Thursday, 12 December 2019
Volume 743
Sitting date: 12 December 2019
THURSDAY, 12 DECEMBER 2019
THURSDAY, 12 DECEMBER 2019
The Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.
Prayers.
Business Statement
Business Statement
Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Leader of the House): Thank you, Mr Speaker. On Wednesday next week, the House will be adjourning for the summer break. On Tuesday, the House will consider the third reading of the Credit Contracts Legislation Amendment Bill, the remaining stages of the Subordinate Legislation Confirmation Bill (No 4), and the first readings of the Land Transport (Rail) Legislation Bill, the Land Transport (NZTA) Legislation Amendment Bill, the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Bill, Taumata Arowai—the Water Services Regulator Bill, the Films, Videos, and Publications, Classification (Commercial Video on-Demand) Amendment Bill, and the Secondary Legislation Bill.
The Government’s notified the Business Committee of its intention to move a motion to extend Tuesday’s business into Wednesday morning if necessary. After questions on Wednesday, the House will pass the Rua Kēnana Pardon Bill. The adjournment debate will round off business for the year on Wednesday afternoon.
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam): I thank the Leader of the House for the most extensive indication of the Government’s intention for the week ahead that I think we’ve seen yet. It is, having said that, a very ambitious programme, and given that there is only 5½ hours on Tuesday and then the four hours on Wednesday morning—which I suspect will be required just because of the length of that list—would it still be the Government’s intention to progress beyond the Rua Kenana bill—
Hon Members: Kēnana.
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: —apologies for that mispronunciation—and then straight to the adjournment debate at that point?
Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Leader of the House): The Government’s intention is to continue as planned on Wednesday afternoon, regardless of where we get to on Wednesday morning, although I would note for the member that given we passed a whole week’s worth of business on Tuesday, and another whole week’s worth of business on Wednesday, I’m very optimistic about our progress next week.
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam): Well, that is just a tribute to the Government’s ability to put up legislation favourable to the Government—to the Opposition, I should say.
SPEAKER: Right, on behalf of the country—
DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Speaking to the Business Statement—
SPEAKER: Well, it’s an unusual process, but seeing as it’s nearly Christmas—Mr Seymour.
DAVID SEYMOUR: We’ve done it before. Can the Leader of the House confirm that the Government has no intention to introduce legislation to ban the sales of nicotine e-liquids to under-18s this year?
Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Leader of the House): The member will just have to wait and see. There are a few more bills to be introduced next week.
Motions
Cook Islands—Death of New Zealand High Commissioner Tessa Temata
Hon POTO WILLIAMS (Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector): I seek leave to move a motion without notice or debate on the passing of the New Zealand Cook Islands High Commissioner Tessa Temata.
SPEAKER: Is there any objection to that course being taken? There appears to be none.
Hon POTO WILLIAMS: I move, That this House offer its condolences to the family and colleagues on the passing of Her Excellency Tessa Temata, New Zealand’s first High Commissioner of Cook Islands descent to serve in the Cook Islands and the first female New Zealand High Commissioner of Pacific ancestry to be posted to the Pacific, and note the strong contribution she made to deepening New Zealand’s relationships with Pacific Island countries.
ʻAere ra ma te ʻau e teia tavini meitaki. Te miʻi nei matou, te aue nei te ngākau i toʻou takakeʻanga. Kare koe e ngaropoina ia matou e teia vaine toa.
[Go in peace, oh humble servant. We are grieving; our hearts are full of sorrow at your passing. We will never forget you, this warrior woman.]
Motion agreed to.
Oral Questions
Questions to Ministers
Question No. 1—Finance
1. Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National) to the Minister of Finance: Does he stand by all of the Budget Responsibility Rules he committed to in Budget 2018?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): Yes.
Hon Paul Goldsmith: How can he stand by his commitment to be in surplus every year until there is a significant natural event or a major economic shock or crisis when yesterday showed the Government is projected to be in deficit this year?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I believe the member will find that Budget 2018, the Fiscal Strategy Report, of which I have a copy here, says that we will deliver a sustainable operating surplus across an economic cycle. That is exactly what we are doing. We have had around $13 billion worth of surpluses up to this point, and we’ll have $12 billion worth of them up to the end of the forecast period.
Hon Paul Goldsmith: What is the point of having fiscal targets if you simply pick and choose when to ignore them?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I completely reject the premise of the member’s question.
Hon Paul Goldsmith: Why does he think it would be “ludicrously stubborn” to keep his promises?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Again, I reject the latter part of that question. That comment was made yesterday in response to a question that, really, had at its basis the fact that, consistently, virtually every economic commentator in New Zealand has been calling for a boost to infrastructure spending—
Kieran McAnulty: That’s right—including the member.
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: —yes, actually, that’s exactly right—including the member opposite, who also, I might add, I believe, said that borrowing to do that was a good idea.
Hon Paul Goldsmith: Isn’t the fact that people were calling for a boost to infrastructure spending because the Government wasn’t doing any quality infrastructure spending, having cancelled or postponed most of the major projects that the previous National Government had left?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: No. I believe the reason that that was was because of this graph here, which represents the infrastructure deficit that the previous Government was left with.
Hon Paul Goldsmith: How can New Zealanders be assured about the quality of his Government’s spending when just today his Government released the Upper North Island Supply Chain Strategy report, the key financial assumptions underlining which Treasury has completely dismantled?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: That report was one commissioned by the Government, undertaken by an independent group. It is now being considered by the Government. It is among a number of questions that the Government is now asking to finalise our position on that—look forward to hearing the member’s position on that matter, too.
Hon Paul Goldsmith: Is it not the case that Treasury points out that the working group’s preferred option of moving the port to Northport hinges on two assumptions, neither of which stack up?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I’ll just repeat the answer I’ve just given: that report, from an independent working group, has come back to the Government. The Government is now in the process of considering it, asking a range of questions, and we look forward to inputs from across the board on where people believe the port should go, when it should go, and that would include whether the member would like to make his mind up about that.
Hon Paul Goldsmith: Is he satisfied with the quality of the Government’s increased spending, such as KiwiBuild and the Provincial Growth Fund?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I’m very satisfied that this Government is addressing the long-term challenges and issues that we inherited as a Government, and when it comes to housing, inheriting 71,000 houses less than what we should’ve had as a country, inheriting the sell-off of State houses, and inheriting increasing homelessness—we’re working very hard to address those. We’re making good progress on that, but it is a big deficit to make up for.
Question No. 2—Transport
2. CHRIS BISHOP (National—Hutt South) to the Minister of Transport: What proportion, if any, of the “$6.8 billion for new transport projects” announced yesterday will be spent on the 12 projects that were re-evaluated following the publication of the 2018 Government Policy Statement on transport?
Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Transport): This package shows that the Government is serious about fixing up the neglected infrastructure that we were left with. The final details of the package have yet to be fully decided, so the member will have to wait for further announcements for information on those projects.
Chris Bishop: Has the Government settled on the final package of transport projects to be funded through the package?
Hon PHIL TWYFORD: There’s just a few i’s to dot and t’s to cross.
Chris Bishop: Can he confirm what New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) chair Sir Brian Roche said this morning at the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, which is that while the transport agency has provided advice, the decisions as to what projects are funded and which ones are not is up to Ministers?
Hon PHIL TWYFORD: This is not an unprecedented approach, and in general—let me make it clear—the vast majority of transport spending under any Government happens through the National Land Transport Programme, with NZTA making those decisions at arm’s length from Ministers, under the guidance of the Government policy statement. But from time to time, Governments choose to invest more in transport infrastructure, as is the case with this infrastructure package, and as was the case when the former Government announced the package of State highway improvements—exactly the same process.
Chris Bishop: Will all the projects funded in the $6.8 billion package be shovel- ready?
Hon PHIL TWYFORD: The projects in this infrastructure package in the transport part of it are being selected on the basis of the transport value that they deliver, to move people and freight more efficiently around the country. The package will be a valuable and much welcomed economic stimulus, and it’s very important that those projects are ready to be delivered as soon as possible.
Chris Bishop: Does the Minister still stand by his previous statement that the 12 re-evaluated roads are of very low economic value?
Hon PHIL TWYFORD: No, the member is quite wrong. What I said was that the former Government’s so-called roads of national significance—that were, in fact, ghost roads—were of very low value, and that’s why our Government put them through a re-evaluation process, so that they would deliver, because this side of the House stands for value for money.
Chris Bishop: Has the Associate Minister of Transport Julie Anne Genter expressed concern to him about the increased funding for State highways; if so, when?
Hon PHIL TWYFORD: No.
Question No. 3—Finance
3. Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central) to the Minister of Finance: What reactions has he seen to his announcement of the Government’s $12 billion capital investment package?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): I have seen a number of supportive reactions to the announcement yesterday that the Government will lift capital spending to the highest level in over 20 years in order to stimulate the economy and address our neglected infrastructure. The Dominion Post editorial today said, “It’s hard to argue against the assumption it is fiscally wise to borrow and stimulate the economy in this way. An international slowdown has started to have local effects,”. The editorial goes on to say, “The contrast between future spending and recent capital spending is striking.” I believe the writer of the editorial may be referring to this chart, which shows a significant lift in infrastructure spending under this Government compared, for example, with the $4 billion spent in 2010, declining to the decade’s low of $1.1 billion in 2014.
Dr Duncan Webb: What reaction has he seen from business groups to his announcement of the Government’s $12 billion capital investment package?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: The Employers and Manufacturers Association said the additional infrastructure spend of $12 billion is a “welcome boost” and good news for small to medium sized enterprises, particularly in the upper North Island, which continues to grow rapidly without having had the necessary investment in connectivity and ease of movement to support that growth. Infrastructure New Zealand CEO, Paul Blair, said, “We’re delighted with today’s announcement of $12 billion in new capital investment by the Government … It is encouraging to see the Government using its recent surplus to invest in productive infrastructure to deliver environmental, social, cultural, and economic outcomes.” The Government’s package is designed to provide business with a certainty and pipeline of Government demand over the coming years, and I’m pleased to see the positivity coming forward from business groups.
Dr Duncan Webb: What other reactions has he seen to his announcement of the Government’s $12 billion capital investment package?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I’ve seen a number of reactions from commentators who have noted the significant need for this package. The New Zealand Herald’s Liam Dann said, “Today’s announcement paints a stark reminder of what fiscally stimulating economic times we now live in. Around the world we’re seeing a swing back to a more favourable view on Government spending as central banks chase interest rates towards zero with limited impact on inflation.” Mr Dann went on to say, “After decades of austerity, it’s hard to see anyone making much of a case against this latest round of spending.” Stuff’s Thomas Coughlan noted—
SPEAKER: Order! Order! That is enough.
Hon Paul Goldsmith: Did he see the reaction from National’s finance spokesman, who said, “This Government is world class at announcing things and third rate at delivering them.”
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I did see that peep come from across the House, and I prefer to take the view of respected economic commentators such as Stuff’s Thomas Coughlan, who noted, “New Zealand has a shocking infrastructure deficit. At [this] time our population began to expand, the Government cut back on infrastructure spending. That was a decision that”—
SPEAKER: Order! Order! I accept it was a patsy, but that’s enough.
Question No. 4—Health
4. Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National) to the Minister of Health: Is he concerned that any of his policies and actions could have a detrimental effect on the performance of district health boards?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance) on behalf of the Minister of Health: No. In fact, I’m particularly confident that after years of neglect, the $2.45 billion that we have invested in rebuilding our hospitals will have a positive effect on DHBs and patients. That number is twice as much as the previous Government invested in health capital over nine Budgets. I’m also confident that the additional $300 million investment in health infrastructure announced by the very modest Minister of Finance yesterday will also have a positive effect.
Hon Michael Woodhouse: If those investments are so great, why have DHBs plunged to $1.2 billion of combined fiscal deficits?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: The member will well know that such deficits build up over time, and when there has been such gross underfunding of the health sector over such a long period of time under the previous Government, it will take some time to turn around. In terms of the answer I gave to the primary question, that was in reference particularly to capital investment, where the member needs to tread very carefully when it comes to talking about the record of his Government.
Hon Michael Woodhouse: Who is correct: Director-General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield, who told the Health Committee, regarding pay settlements, “The funding that the DHBs received was explicitly designed to address their cost pressures.” or Nelson DHB CEO, Peter Bramley, who yesterday told the committee, “$3.2 million was the cost in that year for the settlement of multi-employer collective agreements that were not funded.”?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I would need to see the full quotes from both members to be able to judge any answer to that question specifically. What I can say, in general, is that this Government inherited a situation where we had a number of pay claims in front of us. They were not adequately budgeted for by the previous Government. We have budgeted significantly increased resources for them.
Hon Michael Woodhouse: In respect of those pay claims, what was the extent of industrial action taken by health unions during the period 2009 to 2017, and how does that compare with the last two years?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I think on this I would defer to the comments from the Deputy Prime Minister, who said that if a person thinks that a bus won’t come along, they won’t wait for it, but if they think that there’s a bus which has people in it who actually might care a little bit, they’ll wait for the bus. We have seen under this Government the fact that we’re prepared to address wage issues that were ignored for a decade by that Government.
Hon Michael Woodhouse: So if he believes funding and pay increases were adequately funded by this Government, is he also saying it’s the DHBs’ fault that their financial performance has dramatically deteriorated?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: As I said earlier on, there are a number of reasons for why DHBs’ financial performances are what they are at the moment. A significant part of that is the long-term underfunding that went on. We also have issues related to governance, which the Minister of Health—I am the Minister of Health, aren’t I?—which we, as a Government, have been working on in terms of the appointments to DHBs, and we’re addressing those performance issues, but there are many issues that lie behind that.
Hon Michael Woodhouse: If he wants to look for someone to blame for the DHBs’ parlous state, shouldn’t he just look in the mirror and see a Minister with no plan and no clue?
SPEAKER: Order! Order! No.
Question No. 5—Justice
5. Hon MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney) to the Minister of Justice: Does he stand by all his statements and actions?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): Yes, and in particular I stand by my statement this morning that this Government remains committed to effective changes that turn offenders’ lives around, reduce offending, and make our communities safer. That’s what matters most. We will make change at a pace the community understands and in a way that keeps their confidence. I hope our colleagues across the House will join us in this challenge that I know we all care about.
Hon Mark Mitchell: Does he stand by the action taken to commission the Safe and Effective Justice Advisory Group, which, after two years of engagement and a cost of $2.5 million, has delivered little in the way of promised justice reform?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE: There are factual inaccuracies in that question but, in any event, I stand by the work of that group.
Hon Mark Mitchell: Does the Minister stand by his statement this morning that the Government “will make change at a pace the community [can understand]”, and why won’t the public know until next year what these changes will be?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE: I refer the member to the answer to the primary question.
Hon Mark Mitchell: When he said that they didn’t think they could commit to the sorts of recommendations the group is likely to make regarding the resignation of members of their justice advisory group, what were the recommendations they did not agree with?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE: That is not a statement that I have ever made.
Jamie Strange: What recent announcements, if any, has the Minister made regarding courts in Hamilton?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE: Today, I announced that not only will the Government be making the two alcohol and other drug treatment courts in Auckland permanent but we will also be adding a new alcohol and other drug court in Hamilton next year. I think it’s important to note that, of the offenders who go through these courts, 23 percent are less likely to offend for any offence; 35 percent are less likely to reoffend for a serious offence; and 25 percent are less likely to be imprisoned because of reoffending. I’d like to thank that member, along with the Hon Tim Macindoe, for the support they have given for that initiative.
Jamie Strange: What reports, if any, has the Minister seen regarding his announcement of a new alcohol and other drug treatment court for Hamilton?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE: I’ve seen a report from Hamilton Mayor Paula Southgate, who welcomed the Government’s announcement of the new alcohol and other drug treatment court, saying that punishing people whose offending is driven by alcohol and drug dependency without tackling the underlying issue doesn’t make sense, and there has been sustained and comprehensive public support for the court in Hamilton. The Government has heard the people of Hamilton and is taking action.
Hon Mark Mitchell: Why did it take two years for the Minister to commit to extending the previous Government’s very successful alcohol and drug treatment courts?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE: The previous Government had set up the pilots—in fact, had renewed the pilots of those courts repeatedly until June 2018. Following the completion of that pilot, this Government extended the courts while the pilot was reviewed. I received the report of that review early this year. We’ve now committed to the permanency of those courts.
Hon Mark Mitchell: Isn’t this just a fitting end to the year of non-delivery: that, after two years in Government, he has delivered nothing new?
SPEAKER: Order! The member works out that he doesn’t ask me questions, doesn’t he?
Question No. 6—Justice
6. GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green) to the Minister of Justice: What reports has he seen which were released today that highlight racial discrimination in our justice system?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): Today I released two reports, Te Tangi o te Manawanui: Recommendations for Reform from the Government’s Chief Victims Advisor and Turuki! Turuki! from Te Uepū Hāpai i te Ora, the Safe and Effective Justice Advisory Group. These reports noted the unacceptable rates in which Māori come into contact with the criminal justice system both as offenders and as victims of crime. As the reports note, the justice system must support fairness and equity, accountability and restoration. The Government is committed to a fresh start for our criminal justice system that meets these goals over time so that we see less offending, less reoffending, and fewer victims of crime, who are better supported.
Golriz Ghahraman: Is he concerned with the finding of the report from the Safe and Effective Justice Advisory Group that Māori experience worse outcomes than other New Zealanders at every stage of the justice process?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE: Yes, I am, and, as I’ve already noted, the report showed that Māori are more likely to be affected by the criminal justice sector at all levels, both as offenders and as victims. That’s why justice sector Ministers across the Government have already put in place a number of new initiatives that will improve outcomes for Māori by ensuring that we have less offending, less reoffending, and fewer victims of crime, who are better supported.
Golriz Ghahraman: What is the Government’s intention regarding the Chief Victims Advisor’s recommendation on partnering with Māori to design and deliver tikanga-based justice processes which fulfil Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE: The Government has already begun moving on this. I point to the great work done by the Minister of Corrections in establishing the Hōkai Rangi programme in corrections, which makes more effort to deal with the problems prisoners have as part of their offending. I’d also point to the work of Te Pae Oranga iwi community panels with police, which is a community response to some offending to get offenders off a track to a bleaker future in the criminal justice system. In the justice space, we continue to support alternative courts such as Matariki, the New Beginnings Court, and the Special Circumstances Court, as well as specialist courts such as the sexual violence court.
Golriz Ghahraman: Is it the intention of the Minister to recognise the need for alternative justice processes such as tikanga-based therapeutic and restorative justice processes as well to improve outcomes for victims and defendants?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE: Yes. One example of a more therapeutic approach is the alcohol and other drug treatment courts, and, as I’ve already indicated, I was very pleased to announce that the Government will be making the existing pilot courts permanent as well as adding a new alcohol and other drug court in Hamilton. Again, I acknowledge the support of members Jamie Strange and Tim Macindoe for that initiative.
Golriz Ghahraman: How will the extension of the specialised drug and alcohol courts reflect our Government’s focus on rehabilitation and treating the causes of offending?
