Wednesday, 22 February 2023

WEDNESDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2023

WEDNESDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2023

The Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

karakia/prayers

karakia/prayers

Hon JACQUI DEAN (Assistant Speaker): Almighty God, we give thanks for the blessings which have been bestowed on us. Laying aside all personal interests, we acknowledge the King and pray for guidance in our deliberations that we may conduct the affairs of this House with wisdom, justice, mercy, and humility, for the welfare and peace of New Zealand. Amen.

Visitors

Germany—Bundestag

SPEAKER: Members, I’m sure that you would wish to welcome Josef Rief and his accompanying Budget Committee members from the German Bundestag, who are present in the gallery.

Petitions, Papers, Select Committee Reports, and Introduction of Bills

Petitions, Papers, Select Committee Reports, and Introduction of Bills

SPEAKER: Petitions have been delivered to the Clerk for presentation.

CLERK:

Petition of Natalia Fernandes requesting that the House amend the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 to allow a tenant to withdraw from a tenancy if they have been assaulted by another member of the household

petition of Robert Osborne requesting that the House change section 32(2) of the Summary Offences Act

petition of Christian Cosgrove requesting that the House further protect the paradise shelduck, grey duck, Australasian shoveler, and pūkeko

petition of Our Seas Our Future requesting that the House pass legislation to establish marine reserves to protect at least 30 percent of New Zealand’s ocean by 2030

petition of Dr Nima Maleki requesting that the House provide funding for sealing roads in Mangawhai

petition of Leo Li requesting that the House urge the Government to allow his family to stay in New Zealand

petition of Stephanie Gunther requesting that the House urge the Government to expand eligibility for Paxlovid and other oral antiviral medications

petition of Alison White requesting that the House urge the Minister for the Environment to progress an immediate reassessment and ban of an insecticide

petition of Morteza Sharifi requesting that the House urge the New Zealand Government to recall the Ambassador to Iran.

SPEAKER: Those petitions stand referred to the Petitions Committee. Ministers have delivered papers, and I’d like to let the House know that there are 56 of them.

CLERK:

2021-22 annual reports for Tāmaki Regeneration Company Ltd, Crown Infrastructure Partners Ltd, the Tertiary Education Commission, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, the Commerce Commission, the Arts Council of New Zealand, Ōtākaro Ltd, the Independent Police Conduct Authority, the Law Commission, the Nursing Council of New Zealand, Pharmac, Maritime New Zealand, the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, the New Zealand Walking Access Commission, the Financial Markets Authority, Tourism New Zealand, Ngāpuhi Investment Fund—Tupu Tonu, Sport New Zealand, Kiwi Group Holdings, Kordia Group Ltd, Genesis Energy Ltd, New Zealand Green Investment Finance Ltd, Callaghan Innovation, Retirement Commission, Electoral Commission, Environmental Protection Authority, Crown Irrigation Investments Ltd, and Taumata Arowai

2021-22 integrated reports for the New Zealand Lotteries Commission and Meridian Energy Ltd

2021-22 annual financial statements for Ngāi Tahu Ancillary Claims Trust

2022-23 statement of performance expectations for Crown Infrastructure Partners Ltd, Ōtākaro Ltd, Sport New Zealand, and the Arts Council of New Zealand

statements of corporate intent for Ōtākaro Ltd, Kordia Group Ltd, Kāinga Ora, Transpower New Zealand, and the Arts Council of New Zealand

strategic intentions for the Ministry for the Environment, the Climate Change Chief Executives Board, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Ministry for Pacific Peoples, and Te Puni Kōkiri

report of Archives New Zealand, The Chief Archivist’s Annual Report on the State of Government Recordkeeping 2021/22

report of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, Long-Term Insights Briefing 2022

report of the Ministry of Justice, Long-Term Insights Briefing 2022

report of the Ministry for the Environment, Long-Term Insights Briefing 2023

report of the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General, How well public organisations are supporting Whānau Ora and whanau-centred approaches

report of the royal commission of inquiry into abuse in State care, Beautiful Children: Inquiry into the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit

report of the Attorney-General under the Bill of Rights Act 1990 on the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill

Budget Policy Statement 2023

Treasury Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update 2022

notification to the House of Representatives of the date for the general election 2023

Government response to the report of the Education and Workforce Committee on the petition of Pandora Black.

SPEAKER: Those papers are published under the authority of the House. Select committee reports have been delivered for presentation—there’s only 15 of them.

CLERK:

Reports of the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee on the Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media Bill and the petition of Ross Divett

report of the Environment Committee Interim Report (Natural and Built Environment Bill and Spatial Planning Bill)

reports of the Governance and Administration Committee on the Hawke’s Bay Agricultural and Pastoral Society Empowering Bill and the Local Government Electoral Legislation Bill

reports of the Health Committee on the petition of Joan Perry, the petition of Malcolm Richards, and the report of the Ombudsman on OIA compliance and practice in Manatū Hauora Ministry of Health

reports of the Justice Committee on the Coroners Amendment Bill, the Criminal Activity Intervention Legislation Bill, Criminal Proceeds Recovery Amendment Bill, and Family Court (Family Court Associates) Legislation Bill

report of the Regulations Review Committee, Briefing on best practices for publication of secondary legislation

reports of the Social Services and Community Committee on the 2020-21 annual review of the Social Workers Registration Board and the petition of the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers.

SPEAKER: The following bills are set down for second reading:

Hawke’s Bay Agricultural and Pastoral Society Empowering Bill

Local Government Electoral Legislation Bill

Coroners Amendment Bill

Criminal Activity Intervention Legislation Bill

Criminal Proceeds Recovery Amendment Bill

Family Court (Family Court Associates) Legislation Bill.

The Interim Report, the report of the Ombudsman, and the briefing are set down for consideration. The Clerk has been informed of the introduction of bills.

CLERK:

Ngāti Paoa Claims Settlement Bill, introduction.

Ngāti Hei Claims Settlement Bill, introduction.

Pare Hauraki Collective Redress Bill, introduction.

Māori Fisheries Amendment Bill, introduction.

Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2), introduction.

Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill, introduction.

SPEAKER: Those bills are set down for first reading.

Oral Questions

Questions to Ministers

Question No. 1—Prime Minister

1. Hon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by his statement that climate is a “bread and butter issue” for his Government; and, if so, will he ensure that adapting to extreme weather and cutting pollution are both central to the Government response to Cyclone Gabrielle?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Prime Minister): Yes, and yes. There is nothing more basic or critical for a Government than lifting the country back up after a major disaster, and working to ensure we’re prepared for a world in which these events are more frequent and more severe. The need for greater resilience and adaptation to climate change will be embedded in our response.

Hon James Shaw: Does he recognise that when major emergencies have occurred in the past, Governments have kicked climate action down the road while they deal with the current crisis, and, if so, does he commit to taking a new approach in response to Cyclone Gabrielle?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I’m not going to provide a running commentary on the actions of previous Governments, but what I will say—

Hon Member: That’s good.

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Well, except when I want to. But what I will say is that the need to adapt to climate change will absolutely be embedded in our response this time around.

Hon James Shaw: What immediate actions will he take to ensure that building resilience and adapting to more frequent and extreme weather events is at the heart of the recovery to Cyclone Gabrielle?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: There’s no question that it needs to be. We absolutely have to make sure that building greater resilience and adaptation to climate change is at the heart of our response.

Hon James Shaw: What actions is the Government taking to tackle hardship amongst the most affected communities on the east and northern coasts of the North Island, and will he ensure that people in Aotearoa have the support that they need to deal with future climate-related disasters?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: In answer to the first part of the question, the most immediate support we can provide for people is to help them deal with their needs immediately in front of them right now, which is the need to make sure that they have a roof over their head and the need to make sure that they have money to pay for the basic necessities that they need at the moment, and there is a lot of Government effort going into supporting that. As we move beyond the emergency response and as we rebuild and provide more stability for people and for businesses and for others, we’ll need to make sure that we do that in a way that’s setting people up for the future rather than just setting them up to repeat the cycle again the next time a major event like this happens.

Hon James Shaw: As part of his previous answer, he said that adapting to the effects of climate change would be part of the response to Cyclone Gabrielle, and would he agree that we actually need to fix the hole in the roof while we’re bailing out water from our homes?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I absolutely believe that we need to do both. We need to continue to tackle the causes of climate change and we need to make sure that we are adapting to a world in which more extreme weather events are likely to be more frequent and more severe. I don’t think that we should allow this debate to be framed as an either/or; it has to be both.

Question No. 2—Finance

2. RACHEL BROOKING (Labour) to the Minister of Finance: What will be the economic impact of the recent extreme weather events, and how is the Government responding to those events?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): I would first like to acknowledge the impact of the recent extreme weather events on those affected, particularly those who have lost loved ones, their homes, and their livelihoods. I’d also like to recognise the exceptional efforts of all those who have responded within our communities and supported one another in this tragic and upsetting time. The Government is committed to working with local communities so that affected families, farmers, business people, and others are back on their feet and regions are back moving. This has been a significant event and it is still early days to be able to put a specific figure around the economic and fiscal impact of these disasters, but we do know that it will be considerable and we do know that the bill the Government will need to meet will be in the billions of dollars. The Government has taken action quickly to provide certainty and assurance in these early stages of the response. A little over $352 million of additional support has been provided for. We know that significant further resources will be needed to support New Zealanders through the response, recovery, and rebuild phases.

Rachel Brooking: What support is the Government providing to the primary sector in response to the cyclone and flooding?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: We’ve announced an initial package of $25 million to go with the earlier $4 million announced for the primary sector. Of this $25 million in grants, part of it will support pastoral farmers and growers. This will mean that they will be eligible for up to $10,000 worth of support to help initial on-farm recovery such as repairs to water infrastructure, for stock, and fencing. Grants for growers of $2,000 per hectare up to $40,000 will be available to do, among other things: removing silt and debris from orchards, supporting clean-up, and minimising future losses. Applications for this $25 million fund begin today.

Rachel Brooking: What other action is the Government taking in response to the recent extreme weather events?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: It is worth noting that today represents the 12th anniversary of the 22 February earthquake in Christchurch. There is a lot to learn from those circumstances and we think of those people today on the anniversary. One thing in particular to learn from that period of time is the importance of locally led responses. We are driving forward our response based on the needs of those in communities. The Prime Minister has appointed regional lead Ministers to work with every affected community to ensure that what we do meets the needs that are on the ground. Alongside this, a task force is being established to be led by Sir Brian Roche. That will ensure that all parts of the private sector, community sector, and those involved in specific industries who will be key to the recovery and rebuild are at the table, their voices are being heard, and they can interact with Government and local government and iwi in whatever way is necessary. We will need to be nimble and adaptable, but there are plenty of lessons for us to draw on.

Rachel Brooking: How well placed is New Zealand to deal with the consequences of the extreme weather events?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: The extreme weather events will have an impact on this year’s Budget and those in following years, and it may mean changes to the Government’s economic and fiscal approach as was outlined in the Budget Policy Statement. We are taking the time now to work through all of those decisions. No final decisions on those matters have been made at this point, but we will be actively considering how we meet additional costs, how we may prioritise what we’re doing, and planning to meet any needs that are identified. If further resources are required, we are in a good position to manage that. The Government has been resilient in a challenging global environment. Our debt levels sit at just over 21 percent of GDP, well below our debt ceiling and among the lowest in the OECD. We are well positioned to handle the impact of the recent extreme weather and any future economic shocks.

Question No. 3—Prime Minister

3. CHRISTOPHER LUXON (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by all of his Government’s statements and actions?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Prime Minister): Yes.

Christopher Luxon: What impact has increased Government spending of $1 billion per week had on the cost of living?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Economists, of course, will argue about this at great length, but the reality is we have supported New Zealanders through a difficult set of economic circumstances, and I have yet to hear a single proposal from the National Party about what they would not be spending money on.

Christopher Luxon: Does he agree increasing Government spending actually contributes to inflation?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Depends on the nature of the spending.

Christopher Luxon: Does he stand by State services Minister Chris Hipkins’ commitment in 2018 to reduce spending on consultants?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Yes.

Christopher Luxon: Can he confirm that spending on consultants has blown out to more than $1.7 billion a year?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: That’s partly a reflection of the COVID-19 response where a lot of contracted workforces were used. It’s also a reflection of the fact that the Government’s doing a lot more in the areas which are dominated by contractors and consultants spending, like capital investment—something the last Government woefully under-invested in, which is why we had classrooms that were falling down, hospitals with excrement in the walls, and roads that were full of potholes. We’re dealing with that; the last Government didn’t.

Christopher Luxon: Does he think taxpayers got good value for money from the $53 million spent on consultants for light rail, the $51 million spent on consultants for the failed cycle bridge, or the $6,000 per week per consultant working on a Television New Zealand - Radio New Zealand merger?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: With regard to light rail, we have to recognise that this is a significant once-in-a-generation investment for Auckland. We have to get serious about the fact that Auckland needs a First World public transport infrastructure. The National Party clearly don’t seem to want that.

Christopher Luxon: Is $30 billion on light rail really the right thing to be spending money on right here, right now?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: It’s a multigenerational investment. Look at every other major city around the world. They invest in their public transport infrastructure. And, yes, it happens over decades. In the UK, where the member has previously lived, they’re still building their underground rail network over 100 years after they started it.

Christopher Luxon: Does he think someone on the average wage is paying too much tax when their income has grown less than inflation for the last 2½ years?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I’m not going to make announcements on tax today.

Christopher Luxon: Can the Prime Minister just answer: does he agree that someone on the average wage is paying too much tax or not?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: What the Government will not be doing is cutting taxes for the highest income earners, which is the National Party’s policy.

Christopher Luxon: Isn’t it the case that the Prime Minister has changed, that it’s the same old Labour: addicted to spending and just can’t get anything done?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: The member keeps going on about wanting to get things done. He doesn’t seem to have too many ideas about what it is he actually wants to get done.

Question No. 4—Social Development and Employment

4. ANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour) to the Minister for Social Development and Employment: What announcements has she made to support NGOs and those impacted by the floods and Cyclone Gabrielle?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development and Employment): Last week, I announced an initial $11.5 million community support package to help NGOs in the community sector respond to the adverse weather events. The package consists of $4 million to providers to ensure they can meet increased demand and support wellbeing of their staff and volunteers due to flooding and cyclone, $1 million to replenish stocks at food banks currently experiencing high demand, $2 million of grants for community groups to support flood response, $4 million expansion of the scope of community connectors to support Auckland’s and impacted regions’ flood response efforts, and $500,000 ring-fenced funding to respond to the needs of disabled people. As the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance have stated, the Government’s support for flood-affected communities will be ongoing, and this initial package of support will help our NGOs get through the immediate response.

Angie Warren-Clark: How much money has been allocated from the package thus far?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: The Ministry of Social Development (MSD) began communicating with NGOs and community organisations on the package last week, and started taking applications on Friday. As of 9 a.m. on Tuesday, 21 February, $2.27 million had been committed to NGOs through this package. MSD are working hard to process applications as quickly as possible, and I anticipate more money will be in the hands of NGOs and community organisations by the end of this week. The package has come as welcome relief to many, and I ask any NGOs who need support to contact MSD to see if they qualify for support. I’d like to thank all of the NGOs and community volunteers who have stood up and served their communities so well in these very difficult times.

Angie Warren-Clark: What support has been provided to individuals who need help following these weather events?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: As a national state of emergency is in effect, civil defence payments are available for people in the affected regions. The civil defence payments are not income- or asset-tested. They are for people who need immediate and essential support for items such as food, clothing, and bedding. So far, there has been $36.599 million paid out to over 72,000 people in need. Yesterday, $3.7 million was paid out to 8,067 people. This included $1.7 million paid out in support to people in Hawke’s Bay, and $585,000 to people in Gisborne.

Angie Warren-Clark: Why is this support to NGOs and individuals so important?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: There are many NGOs and community organisations and iwi organisations who have sprung into action to serve their communities. I witnessed this firsthand in Auckland, with organisations at the beginning of the weather events using their own resources and initiatives to support the community. This funding will help them replenish their resources and prepare them for the upcoming support that will be required by whānau affected by these events. Likewise, the civil defence payments are able to help individuals and whānau with their immediate costs. Many have lost homes, possessions, and livelihoods, and these payments are there to be accessed in their time of need. As the Minister of Finance has stated, this is just the beginning of our response. As we move into recovery, we will assess what other support may be needed.

Question No. 5—Prime Minister

5. DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT) to the Prime Minister: Thank you, Mr Speaker, and may I acknowledge the people of the Canterbury region on this 12th anniversary of a terrible tragedy. My question is to the Prime Minister and reads: does he stand by all his Government’s statements and actions?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Prime Minister): Yes.

David Seymour: How much tax is his Government forecast to collect this year and how much more tax is that compared with the $86 billion collected in the last year pre-COVID?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: If the member wants that specific information, he’ll find that in the Budget documents.

David Seymour: Does the Prime Minister not know?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I haven’t memorised the entire Budget, no.

David Seymour: Wouldn’t it be important to understand that his Government is taxing $118 billion off New Zealanders—$32 billion more per year than just four years ago?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I welcome the opportunity to set out for the member that our Government is actually taking less tax out of the economy as a proportion of the economy than when we became the Government.

David Seymour: Which option does the Prime Minister prefer most for funding the recovery from the cyclones: tax people more now, borrow now and tax later, or reprioritise current spending?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I think those kinds of debates are premature, given we don’t yet know what the true extent of the damage is or the true cost of the damage is. Responsible Governments make sure that they consider all of the options around how to pay for a natural disaster such as this, as the previous Government did after the Canterbury earthquakes. They canvassed a range of options before deciding how to pay for it. That is what responsible Governments do.

David Seymour: Is the Prime Minister aware that when his Government came into office, Government expenditure was 27 percent of GDP? It’s now 35 percent, and if tax as a percentage of GDP has reduced, then the Government must have increased the deficit by more than 8 percent of GDP. How does any of that add up?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: It got up to about 34 percent under National, and it’s currently lower than it was under the peak of spending during National’s time in Government after the global financial crisis.

David Seymour: Does the Prime Minister accept that Government spending, especially deficit Government spending, puts pressure on interest rates, meaning people’s mortgages cost more than they otherwise would?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: One of the reasons I’m really proud of the financial track record of this Government is that prior to this most recent series of events, which, of course, will change things, we were on track to get back into surplus faster than the last Government did after the global financial crisis. I note that the member and his party voted for every single Budget during their term in Government.

Question No. 6—Finance

6. NICOLA WILLIS (Deputy Leader—National) to the Minister of Finance: Does he think New Zealanders suffering a cost of living crisis should pay more tax, and why won’t he rule out introducing a new tax to help pay for the Cyclone Gabrielle clean-up?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): I acknowledge that low and middle income New Zealanders are doing it tough right now with cost of living pressures, and that’s why the Government has put in place a range of support for them to be able to help meet the cost of living. No decisions have been taken to change any tax settings further than what the Government has already done. I do think that New Zealanders in this position should continue to be supported by the Government through this time. In light of the fact that we have had just the third ever national state of emergency declared in New Zealand’s history and that many people’s homes, livelihoods, businesses, and lives have been devastated, it is the responsible thing to do to take the time to consider the options for how we will pay for the Government’s share of the recovery.

Nicola Willis: Why is the Minister’s first port of call to fund the rebuild another new tax and not dumping pet political projects like the $30 billion light rail commitment?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: In answer to the first part of the member’s question, it’s not. In answer to the second part of the question, as discussed at the Finance and Expenditure Committee earlier today, there are a range of options for how to finance the future contribution that the Government will need to make. The responsible thing for a Government to do is to be able to work through those options while we work out just how big the bill will be.

Nicola Willis: Does he stand by his commitment in 2021 that “Labour’s policy was clear that we would not introduce any new taxes.”?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: As I said in my earlier answer, no decisions have been taken to do anything other than the tax policy that the Government has. However, what responsible Governments do in this situation is assess options. For instance, Bill English, on 4 March 2011, received a report entitled Funding the Earthquake Recovery: Levies and Other Potential Funding Options, which begins, “This report responds to your request for advice on options for funding the earthquake recovery, including a dedicated earthquake levy.” It’s a pity the member doesn’t share the responsible approach of her former boss.

Nicola Willis: Isn’t it an indictment on the Minister’s economic management that, faced with the rebuild following a natural disaster, he won’t rule out smashing Kiwis with a new tax, something the previous Government did not do following the Canterbury or Kaikōura earthquakes?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: As I note, on 4 March, just a week or two after the Canterbury earthquakes, the then finance Minister, Bill English, got advice on whether or not there should be a levy. As I have already stated today, we have not taken decisions. We are in exactly the same position of assessing the scale and working out how the Government will pay for it. It is what a responsible Government would do. It’s what Bill English did. Clearly, the member is not in that category.

Nicola Willis: How can he possibly justify speculating about new taxes when New Zealanders up and down the country are feeling anxious and squeezed by the prolonged cost of living crisis, which today has seen interest rates rise yet again, for the 10th time in 18 months?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: As I said in my primary answer, I am acutely aware of the cost of living pressures that are facing, particularly, low and middle income households. That is the reason why this Government has stepped up time and time again to support those people, through increases to the family tax credit, through the cost of living payment, to the increases we’ve made to main benefits, to the winter energy payment—every single one of those opposed by the National Party.

Nicola Willis: How much higher does he think New Zealanders’ mortgage rates might climb following today’s lift in the official cash rate, and does he agree that this is not the time to impose yet another new tax on an already fragile economy?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: What I think this is the time for is for the Government to work through the full cost of a significant natural disaster that has impacted many regions of New Zealand. What I think is that, as Bill English did, we should assess all of the options that are in front of us. There are people out there today who are cleaning away the silt out of their houses and out of their businesses. They want to know that New Zealanders have a Government that takes that seriously—doesn’t turn it into cheap political point-scoring but actually assesses the options in front of us.

Nicola Willis: Has he been advised how many New Zealanders will move from a mortgage with a 2 or 3 percent interest rate to a mortgage with a 6 or 7 percent interest rate over the next six months, and is it really his position that in this environment, they should be braving a tax hike as well?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: In answer to the second part of that question, I repeat all of the answers that I have given: no decisions have been taken on that, but just as a previous Government—which the member was very close to—assessed their options, we are assessing our options. Our balance sheet is strong; we have the ability to use the fiscal headroom. We will look at reprioritisation, and we will assess other options. It would be irresponsible to do otherwise, and I can’t understand why the member is so committed to trashing Bill English’s legacy.

Nicola Willis: Why won’t the Minister just rule it out, and is it the case that instead of smashing Kiwis with a new tax, he could comfortably repay the rebuild of the East Coast if the Government simply scrapped their own political pet projects like Auckland light rail?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I don’t know how the member knows what the cost of rebuilding the East Coast of the North Island, the Hawke’s Bay, Northland, Coromandel, Auckland, the Wairarapa, and the Tararua regions, and all those affected are. That is the very work that is under way right now. What we’ve done is stepped up with more than $350 million immediately to support that. There will be more support and we’ll take the responsible approach of working out how best to pay for that, as previous Governments have done.

Nicola Willis: More taxes on their way!

SPEAKER: Order!

Question No. 7—Transport

7. SHANAN HALBERT (Labour—Northcote) to the Minister of Transport: What reports has he received about progress on repairing transport networks following the recent extreme weather events?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): I’m receiving regular reports about the state of our transport network in the wake of the devastating flooding and Cyclone Gabrielle. I’m advised that key routes in most affected regions, including critical parts of State Highway 2 in Napier and Tai Rāwhiti and critical freight routes in Northland, are now open once again. However, the damage to our road and rail networks is substantial and a number of sections of State Highway 2 and State Highway 5, as well as the Brynderwyns on State Highway 1, remain closed. As at 21 February, there are fewer than 10 sections of State highway with full or partial closures. We know there’s a long road ahead of us to repair our transport network, and the Government is committed to supporting communities through this, which is why we’ve announced $250 million of support for the National Land Transport Fund to fund urgent repairs and maintenance in the coming weeks. I want to put on record and thank all of the roading crews from Waka Kotahi contractors all around the country who have done an incredible job over the past couple of weeks to reconnect communities and supply chains.

Shanan Halbert: What reports has he received about repairs under way on transport networks in Te Tai Rāwhiti?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: The situation is a dynamic one in Tai Rāwhiti. Prior to question time, I was advised that State Highway 2 from Ōpōtiki to Gisborne, as well as Gisborne to Wairoa, were both now open to the public. However, as of 1.50 p.m., a major slip has once again closed State Highway 2 between Ōpōtiki and Gisborne, which goes to demonstrate the ongoing challenging situation that our roading contractors are facing. Preparations are under way for a 90-metre long Bailey bridge to be installed on State Highway 35 near Tokomaru Bay to replace the severely damaged Hikuai bridge. I’m advised that, as of yesterday, around 50 local roads remain closed or damaged across the region. We do know that emotions are high across the region in the wake of what has been a traumatic event, particularly where communities are isolated. I do want to assure people that Waka Kotahi, councils, and contractors are working around the clock to restore access.

Shanan Halbert: What reports has he received about the reinstatement of transport links in the Hawke’s Bay?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: Key routes around the Hawke’s Bay have started to open again, including the Napier-Hastings Expressway, and State Highway 51 between Napier and Clive. I understand that the expressway in particular is very busy, and I would encourage motorists to please be patient. As of yesterday, the two key routes that remain closed are State Highway 2 Napier to Wairoa and State Highway 5 Napier to Taupō. I’m advised that they are likely to remain closed for some time while assessment of the road and bridge conditions continues. A Bailey bridge is also expected to be installed at the Waikari River, north of Napier, shortly. Contractors are also working on State Highway 38 from Murupara to Wairoa to restore access to the town from the west, and it is expected to be open to the public in coming days.

Shanan Halbert: What reports has he received about the restoration of transport connections in Northland?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: Northland has also been severely affected by both weather events over recent weeks. I’m advised that State Highway 1 is closed at the Brynderwyns due to a range of severe slips. However, over the past week two detours through Waipū and Dargaville, for light and heavy vehicles respectively, have been reopened.

Question No. 8—Police

8. CHRIS BAILLIE (ACT) to the Minister of Police: Does he stand by his statement that “What I’d say to the gangs, get your bloody patches off”; if so, has he seen reports of how many gang members have taken their patches off?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Immigration): on behalf of the Minister of Police: To the first part of the question, he stands by his full statement on Sunday: “Get your bloody patches off. Go and get a whole lot of wheelbarrows and shovels and start helping people as opposed to adding to already super-high levels of stress.” He also noted that he would go back and be assured that there was a strong police presence to deal with community concerns. Since then, I’m able to confirm to the House that police will have a total of 145 additional staff deployed across the eastern district, that police report that crime in the area is within a normal range for the eastern district; however, this is obviously amplified for a community that is feeling very vulnerable. To that end, police have had high visibility and a strong reassurance focus in addition to responding to calls from the public. For example, in the 24-hour period to 7 a.m. this morning, police conducted 565 prevention activities, including reassurance patrols and proactive engagements with storm-hit communities. Police staff are prioritising taskings to contact those also from the uncontactable list, which I’m sure we all understand is one of the most pressing needs at this time. In answer to the second part of the question, no.

Chris Baillie: What does it say about this Government’s record on law and order that the police Minister has been reduced to begging gang members to be nice, and isn’t it time to send in our armed forces to assist police, like Napier Mayor Kirsten Wise has been asking for?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: I reject the premise of the member’s question. As I responded in my primary answer on behalf of the Minister of Police, police have been conducting a significant amount of work to provide reassurance and support to the people of storm-hit regions at a time of extreme stress. New Zealand defence forces continue to play an important role in the region but will stand by the police who have the expertise to work with communities and provide that reassurance at a difficult time—will stand by them and not further make the situation difficult by whipping up hysteria.

Nicole McKee: What does he say to Grant Porter from Napier, who told the media, “The gangs are coming in or looters in general. They’re threatening people, stealing their stuff. We are very scared. People are very scared.”; and does he believe it’s important to believe the victims of crime?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: I absolutely believe that it is critical to believe the victims of crime, and that is why it is exceptionally important at all times, but particularly in a time of extreme distress for many people, such as now in the storm-hit regions, that we adequately support police to be able to get out on the ground to prevent crime and provide reassurance to the communities. In my primary answer I’ve outlined the significant amount of police work that police have under way in that area. We’ll continue to support police in that operational response and our Government will also continue to support police by building their numbers, which have increased by 1,700 since we came to office.

Nicole McKee: Who is correct: is it the Napier mayor and the Hawke’s Bay chamber of commerce chief executive officer, who say they need armed forces, or is it the Police Commissioner, who is gaslighting locals by telling them that they don’t know what’s going on and that he knows better?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: I believe that the comments of the member in respect of the commissioner’s approach to these issues are unhelpful, intemperate, and incorrect. The Police Commissioner has been working closely with the eastern district to ensure that there are sufficient officers on the ground, including 145 additional officers who have been deployed into that community. No one, including the Minister, the Police Commissioner, or local police, has done anything to reject or downplay people’s concerns about their safety. They have been putting resources in to provide further reassurance. Where crime occurs, police are on the ground to support communities, but, as I have also said in the primary answer to this question, police report that levels of crime are within a normal range. No crime is acceptable, and at this time it is more stressful for communities. So we will continue to work to provide that reassurance.

I would just urge all members of the House to support police in doing that job and not create a climate of hysteria that will add further to the distress of people in an already difficult situation.

Question No. 9—Emergency Management

9. Hon AUPITO WILLIAM SIO (Labour—Māngere) to the Minister for Emergency Management: What assistance has the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) coordinated to support local responses to Cyclone Gabrielle?

Hon KIERAN McANULTY (Minister for Emergency Management): Under our emergency management system, local leadership of responses is critical to ensuring everything we do is informed by the situation on the ground. In several parts of the North Island, the situation remains incredibly difficult for the communities affected in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle. The National Emergency Management Agency’s role is to ensure local responses are getting what they need. Under a state of national emergency—as was declared on 14 February and extended on Monday—NEMA has the ability to direct and prioritise nationwide resources. This includes bringing in extra support from the New Zealand Defence Force, Police, Fire and Emergency New Zealand, and other agencies as required. This has involved the provision of critical supplies, logistics, and specialist skills to aid the local response and recovery. As many of us said in the House yesterday, I want to thank all those who are working tirelessly to support the communities who were hit by Cyclone Gabrielle.

Hon Aupito William Sio: What support has been coordinated by NEMA to local mayoral relief funds?

Hon KIERAN McANULTY: The National Emergency Management Agency has been advising the Government on contributions to mayoral and regional relief funds. These funds are used to provide immediate short-term support in areas affected by emergencies. Once approved, NEMA coordinates the distribution of Government contributions to these funds. So far, in response to the cyclone, the Government has contributed $3.7 million to mayoral and regional relief funds. These contributions reflect that local communities and councils understand where the immediate needs are and how to best help families, community organisations, and marae. They play a small but important part of the Government’s total support package.

Hon Aupito William Sio: What support has been provided by the National Crisis Management Centre?

Hon KIERAN McANULTY: The National Crisis Management Centre, which is housed under the Beehive, has provided leadership of central government agencies and the local civil defence groups working on the ground. Its role is critical in managing the array of priority tasks that are required to support the emergency response. It is staffed by emergency management professionals who link in with representatives of the core agencies who are also represented. I am consistently impressed by the tireless work and dedication of those professionals and how they go about their tasks to protect New Zealanders in the wake of the cyclone.

Hon Aupito William Sio: Can he tell us what other support does NEMA provide to local emergency responses?

Hon KIERAN McANULTY: NEMA has surged its staff to impacted regions to support the response to the cyclone as well as the response to the Auckland floods several weeks earlier. They have helped with activities like planning, logistics, and getting information out to the public. NEMA is also providing expert capability to support local responses through fly-in emergency management assistance teams. They provide specialist emergency management capabilities to assist and support local incident management teams working in the affected areas. These teams are made up of specialist emergency managements with a mix of attributes, skills, and experience to go wherever they are required. In response to Cyclone Gabrielle, they have been deployed to Napier, Hastings, Wairoa, and Gisborne to help boost those local responses, having been already deployed to Auckland earlier.

Question No. 10—Education

10. ERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays) to the Minister of Education: On what date was she provided with the term 3 2022 attendance data by the Ministry of Education, and why was the data not released publicly until just yesterday?

Hon JAN TINETTI (Minister of Education): To the first part of the question, my office received the final copy of the term 3 attendance report from the Ministry of Education on 14 December. Additional data was then sent to my office on 20 December. And to the second part of the question, the Ministry of Education are responsible for the release of the attendance data. Releasing the data right before Christmas when schools had finished for the year would have been cynical. Therefore, the ministry released the data at the start of the year to help raise awareness of the issue so that parents, students, and schools are reminded that we need to continue to have a razor-sharp focus on turning the attendance rates around in 2023.

Erica Stanford: Why is she continuing to say that the release of the term 3 data is not up to her but the Ministry of Education when comments from a senior analyst from the Ministry of Education in an email to my office state that the release of the data depends on the Minister’s approval?

Hon JAN TINETTI: I can categorically tell that member that the Ministry of Education is responsible for the data. I have no say over that. The ministry aims to get the data out as quickly as possible, but it is important that the data is both accurate and the contextual information is provided. I’m advised that sometimes this process can be delayed for publication. For example, last year, term 3 data for 2021 was released in April 2022, so if we were to follow the member’s logic, we are actually early with the term 3 data this year. I also remind the member that there is no requirement to release the data.

Erica Stanford: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I seek leave to table an email received by my office from a Ministry of Education official, stating the final attendance data depends on the Minister’s approval.

SPEAKER: Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There appears to be none. It may be tabled.

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

Erica Stanford: Who is the public supposed to believe: the deputy secretary at the Ministry of Education, who on 7 December at select committee said that the data was expected any day now and would be released before Christmas; or the Minister of Education, who has claimed in recent media interviews that another eight weeks of analysis was required, which happened to perfectly coincide with her policy announcement yesterday?

Hon JAN TINETTI: Arguing about when the data is released is a waste of time. The Government is focused on solutions. We have solutions about putting children and young people at the centre of the response to the attendance issue. If the member wants to continue carrying on arguing about when the data is released, carry on, but that won’t make the difference; our policies will.

Erica Stanford: Can the Minister categorically state here in the House today that she played no part in the delay of the release of the information when it was made available to her on 20 December?

Hon JAN TINETTI: I already have. It is a decision for the Ministry of Education.

Erica Stanford: Can she explain how releasing the attendance data before Christmas would have been cynical, as she stated in the media yesterday and again today, but sitting on the data for another two months and releasing it the same day as her policy announcement is not cynical?

Hon JAN TINETTI: Absolutely. Yes, I can. I know that the member has not worked in schools, but schools have finished by 20 December. Who will make the big difference to attendance? It’s our whānau and it’s our schools. Putting it out when they can have the focus on it and not be concerned, when they’ve had a really tough year, around what they’re doing the following year—that won’t make the difference. I know this from experience. Please listen.

Question No. 11—Small Business

11. ARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa) to the Minister for Small Business: How is the Government supporting small businesses affected by recent extreme weather events?

Hon GINNY ANDERSEN (Minister for Small Business): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, firstly, I’d like to give my condolences to those people in New Zealand who lost loved ones in the recent extreme weather events that New Zealand has gone through. It’s just two months into the year and small businesses have faced unprecedented challenges. The Government has moved quickly to support those small businesses in two different ways. Auckland small businesses have been provided with a resilience package of $5 million, and just this week we have announced an additional $50 million package in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle to deliver interim emergency business support to both small businesses and the primary sector.

Arena Williams: How will these emergency packages support small businesses?

Hon GINNY ANDERSEN: It is my priority as the Minister for Small Businesses that those areas get the support that they need. They are the hardest hit during this time and it’s important that we provide that support. The Auckland package provides not only mental health support but also business continuity to those businesses that need it. The $50 million Cyclone Gabrielle package announced this week will assist businesses and workers by providing a wide range of supports. We are working closely on the ground with local business associations, iwi, and local government to ensure this package is focused where the greatest need lies.

Arena Williams: When will small businesses start to receive this support?

Hon GINNY ANDERSEN: As quickly as possible. Already we have small businesses who have received funding in Auckland. Funding as part of the Auckland package has been released and we are working on the ground up to make sure we tailor the response to those and how they need it.

