Wednesday, 5 April 2023

WEDNESDAY, 5 APRIL 2023

WEDNESDAY, 5 APRIL 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.

Amended Answers to Oral Questions

Question No. 3 to Minister, 4 April

Hon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General): Point of order, Mr Speaker. I seek leave to correct an answer to a supplementary question to oral question No. 3 yesterday.

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

Hon DAVID PARKER: Yesterday, in response to a question from the Hon Eugenie Sage, I said that the member, when she was Minister of Conservation, “approved of the Sea Change proposals which did have the continuation of trawl corridors”. Although the member in her former role as Minister of Conservation was involved in the development of the Government’s response to Sea Change, she was not the Minister at the time that the response was approved by Cabinet. I apologise to the member in the House for that error.

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

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

SPEAKER: No petitions have been delivered to the Clerk for presentation. No papers have been delivered to the Clerk for presentation. Select committee reports have been delivered for presentation.

CLERK:

Report of the Governance and Administration Committee on the Severe Weather Emergency Recovery Legislation Bill

report of the Health Committee on the petitions of Blair Vining

report of the Petitions Committee on the petition of Wendy Baker.

SPEAKER: The bill is set down for second reading. No bills have been introduced.

Oral Questions

Questions to Ministers

Question No. 1—Social Development and Employment

1. ANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour) to the Minister for Social Development and Employment: What reports has she seen on material wellbeing?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development and Employment): Today, Growing Up in New Zealand released the first two reports of their “Now We Are Twelve” research studies. The report shows that 90 percent of young people in the study are living in material wellbeing. This shows that this Government’s commitment to prioritising our tamariki and rangatahi and investing in our whānau and communities is starting to have an impact. The findings from this study align with figures released from Statistics New Zealand last month, which uses different data and a different methodology and shows that we have lifted 28,700 children out of hardship since coming into Government. Growing Up in New Zealand is Aotearoa’s largest and most diverse longitudinal study, following the lives of more than 6,000 young people and their families.

Angie Warren-Clark: What does the report say about the wellbeing of 12-year-olds?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: The report says that most 12-year-olds were living in homes where their family and whānau had access to essential resources, and only rarely were these households having to cut back or delay the purchase of everyday essentials. The findings in the study suggest that most of the cohort have what they need in terms of basic living standards and, most importantly, provide us with new insights into how families are faring two years into the COVID pandemic. This builds on findings from other data, which shows that 77,000 fewer children are in poverty on the after-housing costs measure since Labour took office; 109,000 families with children are better off by an average of $181 per week when compared to 2017; and there has been a drop in children in food-insecure households from 24.1 percent in 2012-13 to 12.5 percent in 2021-22.

Angie Warren-Clark: What has the Government done to address the number of people living in material hardship?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: Growing Up in New Zealand’s data shows that, compared to 90 percent of young people considered to be living in no or little material hardship, 9.6 percent were living in material hardship, with less than 1 percent scoring at the extreme tail-end. Since this data was collected in 2021-22, we have continued to make changes that will improve the lives of these children and hundreds of thousands of others. Despite the most challenging economic conditions in a generation or more, we are continuing to make changes that will benefit families, including successive increases to main benefits, Working for Families improvements, increases to accessibility of childcare assistance, and consistent rises in the minimum wage. While the data shows that most children in the study at 12 years old are not in hardship, we certainly know there is more work to do.

Angie Warren-Clark: What is the Government doing this year to improve material wellbeing in light of the report?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: Our 1 April changes aim to improve material wellbeing even further by putting more money into the pockets of New Zealanders; 1 April saw further cost of living support rolled out to 1.4 million New Zealanders, including families, seniors, caregivers, students, workers, and those on main benefits. For example, from 1 April, 345,000 families, including 646,000 children, will be better off through increases to Working for Families tax credits, and more than half of New Zealand families with kids, including around 10,000 more children, may be eligible for subsidised childcare assistance through our expansion of the income thresholds. While these increases won’t solve everything, they will help to ease some of the pressure, and right now every bit counts when making ends meet.