Hon ANDREW LITTLE: What we’ve seen from the existing alcohol and other drug court pilots is that offenders who go through these courts are much less likely to reoffend—significantly less like to reoffend—because they get the treatment and support they need that addresses the causes of their offending. It’s a great result for communities that those individuals come from. It means that we can do the harm reduction and the help that they need while they are in the community. That’s why they are so positive.
Question No. 7—Finance
DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.
SPEAKER: A point of order, David Bennett.
DAVID SEYMOUR: Seymour.
SPEAKER: Right. There are too many Davids in this place—fewer than there used to be—
DAVID SEYMOUR: I agree.
SPEAKER: —and that’s good.
DAVID SEYMOUR: Mr Speaker, I note that this year you’ve punished the Government by giving a hundred or more additional supplementary questions to the National Party. Well, here in ACT we’re also hurt by the Government’s bad behaviour, and in the interests of proportionality I wonder if you’d consider giving a couple of extra supplementaries to ACT.
SPEAKER: You can discuss that with the National Party whips. David Seymour.
DAVID SEYMOUR: Well, actually, I’m asking on behalf of a different party.
SPEAKER: I will consider giving you an extra supplementary in the new year sometime.
DAVID SEYMOUR: The new year! All right—Jesus.
SPEAKER: Consider it a Christmas present, on a promise.
DAVID SEYMOUR: A rather late Christmas present, I have to say, but we’ve never needed that many anyhow.
SPEAKER: Well, the member’s about to lose one if he doesn’t get on with it.
DAVID SEYMOUR: Ha, ha! It’s a hard row to hoe.
7. DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT) to the Minister of Finance: Does he agree with the OECD that New Zealand is the most highly taxed country in the Asia-Pacific region when measured according to the tax-to-GDP ratio?
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): No.
David Seymour: Why does the Minister of Finance disagree with figures produced by the OECD which show that New Zealanders, as a percentage of GDP, pay more tax than Japan, Korea—
SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! Right. Well, the member didn’t stop when I called him to order, so he won’t have his second supplementary. Answer that one.
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Because I don’t agree with the premise in the member’s question about the definition of highly taxed, and nor do I agree with the selective geographical definition that the OECD used.
David Seymour: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. It won’t make any difference, but the way you just treated me is grossly unfair, and the fact that I can’t even give examples to make a question intelligible is completely ridiculous.
SPEAKER: Well, I note the member’s comment. I think he’s probably asking me for an early trip home to Auckland that’s not going to be granted.
Question No. 8—Corrections
8. Hon DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) to the Minister of Corrections: Does he support the recommendations of the Turuki! Turuki! report?
Hon KELVIN DAVIS (Minister of Corrections): I support some of the recommendations and am already addressing others. One of the recommendations I support is the call for a cross-party parliamentary accord for transformative justice, where the report suggests it is time to take politics out of the issue and put an end to bickering. I guess the member’s line of questioning will make it clear whether or not he supports this recommendation as well.
Hon David Bennett: Does he support recommendation No. 11 to establish community-based habilitation centres for some prisoners?
Hon KELVIN DAVIS: I support anything that’s going to reduce reoffending, to improve rehabilitation, and I look forward to the member also supporting anything that supports rehabilitation and reduces reoffending.
Hon David Bennett: Does he agree that the work of decolonisation must begin in our justice system, and if so, what specifically needs to be decolonised?
Hon KELVIN DAVIS: It’s quite disheartening to hear the National Party denying the effects of colonisation on outcomes in New Zealand. You just need to a look at the fact that over 50 percent of the prison population is Māori. There’s a substantive population that are Pacific Islanders in prisons. It’s evidence that things have gone wrong, and colonisation is part of the issue.
Hon David Bennett: Does he agree with the report that there is institutional racial discrimination in the justice system?
Hon KELVIN DAVIS: Well, if we look at the fact that there are so many Māori who are in the prison system, if there are so many Pacific Islanders—and, in fact, I think it was Chester Borrows today who highlighted this, the Hon Chester Borrows, the former National Minister, who raised and emphasised this very point that we’re making: that there are too many people of colour in our justice system.
Ginny Andersen: What other recommendations has the Minister seen on transforming the justice sector?
Hon KELVIN DAVIS: I’m aware of one recommendation which provokes gangs to commit more crimes and drives them further—
SPEAKER: Order! That’s enough. The member should know that they don’t use patsies to attack the Opposition.
Hon David Bennett: Does he agree with the report that Māori communities should be able to determine their own responses to hara—transgressions—among their people?
Hon KELVIN DAVIS: Sometimes, but what we’re doing in Corrections along our Māori Pathways programme is exactly that: we’re asking Māori to determine what we need to do better so that they can support their people not to reoffend, not to go back to prison—how we can help them to transition from prison into communities safely and be contributing members of society upon their release.
Hon David Bennett: Will the Minister support power-sharing of the justice system with Māori communities to create a Māori justice system?
Hon KELVIN DAVIS: If we look at article 2 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, where that talks about tino rangatiratanga, tino rangatiratanga means that Māori should have the opportunity to have a say in what they want for their people. We as the Government, under article 1 of Te Tiriti, around kāwanatanga—means that we need to be enablers of Māori aspiration. If we work together—article 1 and article 2 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi—we should be able to achieve article 3 outcomes, which is equal outcomes for all New Zealanders.
Hon David Bennett: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. It was a simple question. A yes or no would suffice.
SPEAKER: Order! Order! How long has the member been here?
Hon Members: Too long.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Five minutes.
SPEAKER: No. That’s enough. I’m on my feet. There are two members who are going to withdraw and apologise. One said, “Too long.”—
Hon Kris Faafoi: I withdraw and apologise.
Darroch Ball: I withdraw and apologise.
SPEAKER: And there was one more I heard as well.
Hon Grant Robertson: It was me. I withdraw and apologise.
SPEAKER: And another.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: I said, “Five minutes.”, and I withdraw and apologise.
SPEAKER: The member will withdraw and apologise.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: I withdraw and apologise.
SPEAKER: But the point that I will make is that David Bennett knows well—he knows well. He’s not a new member, and he’s not a member that does not understand the rules of the place. That was a deliberate breach and therefore was designed to create disorder. I’m going to let it go again, because it’s close to Christmas, but he’s facing some risks.
Question No. 9—Ethnic Communities
9. PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour) to the Minister for Ethnic Communities: What recent announcements has she made about community initiatives in ethnic communities?
Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development) on behalf of the Minister for Ethnic Communities: This Government is backing our ethnically diverse and multi-faith communities to plan and deliver more community initiatives and to ensure New Zealand is welcoming and inclusive for everyone. Last week, Minister Salesa announced an increase for the Ethnic Communities Development Fund, from $520,000 to $4.2 million a year. This represents an eightfold increase to the fund, the most significant lift in its history. This Government is delivering for all New Zealanders, and this funding increase will help our ethnic communities to thrive through the practise and celebration of their cultures.
Priyanca Radhakrishnan: What has the fund been used for in the past, and what will this expansion mean for the 800,000 New Zealanders who identify with ethnic communities?
Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: This fund helps support much of the good work being done at the grassroots by ethnic communities. In the past, this fund has supported ethnic communities’ sport and youth initiatives, multicultural events, ethnic women’s centres, refugee and migrant services, and language initiatives. With this funding boost, more work can be done by ethnic communities to include and welcome ethnic diversity, promote understanding, educate New Zealanders about the contribution of our ethnic communities, and support the participation of our ethnic communities in employment and society more generally.
Priyanca Radhakrishnan: What changes are being made to how the fund is accessed?
Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: The changes we are making to the Ethnic Communities Development Fund are not just about this record investment; we are also providing more support for groups to apply and be recognised. Community advisers are available to walk side by side with groups that go through the application process, including support for those with English as a second language. The fund will also now operate on a rolling basis, with application decisions made throughout the year rather than just once annually.
Question No. 10—Housing (Public Housing)
10. SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki) to the Associate Minister of Housing (Public Housing): Have there been any evictions of state housing tenants for anti-social behaviour since this Government took office; if not, how does he reconcile his statement yesterday that there have been 24,386 reports of anti-social behaviour by state housing tenants in that time period?
SPEAKER: The Hon Kris Faafoi, with a warning that I have been warned this is slightly longer than normal.
Hon KRIS FAAFOI (Associate Minister of Housing (Public Housing)): For Kāinga Ora, technically an eviction is where a Tenancy Tribunal has ended a tenancy and a court bailiff takes possession of the property. When Kāinga Ora have to move someone on because of antisocial behaviour, it uses a business-initiated transfer to another, more appropriate property. In terms of antisocial behaviour, I’m advised there have been 308 business-initiated transfers since the Government took office. I’m advised that there has been one eviction since the Government took office. This is in the context of 185,000 New Zealanders in State homes and 65,000 Kāinga Ora properties. As I said yesterday, I recognise it can be tough to live next to someone who is an antisocial tenant, but some tenants have complex needs and these also have to be managed. These issues have always been complex. As a predecessor of mine said, “We know that steady housing helps provide stability and security, however, some tenants face eviction from their home for anti-social behaviour or financial issues, only to end up in need for emergency housing. If we can avoid them being evicted by resolving their behaviour, this benefits the tenant, their family, and the taxpayer,”, and I agree with the former housing Minister Amy Adams.
Simon O’Connor: How many business transfer protocols have there been since the Government took office?
Hon KRIS FAAFOI: If the member is asking around antisocial behaviour, the number that I have is 308. I believe—and I stand to be corrected—from discussions I’ve had with officials that the wider number of business-initiated transfers may be close to something like 380.
Simon O’Connor: What does the Minister say to neighbours of some State house tenants who have to put with daily abuse or said tenants barking at them?
Hon KRIS FAAFOI: I would ask them that they go to Kāinga Ora to make an official complaint. I would also point out that if we take each of those 308 business-initiated transferees in comparison to the 65,000 properties that Kāinga Ora has, that amounts to about less than 0.5 percent. I’m concerned that the Opposition wants to focus on 0.047 percent of those tenants and wants to stigmatise the other 99.5 percent of Kāinga Ora tenants.
Simon O’Connor: Does the Minister agree with using taxpayer dollars to put neighbours of antisocial State housing tenants up in motels rather than evict or move on those troublesome neighbours, and if so, why?
Hon KRIS FAAFOI: I have faith that the Kāinga Ora staff at the front line can manage those situations in order to keep those tenants safe. As I have said, there have been 308 business-initiated transfers to move antisocial tenants out of Kāinga Ora properties. That is in the context of 185,000 New Zealanders living in State homes and in 65,000 properties.
Simon O’Connor: In light of that response, does the Minister appreciate that his keeping the tenants safe is putting New Zealanders, as neighbours—themselves and their children—in harm’s way?
SPEAKER: I’ll let the member answer even though it’s an out-of-order question. Answer the question.
Hon KRIS FAAFOI: Look, as I had said yesterday, tenants are evicted when either staff, contractors, or neighbours could be seriously—their safety is put in serious harm. As I’ve said, there has only been one eviction technically, under Kāinga Ora’s terminology, and 308 business-initiated transfers for antisocial behaviour. I’m sure that people on the front line are taking into consideration the safety and the lives of the neighbours of some of these tenants who have to be managed. But at the end of the day, as former Ministers on that side of the House have said, they have to manage in the best interests of everyone, because if we kick those people or evict those people out of the properties, as the Hon Amy Adams has said, sooner or later they will end up costing the taxpayer more.
Simon O’Connor: Does the Minister therefore agree with people like the Rotorua Motel Association chairwoman who says that motel emergency housing is in a “dire emergency”, and what is he currently doing to keep it under control?
Hon KRIS FAAFOI: We have always been honest that we inherited a housing crisis, which is why we have invested hundreds of millions in increasing the supply of support like emergency housing special-needs grants, like building more public housing when the previous Government was tearing them down and demolishing them.
Question No. 11—Health
11. Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei) to the Associate Minister of Health: Does she stand by all her statements and actions regarding measles?
Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Associate Minister of Health): Yes, in the context they were given.
Dr Shane Reti: Can she confirm her health officials declined multiple requests from Auckland DHBs for a national measles catch-up campaign going back to October 2017, despite her repeated statements urging people to be vaccinated against measles?
Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: It’s well known that it had been recommended to run a national catch-up campaign since 2014, which the previous Government did not do. Our Government has, in the past year, administered more than twice as many vaccines as the next highest year in the last decade, and we’re actively looking to address the under-immunisation that exists in our country.
Dr Shane Reti: Did the refusal to support a national measles catch-up campaign two years ago contribute to the current measles outbreak?
Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: No.
Dr Shane Reti: Why did no health officials undertake any form of contact tracing, including notifying airlines, following a young female passenger with measles who flew with Air New Zealand from the Bay of Plenty in March this year, as stated in answers to written questions?
Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: I think that question is best put down in writing, but it’s my understanding that contact tracing is not usually undertaken for people who are travelling by air.
Dr Shane Reti: Has she addressed that question already in answers to written questions?
Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: It is entirely possible that I have. I have received over 400 written questions from that member in the past two months; unfortunately, I cannot retain to memory the answer to every single one of those.
Dr Shane Reti: Is she satisfied her management of the measles outbreak is up to standard when Official Information Act documents show that contact tracing of the young passenger with measles on Air New Zealand was undertaken by the “backpackers’ grapevine”?
Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: What I can stand by is our Government’s absolute commitment to addressing the measles outbreak. There’s been an enormous effort undertaken at DHB level to contain the outbreak, and the Government is actively looking at doing everything we can to ensure this never happens again in New Zealand.
Question No. 12—Foreign Affairs
12. JAMIE STRANGE (Labour) to the Minister of Foreign Affairs: What recent announcements has he made about New Zealand’s tsunami warning capability?
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Minister of Foreign Affairs): Yesterday, the Minister of Civil Defence and I announced the deployment of a network of DART buoys on board the RV Tangaroa at the Aotea Wharf in Wellington. Yesterday, as I said, we sent the first shipload of five offshore, and bear in mind that when we found out what had happened—we found out that the whole system had been allowed to run down to virtually nothing under the previous Government.
Jamie Strange: What benefit does the DART buoy network bring?
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: DART buoy stands for Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis. DART buoys are the only tried and tested technology that confirms the generation of tsunami waves before they reach the coast. So, in short, half the Pacific Islands were being exposed, and so was the top of our country as well, because of the gross neglect of that administration when they were in power—what a disgrace.
Hon Gerry Brownlee: That’s a complete misleading of the truth. Stop being reckless with the truth.
SPEAKER: Order! The member will stand, withdraw, and apologise.
Hon Gerry Brownlee: I withdraw and apologise. I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. [Interruption]
SPEAKER: Mr Bennett is not helping you.
Hon Gerry Brownlee: I didn’t ask for his help.
SPEAKER: Well, that’s one wise comment the member’s made.
Hon Gerry Brownlee: That would be absolutely right. Now, the question is—[Interruption] My comment—I won’t repeat it because you obviously didn’t like it, but it was simply making a general statement; it wasn’t making an accusation. How can that be out of order?
SPEAKER: The member knows that that statement has been ruled out on many, many occasions in the House—many occasions.
Jamie Strange: How swiftly has the Government acted to deploy new DART buoys?
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: On the very day that, as acting Prime Minister, I found out, I contacted my colleague Kris Faafoi, and we set straight to it. We didn’t lose one day in ordering the equipment, which left yesterday from the Wellington harbour. That’s what we did. It was dramatic, and more importantly, we were so aghast when we discovered what had happened—we could not believe that a previous administration, whose obligation—
SPEAKER: Order!
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: —was to the security of the Pacific people and the New Zealand people—
SPEAKER: Order! Order!
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: —had done exactly nothing.
SPEAKER: Order! Order! I think that’s, sort of, repeat of use of supplement patsies for attacking the Opposition.
Jamie Strange: Who paid for the new DART buoy network?
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: That’s a very good question. The rejuvenated DART buoy network service is an excellent example of the good work that official development assistance funds in the Pacific do. Of the $47.3 million, $24.3 million came from the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management, $20.4 million came from the official development assistance—
Hon David Bennett: How much did the foundation give?
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: —as to the foundation of $100 million, the National Party can tell you all about that—and $2.6 million came from our friends in Australia. Can I just say also that it was vital that this constructive effort be recognised when we found out the crisis that we, potentially, faced.
Bills
Remuneration Authority (Members of Parliament Remuneration) Amendment Bill (No 2)
In Committee
KIERAN McANULTY (Junior Whip—Labour): I seek leave for all provisions within this bill to be taken as one question.
CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): One debate.
KIERAN McANULTY: One debate.
CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is none.
Parts 1 and 2 agreed to.
Schedule agreed to.
Clauses 1 and 2 agreed to.
House resumed.
The Chairperson reported the Remuneration Authority (Members of Parliament Remuneration) Amendment Bill (No 2) without amendment.
Report adopted.
Bills
Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill
Third Reading
Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): I move, That the Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.
The passing of this bill is a significant step towards improving the pastoral care of tertiary students in our polytechs, our universities, our private training establishments, and our wānanga up and down the country. I want to acknowledge again and thank the members of the House for their constructive work to bring this bill to its final stage today. The bill will allow for an interim code of practice to be put in place and be effective from the beginning of next year. I’d like to thank all of the officials who worked quickly and swiftly and tirelessly to develop the legislation and to draft the interim code so that it can be put in place in a very short space of time.
I also want to acknowledge the family of Mason Pendrous at this difficult time for them, and I want to reiterate in this House that we want to do all that we can to take steps to ensure that no family finds themselves in the position that they have found themselves in ever again.
This tragic event and the subsequent information-gathering by the Tertiary Education Commission into the pastoral care arrangements of student accommodation throughout the country exposed limitations in the current self-regulating approach to supporting our tertiary students. The voluntary code for student accommodation had not been reviewed since it was brought in 15 years ago, and in many cases had not been followed. We now have an opportunity to change this. The bill, and the subsequently developed code of practice, will provide greater certainty for students, their families, and for providers. The bill aims to address the regulatory gap for the pastoral care of domestic tertiary students. Families and whānau have a right to feel assured that when their young people leave home after Christmas, they are going to be provided with the best possible pastoral care in terms of the safety and the support services that they receive. This bill and the interim code ensures that will happen.
Students need to know that there are minimum standards of safety and there is support available to them if they need it. Providers also need clarity around what they are expected to provide for their students, including specific requirements for halls of residence and for other student accommodation.
The bill is going to enable the code of practice for pastoral care of domestic tertiary students to be issued. It will ensure that providers are accountable for pastoral care standards and that their students can succeed academically in a safe, healthy, and supportive learning environment.
Further work is being done on the development of an ongoing code, and a consultation requirement’s been inserted into the bill. The consultation with students, the wider tertiary sector, including consultation with the Privacy Commissioner, is going to be essential to developing an ongoing code that is robust and that’s effective.
The bill enables the Minister to appoint a code administrator to monitor compliance with the code, and to issue notices and, importantly, sanctions if they are needed. I anticipate the code administrator will have a range of education, information, or influence interventions that are available to them so that they can promote good practice in line with the code of practice.