Arena Williams: What feedback has she had from small businesses who have been affected by these extreme weather events?

Hon GINNY ANDERSEN: I’ve visited small businesses who have been directly impacted by the floods in Auckland. Since then, I’ve been in regular contact with chambers of commerce right across those regions that have been impacted by Cyclone Gabrielle. The message they gave me, loud and clear in person, is they want a Government that will walk alongside of them to recover, rebuild, and be resilient. That’s exactly what we will continue to provide throughout this recovery.

Question No. 12—Transport

12. SIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga) to the Minister of Transport: Does he still expect “early works to commence in 2023” on Auckland light rail; if so, on what date in 2023 will early works commence?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): Yes; tomorrow.

Hon Members: Ha, ha!

SPEAKER: Order! Supplementaries are heard in silence.

Simeon Brown: On what date will the first metre of light rail track be completed?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: What we’ll be doing this year is moving into the commencement of early works, followed later this year by the confirmation of station locations and moving forward with the consenting process. We expect main works on the Auckland light rail project to begin in approximately 2025.

Simeon Brown: Does the Minister think that spending $30 billion on the light rail project in Auckland is a better use of money than fixing the broken roads and bridges in the Hawke’s Bay which have been destroyed by Cyclone Gabrielle?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: The member is, in the first instance, wrong in the figures that he uses in his question. Secondly, if the member believes that any Minister of Transport or Government should only proceed with one project or priority in the transport portfolio at a time, then that would explain the mess that this Government inherited from an under-investment in transport in the nine years that that lot were in control of the portfolio. For the record, our Government this week has invested $250 million to support the people of cyclone-ravaged regions by providing that commitment to rebuilding their devastated roading network. For the record, it is this Government which has increased investment in the maintenance of our State highway network by 50 percent after the National Party froze it for eight years. For the record, it is this Government which is investing $8.7 billion through the New Zealand Upgrade Programme to deliver critical projects across regional New Zealand. And for the record, it is this Government which has invested $8 billion to rebuild a broken rail network that that party neglected for its nine years in Government. We are the party that invests in transport infrastructure now, but also for the future.

Simeon Brown: Is it true that Auckland light rail only survived the Government’s policy review as a concession to him pulling out of the Labour Party leadership race?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: No. Auckland light rail is an important project, because this is a Government that actually believes in and invests in Auckland and is aware of the growth that it will experience over the next 30 years. It is an important project because it is part of an integrated plan to finally deliver the people of Auckland a linked up public transport of the kind that they have not had for decades and decades. That’s why we are not only investing in Auckland light rail, but why, in the coming months, we’ll be opening the next stages of the northern corridor on the North Shore. It’s why we’ve built the first stage of the Eastern Busway into Pakuranga and will shortly be putting shovels in the ground for the second stage through to the Botany electorate. It’s why we’re under way with the electrification of rail to Pukekohe. It’s why we are protecting the corridor for mass rapid transit between the airport and Botany, and it’s why, by the middle of this year, we’ll have a plan to take forward the alternative Waitematā Harbour crossing. On this side of the House, we believe in Auckland and we’ll actually make the investments that we need for our Queen City.

Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement

Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement

Debate resumed from 21 February.

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Deputy Prime Minister): I just want to start by saying that we, as a country, have a lot to be proud of, and what we have come to realise over the course of the last 3½ weeks is that one of those things is that, in the midst of hard times, New Zealanders do come together and do recognise there is strength in solidarity. On 27 January, as many Aucklanders were just settling in to what was meant to be the long anniversary weekend, the weather system hit suddenly. As a result of this night, four people lost their lives. Many more would be homeless, and thousands would be wondering if their house would remain habitable. My aroha goes out to all of these people and their families.

That night, I saw firsthand the true spirit of our nation, as we banded together to help one another. First responders went above and beyond to make sure people were able to get to safe places. In my own electorate of Kelston, the spirit of a community came together to make sure our people had a safe, warm, and, above all, dry place to spend the night. What we saw was individuals and families walking through the doors of that hall at St Leonards Road School in Kelston, having experienced trauma and also coming with a number of complex challenges. I met many of those families and many of them shared with me their stories and their experiences, and it is incredibly humbling when you are sitting there in the middle of the night listening to these traumatic stories firsthand and people are sharing with you the horrible circumstances that they have had to endure.

I’ll never forget the family that came through who spoke of the woman having been trapped inside her house. The water had risen to such an extent that the front door would not open and she could not get out. The back door, when she opened it—there had been a slip; so she could not get out the back, and she could not escape through a window. She was fortunate she was able to get her hands on a cellphone to ring 111 and was rescued by the emergency services. I spoke to one woman who carried her child up the street, with water up to her neck, and had to rely on a neighbour to take over, given the height of the water and the difficulty she was having carrying her child. Not only did they experience trauma but they came in with a number of complex challenges. It became apparent very quickly that a number of people had lost their medication in the floods—one woman with breast cancer; a number of people with high blood pressure and heart conditions; one man who had only 30 percent vision and had lost his eye drops and needed them urgently to be able to retain the vision that he did have; a tetraplegic man came in on that night because he was flooded out of his house.

These are the very real and traumatic experiences that New Zealanders endured not only in Auckland. Within a week, we had another weather event. The cyclones have meant that Auckland, Northland, the Coromandel, the Bay of Plenty, the East Coast, the Wairarapa, and the Hawke’s Bay have all been tragically affected by what ensued from the weather events. But, again, just like I saw in Kelston, we have seen communities band together and come together to support the people that were affected. Sadly, 11 more New Zealanders are known to have lost their lives, with more missing or still unaccounted for. Our hearts, all in this House—I know this is true—go out to their families and communities, who are grieving right now.

These extreme weather events have taught us many lessons, which we will apply in the rebuild and recovery, but they have also shown us the very best of us. They have shown that we as a nation have each other’s backs when the chips are down. Yesterday, the Prime Minister laid out for this House the Government’s intentions for supporting New Zealand families and businesses through these difficult times. I want to echo what the Prime Minister said yesterday: our Government’s number one priority is to support New Zealand families and businesses through difficult economic conditions and the impact of cyclone and floods. We are committed to building back better, building back safer, and building back smarter. The Prime Minister and Minister Robertson will have more details on the cyclone and flood recovery in the coming weeks.

There has been a number of things that I have been reflecting on over the course of the last few weeks, but one of them is the importance of our welfare system, and I have said on a number of occasions, over the course of the last five years, that our welfare system is there for every New Zealander. Quite often, there is a stigma attached to the welfare system and assertions that there are only certain groups of New Zealanders that need to access the support. This weather event showed us why it’s important to recognise that the welfare system is there for everyone. We’ve had $36 million go out already in civil defence payments. Over 72,000 people have accessed those civil defence payments. We’ve had Ministry of Social Development staff at almost all evacuation centres, where possible, across the country, not working by themselves but working alongside the very important community groups and iwi organisations and first responders, to form that collaborative effort that needs to be there to support these whānau during difficult times. It also made me reflect on where we started with the welfare system, which was changing the culture to ensure that all New Zealanders had their dignity upheld by the welfare system, and I think, at this point in time, and I would hope, every person in this House should agree that, when New Zealanders are experiencing traumatic experiences—in this particular example, it is weather events and having to evacuate their homes in many instances—they deserve to be able to turn to a welfare system that upholds their dignity and works for them.

I do want to recognise the community, iwi organisations, and NGOs that have been working. Many of them got in there early. They used the resource that they had. Fortunately, a number were set up because they’d been resourced through Care in the Community, but they were able to use that resource to immediately respond to the needs of whānau. In those early days, when I spoke to social services and community organisations, they were very clear with me that they would have enough for that time, but it would be important that we turned our eye to what they would need in the coming weeks, and we’ve certainly done that. We announced last week the $11.5 million package that would be there to support them, in some instances to help replenish the stocks that they have exhausted because of the support they have been providing people impacted by the weather events—and, in many instances, to support them for what will come, because the recovery will not be instant. There will be many families who will continue to experience challenges because of what has occurred.

I also want to point out the importance of workforce at this time. We have spent the last five years investing in areas where we’ve had workforce shortages, particularly in areas like trades and apprenticeships. We are going to need them more than ever over the coming months, as we recover and rebuild, and I want to acknowledge that that investment was to address the workforce shortages we were already experiencing, but I also want to acknowledge that we can’t take our foot off the accelerator now, and this Government’s focus and prioritisation on building the workforce that we need for New Zealand continues to be a priority and will be more important than ever given the horrific impacts that we have seen on people’s homes across the country.

I want to end by making sure that I fully thank and acknowledge all of the people who have been out there helping those families that have been impacted. In my own electorate, we have had former All Blacks, we have had community groups, we have iwi on the ground—we’ve got many volunteers that aren’t necessarily getting paid to provide support to these whānau, many of them impacted in some way too by the floods or the cyclone. And I know that that effort is being replicated across the country. So I want to acknowledge each and every one of those people who are undertaking that work. I want to encourage them, because the work will continue for some time, and we need to continue to work in solidarity if we are going to address the needs of the whānau and communities that have been impacted by these weather events. Mālō ‘aupito.

NICOLA WILLIS (Deputy Leader—National): These are dark and foreboding times for New Zealand. Never before have I witnessed and stood amongst as much destruction and devastation as I saw in Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne last week. It is apparent, I think, to all members of this House that in this dark hour, we must back New Zealanders in a great time of need, and we have a great responsibility as leaders to deliver for them.

As I stand here, Cyclone Gabrielle has wreaked its havoc. I extend our utmost thoughts to those who have experienced the loss of family members, with the death toll of 11 people—to all of your friends and families. I think of the more than a thousand people who are still uncontactable, and the great anguish and anxiety their friends and families must be experiencing.

My thoughts are with all of those people and families and communities who have had their lives turned upside down, their houses destroyed, their farms destroyed, their jobs gone, and their possessions gone. To everyone in Napier, the Coromandel, Hastings, Tolaga Bay, Gisborne, Auckland—all of you who are anxious, who are exhausted, who are frustrated, and who, in too many cases, are feeling hopeless. I think our job in this House is to give these New Zealanders hope.

National will continue to support the efforts needed to respond to this great disaster. We continue to stand behind all of those working on the response. We continue to back the need for a rebuild, and we know that that is both immediate and medium term. But we also see that hope will be about more than the words that are offered. Hope will be about delivery. So how is it that we will contribute to that?

The first thing I want to do is to shine a spotlight on the heroes in our community who rose to this time of need, because I see hope in them, and one of them is a man called Cameron Taylor. I had the great privilege of spending some time with him on Friday, and he told me of his rapid evacuation from his home in Hawke’s Bay as he saw the rivers rising. As he drove out of the floodwaters into safety, his immediate thought was for those families living near him who may not have been so lucky to escape. So, putting health and safety rules to the side, Cameron talked to a pilot, he got himself up in his chopper, and he went and rescued families from their roofs. He had no thought for himself. He was selfless, he was brave, and he was courageous. Even when he thought that he had rescued all the people and he saw a hole in a roof with a metal bar and a white cloth extending out of it, he said, “Let’s hover the chopper there.”, and he pulled with his bare hands an elderly couple from their ceiling cavity, where they were floating on water.

These are acts of heroism, and as Cameron shared this trauma with me, he was very slow to then talk about the fact that his business, which employs 300 people, has suffered immense destruction: orchards gone, packing house filled with mud, cool-store broken. So as we work together over these next few weeks and months to rebuild those areas ravaged by disaster, I’m going to think of Cameron and of how we need to be accountable to him.

I am worried about whether or not this Government has the track record to properly deliver in these circumstances, because we do have a backdrop here of a Labour Government who have failed to deliver infrastructure, starting with the promise of 100,000 KiwiBuild homes never built and the light rail promise that was meant to be at Auckland Airport by 2021—not one metre laid. But, more recently, I think of the promise from Chris Hipkins and Grant Robertson following COVID that they would build back better and that they would immediately fund shovel-ready infrastructure projects. The words were there, and they started 225 of these projects—they’re great at starting things—but they haven’t finished them. Only 49 have been completed.

So I stand with those New Zealanders who in this hour of need say, “Nicola, I am worried that they’re going to fudge it, that they’re going to forget about us, and that they’re not going to get it done.” It’s all very well and good for Minister opposite to say that this time it will be different, but New Zealanders know that the road here was paved with Labour’s good intentions, and good intentions won’t get the bridges built. Good intentions won’t pay the supermarket bills of workers who lose their jobs. Good intentions won’t deliver the housing that this Government has already had five years to deliver and hasn’t been able to do it.

So we will stand proudly in this House to hold the Government accountable, and we will propose smarter ways for delivering the recovery that New Zealand so badly needs. But my thoughts, when I think of what hope is needed in the country now, extends beyond the rebuild. We must not forget that whether New Zealanders have been touched by the cyclone and the floods or not, they are in the midst of a cost of living crisis, and that cost of living crisis has gone on and on for month upon month.

We have now, today, had the 10th increase in the official cash rate. We’ve never had the cash rate rise this fast before. The only time it’s risen this many times was under the last Labour Government, and even then it was five. The very real reality that mortgage holders across the country are looking at is flicking from having a mortgage with a two or a three in front of it, to a mortgage with a 6 or 7 percent rate. That is hundreds of dollars per fortnight, and this is at the same time that the Reserve Bank tells us that inflation—that thief in everyone’s pocket—is here to stay for some time longer.

Even while the US inflation rate dips well below ours and even while Canada starts to say goodbye, it’s here to stay in New Zealand, and I find it unfathomable—absolutely unfathomable—that at this time of crisis, when New Zealanders are seeking hope and confidence and certainty, the finance Minister and his Prime Minister think it appropriate to dangle over New Zealanders’ heads the prospect of yet another tax. This is a sword of Damocles that should not be there at this time, because, actually, the job that those two men need to do right now is give people confidence that there are better times ahead, and you don’t do that by saying, “Actually, we see this as a great opportunity to pad down your pockets for some more cash for our pet projects.”

How can it be OK that at a time when there are New Zealanders who don’t even know whether they’re going to have a job next week and who worry about whether or not they’re going to be able to keep their home, the Ministers opposite think it’s a great time to double down on their pet political project of light rail? Those workers, those engineers, and those diggers need to be helping out on our rural roads and getting lifelines and infrastructure connections going again, and a good Government would see that.

So National stands here knowing that many people are relying on Parliament to deliver for them. Well, we back them. We stand with New Zealanders, not just with words but with delivery. That is our track record, because we know that only with delivery will New Zealanders have the strong foundations to bounce back from this worst of times. We will hold the Government to account. This one’s for you, Cameron.

Hon PEENI HENARE (Minister for Whānau Ora): Tēnā koe, e te Māngai o te Whare. Ka noho ahau ki roto i te reo Māori mō te wāhanga poto.

He karanga a aituā he tai timu he tai pari. He tai ka tae atu ki hea. Ka tae atu ki a nunumi mā, ki a roroa mā, ki te hunga kua oti atu ki te pō. Kia tāpae ake ki runga i waku kupu mihi ki te tāhuhu kōrero o tō tātou Whare te hunga mate ki roto i ngā wiki tata kua pahure ake nei.

Kua kōrerohia nei e te Whare mō te āhuatanga ki ngā tāngata i riro i te horonuku o Muriwai, ana kua kōrerohia te Whare mō te āhuatanga ki ngā tāngata i riro atu ki roto i te waipuke ki roto i te Matau-a-Māui, ki roto anō hoki i te Tai Rāwhiti. Na ka tāpae, ake ki ngā mate huhua o aua tāima, anā te ingoa o tōku matua a Vince Heperi, i riro ki roto i te pōwhiri nui a Te Matatini inanahi rā ki roto o Tāmaki-makau-rau.

Nō reira, ko te āhuatanga o te ao Māori kia mihihia, kia tangihia wō tātou mate i te tuatahi, ka mutu ka huri tū atu ki ngā kaupapa o te ao kikokiko, nō reira āpiti hono tātai hono rātou ki rātou. Āpiti hono, tātai hono, tātou te hunga ora, tēnā koutou.

[Greetings, Madam Speaker. I shall speak in the Māori language for a short time.

The call of tragedy is an ebbing and flowing tide. It is a tide which could affect anyone. It reaches to the distant underworld, to those who have gone forever. I present my words of acknowledgment to the ridgepole of our House for those who have died in recent weeks.

The House has discussed the situation of the people who died in the land slips at Muriwai, and the House has discussed the situation of those who died in the flooding in Hawke’s Bay and on the East Coast. I also add, to those many deaths at those times, the name of the respected Vince Heperi, who died just yesterday during the welcoming ceremony at Te Matatini in Auckland.

It is customary in the Māori world to acknowledge and grieve for our dead at the outset, and then we can turn to the issues of the physical world. And so the lines are unbroken; let the dead be with dead. The lines are unbroken to us the living. Greetings to you all.]

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for allowing me the opportunity, as is customary on marae across the country, to farewell the departed first. Of course, I acknowledge those who we sadly lost in the weather events that have plagued this country over the past few weeks. I also add to that my condolences of the family of Vince Heperi, who sadly passed away at the Te Matatini Pōwhiri yesterday in Tāmaki-makau-rau. All of those who have passed, we share, in this House, we share the one sentiment of condolences and love to their families. It is, too, in that tone that we look towards those who have responded in these weather events that have plagued our country over the last few weeks, but, indeed, in the years gone by.

Today, in question time, my colleague the Hon Kieran McAnulty made clear that only three times in our history have we declared a national state of emergency—one under his watch as Minister for Emergency Management. I can say one of the other times when I was Minister of Civil Defence as we responded to COVID-19.

The track record of this Government in responding to crises that affect this country is quite clear. We’ve managed to navigate the tricky waters of COVID-19—the same waters that the international community had to wade through and navigate through—and I can say that the track record from this Government is one of success. We’ve come through that particular period well off and better off than many of our counterparts that we compare ourselves to around the world.

Then when we look to these weather events, I can tell you, Madam Speaker, that the same true: that on this side of the House, this Government looks towards responding to those important matters that arise from the crises that our country is currently facing. I can tell you, Madam Speaker, not just in Tāmaki-makau-rau through the floods but also as Cyclone Gabrielle bore down on this country, I’m proud to say that those first responders in Fire and Emergency New Zealand, in the New Zealand Defence Force, and in our communities spurred into action and responded appropriately.

I want to acknowledge for my part, as Minister for Whānau Ora, the Whānau Ora providers and the Whānau Ora commissioning agencies around this country. They dipped into their own pockets to allow an instant response for families in affected areas. They also pivoted their resources away from what would be considered “business as usual” because of the exceptional circumstances our communities found themselves in—pivoting workforce, pivoting resources to make sure that the communities had what they need.

The same is said about the Māori health providers in this country. They’ve already dipped into cash reserves of their own to make sure not only were they able to respond to the weather events but also continue to keep our communities safe from COVID-19. When we find ourselves in an evacuation centre—and I was fortunate to visit a number of those evacuation centres during the Auckland floods—those health providers were at the door continually reminding ourselves that COVID is still in our community, and when you come into contact during emergency situations with people who are unknown to you and your community, it is important that we must remind ourselves that COVID-19 is still in our community.

But I want to acknowledge those health and Whānau Ora providers because they did an exceptional job. In order for us to support them, what we’ve been able to do is relieve some of the contractual obligations that we might ordinarily see under “business as usual”. That’s important because it’s too much to expect them to do business as usual while responding to these exceptional circumstances due to the weather events. I’m really proud of the way we’ve been able to support them, and I want to reiterate to those providers and those communities that this Government is here, this Government is listening, and this Government will stand by them during the recovery.

We’ve just heard from the other side of the House that this Government has been “light on delivery”. Well, I can say that that side of the House promised bridges, once upon a time—in fact, in my time in this House—and delivered nothing. I can also say that that side of the House has also promised the kinds of investments in infrastructure that our communities have been calling for, but from them we’ve seen nothing. From this side of the House, despite the exceptional circumstances of the weather events, despite the exceptional circumstances of COVID-19, (1) we’ve responded to them, and (2) we continue to do the mahi to make sure that the infrastructure that this country so richly deserves is having investment made into it and is making sure that we can continue to progress. It’s that kind of investment that will make sure that our country will not only navigate these challenging times but also come out with great prosperity.

Part of that, too, is, of course, making sure that those who are affected most by these weather events we are able to respond but also support them to recover. We’ve already made a number of announcements towards investing in our infrastructure that has been broken because of these weather events. We’ve also made a number of investments into those who have helped respond. We’ve made a commitment to those responders that we will be there to continue to listen to them, to make sure that our response is agile enough to meet their needs.

What’s really important is not only should it have national coordination, which is what this Government is promising, but also that the regional voice is being heard during the recovery. We’ve said it many times in this House: what happens in Te Tai Rāwhiti is different to what happens in Te Tai Tokerau. The response required in Te Matau-a-Māui is different to the response that will be required in Tāmaki-makau-rau. Therefore, it’s important that we continue to take a strong regional approach, which is what the Prime Minister has announced in supporting the recovery from the weather events. I wholeheartedly support that approach, and I’m sure that many of the members in this House, as they reflect on their constituencies and their electorates, that that local voice is really important. I’m proud that our Prime Minister has decided to make the call to coordinate and to support centrally, but more importantly, to drive those outcomes and those desired outcomes for the recovery locally, because that’s going to be important.

There are a number of other things that I just want to briefly touch on. One is, of course, we know that the bread and butter issues that continue to face our families are still there despite the weather events. So we’ve got to make sure that we’re working on both of those things. And, of course, this Government has already announced the increase to the minimum wage, which is really important. That puts money in the pockets of the lowest-paid people in our country. That makes sure that many of them who are Māori and Pacific and other ethnic communities who find themselves in the lower-paid ranks of this country continues to put more support behind them, continues to back the work that they do by paying them appropriately.

It isn’t all bad news. I want to finish my contribution by saying, today starts the Te Matatini festival. They call it “the Olympics of kapa haka”. It is the biggest Māori event on the calendar, not just in this country but in the world. And as thousands around the world and, indeed, locally, will tune in to watch their family, their loved ones, despite the challenges that we’ve faced over the last few years, come together in spirit, come together in performance on stage, to share with the rest of the world our culture, the Māori culture, the indigenous culture of this land. I welcome one and all to Tāmaki-makau-rau and to my electorate to partake in what is truly a festival of love, a festival of culture, and a festival of hope.

Nō reira, haere mai ki a au ki runga o Tāmaki. Kia ora, tātou katoa.

[I invite you to visit me in Auckland. Greetings, one and all.]

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Kia ora. The next call is a split call. I call on Ricardo Menéndez March for five minutes.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Like many in this House, I’d like to begin my contribution by acknowledging the lives lost, the families and communities that have been displaced by climate change - induced extreme weather events that we have seen recently. It has been deeply distressing to see the extent of the damage and the challenge ahead of us.

But what we have seen as well on the ground has been the communities that have rallied together to support one another—groups that have organically now been created as a result of the devastation and have tried to put whatever little resources they each have to support their neighbours and their communities. In my own neighbourhood, I’ve seen the student volunteer army deploying people to help with the clean-up. I have seen marae and schools responding rapidly to the needs of our communities. I’ve also seen firsthand the families that have been affected. Like many others here in Parliament, we’ve visited our neighbours and the people in our roads. I’ve seen migrant families that have struggled to access the support that they require, and have required assistance to communicate in English the accessibility needs of our disabled communities who are often left in inaccessible shelter.

But it is not enough as MPs just to visit these communities on the ground without acknowledging that what we are seeing are the inequalities that are laid bare as a result of this disaster—inequalities that in fact have been here for decades. And so we need to set the bar higher than simply accepting that poverty exists or that the research tells us that climate change is very much human induced.

We need to confront these realities with action, and to echo the Prime Minister’s words, business as usual won’t work anymore. But this cannot just be a slogan; it needs to be matched with the action that researchers and communities have been calling for, because climate change won’t be impacting everyone equally. In fact, the communities who often contribute the least to climate change are some of the ones who are going to be most impacted as a result of these weather events.

The communities who struggle to make ends meet on a good sunny day will be struggling even more in the face of extreme weather events. The people who have been receiving income support, who have been facing insecure housing—these are some of the communities who are paying the highest price despite contributing the least to these weather events. And this is why the response and the recovery needs to take a climate justice lens. It needs to include guaranteeing a livable income for all so that we build resilience in our communities. It needs to guarantee quality public housing so that people have a secure home to live in despite the weather events. It needs to ensure that our income support system treats people with dignity, and I want to acknowledge the Deputy Prime Minister’s words around having a welfare system that treats people with dignity. And that’s all well and done to have a smiling face at the door of Work and Income, but when benefit levels continue being below the poverty line, that is not treating people with dignity. Until we lift people above the poverty line and ensure that the guaranteed life of dignity, we are not treating people with the respect that they deserve.

I want to acknowledge the many migrant workers as well who have been impacted by these weather events, including Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) workers in the regions, many who have faced precarious and exploitative conditions. If we’re going to take a climate justice lens to recovery, it also means ensuring that the conditions of these workers improves. This is no time for lengthy reviews; this is time for action. The changes needed to happen to the RSE scheme, and the improvements we need to make for migrant workers in general, who will be contributing to our recovery, need to come now.

Part of business as usual not continuing the same needs to require tackling and holding to account those that are responsible for climate change—the corporations that are ripping off our communities and who are polluting our environment. Taxing the wealthy few so that we can provide livable incomes and good public services for all is critical as part of this recovery. The Greens are committed to fighting for these things to guarantee a livable planet for all. Kia ora.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I will begin—as we all have in this House—by acknowledging those lives lost as a result of the extreme weather events of recent weeks, but also those who have lost so much and are in the midst of that loss right now.

I know that the anxiety we experienced in Tāmaki-makau-rau was as a result of the extreme experience of the floods where we were caught off guard—well, many of us certainly were—and the impact was felt so, so deeply as part of that shock, and then to wait at home with our go bags for the cyclone to come. That anxiety—that climate anxiety, as we have an entire generation call it now—is part of the DNA of our nation right now and it will be going forward. So I just want to acknowledge that and that there are victims still living with that uncertainty now.

But I do want to also acknowledge that this is actually part of a global stress. We are experiencing an existential crisis much like the COVID pandemic, but one that the Island nations around us, as we sit in the Pacific community, have been telling us about for years. We know that there are small island atolls that have already been evacuated over the past decade, as a whole community, to bigger islands. We know and we learnt, as part of a visit just last year by our Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee that even in Fiji—one of the largest of the Pacific Islands and the most stable of economies—multiple islands and dozens of villages have been moved already as a result of rising seas.

So the evacuations, the loss of home, the loss of lives, the uncertainty that we have experienced at an extreme level this month has been experienced by our Pacific Island community for years. And they have been raising the alarm bells for years and years in global forums.

New Zealand wasn’t much of a leader in terms of global policy when it came to health equity with COVID, although we had a great response here for us. My hope, as a Green, is that we recognise the global character of climate crisis. The idea of climate justice requires us to be a bold voice for climate mitigation right now—we finally learnt—but also that prevention stuff; that we stand with our Asia-Pacific neighbours; that we recognise that the floods in Pakistan, that were incredible in the images that we saw and the devastation, are a reflection of what we’re experiencing right now; that the lack of resiliency in Syria and Turkey, who are experiencing extreme devastation as a result of earthquakes right now, is a reflection of what could happen here if we don’t build back resiliently; but that we need to do that as a global community, that none of us are in fact going to be OK if some of us are struggling, that equality is part of the climate response, and that the time to be bold for both global equality and climate action is now.

I met, a couple of years ago—before the COVID crisis, when travel was possible—the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty, Philip Alston, and he’d given himself, as part of his mandate to look into extreme poverty, the mandate to look at climate change and the impact on poverty. He had found such extreme risk for a rise in poverty and the devastation of climate change as an impact on both raising levels of poverty in the global sphere, and also impacting those already in poverty, that he called it a risk of “climate apartheid”.

So our response needs to be fulsome. It needs to be bold and it needs to reflect our experience as a Pacific nation—one that knows the impacts of climate change right now and has been warned about it for many years before now.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The next call is a split call.

Hon GINNY ANDERSEN (Minister for Small Business): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. It’s a privilege to stand and take a call on the Prime Minister’s statement today, and the following debate.

First of all, I wish to acknowledge the strain right now on small businesses in New Zealand. Not only do we have a small business community that has had to go through the turbulent times of COVID—with particular reference to those small businesses in Auckland—but since then, we have had the Auckland floods, and since then we have had Cyclone Gabrielle. There is not a time in my lifetime I can remember where the business community has had to grapple with such unprecedented challenges, and with those I have met on the ground that is exactly the words I hear back from those small-business owners. Not only are they faced with the difficulties sometimes of navigating the local government processes, of having a building or a property stickered and going through that process but, in addition to that, there’s also the insurance process, to get an assessor, to also be able to try and get business continuity insurance in place, and then begin the massive task ahead of repairing and rebuilding. But what struck me the most is that, out of all those concerns, out of all of that—paperwork and thinking that they’ve carried on their shoulders each night as they went home—the primary concern was for their workers; for their workers and their families because they wanted to continue to provide wages so that those people who relied upon them as the business owner could continue to take home a wage each week. That was what really struck me the most, and I see that in the resilience, the innovation, and the amazing tenacity that our small-business community has. I know it is that tenacity that will stand in incredibly good strength as we continue to rebuild and do that in a way that we’re more resilient to future weather events such as the ones that we’ve been through recently.

The Government support package has been tailored to respond to the specific needs in each of those areas. In relation to Auckland, it’s been great to see that in the past few days we’ve already had the first payments going out to small businesses. To have that being transferred in such a short period of time is good to see, because I know it is needed. In terms of Auckland, not only have we got the business continuity support but in that package is specific provision for mental health support. That comes in the form of a programme that already existed called the First Steps programme which provided expert support and resources to business owners and leaders who were feeling overwhelmed and isolated and under pressure from the recent weather events.

So my message today for anyone who knows someone who is under that strain is that help is there, support is there. Whether that’s an online resource or whether you need to take steps further and have some one-on-one time with someone who can provide you with a plan and a framework to move forward, that’s so important because the number one rule I always think of in terms of mental health is you’ve got to get yourself OK before you can help others, and that is so critical at times like this when pressure is building up.

So in terms of the Cyclone Gabrielle package—it came pretty quick off the heels in terms of the Auckland flood response—we’ve made $50 million available, not only to small business but also to the wider primary sector. I’d like to stress how important it is that we do a ground-up approach because we still do not know the exact extent of the damage, and we know that some businesses are impacted far more than others. So it’s important that we work with local community groups, business networks, iwi, local councils, chambers of commerce—all of those on-the-ground networks will be essential for us to understand what is the best way to provide ongoing support and work alongside of the business community to build back resilience, to build back stronger telecommunications, to build back stronger road networks, and to make sure that our communities are set up for the future as we go through more of these climate change - related events.

I would like to finish up by saying how much I admire and respect those on the ground who have mucked in, rolled up their sleeves, dug up silt, and helped out people. The one thing that’s come through is it’s kept people smiling to know their neighbours are looking out for them, and it fills my heart to see that Kiwi spirit shine through. Thank you.

SHANAN HALBERT (Labour—Northcote): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Today I stand to acknowledge the Prime Minister’s statement, presented at an incredibly difficult time on the heels of one of the most significant weather events in Aotearoa New Zealand that we have seen this century. My heart goes out to our people in Auckland and our communities on the East Coast and to friends and whānau in the Hawke’s Bay who have faced devastation and such sad times.

As I listened to the Prime Minister’s statement, I was heartened by his outlook—the combination of our Government’s aspiration, optimism, and resilience for New Zealand and for those of us in Tāmaki-makau-rau Auckland—because we have to be optimistic at times like this. Our Prime Minister is standing by New Zealanders, looking them squarely in the eyes and telling them that they are not alone and we are committed to rebuilding the regions—to Auckland and the groups and communities that felt the brunt of the cyclone and recent floods. There has been a $50 million support package recently announced, of which half of this—$25 million—is for the primary sector recovery from Cyclone Gabrielle. This is for our farmers, growers, whenua Māori owners, and rural communities who have also been affected.

And, of course, this Government has been dealing with many tough issues before this particular cyclone. We are working to tackle the country’s infrastructure needs, and as chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, I can attest to this. As an Aucklander, I know the importance of improving our roads, the need for an improved digital connectivity system, better public transport, and the pipes for new homes and growth. We know the difference that good infrastructure makes. The Government’s investment in water infrastructure in Northcote was lifesaving in the recent floods that preceded the cyclone, compared to the devastating impacts on the Wairau Valley, just next door. We know the urgency to get on with an additional connection across the Waitematā Harbour. Given our certain reliance on the existing harbour bridge, a third harbour crossing is an absolute must. And we know the value of quality housing developments, like the Northcote development, in addressing the housing shortfall that we inherited.

We know the difference our property investment programme has made to our local schools. Every school and every child has benefited. Attending school and kura regularly is crucial to student progress and achievement, and I’m a very, very strong believer in quality education, having worked in this particular space, and, might I say, I’m very passionate about it too. Education changes lives. However, we’ve got to work on our attendance challenges that confront us at the moment with the declining attendance statistics since 2015. The recent work on our Attendance and Engagement Strategy must see education improvements, with the increased resources announced by our Minister recently. This will bring back localised services to my community. It’s something that has been asked of me since well before I became a member of Parliament, and the outcome is too great to ignore—that thousands of young people will benefit and thrive as a result—and I want that for other communities too.

There is no doubt that families and businesses are going through difficult economic conditions too. This Government, the Hipkins Government, is responding to the cost of living pressures families are facing, particularly in Auckland. And our focus is very much on targeting the support of working families in order to take the pressure off. The extensions of the fuel excise reductions, road-user charges, and public transport will reduce the costs of filling up a 60-litre tank of petrol by around $17.25, and half-price public transport will save an average person who pays for two $5 fares $25 a week.

More than 56,000 small businesses are learning the skills that they need to improve productivity through digitising their business through Digital Boost. It’s initiatives like this where we build back better in current times, like we’re seeing in our communities. But most of all, we do it side by side, shoulder to shoulder, with our communities, and with our people.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The next call is a split call. I call on Brooke van Velden.

BROOKE VAN VELDEN (Deputy Leader—ACT): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to be back in Parliament for the year, and what a year it’s been already. My thoughts are with everybody who’s been affected by the heavy rain, the cyclone, and the floods, and we hope that that’s the end of it. But our ACT MPs have been out in the community over these past few weeks listening to New Zealanders to see how we can support them and also to hear what’s on their minds so that we can represent them here in this House.

What I’ve seen in the community is the worst of nature but the best of Kiwi spirit. Just on Monday, I was in Hawke’s Bay and I spent some time in Havelock North. And on Joll Road, which had been heavily affected, I met volunteers from the neighbouring streets who were cooking warm meals, who were providing water and shelter to people—other volunteers who had come to help clear the silt and clear away all of the destroyed property. They had 200 volunteers from the local community come out, pick up their own shovels, and put on their own gloves to help out the community.

There have been neighbours who have been rescuing each other, and in Auckland in the following days of the floods, I was out there helping the Waitakere Indian Association deliver warm meals to people who had no kitchens, no electronics that were working. I saw a woman who was in her nineties who had given up her own bed to somebody else who had no home to go to. I heard from people whose own insurance brokers had turned up to take destroyed walls off their homes. This is a community that’s getting together to help each other.

There’s a lot of stress and a lot of anxiety, but it’s not where it ends. People have stress and anxiety because of the cyclone and the flood and the heavy rains, but because of everyday life as well. In the community, I’ve been hearing from concerned women who feel like crime has increased so far that they no longer feel it’s safe to walk to work in our CBDs. They don’t feel like it’s safe when they leave their work facility to walk home or even walk to public transport, but instead they’re Ubering home. That’s not good enough. We’re hearing from families who feel like the cost of living is rising so much that to get food on the table, they have to forgo saving anything that week.

We’re hearing from cafe staff. I was just talking to a cafe owner last week who said it’s so hard to find staff that he hasn’t had a break all Christmas; he worked the entire way through. We’ve heard from families with small children that mortgage rate rises are getting them very, very stressed. Their repayments will be doubling this year from what they were paying last year. I’ve heard from people with small children who are worried that they can’t even get in to see a doctor. I was in Carterton just last week. They don’t have a GP; they need to go to the local hospital in Masterton. But, of course, I talked to people then in Masterton who said they’re worried they can’t even get into the hospitals at all.

