the heading “Regulation 28D”;

in the item relating to regulation 28D and the cross-heading above regulation 28E, replace “Replace regulation 28D and the cross-heading above regulation 28E with:” with “Replace regulation 28D with:”; and

in the item relating to regulation 28F(2), replace “paragraph (a)” with “subclause (1)(a)”.

Amendments to the amendments agreed to.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 201 as amended in the name of the Hon Stuart Nash to Schedule 3 be agreed to.

Amendments as amended agreed to.

Schedule 3 as amended agreed to.

Clause 1 agreed to.

Clause 2 agreed to.

Clause 3 agreed to.

House resumed.

Bill reported with amendment.

Report adopted.

Third Reading

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN (Prime Minister) on behalf of the Minister of Police: I move, That the Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines, and Parts) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

We are here just 26 days after the most devastating of terrorist attacks created the darkest of days in New Zealand’s history, and we are here as an almost entirely united Parliament. There have been very few occasions in my history when I have seen Parliament come together in this way, and I cannot imagine circumstances where that is more necessary than it is now.

I want to acknowledge, therefore, as I begin my contribution here in this third reading debate, those parliamentarians who have worked so constructively in this discussion and debate. Of course, that goes for our coalition and confidence and supply partners, as members of this Government—I acknowledge you—but I also pay particular tribute to the Opposition, who, from the moment this issue around the use of these particular weapons in this terror attack arose, I have found to be nothing but constructive. I acknowledge you sincerely for that.

We should all be asking ourselves, though, why we are here in the first place, at this present point in time, in this third reading debate. I can recall very vividly the moment I knew that we would need to be here doing what we are doing right now. I was, very early on, in a briefing with the Commissioner of Police, where he described to me the nature of the attack that had occurred in Christchurch. He described to me the nature of the weapons that had been used in this terror attack, and then he described to me that they had been obtained legally. I could not fathom how weapons that could cause such destruction and large-scale death could have been obtained legally in this country. I could not fathom that.

Now, yes, it is true that those weapons were modified. They were modified, and that meant that they were held in form against the licence that that individual in question had, but they were modified easily. I know the Finance and Expenditure Committee witnessed the ease with which a gun of that nature could be modified, and not just the ease with which a gun of that nature could be modified but the ease with which a magazine could hold not just 30 bullets but could be extended to hold upwards of 60 bullets and rain terror on a group of people gathered together in worship and in peace. That is one of the reasons why we’re here.

We are also here because New Zealand stands apart in its widespread availability of weapons of such destructive nature and force, in that military-style semi-automatic weapons are available, or have been available, in this country to that degree, and in that assault rifles have been available in this country to that degree, and today that anomaly ends.

We are here because, after hearing all of that information, I know I was not alone in feeling that I could not, hand on heart, go down and face not just the media, not just the public, but the victims that had been left behind from this terror attack and tell them, hand on heart, that our system and our laws allow these guns to be available and that is OK, because it was not. So I made a decision, after that briefing, that I would go down that day and, without having the chance to question the Parliament, know that Parliament would be with me, and they were, and again I thank you for that.

We are here because we—not just me, but we as a Parliament—have asked the public, have taken the time that we’ve had in the select committee to talk to those who do use guns for legitimate purposes, those who are in our rural communities, our farmers who have pest management and control issues, and those who legitimately use weapons for hunting purposes. When we as a Parliament, and when I as an individual—because I have—asked those individuals, who we absolutely accept their legitimate use, “Do they need military-style semi-automatic weapons? Do they need assault rifles?”, their response was absolute: no. They have told us what is fair and legitimate use, and they have told us that they, by and large, with very few exceptions, support what we are doing here today.

This is not a House here that is demonising legitimate use of firearms in New Zealand; quite to the contrary. In fact, I see the response that we’ve had as an endorsement that we have acknowledged that fair and legitimate use. We’ve responded to that in this legislation, and I hope that we have brought people with us in our response. But, most importantly, we are here because of the victims and families. I have to reflect that when I visited the hospitals and the victims, none of them had just one gunshot wound. I struggle to recall any single gunshot wounds. In every case, they spoke of multiple injuries—multiple debilitating injuries that deemed it impossible for them to recover in weeks, let alone days. They will carry disabilities for a lifetime, and that’s before you consider the psychological impact. We are here because of them, and I believe that they are here with us, supporting what we are doing here today as well, because these weapons were designed to kill and they were designed to maim, and that is what they did on 15 March.

I’ve listened to the debate that has happened in this House and I have heard the debate that has happened in select committee and I’ve heard the minority who may have spoken against this bill, and I want to acknowledge it has been a minority. I don’t want to overstate the submissions that they made, because the majority supported what is happening here, but, within that minority, I heard an argument around process. My question here is simple: you either believe that in New Zealand these weapons have a place or you do not. If you believe, like us, that they do not, you should be able to agree that we can move swiftly. My view is that an argument about process is an argument to do nothing, and I’m not the first politician to say that. The first politician I ever heard say that in relation to gun laws was John Howard when he moved quickly after Port Arthur and for the same reasons we have.

We have moved to stop the sale, and now we’ve moved to stop the ongoing circulation of these weapons. We allowed exemptions on 10-round .22s and we’ve allowed five-shot shotguns—fair and legitimate use of those weapons. We’ve allowed pest control and those specifically working in professional pest control to still, within very tight constraints, access these weapons for the tahr, for the goats, for those areas where we consider that use legitimate. But we will tightly manage and control those areas, acknowledging, though, what we have heard from the rural community and our farmers.

Finally, we have made sure that there is compensation—there is a buy-back scheme. That’s an acknowledgment that until 15 March, whether we agreed with it or not, it was legal to possess and purchase these weapons, and now it is not. It is only fair that we put in place a compensation scheme, and we have. Minister Stuart Nash has released details of that today, including, of course, that we will use independent advice to construct, essentially, what will be a price list that will specify that for particular models and makes of weapons, we will factor in the use and the wear and tear on those models, but we will be specific and create, essentially, a catalogue for compensation. That will be worked up over the next few weeks. We’ll make sure that the buy-back scheme operates for a six-month period once that has been resolved. We will operate fairly, and that is what we have operated on, those assumptions, all the way through in drafting this legislation, and that includes a consideration of the impact on retailers.

Ultimately, I’m proud that we are standing here today. I’m proud of the enormous work that the New Zealand Police have done to get us here today. I acknowledge them; it’s been huge. They have worked constantly, every day since 15 March, and I believe it’s to make our country safer. I acknowledge the select committee, I acknowledge the chair: the work you’ve done has been incredible and important. We are ultimately here because 50 people died, and they do not have a voice. We in this House are their voice, and today, we have used that voice wisely.

CHRIS BISHOP (National—Hutt South): Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the National Party to lend our support to the Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines, and Parts) Amendment Bill. In the start of my contribution, I want to, on behalf of the party, acknowledge the Prime Minister for her remarks in opening this third reading debate, and also acknowledge her leadership in the hours and days and weeks following the shooting. I have received many comments in the last few weeks around your leadership, Prime Minister, and I think all of New Zealand has been impressed by your steadfastness at a time of great trial for our country. I also want to acknowledge the Minister Stuart Nash, who has worked quite collaboratively with those of us in the Opposition on this regime that we’re about to pass into law. And I want to acknowledge Michael Wood, who chaired the committee in, I think, a very good fashion—a quick fashion but a very good fashion.

There are three incontrovertible facts about what happened on 15 March. Number one: the shooter had a firearms licence. Number two: he had legal weapons—albeit illegally modified, but they were legal weapons. Thirdly: using those legal weapons, and with a firearms licence, 50 people were massacred in cold blood in a place of worship where they should have been at peace and at prayer. I’ve been personally reflecting quite deeply on that, and I have to say I thought about it almost straight away, actually, because as our police spokesperson with responsibility for firearms, one of my first thoughts following the news on that Friday night was: how did this happen and where’s this going to go next? I thought it was pretty inevitable what the Prime Minister came out and said on that Friday night, and I agreed with it.

I spent most of the weekend thinking about it, and then, on Sunday, I remembered what an individual who owns a gun shop had told me. I won’t name the person, but, as part of my work in the police portfolio and firearms, I’ve been going around the country. I now remember a man saying to me, “There is a loophole in our law. The loophole is: if you wanted to do something like Christchurch, you get an AR-15 and you get a high-capacity magazine and you’ve got it—that’s what you can do.” I remember thinking, when I was told that some months ago, just how wrong it was, and I’ve been reflecting quite deeply on that over the last few days and weeks. There is a loophole in the law, and it’s that exact loophole that the individual exploited on the evening of Friday, 15 March.

It is true that these weapons are designed to kill. They can be used for legitimate purposes—we’ve talked about it in the Finance and Expenditure Committee—with an exemption regime, but their fundamental purpose is to kill. I think it is undoubtedly true that this will make New Zealand a safer place. New Zealand will be a better country for having as many weapons like this off the streets.

There are people who say gangs and other criminals won’t respect the law and there will be people who abuse the law, like there always are. There will always be criminals, and, actually, we need to do more to take illegal weapons off our gangs. I hope that the Government will work with us in good faith in phase two around firearms prohibition orders. I think they’re a common-sense change that I think everyone can get behind.

We do need to do more, and it is true that there will be people who don’t give up their guns, but as with what happened in Australia post-1996 when John Howard, that great Australian Prime Minister, showed leadership as well and the number of guns reduced and the vast majority of people handed back their guns in exchange for compensation, the country became a safer place—and, actually, just like Australia became a safer place, New Zealand will become a safer place as well. That is fundamentally why the National Party is supporting this. We thought it was important that the Parliament speak as unanimously as possible, that we put to rest once and for all the ongoing debate around military-style semi-automatics and semi-automatics generally, and, actually, when 99 percent of Parliament speaks with, essentially, one voice, in some ways it’s a lot easier to withstand the political consequences.

Now we have the Labour Party in Government alongside New Zealand First, and I acknowledge the braveness of the position that they took. Mr Patterson and Ron Mark and the Rt Hon Winston Peters, as Deputy Prime Minister—quite a brave position, actually, for them to take alongside a Labour Cabinet, to work alongside the National Party and the Green Party as well, for Parliament to speak with as unanimous a voice as possible. Hopefully, the politicking around this will now, essentially, cease, because we are going to say once and for all that with very rare exceptions, military-style weapons are not welcome in New Zealand.

I welcome the exemptions in the bill. I think it is important that we have commercial pest control, for example. I think it is important that heirlooms, mementos, are well dealt with. We spent quite a bit of time at committee trying to get that regime as right as possible. I suspect that there will have to be a few modifications in phase two of the reforms, but I think it’s important that Parliament sends the message that antiques and historical artefacts, mementos, are largely untouched by this bill.

I do want to say that I do genuinely think there is a role for international sporting competitions when it comes to semi-automatic weapons. I think it is possible, as I’ve just made the point in the committee stage—we think it is possible—to design a regime where a small amount of people have access to semi-automatics to compete internationally. They don’t compete in the Olympics, they don’t compete in the Commonwealth Games, but there are people who compete on the world stage, in some cases doing very well for New Zealand, and if we can design a regime around pistols, around pistol clubs and pistol competitions—and we were told by the officials that that regime is working well—it must be within the competence of Parliament to do the same around international sporting competitions. I extend the hand of friendship to the Minister again to try and work through that. Potentially, that’s something that’s going to come in phase two.

But, overall, the committee worked very collaboratively together. It was a quick process, but we heard from lots of different people and we did receive good advice from the police, and the various officials were well shepherded, as I say, by Michael Wood in the chair. We produced a report that I think has improved the bill, and now we’ve reach the third reading. Parliament has acted very swiftly. As I mentioned before, it was important that Parliament do that swiftly, and I agree with the remarks around the Prime Minister as to why Parliament had to act so fast.

In the end, I just finish my remarks by returning to where I started my contribution, which is that on 15 March, the man who caused such carnage in one of our most beautiful cities had a firearms licence. He had legal weapons. In the future, that will not be allowed to be the case, and, hopefully, the third incontrovertible fact about 15 March will not happen in the future, which is the senseless massacre of 50 people at prayer. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

SPEAKER: Michael Wood for a five-minute call.

MICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): Approximately three weeks ago, I stood at the Mount Roskill mosque with our Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern; the Mayor of Auckland, Phil Goff; and a huge crowd of people who had come together to remember what happened on 15 March and to provide support and solidarity and aroha to our Muslim community. What was most evident at that gathering was that although we were there gathering to remember an episode of great darkness, there was also some light. That light came from the fact that people in the Muslim community felt enormous support from their fellow New Zealanders. It came from the fact that they felt the solidarity; that people were standing with them. It came from the beautiful leadership of our Prime Minister, who ensured that those people knew that every step of the way, their Government would be standing beside them.

But it also came from the fact that those people had hope and confidence that there would be action, that there would be action in memory of those whose lives were taken and action to make our country a safer place, to minimise the possibility of the horror of 15 March ever playing out again. So it is so important that here we stand in this Parliament, less than one month after 15 March, collectively as a House, taking that action. The action that we take is not the only action that must be taken. We must resolve ourselves to building a community that is truly inclusive, in which we combat all forms of Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice, but we also must take this action, the action of removing those weapons that were used on that fateful day, that dark day, and which struck such fear into so many of our communities—weapons that, as the Minister Stuart Nash, in an earlier debate, identified, were specifically designed to kill many people in mere moments. That, of course, is what happened on that day.

Along with other members of the Finance and Expenditure Committee and others who watched it, I was horrified by the demonstration that we received from police when we received our initial briefing on this bill, about how easy it is for a category A firearms owner, like myself, to take a category A weapon and put on to it certain parts and turn it into a killing machine of the nature that was used on that day. There is simply no place for these weapons in our country.

This Parliament is taking decisive action, but it is not rushed action, because this has been talked about before. We have been reminded that it was talked about in the years following Aramoana, that it was talked about in the Thorp report in the mid-1990s, and that it was talked about in the select committee report a couple of years ago, but the forces of reaction mobilised every time to prevent action from being taken.

So I wish to commend every other member of this House and the leadership who has driven this reform forward—our Minister and our Prime Minister—for taking this decisive action at this point. We cannot allow, and we are not allowing, those calls for delay to be a cover for inaction again. In the select committee, members across parties have worked to make this legislation effective and fair. We have listened carefully to submissions within a short period of time. We have heard from all perspectives. We have made changes where we have believed that this will make the legislation more fair and more workable.

I do wish to acknowledge that there are firearms owners, many of whom are good people, law-abiding people, who are affected by this legislation. I wish to acknowledge that and put that on record. This is no besmirchment of their character or their decency as New Zealanders, but this is about the public safety of all citizens. We are a country of laws and norms and values, and, every time we legislate in this House, we balance the rights of different citizens and different groups within our communities. On this occasion, we say that the right of all New Zealanders to live peacefully and free from the terror that inflicted our country on 15 March is a more important right than the right to own these weapons.

In our select committee, we heard from Mustafa Farouk, the president of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand. He came and told us that he was there to speak for the 50 New Zealanders who could not speak. In this House today, we stand in memory of those and we stand to keep faith with those 50 lost citizens, and I commend all members of the House for the action that we have taken to make our country safer. Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I call Kiritapu Allan—you have five minutes.

KIRITAPU ALLAN (Labour): On 15 March, our country radically changed for ever. I too want to acknowledge, alongside my colleagues, the leadership of our Prime Minister in responding to the traumatic events of that day. I also want to acknowledge the Opposition, and I want to commend the actions of this House in almost its entirety as it stood pokohiwi ki te pokohiwi—shoulder to shoulder—in recognition of the values that we uphold as a nation and as a country in denouncing behaviours and denouncing that action, and in recognition of what we as a country and what we as citizens of this nation deem to be appropriate and inappropriate actions and values for our home, for our place.

I want to acknowledge, over opposite, my colleague Barbara Kuriger. That day, I stood shoulder to shoulder alongside Barbara Kuriger and Jonathan Young as we watched the Prime Minister. She had to leave us that day, and it was Andrew Little who stood in. That was the first time—I think it was just an hour after the events that unfolded that afternoon. Collectively, there was an acknowledgment amongst every person in this House that it was not a time to play politics. It was a time to come together. It was a time to stand together and uphold what we as a nation held as right.

So I just want to acknowledge you, Barbara, and every member of this House and every citizen in this country who came together and who showed up at the memorials, who showed up at the mosques, who showed up—who showed up. We know as a society that we are an inclusive community, and this Act that is going through this House today with almost unanimous support is an action that we as a nation can be collectively proud of.