The entry and inspection powers in the bill will enable the code administrator to monitor or investigate compliance with the relevant code, and the provisions have been amended to strengthen the privacy of students by the select committee. The bill introduces a new criminal offence for breaches of the application of the code without reasonable excuse where those result in serious harm or death. The maximum level of the fine for this offence is $100,000. It also introduces a new civil pecuniary penalty for serious breaches, without reasonable excuse, of the applicable code.
The penalty and offence provisions will apply both to tertiary education providers and to signatories to the code for international students. Additionally, the bill introduces a dispute resolution scheme for domestic tertiary students. But that won’t apply to the interim code in 2020. Details of the application of the dispute resolution scheme to domestic tertiary students will be arranged and agreed over the course of the coming year.
Other than the new offence and penalty provisions, the bill does not propose to change the existing code for international students, which has been in place for some time, and transitional provisions carry forward that existing code.
I want to say again that I appreciate the cross-party and cross-House support for the bill, which has enabled the bill to progress through the House very quickly. The speed is important because it means that the interim code can be put in place from the beginning of 2020 to provide that assurance to students and their families while we work with them to ensure that we have a more long-term code in place from the beginning of 2021.
The interim code will set out a general duty of pastoral care required of all tertiary education providers in relation to domestic students, and specific requirements for student accommodation. The purpose of the code will be to ensure that as far as practicable, domestic tertiary students can succeed academically in a safe, healthy, and supportive learning environment.
I do want to note that some providers may need to strengthen their existing systems and processes for pastoral care of their students. And I note that some providers are already providing a very high standard of pastoral care, with very robust systems in place. It’s this inconsistency that needs to change, and it’s also why I do not accept any excuses that might be made of increased costs, or any intention to pass those on to students as a direct result of the interim code next year, when providers should already be delivering the level of care consistent with that which the code requires.
We’ll be releasing the interim code shortly after this third reading. I understand a copy has already been supplied to the Opposition. Officials will work with the sector to support them in discharging their responsibilities under the code. The interim code will apply from 1 January, and, as I’ve said, we’ll be working to establish the permanent code, which will come into effect in 2021.
To conclude, the bill is vital to ensuring that the protections and supports that we need to have are in place for the pastoral care of all domestic tertiary students. Tertiary students, but especially those young students leaving home for the first time, can be a vulnerable group. Their wellbeing is essential for them to be able to succeed and achieve their aspirations in education. The bill will ensure stronger protections are in place for students and student accommodation, it will support all domestic tertiary students to succeed academically in a safe, healthy, and supportive learning environment, and I commend the Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill to the House.
Hon NIKKI KAYE (National—Auckland Central): Look, I rise to speak to support this legislation. Firstly, I want to acknowledge the way that members have worked in terms of the Environment Committee to get what I think is an improved law. Can I acknowledge the Minister of Education on this issue. While I will address shortly some of the process concerns that we’ve had, I think that parties across this House have worked constructively on this legislation. Dr Parmjeet Parmar, who chairs our select committee, can I take a moment to acknowledge you as well—it’s been a big year in education—and all of those members on the select committee that have contributed to this legislation.
Look, I think in terms of the purpose of what this is about, we all have already acknowledged Mason and his family. I think when the news of this situation became very apparent, that a young person had lay deceased and undiscovered for nearly eight weeks, it was with absolute sadness and concern that not only parliamentarians wanted to act, but also people across New Zealand have been really concerned about the situation. So National absolutely supports the objective of improving student safety, which is what we think will be the outcome of this legislation.
However, it is upon us to raise some of the issues of process, and it wasn’t just us who were saying that, look, we know we need to move reasonably quickly, but several weeks compared to six months we were concerned about; it was also the Law Society who raised that. We also saw Treasury raise these issues of haste. Treasury went quite far in terms of their comments. The Law Society obviously raised those issues publicly, but Treasury went very far in terms of the unintended consequences that can occur when you move at haste, at pace, in terms of select committee. So we did have some concerns about process.
In terms of the content and the improvement to the bill, I think it is important to acknowledge—and we had this discussion at select committee—that these are young adults. So this ability to move to create a safer environment via a code that can be enforced and with penalties was obviously at the front of mind for select committee members, but we were also aware of that balance of, as well, student privacy. So I want to address some of the amendments that we made at select committee. We obviously made an amendment to the original definition of serious harm. We made amendments around the reference to safety and wellbeing of students, we clarified the single pastoral care code, but this amendment was actually, I think, one of the most important, and that was where we were considering this issue of code administrators seeking consent of students and providing 24 hours’ notice before inspecting rooms. That was about actually saying, look, we want a situation where every young person is safe. We absolutely understand it’s a really tough time for many students. When they leave home, they may be more vulnerable. We know of some of the issues, whether it’s alcohol or, potentially, people get bullied, or they feel uncomfortable because they’re out of their normal comfort zone.
However, we do see the need to balance what are serious issues of safety and standards of tertiary accommodation with that issue of student privacy, and we on this side of the House really wanted to emphasise that. We heard some very powerful submissions from some people, including the Privacy Commissioner, and I want to acknowledge the excellent submission that he gave. I do want to acknowledge that on this side of the House we did want him to be formally consulted. We were not successful in achieving this as part of the legislative process, and I’m sure Clare Curran will have something to say about that, but we were really, really keen to make that happen. We also made a range of changes, including the reasonable excuse defence around penalty provisions.
So, again, I want to acknowledge everybody who’s been involved in this piece of legislation, including Ministry of Education officials. We do support the overall objective. We understand the process in terms of the interim code. I assume that the code has gone to my colleague Dr Shane Reti, so I too will be having a look at that, and there is a transition that needs to occur.
But I think, at the heart of this, what we supported on this side of the House was this ability to say to all of the parents in New Zealand that, actually, we can do better as a country in terms of tertiary accommodation. We can give you greater guarantees that we will never have a situation like what occurred to Mason Pendrous. Again, that is the purpose of this legislation: to lift the safety of tertiary accommodation but also to ensure that we have some basic accountability while balancing those real issues of privacy of students.
Can I just again finish by acknowledging my parliamentary colleagues for your contribution to this piece of legislation. It is great that we can be putting a piece of legislation to the House that has cross-party support in education. Thank you.
Hon CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. The tragic death of Mason Pendrous at the Sonoda campus at the University of Canterbury exposed the lack of a consistent approach to the welfare and pastoral care of domestic tertiary students in our country. This was a young man who had his life ahead of him. I want to acknowledge his stepdad, Anthony Holland, for your courage and I acknowledge your grief.
I also want to extend a heartfelt thanks, actually, to the Opposition for the way that this piece of legislation has passed through the House so quickly and through the select committee process, and so constructively, so that parents and students going into halls of residence next year can be reassured that there is a code of conduct in place, an interim code of conduct, that is mandatory and that there will be the development of a permanent code of conduct through that time next year. So there was an imperative for this legislation to pass this year in order to ensure that.
We’ve heard that the bill enables the Minister of Education to issue that code of practice to provide that framework—the pastoral care of domestic tertiary students. I just want to reiterate how important it is that that is a mandatory code of conduct and that all providers must comply with it. It’s not just a code of conduct that’s sitting in the back office that nobody ever really pays attention to—that it also sets out arrangements relating to the administration, the monitoring, the compliance, the enforcement, the offences, the penalties, and the dispute resolution. So Parliament has worked hard on this piece of legislation, and it’s important.
The select committee also made some important changes, tweaks, to the legislation mainly to improve language and definitions. The member Nikki Kaye may be interested to know that we actually have recommended that those affected by the code be consulted and that they include representatives of students, parents, providers, signatory providers and the staff of providers, and signatory providers as well as the Privacy Commissioner. So I’m not sure that she had caught up on that, but we have actually accepted that the Privacy Commissioner be consulted. We also note that this bill does not override the Privacy Act.
I’m going to end with that, other than to acknowledge the submitters. There wasn’t much time to submit. There were, I think, 22 submissions—11 submitters were heard, and the Privacy Commissioner, and while it’s passed through this House quickly and an interim code will be released in time for next year, there will be a solid amount of work done next year to get that final code in place, and the consultation that’s needed to take its time to make sure that that’s right will happen.
I really commend this bill to the House. I thank the Minister for taking the initiative so quickly on this—again, to the Opposition, to all the submitters and the officials that worked on it. I commend this bill to the House.
Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m taking this call to support the third reading of the Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill. This bill was introduced after that sad incident that happened at Canterbury University. Nineteen-year-old Mason’s body was in his room and nobody noticed. He was there—his body was lying in his room for a number of weeks, and nobody noticed that he was not around. So my hope is that, through this legislation, we are making sure that this kind of incident will never happen again here in New Zealand. This bill allows the Minister to issue a code which will cover both the international pastoral care code and the domestic pastoral care code.
Talking about the international and domestic pastoral care code, I want to highlight that when we talk about international students, our attention towards their pastoral care is a lot more than domestic tertiary students. I can understand to some extent why that exists, because international students come from different countries, different backgrounds, different cultures and societies, and they need time to adjust in our new environment here in New Zealand, and we want to make sure that we are providing them the best possible experience here in New Zealand while they are gaining their tertiary education.
But for domestic tertiary students, we cannot take their wellbeing for granted. I understand that they are in the same country—their home country here in New Zealand—but there could be some young ones that are leaving their home for the first time to move into a hall of residence, and there could be some students that are leaving their hometown going into a different town. So for them also it’s a new environment. For them they have to make new connections, new friends, and, on top of that, there are other pressures, of course—to study, to do well in sports, and there are so many other activities that they might be involved in. So there could be so many reasons that these kinds of things can happen. So we want to see that we have a proactive pastoral care system for our domestic tertiary students as well. I fully understand the difference for the providers for international students—that is, for international students the providers are to take all reasonable steps to protect them, and for domestic tertiary students they are to take all reasonable steps to ensure their wellbeing.
In this legislation, the other thing that is very good is that the Minister is required to consult with students, their families, providers, and also the Privacy Commissioner before issuing a code of practice. I want to especially acknowledge the Privacy Commissioner, because he addressed a lot of concerns that we had during the select committee process. Of course, I want to acknowledge all 22 submitters as well for their contribution, and it’s because of their contributions that we have been able to amend this legislation and bring this legislation back in this form.
We really want this legislation to go through. We want to see that the interim code is in place ASAP, and then the permanent code is in place, because we are really concerned about the wellbeing of our domestic tertiary students. In this legislation, I also want to highlight that while we were trying to balance safety of domestic tertiary students, we wanted to see that their privacy is also maintained, because we know that for parents, their children will always be children and we would like to monitor them 24 hours, 7 days. But that’s not practical, because, in reality, children grow up, and, once they are over 18, they need their space. We wanted to respect that in this legislation. So that has been done in this legislation.
The third factor was accountability of providers. I just want to highlight one point—other points have been already mentioned. This is establishing a student contract dispute resolution scheme. In this legislation, students will have access to this scheme for seven years. We think that seven years is a reasonable length of time, because that is the length of time for which most of the records are maintained.
Finally, I want to talk about the definition of serious harm in this legislation, because serious harm is central to the issue that we are trying to resolve through this legislation. As the legislation was introduced, various kinds of medical and other interventions were listed under “serious harm”. During the select committee process, we changed that. We didn’t want those interventions listed.
I was asked by the media about the select committee process. The question was: have you diluted the definition of serious harm in the select committee process? I don’t agree with that, because we haven’t actually diluted it; we have actually strengthened the definition of serious harm in the select committee process. We didn’t want to exclude any kind of interventions by listing some interventions in a serious harms definition.
This bill is a much, much better bill after our work in the select committee process, and, once again, I want to thank everyone for their contributions. I support this bill. Thank you.
MARK PATTERSON (NZ First): I rise to reaffirm New Zealand First’s support for this Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill and, in doing so, to poignantly remember the reason why this bill, of course, is being pushed through with such speed through the parliamentary process: the passing of Mason Pendrous. I believe his father may be in the gallery, which makes this a very poignant occasion.
Of course, heading off to university or to vocational training, often in a different city or environment, is an exciting period for young people as they explore their new-found freedoms. But it is also a time when they’re away from their support networks, potentially, and that leaves them vulnerable. Through this process, we have found that there have been some glaring gaps in our regulatory process for domestic students. From a New Zealand First perspective, it’s very hard for us to see why our New Zealand students—our domestic young people—shouldn’t have the same or very similar protections as what we give our international students. The bar should be very high for pastoral care for both of those categories of student.
So this bill, I don’t want to draw it out too much. I think it’s been well traversed by the other speakers. But this bill does bring in, firstly, an interim code for the 2020 year—hence the speed of the process to get something in to give the parents and the young people some confidence that next year we will have addressed this gap in an interim way—and a permanent code will be developed over the following year.
Given it will be my last contribution on education matters this year, I’d just like to take a minute to acknowledge the Education and Workforce Committee, which I very much enjoyed being on. I acknowledge the chair, Parmjeet Parmar. Also, our thoughts, of course are with Jan Tinetti, who is the deputy chair and leads the Government side. I know Jan will be watching now, so we wish you well, Jan, with your recovery and look forward to seeing you in the new year—and all the members of the committee, actually. It’s a really constructive committee—both sides of the House. Of course, some are wiser than others, but we get there in the end.
So, anyway, without further ado, I think this is an important bill. It’s important that we get this through so that we can give parents and students everywhere the confidence that this regulatory gap has been plugged for the new year. So New Zealand First support this bill. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
SIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill in its third and final reading here in Parliament. I too would like to acknowledge the Minister, the Hon Chris Hipkins, and also the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, Dr Parmjeet Parmar, for this bill and for Parmjeet’s work shepherding it through the House and also the Government’s collaborative approach with Dr Shane Reti in terms of ensuring that the National Party supports this bill, which we do.
This bill is an important piece of legislation. It is about ensuring that the students, the young people who leave home and go to university for the first time, are given the care that they need—the pastoral care that they need and that they deserve—that our institutions are held to account for the care that they provide, and that there will be a code put in place which can then be used to ensure that the appropriate care is made available to these young people.
The circumstances which have brought us to this place have been well traversed, but I do just want to say that I think that this bill is a step towards ensuring that our young people and families have the confidence in the system going forward that their children, their loved ones, will be given the care that they need.
I do hope that this piece of legislation will be something which won’t be putting an increased burden on the costs for these young people. I think that’s something which certainly the committee spent some time on. That was one of the reasons why we pushed for the consultation requirements for the code in this bill—so that young people, families, and those with interests in student accommodation are actually properly consulted so that the code, while it has the appropriate requirements, is also not something which leads to such substantial increases in cost that young people find alternative accommodation where there might not be the same standard of care that we’re hoping that they have.
So that’s something that I’ll be keeping a close eye on as that code is developed. But, in conclusion, the National Party will be supporting this bill. Thank you very much.
CHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green): E Te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. I stand on behalf of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, still as our tertiary education spokesperson although, unfortunately, no longer on the Education and Workforce Committee.
Mark Patterson: Boo.
CHLÖE SWARBRICK: So I send my condolences, particularly to my colleague Mark Patterson, who I very much enjoyed sitting next to.
But the topic of this legislation that brings us here in the Chamber today is actually of quite a sombre tone. I want to acknowledge, as all of those speakers who have so far, Mason Pendrous from the University of Canterbury, and his whānau, who, you know, I have a limited understanding of the grief of that loss, but I’m sure you’ll still be grappling with that. So I want to acknowledge that.
I’m gutted—and the Greens and, I’m sure, all of us are gutted—that it took a tragedy like this, a loss of a young life, to actually look at such a glaring gap in our legislation and in our care for young people who are going out there into the world, often leaving home for the very first time, and engaging in what should be a really exciting first new chapter out of the compulsory education sector.
When I became our mental health spokesperson for the Greens in 2018, I went on a tour around university campuses to understand mental ill-health as it was presenting on those campuses, given that tertiary students are often those who are pretty good at voicing and communicating their concerns and what they perceive as political failings. In speaking to those university students, a number of themes presented themselves. Actually, a number of Residential Assistants (RAs)—those being students who are put in a position to look after, at times, hundreds of students in university halls—recounted to me that they had been put in positions with a huge amount of responsibility, next to no backing to do it, and a very limited period of time—that being their supposed working hours—to actually address those issues as they were presented.
The way that one of these RAs put it to me is that students and parents, in particular, are sold this vision of university halls on these glossy magazine covers—where, you know, why would you choose to go into a flat when you can go into this place, which is going to look after you and help you transition into a university lifestyle—which for me actually brings out the point, to address what had been raised just then by my colleague Simeon Brown, around the potential for increasing costs. I believe it was put quite well by the Minister Chris Hipkins with regard to how any of those university halls and university providers who are speaking about increasing their costs in response to this are gouging. Because, quite frankly, it’s indicative of how they have cut costs through cutting wellbeing, through cutting the pastoral care that they are supposed to be providing through that advertising that they’ve put out into the world on those glossy magazine covers.
Why on earth would any student, any parent, decide to put their child in one of these halls when it’s cheaper to put them into a flat, if not for the supposed level of service that is provided through this kind of pastoral care that’s supposed to be there?
It’s been raised by a number of those who have addressed the bill so far, the intricate details like how no pastoral care actually existed for domestic tertiary students, no code existed, prior to the passage of this legislation, at the end of these speeches today. A voluntary one was set up in 2004 but it hasn’t been regularly reviewed or updated. I would hope that in light of this tragedy and in light of the anomaly, particularly, picked up between international and domestic student care, we don’t let that lapse again, that we continue to keep that emphasis that is required on wellbeing and on the mental health of students, and indeed, of all in the society.
I also want to speak about the point that had been raised by a number of my colleagues, most notably the Hon Nikki Kaye. I sat on the Education and Workforce Committee up until the point that we reported this back to the House. I’d just like to correct the record that it was actually myself who prompted the fact that there should be consultation with the Privacy Commissioner in here. That was off the back of a brilliant submission from the Privacy Commissioner. I did receive support from National Party colleagues at that point in time, but due to the bizarre vagaries of voting and all of us walking in and out of the room, I don’t think we passed it through the select committee stage, but we did end up getting it through by amendment from the Minister. So thank you, Minister Hipkins, for paying attention to that detailed report from the select committee.
That’s really important to me that we have that consultation with the Privacy Commissioner. It’s really important to the Greens because we’ve seen an abuse of that privacy of students in a number of different situations in the past few years. University students at Otago University will be aware of their proctor engaging in some mischievous behaviour and walking on to their property.
But we also want to make sure that we don’t end up with a hyper-paternalistic model which talks down to our young people just as they’re seeking to get their foot out there into the real world, which is also why it’s crucial that alongside speaking to providers, to staff, and to parents, students are central to this conversation. That was a thread of argument that we heard from a number of student associations who submitted.
Just in summary, the Greens are proud and happy to be commending this bill to the House on a day that it appears that we’ve got another piece of legislation with unanimity, particularly because it is so crucial to guarding the wellbeing of our young people. I hope very strongly that it is the case that we never again see the tragedy that fell upon Mason Pendrous and his whānau. Kia ora.
DENISE LEE (National—Maungakiekie): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. It is right that we try and do our best to achieve a balance around student safety with this particular piece of legislation, but also maintain student privacy, and for this particular young adult age, their right to act as an adult. So it has been a really interesting passage talking around incentivising and encouraging tertiary providers to do their best, but also looking at costs and the impact and, hopefully not but potentially, perverse effect of passing legislation for which we don’t exactly know all the impacts.