There is so much stress and anxiety and it just feels like everything is so hard. We’ve heard from people who find it’s impossible to get any workers in through the borders, builders saying that bureaucracy is increasing and increasing and increasing. And for a young Kiwi, it just feels like the path to homeownership is getting harder and harder. Where is that path to homeownership? Where is the path to having a job that keeps up with inflationary costs? And where is that path to a future in New Zealand?

Well, ACT says what’s happening at the moment isn’t fair, it is hard, but we can’t have more of the same. We need the Government to cut wasteful spending. We need to simplify immigration. We need to show leadership on crime. We need to simplify our building laws. And we want people to once again feel like they can make a difference in their own lives.

The ACT Party has been out there in the community. We are listening, we hear ya, and we’re here to work for New Zealand. We want more substance over spin. We want policies that unite New Zealanders rather than divide us, and we want to have hope that tomorrow will be better than today, and we need real change and a change of this Government.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): I call on Mark Cameron for five minutes.

MARK CAMERON (ACT): That Cyclone Gabrielle was terrible is beyond debate: the damage, devastation, lives lost, many lives upended. So many in the provinces were the hardest hit—whole properties changed for ever, crops destroyed, with the loss in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Silt by the mile, in many places feet or even metres deep. Communities banded together despite these mammoth challenges. They continued to unite behind their shared, common humanity, as Kiwis always do in crisis. Cyclone Hale but weeks earlier left Auckland awash, inundated, floodwaters abreast buildings, businesses, and homes, and even in the shared turmoil, generosity and kindness, a place of Kiwis helping Kiwis, always shone through. We know of the physical havoc, the emotional scars. For some, this will last days; others, weeks or even months, especially for those the hardest hit: Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne, Northland, and beyond.

But there is a parallel often offered to me by those in the rural sector, a parallel that speaks to a different kind of reality—contextualised as a different kind of cyclone, you might say, a different kind of struggle; a war of attrition, they tell me. Farmers speak of foul winds of compliance blowing all over rural New Zealand, carrying mountains upon mountains of red tape and unnecessary bureaucracy, seemingly often laying waste to the emotional wellbeing of farmers and rural folk. We hear the snide retorts from the other side of the House routinely, but most do not share in their reality. Sure, financial grants help, no doubt, but no one knows of the minefields—red tape that remains long after the clean-up—other than farmers.

Rural confidence is at an all-time recorded low, a 50-year low. How can this be when we hear plaudits from up on high? Farmers and rural folk speak their truth unashamedly; I and many of them do it routinely. They ask of this Government: cut the red tape, be rid of the nonsensical lawmaking that we are facing in rural New Zealand from those high of moral fibre but of little consequential knowledge of the outcomes that affect us as farmers.

In the enormity of the recent events, farmers, small-town NZers, do they need lawmakers to really be connected with reality? We say yes in rural New Zealand. They speak of hundreds of thousands of tonnes currently of silt covering farms, orchards, and a mess of rotten fruit for miles to see. They ask of the Government: when you remove the foot on the throat of rural New Zealanders, we will finally see better outcomes.

As the challenges only mount, farmers speak of a pricing structure for on-farm emissions in consternation, abject disdain; freshwater reforms and centralisations over localism; disconnections from outcomes, they speak of; bloated Resource Management Act (RMA) reforms. What will they make of that in rural New Zealand? None seem to know. As we across rural New Zealand deal with a mess of destruction, sedimentation, and the slash, one can only ask: will prescriptions in the existing RMA hamper the debris removal and hamstring recovery?

Well, the ACT Party is listening to them. We know councils need agility now more than ever before, to move away from central planned moulds and actually listen to real people on the ground in rural New Zealand. We don’t need more hoops to jump through in rural New Zealand; we have way too many already. No more hare-brained schemes where problems remain ill-defined and solutions are often routinely misunderstood. Now more than ever, the Government must work alongside rural New Zealand, listen, and invest in tenable outcomes, and ACT is helping them share their concerns in doing that very thing.

Hon JAN TINETTI (Minister of Education): I move, That this debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): This debate is adjourned and set down for resumption next sitting day.

Urgency

Urgency

Hon KIERAN McANULTY (Deputy Leader of the House): I move, That urgency be accorded the passing through all stages of the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2); and the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill.

By moving this motion, I am asking the House to consider and pass two bills, both of which need to be enacted with urgency. On 1 February, the Government announced a package of cost of living support for families and businesses. This included the reintroduction of the road-user charge discount. The Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) enables the reintroduction to take place. It is intended that the reintroduction discount will come into effect on 1 March. It is, therefore, essential that the bill is passed under urgency.

The Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill is intended to clarify that the principal Act applies to returning offenders whose offending predated the Act’s commencement on 18 November 2015, following a High Court decision that called this into question. The bill also provides that the Commissioner of Police must not provide notice or the right to be heard to the affected person before making determinations about their status as a returning prisoner. The quick enactment of this bill is essential to ensure that returning offenders are treated appropriately, according to the level of threat that they present.

I would like to acknowledge members of the Business Committee, following a constructive discussion about today’s business at the committee meeting yesterday.

A party vote was called for on the question, That urgency be accorded.

Ayes 98

New Zealand Labour 64; New Zealand National 34.

Noes 22

Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 10; ACT New Zealand 10; Te Paati Māori 2.

Motion agreed to.

Bills

Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2)

First Reading

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): I present a legislative statement on the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) 2023.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Could the Minister just try that again? According to my notes, there is no 2023, and we’ll just go by with what I’ve got.

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: OK. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I present a legislative statement on the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2).

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: I move, That the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a first time.

As the Prime Minister has outlined in his statement to this House this week, our Government’s top priority continues to be addressing the cost of living pressures that many New Zealand households face. And one of the most important steps that we took to address those pressures last year was the temporary reductions in rates of fuel excise duty and road-user charges (RUCs), alongside half-price public transport. These measures provided a direct way of providing significant and ongoing financial support to nearly all Kiwi households as they have been dealing with cost of living pressures. Fuel excise duty was reduced by 25c per litre of fuel reduced, and to ensure a comparable reduction in rates of road-user charges, those rates were reduced by 36 percent, and that ensured that drivers of diesel vehicles, both private and commercial, received the same level of support as those driving petrol vehicles.

That support has been extremely important for families between March of last year and this time. The estimates that we can apply to the reductions that people receive—if we take someone filling up, with petrol, a 60-litre tank, that person will save approximately $17 every time they fill up their tank with petrol. And the same proportionate reduction in costs would apply to someone filling up their tank with diesel as well. Public transport users—someone taking two trips per day to get to and from work with a $5 bus fare would be saving approximately $25 per week. So while we acknowledge that there are still real pressures on many families, this policy has made a tangible difference and is an example of our Government’s commitment to doing practical things to help Kiwi families at this time.

While New Zealand has seen sustained reductions in petrol prices over recent months due to international factors, which are the fundamental drivers of the increases that we have seen in recent times—such as the war in Ukraine and strained post-COVID supply chains—we do know that those cost of living pressures do continue to persist. And the Government has made the decision that as a way of providing further practical support, a further extension of this policy is a good and helpful step for us to take. For this reason, we have extended the cut to fuel excise duty, and now is a time, through this legislative process, to reinstate road-user charge rates to that reduced rate of 36 percent lower than the ordinary rates.

Road-user charges, as I think most members of the House will be aware, largely apply to diesel vehicles, and they’re paid by the kilometre in advance of travel. So it’s quite a different system from the fuel excise duty that is, effectively, built in to the price that you pay at the pump if a person is going to get petrol for their vehicle. The system works by drivers purchasing a set number of kilometres and displaying that licence on their windshield or electronically via an E-RUC licence, and the number on the vehicle’s hubometer or odometer must be within the range that is stated on that displayed RUC licence. The particular complexity with road-user charges, as compared to fuel excise duty, is that there are over 200 different rates of road-user charges, and these relate to different weights of vehicles and different axle loads. Broadly speaking, heavier vehicles pay a higher rate of road-user charge to take into account the greater degree of damage that they cause to the road and, therefore, the greater cost in maintaining that road. And if that weight is spread out over a greater axle load, that is also calculated, as well.

So the simplest way of this change being made is through a piece of regulation that simply instructs the road-user charge collector—that is Waka Kotahi—to reduce the rates across the board by 36 percent. The previous reduction expired on 1 February, and so this piece of legislation being pursued through urgency ensures that we are able to reinstate that reduction to the benefit of Kiwi motorists as soon as we can.

The bill is straightforward, as I’ve outlined. It puts in place a second temporary reduction period for road-user charge rates, which will run between 1 March 2023 and 30 June 2023, and the rate of reduction—that 36 percent—will simply be the same as a rate of reduction which has been in place previously. Importantly, this bill will also create an ability to extend the road-user charge reductions beyond 30 June by Order in Council. That means that if that is deemed to be an appropriate thing to do at that time, it will create some flexibility to do so through a more simple and more streamlined process.

One of the other processes that we have built in, and will continue to build in, to this reduction are some controls to ensure that we manage against the possibility of excessive purchasing. Because the nature of the road-user charge system is that people purchase the licence in advance of using it, we do not want to have a situation in which people over-purchase at the reduced rate and, effectively, take advantage of a temporary scheme. The vast majority of people, of course, won’t do that, but a small number might, and out of fairness for all payers into the system, we need to protect against that.

And so there are two ways in which we manage that risk. Firstly, to discourage bulk purchasing, what we put in place was a process whereby the reduced rates expire one month after the end of the period of temporary reduction. And this is built out of procedures that are already in the Road User Charges Act that apply to purchases of road-user charges for heavy vehicles. So that means that people can purchase for the period, and there’s a little period beyond that, but purchasing that goes beyond that is not permissible.

Secondly, to address and prevent road users from bulk purchasing amounts, the Road User Charges Act does give Waka Kotahi the power to issue assessments for invoice where they believe that that purchasing has been excessive, unreasonable, or abusive of the scheme’s intent. Now, Waka Kotahi has been monitoring purchasing behaviour since the reductions were put in place and has found a small number of cases where they believe that has been the case, and they have undertaken enforcement action. So the Government does want to send the message clearly that this is a policy which is there to support Kiwi households and businesses at a difficult time, but we won’t tolerate people who take advantage of the scheme in those small number of cases, and the agency has the tools they need to follow up on that.

It’s anticipated that most road users will seek to purchase road-user charges at the reduced rate either through Waka Kotahi’s website or at an approved road-user charges agent. Local AA branches are a common place that people do that. So that will be available for people to do during February 2023 at standard rates. To ensure that they can benefit from the reduced rate, vehicle owners will be able to purchase what is known as an overlap licence. With an overlap licence, the licence begins on the current odometer or hubometer reading at the time of purchase, and the unused distance on an existing licence will be automatically credited to offset the new licence cost. That, effectively, means that those people get the benefit of the reduced rate from the time at which it is applicable.

The final thing that I wish to comment on, for the benefit of the House, is the way in which this programme of reductions will be funded. Across reductions for both fuel excise duty and road-user charges, the estimated total reduction in revenue into the National Land Transport Fund for this period will be in the order of $700 to $750 million. So it is a significant investment that has been made. That amount of money is, effectively, coming off the fuel bills of Kiwi households, and the Government is absorbing that cost, so it is a significant investment to relieve cost of living pressures. Now, it is important that we do continue to invest across the transport programme. We see that, obviously, in the huge amount of work that is ahead of us in cleaning up after the floods and the cyclone. So it’s important for people to understand that the Government will refund the reduced revenue into the National Land Transport Fund with direct funding from the Crown. So there is no reduction in the transport spend across New Zealand as a result of this policy, and I think that is something that people will want to know as a part of this piece of legislation.

In finishing, this is obviously an important and practical way of addressing cost of living pressures. There have been other proposals—for example, around changes to tax rates—that would not deliver anything near the benefit of this policy to Kiwi households. Once again, a Kiwi family filling up a 60-litre tank of petrol on a weekly basis saves 17 bucks. A public transport user in the associated part of this policy potentially saves $20 to $25 a week. So it’s a tangible difference to Kiwi households; it speaks to our commitment to focusing on those bread and butter issues of cost of living. I commend the bill to the House and look forward to the debate to come. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The question is that the motion be agreed to.

SIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on this piece of legislation, the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2)—the temporary RUC reduction, which is temporary for ever, it seems!

I saw the Minister, the Hon Michael Wood, speaking on the bill. He really didn’t want to be speaking on this bill. He really didn’t want to be speaking on the bill, because he has continued to issue press releases saying that this temporary road-user charge (RUC) reduction is about to end. He has been continually saying, “This will be ending”—well, firstly, it was only to be in place for three months, and then another three months, and then another three months. Then he finally issued a press release on 14 December, along with Grant Robertson, where they said, “The Government has invested over $1 billion over the past year to reduce fuel prices. However it is not sustainable to continue to subsidise the cost of petrol indefinitely for everyone [for ever]. We have to strike a balance between broad ongoing support and careful management of the Government accounts. That’s why we are transitioning to more targeted support for those most feeling the pinch.” It said then, “The Road User Charges (RUC) discount will end on January 31 2023. RUC is not being extended because it is pre-purchased”. That was the Minister of Finance back on 14 December. Then Michael Wood said, “It is important to get the balance right though, as these policies are not without significant costs. We’ve got to make sure they are sustainable when that duty and fares help make up the funding we use to fix our roads and invest in public transport, cycling and walking infrastructure.” That was last year, and this is now: “The petrol excise … cut will be 25 cents per litre until the end of June.” So now it’s been extended, and that is, of course, the Minister standing up and giving a speech which, I’m sure, he did not want to give.

But the point here—this piece of legislation—is not to do necessarily with the broad-based policy decision around whether the extension should have been done or not; that’s obviously the politics that this Government has realised. It still has not addressed the cost of living crisis that New Zealanders are facing. That’s the reason why we’re here: because this Government has still not actually dealt with the underlying causes of inflation. It hasn’t dealt with the fact that New Zealanders are paying too much tax; that we are being pushed into higher and higher income tax brackets, meaning Kiwi working families are paying more tax under this Government. They are still wasting hundreds of millions of dollars every single year. They’re continuing with a whole range of policy programmes like three waters, which is costing enormous amounts of money, which—

Simon Watts: It’s been reset!

SIMEON BROWN: Well, it’s had a name change. I don’t know what its new name is, but it’s having a name change. It’s having a reset.

Chris Penk: “Five waters.”

SIMEON BROWN: It’s going to be “five waters”, says Mr Penk. The point is, though, that this Government is not dealing with the underlying causes of inflation. All they’ve got is to put in place and to extend this policy. That’s the only idea they’ve got: to extend this policy.

But this bill does do an important thing, and that is why we will be supporting it. It’s because what it does is it ensures that our diesel drivers and our truck drivers get the cut as well as our petrol car users. Currently, people who drive a truck or a diesel vehicle are having to pay the full rate again, because this Government last year said, “We’re going to finish this at the end of January, and that’s it.” Of course, on 1 February, which is the day afterwards—they didn’t decide maybe to think about doing this before that announcement, before the actual RUC finished!—they decided, “Well, actually, we’re going to extend it on the first.” And they decided to make that announcement on 1 February. So, of course, our diesel vehicle users, our tradies, our farmers, our truck drivers, the people who move our goods, our exports to ports are having to pay the higher rate now. So what this bill does is extend that same reduction in road-user charge—the 36 percent reduction that the Minister spoke about—to those users as well. And that is important because, ultimately, this Government otherwise would just be giving the reduction to people who drive a petrol vehicle, and that would be completely unfair—completely unfair to give the reduction to people who use petrol but not to pass on that reduction to people who use diesel.

So what this piece of legislation does is it creates that fairness, and we are glad the Government’s finally bringing it to the House—a couple of weeks after it was actually announced—but I think what that speaks to is that this is ad hoc policy on the fly by a Government which doesn’t actually have a plan to deal with inflation. It doesn’t have a plan to deal with inflation, because it doesn’t actually know how it’s going to fix inflation in New Zealand. It’s a Government which knows how to spend big. It’s a Government which knows how to dream up new taxes. I heard about a flood tax today. They’re now thinking about a flood tax. In terms of when it comes to actually trying to deal with these issues, the only idea they’ve actually had is to put in place a temporary—which I’m sure has been welcomed by many people. Everyone who drives these vehicles has welcomed some relief, because it’s the only relief that this Government has ever given.

Let me just make another point: the 25c reduction in petrol excise—this Government might say, “Well, we’re reducing petrol excise by 25c.” Well, that sounds really interesting, but if you’re an Auckland motorist, you’ve had your excise increase by 12c under this Government, and you’ve had the Auckland regional fuel tax put in place, meaning you’re paying 23.5c per litre more in excise. So, actually, all this Government is doing for Aucklanders is just taking the excise back to what it was before they came to office. This Government is a Government which knows how to tax, it knows how to waste, but it doesn’t know how to actually deliver and fix the problems that New Zealanders are facing.

There’s one other point that I just want to make, which is in this bill, and the Minister only touched on this very, very briefly—very briefly. This bill includes a five-year extension for the Government to be able to continue to keep the temporary reduction in RUC in place; a five-year extension. So when the Minister of Finance said, on 1 February, “This extension takes us to the end of the financial year. We have already indicated that the Budget will have a cost of living focus,”—well, they should have thought about that last year—“and this extension covers the time until that comes into force,”—which is, of course, the end of June—well, I’m sorry but my prediction is this will be extended again, because that’s what this legislation does provide for. What we’re saying to the Government is that we need a real plan to deal with the underlying causes of inflation. The National Land Transport Fund is a hypothecated fund to help build and maintain our roading networks. This Government has absolutely stripped the funding from that fund. It has poured it into pet projects. It has taken it away from our State highways and our local roads. It has let our roads be deteriorated. Potholes are peppering our highways, and we actually need to make sure we do restore the integrity of that fund. But what this Government is doing is, effectively, giving themselves a blank cheque.

So what we’re saying is, yes, we support this piece of legislation—it aligns the temporary excise reduction with the temporary RUC reduction, which is critically important to our farmers, our tradies, our truckies, those who are moving goods around New Zealand, getting our goods to market; it’s critically important to doing that—but what this Government desperately needs to bring is actually a real plan to deal with inflation, get the cost of living under control, so that New Zealanders aren’t faced with higher and higher interest rates, higher costs of living. Their incomes are going up slower than inflation. Those are the issues that really matter to hard-working Kiwis, and we’re wanting a plan from this Government to address it. And guess what! If they don’t, we will. On 14 October, New Zealanders will have a choice, and we will deliver a plan to actually deal with these issues, get the cost of living under control, and actually get New Zealanders back in the driving seat of their own lives.

SHANAN HALBERT (Labour—Northcote): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I am pleased to stand and speak on the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) this evening.

There was so much in that last speech, and now is not the time for politics because the reality of this particular bill is that it speaks to the hearts of Aucklanders driving around in current times who are feeling the pressures of the cost of living.

This Government is being pragmatic; it’s getting on with the ability to actually walk and chew gum at the same time. Yes, we have to deal with the here and now. We have to deal with the cost of living challenges and petrol—the cost of petrol—is certainly a part of it.

But when we start to throw out “pet projects”—and the next one will be that suddenly there are challenges from the other side, actually, that we don’t need a second harbour connection, do we?—actually, these things are important to deal with Aucklanders moving around right now, and our ability to plan for a modern transport system and infrastructure to help people get around and move in our largest city.

So, without further ado, I think it’s important to acknowledge this particular bill. It deals with the cost of living challenges that are in front of us, and I commend this bill to the House.

SIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. It is an absolute pleasure to rise on the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2). I want to just call out the speaker Simeon Brown for his articulation in regards to this bill which—while National will be supporting this bill because it obviously deals with a key element of inconsistency in the charging process, it reinforces a Government that does not have a plan to deal with the underlying issue—the number one issue in this country—which is inflation, and that is the reality.

So this bill’s coming in and it’s going to be an adjustment to extend this reduction for diesel users and, I think, as has been canvassed previously, in effect, the element that surprisingly the Minister did not mention in his speech—which is a key component—is that he’s given himself an open cheque book of five years to continue to extend this “temporary” reduction. I don’t know, what time is it? Are the kids back from school? The kids will be back from school now. But I can tell you what, I’m not sure what the definition of “temporary” is for those at home, but the last time I looked—

Simeon Brown: This Government is temporary.

SIMON WATTS: —five years is not temporary, right? Simeon Brown is saying, “This Government’s temporary.” Well, we’ll just have to wait and see but I know that Kiwis are sensible and they can see through this.

The reality is that, in regards to this legislation, there is no doubt that people are hurting out there across this country as a result of the cost of living crisis. But this Government is responsible for much of that hurt and for driving elements of this cost of living crisis that we face today. But they continually say, “It’s because of overseas factors; it’s not our fault.” They sort of forget that, as Government, you sort of have the levers to be able to make decisions in fiscal policy implications that actually change and have influences on what happens here in New Zealand. But no, no, no: “It’s a result of global factors.” Well, I’m sorry, the most recent—and we challenged today around some of this stuff, around the fact that, actually, when you look at those global constraints, they are cooling. A number of those factors that are driving the constraints which are feeding the cost of living crisis, which this bill is trying to address, are actually cooling in the international arena. So that reinforces that this Government are out of ideas.

This bill is the only idea that they have managed to come up with to deal with the cost of living crisis. And have they had a little bit of time to prepare this plan to deal with the cost of living crisis? Have they had time between when this last came through the House and now, to come up with other options? Well, of course they have. But have they done anything about it? No, of course not. All they’ve done is “You know what, let’s just renew this, let’s kick it to touch, let’s buy time”—buy a temporary amount of time, which is five years, which in itself is completely inconsistent—and they’ve done another example of band-aid economics. This is a band-aid; this is of no substance, no sustainable basis in order to deal with the core elements driving our cost of living crisis. And that’s a real shame.

That is a real shame for those people across this country that are hurting due to the implications of that cost of living crisis, that this Government is not taking their role seriously. They are not taking accountability. They are not taking responsibility for putting in place tangible solutions other than this road-user charge temporary amendment—no tangible solutions to actually deal with the core root cause of inflation which is crippling Kiwi households across this country. And that is completely unacceptable.

One example—let’s just throw some ideas out there. Of course, National have articulated our five-point plan for dealing with the cost of living crisis, and we put it out, you know, last year, so it’s not like it’s anything new. It’s just a shame that the Government actually haven’t literally read it and decided to implement it because, I tell you what, New Zealand would be far better off today than where we are if the Government had simply taken a little bit of advice from this side of the House, taken a little bit of leadership, listened to Kiwis across this country who are hurting, and actually implemented some changes.

One of those changes, quite simply, is getting rid of the waste—the bureaucracy; the bureaucracy and waste—hard-earned taxpayer dollars coming out of the back pockets of hard-working Kiwis. You know what, in regards to this legislation where they think the solution is a road-user charge amendment bill, they haven’t thought about the fact “Why don’t we fire those high-priced consultants that are undertaking advisory work on the three waters legislation?”, which the majority of Kiwis think is an absolutely wasteful idea—$30 million of consultants, hireage of offices in Freemans Bay in Auckland. That is an example of wasted taxpayers’ money which this Government have not done anything about. It is on their watch that, instead of taking sustainable solutions to deal with the cost of living crisis and inflation, they resort to just simply amending a band-aid solution.

That again reinforces that the cost of Government is driving up the cost of living—the cost of that Government is driving up the cost of living. That Government spends $1 billion dollars more, every single week than what occurred before they came into this House. A large majority of that is wastage which is driving up the cost of living. As a result of them failing to recognise that their actions are driving the situation which Kiwis are facing at home, they have to resort to this type of band-aid legislation in order to simply temporarily—“temporarily” is, as we’ve said, undefined or has got a new definition under this Government—increase the charges. And that is, you know, a great shame.

So we talked about the high-priced consultants in three waters and those ones that are in those lovely offices. We talk about that $2.5 billion of “no worse off” funding for three waters, we talk about that, and all of the other things. I want to talk about the cycle bridge—$51 million. I heard the member from Northcote before saying, “Look, don’t bring politics into that.” But the second sentence after that was about the cycle bridge or the harbour crossing, so a little bit ironic. The reality is that that wastage and this Government is driving up the cost of living and that is unacceptable.

As my colleague Simeon Brown said right from the start, the element of driving consistency in terms of this legislation is important. We will be supporting it, but I think Kiwis can be under no illusion that this is a band-aid solution. The cost of this Government is driving up the cost of living, Kiwis are hurting, and this Government is responsible for much of that hurt. Thank you.

RACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): It’s a pleasure to take a short call on the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2). This bill ensures that road users with diesel vehicles are also provided with a reduction in the cost of their transport, as we have done for those who receive a cut in fuel excise duty and half-price public transport.

I just want to comment on Simon Watts’, the previous speaker’s, comments around inflation, and note that the biggest driver of inflation is the cost of fuel around the globe. It is international-based inflation. It is the cost of transport that is driving up the cost of food in New Zealand. So the biggest step we can take is to reduce the cost of transport for Kiwi households and Kiwi businesses to address the cost of living, and we are doing something about that.

This bill reflects the Labour Government’s continued commitment to address the cost of living for Kiwi families and businesses, and I commend it to the House.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): As it’s my first contribution in the House this year, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge all of those who’ve been affected by the severe floods in Auckland, and Cyclone Gabrielle right across the country. I know that there’s a whole lot of people whose lives and livelihoods have been severely affected by this storm. My heart goes out to them. I want to acknowledge that we have a responsibility—I know everyone would agree with this—in this House to make sure that those who are the most vulnerable and who are the most affected receive the support and the help that they need during this difficult time. Ultimately, we know these storms have been exacerbated—the impacts were exacerbated by human-caused climate change, which is something that the Green Party has been talking about in this House for well over 25 years now. We need to do something about it. We need to tackle all of our challenges, our economic challenges and our ecological challenges, together. Otherwise, we are not going to solve the problem.

That’s why the Green Party does not support this bill. We need long-term investment to ensure that our transport system is not so reliant on fossil fuels. If we had had that for the past 25 years, as the Green Party had been calling for, then we wouldn’t need to take these measures because people wouldn’t be so affected by fluctuations in the price of fuel. Unfortunately, if we keep taking a short-term response, which is trying to address short-term challenges with high prices of fuel, as they are doing in this bill, and, of course, with the reduction in fuel excise duty (FED), we never do anything to get a transport system that is less reliant on fossil fuels, that’s more energy-efficient, that has significant productivity benefits for New Zealand, but, most of all, that enables New Zealanders and the natural world that we live in to thrive. That’s what we need to do. We can’t just keep taking such a short-term approach.

I know one of the reasons that is cited by the Government for this approach is that it was able to be rolled out quickly. But this is, what, the third or fourth extension? It’s now almost a year since this measure was first considered. Certainly, as officials recommended and the Treasury recommended, the Government could have by now implemented a different approach that would have benefited low to middle income households in a much more direct and supportive way. As the post-implementation regulatory assessment says, the poorest households are spending considerably less money on petrol and diesel, on fuel, than the highest-income households. So the cost of this policy, which is well over $1 billion just on the reduction to fuel excise and road-user charge (RUC)—more of that is going to the very highest-income people who are the least affected by high inflation. They are the least affected by cost of living pressures.

So the Government could have afforded to give at least as much support, perhaps more, to the households who need it most at this time, and they could have done even more than that. They could have, you know, extended subsidies for public transport, made it free for key portions of the population, and increased the services in public transport. The cost of half-price public transport is like one-tenth of what the cost of the RUC and the FED discount is.

It’s hard to explain how ephemeral this benefit is. It’s basically money that we’re putting out there and it just disappears. It does nothing to help us combat the climate crisis. It does nothing to help households transition to lower-carbon ways of getting around. It does nothing to save money on fuel in the future. It’s only for this very moment, in this period of time that—and at this moment in time, we have to acknowledge that the oil companies are making record profits globally, and that’s how broken our economic system is, that, in 2022, the major oil companies made basically $100 billion in after-tax profit. A lot of that money was put towards share buy-backs, which increased the wealth of their shareholders. So, in the sense of the global economy, people are being financially rewarded for corporate behaviour, the very activities that are causing the climate crisis, that are causing floods and storms that are affecting ordinary people and taking their lives and livelihoods. It’s deranged and it’s something that we have the power to change.

We don’t have to accept this. In New Zealand, the corporate profits of fossil fuel companies are not as egregious as they are in the global scale, but, in the past year, they have posted hundreds of millions in profits. So at the very time that the public is paying, trying to alleviate cost of living and high price of fuel, Z Energy and Mobil and BP are earning hundreds of millions in profits.

So, clearly, something is out of alignment and we need to have just a slightly longer-term view on how we solve these crises. They need to be motivated. Our solutions need to be aligned with the values that people hold most dear. People care about nature. They care about the planet. They care about where they live. They want to do the right thing. They want to have options to get around, to earn a living, to see their family and friends, to live in decent conditions. All of that is possible if we don’t prioritise protecting privatised profits of big corporate fossil fuel companies and if we prioritise the wellbeing of the people in this country.

So I know that the Labour Government talks a good game on wellbeing. But the reality is that this policy falls well short. It’s counterproductive. It’s making emissions worse. Not only is it benefiting the highest-income people most but some of the benefit will be perceived by petrol companies, and it will be reflected in their profits. So, at some point, we need to stop privatising the profit and gain and socialising the losses, and we need to take a medium and long term view on how we can help people.

Is it true that not everyone can take public transport? Yes, absolutely. And that is always going to be the case. But, you know, if we had prioritised more investment in public transport and active transport, then more people would be able to get around without having to spend so much money on oil and on fossil fuels. So it is true that not everybody will benefit from half-price public transport, but we could spend money supporting the lowest-income people—the people who need it the most—we could give them more money on a weekly basis rather than spending this money subsidising fossil fuel use, of which the greatest share of the benefit will be perceived by the richest New Zealanders and the fossil fuel companies. That’s why this policy doesn’t make sense. The Green Party won’t be supporting it. We will continue to support sensible investment in a transport system that isn’t so reliant on fossil fuels, that gives people real options and real choices.

One of the ironies of, I guess, the political debate on our transport system here in New Zealand just doesn’t recognise that, essentially, decades of planning only for cars forces a huge cost on to households. It’s not about freedom. Like, at this point, if you have to use a car and you have to own a car to get around because Government hasn’t sufficiently invested in an efficient and reliable public transport system, that is a huge tax on New Zealanders because they have to spend thousands of dollars every year owning their car, parking their car, fuelling their car, insuring their car—

Simeon Brown: I love owning a car. I choose to own a car.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Simeon Brown says he chooses to own a car, but I hate to tell you this, Simeon: not everybody is in that situation. There’s a whole lot of people who don’t have a choice and it’s because of decisions made by subsequent Governments. What the Green Party is advocating for is choice. It means a community where children can get around without having to be ferried everywhere by their parents in a car where they can walk and cycle safely.

Simeon Brown: We’ve got two cars in our household.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Yeah, that’s a tax on your household, Simeon.

Simeon Brown: No, it’s not. We choose. It’s our choice.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: It is. You don’t even realise that.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! I’ll just ask—the member is straying dangerously into barracking, and if the member could please address that member by his full name.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: I think it’s very endearing—it’s very cute—the way that Simeon Brown and those on the right believe that it’s their freedom of choice to spend thousands and thousands of dollars that benefit automobile manufacturers and oil companies. That’s the great trick that the oil industry and the automobile industry played on society for 50 years, which is, “It’s your choice, it’s your freedom to spend 25 to 40 percent of your income on a vehicle and fuel to get around”, when, in fact, if the public invested in a high-quality public transport system, you would have choice. And, of course, some people will still use cars, and that’s fine, but we need low-carbon choices for people.

SIMON COURT (ACT): Look, Madam Speaker, forgive me: this bill has come under urgency and so it’s taken a little bit of quick reading to work out exactly where this Government has gone wrong again.

ACT supported the Government’s proposal to give motorists a break with a discount on the petrol excise duty and road-user charges (RUC) when that was proposed in March 2022. At the time, there’d been a spike in the price of fuel as a result of the dictator Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine. But it turns out that, like any crisis that has befallen New Zealand under this Labour Government, they’ve used that as an excuse—and we’ve heard members like Rachel Boyack continuing to restate this falsehood that petrol prices are still high because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

What this graph shows—when you look at the Government’s own data, their regulatory impact statement—is that indeed, in March 2022, fuel prices spiked to over $3 a litre for petrol. But like all kinds of fact-adjacent proposals offered by this Government, this graph omits another whole year of data because, in fact, the fuel price now is back to what it was before Russia invaded Ukraine. So the basis of the Labour Party’s and Minister Michael Wood’s argument that it’s necessary to give Kiwis a break in terms of the cost of living, is not justified by his own regulatory impact assessment.

Now, the problem that this bill causes is not just that it’s bad, rushed lawmaking based on half-truths and facts that are cobbled together to make a poor argument. I also want to address the fundamental problem: that the road-user charges and the petrol excise duties levied on motorists are insufficient to pay for the amount of roading that we need to deliver, not because the Government doesn’t collect enough money, but because they siphon off so much of the money collected from motorists to spend on pet projects—wasteful spending like the Auckland Harbour bike bridge: $50 million to $100 million spent on a project that engineers I know said was unfeasible when it was announced, but they persisted; or Auckland light rail, what could be a wonderful futuristic project to enable land development along that corridor in Auckland between Auckland CBD, the member for Mt Albert’s electorate, the transport Minister’s Mt Roskill electorate, and Auckland Airport even. But, again, future projects that may be sensible but we still haven’t seen the business case—and that’s a $200 million business case.

So the problem that the Government really should be solving is not, “How do we offer a cost of living sop to voters in an election year?”—which is exactly what this policy does—in fact, officials point out that if the Government wanted to address people who were in hardship because of transport costs, there are other options. There are transfer payments available, there is Working for Families, there’s energy payments, there’s all kinds of options the Government has to address the cost of living. And this policy, officials recommend, should not be one of them.

But here we are debating whether to extend the discount on road-user charges, a discount which will benefit many of my friends in the trucking and heavy transport industry, many of my friends who drive turbo-diesel Toyota Surfs on the beach—all of those people will benefit. But, unfortunately, while they might benefit today, this policy is costing $150 million a month in forgone revenue. By the end of January 2023, this policy had cost $1.3 billion in forgone revenue.

When that member Shanan Halbert, who’s the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, stood up in the House a few minutes ago and made the claim that without this policy, we wouldn’t be able to afford a new Auckland harbour crossing, I thought, “That’s the most nonsensical, incoherent thing I’ve heard since the Prime Minister’s statement yesterday.” Mr Shanan Halbert, you are the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee of Parliament and you don’t seem to understand the link between the need to raise revenue—not discount revenue, raise revenue—in order to deliver infrastructure.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! The member is bringing the Speaker into the debate, so find another way of expressing himself.

SIMON COURT: Madam Chair, people watching at home—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Or “Madam Speaker” would do.

SIMON COURT: Madam Speaker, people watching at home must be able to tell how incensed I am as the ACT transport spokesperson about this appalling piece of legislation.

So this takes around $1.3 billion in the last year from the National Land Transport Fund, which is required to be made up by borrowing. That’s kicking the can down the road to future citizens—to people who might not even be born yet—to pay back the $1.3 billion that this Government’s already wasted on this policy.

So what would ACT do? Well, firstly, we would stop lecturing New Zealanders about whether they should be driving less and walking or cycling more. We would stop lecturing New Zealanders about a climate emergency when this Government—in cahoots with the Greens—have failed to deliver the climate adaptation bill, even though James Shaw has been the climate Minister for five years.

And now we face the real problem. New Zealand’s transportation network has been devastated by flooding and storms. This Government, previous Governments, have not put sufficient money in to upgrade our networks and make them more resilient. When you drive on new highways like Transmission Gully, when you drive on new highways like the Waikato Expressway, you’ll see what a resilient highway looks like. If Waka Kotahi let us, motorists would also be able to drive on the brand new, unopened Pūhoi to Warkworth highway on State Highway 1 north of Auckland. But for contractual reasons, Waka Kotahi won’t let motorists on it.