We are picking up the work of what was commenced in 1992 in this House, under the leadership, then, of the Hon John Banks. We heard from the Hon Lianne Dalziel, now the Mayor of Christchurch, who participated in those debates back in 1992, when they were arguing for the absolute ban on any military-style semi-automatics (MSSAs). Due to politics and due to time and events at that time, they couldn’t get that legislation over the line to denounce and to ban MSSAs, but now, by almost unanimous support in this House, we will.

So I want to thank the support of our communities, because we all here in this House are but representatives for the people up in our homes—me in the mighty East Coast, and our friends over in the rural regions and the urban regions—whatever the race, the class, or the creed. We’ve seen people from every single part of our community come up and say that, actually, we don’t need to tolerate—as the Hon Peter Tapsell called them—Rambo-style, military-style semi-automatics. They’re not necessary for hunting. In particular circumstances, they have a very minor role to play in pest management and control, but people up and down our nation have said that we don’t need these.

We’ve heard from a number of people over the period of listening to the submitters, but one particular submitter really struck me. His name was Dr James McKay, and he led the surgical response on 15 March. Forty-eight citizens came to the Christchurch Hospital and had to be triaged, and, as I heard from the Prime Minister just prior, barely any of those people that came before him had single bullet wounds or entries. You had centre-fire bullets that had shattered and imploded in people’s bodies, and they had to triage them. So I just want to acknowledge him and his team, those first responders who are living with the trauma of what they saw that day but too are still treating many of those people who were injured on that day.

I also want to acknowledge the Minister of Police, Stuart Nash, and his team, including the Commissioner of Police, Mike Bush, for your incredible response. I want to acknowledge the Acting Deputy Commissioner Andy Coster and Assistant Commissioner Tusha Penny for the way that you’ve worked with us throughout the course of the select committee, police policy managers Geoff Dunn and Sheryl Pinckney—I hope you can get a little bit of sleep after this—and Barbara and all the team that have worked diligently over the last period. I commend this bill to the House.

IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. It gives me—well, I guess it’s a privilege, really, to have an opportunity to speak on what probably is a historic piece of legislation for this House. I too want to acknowledge the Prime Minister and the efforts of the leadership of this House and all parties—almost all parties—within it. I also want to acknowledge the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee and, above all, the officials. Probably, some of them would have been having bad dreams, I would imagine, during last weekend in particular, when they worked four days in a row to get this piece of legislation to the stage it’s at now.

Like many New Zealanders, I think we’ll always remember where we were on that fateful Friday the 15th. I’d have to say that I was at the central districts Fieldays, with many thousands of others, and I think the way the disbelief just slowly crept in to that event probably was the way disbelief slowly crept into New Zealand as to how this had happened and the result we got from it. Obviously, it’s changed New Zealand, and the change in this law is a very important part of that.

I’d like to think that this piece of law might go down in history as a benchmark in legislation-making, but I accept that the short consultation time is probably not ideal for most of our law. I want to commend the select committee chair and those who chose the submitters who came to submit to us, because I thought it was a broad range of submitters. Whilst there were over 13,000 submissions, I thought the submitters who submitted to us gave us a very good view of almost every—well, almost every view you could get of this piece of legislation. I make no apologies to those who weren’t heard, because I think there was only one way to get this bill through in the manner that it’s got to this point in the House, and I think it’s most important that we did that.

I want to make a couple of comments on what I think are very important issues going forward, and I have commented on that already but I want to comment further on it, because I think the need for broad publicity of where we’ve got to with this piece of legislation—particularly around the amnesty and what is and what isn’t a legal piece of firearms equipment now—is hugely important. I think it’s essential that we get that done and that we get it done urgently and make that publicity work. It’s going to be difficult to get to some people, because, as I’ve said earlier, there will be people in New Zealand who have got no idea they’ve got these weapons in their possession and who don’t have a licence to own them and have never needed to have a licence to own them because they didn’t know they were there. I think that will be much more common than we believe, because some of what, effectively, could be 100-year-old pieces of equipment that are no longer legal will have sat in houses for years and years. So it is essential that we get that publicity done and get it done very well.

It’s essential also that that buy-back scheme, when it is instigated, is—as I think I heard the Prime Minister say earlier—effective, that it’s fair, and that it gives people the incentive to get these guns out and in the police’s hands, or in hands of the buy-back scheme, as quickly as we possibly can, because for it to work effectively, we need to get them all. That’s the next piece I want to turn to, because I think that as this Act is reviewed going forward—and it no doubt will be—and as the second tranche of legislation comes to the House, it’s essential that we find ways of extracting the weapons out of those people who have no reason to own them and have no licence to own them, because the underworld will have many of these guns. There will be many of them in unknown places in New Zealand.

How we get them out is going to be most important to the success of this whole piece of legislation, because a failure to do that, of course, will mean the legislation, effectively, has failed. So I think we need to make sure that in the course of the next few months and the next piece of legislation, we find very effective ways of getting those guns out of our community and getting them destroyed, basically. It’s essential that that happens.

I want to say a brief word about the 250,000 people who currently have gun licences in New Zealand, many of whom will own pieces of equipment—weapons and bits of weapons—that are no longer available. Before this event happened, they were perfectly legal and law-abiding citizens of New Zealand. I make no apology for the fact that they will have to give those weapons up—I think that’s part of the game—but they will feel a little victimised. I think that we should make sure that that process is as easy and as pleasant for them as possible, because they were, as I said, perfectly law-abiding citizens of New Zealand and they had complied with every piece of the law. So I think a little sympathy for them needs to be expressed in this House not because I think, as I said, we need to make an apology for doing what we’ve done—it’s absolutely essential that we did what we did, and they will play their part in that, I’m sure, because they are, as I said, law-abiding citizens of New Zealand.

I don’t have much more to add to that. I think it is a very important piece of legislation for New Zealand going forward, and I think it will go a long way. Once we get the effective buy-back in place, it will go a long way to ensuring that anyone who has a weapon like this in New Zealand clearly shouldn’t have it, and so that will make it very easy for the police to manage.

The last piece of stuff I want to briefly talk about—and the Minister spoke about it earlier today—is the fact that the less people who have access to these guns, the easier it is to control it. I think, whilst there’s always going to be a need for these types of weapons in New Zealand and a specific need for them, we need to make sure as we go forward that that need is catered for in a reasonable manner. So I’m pleased to commend this bill to the House. I think it’s an extremely important bit of legislation, and I’m pleased to have been part of a very efficient system—the select committee—that put that in place. Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.

MARK PATTERSON (NZ First): It is an honour for me to stand and add New Zealand First’s support for this significant piece of legislation. In doing so, we stand behind and beside our Prime Minister, and I would like to acknowledge her in the leadership she has shown. It has been comforting to us all. Her response has been noted not only nationally, of course, but internationally. In a dark time of international politics she has stood out, and New Zealand First, right from the get-go, had absolutely no trouble falling in behind what was, in one word, “leadership” in this time of national crisis. In fact, our own leader’s, the Rt Hon Winston Peters’, initial reaction was that at 1.30 on 15 March our world changed for ever. And so will our gun laws.

I will acknowledge, too, the National Party. I know that the politics for them, as Chris Bishop alluded to earlier, is not easy either, as it is not for us. But their response and their leader, Simon Bridges, falling in behind and getting alongside—this effort has been incredibly important. I acknowledge you on that side of the House—well, the National Party, in particular, on that side of the House—for taking the principled stand, and you have done that for the same reason that New Zealand First and the rest of the House have: because it is the right thing to do.

The gunman, it has been referenced, was operating legally on an A category licence—the garden variety licence that any one of us with a reasonably limited background can qualify for. He had a legal firearm purchased over the counter at a retail outlet. He did modify that firearm, but he did expose the gaping holes in our firearms law. These changes are long overdue and the genesis of this is actually not Christchurch. The genesis was Aramoana, and, as has been referenced earlier, we did fail to act there. John Banks has admitted recently it’s his greatest regret. Mayor Dalziel in the select committee process, in her presentation to us, referenced the fact that she sat where we sat in 1992. She heard the same arguments that we heard and they were unable to get it across the line, and today we have the ability to right that wrong.

The Thorp report of 1995 came out and recommended restricting handguns, banning these military-style semi-automatic rifles, limiting magazine capacity, having a full firearm registry. We had Port Arthur and we saw the exemplar of John Howard. We had Matt Robson’s attempts to get bills before the House and one successfully in 1999 and then again in 2005. The 2017 select committee recommended 20 changes off the back of a full investigation; only seven were implemented. This is not the time to point fingers, but, certainly, for anyone that questions the process, how much process do you need? We have been too timid. We have paid the price.

It is important, though, as Ian McKelvie referenced in his previous speech, to acknowledge the lawful firearms owners of this country. New Zealand is amongst those with the lowest rate of firearms-related incidents in the world. There are 250,000 or thereabouts firearms licence holders and there are estimated between 1.5 million and 2 million guns. There is a lot of firepower out there, and the vast majority of these New Zealanders use their weapons, as described, legally and safely and comply. For those New Zealanders, some of whom are hurting and feeling somewhat victimised, we do understand that hurt but we hope that you will see the greater good in what we are doing. There is no alternative for us. We cannot and will not suffer a repeat of this tragedy.

In terms of the exemptions, I would commend the Minister actually in his pragmatic approach to this with the collectors’ items, vintage firearms. These are history, and, as one of these collectors said to me, they touched history—they lived and touched history. And to be able to keep these with very strict controls and having this amendment where you have to have a vital part stored at another address, we are making sure that that is a safe provision but an important provision nonetheless.

I would also like to talk, too, on behalf of farmers. For farmers, this stuff’s not a “nice to have”; it’s actually a tool of the trade in some cases, and they will be feeling a little bit as if they have been restricted unfairly in the sense of the need that they have: things like wallabies, geese, goats, tahr, deer—of course, which not only damage pasture and crops but carry TB—and pigs that can do so much harm.

There is some need for cullers to have access to these semi-automatic weapons over and above the criteria that we have set, and we have carved out an exemption for cullers on private land. It wasn’t in the first draft of the bill, but we have added that within the select committee process. But we will have to look at that in the second tranche because there are 5 million hectares of private land—hill country—out there under some pressure from these pests and wild animals, and we will have to assess that. But New Zealand First fully supports in the first tranche being tight, because the tighter we make it at the start, it’s easier to make exemptions as required rather than try to do it in an ad hoc manner at the start.

So this is just the first tranche of legislation, and we note the royal commission that’s coming—Sir William Young, a wise head to lead that effort. We will look at things like the licensing regime. We will look at things like registry. We will look at sentencing. Just looking at the bill as it is, I think there is room for toughening some of the sentencing. Prohibition orders have been mentioned by the Opposition, once again, where those exemptions may be able to be increased for our farmers, if indeed they are demonstrated to really need these weapons.

Of course, there will be these wider social issues such as hate speech that will be looked at, and the wider social context of how this tragedy has been able to come about. But these are questions for another day. This is a very, actually, narrow bill around hardware—where the line is drawn in terms of what weapons New Zealanders will be able to have access to and those that we won’t.

Could I commend the Minister Stuart Nash on the way that he has shepherded this through the Finance and Expenditure Committee. I’ve previously acknowledged the chair, Michael Wood, who did an outstanding job in this, and all members of the select committee contributed constructively. Our public service: I understand that there were members from 10 departments seconded on to this bill. There were 13,000 submissions in 48 hours. We, of course, did not get to read them all individually ourselves, but I’m sure—with other members of the select committee—we did all read a select few, and it has also been referenced that we did get a very broad selection, and wisely picked selection, of oral contributors that contributed so much to the drafting of this bill.

To the Police Assistant Commissioner Penny, who I see here, and your team, Mike McIlraith, I might reference as well—who found out he’s a long-lost cousin of mine through this process—but everyone that contributed through that select committee.

Could I quote, finally, from Lianne Dalziel, who quoted a contributor to the 1999 select committee: “If the Aramoana experience has failed to teach our legislators that these and similar weapons must be banned, regardless of the power of the lobby opposing such action, one can only speculate at the extent of the tragedy needed to spur our politicians into positive action to protect our lives.” Today we know the answer to that question.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): The events in Christchurch on Friday, 15 March were despicable, dreadful, and unexplainable. The horror that all New Zealanders felt as events unfolded was palpable. There was a deep sense of unbelievability that such an event could happen here in New Zealand—few could comprehend it.

For our Muslim community it was much worse. For them it did not necessarily represent a loss of a single member’s family; rather, it was a loss of a member of a large, close-knit community. Emotions were, naturally, very raw, and the way that New Zealand responded, with their outpouring of sympathy and support and assistance, was overwhelming and welcome. New Zealanders were rightly outraged that such an event could take place in our city, in our country, and to our community.

The values that we hold in this country around tolerance for one another and the ability to get along with one another are what make New Zealand so wonderful. I, like many of you here in this House, went to many of the Muslim communities, and I went there to give my support, as you did. What I received back from my Muslim communities was much more. What they offered me was hope, a sense of resoluteness, and they had an unerring sense of purpose. They see themselves as New Zealanders, and they’re committed to being good citizens—playing their part to make a better New Zealand.

Prejudice is such a corrosive element in any society and is unwelcome here in New Zealand. So this is one of those moments—a moment of unity, a unity of intent, and an intent to act as one. So we’re about to pass the Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines, and Parts) Amendment Bill. I note it is our duty to protect New Zealand and New Zealanders from the unlawful use of these high-velocity weapons, but I think it’s also important that we respect the rights of New Zealanders to own and safely use guns here. This committee has sought to attempt to reach that position. I think the Finance and Expenditure Committee made good progress.

I think the issue around pest control—and we’ve heard many speeches on it. The ability of farmers and conservation and concerned members of our community to make sure our lands are not overrun by pests has been provided for in the bill. I think the sensitive treatment of heirlooms and memento guns is very, very important. Many of those items are of significance to those family members, and we have stridden a line that, in my view, is reasonable. I do note that in the Arms Act, there is provision for this.

However, I do believe there is further work to do, and we have been discussing that earlier today, particularly around the issue of competition target shooting. But my final thing to the Minister is the need around the amnesty and the need to be clear—absolute clarity—around the buy-back provisions, because, to some extent, Parliament can legislate but it’s the citizens of New Zealand who will respond, and it’s the goodwill that we want, that they will voluntarily hand in these weapons over the course of the coming months.

I want to, finally, just acknowledge the Prime Minister for the role that she has shown in leading this debate. I also want to acknowledge the Minister for bringing this legislation in in a very short period of time and working with the committee. I also want to acknowledge the members of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, who worked in a collegial and collaborative fashion. We didn’t always agree. Finally, I want to acknowledge the officials, many of whom are sitting up in the gallery here today. They worked tirelessly, and I say thank you from me personally but certainly on behalf of the committee.

So, to the families of our missing 50 and those who were injured, I trust you will look at us as an institution and say we delivered here today.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Kia hora te marino, kia whakapapa pounamu te moana, aroha atu, aroha mai, tātou i a tātou, tēnā tātou katoa.

[May the calm be widespread, may the sea lie flat like greenstone, love and be loved, all of us together, greetings to all.]

On Friday, 15 March 2019, just over three weeks ago, an atrocity was committed in New Zealand. It was committed by a white supremacist, it was committed by a terrorist, and it was committed using semi-automatic firearms that he’d purchased legally, though he had modified them. It resulted in 50 deaths: deaths of children as young as three years old, mums and dads, teenagers who had plans with their mates afterwards, and older kaumātua of their community who’d brought that community together over the years. Survivors now live with ongoing trauma, a lifetime of trauma, and ongoing injuries that will not be fixed in days or weeks or even months, because the weapons used were designed to cause mass harm.

In the wake of that atrocity, New Zealand came together. We came together across the country. We gathered in mosques and at vigils. We held each other, we cried together, we held those victims in our hearts, and we promised those victims our solidarity as well as our support and ongoing courage as we make every change that’s needed to make New Zealand a place that is safe—where we all feel safe and free.

I am so proud that in only three weeks this House is already making that change—the first step in that change—together, across the House. So I do want to acknowledge that that is happening in very near unanimity, and it happened through the hard work of the committee that came together at short notice.

Let’s recall that this change was a long time coming. It was not a knee-jerk reaction. It was change that had been repeatedly recommended, including by New Zealand Police, and I want to acknowledge them because they do face the front lines of violence when it happens and they’ve repeatedly recommended this change. So the fact that we’ve come together now to make the change proves our commitment to continue standing with those victims in their grief, in our continued and communal shock.