Question No. 2—Prime Minister

2. 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, particularly the Government’s actions in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions fell to the lowest levels in eight years during the September 2022 quarter. We’ve made a lot of progress, but there’s more work to do to ensure our emissions continue this downward trend.

Christopher Luxon: When does he expect inflation to return below 3 percent?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: That’s ultimately a matter for the Reserve Bank. The Reserve Bank’s mandate is to bring inflation back down to within the target range, so that is a matter for them.

Christopher Luxon: Why do forecasts show inflation will stay higher for longer in New Zealand than in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I note that yesterday when the member was comparing inflation rates of countries, he was often comparing different time periods, so I think he needs to take care in those international comparisons. New Zealand’s economy is not identical to the economies of other countries around the world.

Christopher Luxon: How can he justify increasing spending by an extra $1 billion every week when Treasury advised his Government last year that more spending would fuel inflation?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I think the member should level with New Zealanders. If he believes the way to get inflation down is to cut Government spending, then he should be a bit more up front about what Government spending he’s going to cut, because the sorts of levels of reduction in Government spending required to make a meaningful impact on the rate of inflation we have would have catastrophic consequences to the public services New Zealanders rely on.

Christopher Luxon: Does he agree with the IMF that high Government spending means interest rates just have to go even higher to fight inflation?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: There are a number of things that contribute to inflation, including the tax cuts that the member himself has been proposing.

Christopher Luxon: Isn’t it the case that this Government’s broken immigration settings have stoked labour shortages and fuelled inflation?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: If the member is arguing that we should open up the border in order to repress wages, which was the strategy of the last Government, then he can mount that argument at the next election.

Christopher Luxon: Hasn’t his Government’s failure to control inflation driven up mortgage interest rates, meaning that a family with a $400,000 mortgage is now paying an extra $300 a week in interest?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: No.

Christopher Luxon: How on earth is that family supposed to find an extra $300 a week extra for their mortgage, when real wages have fallen every quarter for 2½ years?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I do want to note, as I’ve indicated before, that this is a difficult economic period for New Zealand households. But if I look at wage growth, the claim the member just made is incorrect. According to the quarterly employment survey, average ordinary time hourly earnings rose 7.2 percent in the year to December, which coincidentally was the same rate as the rise in the Consumers Price Index.

Question No. 3—Finance

3. RACHEL BROOKING (Labour) to the Minister of Finance: What recent reports has he seen on the New Zealand economy?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): The Government’s books are in solid shape in what is a challenging economic environment. For the eight months to the end of January, the operating balance excluding gains and losses recorded a deficit of $3.2 billion—above that forecast at the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update but $5.1 billion lower than for the same period a year ago. Core Crown tax revenue is $1 billion below forecast, but this has been partially offset by core Crown expenses being below forecast by $800 million. We are continuing to take a balanced and responsible approach to the Government’s finances as we traverse a pathway through cost of living pressures, the impact of the flooding and cyclone events, and a volatile global environment.

Rachel Brooking: What did the report say about the Government’s debt position and its impact on the economy?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: The net debt stood at 18.9 percent of GDP, which was below the forecast of 20 percent of GDP, mainly due to favourable market conditions affecting the financial portfolio of entities, such as the New Zealand Superannuation Fund. Our debt levels as a country are among the lowest in the OECD, and well below the Government’s debt ceiling of 30 percent, ensuring that we are well positioned to handle the impacts of the likes of Cyclone Gabrielle and other future economic shocks.

Rachel Brooking: What reports has he seen on sentiment about the economy?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research’s Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion was released yesterday, and it showed that business confidence in firms’ own trading activity had improved somewhat. Nevertheless, sentiment does remain subdued amid challenging conditions for businesses.