So what’s the problem to solve? How do we raise sufficient funds to deliver a safe, efficient—that means, get where you’re going at a decent clip—and resilient transport network funded by motorists, the people who use it, in a way that means what you pay for, you get. In some cases, that might mean that we need to apply road pricing, what people in the olden days used to call “tolls”. Imagine that: you could toll the road like the Auckland Harbour Bridge and then you’d get a new harbour bridge.

Now, that institutional memory appears to have been forgotten by this Government and its officials, but ACT hasn’t forgotten. In fact, in our solutions for building New Zealand and conserving nature, we make the case for road pricing. We don’t just make the case for road pricing; we make the case as to how in five short years, New Zealand could transition from road-user charges—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! I’m going to ask the member to come back more closely to the bill. It is in order to make passing reference to other matters in context, but the main purpose of this bill is to address the first reading of this transport RUC bill.

SIMON COURT: Thank you, Madam Speaker. So it’s possible, in five short years, to transition from road-user charges and fuel excise duties to a system of electronic road pricing. This has been done elsewhere in the world. The ACT Party proposes that that should be a much better alternative to—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! I’ve just asked the member to come back more closely to the bill. This is the second time I’m inviting him to do so.

SIMON COURT: Madam Speaker. So in the regulatory impact assessment, officials identified a number of different options. And, of course, road pricing—charging people for the roads they drive on—is in the mix.

Now, it’s fair to say that when you rush legislation into the House under urgency, and it’s so urgent—I want to draw the House’s attention to this—that in the section “Constraints on analysis”, officials point out that the commissioning was narrow in scope and advice, and needed to be provided quickly. The advice was sought on lowering petrol excise and road-user charges—well, that’s remarkable because the Government announced the reduction in taxes on road-user charges and petrol excise duty over a year ago. Yet, it appears the request for information from officials was made very, very shortly before this policy was announced; this extension on road-user charges and fuel excise duties.

So that would lead me to conclude, in fact, the policy is poorly thought-out. The costs have not been considered adequately. The benefits are very limited except to reduce the cost of petrol to motorists in an election year. And, for that reason, ACT will not be supporting this bill. It does not address our long-term needs.

Hon POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): It’s always a rare and special privilege to follow on from the ACT Party in taking a call on this bill. The ACT Party member would have one, who is listening to his contribution, believe that the largesse and public goodness of the oil companies would forego their profits in a time of national need, which would mean that we wouldn’t need this legislation to go through, which is clearly, clearly false, and that the requirement for the Government to take steps to ensure that people who need to use vehicles to get about their daily business, or to transport goods and services around the country, do not need support to do that by this Government—and it’s clearly, clearly wrong.

So we know the reason for this bill: to extend the reduction in road-user charges to ensure that those people who do need to get to work, need to get to school, need to get about the business can do so, and that transporters, people who freight our goods and services around the country can do so in a way that actually reduces the costs to New Zealanders during this cost of living crisis.

I do want to make one comment. It would be remiss of me not to recognise today’s the 12th anniversary of the earthquakes in Christchurch and in Canterbury, and my colleagues and I share with our people in Canterbury the thoughts of 12 years on from that day.

Just my final thoughts. I do want to kind of pose the question: what kind of life experiences could have created someone as cynical as Simeon Brown, who made some extraordinary statements in this House today, who said that—

Simeon Brown: I’m the least cynical MP.

Hon POTO WILLIAMS: Ha! Well, I’ve yet to find evidence of that, Mr Brown. When saying that the National Party would support this bill, he didn’t find it necessary to have this bill; wanted us to do more for the folk who were impacted by the cost of living, but didn’t believe in this bill. So, on those final thoughts, I commend this bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Chris Penk—five minutes.

CHRIS PENK (National—Kaipara ki Mahurangi): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. As some others have done, I just wish to briefly acknowledge those who are in dire straits even now still as a result of recent extreme weather events throughout New Zealand, including in my own electorate. I’ll welcome the opportunity to speak more fully on that subject in the House later.

On the subject of this bill, the rosy—excuse me—the road-user charges temporary RUC—

Hon Members: “Rosy”.

CHRIS PENK: I’m looking at this through rose-tinted spectacles, Madam Speaker, because, actually, it’s been a long time now since this first came in. I fear I’m in danger of misleading the House in even using the word “temporary” in relation to it, but it’s in the title of the bill, so at the risk of incurring your wrath—or, indeed, that of your replacement—I note that that is at least what it says on the tin.

The can is being kicked down the road. Eventually, the can will fall into a pothole, no doubt. I’ll finish this brief contribution with the reflection that, as someone much wiser than me once observed, there’s nothing so permanent as a temporary solution, to which we might also say in this day and age that there’s nothing so permanent as a temporary Government programme. So this extension of an extension of an extension we have supported on the basis as set out by our transport spokesperson, Simeon Brown.

Hon Willie Jackson: Thanks for your support.

Dr TRACEY McLELLAN (Labour—Banks Peninsula): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’ll make a brief call, also, on this Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2). As is obvious in this bill, the Government’s obvious top priority is, simply, helping New Zealanders with the cost of living amid what is a heightened inflation around the world—it’s not novel to New Zealand; it’s something that many people are experiencing around the world, but there are practical, sensible things that we can do as a Government to help alleviate that pain for people. So, on the basis of that, I commend this bill to the House.

NAISI CHEN (Labour): I don’t know if it was picked up by Hansard, but the Hon Willie Jackson here just said “Thank you for your support.”, and I think that needs to be echoed throughout the House. This is a bill of support for those who are going through the tough times right now in terms of the cost of living. We know that reducing road-user charges and we know that reducing petrol excise actually helps with inflationary pressures as well on our economy right now, so this is a good bill. That’s why I commend this bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): I call on the Hon David Pen—Bennett.

Hon DAVID BENNETT (National): I thought you were going to say “Penk” there for a second, Madam Speaker. Jeez!

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Sorry about that—the Hon David Bennett.

Hon DAVID BENNETT: I know he’s very rosy, but there’s a difference! But thank you very much, Madam Speaker.

First of all, I’d like to also acknowledge those people that are in the regions. Our coastal regions have really done it tough in the last few weeks and months with the weather conditions. What they’ve had to deal with has been tremendously difficult, and we don’t understand that as much as they will, not being there and being part of it. But we think of them, and I’d just like to thank the Government for what they’ve done so far in the gestures of infrastructure to make sure that they’ve got some support there. Also, it’s unfortunate that the new Prime Minister and deputy aren’t here, this is my first speech in the House since they’ve been given the roles, so I’d just like to congratulate them on their roles and wish them all the best, and—[Interruption] I know. It’s a new leaf, but anyway—but it’s not going to last.

Hon Willie Jackson: Sit down now.

Hon DAVID BENNETT: Willie, I’ll come back to you, mate. But, no, well done to them, and congratulations. It’s an honour for anyone to be in those roles, so that’s great.

But to this bill here, you know, when we look at the transport sector in New Zealand, it’s a really important sector when we consider what’s actually going on in our coastal regions at the moment. One of the big things we’re finding is that our infrastructure has been devastated by those natural disasters, and, one way or the other, we have to deal with that. There’s going to be the replacement of certain bridges, there’ll be the replacement of certain roads, and there will be new roads that will be built. But, fundamentally, New Zealand needs to look at its infrastructure in total, and the whole point of why we have road-user charges and the whole point of why we have excise tax is to enable the country to build the right infrastructure, especially our roading and rail networks, which actually enable New Zealand to function.

I just want to take one example and look at that for a moment, and that is north of Auckland to Whangārei. That road has been out of order since the first rains that we had. It is just not acceptable that one of our biggest cities—Whangārei—is, effectively, isolated from Auckland when it’s not that far away. There have been plans to build a four-lane road from Auckland to Whangārei for generations and they have been debated in and out of this House, and we don’t do it. Like, my political career has been staked on getting the road from Hamilton to Auckland, and we did get it, but the next stage is actually Auckland to Whangārei. That’s an important stage, like it is from Hamilton to Tauranga.

If we don’t have that key infrastructure, we abandon those cities and those communities. At the moment, people are having to take a coastal route, going around through small towns like Waipū and Mangawhai, to get back to Auckland.

Hon Willie Jackson: And whose fault is that?

Hon DAVID BENNETT: The fault is the Labour Party’s, which cancelled the roads of national significance, because the roads of national significance would have created that four-laning to Whangārei, and that is the fault of Willie Jackson and his team. So when he says, “Whose fault is that?”, it’s directly that Government’s. They have taken money out of building roading infrastructure. They do not believe in roads. The Green Party will say it honestly and objectively, and the Labour Party will do it. They have taken money out to put in their pet rail projects in Auckland City. They have not delivered for New Zealand’s infrastructure when they had the point and the chance to do so.

I know we have to rebuild in certain places, but we also need to futureproof our infrastructure, and the Labour Party failed in the last five years. It cancelled the infrastructure that would have saved places like Whangārei from what they’re going through now. It cancelled the Cambridge extension to Piarere. It cancelled those northern roads in Tauranga. It cancelled the roads that would have been vital for our coastal cities and growth.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): If the member would like to come back to this bill, thank you.

Hon DAVID BENNETT: Well, the bill—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Yes.

Hon DAVID BENNETT: —is about the road-user charges and excise taxes—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Yes, yes—discuss that.

Hon DAVID BENNETT: —and the whole point of those is to build infrastructure.

That’s what you do with the roading. It’s not there to spend on consultants. It’s not there to think about what could be a greater vision for a New Zealand that doesn’t have cars. That’s what the Labour Party and the Greens have used the transport budget for. They’ve politicised Waka Kotahi, they’ve taken it away from doing the structural developments that are needed for the infrastructure of New Zealand, and that has been the crisis that we are seeing now, today.

There’s always going to be natural disasters. There’s always going to be things we have to rebuild. But we could have made sure that the people of Whangārei were actually given the ability to link in to Auckland if we’d built that road. That’s the opportunity that’s in front of the National Party, when they get in at the end of the year: to bring back the roads of national significance and to bring back that infrastructure that actually stabilises our economy in some of the most vulnerable parts of the country.

Another example is from Napier to Hastings. For so long, those communities have only asked for a decent roading network between those cities, and for so long this House has said no. If we had given them an infrastructure there, that would actually have helped them, no doubt, in these kinds of situations.

There’s the connections between the Waikato and the Hawke’s Bay, for example. That’s an arterial route that is vital for this country. All that Government could do was reduce the speed limit to 80 kilometres on it. It couldn’t get to the position where it invested in the infrastructure of that road; it just wanted to slow it down. Now, that road is one of the ones that has been affected by the cyclone and other events.

So this bill is a symptom of a Government that has failed on infrastructure. It’s a Government—

Hon Willie Jackson: You won’t be supporting it then, will you?

Hon DAVID BENNETT: No, I am going to support it.

Hon Willie Jackson: Oh, I thought you weren’t going to support it.

Hon DAVID BENNETT: Yeah, and the reason I’m supporting it is because—actually, this is the second thing I was going to get on to. It’s actually good for New Zealand in the sense that when the productive part of New Zealand finally gets some money out of this place—because all this Government does is spend money on social spending—at some point, the productive sector of New Zealand is actually going to get their taxes back through some money being spent on infrastructure. Well, they’re not going to get their taxes back; they’re going to get the borrowing that the Government has made in actual infrastructure. The rest of the time, the Government borrows just for social spending.

We don’t actually invest in the infrastructure of New Zealand, and the country suffers as a result. So at least—at least—this is actually going to help the builders, plumbers, farmers, and family people out there that actually can use the roading network, because at least it’s an investment in infrastructure, even if the Government is borrowing for it.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The member has got two minutes to come back to the road-user charges amendment bill.

Hon DAVID BENNETT: OK, Madam Speaker. This bill is a demonstration of a missed opportunity for infrastructure in New Zealand, and I think of the people in Whangārei as a great example. They need that four-laning. Our country needs that four-laning.

The Labour Party has said no to roads. The Labour Party has an aversion to building roading infrastructure. The Green Party does not like roads, either. It’s time they woke up and understood that in New Zealand, we need to build that infrastructure.

MARJA LUBECK (Labour): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a privilege to make a short call on this very important bill. We hear a lot of moaning and whinging from the other side of the House about the fact that they believe we’re not doing enough to assist with the cost of living. But whenever we do, they object to everything we do—whether it’s objecting to the raising of the minimum wage, whether it’s about public transport and the halving of the fees, or, in this case, on the reduction of the road-user charges. The fuel excise reductions were really helpful for people that live on my side of the world. For a household with a petrol vehicle, for example, if a person had to fill up each week, they would save roughly about $36 per month. Now, that is very good money for a lot of people that don’t have a lot to spend. So, again, this bill will help people with the cost of living—and why there is so much noise objecting to that from the other side of the House, I have no idea, but I commend it to the House. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a first time.

Ayes 98

New Zealand Labour 64; New Zealand National 34.

Noes 20

Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 10; ACT New Zealand 10.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) is set down for second reading immediately.

Second Reading

Hon WILLIE JACKSON (Minister for Broadcasting and Media) on behalf of the Minister of Transport: I move that the Road User Charges (Temporary Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a second time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Can I ask the member to just read that paragraph out. You had missed out “RUC”, sorry.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Sorry, Madam Speaker. Where is it?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): “Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme”.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Ah, sorry. Sorry, Madam Speaker. I move, That the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a second time.

As mentioned in the Minister’s first reading speech, the Government’s top priority is supporting households with cost of living pressures, and, of course, that’s what our Prime Minister has been saying for the last few weeks. Bread and butter issues are the focus now for this Government, and it’s a message that is resonating so strongly for our Government—so strongly that it’s leaving the National Party in the lurch.

Fuel is an unavoidable cost for many New Zealanders. They need to get to work or to make sure their kids get to school. For some small-business owners, fuel costs have a real impact on their ability to run their business. We know that many families are facing tough choices right now. For this reason, we have decided to maintain the support measures we first put in place in March and April of 2022, and it’s Cabinet and Government who have considered this and realised the needs of New Zealanders around the country. We know that Kiwis are suffering under a lot of the pressures in terms of the cost of living, so this is absolutely being clear that we support them.

The extension will run to 30 June 2023, with full rates of fuel excise duty and road-user charges resuming on 1 July 2023, keeping those measures in place in a way to provide timely and meaningful support to households and businesses across the country. The Government has already amended regulations to keep the 25c per litre reduction to fuel excise duty in place until 30 June 2023. Half-price public transport will also remain in place until 30 June 2023. We’re not backing off our efforts to encourage New Zealanders to get on public transport.

We know that this announcement has been well received by people right across the different political spectrum, so we’re pleased to see the support that has come across for this policy. The reduction to road-user charges expired on 1 February 2023. For the last three weeks, those who need to purchase a road-user charges licence have been doing so at full rates. We need to amend the Road User Charges Act to bring back the reduced rates as quickly as possible.

The bill is necessary to put in place a second temporary reduction period for road-user charge rates. The period will run from 1 March 2023 until 30 June 2023. During this time, all legislated rates of road-user charges will be reduced by 36 percent. Setting the reduction at this level helps to ensure that we are providing equivalent support to diesel vehicle owners as we are giving to petrol vehicle owners. At this level of reduction, the price of a road-user charges licence for a light diesel vehicle falls from $76 to $49. This means that the owner of a light diesel vehicle will save $27 each time they purchase a licence.

The bill does include a power to extend the reduction period by Order in Council. The international economic outlook remains uncertain and unpredictable. The bill provides the Government with the ability to continue this support, should the economic conditions warrant it, without seeking another amendment to the Road User Charges Act.

The road-user charges system is more complex than fuel excise duty. As the Minister noted in the first reading speech, there are over 200 road-user charge rates and more than 80 different vehicle types. Meanwhile, there’s one fuel excise duty rate paid as part of the retail price of fuel. Road-user charges are based on distance travelled. They must be purchased in advance of travel, and those people subject to road-user charges must affix a label to the vehicle that proves they have a valid road-user charges licence.

For this reason, we provide several different ways for people to purchase road-user charges. You can purchase in person from agents across the country or you can directly purchase online from Waka Kotahi. All the standard payment methods will be available to people during the second temporary reduction period, and the Minister is assured that Waka Kotahi has the resources in place to support those people who need help to purchase.

We’re keeping safeguards in place to discourage excessive purchases. The pre-purchase nature of road-user charges does create a risk of drivers or owners purchasing excessive amounts. When we first introduced the reductions in April 2022, we put some safeguard measures into the Road User Charges Act. We did this to discourage people from making excessive purchases or abusing the intent of the reduction. Waka Kotahi has been empowered to flag and investigate potential excessive or unreasonable purchases. If it concludes that the purchase was unreasonable, it can invoice purchasers at the full or standard rate for the excess. Waka Kotahi’s website provides guidance to help guide decisions on what is likely to be an acceptable or reasonable purchase. Individual travel patterns are often unique, and the guidance recognises this.

Passing this bill is a priority. We need to pass this bill because it is a way to provide timely support to many households and businesses across the country. It will deliver real savings for people who own and drive diesel vehicles, and we can implement it quickly. We look forward to the debate on this bill. Kia ora tātou.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The question is that the motion be agreed to.

SIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on the second reading of this piece of legislation. This debate, which is now being pushed through in urgency, is a reminder of this Government’s ad hoc way in which it is dealing with this issue. This piece of legislation has been dropped into Parliament and is being passed under urgency because of an announcement made on 1 February to, of course, extend the reduction in excise and road-user charges (RUCs), which, of course, is meant to expire on 31 January.

And why did they decide to extend it? Because, of course, this Government has still got no plan on how it’s going to deal with the cost of living crisis that New Zealand taxpayers and working families are facing. This is a Government which simply has one tool in the tool box, and they just keep re-announcing it every three months. So, this is meant to now expire on 30 June 2023, and, mark my words, there will be an announcement somewhere around 29 June—it might even be an announcement on 1 July—to say that they will be extending this only one more time.

But, of course, the National Party will be supporting this piece of legislation, because what it does is quite simple and is important, and it does rely on the fact that it ensures that people who pay road-user charges—which are people who own diesel vehicles: our tradies, our farmers, our truckies—are able to also get the reduction in road-user taxes, which those who drive petrol vehicles and who pay tax at the pump through petrol excise are already receiving. But, of course, there are a number of questions that we will be asking at the committee of the whole House, because, of course, once again, this bill has been rushed, there is no select committee process, and there’s no ability to actually interrogate the bill substantially with officials and actually understand the implications it has on the funding system, etc.

It’s been rushed through, but there are a number of number of questions that need to be asked about the assessment process, which need to be asked around what’s going to happen to those road users who have been purchasing road-user charges in the last couple of weeks and had to because their previous amount ran out and they’ve had to purchase some more. Will they be able to get some of their money reimbursed? Of course, when you have an ad hoc approach to policy, you end up with some people having to go down and buy at the full rate. If you go down to buy your RUC today, you have to pay the full rate. So will these people be able to get reimbursed for this fact? Some people might say, “Well, they should have they should have just bought more in advance.” Well, some people may have, and some people may not have. And the reality is, though, if you do have to go and buy a RUC today, if you go and register a vehicle today and you have to put some kilometres on the clock because you have to pay in advance, and if you went and bought a new diesel vehicle on 2 February, you’d have to put a couple of thousand kilometres on straight away, and so you’ll be paying at the higher rate. How are those people going to be reimbursed?

So there’s a number of questions, but, at its core, that is the fundamental point: it does create that fairness, and that is why we’re supporting it. However, we have a number of questions certainly around why this bill creates a five-year blank slate for this to be, effectively, permanently extended. It’s now no longer a temporary reduction, but a permanent reduction. And those are more questions that we’ll be asking the Minister at the next stage.

But, look, I just want to echo a couple of points which have been raised during this debate, and that is the fact that we do need to make sure we sustainably fund our transport funding in New Zealand, and this Government has mismanaged the National Land Transport Fund, it has failed to invest in our roading network, it has failed to build the roads that we need, and what we need is a National Land Transport Fund which is well-funded and which is able to meet the challenges that we as a country are facing.

This Government’s focused on one thing alone: light rail, which ain’t gone anywhere and is now not going to be started until 2025. They said it would be built by 2021; it won’t be started until 2025. They are stripping billions out from the National Land Transport Fund for their pet projects, when, actually, what New Zealanders want that fund to be used for is building and maintaining our roading network. And if you travel down the East Coast of New Zealand, if you go across the Brynderwyns—well, you can’t go across the Brynderwyns; if you want to go across the Brynderwyns—if you want to go to the Coromandel, if you want to use these roads, well, you can’t, because this Government has failed to invest in our highways. It has stripped the National Land Transport Fund of its primary purpose to build and maintain our roading network and to invest in the quality of our roads, and it’s focused on its pet transport projects, which it has failed to deliver. So we’ll support this bill, but this Government has failed on transport in New Zealand.

SHANAN HALBERT (Labour—Northcote): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I guess it’s important just to acknowledge that, while we are in urgency, we follow the same procedures that we would in any other piece of legislation that goes before this House. Every member of this House has the opportunity to make a 10-minute contribution should they wish to; yet, what I hear this afternoon is a lot of filling of that time in political speech, where, actually, this piece of legislation is an important part to assisting New Zealanders with the cost of living challenges that are in front of them. Yes, it is correct that we are feeling inflation pressures, and that impacts on both businesses and communities; on parents taking their children to schools. But, in fact, when we look at this piece of legislation—and, yes, its extension—times continue to move on, events continue to impact: just recently, we had floods and cyclones. But we know, most of all, that people are feeling the pressures of the costs in front of them. This piece of legislation assists them with that, and I commend the bill to the House.

TIM VAN DE MOLEN (National—Waikato): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s encouraging, actually, to hear the other side finally acknowledging that there is a cost of living crisis. Unfortunately, they have contributed to it through the Government’s policies, and this is a band-aid solution for something that, quite frankly, shouldn’t have been happening anyway. The reality is we are here, and we are, on this side of the House, supporting this piece of legislation, as Mr Brown previously outlined, because ultimately it brings back a level of fairness. Those who are operating petrol vehicles at the moment already enjoy this rebate—“enjoy” is perhaps a loose term for it. But, irrespective, aligning diesel vehicles at that same level is an appropriate change to make. Ultimately, though, the question is: well, what are our long-term solutions to these challenges? And we’re simply not seeing that from the Government.

There is no focus on cutting the unnecessary expenditure out of the Government Budget, and that is a key driver of inflation. We’ve seen inflation sitting at 7.2 percent, well outside the target 1 to 3 percent band—more than double and not expected to come back within that for a couple of years. That’s simply not good enough, because it’s letting Kiwis down, putting pressure on them at a time when, quite frankly, it is tough out there. As the previous speaker, Shanan Halbert, noted, things change—and, yes, we’ve seen that over the last few weeks with these terrible weather events that have occurred—and, actually, that’s why it’s so important to have prudent fiscal management when times are good; so that, when they are not, actually you have a bit more flexibility and you aren’t having to take these sorts of knee-jerk reactions and put band-aids in place, where actually good legislation should have prevailed in the first instance and reduced the costs for New Zealanders whilst growing our economy. We’re simply not seeing that sort of a focus from this Government, and it’s quite disappointing, because there has been a lot of opportunity for New Zealand over the last few years, and, quite frankly, it’s been squandered.

So, look, as I said, we are supporting it. As I say as well, though, it takes $700-odd million, in this instance, off the potential revenue in terms of the National Land Transport Fund, at a time when we have a critical shortage of infrastructure. We’re not seeing strong investment in maintaining our road network, and certainly no new projects being built under this Government, in terms of transport, and a key link between the Waikato and the Bay of Plenty region—you can’t get away from talking about that as the MP for Waikato! It’s critical that we see improved infrastructure connecting those regions. We’ve got two major cities there, in terms of Hamilton and Tauranga, and yet they were completely cut off recently. The road through Karangahake Gorge, State Highway 2; State Highway 29 over the Kaimai Range. It’s simply not good enough that we don’t have this sort of infrastructure resilience in our country. And, of course, now State Highway 25A over the Coromandel, as well, was another road. All of those were cut off, and there are real challenges around that. When we’re robbing our National Land Transport Fund of the ability to, I guess, fund these projects over the longer term, we’re really not taking an appropriate view to managing the needs of our country longer term.

So it is disappointing that we are having to do that. But, at the same time, it is appropriate that we do line up both the diesel and petrol mechanisms. If one is getting a rebate, the other should as well. And certainly for those trucking companies, freight providers in particular, when you think about that cost flowing through, as it does, it will potentially help to reduce some of the costs for the end consumer. And, unfortunately, that’s a key contributor to the cost of living impact: these aspects of the system—the supply chain—that flow through to those end consumers. We’ve seen that just the other week as well now, with the Government proposing a $1.50 per hour increase to the minimum wage. Like their fuel charges, that’s going to flow through to the end consumer, and, ultimately, it doesn’t help reduce that cost of living impact. So this is one measure that may help to alleviate some of that for a period of time. But, ultimately, as I’ve said, it is a band-aid. We need better solutions from the Government, more focused on the longer-term economic prosperity of our country and on the daily impact for New Zealanders. And, frankly, we’re not seeing that at this stage, which is disappointing. But, to our earlier points, we are supporting this bill to ensure there is consistency across those fuel types. Thank you.

RACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): I just want to push back a little on the previous speaker’s comments, Tim van de Molen, around the National Land Transport Fund and just point out that the Minister in his speech earlier today pointed out that with the reduced income from reducing the cost of transport, the Government will be topping up that fund out of the general fund, and we have just put another $250 million into the emergency transport fund. So what the member has been saying on the other side is actually, quite frankly, wrong.

And I want to point out just how fantastic Waka Kotahi were in my patch last year, following our flooding, when they managed to reconnect the most important transport link in the top of the South—State Highway 6 between Blenheim and Nelson—in just six weeks. So I want to commend Waka Kotahi for their work and I commend this bill to the House.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. I would like to speak to some of the comments that have been made in the debate by both sides. The reality is that the Government has choices and there are other options to help alleviate the cost of living, particularly for those households who are most affected, that would be better overall, better for the climate, better for those people, and better for the economy than this bill.

The proposal to continue extending subsidies for fossil fuels, through this bill which reduces the price of road-user charges and is commensurate with the reduction in fuel excise duty, is, effectively, a subsidy for fossil fuels. It’s that fossil fuel use that’s one of the main drivers for human-caused climate change, and we’re already seeing the impacts of human-caused climate change in the flooding and in the cyclone and we will continue to see more and worse impacts from climate change until we reduce fossil fuel use globally.

In New Zealand, there’s a huge opportunity, because our transport system is incredibly inefficient. Government spends somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion a year on the roads, but households have to spend four or five times as much to use the roads, and I think that that fact is often taken for granted. It’s underappreciated that New Zealand’s households and businesses are spending many billions—tens of billions—of dollars on vehicles, and fuel to run them. We’re importing all of that from overseas. It is a direct productivity drain on our economy that we don’t have a transport system that enables movement of people and goods at lower cost, which most other countries have. They have lower per capita transport costs because they’ve invested in a complete network which includes rail, public transport services, walking and cycling in neighbourhoods and around schools. All of these things reduce the cost of transport, they reduce emissions, there’s huge co-benefits to it, and New Zealand simply hasn’t done that.

So when Mr Bennett, for example, talks about the roads of national significance, let’s just talk about what this really means, because in the nine years that National was in Government and the five years since, the seven “roads of national significance” were highways in our highest population urban areas. They were robbing money from the regional roads. The roads of national significance are in the Auckland region, the Hamilton region, the Tauranga region, the Wellington region, and Christchurch. Now, they, basically, enable more residential development on the fringe of the urban area, which enables more car commuting, which makes traffic worse in the city, and that’s what they’re about.

In that 12 years, I believe it’s about 200 kilometres of State highway that were delivered—200 kilometres. That caters for less than 4 percent of all vehicle trips. If, as Mr Bennett asserts, we were going to take the roads of national significance approach to improving vehicle journeys and safety, it would literally take 300 years of the National Government to address the roading network in our country. Now, 300 years from now, we aren’t going to be using fossil fuels to get around; I mean, within 20 or 30 years, we’re going to have to stop.

Although my colleague Simon Court did say many sensible things about pointing out how this was not an economically productive policy or a good way of addressing cost of living, the one difference, I think—and this is just probably because he hasn’t actually looked at the numbers—is that if we were to have direct charging for the types of roads that the National Party’s talking about, they could not pay for themselves. The whole reason we don’t have toll roads for Transmission Gully and for the highway north of Auckland is because every time they look at charging, they realise that not enough people would be willing to pay the cost. That’s what tells you it’s not the best use of money.

Now, we have a roading network and we need to spend a lot more money maintaining it and making sure it’s fit for purpose; that is absolutely true. But spending billions on urban highways, which the Labour Government has, unfortunately, doubled down on since 2020, is not the right way to do this. And so, Mr Bennett, the National Party are just absolutely wrong when they say that the National Land Transport Fund is being used to pay for light rail. It’s not true. The National Land Transport Fund over the past few years has been spent predominantly on State highways, and those State highways started costing more money to build even before there was a change of Government. So, you know, the $200 million on the Kāpiti Expressway—almost immediately, it needed to be completely ripped up and resurfaced. That was a roads of national significance project delivered under the National Government. The New Zealand Land Transport Agency, Waka Kotahi, was already starting to fail in its ability to deliver highways.

Hon David Bennett: You were the Minister.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: And then there was a change of Government—no, no, no; not when this happened, David Bennett. You’ve got the timing wrong. All that news about the cost of the Kāpiti Expressway and the resurfacing—same with the Waikato Expressway—it’s all down to National Party mismanagement of Waka Kotahi. That is why.

I just want to point out that there’s 25 to 44 percent of household income being spent on transport. That is because the Government has not sufficiently invested in good passenger transport. Now, if we actually invested more public money in revitalising our rail network, which New Zealanders are begging for right across the country in the rural areas, we would have a more resilient transport system that gives people choice so that when the road’s closed, we can quickly fix up the rail line, and it’s actually faster to fix up, but also that our transport system’s using less fossil fuels which are causing climate change. It is a case where the environmental right choice is the economic right choice for New Zealand. That’s why I’ve never understood New Zealand’s transport policy, and the political debate around it is firmly stuck in the 20th century, largely because of the National Party.

So here is an opportunity, an opportunity to help those New Zealanders struggling with the cost of living. Even if their only choice, because of a failure of Government policy, is to use a private vehicle and to power that with fossil fuels, we would benefit those low and medium income households more if we gave them direct cash transfers, which could be used on petrol or diesel, or could be used on food—because food prices are also up and one of the major factors—or it could be used on rent. The Government could be doing more to control rent prices while we try to build supply and increase the public housing supply. So subsidising fossil fuels is not the answer.

The majority of the cost of this to Government is going to benefit—well, not the majority, but the largest share. Many times more of the dollars will be benefiting the wealthiest New Zealanders who are the least affected by cost of living. We need to target it to the people who need it most. We can do that with cash transfers and we need to continue—actually, we need to start truly investing in a multimodal transport network, because, I’m sorry to say, despite the fantasies of the National Party, most of the money is still going on highways. Those highways cost more than ever. I have to agree that the New Zealand Upgrade Programme funding mainly being used on highways was not very smart. It’s mainly highways in urban areas and it has mainly just inflated the cost of delivering those highways, because the sector was already at capacity and then the Government threw a whole lot more cash at it to ask them to deliver more roads, but, actually, we’re just getting the same roads for more money.

So, look, we just have to think long term, and there’s huge opportunities here. We can have more livable cities. We can have a more resilient transport system. We can tackle this challenge of climate change. But the only way we’re going to do that is by trying to tell the truth to New Zealanders and not settling for these short-term half measures. They’re like a short-term sugar hit that ultimately take us backwards and the wealthiest New Zealanders benefit much more than the poorest New Zealanders from this policy. The oil companies, the petrol companies will benefit to a certain extent, and our National Land Transport Fund is not sufficiently funded to pay for the maintenance and the rebuilds and repairs that we need on our roading network.

It’s kind of amazing how extreme the National Party’s rhetoric is around what the Green Party’s position is, because all we’re saying is some of the roads that they’ve promised are not the most cost-effective way to solve people’s mobility problems, and that we would like to see the money invested in things that actually would give people real choice, that would reduce their reliance on private vehicles and fossil fuels, because that actually benefits people to have that choice. But in order to do that, we need to invest in the networks that have never been delivered and that is: protected bike lanes in our cities, joined up with high frequency, clean public transport that is frequent, all day, every day, even on the weekend, so it can provide a real alternative to a car—and, of course, investing and maintaining and protecting roads in our rural areas. But that doesn’t mean gold-plated, four-lane roads that would take 300 years to deliver.

SIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m sorry, it gives me no pleasure to speak on behalf of the ACT Party on this bill—the ACT Party is not going to support this bill. And in one of life’s remarkable and fortunate coincidences, there are some things that we agree with the Green Party on about this bill, because it turns out that one of the things that the Green Party and the ACT Party have in common is that we’re generally interested in the welfare of New Zealanders—it’s just that we have different ideas about how to deliver that.

So I just want to note that this policy, including extending the discount on road-user charges to motorists who would buy diesel for trucks, buses, four-wheel drives—like my favourite, the Toyota Hilux Surf—that they are going to be able to obtain road-user charges; they have to pay for every kilometre on the highway at a discounted rate. And while we’ve heard from the Minister responsible for the bill, Minister Michael Wood—and various Labour MPs—that this is going to help with the cost of living crisis, actually, when we look at the regulatory impact analysis provided by officials, what it says is there are other ways to achieve this and other ways which it might be actually more practical, more cost-effective, more targeted at people who are in hardship. Because while New Zealand’s truckies—and I’m sure those people who read my column in Truck and Driver every month would agree with me that if they could actually get the benefit from all the money they paid in their road-user charges by actually having roads that were available when they wanted to drive their truck on them, they might be prepared to forgo the discount if they’re actually getting the roads that they thought they were paying for.

And if we just consider what the National Land Transport Fund that road-user charges—these charges that are going to be discounted; what the fund pays for—in fact, I just did a quick calculation, and sorry, I’ve got a lot of bits paper here, because a lot of it’s had to happen on the fly; that’s what happens when legislation is brought to the House under urgency in all stages in one afternoon. In the three years of the National Land Transport Fund period, 2021 to 2024, about $5 billion of money was collected from motorists, including truckies and people who drive diesel vehicles, $5 billion out of the $15 billion is allocated to capital spending on State highways and local roads and road maintenance. That’s only a third of the money in the Land Transport Fund; only one-third of the money collected from motorists, truckies, and road-user charges in fuel excise duty—only one-third of the $15 billion is allocated to building and maintaining roads. And that is the shocking statistic that you can obtain by looking on Waka Kotahi’s website and having a quick shoofty at the National Land Transport Fund.

So why would ACT oppose this bill that would actually make it a little bit cheaper for truckies getting around the country right now, that would give them a discount on road-user charges? Well, here’s the thing. I’ve done some quick analysis using this high-tech tool called Google Maps. And what it tells me, because the Brynderwyns are closed—State Highway 1 at Brynderwyn, north of Auckland, is closed, it’s taking an average of an extra hour in a truck through any available detour. Because the State Highway 1 at Mangamuka in Northland is closed—and has been since August of last year due to slips—it’s taking truckies about an hour and a half extra to get between Whangārei and Kaitāia. So any small discount this Government is offering truckies through this discounted road-users charge is being more than gobbled up by the extra travel time, by the extra cost of paying drivers, and by the huge inefficiencies that the failure of the State highway network is causing to businesses. That alone will be pushing up the price of food, fuel—everything that you buy in a supermarket in Kaitāia will be more expensive because the State highway network has been unfunded, and slips haven’t been repaired.

And what ACT says is that this temporary reduction in road-user charges—which apparently is intended to help reduce the cost of living in New Zealand—doesn’t address any of the fundamental underlying problems that we face. For 30 years now, rather than maintaining, improving, and renewing the State highway network and the local road network to deliver the level of service that New Zealanders need to allow our cities to grow in the ways that they are planned, we’re actually going to be kicking the can down the road when it comes to funding.

So the ACT Party has identified that in the time this policy has already been in place—these discounts on fuel excise duty and road-user charges—that’s cost the future taxpayer about $1.3 billion, which hasn’t been collected from motorists and used for roads; it’s been borrowed by the Government, and that borrowing, that debt has been allocated to taxpayers—some of whom probably aren’t even born yet.