We also did not know all the contents of the interim code that’s about to come New Zealand’s way. I’d like to acknowledge the submitters who strayed into out of scope areas, and I realise and we can understand why they wanted to address what will actually be in the code, but this particular legislation did not address that.
We do support the passage of this. We know that the current self-regulating approach has not worked and it was exacerbated or highlighted by the tragic death of 19-year-old Mason Pendrous. We’ve just had confirmed, the New Zealand public, about 24 hours ago that we won’t ever know how and why he died, but what we do know, and in the words of his stepdad, was that he wasn’t the young man that died alone; he was the young man that changed the law. Thank you.
ANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Madam Speaker, it’s a great pleasure to rise and acknowledge the unanimous agreement here in the House for the passing of the Education (Pastoral Care) Amendment Bill. I want to thank the Minister and officials in the select committee for this really constructive process. I was not a member of that select committee, but I acknowledge that this has been a serious matter that all parties have taken a very careful and compassionate approach to, to fix a gap in the system which none of us actually realised was there.
I want to acknowledge the very tragic death of Mason and I want to acknowledge his stepdad in the gallery today. We hope that this piece of legislation goes some small way to ease the pain of losing your stepson. I commend this bill to the House.
NICOLA WILLIS (National): It is deeply sad that it took the tragic death of Mason Pendrous for this legislation to come before the House. Members in this debate have acknowledged how horrified we have all been by the events that preceded his death and what it revealed about the quality of care in university hostels around New Zealand. Like others, I want to acknowledge his whānau and I want to acknowledge all those affected by his loss. I want them to know that his death was not in vain. His death ensured that we lifted the lid on the lack of pastoral care in many student hostels, despite the fact that families pay very high fees for those hostels in the expectation that a higher level of pastoral care will be provided.
The voluntary code did not work and that is why this House has come together to legislate and to put in place a framework which will be compulsory. I know that students here in Wellington have some concerns that a code of this sort could lead to higher fees for student hostels, and, to those students and to the people who run those hostels and to our universities, I say: do not let this be an excuse for raising your fees exorbitantly. It should be possible for good quality pastoral care to be provided within a framework such as this without huge fee increases. National supports this bill and we commend it to the House.
TAMATI COFFEY (Labour—Waiariki): This is not a controversial bill. This is a bill that’s needed. There are acknowledgments that have been made in the House tonight to the select committee, to the Minister, and to the family as well. So I’ll keep it short and just commend this bill to the House.
Hon TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West): In similar vein, as the final Opposition speaker I will give a very brief response. I do want to acknowledge the Minister, the Hon Chris Hipkins, for the way in which he has dealt with this matter. I’m sure that it has been widely respected. I also want to acknowledge the Education and Workforce Committee, who, clearly, were faced with a distressing situation and have handled it in a very sensitive manner.
As others have done, I simply wish to add to the expression of sympathy from colleagues right around the House to the family. I can’t see them above me, but I understand that there are some in the gallery today. It is deeply distressing that the tragic death of a young man should have given rise to our understanding of the regulatory gaps that this measure is designed to address.
So without wishing in any way to sound disrespectful by speaking so briefly, could I just say that I welcome this measure and, in particular, the very dignified and compassionate way in which all members have handled it.
Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): It is always a solemn occasion when this House’s activity is prompted by tragedy, and I acknowledge people in the gallery who have come here to see what’s going on today for that very reason.
I want to say that when people do send their children and young people to university, they place a solemn trust in that institution, and it is perhaps with surprise that we look back and discover that there wasn’t a legal obligation as to how that trust was discharged. It’s good to see that we’ve managed to cooperate and move quickly to put in place this measure.
I must say, having spent a lot of time as an academic at a university and as one perhaps does grow a little older, we realise the considerable distance and perhaps immaturity of some of those students and the fact they do need care and they are not adults who are necessarily able to weather the storm of what goes on in that situation. So this bill is a good measure. It will have to be proportionate, because not all students are the same and we know that many students live in halls of residence and so on and they may be 20-plus years old and will able to manage, but it’s those 17- and 18-year-olds that we’re particularly concerned about.
It was also of note that in this instance this was a privately managed institution, one in which the duties had essentially been subcontracted, and that may be a lesson for us. But I know that the vice-chancellor of that university, Cheryl de la Rey, is working very hard to rebuild the trust around what goes on in that university. I wish her well in that. I know she absolutely has the interests of those students very much at heart.
So in terms of this bill, it’s a tool with which to put in place these codes of conduct that the Minister has oversight of. It’s an important step and one in which we can now make sure that that solemn trust that we have to look after our young people in the education system is discharged. I commend it to the House.
Bill read a third time.
Bills
Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Bill
Third Reading
Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): I move, That the Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Bill be now read a third time.
I’m very pleased at the passage of this bill through the House, the examination that it received at the committee stage, and it is now in very good form, the House having approved also a Supplementary Order Paper in my name that made some added improvements to the bill. Obviously, the examination that the bill received in the select committee did not lead to a majority decision on suitable changes, but we were able to get those changes through that part of the House.
I’m thankful for members who participated in the debates, who have given it close scrutiny and close examination, and I think this bill is now in good shape to perform a very important function, which is—knowing the changing situation in Syria and the other parts of the Middle East, knowing that there was a very small number of New Zealanders who travelled to that zone for reasons ideological, philosophical, or religious reasons to do things that we find antisocial and antithetical here—that we need to have the means in place and give the Commissioner of Police the tools to deal with those people who come back and pose a risk to our communities.
We know that the Terrorism Suppression Act from the late 2000s—2007-08—is a piece of legislation that had huge gaps in it. It was problematic; the police said that at the time, the Solicitor-General said that at the time, and this Government has taken up the task of totally reviewing that piece of legislation. In the course of that review, it’s become apparent that we need to have mechanisms such as these control orders to alleviate the risk that people who have participated in events abroad, in conflict zones, would pose to New Zealanders. I might add that it was in 2014 that a UN resolution required member States to have the means in place to deal with returning foreign terrorist fighters. That hadn’t happened by the end of 2017, and it was for this Government to embark upon that task.
The review of the Terrorism Suppression Act will continue, and there will be a comprehensive range of proposals brought back to this House in due course—I expect, sometime next year—but we needed to have the means in place to deal with this now. Once Cabinet had approved the policy on that, we had a suggestion from the National Party that they would approve it in principle but that they wanted to see the detail; that’s entirely reasonable. When the bill was drafted and approved, a copy was sent to the National Party. I received a message in writing that the National Party would support the bill. There were no conditions attached.
Subsequently, the National Party issued a statement saying that they required some changes or they wouldn’t support it. That got into an exchange that I think is most unfortunate. Members opposite, in the course of the debates in the House, characterised the bill as weak. That is wrong. This provides extraordinary powers that do not apply, would not apply, to any other citizen, but we need that because of the risk posed, and I just think it’s unfortunate that on matters of national security, some think that it’s OK to get into rhetoric and puffing our their chest and saying all sorts of weird and wonderful things. That is not appropriate, it is not good for New Zealand, and I’m disappointed that that happened.
In any event, we now have the bill in this form. The committee of the whole House approved Supplementary Order Paper 415. It does a number of things—not unusual, but bearing in mind these orders are orders of a court, a High Court judge; a judge needs to weigh the information before him or her to impose the orders. They will want to know that any risk posed is a real risk, and so that word has been used as a consequence of the Supplementary Order Paper. The bill will be reviewed after two years. That is hardly problematic, because the entire piece of legislation that it amends is under review now anyway, and so that is an appropriate thing to have. Then there is a provision also that allows those subject to any order to get access to legal aid to review it.
This is a civil process, a civil order, for people who have not been convicted of a crime. They might have been assessed as posing a risk and as having done something abroad that is antithetical to our values and therefore they pose a risk, but they haven’t been convicted of anything, and those who genuinely subscribe to the principles of the rule of law will know that if it is not a criminal process and there is not a criminal sanction and it is just a civil process, then we have to encroach very carefully on rights and freedoms. Because, of course, the other thing is that it is possible for these processes to get it wrong. So it is right that we have appropriate safeguards. It is right that we seek to draw a correct balance. We have done that in this case.
This is a piece of legislation that will afford safety and security to New Zealanders for that very, very small number of people who might be subject to one of these orders, and, of course, we will continue the review process and continue to support the wonderful work that our police do and, indeed, the agencies who support them to keep our communities safe. On that basis, I commend the bill to the House.
Hon MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m a bit sad to see the Minister isn’t going to remain in the House, but anyway I just wanted to outline the actual process that has brought us to the House today for the third reading of a bill, the Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Bill, that is weak.
Throughout the whole process of this bill, we have seen the sponsoring Minister, Andrew Little, himself get up and make two contributions—one for five minutes and then again, today, another one for five minutes, when for both speeches he had a 10-minute allocation. He didn’t even use half his time to speak to the bill. We went through a committee of the whole House—not one member opposite stood to take a call. The Minister in the chair, the Hon Andrew Little, responded three times to issues that I raised through the committee of the whole House. He wouldn’t respond to one of those issues to give us a clear answer and to the people at home that were actually watching the debate.
Let me take you through the process of what actually did happen with this bill. The Minister asked me about four months ago to go to his office for a meeting, and he briefed me with his officials and said that we’ve got an imminent threat of Kiwis returning to New Zealand who have been involved in, sponsored, or supported some type of terrorist activity. I said to him, and I indicated to him very clearly in that meeting, that we would support him—we would support the Government. There was no problem at all; we understood that when it comes to matters of national security, it should be bipartisan. The two major parties in this Parliament should work responsibly together to make sure that we have the strongest possible legislation in place to ensure that we actually can protect our citizens. That’s a fundamental role of any Government: to protect the safety of their citizens.
I said to him very clearly, “We understand that one of your coalition partners will not support you.” The Green Party, in the history of this Parliament over the last 20 years, have never supported any legislation that’s been brought into this House to deal with terrorism—ever. So he said that they needed us; it was clear that the Government needed us to support them on this bill. The only thing that I did ask was, “Please, when you take your proposals through Cabinet, please ensure that our security agencies, the police, have got the ability to be able to detain someone at the border.” If someone arrives unannounced—because, in a perfect world, we would have a notification from our coalition partners or the countries that these people are leaving from. Hopefully, the system would work and we’d have a prior notification in which we’d have the time to respond and to get a control order—in this place, an interim control order—in place. That’s the perfect world. We don’t live in a perfect world.
So if we did have someone arrive at our border unannounced and we had information that indicated that they had been involved or could have been involved in some sort of terrorist activity, we needed to be able to protect our people by giving the police the ability to be able to detain that person, and we proposed in our amendment “for 72 hours” in which time an interim control order could be applied for and put in place by the High Court. The police themselves—and let me make this very, very clear: the police themselves—in the select committee process reiterated several times that the amendment that we were putting up to give them the ability to detain a returning terrorist for 72 hours was a tool that they welcomed. They explained to us and said that it is highly unlikely at Auckland International Airport, even if you were to use the Customs department to detain someone—and they can only do it legally for up to four hours and, actually, even they were nervous about whether or not they had the legal right to do that under their legislation. But, even if they did and they detained that person for up to four hours, they have to release them. The police said that in Auckland, it would be virtually impossible to get a surveillance team in place to be able to pick them up as they left the airport. That’s why they asked for—that’s why they needed—our amendment to give them 72 hours to detain that person to ensure that we could get a control order in place. This bill fails at the first test.
The Minister should not be standing in this House and telling New Zealand that this bill provides the protection that they deserve. It does not, and I find it very interesting and I’d welcome the Minister to debate me on this issue—sit down in whatever forum and we’ll discuss it and we’ll debate it—because he certainly wouldn’t engage with me through the committee of the whole House. He made a backhanded insult saying that there was no intellectual rigour to the issues that I was raising, and yet he stood up and he flimflammed. He wouldn’t address it. To this day, he has not addressed this issue. He has not talked to it. He hasn’t spoken about the fact that he said he wanted to give the agencies the tools that they needed. Our most important agency, the police—the ones that are responsible for this—have told him the tools that they need that they’d welcome. He’s completely ignored them. I’d ask a member of the other side to stand up and respond to that and explain why we’ve ignored it.
Now, this is the worst thing about the whole thing: that we did put up seven amendments. I did go and meet with the Minister again, with our leader, the Hon Simon Bridges, and we took our seven amendments and we wanted to negotiate. We wanted to actually—we had our fixed ideas around what we could move on and what we couldn’t in terms of making this a stronger bill. The Minister completely rejected that. It was very obvious to us in the meeting that there was no will to negotiate at all.
I had Phil Goff in my office two days ago. We were talking and he reminded me about the fact that when I chaired the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee we had to rush through legislation—the countering foreign fighters bill—for virtually the same reason. I want to acknowledge the Hon Phil Goff, a past Labour Minister of Defence, and David Shearer, a past leader of the Labour Party, because they worked very closely with myself and with Wayne Eagleson, and with the Hon Chris Finlayson, and they actually had amendments that they wanted to have made to the bill. We worked together, we collaborated together, and we made amendments to the bill, we made changes to the bill, right? That’s how it should work. That’s how the process is undertaken.
So what’s this Minister done? This Minister has decided, “No, I won’t work with the National Party. I won’t”—
Priyanca Radhakrishnan: Talk about good faith—that’s a bit rich.
Hon MARK MITCHELL: Sorry, take a call. If you want to say something, take a call, because I’m telling you now, Priyanca—what is it?
Hon Members: Radhakrishnan.
Hon MARK MITCHELL: Radhakrishnan—Priyanca Radhakrishnan, if you want to stand and make a comment then take a call. I guarantee you won’t—I guarantee she won’t.
So this is what the Minister did. The Minister wouldn’t negotiate with us. He wouldn’t work with the National Party to strengthen the bill—to make sure the bill would actually put the protections in place. He went to the Green Party. He negotiated with the Green Party. And do you know what? Golriz Ghahraman—I have to tip my hat to her—she was saying today that she got everything they wanted.
Hon Gerry Brownlee: It was easy, she said.
Hon MARK MITCHELL: It was easy. She said it was easy. The Minister—the Labour Minister of Justice rolled over and he gave every concession and every amendment and every change that the Green Party wanted, bearing in mind that the Green Party don’t support bills like this. The focus shifted—I can tell you now—from protecting our people in New Zealand to protecting the rights of a returning terrorist. That’s where it shifted. Do you want to know the real crime of the whole thing—and this is a disgrace—is that the New Zealand First Party and the defence Minister, Ron Mark, who was handling this for their party, have rolled over like the Labour justice Minister, and they have agreed to amendments that brought the focus to human rights and protections of a terrorist—
Priyanca Radhakrishnan: Oh, how terrible!
Hon MARK MITCHELL: Oh, how terrible? It’s funny, is it? You think it’s funny. So the human rights of a returning terrorist or someone involved in terrorism is more important than the safety of our law-abiding citizens in New Zealand—that’s what you’re saying. People will judge you on that—people will judge you on that, trust me.
So we’ve got a Labour—
Priyanca Radhakrishnan: Be careful.
Hon MARK MITCHELL: Be careful of what exactly?
Priyanca Radhakrishnan: That some people have less human rights than others—
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Excuse me. Now, look—sorry, sorry, sorry.
Priyanca Radhakrishnan: He asked me.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yeah, you will have your turn. You keep on. You’ve got another 27 seconds, and let’s just calm down with the interjections. Thank you.
Hon MARK MITCHELL: We’ve got a Labour justice Minister that has completely capitulated to the Green Party. Instead of working with us to strengthen the bill and negotiate around our amendments, he’s gone to the Green Party and has agreed to all of theirs. That is a travesty. That is a travesty because the Government of this country have treated the safety of New Zealanders as a trivia—
Priyanca Radhakrishnan: Madam Speaker.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Point of order?
Priyanca Radhakrishnan: Oh, no—his time’s ended.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Right, well, I decide that, not you.
Priyanca Radhakrishnan: That’s right. I was just taking the call, that’s all.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Sit down.
Hon MARK MITCHELL: Thank you, Madam Speaker.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Your time has finished.
PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour): Thank you, Madam Speaker.
Kieran McAnulty: Have you got hurt feelings as well?
PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: I do have hurt feelings as well, but not as much, obviously, as the previous speaker, Mark Mitchell, who has just resumed his seat, who has spent 10 minutes—
Kieran McAnulty: Having a whinge.
PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: Yeah, 10 minutes having a whinge because of bruised egos, actually. I just want to make a point, because Mark Mitchell, you told me to take a call—I was going to anyway—but I just want to respond to your point about good faith. You spent—
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, just be careful when we get into this “you, you, you”.
PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: Sorry. I’d like to respond to his point around good faith, because I think it’s a little bit rich coming from him, given that that was the party that provided support in writing to this bill and then withdrew it. I don’t consider that good faith, Mr Mark Mitchell.
Kieran McAnulty: They flimflammed.
PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: So they “flimflammed”, Mr McAnulty says. Look, so you could wax lyrical all you want about the fact that there’s a particular way to work and so on and so forth—perhaps they should model it.
Now, on to the bill. The point that I want to make about the bill is that it’s a bill that aims to balance a few different things. That’s what members opposite don’t seem to get. We sat through that at select committee as well, where all the Opposition wanted to do was to make it more punitive and harsher, because for some reason they think that equates to safety—it does not. What equates to safety is actually changing the behaviour that led to the lack of safety in the first place.
What this bill does—what this bill is designed to do—is respond to a risk that’s posed by a very small number of people who will potentially return to New Zealand from a conflict zone, people who went there because of ideological, philosophical, or religious convictions that are actually contrary to the values that many of us hold in this country. That is the risk that we’re trying to mitigate with this bill.
Now, what we need to do and what this bill aims to do is to ensure that we actually strike a balance between the management regime that we have for those people who are coming back to New Zealand to make sure that they don’t pose a risk to the rest of our society and to the rest of New Zealand, but also bearing in mind that these are people who haven’t been through the conventional criminal justice system and the conviction process and therefore cannot be treated as criminals. That’s what members opposite don’t seem to understand.
At select committee there were discussions around the fact that we need detention without arrest. That is something we would never support, because that’s going down a very, very dangerous path. The age of detention—reducing that to 14 years of age when we know that Oranga Tamariki has the ability and the capability to deal with that much better than we could through this.
Hon Mark Mitchell: We’ve got a weaker bill than Australia, the UK, and Canada. Thank you very much, Labour!
PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: So despite the constant interjections, which, frankly, I can’t make heads or tails of, from the Opposition—just like the speech—what I would like to say is that this is a good bill. It addresses a real risk that many countries are currently facing. I want to commend the Minister for his work on getting it to where it’s at. I also want to acknowledge colleagues who are on the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee. We might not have agreed but we had some really good, robust debates about this. I think everyone felt incredibly passionate about it and wanted to see it better. We just, ultimately, disagreed on what “better” looks like.
It’s a good bill. It addresses a real risk, a real problem, and I want to commend it to the House. Thank you.