Rachel Brooking: What other reports has he seen on the economy?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: We have seen a number of reports from the trading banks via research offices in the last couple of days. All of them have pointed to the fact that inflationary pressures are, to quote the BNZ, “Clearly moving in the ‘right’ direction.” This has been emphasised by others who also say that they can see inflation moving to a lower on a sustained basis, and the Monetary Policy Committee of the Reserve Bank have also said today that they expect to see a continued moderation in core inflation and inflation expectations.

Rachel Brooking: Which regions are buying our exports and supporting the growth in the economy?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Sales to Asia rose 30 percent for the February year, led by gains in China, Japan, and Singapore, while exports to the US increased 26 percent to Australia by 17 percent, and Europe up by 13.5 percent. Demand among our major export partners has remained resilient, despite the challenging global environment. Global shipping costs have also generally eased, with the container cost rate coming down. Overall, New Zealand finds itself in a good position to face the challenges ahead, with an economy 6.7 percent bigger than before COVID, near record low unemployment, growing exports, and a resilient set of Government books.

Question No. 4—Finance

4. NICOLA WILLIS (Deputy Leader—National) to the Minister of Finance: Does he stand by his statement, “The year 2023 is a tough time for many New Zealand families”, and what impact is the rising cost of living having on them?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): I stand by my statement in its entirety, which was “The year 2023 is a tough time for many New Zealand families, but all of these are meaningful improvements which will help them … all of which the Opposition voted against.” To the second part of the member’s question, I reiterate what I said yesterday, that impacts will differ from person to person and family to family, but we do understand that this is a tough time for many people, and that is why the Government is continuing to take substantial actions to support New Zealanders through this time.

Nicola Willis: Does he understand that his band-aid policies mean very little to a family who will be searching for more than $300 more every week when their mortgage refixes from around 3 percent to more than 6 percent?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: I find it interesting that the member thinks that lifting the incomes of the lowest-earning New Zealanders is a band-aid solution. On this side of the House, we think lifting the family tax credit, increasing benefits, better supporting superannuitants, and better supporting students is actually the kind of thing a responsible Government does to help look after people. It is not a band-aid solution.

Nicola Willis: How many families will be forced to sell their homes because of the 50-point hike in interest rates today?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: In answer to that part of the member’s question, I would note that almost all banks have priced in the official cash rate going to 5.25 percent, and, indeed, the Reserve Bank, in its statements today, talks about the importance of maintaining current lending rates.

Nicola Willis: How many New Zealand families will suffer from significant financial stress as they struggle to service their mortgage?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Many New Zealand families will, depending on their circumstances, have to find more money to meet their mortgage. The way in which a Government can support them through that is to support them just as we have done, by supporting particularly those on low and middle incomes to be able to actually make ends meet. What would make things really bad for them would be massive cuts in public services, which is what the Opposition will need to do.

Nicola Willis: When is the Minister going to stop talking about his plans to spend yet more taxpayers’ money, and instead focus on the substantive work needed to reduce pressure on inflation and interest rates?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: As the Prime Minister has already indicated, the Opposition need to front up about what it is they would cut in order to have a major effect on inflation, because let’s be very, very clear: the scale of cuts to Government spending that would materially reduce inflation would mean things like abandoning the State housing programme. Now, they did try to do that before, and if that is their policy, they should front up about it.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Will the Government instead consider taxing excess profits or the approximate $1 trillion in wealth transfer through COVID to the wealthiest New Zealanders as a more equitable deflationary measure?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: As has been said before many times, any discussions about tax policy for the next election will take place at the appropriate time. The Government has already announced its tax policy for this term.

Nicola Willis: Does he stand by his commitment to return spending to normal levels following the COVID emergency response, and, if so, why is he planning to spend $9 billion more next year than he did last year?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Yes.

Nicola Willis: Is he seriously trying to say to New Zealanders suffering from the 11th interest rate rise in a row that he and the Ministers sitting next to him have done all they can to eliminate ill-disciplined, wasteful spending from their Government?

Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: As the Prime Minister has indicated, we will continue to look for places to reprioritise and make savings, and we have done a significant amount of that. But inherent in the member’s question is the connection that I raise again with her: if she thinks that reducing spending can have the meaningful impact on inflation that she is saying, she needs to come forward with the significant cuts that would be—is that no more State housing? Is it no more public health system? Is it no more public education system? Because that’s the level of spending that the member would need to cut if she were to have the effect on inflation she thinks that she can have.

Question No. 5—Health

5. CHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central) to the Minister of Health: Is the Government’s approach to drugs evidence-based, and does it ensure the best possible health and wellbeing outcomes for New Zealanders?

Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Minister of Health): Yes, the Government takes a harm reduction approach to drugs, providing services to support people to better manage or stop their substance use and seek recovery. I’m proud of this Government’s approach to evidence-based drug policy, like our work to make drug checking services more accessible to young people over summer; deliver drug-checking services and harm reduction advice; passing permanent legislation so drug-checking providers could be licensed and expand their services; and the roll-out of the free methamphetamine harm reduction programme, Te Ara Oranga.

Chlöe Swarbrick: How is it in the interests of public health to drop the work programme on alcohol harm minimisation while continuing to employ an evidentially harmful, criminally punitive approach to cannabis, and will the Government do anything to address either, per the recommendations from their own inquiries?

Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL: I do not believe that the alcohol work programme has been dropped. It has been deferred, and I continue to actively engage with the Minister of Justice over it.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Is she aware that kids in this country, on average, are exposed to alcohol advertising 4.5 times per day, with most of that attributed to sports advertising and sponsorship; if so, will her Government adopt my alcohol harm minimisation bill?

Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL: As I mentioned in my previous response, I continue to work with the Minister of Justice over avenues for addressing a better alcohol policy, including issues around the minimisation of young people’s exposure to alcohol advertising.

Chlöe Swarbrick: How is it in the interest of public health that the police continued glyphosate spraying of small-time cannabis crops in the Bay of Plenty and central regions of the North Island throughout Cyclone Gabrielle, as revealed in my parliamentary written questions?

Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL: I believe that is a matter for the Minister of Police.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Sorry, point of order, Mr Speaker. What we’re talking about here is the Misuse of Drugs Act, as administered jointly by the Ministers of Justice and Health, and when I questioned the Minister of Justice about this last year, she said that that was within the delegation of the health Minister. Joint responsibility must mean both, not neither.

SPEAKER: Well, my hearing of the question is that the Minister has addressed it. I suggest asking a better question.

Chlöe Swarbrick: How is it effective, fair, or in the interests of public health to, last year, have prosecuted over 1,000 New Zealanders for cannabis as their highest offence, when approximately 635,000 New Zealanders used cannabis last year?

Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL: In my capacity as the Minister of Health, I am pleased that this Government has given the police the discretion over how they prosecute on cannabis, and I continue to work to make sure that there are high-quality addiction services available.

Question No. 6—Education

6. CHRIS BAILLIE (ACT) to the Minister of Education: Does she agree with the Ministry of Education’s Literacy and Communication and Maths Strategy that “A critical maths pedagogical approach uses maths to develop critical awareness about wider social, environmental, political, ideological, and economic issues. Critical maths recognises the importance of understanding, interpreting, and addressing issues of power, social justice and equity in the community and the wider world. Ākonga are encouraged to interrogate dominant discourses and assumptions, including that maths is benign, neutral, and culture-free”?

Hon JAN TINETTI (Minister of Education): Yes, in the context of the document from which the quote was taken.

Chris Baillie: Can she explain to parents who might be watching this what “teaching maths for social justice” is and why teaching maths for social justice is important for New Zealand children?