So this Government, while telling us today that in fact they’re giving Kiwis a little bit of a boost, a little bit of a help in the hip pocket with the cost of living, actually is only telling them half the story.

When we look at the assessment carried out for the Minister of Transport, Michael Wood, by his officials, what it says is that “officials did not have time to investigate the problem thoroughly … more time could have allowed evidence and data to be obtained and analysed and greater clarity gained about the problem and desired objectives”. This is policy making on the hoof. This is a crisis caused by this Government. This is not solving any of New Zealand’s short-, medium-, or long-term problems.

When we look further, when we look at diagnosing the policy problem—there’s an interesting graph here which viewers at home might find it hard to see. But if you jump online and you look for the regulatory impact assessment associated with this bill, what it will tell you is on page 4—that, actually, about half the price of petrol is petrol tax collected by the Government and about 20 percent of the price of diesel is excise duties collected by the Government. So what possible alternative could there be to helping Kiwis in a cost of living crisis? Well, what ACT says is that firstly the Government could cut some wasteful spending.

Now, there are members in this House who think it’s a good idea to focus on lowering serious harm and fatalities on our State highway network; that’s the Road to Zero programme. But the problem with the Road to Zero programme is a whole lot of it is comms and spin. When you jump on Waka Kotahi’s National Land Transport Programme and you have a look at what they’re planning to spend over three years—2021 to 2024—they’re planning to spend $171 million on telling you to drive slower and showing you ads on television about their Road to Zero campaign: lecturing Kiwis, infantilising the issue of road safety—$171 million over three years. If the Minister, Michael Wood, and his Government wanted to offer Kiwis some savings, they could stop lecturing us around road safety, maybe fix the roads, but certainly not waste $171 million on communications.

And as much as I like walking and cycling, if I ever have the chance in the busy calendar of an ACT MP, this Government has budgeted $670 million over three years for walking and cycling initiatives. So if there was a serious consideration—which there hasn’t been—about alternatives, then potentially some of that $670 million allocated to walking and cycling, which is a personal choice, and I know that the Green Party likes to make the personal choice to walk and cycle more, so do I. The ACT Party also believes that motorists should be able to make the personal choice to drive.

And, in fact, if they’re going to make that choice, there are alternatives to road-user charges, and that includes road pricing. And that’s what this Government should have considered as an alternative to cutting the amount of money collected from motorists. They could have actually considered cutting some of their wasteful and unnecessary programmes that could not possibly have a high priority at this time, with our nation’s road network smashed by flooding, communities cut off, and roads like State Highway 1 at the Mangamukas in Northland out of service for years and years.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a second time.

Ayes 98

New Zealand Labour 64; New Zealand National 34.

Noes 20

Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 10; ACT New Zealand 10.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That bill is set down for committee stage immediately, and I declare the House in committee for the consideration of the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2).

In Committee

Parts 1 and 2, and clauses 1 to 3

Dr TRACEY McLELLAN (Junior Whip—Labour): Point of order, Madam Chair. I seek leave for all provisions to be taken as one question.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Are there any objections to the motion? We will proceed with it as one. Members, the House is in committee on the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2). The question is that Parts 1 and 2, and clauses 1 to 3 stand part.

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): I’ll just make a few brief introductory comments before other members contribute in this committee stage debate.

The bill, as members will be able to see, is a relatively short amendment to the primary legislation that is set out in two parts. The bill does exactly what has been described during the earlier courses of the debate.

In Part 1 of the bill, section 42A is amended, and this really is the main operative part, which, effectively, replaces the existing sections and puts in place the second temporary reduction period, which runs through from 1 March 2023 to 30 June 2023.

Of note to members: 2B here enables the Governor-General—by Order in Council made before the second temporary reduction period ends—the ability to shorten or extend the second temporary reduction period to a date specified in that order. That is to provide some additional flexibility should it be deemed to be beneficial for there to be a further extension.

I will just take the moment to say that the Government does not have a position that that will happen. But we do believe that, in order to respond to circumstances, should circumstances dictate that that would be a positive thing to do, this will give a bit of extra flexibility without having to go through an entire House procedure as we are today.

Part 2 then has further provisions which relate to the assessment period. That, of course, is an important period, whereby Waka Kotahi can assess whether purchasing might have been excessive, to ensure the integrity of the policy. Sorry, I should note that’s in Part 1, section 6, where there was a change from the previous period of 12 months, to five years.

Members, I look forward to any comments and questions that might arise during the course of this debate, and I’ll certainly do my best to answer any queries that members might have.

SIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you, Madam Chair, for the opportunity to take a call on this committee stage, which I have a number of questions that I’d appreciate the Minister of Transport answering to the House and to the public about.

The first question I have is in relation to clause 6, which replaces the 12-month temporary reduction period, after the second temporary reduction period ends, with five years. My question to the Minister is: what was the reason for deciding that the legislation should have a five-year period upon which the Government could continue to put in place the so-called temporary road-user charge (RUC) reduction scheme? What advice did the Minister receive around potential options in regards to the length of time that should be inserted into the bill? And, ultimately, why did the Government decide and settle on five years?

I think the issue here is, of course, that we support the intent of the legislation, which is to ensure that people who drive diesel vehicles—truckies, tradies, farmers—are able to get the same benefit as people who drive petrol vehicles, but this indicates that the Government has a policy of wanting to continue to extend what is, effectively, their only cost of living measure they’ve been able to put in place for quite some time. So one, I guess, is: why did they choose that period? And I guess the secondary question is: is it the Government’s intention to extend the road-user charge reduction scheme longer than 30 June, which could easily have been put in place without having to put clause 6 into the piece of legislation?

The second question I’d like to ask is in relation to those who have already purchased road-user charges since 1 February. Of course, the Minister will be aware that the last time he announced the temporary reduction—I think was the fourth time he announced the reduction; this was the fifth, I believe—was, of course, on 31 January. So people who have had to purchase road-user charges since 1 February, when this announcement was made, have had to pay the higher rate.

So the question I have there is: for those who have had to pay the higher rate—even though the announcement was made on 1 February that this would be coming back to Parliament—how are those people going to be, if at all, reimbursed for those charges? Of course, people who already owned a diesel vehicle may have had the ability to purchase those kilometres in advance, and many of them would have. But, for example, if you had purchased a new diesel vehicle on 2 February, you’d have to put at least some kilometres on to be able to drive it on the road. So those people would have had to have purchased those road-user charges at the higher rate. Then, when they go and buy more, they’ll be able to get them at the reduced rate once this bill is passed. But will there be any compensation for those people? Because, of course, if they’d purchased a petrol vehicle on 2 February and gone down to the pump, they would have been paying the lower rate of excise. So where’s the fairness for those people? I’m sure the Minister will be able to answer that question and be able to articulate to those people who are very interested in that question.

The third question is in relation to the assessments, and that is in relation to the issue where the Minister talked about one of the other processes—he said in his first reading speech—one of the other processes that we built in and will continue to build in to this reduction are some controls to ensure that we manage against the possibility of excessive purchasing.

So my question there is: what are the additional controls, if any? How many assessments have been issued? For those people who have had issue assessments issued, what happened when the RUC extension was put in place, when this temporary RUC reduction was put in place; were they then having their assessments reversed? Of course, some people would have had an assessment made that they had purchased too many kilometres when the first temporary RUC reduction was put in place. And then, of course, the Government chose to extend it, but they may have already been issued with an assessment to pay a higher rate. But, then, those kilometres may have been actually a reasonable number of kilometres to use over what has now been, effectively, a 12-month—will eventually become sort of 15 months’ worth of temporary road-user charge. So will those people—have they had to pay their assessments; will they have their assessments reimbursed?

And, of course, there’s, again, a fairness element in terms of people who, yep, may have purchased what would have been an excessive amount of kilometres for a three-month temporary road-user charge—or four months, I think it was, at the first time it was introduced—but that may not have been an excessive number if they’d known that the policy would have lasted until midway through 2023, which, of course, is some time after it was announced back in March 2022.

So those are a range of questions which I hope the Minister will be able to give meaningful answers to this House, because, I note, again, when you read the regulatory impact statements, officials have made it very clear they have not had time to be able to actually deal and address many of these issues. They were rushed last year, it’s been rushed again now, and it’s important that this House has confidence in that decision-making process and understands how those decisions were made.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): The question is that—

Simon Court: Oh, Madam Chair.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Just, oh—

Simon Court: Thank you, Madam Chair.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): It’s only because I’m so looking forward to dinner. Simon Court.

SIMON COURT (ACT): I’ve got some very quick questions, Madam Chair—very quick questions. But I would appreciate if the Minister of Transport would give us the benefit of a response.

Firstly, Minister, when was a decision taken to extend the road-user charge (RUC) discount? When I look at the regulatory impact assessment, it says, “advice needed to be provided quickly.” If “Officials did not have [enough] time to investigate the problem thoroughly. … [therefore it’s] possible [they] did not fully understand the extent of the problem to be addressed, including its scope and desired objectives. More time could have allowed evidence and data to be obtained and analysed … for greater clarity about the problem and desired objectives.”

So, Minister, question one, when did you decide to extend this discount on road-user charges? Second question, why did the Minister decide, against the advice of his officials, that—if the problem that the Government wanted to solve was to provide a bit of back-pocket relief for people during a cost of living crisis, why did the Minister decide to extend the reduction in road-user charges and fuel excise duties in parallel even though officials recommended extra support through the welfare or transfer system? The opportunities for transfers—and through additional payments that are targeted to people in hardship—clearly has merit.

Could the Minister just answer those basic questions: when did he make the decision, and why did he choose to extend the discount on road-user charges as opposed to providing extra support to people in hardship through the welfare system, as recommended by his officials? Thank you, Minister.

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): Madam Chair, if I could thank both members for their questions, then I’ll make a start on answering them and I might need to then continue after the dinner break. I’ll go in reverse order there.

Firstly, to Mr Court, with the questions that he has asked, the decision was taken by Cabinet. I can’t remember the precise date, Mr Court, but it was at one of the first Cabinet meetings of this year, that being at the very end of January or very early in February. This was after Cabinet had determined at the end of 2022 that Ministers should focus in and consider further steps that could be taken to address cost of living issues—we were invited to reflect on that over the summer period. So, early in the course of this year, in Cabinet’s deliberations, that decision was made.

Of course, in terms of the relative costs and benefits of the policy, we do have, in this case—although this decision was made relatively quickly and then moved to legislation fairly quickly, it’s not a new policy. It is one that, as has been commented on, was first put into place about a year ago and has had a couple of renewals. So there’s good information to fall back there on about the relative benefits.

The member asked, “What about the other options for providing cost of living relief for people?” Of course, that is something that the Government’s done. The Government did make targeted payments to people through the cost of living payment in the latter part of 2022, and has had a range of other policies in place which are designed to provide support, particularly to those who might be finding it most challenging—the minimum wage increase, for example, earlier this year.

So there are a range of policies. This is one that fits in with them. The reason we think this policy is particularly beneficial is that it provides—because it’s an existing policy and because nearly everyone engages with the transport system, be it through filling up their cars and/or using public transport—some direct income relief to pretty much every household. The total cost of this policy, this extension—that’s fuel excise duty and road-user charge together—will likely be between $700 million and $750 million. It’s a lot of money, but the way of thinking about that is that is directly $700 million to $750 million that would be coming out of household pockets that is now not having to, because it is being covered by the reductions provided for in this policy.

So we believe that the relative simplicity of the scheme and that significant benefit across both households and supply chains—and supply chain benefits’ lower costs flow on to everyone else, of course—make it a useful policy.

In the interests of everyone’s wellbeing, I’ll finish my response there to Mr Court’s questions and will very happily respond to further questions in a call after the dinner break.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7 o’clock.

Sitting suspended from 6.02 p.m. to 7 p.m.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members, the House is in committee on the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2). Members, when I left the Chair for the dinner break, we were discussing Parts 1 and 2.

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): Before the dinner break, I responded to a couple of questions from Mr Court, and I did promise to come back straight afterwards and respond to a few questions that Mr Brown had raised in his contribution.

There were three issues which he raised. The first related to clause 6 of Part 1, which provides a five-year period for Waka Kotahi to look at taking action in the event that they do believe that there has been excessive or unreasonable purchasing of road-user charge (RUC) licences at the reduced rate. Officials advise that the five-year period is important to provide some additional flexibility for the agency if new information comes to light. In particular, what they note is that distance travelled, as recorded at the time of a warrant of fitness, is an important tool for Waka Kotahi to assess purchasing behaviour, and that when it comes to new light vehicles that are purchased, they won’t be required to have a warrant-of-fitness check for three years. So some additional time for Waka Kotahi to keep an eye on things and to be able to have conversations with people in the event that they do believe that excessive purchasing has occurred. As I said before, we don’t believe that this is a big problem—there have been hundreds of thousands of RUC licences issued over this discounted period, and a relatively small number of cases of concern—but, for the integrity of the system, it’s important that the agency does have that ability if information comes to hand that they do need to act on.

Mr Brown also asked a question which, effectively, came down to: in the little gap that we have between the RUC reductions ending on 1 February and the implementation of this legislation, will people be left worse off, and how might we manage that situation? This comes back to the RUC overlap-licence issue that I spoke about in my first reading speech. And if I can just take members through that in a bit more detail, that might be helpful in addressing that particular question. Section 31 of the Road User Charges Act will allow a person who has purchased distance at the full rate to purchase a distance licence at the discounted rate and receive a credit for the unused distance on the full-rate licence. So given it’s been a relatively small period in between—I think, actually, that will affect only a fairly small number of people, given that you are pre-purchasing your kilometres, effectively—combined with the overlap licence, I think, will largely resolve that issue and ensure that people aren’t worse off. Bearing in mind, too, that compared to people receiving the fuel excise duty (FED) discount, which will have a hard end date at the end of June, there will be people who have purchased, legitimately, RUC licences before the end of June that will carry over a little bit beyond then, so there are some swings and roundabouts in this. And all things being equal, I don’t see that people purchasing RUC licences will be disadvantaged in any material way below the benefit that people who purchase petrol and pay FED receive a benefit through the system.

Mr Brown also had a couple of questions about excessive purchasing—just wanting to get a sense of scale, I think, there, about Waka Kotahi’s enforcement behaviour. Officials advise me that Waka Kotahi have investigated, over the course of the discounts so far—basically the last year—4,405 potentially excessive purchases and, based off that, have then contacted 2,207 vehicle owners, which is a pretty small number in the context of hundreds of thousands of licences purchased in that period. The approach that the agency has taken there has generally been an educative approach, telling people that these issues are being monitored and watched, and strongly encouraging people to comply in a reasonable way, rather than going straight in with hard-enforcement action. I think that’s the appropriate way of taking things through. It’s important to note that there’s also no incentive really for heavy-vehicle owners to bulk purchase, because, under the existing framework of the Road User Charges Act, their licences expire one month after the temporary reduction period ends in any case.

SIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the Minister of Transport for answering mostly those questions. I just wanted to clarify a couple of points. Firstly, in relation to the five-year period in clause 6 that replaces “12 months after the end of the temporary reduction period”, the Minister was articulating the reason for that, and I’d like him to clarify for me that that is to ensure that the New Zealand Transport Agency has the ability to undertake that assessment or that review of licences. Is that the intention of that piece, for the extension over time, or is it so that the Government has a tool to be able to continue temporary reductions over a five-year period? What’s the intent of the legislation?

Secondly, the question there around the assessments: the Minister answered the question in relation to how many they had looked at as being potentially excessive purchases—the number of contacts. The question I had was: how many assessments were issued? And, of those, were any of those assessments reversed because, actually, the Government changed its policy approach and extended the temporary road-user charge reduction? That may have been an excessive amount of kilometres if it had been for only the three- or four-month period initially, but given the fact the Government has extended and extended, it may not have been an excessive amount over a 12-month period, which is, effectively, where we’re at now, and we’re going towards closer to a 15-month period. So the question there is: were assessments made? Were any of those reimbursed due to the fact that, actually, the policy has been changed and extended, effectively, a number of times?

SIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): Thank you very much, Madam Chair. And thank you, Minister of Transport, for engaging in some creative and positive dialogue in terms of questions. My question relates to Part 1, clause 4, subclause 2A(a) in terms of the date of initiation around this legislation, and I wanted to reference also, in that regard, the departmental disclosure statement, section 2.1, which is in the context around other publicly available inquiries, reviews, and reports. Obviously, this is an amendment of a piece of legislation that has already been in place, and, as would normally be considered—appreciating that, I think, the wording in here says, “rapidly changing international situation”—why is it that no inquiries, reviews, or evaluations have been undertaken in regards to this underlying policy? I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that we would have undertaken some aspect around that. There has been time in order to do that. What are the reasons for that; what is the rationale for that? Actually, more importantly, is there now the intent, in the period of the proceeding few months from where we are today, to actually go back and do that piece of assessment work to provide some context in terms of the effectiveness of this policy response?

The second aspect I want to question around and get some clarity on is section 3.7 of the departmental disclosure report. Again, it notes here that there was a workshop held with Waka Kotahi, who is obviously the collector of the road-user charge, on 23 March 2022 to assess the workability of the bill, but there doesn’t seem to have been any follow-up formalised—you know, engagement in regards to the main entity that is involved with this legislation. Again, it’s not clear whether there has been any subsequent sessions with the transport agency, and, if not, why not? So those are my two questions.

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): In answer to questions from Mr Brown and Mr Watts—Mr Brown inquired further about clause 6, and I think, really, I’ll just refer back to my previous comments there about the primary purpose of that clause. He’s asked a question about how many actual assessments have been issued as a part of Waka Kotahi’s enforcement. That is a question I have asked of officials, and, unfortunately, they do not have that information to hand, but it’s one that I’m happy, outside of this forum, to get the answer and provide to Mr Brown. My recollection from engagement with Waka Kotahi in late 2022 is it’s quite a small number. They have generally taken the approach of contacting people where they might have a concern or might have observed some behaviour that suggested excessive purchasing, having a discussion with those people, and encouraging them to behave in an appropriate way. I think the actual level of enforcement has been relatively limited once that has been taken into account.

Mr Watts asked about whether there has been any evaluation done of the policy. There was indeed a post-implementation regulatory assessment that was completed and received in January of this year. That was something, at the time that the policy was put in place about March of last year—there wasn’t the time to do some of that normal regulatory work in advance, and so Cabinet did agree to do a post-implementation assessment, and that piece of work has been completed and provided to Ministers.

In terms of the involvement of Waka Kotahi as the collector, I can assure the member that Waka Kotahi has continued to engage with both the Ministry of Transport and myself and my office in the development of this piece of legislation, and they are very comfortable with the workability of it. Obviously, it has, effectively, now been in place for around about a year, and they assure me that because of that, and because of the processes that have been put in place, they are very comfortable with their ability to implement the legislation should it go through its stages in the House this evening.

SIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Minister of Transport, for giving us your full attention. I’ve got a couple of questions for you. In the explanatory note on the bill, it says in the first paragraph that fuel prices in New Zealand have decreased slightly from the high points in 2022, when the initial discounts on fuel excise duty and road-user charges were offered. But I notice in the post-implementation regulatory assessment published in January 2023, the graph that shows tracking fuel prices appears to end in March 2022 with the price spike, which was following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and what that did to world fuel prices. For some reason, even though it’s January 2023, this graph does not continue and show what fuel prices have done since then.

That appears to be an omission, and one which creates an impression that the facts of the situation are being manipulated. When I jumped on the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s (MBIE) fuel price monitor, which is updated weekly, what it showed me was the line I’ve drawn through here, which shows that fuel prices are about $2.40 a litre for regular 91, which is not too much different from what they were in March 2022, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

So I’m wondering whether—in the explanatory note, which sets out a general policy statement, why this policy is necessary—in fact, the most basic analysis of fuel price information from MBIE’s weekly tracker has been undertaken. So, Minister, if you could answer that, that would be good.

The second question I have is around choices. My parliamentary colleague Julie Anne Genter made a good point earlier in the debate, which is that every decision around allocation of road transport funding to various projects, and how that funding is obtained, is discretionary, has trade-offs, has costs and benefits. So, Minister, I’d like you to just consider, in the post-implementation regulatory assessment, officials point out that the cost of this policy, to date, is approximately $1.3 billion. Officials make the point that due to the reductions in revenue from this policy, the Crown, from general taxation, is forced to backfill the lost revenue.

Now, we’ve heard today that the Prime Minister was unaware of how much his Government is taxing New Zealanders, but it’s a lot. It’s in the order of $118 billion forecast this financial year, which is a lot more than the $80 billion - odd that the Government was taxing New Zealanders when it came to power in 2017. So given that any of these decisions are about trade-offs, did the Minister consider any other options? For example, did the Minister consider cutting any of the other programmes that the National Land Transport Fund invests in, such as, say, the communications spend of $117 million over three years for the Road to Zero programme, or even—as much as I enjoy walking and the occasional cycle—the $670 million allocated to walking and cycling over that time frame, or any of the other, essentially, discretionary spending that doesn’t invest in the road network for road users, which are motorists, freight, and all of those economic benefits that are derived from an efficient road network.

So, Minister, is the information which the policy is based on accurate? Is there any omission? Did officials realise that, after March 2022, the price of fuel spiked and then has returned to pre-March 2022 levels? And what other options did the Minister consider to fund this cut in road-user charges apart from general taxation? Thank you.

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): In respect of the member’s questions about the post-implementation review, I think he’s over-analysing the situation a little bit. There’s no smoke and mirrors here; the post-implementation review is the review of the decisions that Cabinet made at that time. As I described in my previous answer to Mr Brown, Cabinet was not able to get a full regulatory impact statement at the time because of the pace that the policy was developed, and so agreed to do a post-implementation review. So the reason that the graph that Mr Court refers to, on page 7 of that document, goes through to March 2022 is because that is the information that Cabinet had in front of it upon which to make decisions and make judgments at the time that it made that decision. The post-implementation review is not about what we’re doing now; it is about reviewing the policy that was determined then.

I do note that further on in the document, when there is some assessment as to the effectiveness of the policy—I’m looking at page 21 here—there is another time series which looks at how petrol prices moved over that time. Everyone is aware that there has been a moderation of petrol prices. The member himself said that is noted—I think, in the explanatory note—that the reason the Government believes it’s important to have this further extension is that, notwithstanding that, those prices are still somewhat elevated, and there continue to be significant pressures on household budgets.

This really goes to the member’s second question, which is really about the choices that the Government has in terms of how it can offer support to households under those conditions. The member notes that the total cost of the policy, once extended, will accrue to something in the order of $1.3 billion. The point I make to the member is this, because the member and his party are often very interested in the efficiency of Government spend: this is a very efficient spend as compared to other ways of channelling money—for example, through the transfers system and other payments. Effectively, that $1.3 billion, nearly all of it is $1.3 billion of cost that come out of household budgets and is absorbed by the Crown. There is very little friction or transaction costs in this policy. It’s a simple mechanism, because we stood it up last year. The ability to extend it, as we have now done a couple of times, is pretty simple to do as well. So it’s a way in which we can quickly push through some of that benefit very, very directly to households.

I do note the post-implementation regulatory assessment notes that low-income households are likely most adversely affected by an increase in the price of fuel. While officials do think other options could have been looked at, they also note that they would have taken longer to stand up. Again, I return to comments I’ve made earlier in this debate around the fact that this isn’t the only measure the Government is putting in place to provide support around cost of living. Indeed, we have also made targeted payments over the course of the last year as one aspect of the policy.

The member asks if I considered reducing certain activities in the National Land Transport Fund. Of course, that is not my decision. The Waka Kotahi board is responsible for the investments that it makes within the National Land Transport Fund.

SIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you, Minister of Transport. I always appreciate the level of detail that you go into in your explanations, but it does raise some other issues. This regulatory impact assessment, which is a post-implementation assessment of a policy implemented at very short notice in March 2022, took 10 months to develop and is a retrospective analysis, as you point out, of a policy decision implemented in March 2022. It seems extraordinary that, between March 2022 and January 2023, nobody asked and nobody received the back-up documentation—the post-implementation regulatory analysis—that would have enabled the Minister to take to Cabinet a document that said, “This is what it’s done in the period March 2022 to January 2023.”

This looks back on the period prior to March 2022, and it doesn’t include any information, as far as I can tell, as to whether the policy worked to deliver benefits to people during a cost of living crisis—people who had transport price pressures, whether they were freight operators, whether they were companies that deliver food to supermarkets or haul quarry rock around to build roads, for example. It’s not clear why it took 10 months, and it’s not clear whether the Cabinet decision that you referred to—the first Cabinet meeting of this year—had up-to-date information, and whether there was any assessment of what happens next, after this bill is passed, and what potentially happens in the period of up to five years that this legislation would have effect. So that’s of great concern to the ACT Party and, no doubt, would be of great concern to people who are interested in how the Government makes decisions about how it spends its money.

Then we just want to come to item 11, on page 6—“Financial hardship concerns are primarily dealt with outside the transport system”—and that’s according to the official report, the post-implementation analysis you referred to. Item 11: “The rates of petrol excise duty and road user charges are set to achieve a revenue target (to fund planned transport expenditure levels).” Well, given that the Minister is proposing a cut to the amount of money that’s collected, and having announced, in the past 24 hours, $250 million to go to Waka Kotahi to fund the reconstruction of our transport networks, those vital links that have been damaged, and before any thorough assessment has been undertaken as to what the overall cost it’s going to take to rebuild those main trunk roads that connect our regions—$250 million is pretty much just to scrape silt off the road, as far as I can tell. Yet the Minister is proposing to cut the amount of money that’s collected, and yet, at the same time, we have this huge demand for funding that’s going to come.

So, Minister, I’d like you to consider what projects would you cut or defer, in the way that an incoming Labour Government did in 2017 with projects like East West Link, for example; the Waikato Expressway, for example; the deferral for ever of the four-laning from Whangārei to Port Marsden, for example; the Takitimu North Link project, which is now being delivered after being deferred by Labour—half the road for twice the price; the same for Penlink. Which projects does the Minister consider should be deferred or cancelled in order to fund this enormous expenditure that’s coming? And does it make any sense at all, given the situation we’re facing, to be potentially cutting road-user charges at a time when we need the revenue to fix our roads and make them more resilient?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): In respect of some of the member Simon Court’s questions that relate to the bill, in the broadest sense, the timing of the post-implementation review, as I understand it—officials did want to assess the policy after it had been in place for a reasonable period of time, in order to be able to draw judgments about its effectiveness. It would have been very difficult for them to have done that after only a short period of time of the policy being in place, and I think it was reasonable for them to make those observations and pull together a report towards the end of 2022 and then report to Cabinet.

The member claims that there is no information here about whether the policy was actually a good policy that delivered benefits. I’d draw his attention to page 21 of the review, “Section 4: Effectiveness of the policy”, which specifically canvasses whether the policy was effective, and the header on page 22 which says, “The reduction to petrol excise duty has largely been passed on at the pump and resulted in lower petrol prices”. So the assessment there is that the policy was indeed effective at lowering the prices that Kiwis paid at the pump. The member’s other questions really do relate to broader transport investment decisions across the portfolio that are outside of the ambit of this piece of legislation.

SIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to follow on from questions that my colleague Simon Court was asking in relation to—he was asking what projects should be cut if there isn’t the revenue, and, of course, it states here that the Government is topping up, effectively, the National Land Transport Fund by the amount that is being lost in revenue. But in paragraph 113 in this regulatory impact statement, it says, “Our estimate is that the scheme, in total, when it ends on 31 January 2022”—which, of course, it will be longer than that now—“will cost the Crown around $1.3 billion. However, the final cost is uncertain and depends on several factors.”

I’d like the Minister of Transport, Michael Wood, to articulate what those several factors are, because that does have an impact on what that topping-up, in terms of the Government, effectively, filling in for the lost revenue from road-user charges or fuel excise duty—what are those factors and what are those dependencies which could lead to that amount of money potentially being lost or being less than what is actually lost and, therefore, may mean that the New Zealand Transport Agency does have some limitation on its choices that it has in relation to investing in our road network?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): In answer to the member’s questions in reverse, there’ll be no limitations on the National Land Transport Fund (NLTF), because the Crown has undertaken to ensure that the NLTF is no worse off as a result of the reduced revenue. So whether there are fluctuations a little above or a little below projections, that will be covered by the Crown, and there’s no impact on the NLTF and its ability to invest in the transport network. The main factors are how much petrol people buy over that period and whether there’s any behavioural impact as a result of the reductions.

SIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you, Madam Chair. So just coming back to the Minister of Transport’s assertion that the effectiveness of this policy has been evaluated, I’d like to draw the Minister’s attention to clause 101 of the post-implementation regulatory assessment. “At this time,”—it states—“no formal or comprehensive evaluation work has been completed by the Ministry of Transport on the policy. The insights below are tentative.” This is a policy which will have cost taxpayers—motorists, who are hitting potholes or whose roads could have been stabilised with proper geotechnical remediation in that period where the money could have been spent—$1.3 billion. We’re talking about not just the Brynderwyns but roads like State Highway 1 at Mangamuka, which connects Whangārei to Kaitāia, which has been closed since August 2021, and which was previously closed for a long period of time.

So there is no formal or comprehensive evaluation work, and yet $1.3 billion has either been taken from the Crown accounts, from taxpayers, to fund this policy, or it’s been accrued as a debt on future generations—I’m not sure which. So if the Minister could clarify that: whether it’s come out of taxpayers’ revenue or whether it has in fact been added to Crown debt.

And now we look forward. This policy now has a five-year time frame and, if we’re talking about on an annualised basis, round about $1.5 billion. We’re talking maybe $7 or $8 billion of foregone revenue at a time when this country, New Zealand, needs to find the money and as many sources of capital and revenue as possible to fund and finance the reconstruction and the improvement and resilience of our road network. So, Minister, it seems extraordinary that no formal or comprehensive evaluation work has been undertaken, and, Minister, on that basis, how can New Zealanders have confidence in the decision making around this policy or any other policy that this Government might make with regard to transportation?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): At the risk of repeating myself in response to previous questions, the document that the member refers to clearly points to the fact that this policy has had the intended effect of reducing fuel prices below what they would be, and as I said before, that is a direct flow-through. In terms of the policy rationale, that is sufficient for me and the Government. The investment that we have made and will make through this policy directly lowers the costs that fall on New Zealand households; $1.3 billion of cost by 1 June will have not been paid by New Zealand households but will have been saved by New Zealand households because of this policy. And we know that flows through. That is a primary driver for this policy.

As I say, and I said before as well—I’ve repeated this several times—the member is incorrect that there is any sacrifice that is made across projects funded by the National Land Transport Fund. He specifically mentioned one, the Mangamukas, which is a piece of road which has been hit by repeat extreme weather events and has been confirmed as a road that Waka Kotahi will remediate and plans to invest approximately $100 million in to do so. There is no project within Waka Kotahi’s National Land Transport Fund plans that will not occur as a result of this policy. I’ve repeated that several times, and I say it one final time for the benefit of members.

SHANAN HALBERT (Junior Whip—Labour): I move, That the question be now put.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the question be now put.

Ayes 98

New Zealand Labour 64; New Zealand National 34.

Noes 20

Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 10; ACT New Zealand 10.

Motion agreed to.

A party vote was called for on the question, That Parts 1 and 2, and clauses 1 to 3 be agreed to.

Ayes 100

New Zealand Labour 64; New Zealand National 34; Te Paati Māori 2.

Noes 20

Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 10; ACT New Zealand 10.

Parts 1 and 2, and clauses 1 to 3 agreed to.

Bill to be reported without amendment.

House resumed.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jenny Salesa): Madam Speaker, the committee has considered the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) and reports it without amendment. Madam Speaker, I move, That the report be adopted.

Motion agreed to.

Report adopted.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) is set down for third reading immediately.

Third Reading

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): I move, That the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a third time.

This bill is an important priority for the Government. At the beginning of 2023, the Prime Minister made it very clear in his opening address to this House—only this week—that the Government will be relentlessly focused on the challenges that New Zealanders face in respect of cost of living pressures in 2023. We have a broad programme to address those measures which go to direct supports to households, our ongoing work to build better wages, our policies to ensure that we have a more competitive supermarket industry, and this policy now, which for over approximately one year now has saved New Zealanders nearly $1 billion in energy costs. By the time this policy is extended, as a result of this bill, $1.3 billion of household costs will have been avoided by the reductions to fuel excise duty, road-user charges, and half-price public transport. That is one of the most meaningful policies that any Government has delivered in recent times to reduce costs to New Zealand households in a very practical way.

I do hear, and I’ve heard it tonight, a lot of noise about cost of living from a range of commentators. Well, it’s OK to talk about those things and acknowledge them; those pressures on New Zealand households are real, but what people actually need are practical measures that put more dollars in the pockets of householders in the wake of these challenges.

Simeon Brown: Like tax relief.

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: I’ll just repeat for the benefit of—oh, like tax cuts, Mr Brown pipes up. I don’t know whether that would be the $2 per week tax cuts that his party has proposed for minimum wage earners or the massive tax cuts that his party has proposed for the highest-income earners in New Zealand. That might be the position of his party; our party is focused on the needs of low and middle income Kiwis who are having a tough time. And in respect of this policy, we can be very specific about the benefits that flow through to householders. For a household with a car with a 60-litre tank, $17 is saved every time that tank is filled up. For those who benefit from the associated half-price public transport policy, who might take two journeys a day to get to and from work—potentially up to $25 a week.

So these are practical policies. They don’t take away all of the additional costs; we acknowledge that. But they do make a meaningful difference, and I’m actually yet to hear practical policies in response that would make a bigger difference. What is more, with this policy, it is one that we’re able to extend quickly and easily through this process to enable that benefit to extend through for a further period. And so I think it is a very important part of that relentless focus that our Government has on bread and butter issues, on cost of living.

There is one other issue that I do wish to address, and I acknowledge my colleagues from the Green Party in the House here who have indicated they will not be supporting this piece of legislation. It was one of those interesting nights where we did have an alliance of the Green Party and the ACT Party linking arms and possibly opposing this policy for slightly different reasons. It is sometimes interesting the alignments we get in this House.

The Green Party, I acknowledge, do not support this policy from a point of principle. It is not one I fully agree with, but I acknowledge the point of principle, which is that they are concerned that any policy which lowers the cost of fuel has the potential to create more vehicle kilometres travelled and more carbon emissions. To a small extent that is true and, the modelling of this policy does show a small impact in terms of greater vehicle kilometres travelled and therefore carbon dioxide emissions. The impact is relatively small, in the Government’s view, as compared to the cost of living benefit that we can provide. So the impact, for example, doesn’t meet the threshold for a climate implications of policy assessment, which is the threshold that Cabinet sets for a full assessment of carbon impact. So it’s there, it’s real, but it’s not large, and we believe that, given the cost of living pressures, it is appropriate to proceed.

I do also note that we balanced this policy up very specifically with the half-price public transport policy, which is part of that broader cost of living package which has supported more Kiwis to re-engage with public transport. And we continue to roll out more policies across public transport, safe walking, and cycling to give people those choices, to move around their towns and their communities in a lower-carbon way, coupled, of course, with the extraordinary progress that we’re making in electrifying the New Zealand fleet. We’re now one of the top markets in the world after Scandinavia for sales of electric vehicles, thanks to the Clean Car Discount. So I acknowledge the point from the Greens, I understand their position, but I just provide assurance that we continue to work across the programme to reduce our emissions, which is so important as we reflect on the climate change - induced extreme weather events that have caused so much devastation to our country in recent weeks.

I will conclude my comments by noting once again that this policy is a practical way in which the Government is following through on its commitment to be focused on cost of living. I do welcome the support from the other side of the House for the legislation. Some of the speeches have been somewhat awkward in that for eight or nine minutes they’ve tried to criticise the Government for the policy and then said, “Yes, but we’ll support it.” I think that’s because most people here, including in the National Party, recognise that it is important to address these cost of living issues. This is a good policy to do it. It makes a practical difference. It’ll help Kiwis and there’s more on the way from this Labour Government, which stands by working New Zealanders in 2023. I commend this bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The question is that the motion be agreed to.

SIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Well, thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on the third reading of the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2), and of course it’s “No 2”, because this is the second time this Government’s come to the Parliament to extend a policy they’ve announced four or five times. And it’s the only policy that this Government’s ever had to address the cost of living. The cost of living crisis is not something that is new, as you might have thought from this Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, who’s suddenly found this focus on the bread and butter issues when for the last 12 months—well, more than 12 months—New Zealanders have been suffering under a cost of living crisis with incomes rising slower than inflation, with costs going up all around them, interest rates continuing to rise, the Reserve Bank once again putting up the official cash rate. This is causing pain for New Zealanders, but all this Government’s got is, “Oh, what we’ll do is we’ll reduce petrol taxes and we’ll reduce, temporarily, road-user charges”. And as my colleague Chris Penk said in his speech, it seems a bit disingenuous actually using the word “temporary” in this legislation because it’s the fifth time they’ve actually extended it. So when does something end up not being temporary?

But we will support this piece of legislation because it does provide some relief for working families, for people who are facing that tsunami of cost of living crises that they are facing on a daily basis; the bills that they’re having to pay, of which one of them is, of course, the price of fuel which has become incredibly expensive. But we do call out this Government and we do say, “Well, actually, where is the plan to deal with the cost of living?” Where is the plan to deal with the underlying causes of inflation other than just simply putting in place this policy? Where’s the plan to give working New Zealanders some of the money that they earn back into their own pockets? This is a Government which is taxing New Zealanders at record levels, pushing people into higher and higher tax brackets despite their real income going backwards. That is theft. That is daylight robbery from this Government. Where’s the plan to get wasted spending under control? Where’s the plan to actually stop the wastage which we’re seeing under this Government? Where’s the plan to stop the burdensome regulations on businesses? Because that is what businesses are crying out for, a plan to actually relieve them of the increased regulation that they’re constantly facing. And what this Government did to the Reserve Bank is give them a dual mandate rather than have a single mandate, which is what they should have focused so they can actually properly deal with the cost of living. So, Madam Speaker—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! I ask the member to come back to this bill.

SIMEON BROWN: The Minister said in his speech when he criticised the plan that National has released around providing tax relief for hard-working New Zealanders, but what he didn’t talk about was the fact that he’s giving millions of dollars to Tesla owners. Millions of dollars to millionaires to buy Teslas. Absolutely ridiculous policy from the Government, once again taking from those who don’t have choices and giving it to people who do already. That’s the Government’s solution to the cost of living crisis is this bill and then giving millions to Tesla owners. It’s madness. It’s absolute madness that this Government thinks that giving millions to Tesla owners is the way to fix the cost of living crisis. But I guess you can add that to the list for the other side of the House’s achievements.

So we have supported this piece of legislation because it does an important thing. It aligns the fact that people who go with their petrol vehicles to the pump today and fill them up are getting the reduction in their fuel excise duty. They’re getting that today. But if you’ve got a diesel vehicle or if you’re a truckie or a farmer who does the hard work getting our goods to market, growing our food and doing those things, and if you go down to buy your road-user charges, you’re having to pay the full rate. And that’s because of one thing: this Government thought this—well, they said this policy was going to finish at the end of January. And then lo and behold, on 1 February they woke up and thought, “Well, actually, we need to think about the bread and butter issues. We need to think about the bread and butter issues, so we’d better”—

Barbara Kuriger: What about the vegetables?

SIMEON BROWN: Well, I know, as my colleague Barbara Kuriger has said, what about the vegetables as well? Vegetables are up—what is it? Fresh fruit and vegetables up 22 percent in the last 12 months, and the point there is all those farmers with their tractors, they of course don’t benefit at all. That is why we actually need a plan. We actually need a plan to deal with the underlying causes of inflation and this is a band-aid solution which, yes, provides some relief but doesn’t deal with the underlying causes of inflation that we’re seeing in New Zealand. So, yes, this bill does mean that those people with diesel vehicles now get the benefit of this policy as well. It would be absolutely wrong if that was to be only given to petrol vehicles and not to our truckies, our farmers, our tradies, those who drive diesel vehicles, the benefit of this policy has to go to them as well.

But at the same time we do hold reservations about how this Government has inserted clause 6, which is now effectively to give themselves a five-year extension to be able to continue to extend this policy and, mark my words, this policy will be re-announced by this Government. Hopefully, they announce it before 30 June, but my guess is it’ll be announced on 1 July when they wake up and remember, “Actually, we should focus on the bread and butter issues again”, because that’s what they do. They wait for the policy to expire and then they wake up and go, “Oh darn, we need to focus on the bread and butter issues again, we better extend that temporary road-user charge”. And mark my words, there will not be a cost of living package plan from this Government in this Budget. There will be more taxes. There’ll be more taxes on hard-working Kiwis, because all this Government knows what to do is to tax and to waste and to spend, and they don’t know how to deliver, and they certainly don’t know how to make sure the economy is working for New Zealanders.

So we’ll support this piece of legislation, but what New Zealanders need is a plan which helps ensure that they are in charge of their lives, that they are back in the driver’s seat of their own lives, not having a Government which does not have a plan, which does not have a direction for this country and all they have is band-aid solutions without actually getting to the underlying issues.

SHANAN HALBERT (Labour—Northcote): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise for the third speech on the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) 2023. Tonight, we’ve traversed in this House the challenges that all of our communities face in the cost of living crisis, we’ve called it, but the reality is that we need families to be focused on the things that matter: putting food on the table, getting to work, ensuring that our kids are in the classroom for their learning. This particular piece of legislation enables those families to consider those costs against the access and the opportunity that their young people face. That’s what we want to support. Our Government is focused on ensuring that the bread and butter issues to New Zealanders have outcomes, and this piece of legislation is attempting to do that, in some ways. We’ve got a work programme that’s dedicated to helping New Zealanders, and I commend this bill to the House.

SIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): Isn’t it ironic that all night we hear, in regards to the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2), that this is here to solve bread and butter issues? The last speaker, Shanan Halbert, just talked about bread and butter issues. I think Minister Wood referred to bread and butter issues. Well, this sounds like a bread and butter pudding, to be honest—that is, well overcooked, and it’s going to be very chewy and not taste that good. But I’m getting pretty tired of hearing this recurring statement about bread and butter—and I’m not sure what sort of butter they’re buttering the bread with, but I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it for a second. And I’ll tell you what, I think Kiwis have higher expectations than just having bread and butter for every meal.

That is the challenge with this piece of legislation. As I said before, Kiwis are hurting across this country, and they are hurting because of the actions and the policies by this Labour Government. And that is a great shame, because the Government have within their powers to be able to dictate the fiscal policy decisions—the choices and the options—that they can actually make some sustainable and significant change of substance that will actually deal with the underlying cost of living problem. This piece of legislation, as has been traversed in the House throughout the evening, does not deal with the underlying substance of the issues that face hard-working Kiwis across this country. It is, as Simeon Brown articulated before, a band-aid solution.

And you know what? Kiwis deserve more from their Government. They deserve a clear plan that has substance, that has actions that are underpinned by evidence that it’s actually going to deal with the heart of the issue. They don’t deserve simply a reoccurring amended bill that is a temporary bill that goes on for five years. It is simply just picking at straws. It actually shows that this Government do not have any other ideas. They’re out of ideas. They’re out of ideas in terms of what they do with the cost of living crisis. They’re out of ideas in terms of how they fight inflation. They have got no other ideas other than putting a reduction in terms of the fuel prices. And as Simeon Brown articulated, in absence of any other ideas it is not inconceivable that we’re going to support a piece of legislation, to say, “Actually, you know what, in absence of any other ideas of any substance, and in absence of a Government actually reading the clearly articulated plan that we have articulated, which will fight the cost of living and fight inflation—in absence of all that, then we will be supporting this piece of legislation.” But it’s only because this is as good as it gets from this Labour Government, and that is a great shame.

I mentioned before in my first reading speech that the cost of this Government is driving up the cost of living. The costs and the spending by this Government, the wastage that they are undertaking, is driving up the cost of living. And so as a result of their actions, then, they are having to come in with a piece of legislation like this to try and, basically, put a band-aid over the fact that Kiwis are going backwards across this country. Kiwis are going backwards no matter where you live in this country, and that is setting up a pretty dark future, particularly for our younger generations, in terms of what that looks like going forward. Nothing of any substance, nothing to deal with the underlying issues. No appetite to reduce Government waste, no appetite to reduce these pet projects that we—and I’m not going to articulate them all, because the list is growing longer and longer, and, you know, it’s just repeating and repeating. Every day, with inflation, those projects are going up.

But the reality is that Kiwis deserve more from this Government. They are hurting. Their hurt is caused by this Government. And this piece of legislation is not going to provide a sustainable solution for that.

RACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): It’s a pleasure to take another short call on this bill tonight. I wanted to make a particular reference tonight about why it was so important that we are reducing the excise on petrol and the road-user charges, as well as reducing the cost of public transport.

Much has been made about the need for us to also be investing in public transport and for that to be our focus. But the point I wish to make is that, having campaigned in my electorate of Nelson, for over 10 years now, for improved public transport, there are many parts of our country that have had decades of under-investment in public transport. In Nelson, for example, the buses only come every hour or so. We will be changing that from 1 July; they will be increasing significantly in frequency. But, in the meantime, until we make those changes, we need to ensure that those low-income people—who do have vehicles; many of them do have diesel vehicles—who can’t catch a bus in Nelson on a Sunday, because they hardly exist, are covered by this legislation.

So I just want to point out that we are doing those things, we are building that infrastructure, but we also need to ensure that people actually have the money in their pockets to put bread on the table, to pay the rent in the meantime. I commend this bill to the House.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Now, more than ever, we need leadership on these issues. We need leadership because we’re going to have to change a lot of things to combat climate change. We’ve waited too long. A previous speaker from the National Party said Kiwis were hurting—yeah, they’re hurting because successive Governments, decades of successive Governments, have failed to invest and prepare for climate change and invest in a transport system that is less reliant on fossil fuels.

We can absolutely do that, but we can’t do it if we keep doing what we’ve always done in the past. We can’t do it if we keep letting the ultra-wealthy get wealthier, if we allow a few big corporates, like 20 big corporates in New Zealand, make excess profits—no, we’re not going to be able to solve these problems, and we certainly can’t do it if the political debate is all about where we are right now.

The reality is there were other options to help low income and middle income New Zealanders deal with higher prices and higher cost of living, and that could have been done through a direct cash payment. It would have benefited those households more than this road-user charge cut and the subsidy for fuel excise.

We’re going to have to raise money to build infrastructure. You know, I’ve heard from the National Party that they’re just going to keep borrowing to pay for things. They oppose every single proposal that would actually reduce climate pollution, make the economy more fair, or raise revenue in a fair way—they oppose. So not a single constructive solution. There’s a fantasy about building four-lane roads everywhere in the country. They didn’t even manage to deliver 200 kilometres of that over 10 years. So there’s just no way they’re going to be able to deliver it all around the country, and certainly not unless they look really hard at raising revenue to pay for it. So it’s an absolute fantasy on the on the right side of the House.

Unfortunately, our Labour Government isn’t building the infrastructure that we need. There actually is not a huge investment going on in regional rail right now. There is not a huge investment in public transport services. Most of the Transport Budget is still being spent on outrageously priced urban motorways that make congestion worse and give New Zealanders no opportunity to get around without having to rely on a car and rely on fossil fuels.

We need climate leadership. The Green Party will continue to provide that. Luckily, we will have an opportunity later this year to change the Government to one that’s actually going to take on the real issues of inequality and of climate change and of ecological catastrophe. We have the means, we have the ability to work together to solve our collective challenges, but we need to be able to tell the truth and not give in to these short-term policies that seem popular to keep you in power a little bit longer when all you’re doing is continuing the status quo—Madam Speaker, I know not you, personally. But yeah, we need real change because this policy, this legislation we’re debating, it’s—three to five times more money is going to go to the wealthiest New Zealand households from this than to the lowest-income New Zealanders. That’s the problem with this policy.

There are options to help low-income New Zealanders who need to drive. You do it through cash payments, not through direct subsidies to fossil fuels that benefit the highest-income people more than the lowest income people.

SIMON COURT (ACT): This is only week two of the 2023 parliamentary year, and already we have an example of extremely poor lawmaking which offers New Zealanders an example of what a Labour Government will continue to do indefinitely unless they’re held to account by the ACT Party.

This regulatory impact assessment of this bill, which proposes to cut revenues from road users to the tune already of $1.3 billion in 10 months, $115 million a month, and instead either borrow that money or add $1.3 billion, maybe $1.5 billion, a year to taxpayers’ tax bills.

This bill proposes to extend a policy that was an emergency response to the fuel price spikes after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This bill should not be extended for one day longer. This Government has failed to address long-term problems with infrastructure funding and financing. In fact, this bill makes that problem much, much worse.

Minister Michael Wood sat in a truncated committee of the whole House stage and explained that this policy was highly effective, even though officials point out in this document prepared after the fact—10 months after this policy came into effect last year—that, in fact, it would be far more preferable, if the Government was worried about the cost of living, to transfer taxpayer funds through welfare schemes, for example, to people who most needed it.

Instead, this is a shotgun firehose of $1.3 billion of taxpayers’ funds in only 10 months—with five more years potentially to roll on this program; $7 billion to $8 billion of spending potentially—for a policy that officials described as, “At this time, no formal or comprehensive evaluation work has been completed by the ministry on this policy.” They don’t know if it works; they don’t know if it actually helps reduce the cost of living.

But what we do know is at a time that New Zealand roads have been devastated by flood events, by storm events—and I’m not just talking about the January and February 2023 events. We look at State Highway 1 and the Mangamukas that connects Kaitāia to Whangārei; we look at that road and we say, “Well, the Minister said he’s going to spend $100 million of taxpayer funds fixing that up.” That road’s been closed since August last year. Trucks need to detour 90 minutes through unsuitable roads to get goods and freight to Kaitāia—food, fuel, and other materials—and to bring from Kaitāia and Northland things that they make that earn money for Northland: dairy products, timber products from the Juken mill from Kaitāia. An extra 90 minutes for each truck, an extra 90 minutes each driver spends in the cab, an extra 90 minutes of fuel usage.

Instead of prioritising the repair, the rehabilitation, the resilience, the safety and efficiency of New Zealand roads, the Minister believes that instead the Government should offer a road-user charge cut to motorists. Some of them could be driving a 1990 Toyota Hilux Surf—that’s a fantastic vehicle. But even somebody driving a Toyota Hilux Surf who gets the benefit of this pays. They pay for the pleasure of a Labour Government announcement—$1.3 billion is what it’s cost Kiwi taxpayers.

So the ACT Party won’t be supporting this; this is an example of terrible lawmaking using the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which happened in March 2022, and the petrol price spike that happened shortly after as an excuse to persist with this policy, even though—even though—the Minister admitted that fuel prices have come back to what they were roughly before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On that basis, there’s no justification for this policy.

If the Minister wanted to relieve the pressure of the costs of living on taxpayers’ pockets; on Kiwis’ pockets; on motorists, what the Minister could do instead—and this is what I suggested—is look to reprioritise some of the projects funded under the National Land Transport Programme. As much as I like walking and cycling—I walk to work as often as I can; I ride a bike, particularly with my son, as often as I can—those are personal choices. Yet the National Land Transport Programme allocates $670 million to walking and cycling over three years.

That surely must be optional spending at this time, when our roads and highways—particularly in the North Island—have been devastated by floods, slips, and are still subject to natural hazards. Roads that, as a roading engineer, I look at and I know full well have not been evaluated for their performance and suitability most likely since the 1980s. So in my entire lifetime as a driver, most of the roads and highways—apart from those fantastic new four-lane and six-lane roads around the Waikato, Auckland, and Wellington like Transmission Gully—are no different to when I got my driver’s licence in the 1980s. It’s a sad indictment of all Governments since then—of all stripes.

That’s why ACT proposes new solutions to fund roads and infrastructure. Here we are, here’s the solution that we propose—ACT’s solutions for building New Zealand and conserving nature. Instead of giving, with one hand, a rebate on road-user charges to one group of New Zealanders while taking from another—the taxpayers that will fund the $1.3 billion this policy’s already cost; maybe the $7 billion to $8 billion it will cost over five years—what ACT would propose is, in fact, we move away from this road-user pricing scheme altogether; road-user charges. We move away from fuel excise duties and we instead replace this archaic and outdated scheme which doesn’t account for electric vehicles; it doesn’t account for the fact that hydrogen-powered trucks and buses are coming on our road, because it doesn’t collect any revenue from them. Instead, we move away from fuel excise duties and road-user charges to a system of road pricing.

That is fair. And the reason it’s much fairer on Kiwis is because they have a choice whether they drive at peak times. This is what’s been proven in the UK, in London, where they introduced road pricing to reduce congestion in London: that people chose not to drive at peak times, rather than incur the charge. For those who must drive at peak times—delivery drivers, truck and trailer drivers delivering quarry rock and concrete to project sites—they will pay the charge because it’s important that they get their load, they get their delivery there on time.

It’s a much fairer system. For people who do need a car for work, instead of paying these blanket fuel excise duties and road-user charges—which accrue to billions and billions of dollars a year—and receiving a fraction of the benefits, only one-third of the National Land Transport Fund—all of that money collected from motorists—only one-third of the $15 billion is actually spent on road maintenance and road construction: $5 billion out of the $15 billion.

This Minister said not a single project will be reprioritised, potentially, to fund this road-user charge discount—not a single project—and that the money would come from somewhere; that we shouldn’t worry. Don’t worry, taxpayers of New Zealand; don’t worry, road users. There’s nothing to see here. This is a payment, a benefit that will help you during this cost of living crisis. It’s nonsensical. It’s illogical. We heard similar arguments from Shanan Halbert, the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee.

I’m disappointed. I didn’t realise when I came to Parliament I’d be facing people who talk such nonsense, who couldn’t engage in a rational debate, who use falsehoods and gaslighting—falsehoods and gaslighting—pretending the fuel price is the same as it was in March 2022. But that’s what we’re facing here. And ACT offers a different alternative; we offer long-term reform—

Sarah Pallett: Point of order, Madam Speaker. I believe that the language used by the speaker was inappropriate in the House, particularly with regard to accusatory of falsehood.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Sorry?

Sarah Pallett: The speaker was accusing the Labour Party of falsehood.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): When he was using “gaslighting”?

Sarah Pallett: He directly accused Shanan Halbert of falsehood.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): I ask the member to withdraw and apologise.

SIMON COURT: Point of order, Madam Speaker. Would the member care to elaborate on the falsehood?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The accusation and the use of Shanan Halbert—which by the way, he’s not even in the House—is also out of order. The member will withdraw and apologise.

SIMON COURT: Not wishing to litigate that point of order; I did not refer to the member Shanan Halbert as being out of the House. I referred to him as the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, and I referred to statements he had made in the second reading of this bill, which he claimed were the justification for this policy. Yet the statement here—the regulatory impact statement here—actually contradicts what both the Minister and Shanan Halbert said.

Camilla Belich: Point of order, Madam Speaker. We clearly heard, on this side of the House, the reference to the member Shanan Halbert and the word “falsehood” used by the member. So I don’t think it’s up to our side to elaborate on that. It’s a point of order in relation to something which is against the Standing Orders.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): I’m not going to take another point of order, Nicole McKee, because I do recall that he did use the term “falsehood”. The member will withdraw and apologise.

SIMON COURT: I withdraw and apologise. So let’s be clear: the ACT Party is offering an alternative. That alternative is long-term reform of road pricing, funding, and financing. We want to see New Zealand’s roads built to withstand the next flood.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! The member is out of time. Are there any other members taking calls on this bill?

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a third time.

Ayes 100

New Zealand Labour 64; New Zealand National 34; Te Paati Māori 2

Noes 20

Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 10; ACT New Zealand 10.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a third time.

The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 98, Noes 22.

Bills

Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill

First Reading

Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN (Minister of Justice): I present a legislative statement on the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN: I move, That the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

A recent High Court decision found that the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Act 2015 does not apply retrospectively. The court also found that natural justice requires the Commissioner of Police to provide notice and a right to be heard before determining a returning offender’s status under the Act. The effect of the decision means that the Act is not available for returning offenders, such as 501 deportees from Australia, who offended before the Act came into force in 2015. The decision would also delay the making of returning offenders orders, which are currently served on the person as they enter the country.

There are currently about 265 returning offenders being managed by the Department of Corrections on particular conditions, and of this cohort about 40 are being managed for convictions that pre-date the Act, with several considered to be high risk. The court’s findings mean that these offenders could apply to have their order quashed, and, further, this affects future returning prisoners with offending that pre-dates the Act, as they would be released into the community on arrival into New Zealand without any specific agency support or oversight. To put it simply, I consider that this situation amounts to an absolutely unacceptable and urgent risk to public safety, and it’s contrary to how Parliament always intended the Act to work.

It is appropriate that the bill is passed through all three stages under urgency, as it only affirms what I consider to be Parliament’s original intention for the returning offenders regime. Further, the Justice Committee reviewed the Act as recently as 2019 and concluded that it was at that point operating as it was intended.

I want to acknowledge the bill’s impact on the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. Increasingly, New Zealand courts have taken the view that regimes such as the principal Act, which imposes restrictions that are usually only available through the criminal jurisdiction, are punitive. I consider these amendments are necessary to protect public safety and are limited in terms of their practical impact on the rights of returning offenders. This is because the bill only puts returning offenders in the same position that they would have been in if they had’ve offended in New Zealand, because parole is not generally regarded in New Zealand as a separate penalty but the administration of the original penalty, and because the vast majority of returning offenders would have been subject to parole regimes in the jurisdictions they offended in had they not been deported to New Zealand upon their release from prison.

I wish to draw the attention of members to the four legislative changes the bill proposes to address the issues raised in the High Court decision. First, the bill explicitly provides that the regime applies retrospectively. This bill clarifies that all operative provisions of the Act apply retrospectively, even where this is inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Express and clear direction as to the Act’s retrospective application would ensure that the Corrections department can continue to manage the 40 returning prisoners with pre-2015 convictions, as well as future offenders with pre-2015 offending histories.

Secondly, the bill provides that standard and special conditions can still be imposed even where this might be inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. There is a risk following the High Court decision that the court might not consider; the Act allows it to impose special conditions where inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. This is because section 6 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act requires legislation to be given an interpretation consistent with that bill where possible. Special conditions are essential to protect public safety and for the overall operation of the returning offenders regime. For these reasons, the bill clarifies that standard conditions can be imposed irrespective of any possible unjustified limitations of sections 25(g) and 26(2) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. These are the provisions that might be engaged specifically because of the Act’s retrospective application. Conditions might continue to comply with all other rights protected by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

Third, the bill confirms that natural justice requirements for determinations are satisfied through the existing review mechanism. The High Court held that natural justice generally requires that returning offenders are given adequate notice and a right to be heard before the Commissioner of Police makes a determination that a returning offender is a returning prisoner. This new requirement will delay the imposition of conditions, creating a public safety gap. I do not consider that notice and the right to be heard is required for a fair determination process. This is because the matters that the commissioner is required to be satisfied of before making the determination are wholly objective and factual in nature. This means that the commissioner must make a determination where the statutory criteria are met.

Additionally, the Act already provides for a process by which the affected person can seek a review of their determination. However, I do consider that there is merit in removing the current time limit on applications for a review of determination notice, which is currently set at 15 days. This responds to concerns raised by the court and will mean that returning offenders have more time to seek legal advice and prepare an application for review.

Fourth, this bill validates past conduct and determinations that were made on the basis of offending that occurred prior to 2015. The bill confirms that all returning offending orders made since the Act came into force are not invalidated merely because they were imposed for offending that pre-dated November 2015. The bill includes a provision that excludes G, the applicant in the High Court case, from the validation of the retrospective applications of the Act. The Government acknowledges that it would not be constitutionally appropriate to legislate over the ongoing litigation, and that, therefore, has been set aside.

To conclude, finally, I wish to thank members for accepting the need to pass this bill rapidly through all stages. It is critical to public safety that we address the issues raised by the High Court decision as soon as possible. I want to reiterate that this bill affirms what I consider to be Parliament’s original intention of the returning offenders regime. Consequently, the bill only aims to put returning offenders in the general same position as they would have been had they offended in New Zealand. I acknowledge the bill raises New Zealand Bill of Rights Act issues, and these have been addressed. Ultimately, I consider these amendments are necessary to protect public safety and are limited in terms of their practical impact on the rights of the returnees. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s my pleasure to speak on this urgent piece of legislation before us tonight, The Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill, which we in the National Party will be supporting. Now, I think the Minister of Justice has explained the background to this bill: obviously, we’re dealing with a piece of legislation that enables New Zealand authorities to impose probation-like orders on returning prisoners from Australia, primarily—although it can be from elsewhere—from the 501 prisons.

There was an obvious public safety issue that arose in around 2015 and 2016, when Australia—in a rather unfriendly manner, I think—started the process of sending prisoners back to New Zealand. Even though they may have only lived in New Zealand for a couple of years and been in Australia for most of their life, they’re still being sent back after their prison sentence if they’ve had a sentence of more than a year. So putting that to one side—the rather unfriendly nature of the manner in which it’s been carried out by the Australian Government for a while—we’ve been left in New Zealand with a real public safety issue in terms of having serious criminals returned to this country, and not wanting to just have to sit back and wait for them to re-offend before they are dealt with by the New Zealand justice system.

So the bill was passed back in 2015: the Returning Officers (Management and Information) Act. Then, we’ve seen a High Court judge come out with a judgment late last year, in effect severely curtailing that Act—saying that it shouldn’t apply to people who were convicted prior to the imposition of this Act in 2015. The judge has said a number of other things: that it doesn’t comply with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act around double jeopardy and process issues around how it should be imposed.

Now, in an ordinary course of events—and I’ll be certainly asking the Minister about this in the committee stage—you would expect the approach to be taken would be to appeal the decision in the High Court to the Court of Appeal, which indeed has been done, and to wait for the Court of Appeal to bring down their judgment on it. The Government has decided that it’s not prepared to wait for that judgment and doesn’t want to risk the judgment going against the Crown, presumably, and the fear of the stay—which is to say that when the High Court make their judgment, it doesn’t take effect until we’ve heard from the Court of Appeal, and so we haven’t had to set aside the arrangements in place for the 40 or so former 501 prisoners from Australia who are affected by this piece of legislation. So I will be asking during the committee stage exactly why—or just to run through the logic of why they’re not prepared to wait. We’re still supportive of the legislation, because we agree with the fundamental principle.

The court case, I do have to say—I did read the court case and found some of the logic somewhat tortuous in it, to be frank. The legislation was passed under urgency in the House to deal with what was regarded by Parliament as an urgent issue, and the very purpose of doing it under urgency was to capture those deportees who had come from Australia, who had already been convicted. So if the interpretation that the judge has applied—which is to say that it shouldn’t apply to anybody convicted before the Act was passed. Well, that would mean that Parliament had sat under urgency to pass legislation that wouldn’t take effect for more than a year after it was passed. So nothing would have happened until somebody had been convicted, served a year, and then been released and then sent to New Zealand. So you would have the ludicrous situation of Parliament jumping up and down under urgency to stop prisoners arriving on the boat tomorrow—and the judge implying that we were doing that in order to wait more than a year for it to take effect. That was not what Parliament had in mind—nobody thought that—and it was rather, I think, frankly, a tortuous logic to apply to the legislation.

That is why I think it’s absolutely appropriate that Parliament should assert itself by this piece of legislation today, to say, “No, that’s not what Parliament had in mind”. It’s clear from the bill, and the manner in which it was passed under urgency, that this was always intended to apply to the criteria that’s outlined in the legislation: people that have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment for more than one year—or two or more terms that are cumulative, totalling more than a year—returning to New Zealand within six months of his or her release from custody, during the end of the sentence. So that’s the criteria. It didn’t say anything about whether the sentence had to be after the legislation was enacted.

Then, when you looked at one part of the legislation, as the court case actually referred to—in that amending the Parole Act it specifically stated that the section had retrospective application: “offender may be an eligible offender even if he or she [has] committed a relevant offence … or became subject to release conditions [for extensions] … [but] before this Part [or] any amendments … came into force.” So it is surprising that the judgment was as it was, and Parliament, it seemed to me, was reasonably clear about its intentions for this legislation, which was in order to improve public safety in New Zealand by setting up a system of parole which was akin to what serious prisoners in New Zealand would expect to see in order to keep the public safe and to aid with rehabilitation and the many other things that are part of it.

Secondly, the case argued that there were some breaches of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act in terms of double jeopardy and constraints on the liberties of the prisoners. Of course, as has been stated many times in recent times in legislation in this House, there will be—and there will continue to be—many pieces of legislation passed in this House that contradict elements of the Human Rights Act. It’s not a black and white thing; sometimes bills do impinge upon the rights of New Zealanders. The only relevant question is whether that impingement on human rights is justified, and, as the Attorney-General’s report—rather good, I think—into this piece of legislation points out, yes, there have been places in which this regime can be argued to have gone against the requirements of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, but can that inconsistency be justified? The answer is absolutely, on the basis of protecting the public safety. And is there a rational connection between the limit and the objective? Is the impairment of right greater than the reasonably necessary to achieve the objective? No. Is the limit in due proportion to the importance of the objective? Yes. It is for Parliament to make that judgment and stand by it. The courts can point out an inconsistency, but they do not have the opportunity to overturn legislation passed by this House. We’re not the United States; we don’t have a separate branch of Government where the court can overturn legislation passed in this Government, and I don’t want to see that happen—that’s not how the constitution in New Zealand operates.

So I stand in support of this legislation, and I look forward to the discussions that we’ll be having during the course of the evening.

ARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Let me start by saying that I agree with much of what the Hon Paul Goldsmith has brought to this debate, and his support for passing this legislation under urgency is appreciated. He is also right to say that it is necessary for Parliament to assert itself in this situation, and I thank the Minister of Justice, the Hon Kiritapu Allan, for her very clear explanation of what this bill does and why it’s important.

Where I disagree with Paul Goldsmith is in his comments around the tortuous nature of—so the logic in the decisions of the court. In the situation we find ourselves in, these matters are under active consideration by our superior courts. It’s really important for parliamentarians not to weigh in on some of the finer points of what the courts will be considering. To do so would be intemperate, but there has also been some reasonably torturous logic in Mr Goldsmith’s speech!

So let me clarify what is actually quite a simple bill. This bill confirms that the returning offenders Act continues to apply to offenders who are deported to New Zealand for offending that occurred before the Act came into force, in November 2015, which is what Parliament intended. It puts returning offenders in roughly the same position that they would have been in had they offended in New Zealand. That is the effect of this bill. It is simple. It’s a good one. Let’s pass it quickly.

CHRIS PENK (National—Kaipara ki Mahurangi): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. As the House will have heard, National and Labour are substantially in agreement on this matter, and our colleague Arena Williams is correct to describe the bill itself as straightforward. There are some incredibly gnarly issues of a constitutional nature, however, relating to fundamental rights under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act (NZBORA) and also the relationship between Parliament and the courts.

I, like others on this side of the House, or at least the National part of the House, have agreed to support the Government’s intention to move quickly on this legislation, so I don’t intend to take longer than necessary to air what I think are some pretty important principles, whether that’s in this, the first reading, or beyond. And we do appreciate the need for quick lawmaking in this case, for the reasons that the Minister of Justice and others have explained.

I mean, there’s a certain irony, of course, in having to rush through a parliamentary process on the basis that the courts may very quickly decide something, because, of course, our court system is horrendously slow in almost every other respect. But, nevertheless, there is a risk of an unintended consequence, certainly from the parliamentary perspective, if not the judicial perspective, of the case of G v Commissioner of Police. So it’s important we act quickly.

The history, even of this bill, is quite complex, and I was interested to read not only the report of the current Attorney-General but also that, back in 2015, of the Hon Christopher Finlayson KC. I think it’s worth stepping through those, and I don’t think that they are substantially in disagreement, although the conclusions that are reached by the current Attorney-General are interesting in a deference that I think is shown towards the courts that leaves me not entirely comfortable.

So back in 2015, Christopher Finlayson decided that there was no double jeopardy imposed by that law that was being passed in response to the 501 issue, as we might call it, because the imposition of the regime was not punitive in nature. This is a slightly different point from that made by the Minister just now, and I think she makes a good point that the equivalent regime imposed here would have been imposed in Australia for that offence committed in Australia, or, conversely, an offence committed in New Zealand would have also attached to the administrative conditions in New Zealand. So, either way, it comes to the same thing. So far, so good.

I think I’m right in saying that Mr Finlayson’s report didn’t touch on the aspect of retrospectivity, because, for the same reason as the double jeopardy point, there isn’t actually a punitive element. There isn’t actually a punishment that looks backwards or is repeated, because, in fact, it’s not a punishment but the imposition of conditions that are either characterised as part of the original punishment, as the Minister would have it, or are of a nature of reintegrating and rehabilitating the offender himself or herself.

Just to complicate matters, the Attorney-General then did, nevertheless, conclude that the NZBORA protection against unreasonable search and seizure was offended, because that leaned on provisions of the Criminal Investigations (Bodily Samples) Amendment Bill, which he had determined was itself inconsistent with the NZBORA, at least to some extent.

So that’s the history, from an Attorney-General report perspective. In reading that of the Hon David Parker today—which is the first opportunity that I’ve had to look at it in this process, which has been rushed, albeit understandably—I see that Mr Parker agrees, I think I can summarise, with the conclusion that had been reached by Mr Finlayson, but says, nevertheless, because the High Court found that there was ambiguity in relation to the law, that it was necessary to defer to the courts and to say that the current law is ambiguous, in fact. This is really troubling, because I think that means that if we are to say that the Attorney-General report must defer to the authority of the court on matters of law, not merely stating what the law actually is, but also that that must imply that we in Parliament, and the Attorney-General himself, must therefore reach the same conclusion of consistency with the NZBORA. That seems to me to substitute the judgment of the courts for Parliament, and this is not a matter of law so much as lawmaking. Of course, it’s as legislators that we address each other in the House on behalf of New Zealand, and so I think the lines are getting considerably blurred.

The real irony in this to me is that, of course, in our determination that we should take seriously pronouncements on NZBORA matters from the courts, to the point that we are obliged to respond to them on every occasion of such a declaration, actually, we’re going to end up with this current bill saying at new section 3B, inserted by clause 4, that the Act’s provisions will override any inconsistent other law. So, actually, we’re going to say, at the end of all this, it’s not going to be justiciable to actually consider whether this amended Act is actually consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act or not. So we’ve gone backwards, and I think I’m not unhappy with that, just quietly. I think that’s a more sensible position for us to return, but it is highly unusual, as I think I heard my colleague and friend the Hon Michael Woodhouse reflect.

So it is highly unusual. It’s a very funny way that we have, you know, ended up having to make a law in this case. As we’ve said already on this side of the House, we don’t disagree with the Government’s approach, in policy terms. We think it’s appropriate to do so quickly—indeed, necessary—and for those reasons, we will support it not only in terms of the bill itself but also as to process, regrettable as that is. Dr Dean Knight often implores Parliament to allow prospective new laws to breathe. This has been a breathless process, but, nevertheless, we will act in good faith to make it as sensible a consideration of complex matters as we can manage. For that reason, I look forward to the rest of the debate at this and subsequent stages.

MARJA LUBECK (Labour): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on this bill. We do seem to be in agreement on the important principles involved here, but it was very enjoyable to be taken on that ride and on that journey by Mr Penk just now. So thank you for that.

We are all agreeing that we need to ensure that there is no unacceptable risk to public safety and making sure that the legislation works as Parliament originally intended—that is exactly what this bill does. It aims to put returning offenders in the same position as they would have been if they’d offended in New Zealand. For that reason, I commend it to the House. Thank you.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise, not with any level of pleasure, to speak on this bill. It’s a disappointing bill. It’s a disappointing process. I bring with me the memory of having acted at the District Court in Auckland when first this law came into effect and when first we began to interact with the returnees, most of whom were made homeless, most of whom began to suffer more and more extreme mental health harm. And our communities, including the court community, began to—in somewhat of a panic and certainly without Government support—respond to those needs. So if anyone wants to talk about public safety being prioritised through policies like this or laws like this, I think that they may be lying to themselves, if not to the public.