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam): We are not supporting this bill and we do not believe that any of the claims that are made about it can give New Zealanders any confidence that their security is enhanced by the existence of this bill. The speaker who just resumed her seat, Priyanca Radhakrishnan, is right in describing what it is that we’re attempting to do via having this bill here in the first place. The problem is it doesn’t do the things that it says it does in the initial statements of the bill.
So I’d like to go through a couple of things. Firstly, if someone is to be picked up at the border and potentially subject to a control order, they will be a known criminal terrorist. Our intelligence interactions internationally will have helped our agencies identify that person, or our own agencies will have been able to identify that person, particularly if they are a returning former New Zealand passport holder. So when they are picked up at the border, they can be held for four hours only, and the application is made to the High Court. Then, once the control order is issued, it’s served upon them.
Now, what will be in a control order? That’s found as a list of examples, but apparently not exhaustive—they don’t have to be these things; they can be a lot less—in clause 16 of the bill. Interestingly though, in all of this—there are all of the provisions that are there about what can be in a control order—there is a caveat right at the front of the bill, where it says that in determining any requirements imposed, the court must also consider how requirements, if imposed, will or may affect a person’s personal circumstances.
Well, forgive me, but I thought the reason they were being apprehended at the border was because we were worried that their personal circumstances might pose a threat to the security of New Zealanders. So why is it that we have a requirement in a bill that’s supposed to protect New Zealanders for a court to consider the personal circumstances and the imposts that the various control orders might have on the known criminal terrorist? It doesn’t make sense.
So let’s take one of the provisions here. Clause 16(h) states the person could be prohibited or restricted “from holding accounts, possessing certain financial instruments, or using specified financial services:”. Now, that would seem reasonable. We don’t want one of these people coming into the country and then amassing the money from offshore donations or whatever in order to buy the equipment they need to carry out their terrorist intent if they’ve still got it. We don’t want that happening. So that’s understandable—except that, go back to clause 11(3)(a) in the bill, right up front, that says that in determining any requirements imposed, the court must also, beyond personal circumstances, “consider … (for example, financial position, health, and privacy);”.
Well, we don’t have a cash economy to a great extent in New Zealand these days. People do rely on bank accounts. I would suggest that given the references in here to the court also being mindful of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act obligations, it would not use that clause and impose the restriction on a person being able to have a bank account. Once someone has a bank account, anyone who has done any degree of internet banking will know that there are infinite possibilities from the number that you have as your base account. So that’s a load of nonsense.
Then there is another one in here. Clause 16(j) says, “require the relevant person to reside at a specified address agreed between the relevant person and the Police (or as otherwise specified by the court) and to remain at that address between specified times each day, or on specified days”. Now, that sounds interesting. The known criminal terrorist sits down with the police and, presumably, an officer of the court, and they negotiate where the person is going to live and all the things that go with it, except that further into the bill, clause 17 says, “No requirement of the kind stated in [section] 16(j)”—that’s the one I just quoted—“can require the relevant person to remain at a specified address for more than 12 hours in any 24-hour period.” So the police can only surveil someone for 12 out of any 24 hours. So what do we do? The police stay up all night watching the person sleep. It’s a complete load of rubbish. It means that surveillance is practically, for all intents and purposes, impossible.
The worst of it is that if that person decides they’re not going comply with that, we go into the provisions under clause 31, where there are breaches of the requirements, and it says how they can breach that. But what it makes it clear is that it’s a misdemeanour type thing—a fine of no more than $2,000 or, potentially, one year in prison. Well, if someone doesn’t, you know—a couple of hours away from their 12-hour surveillance or whatever, no court’s going to go hard on them for that. So that’s another one of those very loose and rubbishy sorts of requirements.
Then there is, in clause 16(p), “require that the relevant person, if they have given and not withdrawn their informed consent to do so, engage with specified rehabilitative services”. So someone comes in—they’ve been radicalised; they are known to be a criminal terrorist, because they wouldn’t be in this situation if they weren’t identified so—and has the court say to them it would be a good idea to go through a deradicalisation programme. Do they have to do it? Not according to this bill, because it’s written here, in clause 19(1), that no relevant person may be made to remain subject to the requirements of the kind that I’ve just spoken of in clause 16(p) of the bill unless the relevant person, firstly, has been advised about what the treatment will be—well, that’s fair enough—and is competent to make an informed decision. Well, that would be good. That would be a positive thing. “Yes, I do want to be deradicalised.” would be a great thing.
But then it says in clause 19(1)(c), “gives, and has not withdrawn, informed consent to [engage]”. In other words, it’s optional. It’s totally optional—if you feel like it. Then it goes on to say, just to make it absolutely clear, in clause 19(2), “Informed consent of that kind can be given, withheld, or withdrawn by words or conduct.” So you just don’t turn up. No problem whatsoever. Then it goes even further to make that clear. Clause 19(3) states, “No … conduct, or form of words, is required to give, withhold, or withdraw informed consent of that kind.”
What one of all of these potential restrictions on known criminal terrorists is anything other than voluntary? This is an extremely weak bill. It provides for known criminal terrorists to be treated better than New Zealand criminals—we don’t want them to be treated particularly well—who are on remand, for example. I can’t understand how anyone in this House thinks that they can genuinely tell New Zealanders this bill is the bee’s knees—that this will stop people at the border coming in who have criminal intent to commit terrorist activity. It won’t. It simply means that we can know who they are and then if we want to do something about them, they have to give their informed consent and volunteer to be part of that programme.
How’s that reasonable? I’d ask how many Government members have actually read the bill. I doubt any of them have read it. I don’t even think the people on the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee read it, with all due respect. I do pay a tribute to Golriz Ghahraman because she told the committee this morning that the Greens did negotiate all this. It is their idea. Yes—nodding her head wonderfully—and then I said, “Gosh, you must be a good negotiator.” She said, “No, it was easy. It was easy.” Well, I wonder how many people would have experienced those sorts of negotiations with Andrew Little in the past? Not many, I would suspect.
So congratulations to the Greens. The Government with their input has delivered an incredibly weak bill. When it comes to the whole issue of human rights and New Zealand Bill of Rights Act issues, what about the vast majority of the New Zealand population who don’t want to be bothered by these people? Well, they don’t get their rights considered. It’s all in the favour of a person who, I state again, is a known criminal terrorist. I say that reading it against the conditions that are put in the bill for how those people are identified. So on the one hand, the bill identifies who we’re talking about, and then on the other says, “Well, if they agree, we’ll do something about it.” It’s hopeless, it’s pathetic, and it’s very sad that it’s going to pass today.
Hon RON MARK (Minister of Defence): It befalls me to speak for New Zealand First on this bill. I am not sure that there is a great deal more that can be added to the conversation on this other than to say that New Zealand First—
Hon Mark Mitchell: You’re a laughing stock, Ron.
Hon RON MARK: Well, Mr Mitchell says I’m a laughing stock, and I guess I do have a right to respond to that. I’d say that, you know, sadly, if people had a look at that member’s track record as a Minister of Defence, people would say the same about his work rate—
Hon Mark Mitchell: Well, they’re happy to say that, but I’m telling you, on this bill, you’re a laughing stock.
Hon RON MARK: —and about his achievements and what he never got through anywhere. I think the greatest thing that anyone can do for the security of this nation, Mr Mitchell, is actually equip the men and our women of our defence force with that which they need to do their job, and I’m about doing that. That’s all I have to say.
SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I share the disappointment on this side of the House. At this point, it looks like the bill will proceed. I would certainly encourage the New Zealand First Party to reconsider. They have always put themselves forward as the party of law and order and strengthened security, and the Minister who has just resumed his seat, the Minister of Defence, has spoken rightly on that in the past, and again I would encourage them to stand up to those principles and vote against this bill. It’s not a good piece of legislation. What it intends to do will not be achieved.
Look, I’ve wondered when it comes to issues of national security whether you’ve sort of just got to accept that adage that the perfect is the enemy of the good. In other words, you go, “Look, OK, this is not good. In fact, this is a very bad bill, but in the interests of security, with the little bit of improvement it will bring, should I vote for it? Should National vote for it?” But the more I reflected on it, this is actually going to make things worse. If this bill passes the Parliament, it’s going to put us into a false sense of security that, actually, we’re able to handle returning terrorists to New Zealand, and I believe we won’t be achieving that. We’ll think after today, if this does pass its third reading, that it’s done and dusted, it’s all tickety-boo—that when these lunatics come back, we’ll just be able to put these control orders around them and it will all be fine—but there’s a number of gaps and problems.
I pointed it out in the committee stage of the whole House—which, again, as others have mentioned, was disappointingly quick, primarily because this side of the House, the Opposition, spoke, we took that element of national security seriously, we debated, we raised questions, we waited for the Minister’s response, but we by and large waited in vain, including from members of the Government, to try and argue or justify their position. But I mentioned in that debate that the gaps that are presenting themselves may, if you will, be low probability, but they come with high risk. So, yes, it is a low probability, I would suggest, of someone returning to this country unknown to our intelligence services, or unknown that they are returning. That is a low probability; it probably won’t happen. But if it does, it brings enormous risk—enormous risk. I think the nature of who these people are has been downplayed by the Government side far too often. These zealots, these fundamentalists—if you will—these terrorists are not someone that you can sit down over a cup of tea and just have a little discussion with and express to them the wonderful values of progressivism and how they’ve just got it all wrong. As I said yesterday, they’ll look at you, they’ll smile, they’ll probably slit your throat and then have another cup of tea—we’re dealing with terrorists.
I think one of the fundamental problems we’ve ended up with here is that in their desire to get the bill through, the Government had to turn to the Green Party. I want to put it on the record again: the Green Party has long advocated for the abolition and demolition of our security services. Just let that sink in for a moment. They have argued consistently for the abolition of our security services, and they are the ones who are providing the votes to get this through. They have done it by effectively turning what should be a national security issue on its head, and that is that the national security and the defence of the Realm come second to the human rights of these criminals, these terrorists returning from overseas.
So what are some of the problems? Well, first and foremost, this bill is weaker than many of our counterparts, including in the Commonwealth realms. So if we look at Canada, Australia, the UK, our equivalent legislation is much, much weaker. I’ve pointed out before in the House, the age—these control orders only apply if you’re 18 years or over. Members in this House know very well that there are people who are actively engaged, or have been actively engaged, in terrorist activities who are younger than 18. These control orders will not apply to them. We know that these control orders can only last six years—six years, as if somehow, magically, we’re going to be able to turn every returning terrorist away from something that has completely defined their lives in six years. No other jurisdiction has that limit. I put forward a Supplementary Order Paper to say, look, let’s just allow renewal if required. It’s not as if someone comes back and they’re going to have a control order on them for life. They should be able to renew that control order if required, and I have given a very practical and recent example where a supposedly de-radicalised jihadist in the UK, sadly, after six years, went out and killed two innocent British people only two weeks ago. He was a terrorist, he was known, he went through all the programmes, and after six years he went out and killed two innocent people. I do worry that we’re allowing that gap or opportunity here.
There are basically—well, excuse the parlance, but bugger all consequences for breaching the control orders: $2,000 fine—
Hon Gerry Brownlee: Max.
SIMON O’CONNOR: Or perhaps maximum, sorry—Gerry Brownlee rightly reminds me that’s the maximum. I’ve yet to see of late a judge—with no disrespect to the comity between the Parliament and the courts—push the full extent of what Parliament puts forward. But if, for example, a terrorist doesn’t turn up at the right time to meet their supervisor or doesn’t come home exactly at the right time—they haven’t breached anything criminal so we can’t catch them on that—the maximum fine is $2,000 or, potentially, a year in prison. Again, this is not your little thief who steals a bike; this is a person who is a well-known terrorist to our security services.
Then there’s the whole notion of informed consent, as if this was some sort of medical transaction. Again, it just makes a lot of the conditions put forward ludicrous. I’m not going to repeat it at length because I think the Hon Gerry Brownlee well articulated it, but just about all the conditions that can be put forward on to the terrorists have to be with their informed consent. So to flip it around on its head, terrorists can say, “No, I don’t really agree to that, sorry. Look, thanks for asking that I should stay at this address, and yeah, I know you want to slap on some sort of financial restrictions, but I don’t really agree with that, sorry.” So we’ve got it all the wrong way round.
I am disappointed at where this legislation has ended up. It had been my hope, somewhat in vain, that through the select committee process—as incredibly truncated as it was—we might be able to, through some civilised conversation, come to a much tougher bill. We have failed to do that. I personally think that the suggestions that the Opposition have put forward are practical. They’re not overly—no, in fact, not even overly; they’re not political at all. As I say: changing the age, ensuring that control orders can be renewed. I think this would make sense to the ordinary New Zealander. In fact, that’s what they would want—that’s what they would want. But we haven’t ended there, and as I said at the start, the real problem with this bill is if the Parliament thinks in passing it that this is now a done deal, that it’s all tickety-boo, tidy, and we’re going to have no problems, then I think we will find, and it will be unfortunate, through action or actions, that we’ve been remiss in our duty—or the Government, actually; it’s not us. The Government has been remiss in its duty, they’ve pulled the wool over their own eyes, and that sort of ignorance is very, very problematic.
I just call on, again, Government members to really consider what they’re doing here, which is fundamentally putting forward a flawed, very weak piece of legislation. If they are going to pass it, I encourage them within an hour to put forward an amendment bill and tighten this up, because, actually, the problems in this bill must be and need to be addressed. It’s, again, a weak bill, and I cannot commend it to the House.
GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you, Madam Speaker. We—all of us—would like to live in a world without violence and without hatred. That is terrorism. The Green Party has stood for non-violence and has stood for equality from the inception of our movement. Non-violence is one of our four charter principles, so we take seriously the responsibility to protect marginalised groups and us all against the threat of terror. This law, it has to be noticed, comes to this House in the context of New Zealand’s worst act of terror in living memory, which happened on 15 March at the mosques in Christchurch. It comes to us in the context of the now eight-year bloody war being waged in Syria. It comes after decades of terrorism on the rise that includes the likes of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, but it also now increasingly includes the rise of white nationalist terrorism. We know that that has included, in terms of Syria—and that’s what the focus of the context of this bill has been—New Zealanders travelling over to commit acts of terror and untold harm against communities over there who have asked us, together with the United Nations, to bring our own so-called “foreign terrorist fighters” to justice, because they don’t have the resource, and, frankly, they don’t feel safe. So we do have a responsibility.
But this bill also comes to this House in the context of decades-long harmful, prejudice-filled rhetoric of the war on terror that has justified illegal wars in the Middle East and that has justified violence and degradation of refugee communities, of Middle Easterners, and of the Muslim community living in their own homelands and abroad. We know all too well the threat of that harm. We’ve seen it from Guantanamo Bay to Trump’s so-called Muslim ban, and then in Christchurch this year, so the Green Party takes seriously the responsibility to get this right. New Zealanders have put this House on notice that they will not stand for the kind of knee-jerk lawmaking or the kind of political rhetoric that places us at more risk, because it’s based on fearmongering, not fairness.
So, in that context, this bill proposes to introduce control orders that will apply to those over 18 years old, and these are civil orders. So we’re not talking about anybody that has been proven beyond reasonable doubt to be a terrorist—nothing like that, and I remind the Opposition of that—because that’s why we need to be so careful. These orders would include surveillance, monitoring. They will include, in certain cases, limited access to firearms and limited access to electronic devices and online spaces that may place us at harm in those particular cases. It will also include, with consent—and that’s the only part that is requiring of consent—mental health care and rehabilitation programmes.
These all include rights issues and breaches of rights that if we don’t get right could have unintended harmful consequences, and it is no secret that the Green Party opposed this bill in its original Government form when it was introduced. We were loud about that and we welcomed public debate. Our opposition was primarily based on the definition of terror included in the original bill that we saw as potentially risking political activists and dissidents coming back from overseas, and the lack of due process—in particular, around the use of secret classified information. I do want to, again, remind the Opposition that due process is where we determine whether someone is actually a risk to us, because we don’t want to catch people who aren’t. We want that process to be safe.
So that was the basis of our original opposition, and then, very quickly, it was made clear to us that that Government bill was not, in fact, what was at stake. The National Party, in a callous and irresponsible move, held the Government to ransom, introducing new Draconian measures that would include catching children under order—
Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. I’m sure you heard the unparliamentary allegation that was made there. The National Party held no one to ransom. That’s completely rubbish. If we had held them to ransom, then, quite clearly, we wouldn’t be here discussing this bill now, with a load of tripe that we’re getting from the Green Party.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I’m not sure that that’s the most helpful way of ending a point of order. The member has taken offence at the phrase that Golriz Ghahraman used, and I’d ask her to withdraw and apologise.
GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Madam Speaker, it was meant as a figure of speech—
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I’ve asked you to withdraw and apologise.
GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: —but I do withdraw and apologise.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Thank you.
GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Their provisions, upon which their support was conditional—after having said that they would support the Government’s bill—included holding children under order, included imposing indefinite orders, and included detention without due process. They would hold children under order for life. That was what was at stake, and it was made clear to us that it would not be the Government bill that would go ahead if we did not improve it; it was that bill. But, even then, we didn’t blindly support the Government bill that we didn’t want; in fact, we held tight to every single one of our bottom lines, and we got them. Then, we didn’t stop fighting through the select committee process, and we got a suite of new changes.
The Green Party, for the first time in our long history, was at the decision-making table on anti-terror law, and the changes we got were described by the Human Rights Commission’s senior lawyer, John Hancock, as substantially improving the human rights compliance of this bill. That was the first lot of changes.
Our first bottom line was changing the definition of terror to exclude anything that’s coming from an overseas jurisdiction that might go beyond our own terrorism definition—that might catch feminists, rainbow activists, and environmentalists, and we know that we have caught those people under dodgy anti-terror laws before—and so that the definition wouldn’t be imposed based on any convictions or deportations from jurisdictions that don’t have our fair trial standards, and I’m reminded of the Ahmed Zaoui case. Ahmed Zaoui was convicted in absentia. He didn’t even know he was being tried and he wasn’t there, and we—our security agencies—relied on those convictions. That wouldn’t happen under this bill.
We know that our own security agencies are not without prejudice. We know that they looked more closely at the Muslim community and at Māori activists, in the past, rather than at white supremacists, so we knew that was important.
Our second bottom line—and this was something that was very close to my heart, as a baby Amnesty International intern at the time of the Zaoui case—is that secret, classified information will not be used in a blanket form whenever security agencies want to introduce it to hold anyone under control orders under this bill. So if secret information is to be introduced, a court has to first be satisfied that there is an actual security risk to a person or an actual national security risk in that case in relation to that information being disclosed to that particular person. That was not in place under the Zaoui case, and it would have set him free. But even then, under the process we’ve introduced—even then—there will always be a defence lawyer who can see the information and can advocate for the person affected. That is the highest standard of due process anywhere in New Zealand law. It was recommended by our Law Commission, and it is the best practice recognised in international law.
Then, in the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee—and I do want to stop and I want to thank everyone who came to select committee. It was such a truncated process. It was so difficult to get those submissions in, and you still did it: the Law Society and the Chief Justice wrote to us, individuals came, Amnesty International wrote to us, the Human Rights Commission, the Privacy Commissioner. All of the constructive changes that were suggested to us, I fought for, and—as Gerry Brownlee has so kindly acknowledged, and others in the Opposition—we got so many of them passed.