Hon JAN TINETTI: The quote the member referred to in his primary question is taken from a draft of the Common Practice Model that is currently out with the sector for early socialisation and was informed by an expert contributors group. It is a draft and out for feedback from the sector. I haven’t signed it off for the final Common Practice Model. I do think that this particular paragraph is worded in an overly complicated way to explain that maths teaching should be used in teaching of critical thinking.

Chris Baillie: How many parents have asked her to make social justice a goal of teaching maths in New Zealand schools?

Hon JAN TINETTI: It’s important that we do teach maths in authentic contexts. Research does show that teaching maths is effective when it is put into the context of the learner.

Hon Kelvin Davis: Does the Minister agree that the development of the annual Budget is an example, a real-world example, of critical maths and it provides many opportunities for authentic teaching and learning in maths?

Hon JAN TINETTI: Absolutely, that is an absolute authentic context, and I would think that many parents would actually support the teaching of maths in that particular way.

Chris Baillie: So, when did teaching maths become more about “addressing issues of power and social justice” than teaching kids to add and subtract?

Hon JAN TINETTI: It hasn’t.

Chris Baillie: At a time when 100,000 students aren’t showing up to school regularly, let alone achieving in maths, why is the Ministry of Education smuggling left-wing nonsense into schools and trying to politicise the curriculum?

Hon JAN TINETTI: I reject the premise of that question.

Question No. 7—Immigration

7. IBRAHIM OMER (Labour) to the Minister of Immigration: What recent announcements has he made regarding the migrant workforce?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Immigration): Yesterday, I announced two significant changes to the working holiday scheme, which could mean thousands more workers available for Kiwi businesses. Firstly, we’re extending, by six months, the visas of working holidaymakers currently in New Zealand with visas due to expire between 4 April and 30 September, and granting them open work rights so they can work for the same employer for longer than three months. Secondly, the Spanish Working Holiday Scheme will be significantly expanded, with the amount of places increasing from 200 to 2,000 under an agreement that was negotiated by the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern. These changes will come into effect when the scheme opens on 13 April. We know how many industries, such as tourism, hospo, agriculture, and horticulture, do rely on working holidaymakers, and it’s great to be able to give these sectors a boost as they deal with historically low unemployment in New Zealand.

Ibrahim Omer: How many working holiday visa holders will be eligible for the sixmonth extension?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: I’m advised that around 7,500 working holiday visa holders will be eligible for the six-month extension. They must also have been onshore on 4 April to be eligible. They will continue either to be able to work in their current casual jobs or to travel and find other work, depending on their individual circumstances.

Ibrahim Omer: How many working holiday visas have been approved since the border opened last year?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: Immigration New Zealand has approved over 52,000 working holiday visas since the border reopened last year, with around about 36,500 people subsequently entering New Zealand after having a visa approved. These are strong numbers given both the high demand for migrant labour internationally and the disruption caused by COVID-19 and the border closure, and we are constantly reviewing our settings, as per this week’s announcements, to ensure that we’re doing all that we can to make New Zealand an attractive place for people to travel and work.

Ibrahim Omer: What other recent announcements has the Minister made regarding migrant workforce?

Hon MICHAEL WOOD: Earlier this week, I announced, alongside the Minister of Finance, the Government’s interim response to the Productivity Commission’s report into how immigration policy settings can best support economic growth and community wellbeing. The Government’s interim response noted that work would be undertaken on a Government policy statement on immigration, which will give both employers and migrant groups a greater understanding of the Government’s priorities and decisionmaking processes regarding immigration policy settings. It will also complement our efforts to ensure that we have the right mix of skills amongst migrant workers to boost productivity and growth, and to ensure that migrant workers are treated well. I look forward to engaging with sector groups and others with an interest in this work as we take it forwards in the coming months.

Question No. 8—Child Poverty Reduction

8. Hon LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō) to the Minister for Child Poverty Reduction: Does she agree with Child Poverty Action Group that the latest child poverty statistics are “a sad indictment on the country with no real improvement in policy that could turn things around”, and why was the reduction in the number of children living in material hardship over the last five years less than half the reduction from 2013 to 2017?