But also I think it acknowledges, as we must acknowledge, that members of the communities that were directly affected—Christchurch city, our Muslim communities, our migrant communities, and our refugee communities across New Zealand; and I do include myself in that—we live not only with ongoing grief but also very real fear, because that is the purpose of an act of terror. So as we walk our kids to school, as we catch the bus late at night, and as we gather in our community hubs, we now live with the fear of mass violence, and this House recognises that and the job of making New Zealand safe.

So this bill will finally ban semi-automatic military-style weapons, magazines, and modifications that make them behave like semi-automatics, because we recognise that weapons like the ones used in mass atrocity have no place in civil society. We will establish an amnesty, and I think that is the right thing to do, and I think we all probably come together to urge all gun owners who hold these weapons and these parts legally to come forward and hand them over as part of the amnesty or do it now.

We have made some exceptions, as it was appropriate to do for pest control. Other exceptions were made for heirloom and collector weapons that will now have to have their parts kept in separate places. The Green Party agrees with New Zealand Police, who said that it would be best to disable those weapons permanently, but we also do note that this is a great move forward and that it is only the first part of changes we will make in gun control laws.

I want to acknowledge also that as much as this was a change that was recommended over time by experts, it also is a change that was championed and brought about as a result of people power. It was incredible that 70,000 New Zealanders signed a petition within five days of what happened in Christchurch calling for this very change, and 60 percent of select committee submitters supported it. So this is change that New Zealand wants.

Chris Bishop: Where were you on the committee?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! Mr Bishop.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: This is change that New Zealand has called for. It is change that’s driven by people power, because big money lobby groups don’t drive change in New Zealand’s Parliament.

I want to acknowledge also the long line of Green Party activists and MPs, in whose giant shoes I stand today, who’ve championed for better regulation of gun control. Over time, as part of our ongoing kaupapa on peace, we’ve advocated for non-violence. It is one of our founding charter principles, and we stand for peace in New Zealand now as we come together to have those hard conversations that will reveal the causes of this tragedy.

So future action will happen. We look forward to the royal commission of inquiry recommendations that will look at the causes of the violence in Christchurch and that will look at the activities of our intelligence services and our law enforcement services and the way that hate speech and hate crimes are recorded and defined in our law. We must be brave as we shine a light in the dark corners of hate, racism, and prejudice that we’ve learnt do exist in our society and make the changes we need.

The cost of doing nothing has been too high. Too many people have been hurt. Today, we are drawing a line in the sand. Fixing our gun laws is the beginning, but New Zealand and this House are committed to doing all of the hard work, beginning all of the change that will make New Zealand truly a place where we can all feel safe and at home. So I commend the bill.

Hon MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call in this, the third reading of the Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines, and Parts) Amendment Bill. Can I acknowledge the Prime Minister first of all. I was very grateful of the fact that she shared with us some insights around how it crystallised in her mind, the leadership that was required, and then, of course, the Parliament coming together to bring this bill to the House to make the changes that we needed.

She was very clear about the fact that it was during the briefing with Commissioner Mike Bush and the police team where she got the graphic detail about the attack and also the detail about how the offender was able to actually go through a process of obtaining a firearms licence legally and then acquiring military-style weapons and then, of course, the ability to be able to get a detachable magazine with a capacity, I think she said, of up to 30 or 60 rounds. Of course, the whole purpose in an attack like that is to try and do as much damage in as short a time as possible, and, when you’re armed with a semi-automatic military-style weapon with a capacity of 30 or 60 rounds, then you see the tragic result that we’ve had to face as a country in Christchurch, with 50 of our people dead and another 50 in hospital receiving treatment for injuries—like Kiri was saying, horrible injuries—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order!

Hon MARK MITCHELL: Madam Assistant Speaker, pardon?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Kiritapu Allan. You use the member’s full name.

Hon MARK MITCHELL: Oh yes. Sorry, Madam Assistant Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Thank you.

Hon MARK MITCHELL: Just very quickly though, I do want to address the comments made by the Green member Golriz Ghahraman. I know that they’re heartfelt, but I think that it’s incumbent upon this Parliament now to show some leadership, to not be alarmist, and to not create anxiety in our country, especially when we’re already dealing with major mental health issues and anxiety. So now we have to project some confidence. We have to project some confidence in our police service and in our intelligence services. We have to take the action now, in the coming weeks and months, to make sure that we can prevent another attack like this from happening.

I think Ian McKelvie said that we can all remember where we were on that Friday. I remember where I was. I was opening a new business in my electorate, in Rodney, when I got the news of this attack. It was a huge personal blow because I had invested heavily, myself, when we were in Government, to make sure that we were updating our legislation to try and make sure that we could prevent an attack like this happening in New Zealand.

I want to acknowledge the Labour Party, because I remember very clearly working with Phil Goff and David Shearer and also the Hon Christopher Finlayson, as our Attorney-General, on our countering foreign fighter legislation. That was cross-party. But I would say to the Green Party that if you are truly motivated now in making sure that we do a better job of protecting our country, then continue to show that support, because, I could tell you right now, at that time we got no support at all; in fact, it was quite the opposite.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! Remember, when you use the word “you”, you are referring to me in the Chair.

Hon MARK MITCHELL: Sorry, Madam Assistant Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Thank you.

Hon MARK MITCHELL: I’d just like to say that this is an important piece of legislation. We are sending a very clear message as a Parliament and as a country that we don’t see the need for military-style, high-powered semi-automatic weapons in this country. We don’t. You can’t justify their use—other than the exemptions that we’ve clearly stated.

I do want to acknowledge our first responders—all of them that responded on that day in Christchurch. I think I spoke in the House in the first reading and said that in the initial chaos and confusion—and I know there was different information that was flying through to the police and they were trying to make very quick decisions on the ground—we still had our first responders, we still had our police officers, we had our ambulance and paramedics, and we had firefighters, nurses, and doctors. They didn’t know what they were dealing with, but they were still going out there and putting themselves at risk to help their fellow Kiwis. I want to acknowledge all of them and the outstanding job that they did. We should all be proud of them.

I do want to acknowledge Assistant Commissioner Penny and Coster, who I’ve been lucky enough to work with myself. Can I acknowledge both of you and the leadership and the support and also the other officials. I wasn’t part of the select committee process, but I heard that it was a very good one, even though it’s been truncated, and the public can have a lot of confidence in the work that has been done. Can I acknowledge the chair Michael Wood—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I apologise to the member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.

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

Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Tēnā koe e Te Mana Whakawā. It’s with pleasure, in some ways, that I stand in support of this third reading of this bill, but, of course, with sadness when I reflect upon the tragedy that happened in my hometown and electorate of Christchurch. I don’t want to reflect so much on that tragedy as on the change in the conversation that this bill has created, because this bill, which changes a law which has been outstanding for many years—it’s a change that we’ve known has been needed for many years—could have been a conversation about rights. It could have been a conversation about liberties. But it isn’t. It hasn’t been that. It’s been something quite different.

I’m heartened by the fact that we have shifted away from that libertarian narrative of what people’s entitlements are and we’ve changed to look at how communities need to care for each other. This isn’t about taking away anyone’s rights; it’s about this Parliament—and I say “Parliament”, not “Government”—across the floor, moving together to make our communities safer, not because someone has rights but because we have duties: duties to each other; duties to care. I say not a “duty of care” but a “duty to care”, because it’s time we moved away from that legalistic language and recognised that this Parliament and the Government is how we mediate those duties, how we talk across party lines, across rural lines and city lines, across all kinds of divides, to reach a consensus about how we create a community which is safe—safe from all kinds of harm. This discussion has been a discussion about how we make our communities safe from firearms, which are intrinsically dangerous and, in the case of these prohibited firearms, absolutely lethal. It’s entirely right that the consensus we’ve struck is to prohibit these semi-automatic weapons, because they are tools of violence, and only in the most extenuating circumstances should they be permitted. That is the conversation that’s been had.

But this conversation, I hope, is the start of a longer conversation about how we can keep our communities safe—how we discharge that duty of care so that not only do we not see our citizens harmed with firearms but we don’t see our citizens harmed in other ways either, that we see our citizens kept safe from hate in all of its forms. That’s a conversation that’s going to be difficult, a conversation that’s going to require a discussion about many of the tools we use in our daily lives, including the internet and the information we obtain and we share on that. It’s a conversation that’s started. It’s a conversation that very much needs to continue. But, because of the way this has been done, I think we can now go back to our communities and our electorates, talk to our friends and our families, talk to our constituents, and implore them to comply with this law and that for every weapon they have which the community has agreed is no longer legal, is inappropriate, is dangerous, and is harmful, hand it over. Come and comply with the amnesty scheme. It’s absolutely imperative that these weapons are taken out of our communities and that our communities are made safe by it.

So to everyone in the Chamber, everyone listening, let’s embark on that conversation. Let’s not for a moment abide any suggestion that it’s OK in any way for anyone to hang on to any of these weapons. We have made a huge step in making our communities safer. Let’s keep on with that important work. Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.

BRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. It is an honour to rise in support of the Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines, and Parts) Amendment Bill. Quite often, in standing in support of a bill, I might say “It’s a pleasure”; however, the circumstances of 15 March do mean that it is not possible to take pleasure in where we are and what we are having to do. But it certainly is possible to, and I do, acknowledge the importance of what we are certainly shortly to pass, and it is with a sense of both privilege and a degree of pride that New Zealand and New Zealanders, through their elected officials, are about to take some action to help safeguard the lives of our people and to help to ensure that we have the sort of New Zealand that we all want to see. I acknowledge that privilege and take pride in being a part of these moments.

Parliament decided—it was a choice, and Parliament decided—to take the process we have with this bill to reach the point we have now and where, I would predict, we are about to get to. As adults in the room, we can fully support that—those decisions, those actions, and where we are—and still critique the process which underpins it. There is certainly simply no way a select committee can address a bill of substance in such a short period of time and give it the same scrutiny that it could do if it had an extended, normal, or longer period of time. With all the will in the world, and with all the effort of members and officials—and I acknowledge the hard work of all the officials—there is simply not, in a shortened period of time, sufficient opportunity to hear all of the voices, to give all of the consideration to all matters raised, to debate every point, or to look at every possible alternative. Shortened time simply does not permit that.

That doesn’t mean that the outcome of the committee will be flawed or, indeed, that it’s the wrong process. In fact, I would acknowledge that through the work of the committee and with what we have returned to the House and are debating in this third reading, the committee and the House have done a great job, along with officials, to get the very best possible bill that will deliver the objectives that Parliament and the Government have set out for it to deliver. What it does say, though, I contend, is almost shouting out to members of this House a timely reminder that these truncated processes, particularly these deeply truncated processes, should not only be the exception for this House; they should be a very rare exception.

But by no means does that indicate or suggest that what we have done over this past week or so was the wrong thing—quite the opposite. I endorse the decision Parliament took, and it was Parliament’s decision. The Government put forth a proposition to do this bill under an extremely short period of time, but it was Parliament that agreed to do so. We now find ourselves in the last few minutes of a decision to rid New Zealand of weapons, of firearms, that no normal citizen needs but with enough careful consideration that where exemptions are warranted, they have been granted, with enough thought and consideration to help inform elements that might take part of the next phase of the firearms reform.

The only call I would make to the Minister is: when we finish this tonight, Minister, I know that today the framework for the buy-back has been released—that is a great thing; it has helped to remove some of the uncertainty that responsible firearms holders would be feeling—please address the remainder of it, if not exactly at the same haste, certainly in the same good faith and with appropriate speed so that those remaining vestiges of uncertainty can be removed and our law-abiding citizens can easily comply with the law we’re about to place upon them. It’s the right thing for them and all of us. I commend this bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): This is a split call. I call David Seymour—five minutes.

DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this bill but not in opposition to changing our gun laws. I want to pay tribute to those victims of our nation’s tragedy of 15 March. It is for them that our gun laws must change, because it is not sustainable to have a set of laws where such a deranged individual can get their hands on such lethal weapons with almost nobody knowing about it. That much is certain, and that much is the consensus in this House of Parliament, and almost up and down the entire length of this country. However, this bill is not an attempt to improve public safety; it is an exercise in political theatre.

This bill was made redundant and unnecessary by an Order in Council passed down by the Prime Minister and the Government in the week after the tragedy of 15 March. That Order in Council made it clear that only those approximately 7,500 people with the most restricted level of licence—an E category licence that requires extreme vetting and registration of every single weapon—could have semi-automatic weapons. That was a great start. That was a good placeholder, which wouldn’t expire until 30 June. That Order in Council could have been the beginning of a careful, considered, thoughtful legislative process—the type of legislative process that the Government now promises will commence almost as soon as this bill has passed through this House and become a law.

People might ask themselves, “What was the rush and what was the hurry?” Other than the need to be seen to be doing something, there was none. The fact is that, unlike the Prime Minister, who asked, “Well, is it better to do nothing?”, I believe that this bill may end up being worse than nothing.

We could not find, in the Finance and Expenditure Committee, what the officials’ estimates of the success of the gun buy-back might be. So what will members of this House say when we get to the end of the amnesty period this September and we find that our gun buy-back has been no more successful than the Australian one—one that found that between 40 and 80 percent? Just as our Prime Minister couldn’t say, today, how many guns there are in New Zealand, the Australians didn’t know either, but between 40 and 80 percent of these dangerous weapons have been handed in, and they’ve been handed in by the people who are the law-abiding ones. We could find ourselves with a bigger black market in dangerous semi-automatic weapons than ever outside any regulatory cordon whatsoever. Why might that be? Well, one good reason is that today, in the eleventh hour—such is the rush of this process—the Government decided that they would reward people with compensation if their weapons were owned legally but they wouldn’t offer compensation for people who hand in illegal weapons. That is how insane the outcomes of this process are.

That is to say nothing—maybe it’s a law that won’t work—about the way it has been gone about—to say nothing of the truncated select committee process, which gave no serious consideration to improving the law, didn’t consider any other options such as upgrading licensing, and didn’t allow the committee to consider what the success of the buy-back might be. It simply said, “There is urgency. We must act. We’re going to do this anyway.” That is not good lawmaking. That is not the way to get the law-abiding gun community—whom we need as allies in creating a safer society—on board, and that is not the way to celebrate the institution of Parliament and our democracy at a time when exactly our democratic institutions of freedom have been challenged so violently.

So, for all of those reasons, I am in support of changing our gun laws, but it is impossible for anyone of good conscience to support this bill, the way it’s been brought about, and the problems with it that may well make our society more dangerous than on 15 March. Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.

TAMATI COFFEY (Labour—Waiariki): Tēnā koe e Te Mana Whakawā. Tuatahi, ake ka hoki ngā whakaaro ki a rātou mā kua wehe atu ki te pō, te wheao o Ihirama, te 50 kua mate i Ōtautahi i te rā 15 o Poutū-te-rangi i tēnei tau. Mā tō atua koutou e manaaki, e tiaki, moe mai, moe mai, e oki.

[Greetings, Mr Assistant Speaker. Firstly, our thoughts return to those who have passed away, the followers of Islam, the 50 who died in Christchurch on 15 March this year. May your god look after you and care for you, rest in peace, rest in peace.]

I just want to very briefly acknowledge the previous speaker, David Seymour, who talked about how this was a bit of an emotional knee-jerk reaction. Do you know what? Maybe it is, but you know what? I think that when his member’s bill comes up very soon, he’s going to be hoping that there are a few people that vote—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! No, you don’t comment on future papers.

TAMATI COFFEY: I shan’t then. Twenty-six days ago something extraordinary happened here in New Zealand. We have the saying in Māori that when your iwi cry, my iwi cry; when your whānau cry, my whānau cry. On that day when Christchurch cried, we all cried. We shared a moment in New Zealand’s history, and I’m sure that everybody will remember. I, myself, was waking up on a Saturday morning, intending to do the Iron Māori sports event in Lake Taupō, but, actually, that all went out the window because it didn’t feel right. I started getting messages of pain and anger and frustration from my community, people that needed support. So I pulled the plug on that event and I actually went home and I organised a candlelight vigil for Saturday night in Rotorua, and it was mimicked all around the country. Everywhere, in the smallest parts of New Zealand, they were holding candlelight vigils because they too were affected by the events of that day.