I do want to focus, because two of the most important changes we got through in select committee were that in all cases, appropriate allocation of legal aid will be made for those who control orders may apply to. Also, a huge win—especially given the truncated select committee process—is that we will have mandatory, independent review of this law in two years’ time, including a review of whether or not the law itself is at all necessary.
So we are very pleased that we stopped the National Party Draconian changes. We are very pleased that we’ve protected children from having their rights breached. We are very happy to have protected New Zealand from going down the route of Guantanamo Bay—of arresting people for the crime of having travelled to places like the Middle East. Lawmaking is not a game by which politicians can make themselves look tough on crime or terror.
So, again, I want to thank everyone who came, who was loud, who submitted, who talked about human rights, who talked about justice, and who held us to account, because the improvements that we got to this bill—although we must always be careful when we’re talking about civil orders in this context—have made it better. They have made it fairer and they have upheld the rule of law in New Zealand, so we can be proud, at least, of that. Thank you.
PAULO GARCIA (National): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’d just like to comment in starting out on my contribution that when emotive words like “Guantanamo” and “children” are used in a debate such as this, it is quite emotion-stirring. But I think the word “children” as used by the member Golriz Ghahraman seems to apply to my children or anyone’s children in this House, but not to radicalised youth, which is what we are talking about in this terrorism suppression bill.
The object of both sides—of everyone in this House—is to protect New Zealanders, and that is the starting point of all of this debate. Whatever has happened in the past in the negotiations or the process, the National Party only seeks to make a bill—this bill, once it is passed, and it will pass—stronger. There are points that, without doubt, a reasonable mind would agree that there are portions that need to be strengthened, particularly, again, starting with the age of terrorists.
Radicalised youth are all over the world, and it is common knowledge. We’re not talking about children; we are talking about radicalised youth. They may be younger than 18 years old, hence the proposal of National to include children aged 14 to 18. But in that context, again, it is quite possible that once a youth or a person is radicalised, the possibility of rehabilitation is indeed unlikely or very small, hence the proposal of National for control orders to be renewed over time. Recognising that young people may be subject to control orders, National also proposed that if there are guardians of the young person, they be immediately notified, and that the control order only be allowed to last for six months, and be renewed, if necessary, and justified through the process.
National also wanted control orders to be able to be renewed beyond the six-year limit—of course, reviewed every two years and justified as necessary—and if a control order is to expire, National proposed that the registrar of the High Court ensures that the Police Commissioner is notified at least two months before the expiry of an expiring control order. This, obviously, is just aimed at allowing for the control order to be renewed by application—again, requiring justification each time, so it can be unjustified and stopped at any point in that renewal process. Again, it has to be justified as necessary. But what we have been asking for, only, is the opportunity for these to be extended by under six years, as evidenced by recent occurrences around the world where people have been under a control order or under detention for over six years and have come out and have caused harm.
Detention on arrival: yes, the bill presumes that the person who arrives who has been engaged in activities related to terrorism will have been identified and known. However, it is quite impossible—and it’s actually reasonable to assume that no one country in the world will be able to identify every single person who has been out there and is returning and may cause harm. So the four-hour detention period for when a person may have presented as appearing to be a threat—a longer period than that should be allowed so that control orders can be applied for again, as necessary, and, again, subject to justification that these be issued and that that person be put into that process of surveillance and it be ensured that he will not cause harm. Again, all of these proposed amendments by National have been voted down.
For me as a member of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, and having sat through the submissions, I just believe in going through the process—that these are proposed amendments that can only strengthen the bill, and not for any other reason. For this reason, I can stand and say that the National Party cannot support the bill because of these points that have not been able to be strengthened. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): The next call is a split call. I call Kieran McAnulty.
KIERAN McANULTY (Labour): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. What we have just heard sums it up. The previous National Party speaker, Paulo Garcia, essentially said that their proposed amendments would have strengthened the bill, and because they couldn’t get them across the line, they’re not going to vote for it. How bad is that? They could have voted for this bill, the Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Bill, and expressed how they wanted to improve it, just like they did with the zero carbon bill—that wasn’t what they wanted, but they still voted for it because they wanted to send a message.
Now, what we heard just now is that if the amendments got across the line, they would have voted for it. But because they didn’t, they didn’t vote for it. Where I come from, that’s called packing a sad. I think if members of the public wish to go and listen to Mark Mitchell’s speech right at the start that outlined the National Party’s position, they would see 10 minutes of whingeing and 10 minutes of packing a sad.
I am very happy to stand and speak in favour of this bill. It is a rational and moderate approach to this that finds that balance, and I commend the Minister for leading this through the House.
CHRIS PENK (National—Helensville): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I speak, as others have done on this side, on the Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Bill. I’m cognisant of the clear need that has been established for legislation of some kind to meet a threat from overseas—by definition, that’s what we are looking at in this proposed legislation. In particular, I note its purpose: among other things, to protect the public from terrorism. Of course this is a worthwhile aim, the security of the Realm being among the highest good that any Government—or Parliament, too, for that matter—can concern itself with. So on that much, at least, there is no disagreement.
However, as to whether the bill will meet its intended purpose in the committee of the whole House stage, there was much detailed discussion about the extent to which we could fairly say that that was the case, sufficient to outweigh the consequence that we would potentially engender a false sense of security—to say, “Well, we’ve got a piece of legislation that will do the things that we want to do. Therefore, we need to consider the matter no further.”
A number of these were traversed pretty well at the committee of the whole House stage. I’ll just touch briefly on three that sort of caught my eye as being particularly key. One is the time frame of retention at the border. Just four hours is allowed under the legislation as it was introduced and remains now at this point. Four hours is not very long. Probably BJ Watling will score a century against Australia in the test match later today within that period of time, for example, and Kane Williamson will score a double hundred. But actually, more significantly, in terms of the legislation, that’s just about the time it takes to get from Auckland Airport to the High Court and back. So to be able to think about a process where we need to have the paperwork prepared and the necessary actions taken within that time frame, at the risk of losing the person into society, perhaps not to be found again until such time as something terrible has happened—that’s a real risk that the Parliament should not be contemplating taking.
The next point was in relation to the age of the relevant person. I made a case at the committee of the whole House stage that if a person is old enough to engage in terrorism-related activities, as defined, including that they pose a credible threat, then they’re old enough to be considered as needing to be protected—or, rather, New Zealanders need to be protected against such activities by the bill. I further suggested that it could be that a person’s age could be taken into account, so if they were younger than 18, then they could be treated in a way that’s appropriate to their age, but not to be excluded from the ambit of the bill entirely. As with other proposals that were made on this side of the House in the committee of the whole House stage, that was not accepted or taken up.
A brief note on the process versus the substance: we felt on this side of the House that the process being rather rushed at select committee has probably been a contributor to the fact that the substance of the bill, the final result, is such that we don’t think it can be supported.
I’ll just add a further note, just in response to some of the discussion, the debate, that’s gone back and forth across the House this afternoon in relation to the word “children”. It’s a very emotive concept, of course, that of the child. It implies a certain innocence as well as, of course, being a matter, in strict legal terms, of one’s birth certificate. I think the innocence that’s implied by the notion of a child is to be understood in the context of a person who, if the bill were to apply to them, would need to have been proven or at least be a credible threat of being proven to pose a danger to New Zealanders. So I think if we consider the starting point of the bill being to protect New Zealanders against terrorism, then I think that that’s something we should consider in a pretty holistic—and that is to say a pretty broad—way, as opposed to merely saying that because someone is perhaps only 17 years and 364 days old, they are not a worthy subject of the bill.
With that, I conclude, except just to note, as others have done so, that we feel that this legislation falls short of its intended mark, and so we cannot support its passage at this stage, at this, the third and final reading.
Hon CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Thanks, Madam Speaker. Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Bill, third reading—succinct and to the point. The Government has acted where the Opposition has failed to. I acknowledge the Minister of Justice for acting and the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee and members of the coalition for working well on this legislation, which does what it says it will do to protect the public from terrorism, to prevent engagement in terrorism-related activities, and to support the relevant person’s reintegration into New Zealand and/or rehabilitation.
Terrorism is a threat that we take seriously, but we will not remove human rights, for if we do that, we descend into chaos. I commend this bill to the House.
Hon TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West): I think that assertion by the Hon Clare Curran in her speech, which I think was about 35 seconds, on a security measure, highlighted the totally arrogant and unacceptable nature of the Government’s approach to this bill, because to suggest that the Labour Party has been taking the matter seriously and has acted where the National Party has failed to do so ignores history and flies in the face of the situation that we are dealing with in this particular measure.
There is a long history in this country of bipartisan work on security matters. [Interruption] And here they go; the chorus from the other side has started again. Here they go again. Nobody in the National Party is in the least bit inclined to leave New Zealanders exposed. The whole point of our opposition to this bill is that there is such a great hole in it—that is precisely what the Government is doing. I think it is deeply disappointing that the current Government has decided not to negotiate in good faith with the Opposition, because our security legislation should be enduring. Our security legislation should reflect the overwhelming will of the Parliament, representing the concerns of the vast majority of New Zealanders.
I want to acknowledge that there are many fine people who have been through this House in years gone by who have worked diligently and respectfully with their opposite numbers in order to achieve that. While I can accept the fact that the Minister of Justice has in this case tried to respond to a specific threat—and that’s as he should do—he has, however, in the end, compromised to the point where he has undermined his own bill, and that’s the real problem.
When I spoke in the House last night in the committee stage, I confessed that I was pretty angry, and it was partly because I followed immediately a very angry contribution from the Minister, who at that stage was in the chair. He made comments that I thought were both outrageous—
Hon Nathan Guy: That’s normal—that’s normal.
Hon TIM MACINDOE: It is fairly normal, Mr Guy—you’re quite right—but this is a serious matter. I felt that he had made comments that were both outrageous and fatuous, and I wanted to correct the record, because my colleagues have made clear that it’s not possible for me to come up with a whole lot of fresh material as the last Opposition speaker in the third reading of a debate. If members of the Parliament and the public who are listening aren’t aware of the reasons for National’s opposition by now, then I would be very surprised.
But the point that I was making, and I hope that I can make again today in a more concerned tone rather than an angry one, is that National was keen to put forward some recommendations that we didn’t think were controversial. We certainly didn’t think that traditional Labour-National cooperation on this matter would have found those suggestions—
Tim van de Molen: Prudent suggestions.
Hon TIM MACINDOE: —difficult to accommodate. As Mr van de Molen is saying, they were prudent, and we did hope that the Government would sit down with us and say, OK, let’s look at the things, because Parliament is often required to compromise, and in particular on challenging issues, we work well where we can sit down, try to understand each other’s point of view, and work from there. That’s what the Minister didn’t do—that is what the Minister didn’t do.
Hon Andrew Little: They’ve stuffed it up.
Hon TIM MACINDOE: And here he is making an offensive remark instead of acknowledging that his responsibility as the Minister in charge of this bill was to negotiate in good faith. Yes, he might well have said that there are certain things that the—
Hon Andrew Little: Takes two to tango—takes two to tango.
Hon TIM MACINDOE: —Opposition—he’s shouting over the top of me. He’s had his speech. He’s had his speech, but he shouts over the top of me. He should have been prepared to say there are certain things that we probably will not be able to reach agreement on, but there are other things where we’ll accommodate the Opposition. He didn’t accommodate any of them. That’s the key thing here. There is nothing significant that the National Party put forward that he was willing to accommodate, and I am very disturbed by the Minister’s approach. I’m very disturbed that his colleagues have supported him, because, as I say, it is important that this legislation should be enduring, and in particular it is important that this legislation should be fit for purpose.
We know that there are New Zealanders based overseas who have been radicalised, who have been in very disturbing situations. Several of my colleagues have mentioned a number of different instances, and there will be others in the future. We don’t know what they are now. We can’t imagine who they are or where they are. We simply know that it is in the nature of modern security threats that there are people from like-minded countries with which we have close relationships, and other countries with which we don’t have such a strong relationship, where they have people who mean to do ill to other people. Every terrorist, regardless of the motivation behind their terrorism, is a threat to humanity and is a group that we should be looking to do everything we can to contain. In particular, if they threaten New Zealanders on our shores, we have a responsibility, not just as the Government of the day but as parliamentarians, to do everything we can to protect our citizens.
That’s what the National Party has always stood for. That’s why I said last night that the National Party has the proudest record of any party in this Parliament in this area.
Hon Andrew Little: Rubbish.
Hon TIM MACINDOE: It is not rubbish, Mr Little. Mr Little knows that this is true. I was sitting behind the Prime Minister, where the senior Government whip is now, when I was in that seat as I listened to a debate on this very type of issue, and to suggest that our Government did nothing flies in the face of that particular debate, which that member should remember better than any other—he should remember it better than any other.
The defence of the Realm is the core responsibility of the New Zealand Government and, by extension, the Parliament. In the current regime, the sort of security threats that we’ve seen in recent times, terrorism has often been the core focus of our military—and I want to say it’s good to see the Minister of Defence in the House. How proud I am of New Zealand’s military.
We are extraordinarily well served, both at home and abroad, by all the brave men and women who serve in the New Zealand military force, and they face very real challenges and they deserve our absolute backing, our gratitude, and the resources to do the job. This bill doesn’t give them all the resources they need to do the job. This bill puts at risk some of those very people who they are so dedicated to try to defend and protect.
Our proposed changes that we put forward would have improved this bill, and that’s what we went to negotiate with the Government over. We tried again during the committee stage to put forward further proposals; the Government said, as they have done in recent times, “We know best. We’re not interested in dealing with the Opposition.” Well, that’s not the good faith that I would expect of any party in this Parliament on an issue of such importance. They ultimately said, “OK, we’ll go to the Greens.”, and the Greens, then, were able to negotiate all sorts of things that weakened this bill, and that, I think, is deeply disturbing. I understand the Greens’ point of view but I fundamentally disagree with it, and I think that Parliament should have disagreed with it as well.
So I close by echoing the words of my colleagues who have spoken before. This bill isn’t fit for purpose. This bill will not achieve its objective. It is deeply disappointing that we can’t support the measure, but we can’t support it because of those fundamental failings. We will, at some stage in the future, as a Parliament, have to fix it. It won’t be this Parliament, obviously, but a future Parliament will be charged with having to fix it, and that is disappointing, and I can only pray that as a nation we will not pay a very heavy price in the meantime before we’re able to rectify it.
GREG O’CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): I can only admire that previous speaker’s ability to feign indignation and to feign sincerity, because I know, as anyone sitting over there knows, this is good legislation. This is legislation that has to go through. It’s not the first time New Zealanders have gone and fought overseas. The Spanish Civil War—many New Zealanders went there, but the difference is that when they came back they didn’t bring a philosophy back that was dangerous to this country. The modern fighter who goes to fight in the places we’re talking about—the Middle East—brings back a philosophy that is dangerous to this country. It needs to be dealt with. They need to be monitored. We need the ability to deal with them. This Government has put together legislation which will enable us to deal with it, and I have no hesitation in recommending this very good legislation, this very effective legislation, this well-thought-out legislation—and, most importantly, this legislation will allow us to address the changing, evolving world of law and order, the changing, evolving world of terrorism. So I have no hesitation in recommending this to the House.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) 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 56
New Zealand National 55; Ross.
Bill read a third time.
Bills
Maritime Transport (Offshore Installations) Amendment Bill
Third Reading
Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Transport) on behalf of the Associate Minister of Transport: I move, That the Maritime Transport (Offshore Installations) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.
It’s my pleasure to stand on behalf of the Associate Minister of Transport Julie Anne Genter to speak to this third reading of the Maritime Transport (Offshore Installations) Amendment Bill. I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to the development of the bill in its passage through the House, including the officials in the Ministry of Transport, of course the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, and all of the submitters who have helped us refine the bill.
The Maritime Transport Act basically operates a user-pays, or, I should say, polluter-pays, regime. In simple terms, this means that the owner of offshore installations like those at the Maui and Pohokura oil and gas fields have an unlimited liability for the costs of any pollution damage from their installation. So if something goes wrong, particularly with deep-sea installation, it can go really wrong, and the consequences can be catastrophic for New Zealand’s marine environment. That’s why the Government has taken this issue so seriously. The owner’s liability in this sort of situation is extensive. It includes the costs of any clean-up and, importantly, reinstatement and the impairment of damages to the environment.
The main objective of this bill is to clarify and strengthen the requirements that are placed on the owners of offshore oil and gas installations to hold insurance or equivalent cover for their liabilities in the event of an oil spill. There’s not much point in having that liability if companies are not required to hold insurance to the level that would allow them to properly respond to the damage and the consequences of a spill in an offshore installation. This bill doesn’t change the legal situation at all, regarding the owner’s liability. However, what it does do is it makes a trade-off between the current regime, which requires third-party assurance for all pollution risks but subject to what we believe is a totally inadequate amount of around $27 million, and the regime proposed in this bill and the associated rules, which will require third-party assurance for the key risks and costs to a level that can be expected to cover those risks up to $1.2 billion.
The key risks and costs covered will include costs arising from pollution damage, the costs of clean-up, and the costs of reinstatement arising from an out-of-control well. If we are going to continue to allow oil and gas exploration under the current permits, and to continue to extract oil and gas from fields like Maui and Pohokura, we owe it to New Zealanders now and in the future to ensure that we require the best cover that we can get. I commend this bill to the House.
JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to speak on this third reading of the Maritime Transport (Offshore Installations) Amendment Bill. Like the previous speaker, the Hon Phil Twyford, we too, on this side of the House, take this very seriously. In fact, we did a tremendous amount of work preparing for this bill before the last election. Of course, the election came along and then the responsibility for continuing that work fell to the Government. Thank you for the work that they have done.
Can I say, the people of Taranaki, who have a number of these offshore installations surrounding them in our vicinity, and also particularly the sector itself, take this to be a very serious matter, that not only do we have agreement and unlimited liability to these companies but we have financial assurance, or we have a financial security to ensure that that which they are liable for they also have a provision to meet those costs.
So we certainly do support not only world’s best practice in terms of any exploration that happens offshore, but we also ensure that in our jurisdiction they do carry the financial ability to put right anything that does occur.
The Minister in charge of the bill, the Hon Julie Anne Genter, presented to the House Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 417 yesterday, and we had a look at that. It was a last-minute SOP, and it would allow rules to cancel certificates of insurance before their expiry. This SOP is to allow the Government to require summer 2019-2020 drilling to comply with the new financial assurance rules. Though it does seem poor for the Crown to override its existing insurance certificates rather than let them run their course, the sector has expected for some time that the summer drilling programme would require compliance with the new regime. So there is an acceptance of that and a preparedness for it. And, even though the potentiality of Government regulation and rules cutting across what were previously accepted practices and limits, we do note that there is sensitivity around this particular area, and we were happy to vote for that SOP.