It’s enormously regrettable that the first time this law comes back to our Parliament for debate, not only is it again being debated under urgency but it is to affirm one of its most abusive aspects, rather than to look at the policy more broadly and now with the benefit of hindsight—with all of the harm indicators and the risk alerts, which were raised with us the first time, now having come to fruition, being ignored. The Green Party first abstained our vote on this bill, when it first came to the House under the John Key Government, for it was done under urgency. We won’t be abstaining this time. We will be voting against it because we now can see the harm, in its full realisation, to not only those who are returned and sanctioned retrospectively but to the communities that are being left alone to handle that harm, to handle these people cut away from their families, from their culture, from their whānau. Cut away without support, dumped in New Zealand because of a deal made by a previous Prime Minister, because of this law, which ignores the principle of legality, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, and all of the evidence that tells us how to in fact keep communities safe, how to in fact keep people from a life of crime, how to in fact keep people from addiction and from mental health harm. It ignores all of that so that politicians can look tough on crime.

And that context is important: the context that a previous Prime Minister chose to act upon that deal with Australia—didn’t stand up for the rights of New Zealanders, didn’t stand up for our community safety issues that we are all now debating—and chose this law. We don’t have this kind of agreement with anybody else, because you know what? We don’t have jurisdiction to sanction those who have committed acts in another jurisdiction, in New Zealand. This was a political move. It was never about public safety. Otherwise, we’d have an agreement like this with every nation State, every place where someone else does something wrong under any process. Whoever decides to deport whoever else who’s served their sentences, who’s served their parole, we would be sanctioning them, too. This was just a political move. And remember: when people ended up on Christmas Island, that Prime Minister chose to lie to the House and say that they were rapists and murderers when they weren’t.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Yeah, yeah, yeah. The member—yes, I think I can anticipate what the member is going to say. The member will stand, withdraw, and apologise.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: I withdraw and apologise. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

So here we are, with a High Court finding that it isn’t in fact clear enough, in that previous law, whether or not that House wanted to pass law that breached the principle of legality. We’ve come back to Parliament to debate this law—not the merits of it, not the impacts of it, but to make it clear that we do want to breach the principle of legality. That principle is based on the ways that laws are made fair. Laws are to be knowable and they are not to sanction anyone retrospectively. So if you’ve done a thing at a time when it was not illegal, when there wasn’t a sanction for the thing you did in the jurisdiction that you did it for, you are normally not allowed to be sanctioned, because that wouldn’t be fair. The law wouldn’t be knowable. It wouldn’t make sense. And we don’t do it in any other context. But we made a political deal with Australia and we decided we were going to do it in this context.

OK, so that happened, and so we have this law. We’ve had it harming our communities for some years now. And you talk to any of those District Courts that have to deal with the homeless, with the people we’ve disenfranchised, we’ve cut away from community—the people we’ve chosen not to support, knowing Australia has dumped them here. We’ve chosen not to keep communities safe, not to help people with their addiction issues, with their mental health issues, with their social welfare issues; we’ve just dealt with the criminality. And here we are, saying it will apply retrospectively, that bad lawmaking is OK in the political context of the returning offenders, no matter what the High Court says, no matter what the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act says.

In fact, we had a review of this law in 2019. The Green Party didn’t have a member on the Justice Committee then, but we read the submissions and we know that the New Zealand Law Society gave us some actual practical measures to ensure that the framework didn’t infringe unduly the rights of those to which it applied. Surely our focus as a lawmaking body should be to uphold people’s rights? At least, not to breach them unduly. And, yes, we have courts, and they don’t bind us. Yes, we have independent expert bodies like the Law Commission, the Law Society, the Human Rights Commission, and, yes, none of them bind us. But to say that this brief debate without a select committee stage is all we’re going to do, and ignoring the findings and recommendations of all of those expert bodies that also have a role in our democracy—we’re not the only dictatorial little house that sits within that democracy. To ignore all of those findings and to say we will rule according to what makes us look tough on crime, in an election year—let’s not ignore that politicised context here, now—that we will ignore the harm and the rights breaches, we will ignore the principle of legality, we will ignore the racism in the policy Australia is applying itself, we will ignore the fact that it is Māori and Pasifika—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! The member has for the second time prompted me to get to my feet. The member should be very careful when she uses words that are unparliamentary. The first time it was very clear—an allegation made which was unparliamentary, that was the first time. The second time—the member should know by now that any mention of racism should be treated with the utmost care and respect in this House. So I do ask the member to take note.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Thank you, Madam Speaker. I do want to notice that all the evidence shows that those being deported by Australia under this policy do happen to fit a certain racial descriptor, so—but that data is collected.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): And I will warn the member, for the last time, that arguing against a Speaker’s ruling is a very unwise thing to do in this House. Golriz Ghahraman has one minute, 39 seconds.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Thank you, Madam Speaker. So we’re passing a law that will apply retrospectively to a community already harmed—a law that will not keep us safe, that has not kept us safe, that has increased crime in New Zealand to uphold a policy in Australia. What we could have done instead, of course, is to introduce a law that would in fact review this policy, that would send it to select committee, where we would hear from those communities, where we would hear from the experts and actually take them seriously. Look at what, in fact, prevents crime. Look at what Australia is doing on its face as not quite right, not quite right for New Zealand, and say, “What can we do, in receiving the returning offenders, to keep our community safe, to minimise that harm, and to uphold our principles, our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, and the integrity of this House?” Unfortunately, this bill, in every way, undermines those principles. It does, although, make politicians look tough on crime.

NICOLE McKEE (ACT): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I stand to speak, on behalf of the ACT Party, to the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill. I’d like to start, first off, by acknowledging the Minister of Justice in the House and hope that all is relatively well in Te Tai Rāwhiti and appreciate the work that has been done by that Minister, the Hon Kiritapu Allan, in her rohe. And I also appreciate the inclusion that the ACT Party had in being able to have a look at this bill and have some predeterminations before we came into the House to have it all heard under urgency.

I did know where I was going to start here, but I think I just might change it because there’s a few rebuttals I’d like to do to the previous speaker Golriz Ghahraman’s comments—those where she talked about mental health issues of those being returned and those people actually not being looked after. I agree with some aspects of the mental health that we need to look at, and I will address that in some later speeches, but these offenders are being returned and, basically, going on to parole conditions. That means they are being looked after, and if mental health is an issue or there are other needs, that is why they will have these conditions placed upon them—so that the Parole Board can help to reintegrate people into society in a better way. Also, I don’t think that this is about race, it’s not about colour, and it’s not about ethnicity. Those that are being returned to New Zealand from overseas, from Australia, as 501s, have committed crime, and it doesn’t really matter what colour the skin is. It’s the crime that counts.

ACT stands in support of this bill, which we’ve colloquially called “The 501s Retro Bill”, because the reality is that it affects more than those deported under Australia’s section 501 Migration Act 1958 regime. But this amendment is targeted because of, and at, one specific individual: the 501 who went to the High Court to have the conditions that were placed on him and the information that was gathered from him destroyed—and that’s his photos, his fingerprints, and his DNA. The appellant was successful in the High Court because there was no ability within the current Act to place conditions or to be able to get these details from him. The retrospectiveness of this Act being made in 2015 means that we do need to ensure that those that were convicted and served a sentence before 2015 are captured in this legislation.

And in this particular instance, the crime that was committed in Australia occurred in 2012. The man was convicted in 2014, and then, in 2019, he was released back to us. Conditions and information were garnered from him, and the High Court has decided that it shouldn’t have been. Further to this, if the Court of Appeal upholds the High Court’s decision, then a further 40 deportees will be entitled to have their information destroyed, too. Officials have indicated to us that 21 of those 40 are considered high-risk individuals and are currently subject to electronic monitoring. So it makes sense to ACT that we support this bill. If a person committed a crime before November 2015 and is getting deported to us now, some eight years on, for a conviction from a crime that occurred before 2015, then it stands that they have been in prison for over eight years. They must have done something pretty bad to be incarcerated for that long. It also makes sense to ACT to support this bill, because if this bill is not passed, it means any future deportee from an overseas prison, convicted before November 2015, released and deported to New Zealand, would not have to undergo a parole-like regime that they would have been expected to participate in if they were released from a New Zealand prison for that same offence.

To help this make more sense, and maybe for the benefit of the Green Party member, here’s a rundown on how the Act actually works. New Zealand Interpol receives notification, usually in advance, of the arrival of a person being deported to New Zealand. New Zealand has an information-sharing arrangement—not an agreement, not a deal, but an arrangement—with Australia. It’s proven to have improved not only the timing of the notifications but also the information that is being shared with New Zealand authorities. This includes names, aliases, dates of birth, summaries of facts, and records of convictions. Once Interpol has the information, they then share it with Police and Corrections. Police has a register of deported offenders, and they update that register. Before the deportee arrives, Police will assess whether they meet the “returning prisoner” definition, and that means they look at whether or not they were sentenced to one year or more for a crime committed in another country, whether they returned to New Zealand within six months of their release from custody overseas, and whether they were imprisoned for behaviour that would be an imprisonable offence here in New Zealand.

If the criteria I just spoke to is met, then the Police prepare a written notification for the offender as to what their obligations are under the supervision regime that will be imposed upon them on their return. Corrections may also apply for interim special conditions before a returning offender’s arrival. When the deportee arrives, Police are able to detain them, either at the airport or within six months of their arrival, and require them to provide identifying information like the fingerprints, the photographs, and maybe even the DNA. The deportee is also served with a notice stating that they are subject to a regime set for them and that they have to report to a probation officer. The term of their supervision will depend on the length of their sentence overseas. These conditions are what would be imposed on a released prisoner undertaking parole conditions if the deportee was sentenced and released from a New Zealand Corrections facility. Standard conditions like reporting to a probation officer, and the probation officer being able to direct where a person might live or work, or even who they can associate with, are part of those orders. Corrections will be able to apply for an extended supervision order or a public protection order while a deportee is subject to the standard conditions under the imposed supervision regime, too.

This shows to me a type of support for those prisoners. This is a standard practice of management of a prisoner upon release from prison in New Zealand. It has been undertaken since this Act came into effect, and the ACT Party supports what we view as its necessary continuance in order to not only reassure Kiwis that serious, violent criminals returning from overseas have mitigating actions placed upon them but that they will remain safe from harm as a result.

We do have some questions around the speed that this bill is going through in the House, and I will address those in my second reading speech. But the ACT Party opposed the House sitting under urgency to hear this bill. Removing the select committee process from the people is not going to be something that we support, but ensuring their imminent safety is. So, while we don’t support the process, we do support the bill. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

GLEN BENNETT (Labour—New Plymouth): Kia ora, Madam Speaker. I just want to affirm urgency this evening for this piece of legislation, only because the bill itself only affirms Parliament’s original intention for this piece of legislation, which was around returning offenders having the same general position as they would have had if they’d offended in New Zealand. So I feel comfortable with the fact that we are in urgency to pass this piece of legislation to correct a piece of legislation from 2015. On that, I commend this to the House.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s good to be able to talk to this as someone who was pretty intimately involved in the process that led to the initial bill being passed. Section 501 of the Migration Act in Australia was passed on 24 December 2014 without any consultation with the New Zealand Government or the New Zealand High Commission, and without any forewarning until late January, when it became newsworthy in Australia. I wouldn’t normally be that comfortable with a bill like this being passed under urgency or with any perceived retrospectivity about it, but it was the right thing to do in 2015, when we did it; it’s the right thing to do now—for reasons that I will elaborate on.

But I want to touch first on the extraordinary contribution by the Green MP Golriz Ghahraman. I say to Golriz Ghahraman this: if she wants to be angry with a Government and to rail against a Government that created the conditions for this to be necessary, I say fair enough, but pick the right Government, because there was no deal, and any suggestion that there was is quite mischievous, in my view. This was imposed on New Zealand, with the deportation of offenders whose DNA may, in many cases, have been Kiwi but who had lived so long in Australia that the conditions that led them to a life of lawlessness were entirely Australian, and that they were removing their responsibility—the responsibility that the conditions they imposed led to those crimes—is entirely them. That was exactly the message that I and my colleague Amy Adams, as Minister of Justice, said to Australian home affairs Minister, the Hon Peter Dutton, sometime in the middle of 2015 in the Cabinet offices in Sydney. I can tell the House, without going into details of the conversation, that that was a particularly robust exchange.

I think it is, as the last two Prime Ministers have said, a bit of a stain on the relationship between our two otherwise very close countries that we will not—cannot—control. Despite the hyperbole by Ms Ghahraman, this is not something that New Zealand can fix, but we can manage, and we should manage. And I think, in doing this, we are making New Zealand safer than if we don’t pass legislation like this. If both Attorneys-General, in their New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vets on the original bill and on this one, have said that there is not a punitive aspect or a double jeopardy aspect to this—in fact, it’s rehabilitative, and I think if anybody, including Ms Ghahraman, would consider this in another way: imagine what somebody on life parole for murder, having been deported, would pose in risk to New Zealanders if that person were not subject to some controls. And she rightly points out that, until the 2015 bill was passed, there wasn’t actually any protection in that regard. Perhaps there should have been, but it’s right to have it now, and it’s wrong to suggest that that’s retrospective.

If one looks at the purpose, the definition of “returning offender” that Nicole McKee went through—the definition of and criteria for determining that a person is a returning prisoner—it was always intended that the people who were convicted prior to that bill having Royal assent would be captured by the legislation. The Attorney-General, the Hon David Parker, I think, quite confidently says that he disagrees with the High Court’s decision, and indeed the Crown’s appeal to the Court of Appeal is a signal that the Crown disagrees with the courts. That’s appropriate, and I frankly think—I’m no lawyer, but I’ve watched this closely—that the Crown would prevail on appeal. We’ll never know, because the right thing to do, and the safe thing to do, is to pass what is a belts and braces piece of legislation to make it absolutely clear what is required to keep New Zealanders safe. That was what we did in 2015, and I think that’s what we’re tightening up today.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Five-minute call—Sarah Pallett.

SARAH PALLETT (Labour—Ilam): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to speak very briefly this evening on the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill. I am not a permanent member of the Justice Committee and so, when I’m rising to speak on bills like this, I like to take a quick look at the bill and what it means for me. What I can see here is that the bill confirms that the returning offender rate continues to apply to offenders who are deported to New Zealand for offending that occurred before November 2015, which means that those returning offenders, such as the 501 deportees from Australia, will continue to be managed on parole-like conditions when they return to New Zealand after being released from prison. It makes sense to me, and I commend this bill to the House.

ANGELA ROBERTS (Labour): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a short call on the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill. We’ve heard a lot of people in this House tonight talk about this bill making sense, and it is reassuring when we have so many of us in this House in agreement about doing something that respects the original intention of the returning offenders regime, and attempts, across the House, to make everyone’s lives a little safer. And if the regime goes according to plan, actually, these returning offenders may be a little safer themselves. I commend this bill to the House.

SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I’m a little bit miffed. Not because of the last speaker, and the fact that there’s agreement, by and large, across the House. I’m not miffed that the Green Party thinks that this is an “agreement” between Australia and New Zealand—this was a decision by Australia we have to live with. No, what I’m miffed about is that for some in our courts, the original intention, written in black and white, debated, put in Hansard, was not clear enough for them. But because I am miffed, and I suspect many in the House are miffed—I don’t know why this word now is like 17 times in Hansard—we’re having to come in and write another bill.

I just hope for our courts, respecting comity, and for those judges, that this will be clear enough for them to understand what was exactly intentioned in 2015. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

INGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): I can understand why the member opposite—Simon O’Connor—is miffed. But, from a constitutional law perspective, I think, actually, this is a great case of the constitution working and separation of powers. There are overwhelming reasons why we need to legislate. One, as the Minister of Justice has rightly said, is around public safety; the second one is that the intention was always to have this law be retrospective; and, thirdly, actually, what’s been really heartening is to see that this bill takes into account commentary made by the High Court. So it is actually a fantastic example of democracy in action. It’s been a bit messy. But that’s what happens when you have good tension between the different powers that make up a democracy. So I commend it to the House.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

Ayes 108

New Zealand Labour 64; New Zealand National 34; ACT New Zealand 10.

Noes 12

Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 10; Te Paati Māori 2.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill is set down for second reading immediately.

Second Reading

Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN (Minister of Justice): Look, I just want to acknowledge the tone of the House this evening and particularly some of the contributions made by the honourable member Michael Woodhouse, just to give the context by which this law came into being. It was in 2014—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! The member—sorry, I didn’t pick it up in time, but the member needs to move the second reading.

Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN: I move, That the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

Just understanding the context by which the original bill came into force in New Zealand, it was on the back of a decision and, whether it was political or otherwise, it was a decision made in a completely different jurisdiction based on that Government’s policy decisions of the day. What that meant, though, is that New Zealand had to respond, and had to respond swiftly. This was the bill that was produced—the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill.

I won’t get too much into the details of what all speakers in this House have said—we’ve got time to do that in the committee of the whole House—but there are a couple of things I just want to pick up: why are we doing this? Look, there were varying views from the contributions made by the National Party as to whether or not we should be doing this. Why are we doing this? It is public safety.

Now, I know that the Green Party will respond and say, “Oh, well, they’re just trying to look tough on crime.” No, we’re not. We’ve got 40 offenders that are currently managed under that regime that, in absence of the stay that was granted by the court under urgency at the end of the year, would be in our communities, in absence of any oversight by any agencies. These are serious offenders and I won’t go through the nature and the context of each of them but if they had been people that had undergone a sentence in a New Zealand context, there would be a right expectation by New Zealanders that there would be some kind of oversight of those individuals as they come out into society, by dint of the offences that they had committed; 40 people that would have to be released into New Zealand—that was at that time. Since then we’ve had more and more people return to New Zealand.

Now, this is not a statement about whether or not a different jurisdiction’s political decisions to release people with New Zealand DNA into our communities, in absence of any support infrastructure otherwise is the right thing. But it is something that we as good governors have to respond to and have to respond to with public safety and, actually, their safety, at the forefront of our minds. People need some kind of support when they come in to New Zealand, and this is the regime that was established to provide that.

So I won’t delve too much more into the details—there’s time to do that later—but I want to acknowledge the overarching tone of the House tonight, and I commend this bill to the House.

CHRIS PENK (National—Kaipara ki Mahurangi): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I acknowledge the Minister of Justice for her contribution. As she’s noted, the tone has been constructive—if I can put that word in her mouth—and, in turn, I want to acknowledge that she has engaged with other parties across the House in the spirit of good faith to allow as much discussion and ventilation of the issues as possible in the circumstances. So I think that’s positive, if I may say.

I think it’s worth stating for the record that the person known as G in the particular court action that sparked this case will not be affected by the action of this Parliament. So we’re not denying that person their day in court or the fruit of their litigation, if it should go well for them, because that’s specifically an exception inserted at Part 4 of Schedule 1 of the Act, as it will be amended.

The only additional comment I would make to the reflections I made at first reading would be just to muse that, as far as I can tell in examining all of the papers—the decision itself, the reports from Attorneys-General, and, of course, the bill and other ancillary documents—it’s unfortunate, it seems to me, that the court didn’t choose to make a declaration of inconsistency with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, as opposed to reading the legislation in a particular way that they thought would render it consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Of course, if the court had taken the action of a declaration of inconsistency, then Parliament could have and, indeed, would have been obliged to respond in some way that reconsidered the question of inconsistency, and, of course, it might be said that the High Court felt it had no option but to find as it did because, in their view, there was ambiguity.

But I think in order to decide that there was ambiguity, they would need to have decided that there was an unresolved question of inconsistency, whereas, as I’ve said previously, the Attorney-General in 2015, at the time of the bill’s passing, did not consider that there was a retrospective application or, indeed, double jeopardy, because there was no negative element. There was no punitive element to the regime—certainly not additional to what a person could have expected had they committed the offence in New Zealand—so there was no retrospectivity in that negative sense of looking back and applying an additional penalty. So the whole thing ends up reasonably circular.

I’m not sure that I’ve expressed it terribly well, but I think that for courts looking to highlight what they consider to be matters of inconsistency with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, it would—and I say this as respectfully as I can manage in the circumstances. It would be preferable for them to err on the side of giving effect to what Parliament surely intended at the time, but to highlight, then, if they think that that would produce inconsistent results with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and to make a declaration accordingly, and then allow the lawmaking institution—in the legislative sense of that phrase—to respond in due course, as we have now allowed and, indeed, required.

So I’ll conclude my remarks there. But I look forward to any engagement across the House, including, if the Attorney-General himself would care to make a contribution, I’m sure we would all greatly benefit from that.

Debate interrupted.

Voting

Correction—Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2)

Hon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Point of order. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I wish to seek the leave of the House to correct a vote on the previous bill, Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2), third reading.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is none.

Hon JAMES SHAW: On the third and final reading of the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2), Te Paati Māori’s vote was recorded as “in favour” of the bill, but should have been recorded as “against” the bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Thank you for that, so—just a moment, the cavalry has just arrived. Can the member just repeat what he believes happened in the vote, and I’ll just check it against the sheet.

Hon JAMES SHAW: I believe that it was recorded as being “in favour” of the bill when it should have been recorded “against”.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): OK, thank you. So the record I have of the vote in the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) at its third reading has Te Paati Māori 2 votes against. That leaves the total the Ayes 98, the Noes 22. The Noes comprise of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, ACT New Zealand, and Te Paati Māori. The question is that that motion be agreed to.

Bills

Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Debate resumed.

VANUSHI WALTERS (Labour—Upper Harbour): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Australia’s deportation policy is unquestionably corrosive. But as members have said, we do need a response and there is no disagreement about that. I believe the Greens, when they abstained on the 2015 bill, were abstaining as a matter of process as opposed to substance.

The real question is the scope of the application of the bill. Reviewing the Hansard of the first, second, and third reading speeches on the 2015 bill, it’s very clear that the intention of members was for the bill to apply to those coming through the system. You can see that by the suggestion that, actually, the bill should have been introduced before it was in 2015, because members made the point that we knew the numbers of people coming through the pipeline.

But I do agree with the principle of clarity of law. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.

SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I’m still a bit miffed, but I’m learning. I’m learning.

Golriz Ghahraman: Stop it!

SIMON O’CONNOR: And I’ve just been told to stop it from the Green Party, which means I can’t. I have to carry on. I have to carry on. Don’t encourage me; you know I’m a contrarian.

Actually, I do want to acknowledge the honourable member Ingrid Leary, who did point out that there is some constitutional good developing in this. There is some sort of engagement, as I understood it. You know, Parliament’s passed a law, and a court has made a decision, and now the Parliament’s responding to that. I accept that point, but I probably lean more towards what the Hon—sorry; well, soon to be, hopefully, the Hon—Chris Penk noted. There could have been more constructive ways. There could have been more constructive ways to have dealt with this.

I think at the heart of the question is not simply how we deal with Australia’s decision to deport what they call 501s and how we appropriately deal with that for the interests of public safety and, you know—to stress particularly the Green Party’s objections—how to look after those New Zealanders returning here. Well, I think, actually, that care, if you will—if that’s the right word to use—of those 501s of which these orders are required—the Attorney-General’s report actually indicates often parole, if not always parole, is used as more a rehabilitative than a punitive measure. So I think that’s relatively important to state.

But, again, my fundamental point—being probably far too serious—is that the Parliament thought it had made things clear enough in the original piece of law, and I think we are rightly here tonight to address a court decision and to try and make it as abundantly clear as possible what this Parliament intends.

And so I’m looking forward to the committee stage. I think that will be useful to tease out some various ideas. Minister Allan’s actually very, very good at addressing the questions. But I’m also hoping—coming back to my original thought of being a bit miffed, it will be fantastic if the Attorney-General will help my miffed-ness and get up and indicate and articulate a bit further around his report. Because, actually, without being silly, there’s really good thoughts and insights that he brings. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Debate interrupted.

Voting

Correction—Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2)

Hon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Point of order?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The Hon David Parker.

Hon JAMES SHAW: Point of order?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Oh, I’m sorry. Apologies to the Minister. I missed the point of order.

Hon JAMES SHAW: I beg your pardon, Madam Speaker. I actually compounded the error before when I said that they had voted in favour and should have voted against; it’s the other way around, and I compounded it again once you sought my clarification. So I wonder if I may seek the leave of the House again to actually get it right this time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? I might object! There appears to be none.

Hon JAMES SHAW: Thank you. So on the third and final reading of the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2), Te Paati Māori’s vote was recorded as against, when it should have been recorded in favour.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Thank you for that.

Hon JAMES SHAW: I’m pretty sure about that.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): We will correct—in fact what I’m going to do is hand it back to the Clerk, who will change the—yep, and I will read it out; I don’t do maths. So the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2), third reading: the Ayes are 100, the Noes are 20. The motion is agreed to.

Bills

Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Debate resumed.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I will take a brief call. It is an unusual situation that we find ourselves in. Can I firstly endorse some of the comments from other members. I thought Nicole McKee’s description of how the legislation works was very fulsome and accurate—thank you for that. I also agree with the analysis of Michael Woodhouse as to how this came about.

It wasn’t a deal, as was suggested by the Green Party. It was a decision of the sovereign Australian Government that we might disagree with, but, none the less, they had the power to make and did make, and it meant that there were consequences that the New Zealand Parliament had to address in order to deal with the consequences of people being deported immediately upon release from prison in Australia and not being able to be supervised upon their release, as they would have had they been released to Australia or had they been released in New Zealand following a similar sentence in the New Zealand system.

So the New Zealand Parliament and the then Attorney-General thought it was appropriate to pass that legislation, viewing it as rehabilitative rather than punitive, and, in the view of the Parliament, thought that we were applying that not just to people who were sentenced after the date of that legislation in New Zealand but people who had previously been sentenced earlier than that date.

We find ourselves in the unusual position that because of our respect for the courts, even though we have that decision under appeal—and it may succeed or it may not succeed, but in relation to the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet that now has to be done, that has to record that the view of the courts is that this is inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Even though we don’t agree with all aspects of that decision, we do have to respect it, and therefore that creates the need for this remedial legislation, and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet attempts to make those points.

Can I also thank Chris Penk for pointing out to Parliament that even if we won the appeal, G still gets the benefit of the decision personally. None the less, there is a need to, in the view of this Parliament—and now I’m speaking as a member of Parliament rather than the producer of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet—remedy the situation by enabling supervision of returning deportees following serious sentences in Australia, including those who were sentenced prior to the passage of the remedial New Zealand legislation. We believe that it’s important that supervision is possible, in part because we can sometimes help those offenders deal with the problems that underlie their offending. There could be some strength to what the Green Party says, that we should be doing more to help these returning offenders to integrate into New Zealand without reoffending, and that could be a valid criticism, that we’re not doing enough. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have the power to intervene through supervision-like or parole-like conditions being imposed on returning deportees from Australia in these circumstances.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Unless I’m interrupted by my co-leader to correct a vote—ha, ha!—it is again with dismay that I rise to speak to this bill.

A lot has been said about the rehabilitative aspects of parole. And yes, sometimes parole is rehabilitative. A lot of times, the supervision aspects of parole—and I think most people and all courts agree, certainly—have a punitive aspect to them: reporting conditions, curfews, various other types of things are there as part of the punitive sentences; they are there for reasons that are not necessarily proven to be rehabilitative.

But I think if we were to be honest, and I speak this to the courts as much as to us here—when rehabilitation works best is when we do a personalised, individualised risk assessment of offenders. That’s exactly what we do in a sentencing process, that’s where the sentence is meant to go to—in a lot of ways, as much as it is supposed to go to deterrence and to community safety, it’s meant to also take into account the individual circumstances of the offender and the offending, the causes of offending. That’s what parole is meant to do.

One of the submissions and recommendations of the Law Commission when this Act went through its not-quite-formal—but at least it did go through it—review process in 2019, was that the Law Commission criticised and recommended that we change the one-size-fits-all bulk approach to the way that we treat returning offenders in this law, so that we do change that approach in law to require an individualised risk assessment.

The reason I bring that up is that’s one of the recommendations that would go towards what we are all saying is the spirit of this law, which is to keep communities safe, to bring down crime rates, and to ensure that reoffending by returning offenders isn’t happening—or at least to reduce that risk. That’s not why we’re here today though; all we’re doing is fixing the retrospective application of the law. So that’s why urgency is particularly offensive with this. We’ve had a review process, we have recommendations in that process, and yet we’re here, under urgency, debating this tiny little change that we know breaches rights, that we know breaches rights unduly, and being all “miffed” about why we have to do that.

What would have been better is if we actually acknowledge that we shouldn’t be comfortable with this urgency process because this law was always passed under urgency. It never had a proper select committee process. We’ve never properly responded to the review. We’ve not adopted any of the expert recommendations or what we heard from the public. All we’re doing is fixing this one thing that’s come out of the High Court decision to apply the law retrospectively in breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the principle of legality, and we’re turning our back on what the evidence is, of what actually rehabilitates people, what actually keeps our communities safe.

We’re seeing the desperation and the harm in our courts every day, on our streets every day, because the 501 returnees are largely in those communities now, suffering from more and more grave mental health, addiction risks, addiction harm, reoffending—because what else would we do? And we’re ignoring all of those indicators. We’re ignoring that principles like that of fairness, in terms of the application of the criminal law, are there also not only because fairness is important, transparency’s important in our law but because dignity is important.

If we say it’s Australia that has harmed, well, why are we doubling down on that harm? Retrospective sanction is never good, because we wouldn’t say to a New Zealander in New Zealand that we are going to change the law to apply certain conditions to you for doing something that, when you did the thing, was not in fact criminalised or was not in fact subject to sanction. We wouldn’t do that, and we don’t do it to anyone coming back from any other nation, in fact. That doesn’t exist, by the way. We don’t do it. We only do it to these particular returnees. It’s a scheme that has never quite made sense, and we’re just doubling down. That harm is heart-breaking, but the urgency in this process makes it doubly—well, it makes for bad lawmaking in a bad process, and it means that we’re not actually taking account of the evidence. So it’s not only harmful; it’s a little bit dangerous, it’s a little bit backward, and it’s kind of disappointing that we’ve come here with all of that evidence and we’re criticising the High Court instead of looking at ourselves and looking at the evidence of what keeps communities safe.

It’s not that we as the Green Party are uncomfortable with urgency only, but urgency in changing a law that we know is breaching the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, was originally passed in urgency, and is particularly perverse, especially in the criminal justice context, especially in the context of the most pervasive, the most punitive, of our justice system sectors. I don’t think we would do it in any other sector. I don’t think we would do it to people who were less marginalised than the 501 returnees. And I do think we should look at the stats of who Australia returns, because it’s not everyone who is convicted of the same type of offending that has returned. So the policy is doubling down on the same prejudice that our justice system suffers from, and this is bad lawmaking, so we don’t commend it to the House.

NICOLE McKEE (ACT): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I stand to speak on behalf of the ACT Party to the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill in its second reading. A second reading usually occurs after a select committee process has been undertaken, but we’ve not had this process because this bill is being heard through all of its stages under urgency. So I stand here, delivering the speech with what should have been informed and developed information learned from a considered select committee, their officials, and, of course, submitters. While we understand the urgency and the reasoning, we can never support doing away with good lawmaking and democratic processes, such as hearing from the people. They, the people, are already telling us that they’re not being listened to, and when two laws go through in one afternoon, you cannot blame them. At least ACT is listening to them. We hear you.

When researching information on this bill, I found what I thought was interesting commentary about this legislation. If we had had a select committee process, I expect some of the things I’m about to mention would have been brought to the attention of the presiding select committee. And I think these things are still relevant. The original returning offenders Act was also brought to the House under urgency by the National Government in 2015. The then Minister of Justice the Hon Amy Adams said she first became aware of a potential issue of 501s being returned from Australia in February of 2015. We were receiving around five deportees a month, but it had risen to 25 deportees a month. In October 2015, the regulatory impact statement prepared for the original Act stated that 25 returnees per month could actually increase to as many as 300-plus per month. The regulatory impact statement also stated that of the 60 to 80 deportations, which is what they were currently receiving each year, around 80 percent of them were from Australia.

The regulatory impact statement also went on to note that 70 percent of offenders who had returned to New Zealand since 2013 had been convicted of violence or burglary offences on our soil and that re-conviction rates between the years 2000 and 2002 were sitting at 48 percent. That’s 48 percent committing crimes once they came back to New Zealand and within a two-year period. When you hear stats like that, it is easy to see why the majority of this House supported the original legislation going through under urgency.

And because it went through under urgency, there were considerations made, such as that in Part 2, subpart 4, at clause 37, where a review was legislated to take place 18 months after the commencement of the Act. The justice select committee did do that review, which looked at the operation of the Act. The justice select committee of the day considered papers from submitters, especially that which received from the New Zealand Law Society. The Law Society made four proposals for amendment, and the justice select committee had suggested one change. The Law Society suggested that a small percentage of returning prisoners were made subject to more restrictive special conditions with—and it was at that time—2.6 percent being subject to curfew conditions. Another 2.6 percent had conditions on them relating to electronic device use for child pornography, and only 5.2 percent had been subject to driving-related conditions. Their submissions suggested that, “Instead of this wide use of special conditions, applications should only be made based on individualised assessments of the risk posed by each offender.”, and, “When the Act was drafted, legislators expected special conditions to be used only in circumstances where a person poses increased risks.” It would appear that this was not happening, although the justice select committee of the day found no issue with that because they were assured by Corrections that they will assess the situation of special conditions as the Act is implemented over its following years.

The select committee heard from the Law Society that conditions should be removed if a conviction is quashed or pardoned, but were assured that there were no convictions to date that had been quashed or pardoned, and say in their select committee report: “We were told that the police would revoke a determination if this situation arose.”

Yet new section 3A(1), inserted by clause 4 of this amendment bill, states that these provisions apply even if, as in paragraph (h), “the person’s conviction for oversight for the overseas jurisdiction offence being overturned.”

Nor does the bill being heard under urgency today reflect any of the recommendations made by the New Zealand Law Society or the justice select committee. I read the New Zealand Criminal Law Review dated in December 2018 on this Act, and a number of other issues were raised under the heading of “The process of challenge”. The review states: “The provisions give the police a power to obtain information rather than mandating it, this conveys a public law discretion that might be open to challenge via judicial review in relation to the outcome of that determination made pursuant to the statute or the process following and considering its application. The fact that the language does not direct police to obtain the relevant information suggests that there are circumstances in which it might not be proper to obtain the information. In this context, the obvious starting point is that a general discretion should have the limit imposed on it that the discretion should be used for the purpose for which it has been conferred.” That’s a good point.

Another consideration in the review is around the word “removal” and whether these people who are deported because they have had their visas cancelled following a conviction of any offence are captured in this Act. They have left them “with no option but to leave” the country they are in if their visa has been revoked and they are removed. The review goes on to say that the Act “does not require that there has been a custodial sentence” for those people, and yet the conditions or need for them should be questioned. And that’s another good point.

Finally, the review questioned what we do with mental disorders, and they gave an example: “If the person has a mental disorder and would not have been convicted in New Zealand but the overseas system has a more stringent insanity or unfitness to stand trial procedure, is such a person covered by the definition of a returning offender?”

So there are a number of layers to the provisions being introduced in this bill under new sections 3A and 3B. And while it’s intended to capture those already in the system that were convicted pre November 2015 as well as those that are still to come here, there are layers that do not address the recommendations or questions made to this House post the review of the Act. That is disappointing because regardless of the urgency, if we’re able to make robust law, the first thing we should do is hear from the people. And when we do, we should take note because that is our job here as representatives.

However, the immediate problem here is another one that runs us into urgency, because a situation is before us right now that can have frightening consequences for our society should we lose the ability to manage, rehabilitate, and reintegrate deportees into our society. For that reason, we are continuing to support this bill.

However, I do note that an aspect of this bill is the repeal of the section of the Act that ordered the review, and I guess it was because it’s already been done. But ACT suggests that with this new bill and additional clauses being added, the past reviews and recommendations for change from New Zealand Criminal Law Review, the New Zealand Law Society, and the justice committee that a further review be maintained so that we can clearly ascertain whether we’ve gone too far in controlling the lives of all that are deported back to New Zealand, or whether we have captured those that are determined to be a risk to our communities. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

Ayes 108

New Zealand Labour 64; New Zealand National 34; ACT New Zealand 10.

Noes 12

Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 10; Te Paati Māori 2.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): That bill is set down for committee stage immediately. I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill.