The people of New Zealand should know that we have done the best that we can with this piece of legislation. We have made some exemptions, the exemptions that have well been talked about: exemptions for heirlooms and mementoes and exemptions for wild animals and pest control. What we’ve done is we’ve made sure that we have not made too many exemptions, because what we didn’t want to do was create an ineffective bill and create lots of loopholes for people to be able to crawl through. So we are proud of this piece of legislation. The unity that our Finance and Expenditure Committee showed in putting this legislation through mimicked the unity that New Zealand showed in the wake of those terrorist attacks in Christchurch.

But, you see, we’re not out of the woods yet, because the hardest part is actually going to be the implementation of this bill. We can do what we can as lawmakers in here to set the framework so that these military-style semi-automatic weapons are taken off the shelves so that they’re not in the community, but we need New Zealand to stand with us and we need them to stand firmly with us. We need responsible gun owners to actually stand next to us as we take these out of our communities to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

Although we can say that we’re trying to do it so that it doesn’t happen again, are we guaranteeing that it will never happen again? Well, no, you could never guarantee that. If somebody wants to kill, they will find a way to do it. But with this, we have done something that this Government has been wanting to do for a very long time, and I’m proud to have been part of the committee, part of the movement that has washed through this Parliament after those terrorist attacks, putting this bill through the House.

It would be probably remiss of me not to touch on the actual cause of this heinous crime, and that crime is something that we Māori have battled with for a long time. The root cause of this is racism, and we’ll call it out for what it is. It was a racist act against an innocent group of New Zealanders, and we need to also sort that out. In the months to come, we will have conversations about hate speech and we will have conversations about racism, but what we need to do as a country, as communities, is look back into our communities and do as much as we can to celebrate and embrace the diversity that we have across the country.

I fully support this bill. I’m proud of it. I will go back to my people that I represent and tell them that we did the best that we could. Kia tau te rangimārie mō ake tonu atu.

[May peace reign forevermore.]

Hon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura): I am so proud of us. We have worked so hard over quite a short period of time, and we have worked in the Finance and Expenditure Committee to get the best bill that we could in the shortest amount of time. Even when we have not agreed, we have been able to be civil and adult, and that is something that I think we can pat ourselves on the back for.

I also want to say to New Zealanders who have purchased guns over the years that are now going to be, following the Royal assent of this bill, prohibited items that they need to hand those in. We need to have—and we have said this in our National Party view in the report—a very good buy-back system in place. We have talked in the last few weeks about how much money that will cost. We know it’s a lot of money whichever end of the spectrum we’re talking about, but I say: how much is a life worth? How much are 50 lives worth? And how many other times could the atrocity that happened in Christchurch happen again?

We have already seen that our Anzac Day is coming up, our day of national mourning—to me, anyway. We in this debating chamber, a war memorial to our dead, are now seeing our Anzac Day being affected, and I’ve never in my years in Parliament seen us at such a high security level—the highest security level that we’ve ever had. I don’t believe that that’s just chance. I don’t believe that’s just to encourage us to get this bill through. I believe it’s there because it’s needed, and I speak as a former Minister of Police. I would not, for a moment, expect that that security rating would be in place if it wasn’t needed.

We’ve had some very good submissions on this bill from members of the public, and I want to thank those people who came and made their submissions—the 20 that we heard. It’s less than a week ago, although, actually, those members of the committee, I’m sure, will agree with me that it feels like it was about three weeks ago—so much has happened since then. I will say that most of the people who came to submit came with a constructive outlook to say what they thought we could improve, and we listened to those and some changes were agreed in the select committee, particularly around antique firearms, what we could do around some of the airsoft and paintball guns—all of those sorts of things—and we also were concerned to make sure, as a committee, that we gave exemptions around the commercial wild animal and animal pest-control businesses.

In the National Party, we felt we could have done more for those people who are sports shooters and who engage in international competitions—our competitive shooting sports. We would like to hope that in the second tranche of legislation, that could be addressed. I was personally, and I think we all were, very impressed with the quality of the submission from the pistol shooters’ association. They have a very good system, which I’ve heard of before, obviously, but to have them run through exactly how it worked gave me a lot of confidence in that system being able to be used for people engaged in sporting events where some of these higher calibre or higher capacity weapons are used—that we could bring that in for them.

We are concerned about the firearms prohibition orders not being in this bill, and we’d like the Minister to come back to us on that. We think that is very important. Why we think that’s very important is that most of the people we’re talking about whose firearms will now be subject to the law and will be illegal and must be handed in are law-abiding New Zealanders who have purchased their weapons, and the accessories and everything else that goes with them, from firearms dealers. They have done so within the law, and some of those people feel very strongly towards their firearms and their weapons, and they, in many cases, feel that they are being targeted or picked on, I could say, in more colloquial terms.

Those people must know that the Government and Parliament take seriously the fact that we know that some of our violent gang members in New Zealand have firearms that are not legally owned, that they do not have licences for, and that are also prohibited items under the law. Those people—those law-abiding New Zealanders—need to be encouraged through a very good and generous buy-back scheme to hand in their weapons, and they also need to be encouraged by this Parliament saying that we’re going to be asking not just law-abiding people to hand in their weapons but also people who are not law-abiding. I think that is something that we are going to want to hear more from the Government on.

It’s not often that peace breaks out in Parliament, but to most intents and purposes—I won’t say “all”, because not entirely—it has over this matter. We have all been deeply moved by what happened in Christchurch, by the murder of 50 people and the attempted murder of many more. We have all been deeply moved. It could have happened anywhere. It happened in two mosques. It could have happened in a kindergarten. It could have happened in a church. It could have happened in a school. For any New Zealanders who think, well, it wasn’t some place that they would go, it could have been. It could have been anywhere. It’s the sort of thing that happens, and we could say a person who has done this has done this for particular reasons. It’s not only that person we need to be concerned about and worried about—that they have access to firearms—or only people with those sorts of thoughts and those drivers. There are other people as well.

I just think that New Zealand cannot continue down the path of having a generally unarmed police force and a highly armed population. We can’t have that. We’ve seen other countries where they have armed police all the time. We’ve seen where they have great access to firearms. It doesn’t necessarily make people safer—not if everyone else has them as well—and so I think that it is important that we do this. This is one of the most important pieces of legislation that we will pass during this Parliament, because it’s not only about keeping people safe; it’s about putting a marker in the sand for our New Zealand culture, It’s saying that, yes, firearms are necessary in the agricultural sphere, and, yes, firearms are necessary and desirable for hunters—yes, they are—but, actually, living in Thorndon, do you really need one? And the answer for many people will be no.

I think there will be more people who hand in their firearms than those who have to under the law. I think there will be people looking at their firearms and saying, “Do I need this? Can this be stolen? Can it be used against people? What if my child got access to this?” I hope this legislation makes a real difference to our culture in New Zealand. I hope too that the second tranche, and particularly the buy-back scheme, addresses the absolute concerns that some gun owners have. I hope that the more quickly we can deal with those issues, the better I believe it will be for New Zealanders.

In the meantime, while people are still waiting for further detail—I know we’ve got some detail today about the buy-back scheme—and until gun owners can start speaking to other gun owners about them being treated fairly, which is what they want, then we will have more people putting out false information about what this bill actually says. We’ve seen quite a lot of that, haven’t we? Many of us have been subject to a lot of lobbying, which people are entitled to do. Some of it has been patently wrong. If we answered all of those emails and other bits of lobbying, then we would do nothing else all day. So I think our best answer to those who are concerned about this law is to put the information out there as quickly and as fairly as possible and get that scheme going as soon as possible.

This has been a good opportunity for the Government and the Opposition to work together for New Zealand, and I would hope that the Government will keep us informed and ask for our support on other matters pertaining to these firearms laws.

Hon STUART NASH (Minister of Police): We have travelled a long way in eight days since this bill was read a first time. It has been a punishing schedule for MPs, submitters, and public servants who played a role in this process. In that time we have walked in the shoes of a wide cross-section of our communities. Discussions during the eight days of debate on this bill have taken us to the sanctuary of the mosque; they’ve allowed us to witness the supreme effort of trauma surgeons in the hospital emergency department.

We’ve caught a glimpse of the family circles, now with an empty chair or two in their household. We know there are widows, many widows. There are children who have been to funerals of a sibling, a parent, or a grandparent. There are elderly members of our community who never got a chance to say farewell to an old friend. As well as the victims and bereaved, we have walked through the worlds of the gun users and dealers. Women have talked about their lives on farms. We’ve been taken through the landscape of the high country sheep station, introduced to the atmosphere on rifle ranges, and heard of the wildlife in the mountains and valleys frequented by recreational hunters. The Police Association reminded us of the everyday reality for front-line cops, listening to instructions and warnings on the radio as they head to a call out wearing body armour to enable them to walk into danger.

While Parliament has been to these worlds, many other visits have been happening outside this place. Family and friends have been tending to the 14 people still lying in hospital beds, recovering from gunshot wounds and other injuries. That includes a five-year-old girl at Starship in Auckland and her father in the hospital next door. One patient remains in intensive care in Christchurch Hospital; others are at Burwood Hospital. This legislation is just the first step of many to make our country safer. The all-of-Government response is ongoing.

Police are acutely aware of how vulnerable and frightened some communities still feel after the terror attack. They’ve established a special operation to reach out to these groups to provide reassurance and advice. They are also responding to the many questions people have about safety and security. Police have made almost 2,000 visits to schools. They’ve made almost 1,400 visits to places of worship. These visits are mostly, but not exclusively, to our mosques, but I’m also aware of a visit made by police to a Chinese Christian church which normally has 150 people at its Sunday service. Many had stopped coming because of fears and false rumours about threats, but police were able to reassure this congregation. Fourteen police officers with specialist cultural knowledge and skills have been deployed to liaise with ethnic communities in Christchurch. The diversity of our police force is growing as we roll-out 1,800 extra officers, which means that police are increasingly drawn from the communities they serve, they can speak the language, and they know about faith and cultural practices. Police have also made about 150 visits to gun clubs—this is an important community for police.

It is worth repeating the assurances given by Government from the earliest days. There are good people in all of our communities who will find themselves in possession of banned firearms, parts, and magazines. This is because we are changing the law not because these people have done anything wrong. This is why we have an amnesty and we are putting in place a buy-back scheme. To date, more than 300 weapons have been handed over during the amnesty and more than 1,100 online forms have been completed for more weapons and parts to be handed over. There have been 1,900 phone calls to the dedicated police freephone, 0800 311 311. The amnesty runs to 30 September, but I want to remind the House that there has always been provision to extend that date by Order in Council if necessary.

Alongside that amnesty, the buy-back will now be structured within a strict statutory framework. The framework will provide certainty for all participants and create a transparent system for compensation. Police have consulted extensively with Australian officials about their experience with almost 30 amnesties and buy-backs since the 1990s. We want to take the time to get it right, to avoid some of the pitfalls and legal risks encountered across the Tasman.

Tonight’s third reading completes the passage of the Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines, and Parts) Amendment Bill. We’ve begun work on an Arms Amendment Bill (No 2), which we hope to see around June. That bill will address some long-debated questions around a gun register, the licensing regime, the system of police vetting, the fit and proper person test, storage requirements, and penalties, amongst other matters. I hope this House can, once again, come together to work collaboratively on the next stage of reforms.

Before I conclude, I would like to specifically acknowledge a few people. The first is our Prime Minister. Jacinda Ardern gave us the mandate to respond swiftly to the horror attacks of 15 March and change the gun laws in a way that will make a real difference. Opinions will vary, of course, but I believe this bill will be one of the more important legacies of her prime ministership, as it was for John Howard. I thank her for her boldness and her leadership.

Secondly, I’d like to acknowledge my ministerial adviser, Barbara Edmonds, who has been fantastic. Without Barbara’s tenacity, drive, intellect, organisational skills, and relationships and huge hours—huge hours—I’m not 100 percent sure that we would be here, now, where we are with this bill. To Barbara’s husband Chris and her children: I just want to say that your wife and mother has been as influential as anyone in making change that matters to ensure the ongoing safety of our communities. She has made a difference to New Zealand, and you have every reason to be very proud of her. My press secretary, Kathryn Street, has also worked incredible hours and provided an extremely high level of professionalism, advice, guidance, and insight since 15 March. She is a star. Travis Mills, my police private secretary, even though only 24, has the wisdom, intelligence, and insights of someone twice his age and experience. Trav, you have been brilliant. In fact, everyone in my office: Catherine Pantling has worked incredible hours, Jason Smith has taken over Travis’ police workload in order to free Trav up, and Anna Weir, who has had to read a lot of the terrible messages and take some of the unpleasant calls. We’ve asked a lot of our public servants, and I would especially like to acknowledge Deputy Police Commissioner Andy Coster and his police policy team. They have made this country a better place.

To conclude, I acknowledge that in just over two weeks we’ll be marking Anzac Day and police are busy working with RSAs and councils to make the occasion as safe as possible. Traditionally, this day remembers those who have been lost in war—the military and civilians. We remember those who have served our country, who have worked to make it a safer place where freedoms are protected. Of course, those freedoms include being free from harm and free from the fear of harm. Those freedoms include making room for diversity, tolerance, and inclusion.

The day marks the historical ties that will for ever link New Zealand, Australia, and our friends in Turkey. It is an appropriate moment to remind the House of the words of the great Ottoman and Islamic leader Field Marshal Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. He honoured our war dead who are buried in Turkey with the words which are reproduced on multiple war memorials in Wellington, Canberra, and Anzac Cove overlooking the Aegean Sea.

He noted: “you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference to us between the Johnnies and the Mehmets … where they lie side by side here in this country of ours.”

We embrace those who lost their lives in the mosques. They are us. Thank you.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines, and Parts) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

Ayes 119

New Zealand National 55; New Zealand Labour 46; New Zealand First 9; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 8; Ross.

Noes 1

ACT New Zealand 1.

Bill read a third time.

Bills

Social Security (Winter Energy Payment) Amendment Bill

Third Reading

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development): I move, That the Social Security (Winter Energy Payment) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

I’m pleased to see that the majority of this House is committed to ensuring that those New Zealanders who are most in need are able to heat their homes over the coming months. The winter energy payment was a new payment introduced as part of the Families Package. This package has provided additional financial support for low and middle income families towards accommodation, heating, and the costs of raising children. As a form of financial assistance, the winter energy payment has the largest eligible population within the benefit system. It provides extra financial assistance in the winter months to everyone who is on a main benefit, superannuation, or veterans pension in recognition of the increasing cost of living that often leads to those on fixed and low incomes struggling to heat their homes in winter.

This bill is about ensuring that the winter energy payment continues to positively impact the lives of New Zealanders by helping eligible people and families heat their homes over the winter months. During 2018, 774,200 New Zealanders on average per month received the winter energy payment. After including those with their partners, close to one million people have benefited from the winter energy payment already.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all the members of the Social Services and Community Committee for their work and acknowledge all of the contributions of submitters. I also want to acknowledge the officials who have worked on the bill. The Social Security (Winter Energy Payment) Amendment Bill has gone through the full scrutiny of the House within a short time frame. This has provided the opportunity for feedback from relevant stakeholders and select committee consideration within the specific and narrow nature of the changes proposed by the bill.

The winter energy payment policies themselves have not been amended. The only change is ensuring that legislation gives effect to the policy intent that has already been agreed to by this House. The shortened time frame also reflects the importance of passing this legislation by 1 May 2019. Our priority is ensuring everyone who is entitled to the winter energy payment receives this payment so they can have extra support throughout winter with the costs of heating.

This bill amends the Social Security Act 2018 to align the winter energy payment legislation with the agreed policy intent. As I mentioned, no new policy is being introduced as a result of the proposed amendments. The technical amendments in the bill ensure that the people who were intended to be eligible for winter energy payments received these payments lawfully. The policy intent was that the following two groups of people should receive the winter energy payment: people receiving Government funding for their long-term residential care or residential care services but who are not eligible for residential care subsidy or residential support subsidy, and people who travel overseas for more than four weeks during the winter period who should receive the winter energy payment for the first four weeks of their absence.

The amendments in this bill will ensure that people in these two scenarios are legally eligible for the winter energy payment. The amendments under clause 4 to section 72(2) ensure that people receiving Government funding for long-term residential care or residential care services and not receiving a residential care subsidy or residential support subsidy are not excluded from receiving the winter energy payment. The reason why people receiving one of these two subsidies are not entitled to the winter energy payment is because the cost of their care, including heating costs, has already been met by the State.