Hon JAN TINETTI (Minister for Child Poverty Reduction): In answer to the first part of the question, no. In answer to the second part of the question, the period selected by the member encompasses the period following the GFC—a global financial crisis where child poverty rates rose sharply. Comparing that period to the last five years, where we have seen some of the most challenging economic conditions in a generation is not a fair comparison. Measures taken by the Government during the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic shock have avoided more children falling into poverty, and eight of the nine measures of child poverty are statistically significantly lower than 2018. There is still much more to do, and the Government won’t let up on our goals of reducing child poverty.

Hon Louise Upston: Why has the number of children living in benefit-dependent homes increased by 35,000 under this Government?

Hon JAN TINETTI: What really matters here is that we are lifting children in all households out of poverty. There are more people in need of support due to COVID, which is why one of the first actions we took in 2020 was to lift benefits, and we have further lifted benefits in line with recommendations from the Welfare Expert Advisory Group. Unlike the previous Government, we are investing in supporting people into work, and we are starting to see the results.

Hon Louise Upston: Point of order. That didn’t address the question; it was kind of interesting, but it didn’t actually address the question I asked.

Hon Grant Robertson: Speaking to the point of order. I’m not actually surprised that the member couldn’t hear, because of the noise that was taking place from her side of the House. But, actually, the Minister did directly address the question when she stated that, because of COVID-19, more people were in need of Government support, which was the question that the member asked. It was directly addressed.

SPEAKER: And, from what I heard, the Minister did address it. If members—and I’ve ruled on this before: if the House is telling me that it doesn’t want to hear the answer, then it’s already addressed.

Hon Louise Upston: Does she accept that, with the rate of child poverty reduction more than halving over the last five years, this Government’s strategy of relying solely on benefit increases, instead of reducing the number of people on benefit and benefit dependency, has backfired?

Hon JAN TINETTI: No.

Hon Louise Upston: What actions, if any, has this Government taken to actually reduce the number of children living in benefit-dependent homes, given benefit dependency is a driver of child poverty?

Hon JAN TINETTI: We have had a number of initiatives that are helping reduce those numbers, including the $5.5 billion Families Package, successive main benefit increases, minimum wage increases, Working for Families increases, healthy school lunch programmes, and our extensive COVID-19 supports—have all had a profound and positive effect.

Hon Louise Upston: Is there any greater symbol of her Government’s complete and utter failure over the last five years than the rate of child poverty reduction more than halving despite promising to make it a priority?

Hon JAN TINETTI: When we came into Government, we had to follow nine years of a Government that had seen child poverty numbers increase over the global financial crisis. This Government is working incredibly hard. I’ve already listed some of the package that we have put in place. I am proud to stand on that record.

Question No. 9—Tourism

9. TĀMATI COFFEY (Labour) to the Minister of Tourism: What recent announcement has he made on the Tourism Infrastructure Fund?

Hon PEENI HENARE (Minister of Tourism): I am proud to announce today that round seven of the Tourism Infrastructure Fund will open next week, on 11 April. The process this year will prioritise applications where tourism infrastructure has sustained damage during the extreme weather over the last year and where upgrades will improve resilience, particularly in regions with a low ratepayer base and high visitor numbers. There is just over $14 million available in this round, and I’m proud to announce that.

Tāmati Coffey: What projects are eligible for the Tourism Infrastructure Fund?

Hon PEENI HENARE: The Tourism Infrastructure Fund is open to all local councils and not-for-profit community organisations that can demonstrate support from their local council. Otherwise known as the TIF, the Tourism Infrastructure Fund supports the development of public infrastructure used by visitors such as car parks; safety upgrades in public spaces such as footpaths; freedom camping facilities; and, in some cases, water treatment and wastewater.

Tāmati Coffey: What’s unique about this current round of the Tourism Infrastructure Fund?