In Committee

Parts 1 and 2, the Schedule, and clauses 1 to 3

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members, the House is in committee on the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill.

SHANAN HALBERT (Junior Whip—Labour): I seek leave for all parts to be taken as one question.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There appears to be none. Members, we come first to Part 1. The question is that—oh I see. There we go, thank you. The question is that Parts 1 and 2, the Schedule, and clauses 1 to 3 stand part.

CHRIS PENK (National—Kaipara ki Mahurangi): Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I don’t have many questions—in fact, I think, three. If the Minister is comfortable with the approach, I’ll ask them all in one hit, so to speak, and then look forward to any answers she can give us on each of those.

The first, and probably most straightforward one, goes to process—just to acknowledge the discomfort of the Green Party and ACT Party, which I share to an extent, around the fact that we are having to legislate in urgency. I’m sure all of us would rather not be, but I do acknowledge and accept the case made by the Minister and the Government that it is necessary, nevertheless, to pass this legislation with some haste. I wonder if a post-enactment review of some kind might be contemplated, either by reference to a select committee—obviously, that’s not our usual process, but then, again, neither is urgency. And, obviously, the significance of the issues at stake, I think, would indicate that that’s a proposal that hopefully she would at least take seriously and consider. That’s the first question.

The second is: I wonder if she can speak to what she understands to be the effect of new section 3B—in clause 4—and specifically the operative provision is subsection (5). This is where the amendment bill is saying, “This section overrides any inconsistent other law.” This is placing the new law—or the newly amended old law, if you like—above any other law. So if there’s any inconsistency, nevertheless this shall prevail. It seems to me, taking that at face value and, I think, in accordance with the explanatory note of the bill, this is placing the legislation beyond the remit of the courts in respect of considering even the question of inconsistency with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. I may be wrong in that. I genuinely seek any guidance that the Minister, in conjunction with her no doubt excellent officials, can provide on that score.

My third and final question is, really, just to invite the Minister to agree or disagree with me in my angst, I suppose—if that’s not stating the case too strongly—in relation to the manner in which the courts and Parliament have interacted in this matter. We see, in the Attorney-General’s report, which, as I’ve already said, I think is excellent and records the key issues well, in most cases—but I’m nevertheless uncomfortable by the idea that the Attorney might regard as off-limits to him the question of consistency with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, as opposed to recording quite correctly that the current position of the law is that there was ambiguity in the original Act.

So, again, I’m not sure that I’ve articulated that well, but if the Minister can provide any comments about what she understands the relationship of the court to Parliament to be in terms of the question of inconsistency, particularly because, as the Attorney has noted in the section 7 report, the case wasn’t argued on the basis of limits at section 25(g) of New Zealand Bill of Rights Act being justified. That wasn’t actually argued. So I think it’s unfortunate if we were to regard the question of reasonable limits on the basis of policy objectives as having been settled. And, just for the sake of the record, section 25(g) is the part of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act that talks about a person having the benefit of a lesser penalty if there are two possibilities, as between the time that the offence was committed and the sentencing.

And, actually, I suppose a related question—I’m being cheeky here; this is now a fourth, and I said there would be three—is whether indeed the returning offenders regime is in the nature of a penalty at all, because it seems to me that that question lies at the heart of the way that we would consider rights to have been breached or not, and, for example, differentiates the position of the Green Party and, I think, all other parties in this House. So I’m grateful for any comments that the Minister can provide, whether that’s this side of 10 o’clock or, indeed, we hear that tomorrow morning, as it seems inevitable we’ll return to finish this matter.

Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN (Minister of Justice): Oh, look, I thank the member for his always considered probing into the way in which we’re making law, and particularly when it rubs up against the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and these significantly important constitutional questions. I’ve got four questions; let’s see where we go. So just, look, on the process, I think always when we are legislating under urgency, and particularly when there is this rub up between these constitutional questions, the interplay of comity, the interplay of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, there is a discomfort. That said, I think, you know, it’s all about making judgment calls, right?

So the tipping factor in terms of—process was jolted a little bit in a couple of ways. This case was heard early in 2022. The judgment was released in that third week of December, after the Parliament had lifted, and that required an urgent application for a stay on the impacts of that decision, because you had the Department of Corrections in a position where, effectively, any conditions that were imposed or any obligations that they had with any of the returnees would be inoperational and therefore unlawful. Ordinarily, we would’ve brought that issue directly back to the Parliament so that we could clarify pretty swiftly what Parliament’s intent was in 2015 when the regime was originally passed. We didn’t have that luxury because Parliament wasn’t sitting; this is that first available opportunity. But I think because we are only going so far as to restate what I think this Parliament considered the law already was, on those bigger issues where we would usually probe more, we’ve decided that we’re falling on the fact that public safety in this circumstance—and it is very much this circumstance—trumps. So that’s to those process issues.

On the questions around new section 3B(5), inserted by clause 4—so the wording, for the benefit of the record, is: “This section overrides any inconsistent other law.” Directly following that is new section 3B(6), and it specifies that for the purposes of subsection (5), for any other law, for the purposes of subsection (5)—and it specifically references three provisions, or three elements: section 6(1) and (2) of the Sentencing Act, sections 25(g) and 26(2) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, and G v Commissioner of Police [2022]. That’s really specifically targeted towards the common law elements which arise out of each of these to specifically address where there may be any inconsistencies. So that’s for the purpose of clarity and, going to the honourable member Simon O’Connor’s point, for express—express—clarity of what the Parliament’s intent was.

I’m going to come to your question four about what a penalty is and how we understand a penalty and how the courts have been interpreting “penalty”. There’s been an issue—I was just going through some of the case law earlier. There’s a body of case law now which the range of additional restrictions imposed on an offender now constitutes a penalty for a broad range of purposes. In Davies v R in the Court of Appeal in 2012, it was held that the imposition of a minimum period of imprisonment by the sentencing court had been found to independently constitute a penalty. Outside of sentences of imprisonment, the imposition of an extended supervision order under the Parole Act 2002, that constituted a penalty. There is a series of decisions on that commencing—basically, anyway, it went right up until 2002. From the original imposition of a sentence until the case under appeal, the Supreme Court has held a court order placing a person on the child sex offender register under the Child Protection Act is a penalty. So the courts have read more and more into extending any condition to become a penalty, and I think that’s where we’re finding ourselves currently.

One of the things that you originally posed was whether or not there could be some type of review, I think you said “post enactment”, into the review; it might be the scheme more generally. I don’t have any opposition to that. I think what we needed in the emergency interim was just a real clarity of law so that the departments charged with custody or supervision or other obligations to those currently in New Zealand and those that were coming in—that they could continue with their ability to do so.

But with respect to a broader look into these areas—I mean, if there’s a case to be made, I really, genuinely am not opposed to it, because I think there probably are—if more challenges are presented to us, I think that that’s certainly something, whether you do it through a review or otherwise. Yeah—I think I’ve got to your four questions.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members, with apologies to the member, but the committee is suspended and will resume at 9 a.m. in the morning. Mā te wā.

Sitting suspended from 9.57 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Thursday)

WEDNESDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2023

(continued on Thursday, 23 February 2023)

Bills

Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill

In Committee

Debate resumed.

Parts 1 and 2, the Schedule, and clauses 1 to 3 (continued)

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members, morning. The committee is resumed on the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill. So when we suspended last night, we were considering the debate on all provisions of the bill as one question. Once again, the question is that Parts 1 and 2, the Schedule, and clauses 1 to 3 stand part.

NICOLE McKEE (ACT): Thank you, Madam Chair. Minister, I wonder, please, if we could have just a bit of clarification around new section 3A, in clause 4, which states that the provisions listed apply to a person “even if all or any of the following had occurred.”, and specifically, I’m looking at paragraphs (h) and (i), which reference a conviction being overturned or pardoned from an overseas offence. Can the Minister please explain why there is an opportunity to place conditions on people who have, effectively, been cleared by, and from, the countries where an alleged crime has taken place? If a person’s conviction was overturned or even pardoned, who are we to continue a punishment deemed no longer necessary in the jurisdiction where it was given?

Hon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General): Can I thank Nicole McKee for that question. I’ll respond to the individual point and then just make a couple of comments arising from another question last night that I discussed with the Minister of Justice afterwards. I’m advised that the legislation enables these supervisory orders that are imposed on someone to be reversed if their conviction in the country from which they were deported is subsequently overturned and that this provision is necessary to ensure that that ability can also be applied retrospectively in respect of convictions that were in place earlier than the date of the passage of this legislation.

In respect of some of the other questions that the member raised yesterday and were also raised by the members of the National Party, a suggestion was made that some of those finer details be discussed at the Justice Committee. The Minister of Justice—and I can say this because there’s been a determination of the Business Committee to allow people to vote whilst they’re dealing with events from Cyclone Gabrielle and the like, and that’s why the Minister of Justice isn’t in the chair today. But she would be open to the idea that the Justice Committee open a small inquiry into those issues but would not want the breadth of the inquiry to be looking at the overall need for the legislation, because there would be, no doubt, some grandstanding around that particular issue. And from the point of view of this Parliament and from the look of the votes, it is pretty well settled that we do need some form of intervention for people who’ve been deported and would otherwise be in parole in the country that they’ve come from, particularly Australia, where most of the deportees come from. But if members of the Justice Committee are interested in just looking at some of those finer issues, then we’re not proposing to amend them through this process but we’d be amenable to looking at those and just working them through.

NICOLE McKEE (ACT): Thank you, Madam Chair. Minister, could you please explain what happens to a person who is deported to New Zealand after serving a one-year sentence overseas for a crime that may not be a crime in New Zealand or one that does not usually require parole conditions in New Zealand?

Hon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General): Thank you, Madam Chair. The orders are not available for convictions that are not a crime in New Zealand.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you, Madam Chair. My question—the first one—to the Minister is a broader one, and it is in relation to the bill in its entirety and the timing of it. In the normal course of events, for when the court case has come and an appeal is under way, we would expect to sort of wait for the Court of Appeal to hear the case and make a decision and respond, if required.

So I’d just like to get on the record from the Minister an explanation as to why the Government felt it necessary to bring the bill through at this moment, before the Court of Appeal had concluded the case. We support the bill, we support the Government in doing it, but I think it’s important to understand why that was important.

The second question is around the question of double jeopardy and the suggestion that by imposing these restrictions on returning prisoners, they’re facing two punishments for a crime—and this is a breach of their human rights, in the bill. The section 7 analysis that the Attorney-General undertook made the point that it may well be the case that it goes against those rights, but the question is whether or not that is justified, and the view of the Attorney-General was that it is justified, and the purpose of this bill is to assert that.

So I just want to get an understanding from the Minister if indeed that’s the view of the Government as a whole—that, yes, the legislation does impinge upon the rights of returning prisoners, but the need of public safety and the need to ensure proper rehabilitation is carried out justifies that, and that’s the view of this Parliament and that’s why this legislation is important.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General): Dealing to the first point about why now, the court hearing before the High Court was earlier last year. The decision of the High Court, which has been well traversed in this House, was delivered after the House had risen. We were very concerned that had we not got a stay of that decision, the duty of the Government would have been to apply the law as the court determined it to be, rather than as we thought it to be, and immediately we would have had to have removed the supervisory aspects in respect of people who are subject to the regime currently, in a way that caused concern to Government agencies and the Government.

We were fortunate that we were able to secure a stay. The stay itself, perhaps—well, depending on how you view that judgment—is effective. It’s not for me to criticise, or otherwise, a judgment, but we were pleased to get it, and there will no doubt be some analysis by legal academics of a stay being granted in that situation, because it is somewhat unusual.

The effect of waiting for the Court of Appeal decision is if the Court of Appeal opined in that way, there would be very little chance that we would get a stay, and immediately the Crown would have to, effectively, abandon what has been done between the passage of the 2015 legislation and now, and we thought that would be an undesirable risk. The Court of Appeal may overturn the High Court decision, or it may not. We thought we had to guard against that possibility by bringing this legislation to the House at the first opportunity, which, of course, we have done.

In respect of the double jeopardy issue, the Government’s position is, as the prior National Government believed when the legislation was already passed, that these provisions are not punitive; they are supervisory and rehabilitative. One of the reasons why I’m interested in some of the points that Nicole McKee made yesterday is that we actually have to make sure that it is applied in that fashion, because otherwise we do run the risk that it could be seen as punitive rather than rehabilitative. And just having a bit of a look at that part of this regime could be a good thing so as to make sure that it truly is supervisory and rehabilitative rather than punitive, because if it is punitive, that does create problems for me, and, I’m sure, for many members of this House.

But that said, our view is, because it is supervisory and not punitive, it doesn’t amount to a punishment, and therefore the retrospective element doesn’t become difficult, because it’s not a punishment being imposed after the date of the offence, unknown to the offender, and, equally, it doesn’t, for similar reasons, amount to double jeopardy. So that’s the reasoning of the Government.

NICOLE McKEE (ACT): Thank you, Madam Chair. Minister, new section 3A(1)(a) in clause 4 reads that—when I spoke earlier about section 3A(1)—“A provision of this Act applies to a person … if all or any of the following occurred”, and paragraph (a) is “the person’s conduct overseas that constitutes an imprisonable offence in New Zealand:”, and I’m thinking here of an example of, say, a visa issue where a person may have had their visa cancelled, perhaps after spending a year incarcerated. They may not have been convicted; they may have just been deported after a year, not having stood trial or even having been found guilty of an accusation, but they have been deported anyway. So if a person who has had their visa revoked and is, therefore, removed from a country for an unproven accusation turns up here and it’s determined that the accusation made against them is punishable by imprisonment here—and it means that, even when they’re not found guilty or even charged—am I right in thinking that their conduct alone could mean restrictions are placed upon them, and, if I am right, how is this an acceptable way to treat our own citizens? Would we not be stepping too far when we start to look at every returnee under this regime as a potential criminal?

Hon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General): Thank you for the question. The answer to that is found in section 7 of the primary Act. That section is not being amended by this bill, and it says that a returning offender is “a person who has been convicted in an overseas jurisdiction”. So, no, that would not be within this legislation.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Again, just for clarity, I want to hear the Minister explain: clause 6, inserting new section 18A, is around the notice and right to be heard. The practice prior to the court case was that a prisoner arrived, primarily from Australia, and was immediately designated a returning prisoner and served with notice. The court judgment said, “Well, that’s not good enough; there needs to be the right to be heard and a process.”, which this legislation today negates and asserts, “No, that’s not the case”, that the person can be given notice straight away or a determination made straight away.

So I just wanted to get an explanation from the Government as to why that is important in terms of practicality. I’m assuming the absence of it would mean that there would be weeks, potentially months, of that returning prisoner being in the public and being a public risk while that consideration went on. The view of the Government is that that is not an acceptable risk, but I’d like to get a little bit of background to that, just so that we’re clear about these additional powers that have been granted.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General): The view of the Government—successive Governments until the decision of the High Court—was that there was no natural justice right to a hearing before the imposition of these conditions. The High Court decided otherwise and, from the point of view of the Government, we think that there is an adequate way to provide protection to the person who is returning to New Zealand; that their position might be abused other than a hearing in advance of the order.

We’re not in control of the process in the overseas country before deportation. And although we do now get some notice in the case of Australia, we may not always get notice in the future and we might not get notice in respect of people returning from other countries. So, as a matter of practice, the view of the Government is that it would be impractical to always grant a right of hearing in advance.

We acknowledge that that means that, of course, the person hasn’t had a right to be heard and say, “This is wrong.” But we do view this through the framing of what would happen to someone in New Zealand in similar circumstances being released from our prison system—and they would generally be on parole for a period. There are protections built into the existing Act that require that if someone complains, then an application can be made by the person who’s subject to the order, pursuant to section 22(2) of the Act—I’m sure officials will advise me if I’ve got that section wrong.

In addition to that, new section 18A, inserted by clause 6, makes it clear that notwithstanding that there’s no right to a hearing in advance and in addition to the right to apply for a review of the order that’s made under section 22, section 18A(3) makes it clear that, as I’ve said, the section 22 review remains, and, in addition to judicial review of the commission, this determination remains available.

NICOLE McKEE (ACT): Thank you, Minister Parker, for bearing with me with my scenarios—this is my last one. It’s in regard to just trying to find provisions within the bill as to how we deal with those that have returned with mental health disorders. In this country, as you know, we can often find a person not guilty by reason of insanity, but they’ve been quite violent in some aspects. So I’m wondering what happens if a person is returned from overseas after having served a sentence not necessarily in a prison but in a mental health facility, and whether or not this legislation allows us to capture them as well and put that wraparound support—conditions, rehabilitation, and reintegration—into their lives as well.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General): Well, the first point to be made is, if I’m correct in my reading of the statute, there has to have been a conviction for it to apply. Where there is a conviction and someone has mental health difficulties, of course, the supervisory orders that can be made could provide a route for the Government to become aware of the needs of the person who has been deported to New Zealand and, through that route, make available the services that are available to people with mental illness in New Zealand. So it could help in that regard.

In respect of the issue as to whether there should be specific legislated reference to that, there was a submission to the Law Society when it met with the select committee in 2019. The select committee made no recommendation to that effect back to the House, so, presumably, they didn’t think that the matter needed to be taken further.

A party vote was called for on the question, That Parts 1 and 2, the Schedule, and clauses 1 and 2 be agreed to.

Ayes 108

New Zealand Labour 64; New Zealand National 34; ACT New Zealand 10.

Noes 12

Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 10; Te Paati Māori 2.

Parts 1 and 2, the Schedule, and clauses 1 and 2 agreed to.

House resumed.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Madam Speaker, the committee has considered the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill and reports it without amendment. I move, That the report be adopted.

Motion agreed to.

Report adopted.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill is set down for third reading immediately.

Third Reading

Hon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General) on behalf of the Minister of Justice: I move, That the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

The bill amends the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Act 2015 to address issues raised in the recent High Court decision of G v The Commissioner of Police. The High Court recently found that the Act does not apply in respect of offending that occurred overseas before the Act came into force in November 2015. There are some in this House that thought that Parliament did do that, but the court has determined that the language in the Act is not clear enough for it to have acted retrospectively in that way since it’s come into force in 2015.

So what this bill does is confirm that the Act does apply since its inception, to people whose offences and convictions occurred earlier than that 2015 inception date of the underlying legislation. The bill confirms that the Act continues to apply to offenders who are deported to New Zealand or have been deported for offending that occurred before the Act came into force in November 2015. This means that returning offenders such as the section 501 deportees from Australia will continue to be managed on parole-like conditions when they return to New Zealand after being deported following release from prison in, normally, Australia. Consequently, the bill, in our view, achieves the aim of putting returning offenders in the same general position they would have been had they offended in New Zealand or, indeed, had they continued to be in Australia after release rather than been deported.

We think it is important to public safety that we address the issues raised in the High Court decision as soon as possible because it is possible that the appeal to the Court of Appeal may not—the Court of Appeal may agree with the High Court, or they may not. We would have had a gap had we awaited that decision and then it had gone against the Crown, hence the use of urgency to progress the bill through all stages.

I’d like to thank MPs from around the House for their support of this important bill. If there are some residual issues that members of the Opposition want to raise as to some of the details, and they wish to do that through the Justice Committee, as I said in the committee of the whole House stage, the Minister of Justice and I spoke about that issue, and we’d be subject to the work programme, I suppose, of the select committee. I think that select committee members might entertain consideration of those issues but I can say from the point of view of the Government that we wouldn’t want it to be a broad inquiry into the whole scheme of the Act which seems to have broad support in this Parliament. On that basis, I commend this amendment bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I stand to support this amendment bill, under urgency, which seeks to assert the current understanding of this legislation and how it applies in New Zealand in relation to returning prisoners primarily from Australia. As I said in my first reading speech, it arose during 2014-15 when the Australian Government adopted an unfriendly practice of sending back to New Zealand large numbers of prisoners whose connection to this country was not very strong in many cases, and the Government of the day was left with the significant public safety issue that developed. We had prisoners with serious offences coming back to this country and just being dropped at the airport, and we just waited for those offenders to offend again in this country if that’s what they were to do, before protecting the community from them.

The designation and the ability to put parole-like conditions on those returning prisoners was the purpose of the legislation, and, as the Hon Amy Adams indicated in the House when that legislation was passed, under urgency, it was to give a swift remedy to a problem that was urgent and topical—and that legislation was passed. Then we’ve had a High Court judgment which came to the conclusion that the Parliament, acting under urgency, was passing something that wouldn’t really take effect for more than a year if the court’s reading applied, which I can’t understand.

The National Party certainly supports this legislation to assert Parliament’s understanding of the legislation that it passed, and to make it clear that we do believe that the imposition of parole-like conditions is appropriate and is justified in terms of keeping our communities safe, and that it also gives the best shot at rehabilitation for those returning prisoners, who, as we all can understand, face many real difficulties in being returned to a country where they may not have any real connections. They may have left when they were infants. They may not have any family around. They may not have any support, and it is, in the absence of any such regime, a recipe for disaster.

It is important, I believe, to pass this legislation and ensure that the regime that has been in place for the last seven years continues, recognising that there may well be arguments about the impinging of the rights of those returning prisoners. But Parliament has made the judgment that that is justified by the need to maintain public safety. As the Attorney-General’s report, originally back in 2015 and again recently in relation to this bill, has pointed out: yes, human rights are impinged but, yes, that is justified by public safety. So with that—I don’t think we need to elongate things any further—we do agree with the Government on the need for this legislation and for its urgency.

VANUSHI WALTERS (Labour—Upper Harbour): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Can I just thank colleagues across the House for their really robust contributions last night and today. I think a number of members dwelt on the pivotal point, which is the distinction between an element of retrospective application versus retrospective punishment. And Mr Penk, I think yesterday, summarised the mood of the room, with the exception of the Greens, that we don’t consider this applies retrospective punishment, so double jeopardy isn’t engaged; the element of being retrospective in itself isn’t always contentious. And fun fact: the Interpretation Act in itself, while it prevents retrospective legislation, is in itself retrospective.

I also just want to acknowledge my colleague Nicole McKee, whose comments about the Justice Committee review led to the committee of the whole House discussing the Justice Committee’s role. And as the Chair of the Justice Committee, I just wanted to acknowledge the Minister yesterday and this morning and their openness to the committee opening a matter to make some brief comments. Kia ora. I commend this bill to the House.

SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I think, like a number of people at this third reading, I don’t intend to speak for too long. Obviously, the National Party continues to support this. We thought the original piece of legislation in 2015 was a good, satisfactory, and well-explained piece of law. We have learnt—through the courts, of course—that some did not understand what we said and thought, and, as I mentioned last night, it’s my hope that these debates, discussions, discursions will make it abundantly clear.

I will make this comment—and it’s again an element that was picked up in the discussions last evening—we are seeing our democratic, if not constitutional, structures working. It’s good that the court has decided to make a decision and that Parliament responds. But, I think, if there is a further benefit, not only that we’re keeping New Zealanders safer, that we’re actually providing, to a degree—I know it’s parole but it’s also somewhat pastoral support to those coming back to this country. As Paul Goldsmith noted, this is something imposed upon us by our Australian friends and neighbours, and I know successive Governments will continue to raise that with Australia because while they might be on paper and in their passports New Zealand citizens, many, if not all, of those coming back don’t really have the connections here. So, in many ways, one of Parliament’s intentions back in 2015 and now in 2023 is to ensure not only the safety of the community but that we have some sort of oversight control support mechanisms to those who are here.

But fundamentally important, as I say, the courts have the right to critique, to challenge, to say that they’ve got a problem. But Parliament also has the ability, as it is today, to say that Parliament is sovereign and we will decide what the laws say, and I don’t think we can make it any more clear than that.

ARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): I quite agree with my colleague on the other side, Simon O’Connor. I have enjoyed the contributions to the debate this morning and last night—the fun facts from my colleague, the chair of the Justice Committee, Vanushi Walters, and also our Attorney-General reprising his role as Parliament’s favourite and most even-handed and thoughtful lawyer. You know, we have traversed the details of this bill in our contributions, but it’s really quite simple at this point: that we are affirming Parliament’s original intent, that we are putting returned offenders in the same position that they would have been in were their offending in New Zealand. That’s all there is to it. Hopefully, we can wrap up this debate soon.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise, I think once again, as the lone voice for the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and for the principle of legality in saying that this is a bit of a sad day for our Parliament. I know that my friends in the ACT Party also have a big problem—as do we in the Greens—with the process being adopted, but I’ll just address the substance of what we say is wrong with this bill first.

This is something that did come into effect under a previous Government. No matter the process—and we had some backwards and forwards last night about that—what it is is taking care of the New Zealand end of a terrible and unfair and unjust Australian policy. We now know how that plays out in New Zealand, and I do want to recall again, as someone who was in the Auckland District Court through the first years of the returns of the 501s, that we didn’t see what this bill and the Act that it amends tell us it would do, which was to keep us safe and keep the 501s off the streets, and to ensure that they were rehabilitated.

More than anything, we saw an incredibly marginalised, disconnected, harmed group of people who were, in effect—and I think they felt this—dumped here without wraparound support, without access to rehabilitation or proper and safe reintegration into New Zealand society. That didn’t just harm them; it harmed a community that they had joined as well, and we saw them come through the courts again and again in very tragic circumstances. We saw the same people come through the courts, deteriorating in their mental health and becoming more and more addicted in a harmful way to substances, and, of course, we know—as all the evidence shows us—that it’s social disconnection and it’s the lack of systems that support a person into our community that contributes to addiction, that contributes to mental health harm, and that, thereby, contributes to offending.

So this bill isn’t about any of that, and one thing that it’s also not about—because I think there’s some confusion—is continuing something like parole conditions that were imposed in Australia. This is a separate scheme. The people to whom it applies have most often completely finished their sentences and their parole conditions in Australia.

What it also is not is a risk assessment tool that considers the circumstances of a person, the circumstances of the offending, and the causes of that offending, and makes any kind of future risk assessment, which is what parole would be about, which is what we would be doing if we were talking about rehabilitation. So let’s not pretend that that’s what this is.

What it is is a scheme—and the Law Commission pointed it out in 2019, when they came to select committee when there was a review of this law—that is a bulk application, and we keep talking about how some of the people to whom this retrospective set of sanctions will apply as being high risk. Well, the number of people to whom this will apply retrospectively is 41, and only 21 of them have been assessed by whatever tool—not in a transparent process—as being high risk. So who are the others, and why, if we are so concerned about risk and rehabilitation, are we not imposing what the Law Society asked us to do, which is an individualised assessment and scheme and programme that would help to bring down that risk and that would support a non-offending lifestyle? That’s not what this is.

Not only is that not what it is; it is also a scheme that is being applied retrospectively. So it is a sanction-focused scheme, a restriction-based scheme, not rehabilitative, and it’s being applied retrospectively, which not only breaches the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act unduly but breaches the principle of legality, which is to say that laws must be knowable to be fair to the people whom they sanction.

This lawmaking body—we, today—is breaching that principle and breaching the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, and we’re doing it under urgency, without the appropriate means for the public and for the expert bodies that we entrust to comment on law and on rights to come here, come to us, and make submissions. We are taking away our own ability to make this law better by hearing from the public, which is an essential part of lawmaking, and, in this case, I would say it is far more essential because we know we’re breaching rights and we’re doing it in amending an Act that was itself passed under urgency.

So it has never had that proper process, and to say that we’re going to bring it back after so many years where we have experienced that harm, where we know there are things wrong, because we’ve heard in a far more informal process from those expert bodies—we’re bringing it back to Parliament finally just to make the retroactive application clear and nothing else? It feels a bit shameful. It doesn’t quite feel right in the scheme of things where we, as representatives of the people, are meant to not only be cognisant of what the courts tell us but also of what the experience and the impact of the laws that we pass have been out there on the street.

We’re turning away from all of that, and, yes, we are sovereign. Yes, Parliament in our system is supreme, but surely those principles and the processes that we’ve put into place ourselves, as sovereign representatives, are there for a reason too. Breaching them sometimes works because things are truly urgent or they are very clearly to the benefit of the public, but when we know there is something so wrong as to be a breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and we know so clearly that there are aspects of this law that are causing more harm, even in a criminal justice context, I think it is absolutely a shame that we’re turning away from that today and we’re pretending that what we’re doing is clarifying a very technical point raised by a court, because we’re not.

We are actually perpetuating harm, we are lowering the standards of lawmaking in New Zealand, and we’re breaching the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. So, on behalf of the Green Party of Aotearoa, I do not commend this bill to the House.

NICOLE McKEE (ACT): Thank you, Madam Speaker. On behalf of the ACT Party, I will be speaking to this third reading of the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill—again, supporting the bill in its entirety.

In my first reading speech, I outlined how this bill works, how this bill is about supervisory rehabilitation and reintegration for those that come from overseas to New Zealand, having committed a crime there and serving what would be administrative, parole-type conditions. I see this as a sort of support mechanism for those that have come, especially when you look at many of those that have been returned from Australia who know nobody here in New Zealand, who have no one. Instead of just letting them get off a plane and try and fight for themselves, we actually put a system around them which helps to reintegrate them back into society. The reality of all of this, though, is that these people have committed crimes, and some of them are more serious than others. Because of that, some of the conditions imposed upon some of those people include having electronic monitoring put on them. That is for the safety of them, for the immediate community, and for our society as a whole.

In my second reading speech, I outlined the difficulties that had been mentioned not only by the New Zealand Law Society but also by the Justice Committee back in 2019, and the New Zealand Criminal Law Review also pointed out a number of areas that deserve some contemplation. I’m very pleased that the Minister of Justice and the Attorney-General, as well as the chair of the Justice Committee, have accepted that we should have a form of inquiry to address some of those issues that I have raised, and it would be a good idea to do that. I do appreciate the ability of the Government to actually say, “Yes, this is an issue and we should be looking at it at some stage in the future.” So I thank the Government for that.

Now, in my third reading speech, I want to just again acknowledge the support but also outline why ACT is supporting retrospective legislation, which is something that we don’t usually do. I know that there are countries around the world that send people back. We may not have that information-sharing arrangement with them and may not know when they come, but, effectively, 80 percent of those that are returned to New Zealand do come from Australia and are coming under section 501 of their Migration Act 1958 legislation. The reason why ACT is supporting this is because we see that law and order in New Zealand is not what it used to be. We now have a system where victims are often treated worse than the criminals, and it doesn’t help when the Government ignores or denies that it’s happening, resulting in the good people of this country finding themselves often victimised several times over.

When we speak to retrospectivity in legislation, ACT usually recoils from supporting such things. However, this instance is different, and the reasoning behind it is valid, in our opinion. There are currently 265 people being managed by Corrections that have returned from overseas; 41 of them have convictions pre - November 2015, when the parent legislation came in, and 21 of those are considered high risk and are on electronic management by Corrections. Should this bill not go through, then 21 serious offenders will be let loose without management, rehabilitation, conditions, or proper reintegration into New Zealand society, and that’s not a recipe that we want to mix into our communities.

I just want to point out a couple of things—another stat, for example: we’ve had, between 2017 and 2018, 85 child sex offenders returned to New Zealand. That’s 10 percent of those that were returned that year. Having the monitoring ability of these offenders and reintegrating them back into society is essential, in ACT’s view. We also know that out of the number of returnees, 5 percent of them are known gang members, and the police have actually highlighted how much of an impact these returnees have had on our gang situation. We would like to get that under control.

Another couple of examples was one of a man who was deported from Australia for a long list of crimes, including drug trafficking, stalking, intimidation, weapons offences, family violence, as well as two assaults—one against a police officer. These are the sorts of people that are being sent back here. Another one is a 23-year-old sportsman who repeatedly bit his then partner during fits of jealousy. He spat in her face and apparently accidentally cut her abdomen while he was cutting her hair, something that she did not want to happen—the cutting of the hair or the abdomen. So these are just a couple of examples of some of the people that have been sent back here to New Zealand, and some of them are often with no family or no connection to any person within this country.

Being able to retrospectively go back pre-2015 to ensure that everybody is captured we think is essential, because it’s not about punitive punishment; it’s about support and it’s about reintegration as well as rehabilitation. With that, we do support this bill.

GLEN BENNETT (Labour—New Plymouth): Kia ora, Madam Speaker. I rise this morning to endorse the fact we’ve been in urgency to tweak and pass a piece of legislation. Obviously, it was here before the House in 2015. The original intent is what we are working on today and I feel comfortable that it is being done in urgency. Most people have said what needs to be said. We need to get on and move to other important legislation as well. So I commend this bill to the House.

CHRIS PENK (National—Kaipara ki Mahurangi): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’ve had the opportunity to contribute at a previous stage to the debate and I’ve listened carefully to the contributions of all other members, some of which have been very helpful indeed. If I may say, having the Attorney-General in the chair and then making a speech—with no disrespect to his colleague the Minister of Justice, who also made a valuable contribution yesterday—I think we’ve had an opportunity for as much airing of the relevant issues as has been possible in this process.

Briefly, on the chronology, the 2015 legislation was a response to the decision of the Australian Government. And just to be clear: it was their policy, not that of the New Zealand Government—at the time then, or now—in relation to the so-called 501 deportees. The bill was produced in response to that; a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act report was produced by Attorney-General Finlayson. He found it inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act only in relation to the search and seizure aspect, as opposed to double jeopardy or even engaging the possibility of retrospective application.

Fast forward to 2022 and the matter is currently before the courts from last year and still a decision, effectively, pending now—G v Commissioner of the Police. And it’s in response to the court’s finding so far—the High Court’s finding, that is—that there’s a lack of clarity in the original legislation that has required that we move with some haste in this House.

The benefit of the doubt, of course, must go to a litigant where there is an interpretation that can be consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. But myself, I would have preferred—that’s not relevant; perhaps “expected” is more relevant to say—that a finding of a declaration of inconsistency might have been produced by the court rather than a finding that there was ambiguity in that matter. For the record, of course, it was the right to be heard as an aspect of natural justice in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, along with those questions of retrospectivity, that allowed the court to reach its conclusion so far.

I just want to touch briefly on that question of punitive versus rehabilitative versus reintegrative action that is the nature of the regime. I think reasonable minds can disagree on that point. I myself have certainly—whether or not a reasonable mind—grappled with that a little bit in the last 24, 48 hours. I think it is worth noting, however, that an argument in the alternative was articulated by the Minister of Justice yesterday.

So even if it were an additional punishment—or rather in the nature of a punishment—it would not be an additional punishment in the sense that the restrictions on the freedom of the person who’s returned to New Zealand would be equivalent to those that would have been imposed on them were they to have remained in Australia. And similarly, if they had committed such an offence in New Zealand, the same equivalent actions or restrictions would flow through to them at that point in any case. So our collective argument—“our” being that of all the House except the Green Party—need not rest on that point. I think that’s a fair point to emphasise again—even at this, the third and final reading.

The question of process, I think, is entirely fair that others have raised in this House—and I think, actually, all parties have acknowledged that this situation is less than ideal. It is a fair point to raise that lawmaking should not be so rushed as this in ideal circumstances. We are not in ideal circumstances here. I think the opportunity for the public, particularly very engaged members of the public—for example, the New Zealand Law Society—would have a lot positive and constructive to say about the law itself. Perhaps if the Justice Committee were to consider the matter—notwithstanding that the law would have been passed by that point—as chaired by the excellent Vanushi Walters, I’m sure that would be helpful to the extent that we’re able in the circumstances, again.

Some 40 persons will be affected by this law change, of whom roughly half are deemed to be high risk. As Nicole McKee has pointed out, the lack of rehabilitation and reintegration that would flow from that, were we not to pass this law, I think is a very serious consideration. It goes to the policy implications, which, of course, is part of the assessment of whether a justified limitation is possible under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

So the stakes are high. Parliament has inevitably moved quickly. And of course we have to do so independently of the courts; we can’t say to the courts, “Please hold off while we have a fuller parliamentary process in the usual way.” This is the first sitting of Parliament in 2023 since the court action. So, for those reasons, we have acted in the way that we have—and look forward to further discussion on the matter, perhaps after even the law has passed, for those reasons.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

Ayes 108

New Zealand Labour 64; New Zealand National 34; ACT New Zealand 10.

Noes 12

Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 10; Te Paati Māori 2.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a third time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The House stands adjourned and will resume at 2 p.m. today. Thank you, everybody.

The House adjourned at 9.56 a.m. (Thursday)