During select committee, officials identified two further small groups where the winter energy payment is intended to be paid: people receiving residential care services with long-term chronic health conditions who do not contribute to the cost of their care—the funding that they receive is not considered a residential support subsidy because they do not contribute for their care—and people who are in residential care due to a disability or a long-term chronic health condition where the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) does not redirect their benefit to the provider, instead they have a private arrangement with their provider. This funding is also not considered a residential support subsidy because MSD does not redirect their benefit. The amendments proposed in clause 4 to section 72 of the Act have been updated to make it clear that these two groups would be eligible for the winter energy payment.

There is also a small group of people—around 460, according to MSD—who are in residential care and receive Government funding for this care; for example, if they have been the victims of crime or are also receiving a main benefit, superannuation, or veterans pension. MSD has no information about the funding they receive for their care as MSD is not involved in undertaking financial means assessments for this group, as it is not required, and it continues to pay these people the full rate of their benefit. In order for MSD to identify this small group and change their payments, new systems would be required to share information between the Ministry of Health and MSD. MSD is determined that the most cost-effective, lawful, and practical option is to continue to pay this group the winter energy payment.

The amendments in clause 5 to section 220(2) ensure that people who leave New Zealand for longer than four weeks are eligible to receive the winter energy payment for the first four weeks of their absence. This aligns with the treatment of other forms of supplementary benefits. The bill also retrospectively validates decisions made by MSD last year to pay the winter energy payment in the scenarios that I’ve outlined.

Eligibility for the winter energy payment has already been agreed by the Government and Cabinet and in the House through the debate on the Families Package legislation. The clients who were paid winter energy payment last winter were all entitled to it. The issue is that the legislation did not reflect this intent, which is why we are correcting it. Most importantly, there have been no negative impacts on clients as a result of the legislative error. This bill will simply align legislation with policy intent and operations. Following on from this drafting error, MSD has documented lessons learnt from the winter energy payment process and will ensure that these are applied next time a new payment like this is set up.

We know that our officials are working hard to support this Government as we continue to make positive change for the well-being of New Zealanders. In this House, this topic, this issue has come up for debate and certain points were raised during other parts of the debate in this House. One in particular was the fact that it’s taken us 16 months to identify and then rectify the situation. It’s never ideal when mistakes are made in legislation and corrections need to be made to the legislation, but this is not the first time that a drafting error has occurred with legislation.

As the Minister, I acknowledge again that it’s not ideal, but I will say that one of the examples that I was able to find that was recent was an example whereby in 1998, a change to stand-down periods in the Social Security Act was made, and it went unnoticed and was not picked up until 2015, at which point the Government of the day were then able to make the necessary changes. There were financial ramifications in that instance, whereby many people over that period of time had lost a day of pay because the legislation was not befitting of what the intention of the policy was.

Yes—disappointed it’s taken 16 months for us to discover it and then change this. However, 16 months, as I said before in this House, is much better than, in that particular instance, 17 years. So we are here to make the change tonight. It is the final reading. This bill has gone through a fast but thorough parliamentary process to ensure that people who were intended to be eligible for the winter energy payment receive it now in a lawful way. This Government is committed to supporting those New Zealanders who are most in need to heat their homes this winter. I commend this bill to the House.

SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): A noble defence—a noble attempt by the Minister Carmel Sepuloni to explain what happened. She was, of course, quite accurate in describing what the bill does. I would suggest she’s accurate in that it is fairly minor, but that’s where it ends. This was not simply an oversight. It’s appropriate, if I can, that the Minister tries to look at analogies from the past, but this was not an oversight by officials, per se. This was, arguably, not even an oversight by the Minister. This was an oversight caused by Ministers directing officials to work far too fast—far too fast.

We on this side of the House, obviously, are opposed, and I will elaborate further on that as to why, but the primary reason is that this process has been shoddy—absolutely shoddy—and I’ve said it many times in this House, and it’s unfortunate that yet again I have to say it. This is something we on the social development side of the House—those like myself, Louise Upston, Alfred Ngaro, and others who are working in this space—are seeing time and time again around social development legislation. It is rushed, it is not well-thought-out, and it constantly has to come back to the House to be rectified. As the National Party has put in its minority view, we expect that we’ll be returning to this House again, probably in this particular Parliament, to fix more mistakes.

The Minister talked about a process that was thorough—very nice, positive way to introduce the sentence—but, of course, the subclause to follow: “But it was pushed through quickly”. It was rushed; this was a rushed process. Those people that the winter energy payment is directed to were not given the usual full time that a Parliament should provide for them to speak. So those who are choosing to go overseas for four weeks, those who are in residential care—they were not given a chance to speak. In fact, the officials, I would argue—who did a good job in and of the time they were given—have not been given the right amount of time to think this through. In particular, we have a piece of legislation in front of us here at third reading which is retrospective. All members of this House understand that retrospective legislation should be done infrequently, and here is a situation where, personally, I don’t think it was the right thing to do. Personally, I think we should’ve taken more time to consider this, because, amongst other things, what this is is an attempt to rectify a mistake that was introduced because of mistakes made in an earlier rushed process.

There was a social policy, or a social welfare rewrite bill, before this Parliament. A Supplementary Order Paper was dumped at the last moment into this House—literally the last moments—it had no select committee oversight, it had no scrutiny other than what the capabilities of—

Hon Member: Surely not.

SIMON O’CONNOR: No, sadly, that is true. We warned them at the time that mistakes would happen, not just around the rewrite itself, but around this winter energy payment, and lo and behold, here we are having to do an amendment, as predicted. So that is primarily why we are opposing this bill.

The Controller and Auditor-General themselves identified, around about April this year—which is, obviously, of course, not that long ago—that payments had been made illegally by the Ministry of Social Development. Moneys were being paid not only against policy but against the appropriations of this Parliament. I think that needs to sink in for a moment, that payments were being made illegally. Someone on the other side sighs, which may be because it’s been a long night; maybe they don’t like what’s being said, but they were illegal payments.

Probably, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not an enormous amount of money, but, again, it’s a very clear indication that when you have a Government which is not following good parliamentary processes, which tries to rush things through, there are consequences. The consequences are not just long committee stages or, perhaps, MPs in the Opposition droning on and on; the consequences are that taxpayers’ money—hard-working mums and dads, who spent their extra hours working in the fields or on the roads or in the lawyer’s office—has been wasted or paid—paid, if you will—in a way that was not intended.

So what this bill attempts to do is fix two areas. They’re described as minor and technical, but I actually don’t think they are. I don’t think they’re major, but I wouldn’t describe them as minor and technical. One is that, effectively, the winter energy payment, if you will, was not designed to be paid to those who are already receiving the full support of the Crown, particularly those in the likes of residential care. But it was; that’s one of the illegal elements. It was paid out, and so this bill’s going to tidy all that up. In some ways, it’s all nice and tidy—neat little package, little bow all tied up, very nice—except for the fact that now we’re, effectively, paying people twice. They’re going to get the full cost for their living in residential care—heaters, electricity, whatever—and on top of that, they’re going to get a winter energy payment. It’s paying twice.

Officials were not able to tell us actually how many people are affected by this, which, of course, doesn’t give myself or, I’m sure, this side of the House much confidence. But they’re being paid twice—paid twice. What’s the point of that? I mean a lot of us—

Hon Member: Poor taxpayer.

SIMON O’CONNOR: Yeah, poor taxpayer, as one colleague said. Others would wish to be paid twice, too. But the other point I’d point out—if that’s not a very oddly constructed sentence—is that that’s, effectively, a discrimination. I expect this to be challenged in some way by a whole lot of other people who say, “You know what, actually? I know that the Crown already pays some contributions to me, but I just want a little bit more, if you don’t mind. You know, I wouldn’t mind being paid twice as well”. We’ll see how those who are all into, you know, discrimination—it’s sort of one of the buzzwords—handle that one in the future.

The other is around those who are overseas who are being paid after the 28 days, or because they were away for 28 days. Again, a good tidy up there, but the fundamental point is that this should not have happened, and I’d like to suggest, once again to the House, that this would not have happened if we, first and foremost, had a proper amount of time to have considered the genesis of the amendment bill that we have today. I want to once again put on record, particularly in the social development space, that we are seeing a habit, a trend, a vice, if you will, of rushing legislation through the Parliament, which in itself is disrespectful and fundamentally disrespectful to the people of New Zealand.

The other part that I’d add—and this may reflect more my views than this side, but we’ll soon pick up on it. The winter energy payment I’ve described before as simply bribing people with their own money. What I mean by that is some people will be very grateful that they’re receiving this money. It’s delightfully packaged, it has a nice three-word name. Anyone who’s studied rhetoric will understand three words is better than four, and, certainly, better than two—it just sounds good. But where did that money come from? It didn’t come out of magic. In fact, today’s National Unicorn Day—how I know that, I’m actually now a little bit concerned—but, anyway, it’s National Unicorn Day. The money just didn’t pop out of magic. It popped out of the taxpayers’ money. In fact, those hard-working New Zealanders—

Greg O’Connor: Facing extinction, like your party.

SIMON O’CONNOR: No, they’re actually already extinct—it’s a big distinction. We’re still alive and kicking, and we’ve got more than one horn.

In fact, the thing is here, the hard-working people who are receiving the winter energy payment are the ones who have already paid their taxes for that payment. This is yet another example of how the hard-working New Zealander contributes money into a governmental or a tax system and then, bizarrely, is told to be grateful that they receive only part of it back in this smart little package. It’s why I call it bribing people with their own money. It’s a very strange dynamic, and I think it behoves this side of the House—myself and others—to get that clear into Kiwis’ minds, that what this Government offers is nothing more than a little bit of the money that you’ve already given.

So I oppose this bill. I oppose it in principle. I oppose it also because of the way that it’s been pushed through this Parliament. It was not a thorough process. It was ill considered, it was ill put through this Parliament, and, fundamentally, it arises out of an earlier mistake, which in itself was fixing a mistake after that. In fact, you don’t, Mr Speaker—oh, sorry, not you; this House does itself no justice by continuing to replicate the problems which bring about the problems in the first place, and that’s what this bill is about tonight. It’s about fixing a mistake that was already indicated was going to happen.

So we on this side have no confidence, not only in the Government that is putting these sorts of things forward but we have no confidence that this will be the last amendment bill around social security. So as I end my speech, I for one, and those on this side, brace ourselves for the next time we have to take a call on a rushed parliamentary process around social welfare.

PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour): Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise to take a reasonably short call at the third reading of the Social Security (Winter Energy Payment) Amendment Bill. I thought I would address a number of points that the member who just resumed his seat, Simon O’Connor, made, but that would probably take up my entire allocated time because there was so much that was just misleading, really.

Anyway, so the reason that we’re here today is because the winter energy payment legislation that passed in 2017 didn’t fully cover all those who received it last winter. That’s pretty much it. That’s the crux of this bill that we’re debating for the third time today in this House. The reason that happened was because of an issue with the technical drafting of the legislation which meant that it differed slightly from the policy intent. Everyone—and I want to make this very clear in light of some of the comments by previous members—who should’ve been paid that winter energy payment last winter was. About 3.3 percent of people who received it weren’t fully covered by the legislation in the way that it was drafted. However, they were covered by the policy intent of the legislation that passed. This bill fixes it so that everyone who’s covered by the policy intent of that bill is also covered so that they can be paid lawfully this winter. So it’s incredibly disappointing that members opposite won’t support this bill, because, in essence, what they’re not supporting is for people in two specific categories to be paid the winter energy payment this winter, hence the intent on this side, I guess, or the focus on this side of the House, to pass this legislation quickly so that people can be paid this winter.

We’re not here to discuss the eligibility of the winter energy payment; we did that. We did that when this House debated the Families Package that was passed in the first 100 days of the coalition Government. We discussed all the ins and outs of the policy detail. This bill is just a technical amendment, and it’s policy-neutral as a result of that.

So the two categories that this bill amends, in a sense—well, it amends the Social Security Act 2018 to ensure that people who fall into two specific scenarios get the payment, and these are the two scenarios: the first, of course, is when people travel from New Zealand and they’re absent from New Zealand for more than four weeks. The technical tweak to the bill will ensure that they are paid for the first four weeks, and that means it aligns this payment with other such payments as well. The second category is those who receive Government funding for long-term residential care or residential care services but aren’t eligible for the two subsidies—the residential care subsidy and the residential support subsidy. So these are the two categories. People who fell into these categories—that’s about 3.3 percent of those who received the winter energy payment—received it because they were intended to, fully, but the drafting of the legislation didn’t actually cover them. So when this bill, the Social Security (Winter Energy Payment) Amendment Bill, is passed, they will be covered and they will get the payment this winter, as they so deserve.

This bill was part of the Families Package, as I mentioned before, which is a targeted package of assistance to those who really need the support, although members opposite would have people believe that those who get the winter energy payment—I think in previous debates we’ve heard it referred to as those who wanted to stock their wine cellar, but that’s actually not the case. This is a payment that goes to those who get either a superannuation, a veterans pension, or a main benefit—people I have sat with who wear layer upon layer of clothing because they were struggling to heat their homes and people were dying as a result of cold, damp homes. These are the people who get a little bit of allowance to get them through the winter months in a way that is warm and in a way that’s healthy.

About one million people received the winter energy payment last winter, and we have had on this side of the House a wide range of correspondence from different people, people in different conditions, I guess, or circumstances, who have benefited from the winter energy payment. I am incredibly proud that we are moving quickly on this side of the House to ensure that everyone who should be getting this payment will get it this winter, and I’m glad we’ve moved swiftly on that, even if members opposite are churlish enough not to support. I commend this bill to the House.

AGNES LOHENI (National): It’s my pleasure to take this call on the third reading of the Social Security (Winter Energy Payment) Amendment Bill. I think of my parents, who are both superannuitants, and I am sympathetic to the intent of the bill, which is to address and to recognise the costs of heating homes during winter, but, actually, they are also facing rising costs of living under this Government during the course of a full year.

There are a number of concerns which have been highlighted by members on this side of the house during the passage of this bill. The previous speaker, Priyanca Radhakrishnan, and also the Minister for Social Development, just earlier tonight, talked about this bill targeting those that are most in need. I’m pretty sure the Rt Hon David Carter is really in need of this winter energy payment, which he is receiving. This bill actually does not consider need; it merely gives a blanket subsidy to everybody who is eligible. It is an opt-out, not an opt-in, payment, thus giving additional moneys to many who have stated categorically that they don’t need it.

The bill’s fast progress—expressly fast progress—has not allowed a fair process for scrutiny. We are here debating this winter energy amendment because of the lack of scrutiny on this bill due to the rushed process which resulted in the ministry paying out $3.45 million of unappropriated and unlawful expenditure, moneys that cannot be recouped.

I think of my parents—and I mentioned this before—who are both superannuitants who will receive this winter energy payment, but I also think that under National’s proposed tax cuts, they would’ve received the extra money spread across the year rather than an injection across several months which forces them to adjust their budgets accordingly. Further, the winter energy payment will erode over time in real terms with no indexation factored in.

We on this side of the House have reiterated our concerns that legislative changes are being made in a rush due to mistakes having been made when the original legislative changes were rushed through Parliament without proper scrutiny. Let us be reminded that this is a result of the Minister dropping a 500-page Supplementary Order Paper in May last year, 24 hours out from the Social Security Legislation Rewrite Bill, which failed to get the details right around this winter energy payment. The amendment in this bill purports to correct a mistake related to those in funded residential care, but we are of the view that this is still not being corrected, and further mistakes will be made.

Ministry officials were unable to advise us of the precise number of people who will be fully funded by the Government for their full-time residential care and who will still receive the winter energy payment. As noted in one of the very few submissions—very few, because there was only a short amount of time—one of the submitters wrote, “One of the things I care deeply about is people trusting decision making institutions and feeling like they can be genuinely heard—this undermines that work.”

There was no genuine attempt by the Government to allow fair scrutiny of this bill or to allow more voices to be heard. On that note, I do not support this bill to the House.

JENNY MARCROFT (NZ First): Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise and take a call on the Social Security (Winter Energy Payment) Amendment Bill. I’ll begin my contribution by just acknowledging the member from Tāmaki, who spoke—after spending some time today with pink, fluffy unicorns—to suggest that perhaps he has never been on Struggle Street. Perhaps he has never had a cold home. So when you are in a cold home, you get sick, your children get sick, your old people—your seniors—get sick.

There are two words I’d like to reflect on today. Makariri—that side of the House, makariri. This side of the House, mahana—mahana. Cold, warm—those are the two words that this bill encapsulates. For me, it is making sure that our people who need it and those members of society who are vulnerable have this winter energy payment to keep their homes warm during winter.