Hon PEENI HENARE: For this round, it was important to focus priority on those regions where there has been significant damage from the extreme weather events. The return of visitors to those regions will aid the recovery of the local economies, and the repair and replacement of damaged visitor facilities is vital to be in place as soon as possible. Prior to the round opening, a number of councils were canvassed to get a sense of their needs which informed the priority statement for this round. It is always a challenge for small communities to afford the infrastructure required for large numbers of visitors, and the extreme weather has further exacerbated this.

Tāmati Coffey: How has the Tourism Infrastructure Fund supported our regions previously?

Hon PEENI HENARE: Since 2017, this Government has funded more than 200 TIF projects as part of our plan to promote tourism as we progressively open our borders, support domestic tourism opportunities, and maintain New Zealand’s presence internationally. Kaitiakitanga is a responsibility that we all have, whether you are manuhiri or a local. This fund has seen much-needed upgrades to infrastructure across the country and I’m proud that we are also seeing more innovation and sustainable applications coming through. Just recently, the Far North District Council has installed some solar-powered trash-compactor bins around Paihia, Russell, Kawakawa, Ōpōnoni, and Pukenui Wharf. These bins use sensors to detect rubbish levels and alert contractors when they need to be emptied. It is also solar powered to take up to five times more rubbish to help eliminate overflow problems. These infrastructure are needed in areas like this and this fund is available to them.

Question No. 10—Education

10. ERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays) to the Minister of Education: How many decile 1 students passed the writing assessment for the second 2022 literacy and numeracy pilot released last week, and what advice, if any, has she received on the number of students next year that will leave school with no qualifications?

Hon JAN TINETTI (Minister of Education): The number of decile 1 students who achieved the writing assessment for the overall 2022 pilot was 33, which is 11.7 percent of decile 1 students who attempted the trial assessment. To the second part of the question, the maths and literacy co-requisite is intended to sit along the NCEA qualification as an endorsement of foundational knowledge. We have been piloting the draft assessment in around 200 schools, kura, and tertiary providers to determine the settings for the assessment material and conditions. Advice has been given that if it is implemented as currently planned, the assessment could disadvantage some students, particularly those already faced with inequity, which is why we have put in place a $24 million tutoring programme to help the students whose learning was most disrupted by COVID-19, and it is why I am investigating transitional options that balance the need for a fair and equitable implementation, but without reducing the credibility of the qualification.

Erica Stanford: Before implementing the numeracy and literacy pilots, did she expect that 90 percent of decile 1 students would fail a basic writing assessment?

Hon JAN TINETTI: The bottom line here is that 10 years ago, we weren’t testing or investigating literacy or numeracy in this particular way, because we didn’t have this ability. It would be probable that we would have got exactly the same results 10 years ago. It would be hard to know where those young people would be actually achieving in those assessments, because we did not have visibility of it.

Erica Stanford: In light of the answer she just gave that she wasn’t expecting that level of failure, why didn’t she in the last six years implement some form of assessment—

Hon Carmel Sepuloni: Make things up.

SPEAKER: The Hon Carmel Sepuloni, stand, withdraw, and apologise. You can’t say that.

Hon Carmel Sepuloni: I withdraw and apologise.

Hon Grant Robertson: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I accept, obviously, your ruling on Minister Sepuloni. But this is, as we discussed earlier in the week, another example of an assertion in a question, which I know what you want is for us to say nothing until the Minister gets up. But when virtually every question other than the primary coming from the Opposition contains assertions, it is extremely difficult for order to be maintained in the House.