So the regime’s primary focus, of course, is to prevent hazards and discharges from occurring. New Zealand does have very strong regimes in that regard. It ensures that permit holders have sufficient plans and resources in place to decrease the likelihood of any adverse event. The likelihood of a major marine oil spill is very low. We always are shown examples of what happened. Of course, many, many years ago in the gulf in the USA—of course, that’s a completely different pressure system than New Zealand has; completely different environmental environments and seascapes. However, it is very important that we have in place the right regime and all the different factors and enablements to ensure that if anything did happen, we could respond to face those issues and also protect the interests of third parties as well.
So we are supportive of this bill. We are supportive of the SOP. We believe that this will once again enable us to have world’s best practice in the exploration programme and regime that New Zealand supports. Thank you for the Minister’s comments that “If we were to continue to support exploration in those permitted areas”. Of course, I would remind him that the Government promised to protect existing permits. So it’s not a question that he should ask; it is something that he should state: that that is the regime in which the sector operates under under the promise of protection of this Government to protect those permits. I’m very happy to commend this bill to the House. Thank you.
ANAHILA KANONGATA’A-SUISUIKI (Labour): Kia ora e Te Mana Whakawā. It is a privilege to stand here and make a contribution in the third reading of the Maritime Transport (Offshore Installations) Amendment Bill. Currently, operators are only required to hold insurance worth $27 million. This level of coverage is far too low to cover the clean-up and compensation cost of significant oil spills. As we’ve seen in the Rena oil spill, for example, it cost the taxpayer $47 million to clean up. So this will rectify that.
Before I sit down, it’s my sister’s birthday today. So I’d just like to wish Evanjica Kanongata’a a happy birthday, and that’s my gift. Ka kite. I commend this bill to the House.
Bill read a third time.
Bills
Credit Contracts Legislation Amendment Bill
Third Reading
Hon KRIS FAAFOI (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): I move, That the Credit Contracts Legislation Amendment Bill be now read a third time.
This is an important piece of legislation that amends the law around the provision of credit in New Zealand. Credit is important to almost every New Zealander in some way and at some point in their life. However, when provided irresponsibly, credit can quickly result in debt spirals and hardship. Under current credit laws, consumers are sadly still experiencing harm from predatory lending practices and credit terms, and this disproportionately harms our most vulnerable consumers. As a result, the Government introduced this bill to better protect New Zealanders from these harms. This bill has been one of my key priorities in my commerce and consumer affairs portfolio, and I’m confident that the changes in this bill will help to protect and improve the wellbeing of New Zealanders.
The bill introduces a number of changes which will make significant improvements to lending practices. Not only does the bill cap interest and fees on high-cost loans to 100 percent of the principal but it will also cap the rate of charge for interest and fees. Both of these caps will go a long way to limiting the harm that irresponsible high-cost lending causes in our communities.
The changes will also improve the implementation and enforceability of rules around responsible lending by allowing for clear minimum standards to be set and strengthening the penalties for breaches. For example, lenders will be required to keep records that demonstrate they have made inquiries to ensure their loans are affordable and suitable, and, where these requirements are breached, lenders can be subject to tough financial penalties.
The bill also raises the bar for becoming a lender by ensuring that persons at the top levels of creditor companies and mobile traders meet requirements for being a fit and proper person. This will reduce the number of unscrupulous individuals who are operating in lending businesses in our communities.
Speaking of mobile traders, the bill will now treat mobile traders as creditors under the consumer credit contracts and require them to comply with the Act. This means that they must ensure that the products and the services that they provide are affordable and appropriate and that the right information is disclosed to the purchaser and borrower.
Finally, the bill improves transparency and access to redress during debt collection. It will make the debt collection process more transparent from the start, as well as giving debtors the key information that they need so they can ask for help.
At the second reading of the bill, I welcomed the changes from the Finance and Expenditure Committee. The most significant of these is the decision to include the Government’s proposed rate cap on interest and fees. I proposed this change after I heard the overwhelming number of submissions to the Finance and Expenditure Committee from people who work on the front line with vulnerable borrowers and see the everyday harms and irresponsible high-cost lending damage that can be caused. These submitters said that a rate cap was a critical change that could be made to the law to protect consumers, and the rate cap of 0.8 percent per day will complement and strengthen the total cost of credit cap that’s already in the bill since its introduction.
There’s been some concern about this rate cap, in that it will serve as a target for lenders. However, some lenders currently have interest rates over twice as high as the proposed rate cap. Given the significance of this change, it will be important to review the rate cap and the total cost of credit cap after they have been in place for three years, which is included in the bill. This will allow us to evaluate how well the current cap level is working.
Before I finish up, I’d like to thank all those people who have contributed to the bill. This includes those parties that made submissions to the Finance and Expenditure Committee and the members that considered the bill on that committee and also the many officials who have provided advice. I think through this bill we will be helping to contribute to improving the wellbeing to thousands of New Zealanders who have experience of problem debt, and I truly believe that as a result of the changes that we are making here today, fewer New Zealanders will be given loans that cause or deepen hardship. Problem debt is the source of ongoing mental, emotional, and financial stress for families and does contribute to lasting health problems, and reducing the highest interest rates and irresponsible lending is necessary to support public health and will have significant overall benefits to New Zealanders.
Can I also thank those who submitted to the select committee for the passion for their work—[Andrew Bayly waves]—and you too, Mr Bayly—as I do believe their passion for this subject made meaningful changes at that stage. I’m very proud to commend this bill to the House for the third time.
BRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise on this, the third reading of the Credit Contracts Legislation Amendment Bill. When this bill was introduced into the House, we held a view that there were a number of things that it was doing that were positive—things such as further regulation of mobile traders, fit and proper person tests—and while we generally have issues with creating new regulations, we did agree that in this instance a regulation-making power to allow the Government or the Minister in the future to determine that certain payment arrangements should be deemed to be credit contracts for the purposes of the legislation, we thought, was a very, very good idea.
We were a little sceptical, not on the idea of a total cost of credit cap but about just what it might mean in terms of the availability of credit for those who genuinely need it. Let’s be fair, I mean, people find themselves in enormous difficulty in some occasions, but everyone enters into their first loan, at least, under these high-cost lenders on the basis of need. It’s not purely a discretionary desire. So we were a little bit mindful that there was potential that a regime that was too hard or too harsh might actually create other harms for people—fix some but exacerbate others.
We were also concerned at the change to the obligations on lenders, not just high-cost lenders, about establishing the bona fides of affordability for borrowers. It’s fair to say that that one at least was handled very well by officials in the select committee stage, and we are comfortable with it.
Likewise, looking into the heart of the discussion document that led up to the introduction of the bill, and then later confirmed in discussions with officials, it really looked like they had structured the total interest cap in a manner that wasn’t meant to knock out large swathes of commercially available high-cost lending products today. It was instead more focused on not allowing those things to expand or get worse. So we had reached a degree of comfort in that area as well, although we still have lingering concerns.
There will be a change to availability of credit for people in need under this bill when it is passed, and that will force some people into other areas of harm. It may not be black market lending, but one thing—for instance, it was postulated by officials that in the UK, up to 30 percent of people unable now to get a high-cost loan will borrow from family or friends as well. But when pressed on that, officials accepted that in most circumstances, those families or friends that they seek to borrow from will be in very similar circumstances to the person who’s already in financial trouble. So there is a real risk that that simply spreads a bit of misery around rather than genuinely solving a problem. But for all of that, we had determined that the changes weren’t a great evil, and we were comfortable enough to support the bill.
But then out of the blue, of course, came this daily interest rate cap, which came out without official advice. The officials weren’t even asked to give advice on the merits of it. Before the bill’s introduction, they had been asked and had given advice that it was a bad idea and that the consequences of it couldn’t be accurately predicted. Their advice at the time, that the Minister accepted at the time, was don’t do it. Then, in the w-e-a-k of delivery, out of the blue on Tuesday, all of a sudden: a daily interest rate, which the Minister hadn’t bothered talking to officials about. This will exacerbate this issue about will this constrain availability of credit to those who actually need it, and what will that then lead to in terms of their borrowing habits and the financial straits they may find themselves in?
For that, though—for all of that—the question for us then was: if we have an issue, particularly with this daily interest rate cap and the manner in which it was introduced, is that issue sufficiently serious that we would refuse to support the bill? Although the reservations persist and are real, with the review in three years, we think there are sufficient grounds that if it doesn’t work well, it can be removed. So we will continue to support this bill through to its conclusion in this, the third reading.
Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): It heartens me to hear the words from Mr Hudson, who has spoken just now, that, on balance, the Opposition will support this bill. I hear the concerns of the Opposition. Nevertheless, the interest rate cap was introduced for good reason. It was introduced not out of the blue but because so many of the people working in this sector, in the financial advisers sector, came to us and said, “Good work, everyone, good work—but actually, we need a bit more in this space. We need an interest rate cap.”
In fact, people who came to us wanted straight out 50 percent cap, a very flat cap on interest rates. In the end, we settled on a slightly different model, a cap of 0.8 percent per day. This is based on what is happening in the United Kingdom, so it hasn’t just come out of the blue, as though it was dreamed up de novo. It is actually a model that is working elsewhere.
As Mr Hudson has said, for further reassurance, there is a review of the workings of this Act scheduled for three years’ time. Should there be problems with people being unable to obtain finance, should there be problems with people perhaps seeking black market finance or getting into worse trouble, then that should come to light in the review and changes can be made as necessary. So, on the whole, this is good legislation and it came through what I thought was a good, robust select committee process.
I don’t wish to speak for long, but I wish to quote some amazing women who came to present to us, some radical nuns from Gisborne. Sisters Carmel, Adrienne, and Marie talked to us about debt and what it did to people’s lives. In their written submission, they concluded with a quote that “Debt is the Slavery of the Free”. From there, they said people who get into horrendous debt are, in effect, enslaved. They are no longer free; they cannot order their lives as they will. Their daily behaviour is threatened by the spectre of outrageous debt hanging over them.
Now, of course, we all need debt to smooth the way from time to time, and it’s typically used for mortgages and the like. Debt can be a very effective tool, but it can also enslave us. This bill seeks to strike the balance between debt as a tool and debt that enslaves us. I think we’ve struck the right balance and I am proud to commend this bill to the House.
GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora, Mr Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise a little bit earlier than I was anticipating, to speak on this legislation—
Hon Andrew Little: You came well equipped with your devices, Gareth. That’s a good thing.
GARETH HUGHES: Well equipped with my devices, the Minister says. Look, there are many bills that this House passes in the course of a week or a month or a year. Many of them are technical, many of them are fixing regulations, some are historic—I’m thinking of things like marriage equality—and some legislation you can make a real difference for real New Zealanders’ lives. I think this is in that category.
This legislation, this great legislation, will make a real difference to people. All of us are familiar with the stories of lives and families torn apart by the cost of high-interest borrowing. We’ve heard of cases of 600 percent annual interest rates. We’ve heard of cases of 800 percent interest rates. We’ve heard cases of 2,000 percent annualised interest rates that have been ripping apart New Zealand families.
Now, in the last speech, I talked about how this is a relatively modern phenomenon. The Speaker actually sent me a note saying this has always happened in New Zealand, and that’s true. But the modern form of pay-day lending is a relatively modern thing, only this century, and it’s had a huge impact.
Now, what this legislation is going to do is cap the total cost of borrowing and cap interest rates for these loans. What we know is there is $120 million being sucked out of some of our poorest and most vulnerable communities by lenders, many of which I’d categorise as predatory, which are charging such incredibly high interest rates, I think taking advantage of information asymmetries where they have more information about it. It’s a real cost coming out of New Zealand families. So what this legislation is doing is capping the interest for these high-cost loans at 0.8 percent.
It’s wonderful that the select committee and the Government have been able to amend this legislation in the committee. The total cost of borrowing was a good first step. However, what the expert advice we received—and at this point I’d like to acknowledge the work of the FinCap organisation of financial advisers, the Salvation Army, the Council of Trade Unions, individual experts such as Andrew Shand, who’s been working on this issue for many years. What they said is that if you only cap the total cost of borrowing, what you’re going to see is these lenders further taking advantage by rolling over multiple loans, essentially seeing an incredibly high interest rate.
What this legislation is doing is moving New Zealand into line with literally dozens and dozens of other jurisdictions, including the countries that we most identify with—from Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States—where they’ve capped interest rates. So I think it’s incredibly great that the Government has taken this step. It’s something the Green Party was insisting on right from the get-go. From the earliest days of this legislation we thought that interest rates had to be capped. Obviously, this was something we’d voted for previously when Carol Beaumont, a former member who’s departed this House, introduced legislation to enact many years before. It’s something where we’ve drafted a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP). It’s wonderful that we weren’t needing an SOP, because the committee has taken this strong step to include interest rate caps.
Now, we still wonder if the interest rate cap set upon is too high. This will be reviewed. We do note there will be a review in the future. We also think the next step, once we pass this historic legislation where New Zealand’s joining a host of other countries by capping the total cost and interest rates, is actually more practical steps that this Government or future Governments can take to support New Zealand families facing high-cost borrowing.
Why do people have to go out to the market with such high interest rates for such short-term borrowing costs? Is there a role that the Government could take to support those families? Obviously, supporting through financial literacy packages, support for financial planning advice, but is there another step the Government could take in the future to support these families?
I won’t take long, except to reiterate the Green Party’s strong support for this legislation. The fact is that this will make a tangible difference for people who find themselves, in many cases through no fault of their own, facing, I think, usurious interest rates that have had such a catastrophic impact. This is positive legislation. Look, if this is the legislation we’re passing this week, it’s a wonderful highlight for which to finish this week.
I’d like to thank the Minister, Kris Faafoi. He’s been wonderful to work with. He’s had an open door. He’s taken a very considered, very interested approach to this legislation. I’d like to thank the National Party as well for their support tonight. This is a good example of Parliament at its best, and the Green Party wholeheartedly supports it. Kia ora koutou.
MARK PATTERSON (NZ First): I’d just like to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support this Credit Contracts Legislation Amendment Bill, and I just would endorse the words of the previous contribution of Gareth Hughes. This will make a difference for actually some of our poorest and most vulnerable New Zealanders who, maybe through no fault of their own or actually in some cases just through a lack of financial literacy, get themselves into some of these high interest-bearing loans at exorbitant rates—up to 800 percent at times. So putting this 0.8 percent per day cap and, I think importantly, a total of 100 percent of the original principal is a really good move.
It’s not to say that these loans aren’t in some cases necessary and a part of the lending ecosystem. There are times when people are caught a bit short, and we don’t want to stifle the ability of that part of the lending spectrum to be taken out. But we do want to make sure that it is fair and equitable. And I think we’ve seen any amount of examples of people getting taken for a ride and usury interest rates and getting into a debt spiral that just simply is impossible to get out of and the wider social consequences that come with that. So anything that can address that—and Minister Faafoi is to be commended for bringing this to the House and getting it through, and bringing us up to speed with where so many of the other jurisdictions that we would consider our comparators are already at and have been for a long time in some cases.
I won’t draw this out any longer, except to reiterate New Zealand First’s strong support for this bill. Thank you.
GREG O’CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): I had the pleasure of sitting on the select committee. We heard some terrible stories. It was summed up by one submitter who said, “No one can afford their last loan.” This legislation is about ensuring that that last loan that does drag people into that downward spiral, when all the indicators would say they should never get it, doesn’t occur. So this is good legislation. I commend it to the House.
Hon CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): As you walk down the street in South Dunedin, there are a range of lending organisations which charge high rates, interest rates. If you drive around in the suburbs in some of the hill suburbs in Dunedin at certain times of the week, you’ll see the pay-day loan buses driving around. They’re all a reminder of the exploitative practices that happen in our country still, that exploit people on low incomes who find that they get into these debt traps. And despite several attempts—and thank you to Gareth Hughes for outlining some of the previous attempts—to change the legislation in this space, we still hadn’t got it right. So I commend the work that Kris Faafoi has done on this in particular, to introduce an interest rate cap of 0.8 percent a day and the cost of credit cap on high-cost loans to 100 percent of the original loan, which means that one can never be charged more than 100 percent on any additional fees or charges.
When I sat on the Commerce Committee several years ago, the previous Government never went that far and, thankfully, this one has. So I commend the bill to the House.
Bill read a third time.
Bills
Land Transport (Rail) Legislation Bill
First Reading
Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Transport): I move, That the Land Transport (Rail) Legislation Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Transport and Infrastructure Committee to consider the bill, and at the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 24 April 2020.
This Government is committed to securing the role of rail in the New Zealand transport system now and for future generations. This bill entrenches a heavy rail network that delivers for New Zealanders, and it’s our Government’s vision that rail is and should be the backbone of a sustainable 21st century transport system. Our vision is for the country’s rail network to provide modern transit systems in our largest cities while allowing increasing volumes of freight to be moved off the roads and on to the rail network.
Rail is our weapon in the fight against the climate emergency. In our big cities, rail enables us to move more people with fewer vehicles, and I point to the City Rail Link that the party opposite delayed for five years. When it’s completed in 2024, the City Rail Link will allow 54,000 people—that’s the equivalent of 16 lanes of motorway traffic to carry people in and out of the centre of Auckland every hour. That is 54,000 people every hour. That is the power of rail.
And with freight, we know that over the next two decades, the freight task in this country is predicted to increase by 55 percent. If we move all of that freight on our highways using trucks, our cities and towns and suburbs will become unlivable, and we know that there’s a lot of freight that can be most efficiently moved by rail. Not all of it; there’s plenty of freight that’s time sensitive, that needs the flexibility of the point to point service that the trucking industry offers, but there’s a great deal of freight that can be most efficiently and sustainably moved on the rail system.
Rail contributes to our national and regional economic growth. It reduces carbon emissions, it reduces congestion in our cities, it reduces road deaths and injuries, it delivers many wider social benefits, and it provides resilience and connection between communities. The freight task in New Zealand is growing, and it will continue to grow in nearly all regions. We expect freight tonnage in New Zealand to increase more than 55 percent by 2042, and all parts of the freight system will need to play their part to support this growth. Moving more freight by rail will help to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, it will reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries on our roads, it will reduce congestion, and it will deliver jobs and economic development in our regions.
The Future of Rail review found that the current state of the rail network is in a state of managed decline due to long-term under-investment. Short-term planning and funding arrangements for the rail network through the annual Budget process creates uncertainty for the rail business, KiwiRail’s freight and logistics business, as well as their customers, who include many of the biggest and most important exporters and producers in the economy. It also found that a lack of integration between the road and rail network investments has been a longstanding problem. Road and rail investments take place within different decision-making frameworks, and this makes it very difficult to achieve sensible trade-offs and policy choices between these two vital transport networks. Fixing these issues requires a long-term commitment to investing in the rail network so that New Zealand has a reliable and resilient national rail network that allows rail to play its part in the freight supply chain to move the freight that it can move most efficiently and sustainably.
On top of investment in the passenger network through the National Land Transport Fund—and I want to just say that, on Monday morning this week, it was great to be out at Trentham with my colleagues Chris Hipkins and Ron Mark announcing and kicking off the beginning of construction on the double-tracking of the railway line between Upper Hutt and Trentham. That’s an improvement to the Wellington regional network that’s been talked about for 50 years. Our Government is getting on and doing it after 50 years of other people talking about it, and Ron Mark made the comment when we were out there at the Trentham railway station that he and Chris Hipkins had campaigned in 2008 on those improvements.