This is a slight, technical fix-up. There was a drafting error, and no more than that. Perhaps the members on the makariri side of the House would like to stop seeing pink, fluffy unicorns and get back down to earth. Kia ora, Mr Assistant Speaker.

NUK KORAKO (National): Tēnā koe e Te Mana Whakawā, e huri noa i Te Whare nei, e mihi atu ki a koutou katoa. Well, I’m someone, actually, that is mahana, because that previous speaker, Jenny Marcroft—kia ora to that speaker. But, you know, I can remember when we—our nine kids—were in our State house. I also know what it’s like. We used to toss up for Dad’s army coat, actually, to put on our beds to keep warm, so we’ve been there and done that. All we’re doing is our job—this is our job on this side of the House. Our job is to actually hold the Government to account, and what we are doing here—you know, we are sympathetic to the intent of this bill, but it’s really just the process.

Just for the record, what I want to do, just for the sake of the Hansard, is to cover the National Party minority view which came out in the Social Services and Community Committee report: “National reiterates concerns that legislative changes are being made in a rush due to mistakes having been made when the original legislative changes were rushed through Parliament without proper scrutiny. National members are concerned that a bill that purports to correct a mistake related to those in funded residential care is still not being corrected. There will be a number (officials were unable to advise the precise number of people) who will be fully funded by the Government for their full-time residential care and will still receive [the winter energy payment].” Also: “This does not make sense [at all] because their energy costs will be funded twice by taxpayers. This perpetuates an inequity and there is a risk of legal challenge for those who will be excluded from receiving the [winter energy payment].”

So, looking at those different clauses of the minority view is very much about holding the Government to being responsible in actually putting together legislation through this winter energy payment bill. That is why, I think, we have heard from this side of the House all of the different sorts of reasons why we need to oppose this bill, and we do. But I want to make the point that, particularly when you talk about us being cold on this side of the House and you being warm—I mean, our whole whakaaro here is to hold you to account, particularly on what’s been highlighted throughout this whole process of this bill.

E Te Mana Whakawā, tēnā koe. So that was my short call, just to reiterate why this side of the House cannot support the bill. Nō reira, e mihi atu ki a koutou katoa. Kia ora.

JAN LOGIE (Green): Tēnā koe, Madam Assistant Speaker. It’s with pleasure I rise to support this minor, technical piece of legislation that will help ensure that people that got money to keep their houses warm over last winter are able to keep that money that they used and ensure that people this winter who are—from the intent of the legislation—entitled to be able to turn on their heaters will be able to do so.

That feels like a nice thing to support, I think, particularly now as it’s starting to get cold outside. I had the fire on last weekend. I was thinking about this legislation and thinking about the Opposition’s position in relation to it. Actually, I went through two bags of firewood in one day, which I think was about 40 bucks’ worth of firewood—in one day. I was just thinking about all the people struggling to keep themselves and their kids warm.

Hon Aupito William Sio: They don’t care.

JAN LOGIE: As my colleague points out, it doesn’t seem as if the Opposition cares about those people, but on this side of the House, I’m pleased to say that we do.

There are a few points that have been raised by the Opposition in particular that I do just want to quickly address. I don’t expect my speech is going to take the full time because, actually, this is quite a simple correction to make sure that the intent of the legislation is able to be enacted. But people have been raising that the Government’s being lax and that they shouldn’t make mistakes, and members of the Opposition have been quite exercised about that. But I’ve been here a few years now, and the number of times I’ve been in Opposition speaking to legislation from the previous Government and correcting drafting errors—I don’t know how many times, but there were quite a few. I would predict that in the future, I will stand on this side correcting drafting errors from the previous Government’s legislation. I see that coming.

Hon Damien O’Connor: Oh, they stuffed up a hell of a lot.

JAN LOGIE: They did stuff up a lot, and part of it is just that drafting is difficult and technical errors happen. So it’s not something to take the moral high ground over, because we’ve all been there, and we will all be there at some stage.

Also, the point has been made challenging the retrospectivity of this, and the Greens often raised concerns about retrospective legislation. As a general rule, legislation should not be retrospective when you’re holding people to a standard of law at a time when that was not law. That’s unreasonable to do. However, when the intent of the legislation was not realised by the drafting of the bill, I don’t think the conceptual framework of the opposition to retrospectivity applies, because, actually, it’s just that the legislation didn’t reflect the intent. We’re not taking anything away from people or judging people on an unfair standard; we’re just giving them what we wanted them to have.

So I’m all good with giving people what we wanted them to have, and particularly when it comes to being able to keep themselves warm. That seems OK to me, particularly when we know that there are, I think, 1,600 excess deaths from the cold and damp houses in this country every year. That’s appalling, and in this debate I think we need to remember that.

Another point that’s been made from the Opposition is where they’ve raised the idea that there’s potentially a group of up to 400 people who will get this winter energy payment who may already be having their costs covered in other ways. So there’s a suggestion that this is double-dipping. But I haven’t heard anybody speak about who those people actually are, and my understanding is they are people who are likely to be in rest homes who are moving into or out of the hospital section of that rest home. This is the group of people that the National Party wants us to be going through and cutting entitlements to make sure that they don’t get a cent extra to be able to keep their heating on when they get out of the hospital.

Hon Member: Makariri.

JAN LOGIE: Makariri. It’s just a meanness and a meanness that they haven’t been upfront about in this debate—

Gareth Hughes: And uneconomic.

JAN LOGIE: And uneconomic, as my colleague points out, because, actually, the cost of being that mean would be more expensive than the money being paid out. So it’s not that this side of the House is being loose with the money; it’s actually that we want people to be warm. We are being compassionate for people going in and out of hospitals and we’re being efficient with the money. It doesn’t seem, kind of, very good grounds to be opposing those principles.

I do just want to point out that the member of the Opposition also brought unicorns into the debate, rather confusingly. I did struggle, and there was a suggestion that maybe they were unicorns and going extinct. The member mentioned that, actually, no, they’re not unicorns, because they have more than one horn. So now I’m a little confused and going, “Are they bulls, are they goats, are they stags, or are they naming themselves as devils?”, because, really, I just think they shouldn’t be quite that harsh on themselves. I may have trouble with their contributions in this debate and their policies, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call them devils. But if they’re going to call themselves that, then far be it from me.

But, really, this is a very simple piece of legislation to ensure that everyone who is meant to be able to get the money to be able to ensure they can keep their heater on and pay for their firewood this winter, if they have a fire like me, are able to do so, and we are proud to support that.

DAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): Tēnā koe e Te Mana Whakawā. Well, here we are, here again, cleaning up a mess that should not have been and it’s become something of a regular occurrence under this Minister—where a bill is drafted and then we revisit it with a Supplementary Order Paper or a revised amendment bill to clear up her mistakes.

The previous speaker, Jan Logie, who I really thoroughly enjoyed listening to, mentioned the intent was not realised in the initial drafting of the bill. But that is the point: when you’ve got good process, you get the laws right the first time and that is, in essence, the reason why we don’t support the winter energy payment amendment bill; not because we don’t support the universal nature of the winter energy payment, but that this bill did not go through a proper process, and we’re here revisiting it and wasting valuable time when we could be talking about more important things.

So this bill has been rushed through Parliament in a very ill-informed manner. It doesn’t have the proper scrutiny, and the mistakes that we’ve been correcting may, in fact, not be corrected at all in terms of the advice that we’ve had—

Stuart Smith: They didn’t do the mahi.

DAN BIDOIS: —and so, if you don’t do the mahi, you don’t get it right the first time. So we definitely oppose this bill. Again, the intent of the bill we can understand, and I refute the previous speaker who says that we don’t care about how people heat their homes. We do, but we care, we believe that—we’ve got to ask ourselves what the right mechanism is for that to occur and in a scenario where you’ve got rising costs of living—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I apologise to the member. Could Mr Penk please refrain from those interjections. They’re very disconcerting and disorderly.

DAN BIDOIS: Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.

When we’ve got rising costs of living across the board, whether it be petrol prices, increased taxes, increased rents, increased food prices, Consumers Price Index about 2 percent, you’ve got to ask yourself, “Is there a better way to help these people heat their homes?” We just think that this is an ill-informed policy. It’s a policy that we think should be better targeted and managed. So with my closing remarks tonight—

Brett Hudson: No, keep going, Dan. You’re doing a good job.

DAN BIDOIS: Ha, ha! And thank you to my colleagues, because this has been a rushed process and that is what it’s about. It’s about getting the right process and the right process at the right time. Sixteen months after this bill was considered, we are back here cleaning up the Minister’s mess. You know, Einstein said if you do the same thing over and over again, expect the same results. I mean, that’s the definition of insanity. And if this Minister doesn’t change her approach, we’re going to see this not just with this bill once again but with other bills that she puts before the House. So we oppose this bill. Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I understand this is a split call. Anahila Kanongata’a Suisuiki—you have five minutes.

ANAHILA KANONGATA’A-SUISUIKI (Labour): Te Mana Whakawā, it is an absolute privilege to contribute to the third reading of the Social Security (Winter Energy Payment) Amendment Bill. And it would be remiss of me not to respond to “unicorn land”, to the Rt Hon David Carter’s payment, or to anything that was contributed from the other side.

We’ve heard “makariri” and we’ve heard “mahana”. I think those words are words tossed around in this House. It is time that we hear from the people who receive this benefit. So can I read this, Madam Assistant Speaker, if you can allow me to say this. One woman wrote, and I quote: “Thank you very much for the winter energy payment. My son has autism and lives at home and gets supported living payment. I really appreciate that the Government cares about the least privileged members of our community. Families affected by autism are often struggling so an extra help is great.” Another voice from the street—as I was on the streets of Māngere in Tāmaki-makau-rau, one person came up to me and said, “Anahila, tell the Prime Minister my dad says we can turn the heater on.” That was last year.

What, basically, that means is that—as the member Jan Logie spoke about, as she puts firewood into her fireplace, as the Rt Hon David Carter, as mentioned by the member across the House, turns on his heater—we don’t even think twice. We don’t think twice. I go back to my apartment tonight; I turn the heater on—I don’t even think twice. But to people like this—like people who have just spoken like this mum, or the daughter that told me that her dad is so thankful that they can turn the heater on—it has a rippling effect of warmth in the community, in the household that these New Zealanders live in, these taxpayers. These people are also taxpayers. They’ve worked hard. If you are receiving superannuation, you’ve worked all your life.

This is about listening with the heart. “I can’t turn the heater on because I can’t afford it.” Well, this coalition Government said last year, “Yes, you can.” This year, we are correcting a drafting error—only one or two. No new policy coming through; we’re just correcting it. I say let’s finish the talk now. Spark it up. I commend this bill to the House. Malo.

ERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. I’m very happy to make just a quick contribution on this debate—a debate that has been rightly described previously as an amendment to an amendment, a fix up to a fix up. We’re here to fix a situation where there were some drafting errors in the legislation that led to 25,000 people receiving unlawful, illegal payments that were not authorised by this Parliament. The intent was that they should have received these payments, but the legislation didn’t match the intent. It’s been really fun tonight to watch the Minister Carmel Sepuloni and her backbenchers get up and squirm and try and tell us that “Oh, look, it was just a mistake. It was a drafting error. These things happen. It happens all the time. Don’t worry about it.”

I tell you what—it’s not normally nice to put the boot in when these things happen, when mistakes happen, because we all know that these things happen. From time to time, they happen—

Hon Members: Ask Simon.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I apologise to the member. If you’re interjecting, I think you still need to use the member’s correct title.

Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: Ask Simon Bridges.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Thank you. Please carry on.

ERICA STANFORD: From time to time, we need to pass legislation—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Just make them witty, please, will you?

ERICA STANFORD: I don’t know if that member’s capable of wit, but we’ll see, eh?

Look, on occasion we have to pass some fix-up legislation. Despite the fullness of process and the closeness of scrutiny, things slip by—these things happen. But this is not one of those times. This is not simply, as the Minister puts it, a small technical drafting error that slipped by—giving an example of how it happened previously once in 1998 as if to exonerate her ineptitude. This bill is borne out of, firstly, arrogance—the arrogance of the Minister, who politicised a rewrite bill that did not need politicising, then dropped a 500-page Supplementary Order Paper on the Table at the last minute.

This bill is borne out of a lack of process. Those 500-page amendments were delivered so late that we didn’t have time to scrutinise them and New Zealanders didn’t have the time to have a proper process—there was no select committee. Perhaps if there was, some of those seniors heading overseas could have pointed out the 28-day anomaly. Perhaps it would have been pointed out that there were some issues around the residential care problem. This bill is borne out of an unwillingness to listen, because at the committee stage, for hours—and I’m sure Mr Dan Bidois, sitting beside me, got up in the committee stage and pointed some of these issues out. We did so for hours, but we were ignored.

This bill is not fixing up an unintended consequence or mistake that was just simply overlooked. We are here today with this bill because this was always going to happen. It’s what happens when they rush; it’s what happens when they don’t follow proper process.

For Jenny Marcroft to come up here tonight with her very theatrical “Oh, they’re so cold and we’re so warm.” How about: “You’re so inept and we’re so capable.”? I don’t know the Te Reo words. Maybe Nuk Korako could come up here and tell me what they are. But I tell you what: [Gestures to Government benches] inept; [Gestures to Opposition benches] capable. I can’t do it as theatrically as Ms Marcroft, and I am not concerned about putting the boot in.

From here, the question has to be: “Will they learn their lesson?” This bill tells us they’re not going to learn their lesson, because here we are again, doing exactly the same thing—they’re rushing legislation again and they’re not listening. Here we are, rushing through this bill at breakneck speed, even though they knew in June last year that they had this mistake. The Office of the Auditor-General told them in October last year—plenty of time to bring the bill to the House in a timely manner, yet here we are racing it through again.

Furthermore, here we are in Opposition, once again warning the Minister of problems that are still not sorted by this bill. It’s been traversed earlier and in previous speeches that there will be seniors who are living in residential care who are fully funded by the Government, and yet here they will still be receiving the winter energy payment—the poor taxpayer, effectively, paying twice, even though the intent of this bill is for those receiving residential support subsidies to be ineligible for the winter energy payment for this very reason: the taxpayer shouldn’t pay twice. But this Minister is not listening to us and is, once again, making excuses tonight: “Oh, it’s all a bit difficult.”

I just can’t understand that. This is from an extraordinary Minister with such great successes as putting water in Work and Income New Zealand! How could she not come up with a solution to this? So here we are fixing up a totally avoidable error, had we followed correct process and had they listened to us. And here we are again, with retrospective legislation that, when they were in Opposition, they rallied against. How things have changed. We oppose this amendment bill, and we oppose this amendment to the amendment. Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.

Dr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): My goodness, what an act to follow! It’s an absolute pleasure to speak on this bill, because I know how important the winter energy payment is to so many New Zealanders. In my previous job, it used to be my job to count how many children were coming into hospital with infectious and respiratory diseases, and so many of these are associated with cold, damp houses.

Where I live down south, it gets really cold in winter, as you can imagine, and our houses really aren’t equipped, in many cases, for winter. So coming into Government, what I was hearing from a lot of pensioners was they were having to go to bed when the sun went down with a hot water bottle and a beanie, because it was just too difficult to turn the heater on. So the winter energy payment has transformed that for a lot of New Zealanders, and it’s one area where we get positive, thankyou correspondence from a lot of people saying “Thank you. I can now afford to turn the heater on.”

What this bill does, though, is just make a couple of minor amendments to realign the current practice with the legislation because, when the legislation went through in 2017, there were just a couple of small groups that weren’t covered in detail with that legislation. As we’ve heard tonight, those were people receiving Government funding, who were in long-term residential care or residential care services, but they weren’t eligible for a residential care subsidy or residential support subsidy, or otherwise people going overseas for more than four weeks, and the expectation was that they would receive the winter energy payment for those first for weeks.

All this bill does is just minor technical fixes to ensure that what was intended in the policy intent of that legislation is actually carried out. It only relates to about 3.3 percent of those receiving the winter energy payment—so a small number of New Zealanders, but it’s critically important that they can continue to receive that payment legally from further on, and also that, retrospectively, it’s tidied up in terms of the payments that were made last year.

So we’re not introducing any new policy, because the eligibility was already agreed, in that policy sense, when the legislation went through in 2017. But what we’re aiming to do is make sure that the benefits of the winter energy payment can be received by all of those who were originally entitled to that, and that’s where the policy intent was. So I therefore commend this bill to the House.

JO HAYES (National): Kia ora, Madam Assistant Speaker. I stand to take a short call on the Social Security (Winter Energy Payment) Amendment Bill in its third reading. Before I start, I just want to make a comment about mahana and makariri. On this side of the House, we are tino wera: we are hot, and they should know that, because that’s what we are on this side of the House. Ha, ha! Anyway, I digress—I digress.

I just need to make a couple of comments about this bill. I think it’s a waste of the House’s time. I think that it is an example of an inexperienced Minister who does not know the outcome of putting a 500-page Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) on the Table that hasn’t had external scrutiny. I also think that from this bill, there has been a lot of hurt. We’ve had a number of payments that have already been made illegally with this legislation, and we’ve had some people that will receive the winter energy payment twice. There’s lots and lots of hurt because there are going to be a lot of people out there that won’t actually qualify to get this winter energy payment. We think the process of getting us to this place has just wasted a whole lot of House time, whereas the Minister could have actually taken time out to review her SOP and to give it the proper scrutiny.

I think that really my contribution, essentially, ends there. My colleagues have traversed the area very well. I just want to say to the Minister: please, please do your work properly—do it properly. Look over the bills; listen to the officials. They may have something worthy of saying, and listen to this side of the House, because we scrutinise the Government bills very clearly. What we say, when we actually put our contributions in the House during the committee of the whole House, is we need the Government to actually listen to what this side of the House is saying, because—I will end—this side of the House, Jenny Marcroft, is tino wera.

GREG O’CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): Members opposite are not a bad bunch of blokes and women. I get on pretty well with most of them, but they do exist in an irony-free and a luxury zone—irony free.

Tonight, before this bill, we passed some very significant legislation. Its significance, its magnificence, was in the fact that it went through this House with the compliance—with the agreement—of virtually the whole House. I think most of us will look back on that as one of the most significant pieces of legislation we were fortunate enough to be involved in. Yet here we are, not 15 minutes later, being harangued for bringing some legislation to this House which actually, to those who it is going to affect, is equally important.

Who is it going to affect? It is going to affect some of the 1,600 people who will die this year in all of our electorates—that comes down to 22.5 people per electorate—as a result of the cold—the cold.

As I say, as well as being an irony-free zone over there, they’re also a luxury zone, because imagine having to debate—having to oppose—this. OK, their KPIs across the way are around opposing. They have to make the speeches. They’re measured on how many negative texts and how many negative Facebook and other social media posts they put out. But imagine the bad luck to have to do that at this time of the year. Imagine the bad luck of having to do this just as daylight saving finishes—that harbinger of winter; just as the godwits start heading towards Siberia on that long migration that we know not how; just as our children head out to do their winter sports and we get ready with our big coats to stand there; just as some people start to get the ski equipment out; while, at the same time, others sit there pondering as to how they are going to get through this winter. Are they going to be one of those 1,600 people?

It’s very real. I refer to a work there according to Philippa Howden-Chapman. She’s a professor of public health at the University of Otago. “We know that being cold has an impact on older people’s circulation in particular, because the blood gets more”—is it viscous?—“viscous and is more likely to form plaques, and people are more likely to have atrial fibrillation, or stroke and malfunctioning of their heart.” That’s what we’re actually talking about. That’s what happens when you do get cold.

There was another article, actually, a Listener article—Arthur Grimes, a senior fellow at Motu economics and former chairman of the Reserve Bank—talking about the risk of circulatory problems. For warming houses, this is where you get the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to insulation. They might not have heart disease now, but they may get it later. I would say that as a group they should be targeted. So these are the people that are going to be affected. This is how real it is.

So, again, I go back to the Opposition. Talking about unicorns—how ironic. I mean, if you’re going to bring something up, you really should just do something as simple as googling, just to find out what unicorns were renowned for. What they did was they had the power to render poisoned water potable. Well, that’s pretty much what we’re doing here. We’re making sure that our people—it’s very metaphorical, but that potability is actually people’s ability to get through the winter. But it doesn’t end there. This unicorn, which was hailed by members of the Opposition, it heals sickness and has magical powers, and so does legislation for some of our older citizens, some of those people who are wondering how they are going to get through this winter. The unicorn might be not a bad sort of analogy, because this will help to heal their sickness and have some magical powers to get them through the winter.

As the last speaker on this bill, I just go back to some of the comments. This is not “a terrible mistake”. I heard one of the—I can’t remember who it was; there were so many negative comments made across the House. This is not a terrible mistake, to pass this legislation. This is something that is actually a very, very good thing to do and—for those individuals who will be affected—as good as the previous legislation we passed tonight.

More impact—the other comment that was made: “Good processes don’t keep people warm.” Well, no they don’t. Good processes aren’t what keep people warm. It’s actually good heating—good heating that you can afford.

I’d just like, in commending this bill to this House, to say that not only was the original intent of the legislation to give our older and more vulnerable people the opportunity to survive and not become one of those 1,600 this winter a very, very good thing to do, but passing this legislation, which came from necessity, came from a drafting error, to do that at this time, at the start of winter, is actually a very, very good thing to do. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Social Security (Winter Energy Payment) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

Ayes 63

New Zealand Labour 46; New Zealand First 9; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 8.

Noes 57

New Zealand National 55; ACT New Zealand 1; Ross.

Bill read a third time.

Bills

Taxation (Research and Development Tax Credits) Bill

Second Reading

Hon AUPITO WILLIAM SIO (Minister for Pacific Peoples) on behalf of the Minister of Research, Science and Innovation: I move, That the Taxation (Research and Development Tax Credits) Bill be now read a second time.

This is an important bill for our economy. While total research and development spending increased to $3.9 billion in 2018, or 1.37 percent of GDP, New Zealand still lags behind the rest of the world. This bill, therefore, is part of the Government strategy to address that and to boost our economy through support for research, science, and innovation. The support that this bill promises for business has been generally welcomed by submitters to the select committee, and rightly so. The New Zealand economy is better off when businesses are encouraged to be bolder, think laterally, and invest more in novel ideas.

In bringing this bill to its second reading, I’d like to thank the Finance and Expenditure Committee (FEC) for their work on this bill. In particular, the committee has made some very valuable recommendations to this bill, which I would like to briefly run through.

The purpose of the controlling rights requirement in the bill is to ensure that R & D contractors are not able to claim for R & D activities they perform for other people. The Finance and Expenditure Committee recommendation is to make several amendments to ensure that joint ventures undertaking R & D are eligible for the tax credit, which would otherwise be excluded.

In the bill as introduced, contractors’ profit margin was removed from the calculation of the credit, with the aim of giving equal treatment to expenditure on R & D performed in-house and by contractors. However, the Finance and Expenditure Committee considers that splitting out the profit margin could incentivise businesses to conduct R & D in-house when it would be more efficient to outsource it. In that way, the cost of the profit margin would be part of the true cost of performing research and development. The FEC has recommended that it be considered eligible expenditure for the credit.

In the bill as introduced, expenditure on internal software development over $3 million would not be eligible for the credit. The committee considers that the existing provision would unduly cap some internal software development expenditure that would have a spillover benefit for New Zealand. The recommendation, therefore, is to increase the internal software development cap from $3 million to $25 million in order to better reflect the distinction between internal software development, which has an external focus, and external software development. The committee also recommends amending the legislation so that internal software development undertaken for the purpose of internal administration would be excluded from receiving the credit.

Turning now to integrity measures. In designing the measures contained in this bill, the Government has been careful to protect the sustainability of the scheme by building in checks and balances. I’m very pleased to see that the FEC was of a similar mind, and they have made some very useful recommendations to protect the integrity of the scheme. The bill as introduced allows for activities and expenditure to be considered as eligible or ineligible R & D by Order in Council. The Government’s view was that frequent fine-tuning of this scheme is preferable to periodic major changes, which can be unsettling and undermine business confidence. The bill, therefore, allows for this fine-tuning through regular review and the ability to adjust the scheme by Order in Council as required. While not disagreeing with the central concept, the committee considered this power needed to be tightened up and only used in defined circumstances.

The policy intent of this bill is to encourage businesses to undertake additional R & D. The committee considered that a business reclassifying expenditure would not necessarily encourage additional R & D. In some cases, it is simply changing the way costs already incurred are viewed in order to secure the tax credit. They therefore suggest that a person should file their R & D supplementary return by the due date if they would like to make a request to amend their R & D tax credit assessment. This would limit a claimant’s ability to retrospectively reclassify expenditure as R & D expenditure.

The committee made one other recommendation to limit claimants’ ability to retrospectively reclassify expenditure as R & D expenditure. The bill as introduced allows the commissioner to increase a person’s R & D credit claim up to two years following the expenditure. The committee has recommended reducing the maximum time frame from two years to one.

The bill as introduced contains an in-year approval process. This allows taxpayers to have their expenditure considered for eligibility under either the general approval or the significant performer regimes. The committee has recommended that if a significant performer was unsure whether its activities would satisfy the core or supporting R & D activity definitions, it would be beneficial to allow the business to obtain general approval for these activities. Allowing significant performers to use the general approvals regime would give them more certainty about the eligibility of those R & D activities, but it also provides a greater level of scrutiny from Callaghan and R & D officials.

The same thinking is behind the committee’s recommendation that supporting R & D activities should also be able to be considered under the general approval regime. The committee foresaw instances where an application could be declined and felt that claimants should have the opportunity to discuss their applications and provide additional supporting information if appropriate. The recommendation, therefore, is that the commissioner should contact the claimant before declining their application.

Finally, the committee has also suggested a pilot programme for the in-year approval mechanisms, the general approval process, and the significant performer regime for year one of the regime. This would allow IRD to improve the in-year approval process before it is rolled out to all claimants in the second year.

These worthy adjustments from the Finance and Expenditure Committee to the draft legislation join the other safeguards which were already built into the scheme, including that claimants must satisfy certain general criteria to be eligible for R & D tax credits, that the tax credit is available for R & D that happens primarily in New Zealand rather than offshore, and that claimants have to perform at least one core activity in New Zealand. We also have an anti-avoidance rule and a requirement to publish claimants’ details in a five-yearly evaluation, to name a few of the measures. We want to ensure that the R & D we are supporting will contribute to the kind of groundbreaking thinking that we want to encourage, so there’s also a test that there is genuine scientific and technological uncertainty.

As an aside, I think it is worth mentioning that questions of what qualifies as genuine scientific and technological uncertainty are not being decided by tax officials alone. Callaghan Innovation will be advising Inland Revenue in its administration of the scheme. In many cases, it will be a case of one scientist discussing the merits of an R & D project with another scientist.

That is a brief overview of the most important changes made to the bill, and once again I thank the committee for their important contributions to this bill. R & D performed by businesses results in new products and services, helping to strengthen and diversify the economy and improve international competitiveness. This bill gives crucial support to businesses who are striving to open up new fields of enterprise. So it is with pride that I commend this bill to the House.

Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker, for the opportunity to take this call on the Taxation (Research and Development Tax Credits) Bill. I’m actually really grateful to have this opportunity to speak on this bill, because, based on my observation of how this bill was dealt with in the select committee process, I thought there wouldn’t be any opportunity for the Opposition to contribute. So I am really grateful. This is because during the select committee process, when we were deliberating on this bill, we had a minority view, and Government members voted against inclusion of our minority view in the report back. I have been in several meetings where bills have been deliberated, and I cannot remember any time when we were in Government when we voted against a minority view to be included in the report back. So this, in my view, was just suppressing National’s view—suppressing National’s view—and so I want to take this opportunity to read out the minority view so that it is on the record.

“The National Party supported the bill in the first reading as we see merit in exploring the potential for taxation to incentivise greater investment into R & D, and to have the opportunity to explore where the framework proposed by the Government would be the best way to do that. It’s now clear that this legislation will not work well for many. Moreover, this bill gives no real visibility of what additional R & D spending will occur as a result of a significant item of expenditure. It’s essential that businesses have certainty over the details. The Government is determined to roll this policy out in 2019, and those that are pre-profit for now will be covered by temporary arrangements subject to review down the track because, as per the Government’s own officials, the issues were too complex to resolve now.

The National Party is disappointed in that the Government has followed the process that is creating uncertainty for businesses and investors investing in R & D. That’s the reality, yes. The Government officials have also accepted that only a small number of companies that receive growth grants will be eligible for R & D tax credits, which indicates that this Government has failed to understand the nature of businesses in New Zealand. The difference in R & D definition in various policies will create further complications—for example, the ability for Statistics New Zealand to measure business spending on R & D.

The bill also creates a significant fiscal risk to the Crown, as it’s very difficult to estimate what the policy will cost as uptake is uncertain and can fluctuate substantially year to year. Small and unprofitable firms were able to find support under National’s innovation ecosystem. We understood that the big companies of tomorrow emerge from the risk-taking entrepreneurs of today. This policy needs a thorough consideration and should be part of the full package to support all companies that are invested in R & D, and hence the bill should be delayed until that time.”

So that was our minority report. Very clearly we wanted to state that we are not satisfied with this legislation after it has been through the select committee process, and we are opposing this legislation. It’s actually quite disappointing, because we supported this legislation in the first reading. We supported this legislation in the first reading because we wanted to work with Government during the select committee process to make this bill a better bill. But that opportunity wasn’t there, but I’m not surprised that the Government tried to suppress the Opposition’s voice.

But if you look at what businesses had to say about this legislation—this is legislation which this Government claims is their biggest policy. How many submissions did we receive on this bill? Thirty-two—32 submissions. And how many businesses do we have in New Zealand—how many businesses do we have in New Zealand? Around 550,000 businesses in New Zealand. Out of around 550,000 businesses, this bill received just 32 submissions. That is 0.005 percent. Businesses didn’t care about this policy, so businesses didn’t see this policy to be relevant to them. They didn’t want to waste their time coming to the select committee. [Interruption] Yeah, I know, I know—Government members are getting agitated. That is what happened during the select committee process, and that is why we were denied having a minority view included in the report back.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! We will not have discussion across the Chamber. Thank you.

Dr PARMJEET PARMAR: Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. Out of those 32 submitters, 13 appeared before the Finance and Expenditure Committee. So you can see how relevant this legislation is to businesses, the type of businesses that we have in New Zealand—not relevant at all. Most of those businesses think that it’s not going to deliver any benefit for them, so they didn’t want to waste their time coming before the select committee to talk about this legislation.

What we saw during the select committee process was that submitters raised some points, and officials accepted that, yes, for some submissions the intention was exactly what the submitter was saying, so the wording was changed to reflect that intention. That clearly shows that there were several flaws in this legislation, and this is not the first time, because we had an initial draft that was put out for consultation and, yes, it was fixed after that and then the bill was introduced; it went to the select committee. During the select committee process, again, several changes were made because the legislation didn’t reflect what, actually, the intention was.

So looking at those changes, we don’t have any confidence that this bill is actually going to deliver what the Government is thinking it’s going to. I think we will be again in the state like we just heard with the bill before, the Social Security (Winter Energy Payment) Amendment Bill, where the Government was fixing mistakes in that legislation, and I think this bill will be back again in a few months’ time, or maybe a couple of years’ time, to fix mistakes in this legislation.

Another thing on the minority view—it would be, actually, really good to see Government members defending their position, or maybe they don’t want to defend it and will come out in a very arrogant manner saying that they had the numbers. So it was their decision not to allow a minority view included in the report, and that would be interesting too.

One point that one of the Government members raised was about how there’s only a small number of companies that are receiving growth grants that will qualify to receive the R & D tax credit, because this bill is to phase out growth grants and bring in the R & D tax credit. So the facts were put forward to that member, because that member didn’t know exactly that it is, actually, a small number of companies that are receiving growth grants that will qualify for the R & D tax credit. The next thing we realised was that, actually, some members didn’t understand the difference between the R & D tax credit and the refundability provision in this legislation. So if Government members were trying to pretend that that is the same thing, then there is seriously something wrong—something wrong. There is a different criteria for R & D tax credit and refundability provisions in this bill. It’s not the same thing—it’s not the same thing.

So the refundability provisions in this bill are temporary provisions, and we really wanted the Government to fix that, because companies that are in pre-profit stages should be able to have some certainty. For the Government to put something in this that is temporary and say, “We will be reviewing our policies to support pre-profits in 2020.”, which also includes the R & D loss tax credit policy that was put in place by the previous National Government, started in 2015, delivering some really good results—that is creating a lot of uncertainty for companies that are in pre-profit stages. We wanted to work with the Government in the select committee process to ensure that this uncertainty is removed and that there is something concrete for companies that are in that pre-profit stage. But the select committee process appeared like it was just a stamping exercise, because it was about just getting the legislation through the select committee and brought back to the House for the second reading, committee of the whole House, and third reading.