Michael Wood: What happened?
Hon PHIL TWYFORD: Nothing happened for nine years—nothing happened for nine years—but now our Government is getting on and doing it. It is part of a package worth $196 million that our Government is investing in improvements to the Wairarapa line, supporting those communities in the Wairarapa and making a more efficient service in Wellington that will serve both commuters and freight customers. And I should remind the House that, in the Wellbeing Budget, earlier this year, the Government made a $1 billion investment in the rail network—a $1 billion investment; $741 million of that is just the first phase of investment needed to start restoring a reliable, resilient, and safe freight and passenger network. Alongside that $741 million, another $300 million has been committed from the Provincial Growth Fund to support regional rail projects, to provide lead investments, and to support growth and jobs in the regions as they too recover from nine years of neglect.
Fixing rail is not only about increasing investment; we cannot continue with the current approach to planning and funding rail that we’ve inherited. Until now, rail’s been treated as an orphan in the transport system, left out in the cold, cut off from the funding, planning, and decision making in the national land transport programme. We are bringing rail in from the cold, fully integrating it alongside roads, motorways, and all the transport investments so that, for any transport task no matter what it is, decision makers can consider rail alongside other modes and invest in the most sustainable and efficient option. We want to move more people and more freight by rail, and we want to grow the network where it makes good economic sense. That means investing in the infrastructure, the rolling stock, the hardware, and the people that will make the system work as it should.
The Land Transport Management Act 2003 currently deals with the planning and funding of public transport, State highways, and local roads, and this framework ensures that these land transport modes are planned on a long-term basis and have certainty. This bill amends the Land Transport Management Act and the Land Transport Act 1998 to bring the planning and the funding of the rail network under the land transport planning and funding regime set out in the Act. The new rail planning and funding framework will see a statutory three-year rail network investment programme prepared. The Minister of Transport will be required to approve in consultation with KiwiRail shareholding Ministers. The Minister of Transport will be required to approve National Land Transport Fund allocations for rail network investments. KiwiRail will be responsible for developing the rail network investment programme and the delivery of rail activities within it.
The New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) will also have important roles under the proposed changes. The NZTA will provide advice for the Minister of Transport on how the rail network investment programme fits with the overall land transport investment programme. The agency will also be responsible for monitoring the delivery of the programme. This bill also recognises the importance of metro rail in the Auckland and Wellington regions and, under the bill, KiwiRail will become a member of the regional transport committees in those regions. Those committees put together the regional land transport plans every three years. KiwiRail and the regions already work closely together on the development of the Auckland and Wellington rail networks, and this provision in the bill will just reinforce that relationship.
The changes to the Land Transport Act will also allow fees and charges on track users to be set by regulation and to be paid into the National Land Transport Fund. This will ensure that track users can contribute to the costs of the rail network in a fair and transparent way.
This bill is about changing our approach to transport and taking a long-term, strategic-planning approach to rail. It will consider rail and road investments together in a joined up way. It will allow fair, rational, and consistent decision-making and investment. This will deliver a better, stronger, more sustainable transport system.
CHRIS BISHOP (National—Hutt South): Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. The National Party will be opposing this piece of legislation, and I want to explain to the House why, and want to—
Hon Clare Curran: What a surprise!
CHRIS BISHOP: Oh, well that’s a bit unfair. We support all sorts of legislation but not this one.
I want to explain to the House why that is. Let me start by talking about rail in New Zealand. It was the Minister of railways, Gordon Coates, in 1923 who said, “The railways have never been regarded or run as a profit-making concern”, and we are getting back to that point 100 years later, where the Government appears to have no expectation of commercial common sense and no expectation of profit making on the railways. We are going back to those days that Gordon Coates talked about in 1923—
Hon Clare Curran: Neo-liberal.
CHRIS BISHOP: Oh, “Hear, hear.” says Clare Curran. Well, that tells you all you need to know, I suspect.
Hon Clare Curran: No, I didn’t. I said neo-liberal.
CHRIS BISHOP: Oh. Ha, ha! Well, that doesn’t even deserve a response.
So let’s be clear about it in New Zealand. The economics of rail in New Zealand are challenging. We are a long and thin country with challenging geography. We have a population density that is far less than other countries. The United Kingdom, for example, has 338 per square kilometre; Japan has 251; we have 16. The freight used in New Zealand on the rail is difficult. The routes that the freight on rail operates on are mapped out often from routes 100 years ago, and so you have to travel over quite long distances to reach the same destinations caused by roads. So rail in New Zealand is economically challenging, but it plays an important role. That is definitely true. The Minister made mention of that in his speech, and, of course, he is correct. Freight makes sense where you’ve got bulky products that are close to markets and close to ports. I’m, in particular, thinking of the “Golden Triangle” of Hamilton and Tauranga and Auckland, where rail does make sense. In the rail lines in Auckland, Hamilton, and Tauranga there is good use of—
Simeon Brown: Particularly the Auckland part.
CHRIS BISHOP: “Particularly the Auckland” says Simeon Brown, there is good use. But let’s be clear: 93 percent of freight in New Zealand does not travel by rail; it travels on the road. Let’s also be clear that that is a decision made by freight companies and people transporting goods around, who have made those decisions because it’s more economically sensible to move something on the road by truck than it is by rail.
Rail makes sense for our metro networks. You’ll never hear a stronger defender of our passenger rail networks in Wellington: 10,000 people in Hutt South and the Rimutaka electorate every day get on the train and go into Wellington. It is a vital part of the Wellington metro network, as, indeed, it is part of the Auckland network. National is proud of our investment in metro rail. It was the National Government—despite what the Minister says about nine years of neglect—that bought the Matangi trains for the Wellington railway network. It was National that completed the electrification in Auckland, which has driven the very large increase in passenger growth on the Auckland network. Despite what the Minister says about the City Rail Link, it was National that agreed to get on with the City Rail Link.
I welcome—
Hon Phil Twyford: More like delayed it for five years.
CHRIS BISHOP: Well, he might quibble, but I welcome what the Minister said around the thousands of passengers that that will allow the Auckland metro rail network to take. That will be a good thing, because they’ll be people not in cars; they’ll be people using that rail link. And, of course, I think you’re beginning to see passenger usage in Auckland continue to increase. So rail in New Zealand definitely has a place, but we need to be cognisant and we need to be clear that the economics in many parts of the country are challenging.
That brings me to the second point I want to make, which is about what is the appropriate structure for rail in New Zealand. It would be true to say that rail is probably the most reviewed operation in New Zealand history. We have oscillated, basically, from rail as a public service sponge for excess employment, which was how rail operated throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s. It was the biggest employer in the country and the Government owned the rail. There were no commercial disciplines whatsoever, and there were railway lines and spur lines all around the country. I think everyone agrees that that was, essentially, a sub-optimal state of affairs. It was totally economically inefficient and, of course, we unwound that in the 1980s—and 1982 was when the restructuring started. People actually often claim it was Prebble that destroyed rail or started it all. It was actually started in 1982 under Muldoon—that great reformer, not. But he started the process of reforming rail, and then, of course, we had the reform of rail from 1984 onwards. Then we had privatisation from 1993 to 1996, and then the renationalisation when we now have KiwiRail in 2008.
The National Government’s approach to KiwiRail was to expand rail where it made sense—and that’s in Auckland and Wellington and the “Golden Triangle”, as I talked about—but to try and make sure it was run in a commercially focused way. That brings me to the concern about this bill and about where this Government is taking rail, which is that we are now seeing—on the great oscillation in New Zealand in how we run rail between public service non-commerciality and complete profit maximisation—the wheel turn again back towards that public service mentality where commercial discipline goes out the window.
So I’ll give you an example. KiwiRail, even though it’s a State-owned enterprise, has been revalued by Treasury as an entity that is just a public benefit.
Michael Wood: That’s an entirely different issue.
CHRIS BISHOP: Well, no, it’s not a completely different issue; it goes completely to the point, which is: what is the expectation of rail in our transport system? If Treasury and the Government regard KiwiRail and the Crown accounts as an entity that is not a for-profit entity—that’s the distinction: it’s not a for-profit entity; it’s a public-benefit entity—that has an impact.
We saw the instruction to KiwiRail to cease the ending—not do the diesel electrification, which Michael Wood talked about back in 2018. And so what we are seeing on the pendulum is KiwiRail revert to being something that doesn’t have any commercial discipline on it. And Mr Twyford, the Minister, talks about the huge increases in funding going to rail. Our concern in the National Party is that none of that is based on strong business cases because none of them are available. We saw $331 million in Budget 2019, we’ve got huge amounts of money going through the Provincial Growth Fund, and our concern is that those investments are actually wealth destroying. They’re not actually investments that will grow the economy; they’re actually wealth destructive. We’ve seen the opening of commercially dubious lines like Napier to Wairoa, for example, which members opposite got very worked up about when the last National Government was in power. But they’ve reopened it. Do you know how much freight’s travelled on that line so far? Nothing. Nothing. No freight has travelled on the Napier to Wairoa railway line.
So that brings me to the third point, which is why we don’t support this bill. The first point is we don’t believe the case for change has been made. And the Minister really didn’t make a very strong case for change. We think the status quo is fundamentally satisfactory. Road users pay for roads and the maintenance of existing roads through fuel taxes and road-user charges and the users of rail pay for the use of the rail network through a State-owned enterprise (SOE), which is called Kiwi Rail.
We think that having KiwiRail as an SOE that has a for-profit motive and is run under the Companies Act is something that’s a good thing because it promotes commercial discipline. It means that we don’t get uneconomic, wealth-destructive investments. The worry with this bill is that, essentially, road users will end up cross-subsidising rail users on uneconomic routes that rail users don’t wish to use. And so the concern is that this is going to be a giant waste of money, and that is why we oppose the bill. Thank you, Mr Speaker.
MICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): I’m very pleased to be able to have the opportunity to speak in this debate and I, firstly, want to address the very interesting peroration we just had from the previous speaker, Chris Bishop, which did provide some interesting information about the history of rail in New Zealand and the National Party’s position on it at various times. But very few points actually came close to addressing what the concerns of the National Party might actually be with the substance of this bill.
The problem is that there are several core fallacies that sit at the heart of the National Party’s analysis of rail. As soon as you mention it, it’s kind of like National Party bingo. David Bennett pops up and says “socialism” as soon as you talk about rail. It’s just this Pavlovian instinct. And we had another good one from Mr Bishop, which was the claim that rail in New Zealand is not viable as a transport mode because it doesn’t make a profit—because it doesn’t make a profit.
Chris Bishop: I didn’t say that.
MICHAEL WOOD: Mr Bishop should check the Hansard, because this was one of the assertions near the very beginning of his speech. And of course the interesting thing about that assertion is that it never gets applied by the National Party to roads. Does anyone have a reasonable expectation that there needs to be a profit made out of the New Zealand roading network? Never. But we always get this fundamental objection to any investment in New Zealand’s rail network that doesn’t turn a profit, as if that somehow undermines its role as a core piece of transport infrastructure in New Zealand.
What Mr Bishop also did not address was actually the core purpose of the bill and why the National Party might object to it. At its heart, what this bill does is says that in a country like New Zealand—particularly a small country, I would argue—it makes sense that we have an integrated transport network, that we have a model for planning and funding our transport infrastructure that is actually linked together, that allows us to make rational decisions about where the money best goes to get the best transport outcomes. Whether it’s around the efficiency of freight, decongesting the country, environmental impacts—let’s actually look at the ability that we have to invest as a country and then make rational decisions about whether that should go into roading solutions or rail solutions or coastal shipping solutions or whatever it is.
What is important about that approach is that it shifts the dial on the approach that we have had for so many years in New Zealand where we haven’t had a mode-neutral approach, but where the investment has just, virtually, automatically gone to roading. That is one of the reasons—coming to one of the points that Mr Bishop raises, he’s quite correct when he says that 93 percent of freight in New Zealand currently goes by road. Without doubt, road has been and is and will continue to be an incredibly important part of the New Zealand transport infrastructure system, and will probably continue to be the dominant mode by which freight is sent around the country. It’s a strawman argument; no one is arguing against that. But, of course, people do make their choices about the infrastructure that they use based on the quality of the infrastructure that is available to them, and the fact that we have had decades of rundown, and asset stripping of our rail system has in fact made the rail system less efficient and less capable and less of an option for people who might wish to use it.
I remember one of my very first select committee annual reviews when I was elected as a member of this House was on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee in the previous Parliament. I remember the poor bloke, the chair of KiwiRail, turning up and telling us about the utterly woeful state of the infrastructure that he had to oversee. So we have a freight network in New Zealand in which trains have to slow down to a virtual crawl because they’re going over bridges and other pieces of infrastructure that are 100 years old and need a massive amount of investment to actually make them a viable option.
So one of the core things that this Government is about is having a mode-neutral approach and about making the investments so that people, whether they are looking to send freight around the country, whether it is passengers in our cities, actually have real transport choices—
Chris Bishop: Why don’t you pay for it then?
MICHAEL WOOD: —and then can make rational choices about the best way to send—“why don’t they pay for it?” Well, it’s exactly the same question with roading, of course.
Hon Members: Fuel tax! Excise tax!
MICHAEL WOOD: The Government makes investments—yes. And this is the point that Mr Bishop forgets about this bill as well: this bill is about rail making user charges and paying into the National Land Transport Fund—that is what this bill does. So the objections of the members opposite that, somehow, this is about a free ride for rail are utterly spurious, because the bill itself says that rail should make a contribution and then, as a Government, we make rational decisions. That is what they are arguing against—they are arguing against an integrated transport network and a mode-neutral approach to making transport investments. That is the core of it—the National Party’s fundamental, unhealthy, almost screwy sort of love affair with as many big roading projects as possible at the expense of actually making the best transport decisions that are available.
Let me make this point as well, the point around cross-subsidisation. Under the previous Government, in 2016, KiwiRail actually undertook a study that was carried out by Ernst & Young that actually looked at the economic contribution of rail to New Zealand’s economy. What the Ernst & Young study revealed was that, actually, rail delivers $1.6 billion of benefits to the transport system.
Chris Bishop: Oh yeah.
MICHAEL WOOD: This was a study that Mr Bishop scoffs at that was carried out under the previous Government in 2016, and they suppressed it—$1.6 billion of decongestion benefits that the rail system at that point in 2016, as parlous and rundown as it was, delivered to the broader transport system. So those members shouldn’t talk about cross-subsidisation unless they are prepared to look at the benefits from rail that actually accrue to the rest of the transport system as well. That goes to the very point about this bill. It is just stupid policymaking to put our transport modes in different buckets and not have an integrated transport planning and funding process. That is all this bill does. What do those members object to about having a transport funding mechanism whereby we say “We’re mode-neutral and we make the decisions based on the best investment and the best outcomes for New Zealand’s transport network.”? It is bizarre that the National Party can’t deal with that.
This bill is important, and at each level it ensures that rail is brought into the transport planning process—in the National Land Transport Fund, but also at the regional land transport planning level. Members and people watching this debate may not be aware, but we do have a regional land transport planning process, whereby territorial and local authorities and local residents can front up to a committee—I think it’s about once every three years—that makes decisions that feed into the national land transport planning process about what the important projects might be in each region, and I have gone and submitted in Auckland to that effect. This bill will ensure that at that level as well, people, whether they’re in Auckland or Wellington or Christchurch or the regions, are able to front up to their regional land transport planning committee and actually talk about the investments that would make a difference in their area. They can advocate for roading projects and they can advocate for rail projects or other transport modes. Again, it’s actually about having an integrated approach at every level.
The story of rail in New Zealand is one of a nation-building piece of infrastructure. You only have to go back to the 1880s and Julius Vogel and his vision for a connected New Zealand in which people and freight could move around. It was an essential part of the building of this country. But then, in a period of significant decline and rundown and abuse through the 1980s and 1990s—rail was, of course, privatised during the 1990s, under the National Government of that era—it was shamelessly asset-stripped by foreign corporate raiders. Hundreds of millions of dollars were, basically, stripped out of that system and taken overseas by fat cats, and New Zealand was left with a rail system inherited by the fifth Labour Government that was utterly on its knees. So I pay tribute, actually, to the Government, and particularly Michael Cullen, who intervened to make sure that New Zealand had a functional rail system. Without that decision, New Zealand’s rail network was in absolute dire straits.
Since that time, we have actually seen a significant renaissance of rail, whether it’s on the freight front or whether it’s in our cities, where investment—which mostly commenced under the fifth Labour Government—has delivered massive increases in patronage. Commuter patronage in the Auckland region since 2010 has gone up, I think, by about four- to fivefold, or 400 to 500 percent—absolutely outstanding stuff.
This bill, which comes out of the Future of Rail report initiated by this Government—and I acknowledge our partners, New Zealand First and the Greens, who have been right in behind this—is about building a viable future for rail, a mode-neutral, integrated planning and funding system to deliver the best possible transport network for New Zealanders to get people and freight moving freely around our country. It is bizarre that the National Party opposes those things, but not surprising, given their bizarre, anti-rail bias. But I think that New Zealanders in the cities and the regions all over our country are going to be right behind this excellent piece of legislation and the further renaissance of rail under this Government. Thank you, Mr Speaker.
BRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, that previous member—why, why was he so relentlessly putting the boot in to his own team? He talked about Michael Cullen. Well, Michael Cullen’s philosophy was “sell low, buy high”, and over that side, they call that investment. Well, we can guess where it’s going to lead to, if that’s their approach.
He talked about the model that KiwiRail operates under now and he spent minutes telling us how poor it was, but who set it up? It was the Hon Dame Annette King, and he’s just told us how rubbish she is. That’s absolutely terrible. Look, I’ve got more respect for Dame Annette than that, and certainly a lot more than Mr Wood does.
But I want to talk about the three elements that are really behind this bill but that aren’t explicit in the words, though they are the true reasons behind it. The first is they are blinded by ideology—particularly, two of the three governing parties—where they have this romantic love for rail, often couched in terms of emissions reductions, but this is one of the few items that the three governing parties can actually agree on. Labour and the Greens just see it as this ideological bent they have for “If it’s rail, it must be good.”, but for New Zealand First, as long as it is reminiscent of the 1970s, they are into it. I mean, you only need to look at their economic policy to see the truth behind that statement.
So what we have is them trying to say “We’re going to do whatever it takes to have more rail.”, and they try to claim that if only the public would agree to investment in rail, it would shine through and everyone would see it as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well, here’s the reality: New Zealand’s had a rail network for 100-odd years, and people have been able to shift themselves or their goods on that rail network. If it was the optimal choice, then passengers and companies moving goods would be using it, and here’s the thing: if they were using it, then it would generate revenue and profit and it would have been able to reinvest that in its stock and its tracks, and it could have done the renewal they are talking about. It’s the failure of rail to meet customers’ needs which drives the problem here.
All they are saying is “Let’s take some of the taxpayer money and make a bad situation even worse.”, because, as far as they’re concerned, if it’s rail it must be good, which brings us—
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): I’m sorry to interrupt the member.
Debate interrupted.
The House adjourned at 6 p.m.