Now, another interesting thing is that we’re debating the second reading of this bill, but the policy has already come into effect from 1 April—so the policy has already come into effect. We saw that this legislation has been lagging behind from the start. During the select committee process, I didn’t see any leadership from the select committee to go out and connect with businesses that have, or are, receiving growth grants, because it’s those businesses that are going to be hugely impacted by this policy. We have done that. We have gone out and spoken to those businesses, and we have their responses here, and we can clearly see that they’re saying that MPs should be going out and engaging with companies to understand their R & D plan, and then the funding should be provided accordingly. The select committee—in my experience in the past, we have gone out and connected with sectors if we thought that sector was important to connect with for any particular legislation, but the select committee didn’t bother because they didn’t want to hear from them.

So I think this is going to be another failed policy just like their KiwiBuild and light rail policy. We oppose this bill.

TAMATI COFFEY (Labour—Waiariki): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. Painful, that’s what that was—painful—and it was just as painful on the day when the member Dr Parmjeet Parmar was sitting in there barking in the Finance and Expenditure Committee, trying to tell everybody what she believed was the right thing to do. It was a tough moment, and I do have to address this, because it was a time when the member was sitting there and we had to have a discussion about what was fact and what exactly was fiction.

There was a discussion about whether or not the wording should be this way or that way. The member was unrelenting in her consideration of what we were trying to suggest to her. We didn’t want to change any wording from it, but, actually, what happened was that she was so determined to not listen to anything that we were saying that, actually, we were within our rights to vote it down. We have no interest in supressing Opposition view. If you look back at the nine years that we were in Opposition, we were very keen to submit a minority view to any bill that was going through Parliament, and that one was going to be one where we were very happy to do it, but because of that one issue, it didn’t happen. So, unfortunately, that didn’t happen. The member had her moment to vent her anger at the process and let everybody know just how put out she was about what happened in the select committee on that particular day.

So, as far as I’m concerned, we can put that to the side and concentrate on just how good this piece of legislation is. The Government is, in fact, committed to building a productive, a sustainable, and an inclusive economy, and research and development is going to play a huge part in that. Currently, we’re spending $3.9 billion, which only equates to 1.37 percent of our GDP this year, and that’s what this Government is focused on: high goals, achieving well above what the previous Government were having us wallow in. So we have set this very ambitious target to increase expenditure on R & D to 2 percent of GDP by 2027. That’s right: we’re aiming high when it comes to research and development, and who will benefit from this? All of New Zealand, because when businesses invest in research and development, they can help to solve a lot of problems that we have as a country. They can help to push their own businesses forward.

We did have 32 submissions from businesses, from a variety of places across the employment spectrum. They came, they presented to us, and they were very supportive of this. There were a few things that we had to tweak, and earlier my colleague the Hon Aupito William Sio outlined some of those changes that we are intending to make as a result of listening to those submissions in the select committee meetings.

Just to run over a couple of them, the one part that we talked about was just, first off the blocks, the changes to the eligibility criteria for the credit. Now, the original proposal was that the controlling rights requirement—and this might sound a bit technical to people who don’t understand—in the bill as introduced was to ensure that R & D contractors weren’t able to claim for R & D activities that they performed for other people. But, as a result of the submissions, the committee recommended that we make several amendments to ensure that joint ventures undertaking R & D are eligible for the tax credit, which would be otherwise excluded. We had that that we dealt with. There have been a few considerations around claiming the credit for a contractor’s profit margin, also around software development, too.

Members, you can be very happy that this is the second reading of this bill. It represents the next step in ensuring that New Zealand increases its levels of business R & D investment, with the aim of bringing us closer to the international average. The R & D tax incentive is going to be a significant addition to New Zealand’s research, to New Zealand’s science and innovation ecosystem, as part of our wider Government support to support the commercialisation of New Zealand’s excellent service and research base. This is going to help us to develop, as I said, that innovative and resilient domestic economy. Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Just before I call the honourable member Andrew Bayly, I just want to point out to the House that the time clock above the Noes door is malfunctioning. However, above the Ayes, it is still reading correctly. I will advise members when they have got a minute or two minutes to go in their speeches.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. It is a pleasure to be talking on this Taxation (Research and Development Tax Credits) Bill. First of all, I’d just like to congratulate that member who’s just resumed his seat, Tamati Coffey, for such an incisive display of knowledge around this bill—very good, very good. Nice to see him leading off.

This bill is about research and development, and, you know, it’s interesting going back and looking at history and the context of what we’re talking about tonight. The thing about research and development is that no one in this House is going to stand up and say we shouldn’t be doing it—no one—but the issue about research and development is that it is a see-sawing issue. We have been through periods where we’ve had these types of schemes in place, and then we’ve gone back to specific tailored schemes, and then we’ve reverted back. Unfortunately, we’ve got another reversion—another revision and reversion. It’s a reversion back to the past, and this bill takes us from where it was a very targeted system, using the Callaghan group to actually identify and work out where we want to spend our dollar—the hard-earned dollars of the New Zealand public—and what this bill does is it says, “No, we shouldn’t do that. No, we’re going to scrap that. It’s been in place for a few years. No, we’re going to be going on, because philosophically we’ve got to be seen to be doing something about R & D.” And, of course, now we’ve arrived at this new thing, which we’ve all seen before, which is “Let’s just open it up and go for it.”

The first thing that I found staggering is how few people actually came to the committee—32 submitters. Now, there are, roughly, 530,000 businesses. I actually got my computer out and worked it out as a representative sample. That is 0.00000006 percent. Isn’t that amazing, the number of people who thought “This is so incisive, so important.” that they came to our committee and made a submission. And I’d say to you, there are not many companies—and I’ve been in this situation—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! [Interruption] Order! Despite the fact that you, clearly, speak very well, Mr Bayly, I cannot hear the member over the chatter and rabble that’s going on in the Chamber. Can we settle, please? We’ve got 15 minutes to go, and I would like that to be done with some order. Thank you.

ANDREW BAYLY: And I appreciate that, Madam Assistant Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I’m sure you do. We just wish they would listen.

ANDREW BAYLY: There are times in this House when there are people who are very noisy.

So the issue is that not many companies or business owners are going to say “No, we don’t want R & D support.”, and that is correct. We do need to supply them and support them, but the issue I’ve got—the first issue with this bill, and we discussed it at length with the officials—is the one around definition. What do you want to try and achieve with research and development? I’d suggest to you that what you’re trying to do is grow the economy faster by supporting those businesses that need the help in the form of financial—but it’s not only in financial terms; it’s also all the other things around governance and all those other aspects that will enable those companies to proceed and grow faster than they otherwise would.

If you have a clear line of sight on what you want to achieve, then the issue with this bill and the definition—and this is the bit I struggled with—is that we have moved, one, from being very clear about commercial outcomes. It’s fine, as the honourable member Tamati Coffey talked about, achieving a 2 percent spend on research and development. I would suggest to you that that’s not what we’re after. That is about just spending money. That’s about ticking a box. What we actually should be measuring, and what we should be achieving with expenditure of this scale—we’re talking about a budget for this of about $1.4 billion over four years—what we should be trying to achieve is actually to grow this economy much faster. That is the issue, of course. We’ve seen this country go backwards from an annual GDP growth rate of 3.3 percent under our Government over the last three years to now just over about 2.6 percent—a big, significant drop. This is the type of thing that can drive this economy, because when you do this well you can afford to spend it on health, you can afford to spend it on police, you can afford to spend it on all those things like education.

This bill, I think it has an issue with its objective and its definition. Also, I think the issue around its cost—we did make an adjustment reducing the threshold from $100,000 to $50,000, but the one issue is: what is the cost to make applications? Is it worth it? Are smaller companies going to be prepared to do this? I think these are the issues—particularly around start-up businesses—and this bill does not deal with them. It assumes that we’ve got these larger businesses who are doing research and development, and I would suggest to you it’s not necessarily about them. It’s about the dynamic small businesses who will yet become that big business. I think that is the issue with this bill, and that is one of the principal reasons that we cannot support this bill in its form. We do support the overarching objective for New Zealand to increase its spend but it’s got to be for the right purpose. It’s got to grow these companies, and it’s got to result in a better outcome for all New Zealanders.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU (Deputy Leader—NZ First): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker, for this opportunity to speak to this fantastic piece of legislation, brought to the House by this coalition Government.

I just want to address a few comments by the previous speaker, Andrew Bayly. He seemed to suggest that small businesses were disadvantaged by this legislation, by the nature of their size and the costs of application. I distinctly remember that member asking officials that very question in the Finance and Expenditure Committee, and kudos to the officials who spoke quite eloquently about the nature and the flexibility of the application process, which would reflect the size and the nature not only of the business but the application itself. There is the ability, and this legislation does reflect the opportunity for small businesses to take advantage of this legislation in a cost-effective way. So I completely rebut the comments from the previous speaker.

Mr Bayly also made the comment—and I quote—that he “didn’t know what we were trying to achieve with R & D tax credits”. Well, let me spend the next eight minutes and 45 seconds outlining exactly what it is we were trying to achieve with R & D tax credits in the New Zealand economy. The tax credits themselves are an incentive for business to engage in efforts within their organisation that will see them advance, accelerate, develop, and grow existing organisational plans, products—

Andrew Bayly: Is that your elevator pitch?

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: —services, and systems. So to Mr Bayly, I suggest to him that he just read some basic 101 books on R & D tax credits. What we’re trying to achieve here is, essentially, a level playing field. So around the world, essentially, all of our OECD trading partners run R & D tax credit regimes. New Zealand is behind the times.

Jonathan Young: That’s what it’s all about!

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Yes, it is all about that. So for nine years, Mr Young, this country has been served incompetently by the previous regime. They attempted to bring in this exact regime. They attempted to bring this in—no, actually, forgive me. It was the previous Labour regime who brought this regime in, and the National Party came into power and scrapped it. They said they didn’t want New Zealand businesses to take advantage of R & D tax credits from the Government. It is shameful. They shut it down and they said that it wouldn’t make a difference. Well, we know from international example that R & D tax credits make a huge difference to research and development of companies around the world, and our New Zealand businesses have been suffering from that kind of competitive disadvantage, as it were, because our international competitors have been able to avail themselves of this opportunity.

Right now, as we have learnt from the Prime Minister and from the Minister of Finance earlier in the House today, the world economy is going through an economic downturn. What is exciting, though, is that at the same time we have learnt that right now the New Zealand economy is performing better than, essentially, all of our trading partners. In fact, the Acting Minister of Finance tried to list all of the economies that we were performing better than but was stopped by the Speaker because the list was so long. That is how well the New Zealand economy is performing, and that is a huge kudos to New Zealand business right now, who are performing exceptionally in this world economy. What they’re doing is exporting to the rest of the world. Actually, right now, to be fair, the New Zealand dollar’s quite advantageous for them. So there’s lots of money to be made right now around the world.

This piece of legislation came about, I’m proud to say, in negotiations between New Zealand First and the Labour Party as we formed what has become a magnificent coalition of these two parties. What New Zealand First was saying—and I acknowledge the previous contributors who spoke to the fact that New Zealand businesses are performing exceptionally well. We are near the world average in terms of percentage of GDP to R & D, but we’re not there yet. So the conversation was about what can a good, practical Government do to make sure that New Zealand businesses have an advantage—well, actually, not an advantage, but get on to the same playing field that their international competitors are able to avail themselves of right now. This is what this legislation seeks to do.

We have strong evidence from around the world, from international studies, that tax credits are an effective way of raising R & D engagement by business. I think it was a speaker on the opposite side of the House who spoke about talking to business not wanting these things. Quite contrary is my experience. I have gone out in my privileged position as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister for Regional Economic Development, which is a great programme that will complement what it is we’re trying to achieve here. But the conversations around R & D tax credits and the possibilities that small, medium, and large businesses will be able to use because of this legislation, because of the 15 percent tax break—I’m going to say—that they can avail themselves of is a huge, huge incentive for them to invest, to spend, to commit to their businesses, to their products, to their services, and, in so doing, increase their economic performance and, hopefully, their profits. They told me that they will see their profits increase because of this; not only their profits but the New Zealand economy, jobs, and regional growth. Now, that is exactly what this Government has sought to do through this legislation, and I believe that through those conversations, I’ve already had engagement which tells me that this will be the outcome of this legislation.

So it is with a great deal of pride, actually, that I stand to support this legislation. This is a Government that is spending more on our engagement around the world, that is doing more in our engagement around the world, to support businesses in their efforts to grow business in export markets around the world. In fact, just this evening, I was speaking to the Minister for Trade and Export Growth, and my understanding from a very brief conversation is that exports to Canada have already increased by 600 percent in specific industries. Now, that is exactly the kind of conversation that businesses, this economy, and this Government is absolutely proud to have. So on that note, I support this legislation and absolutely commend it to the House. Thank you very much.

IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a short call—and it will be short—on the Taxation (Research and Development Tax Credits) Bill, and I need to say, I guess, for all the reasons so eloquently espoused by Parmjeet Parmar earlier tonight, we are not supporting this bill. I want to make a couple of comments about this, because, the bill—and I would like to remind the last speaker, Fletcher Tabuteau, that just because the rest of the world does something doesn’t mean we should.

I want to just go back in history a little bit, because this is an issue that we’ve never dealt with adequately in New Zealand in my lifetime. So if you go back to the reforms of the 1980s, which may well have been necessary, that was the last time, in my view, that we adequately funded R & D in New Zealand, and we’ve never been able to, primarily, I think, for fiscal reasons. We’ve never really got back to the point of funding R & D satisfactorily in New Zealand, and no Government in that time, since the late 1980s, has come up, in my opinion, with a method of funding this type of expenditure in New Zealand that works. I think that’s our great challenge, and I don’t know whether this is the answer or not, but what I do know about this bill is that it’s going to deal with the large spenders well, but it may well be challenging for anyone else to access it, and I think that’s the challenge we’ve got with it.

So if you look at our history, when we last funded this type of thing reasonably well, farming was one of the beneficiaries of that, and we were leaders throughout the world in agriculture as a result of that funding. Since that day, of course, we’ve had a whole lot of new things come along that weren’t even heard of in the 1980s: biotech, the technology industry—they were hardly heard of. No one had an email address in 1985 that I know of—they may have had, but I didn’t know about it. So the world has changed dramatically, and I think that’s the big challenge we’ve got.

So I think my issue with this bill is that it’s expensive to access. Big operators will be able to access it easily, and they’ll have the infrastructure to do it. Smaller ones, I think, will struggle, and the cost of access is one of the things that really concerns me and the expertise to provide that access is also an issue.

One of the things, I think, that the Finance and Expenditure Committee did well in the course of this was to deal with the issue of outside contractors, because, in New Zealand, because of our scale, we, frankly, don’t have the ability—nor should we have the ability—always to internally employ R & D experts, or people that are part of this programme. There was a proposal in the initial stages of this bill that would only fund 80 percent of those outside contracts, and the reason for that was that there was a feeling that there was profit charged in the course of that and we should take the profit out of that discussion. That has been done away with, and I think that was a very good decision the select committee made.

So I think some things have come back from the select committee in good order, and I congratulate the select committee on doing that. It is a bill, as Parmjeet Parmar said, that we can’t support, and the reason we can’t support it is because I don’t think it encompasses the entirety of where we need to get to with R & D and the way in which we arrange the funding of it in New Zealand. It will be a challenge for the Government to get there, and it will be a challenge for future Governments to arrange this stuff, but there’s no question in my mind that in New Zealand we dragged the chain on this, and we need to find a way of satisfactorily doing it. This will do it to some extent in some parts of our industry, but I’m not sure that that’s where we need to be.

So that’s my contribution to this bill. We can’t support it for those reasons. I would like to think that this is a partial solution, but it’s not the entire solution. Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker; that’s my lot.

GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora, Madam Assistant Speaker. There’s a limit to how many cows we can crowd in our paddocks; we see it in our rivers. There’s a limit to how many tourists we can cram in Fiordland; we see it in our infrastructure. There’s no limit to the export of innovation and R & D. That’s why the Green Party is supporting this. The Government is increasing spending in R & D. It’s making practical changes, such as tax credits, to make it easier to support the innovative economy. It’s fantastic to see the computer software changes—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I’m sorry, I apologise to the member. This debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.