SPEAKER: Well, further to the ruling that I made last week, which was that at least one part of the question needed to be in order, I’m going to leave it to the Ministers. If it’s your feeling that it’s out of order to the extent that you don’t wish to—I mean, I’m happy to intervene, but I don’t want to intervene until the question has been asked. I think we all know when there are far too many assertions—we’ve already had at least two today. One of them had four assertions. I would have been quite—I would have accepted it if the Minister just remained seated and did not want to answer it, and I would rule it out of order. I can do that, but it’s really up to the House. As I have said before, if the House wants to tolerate out-of-order questions and address them, it can, but if it doesn’t—because we have had a situation where I think they should be ruled out of order. So, in that respect, I agree with the Hon Grant Robertson. But, as I have said before, this House has told me that it wants more robust question time—OK. That’s entirely up to this House.

Erica Stanford: Why is it, then, that over the last six years she didn’t put in place measures to allow students to master the basics in literacy and numeracy before they were required to sit this high-stakes national standard in numeracy and literacy, to ensure they had a better chance of success?

Hon JAN TINETTI: That’s exactly what we are doing. This is a package. This is not cherry-picking off one part or another. This is a whole package that we are doing to make sure that we are lifting literacy and mathematics achievement in this country.

Erica Stanford: What things has the Minister put in place in the last six years specifically to allow students to master the basics before they had to sit this exam?

Hon JAN TINETTI: We have put more teachers into the classroom. We have put in the Better Start Literacy Approach. We are putting more professional learning and development into the classroom. We have a strategy that’s coordinated across. We are working with the sector; the sector are on board with us with that. We are absolutely laserfocused on lifting literacy and numeracy.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Point of order. I apologise for taking a little time to find the relevant Speaker’s ruling, but I think I heard you say that it would be over to the Minister to decide whether the question was in order and not answer it, which seems to be at odds with the rulings of Speakers Gray and Mallard, 175/7. I would be the last one to advocate for a change in the approach that you are taking to things like assertions and so on, but I don’t think it would be in order for the Minister to determine and therefore decline to answer, which has been the rulings of previous Speakers.

SPEAKER: The alternative would be for me to intervene on every question that’s out of order. If that’s what the House is telling me, then I will do it.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Speaking to that point, that’s not what I’m suggesting. It’s not a binary choice, I would suggest. You have done a very good job of allowing the flow of questions, and it would be a shame if an answer would be denied by the Minister simply because he or she, in their own mind, felt that it was out of order.

SPEAKER: Can members consider, then—perhaps at the next Business Committee. Can members consider and come back to me about at what point, how many assertions rules out a question. We’ve had one today—I mean, I counted three, and when you consider that one is out of order, at what point does this House want me to rule those sorts of questions out of order? Bring that back to me. I also point to Speaker’s ruling 186/4 as well: the Speaker cannot force the Minister to answer. Have you got further supplementaries?

Erica Stanford: Only if you’d like to give me one.

SPEAKER: Pardon?

Erica Stanford: Only if you’d like to give me an extra one.

SPEAKER: I don’t want to do that.

Question No. 11—Commerce and Consumer Affairs

11. GLEN BENNETT (Labour—New Plymouth) to the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs: What reports has he seen about how competing businesses can cooperate to respond to natural disasters?

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): The Commerce Commission last week issued their report Business collaboration in response to an emergency to help businesses understand how and when they can collaborate after an emergency. Cyclone Gabrielle provided a clear example of where businesses that are normally expected to compete had important reasons to collaborate in the immediate aftermath of an emergency so that access to critical supplies, such as groceries and banking services, could be quickly reinstated. The commission wants to ensure businesses have simple and clear information about how they can work together to maintain the supply of goods and services during an emergency situation.

Glen Bennett: Why is this guidance necessary?

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: The Commerce Commission is aware that concerns and uncertainty over competition law enforcement has the potential to impede necessary cooperation in an emergency situation. The guidance is needed because it gives clarity to the situations in which the Commerce Commission is likely to take enforcement action and where it is not, providing businesses with the certainty to do what’s needed when it’s needed most.

Glen Bennett: How will the Commerce Commission consider matters of competition in a crisis setting?

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: The first question will be whether an emergency exists. That will be the case where a state of emergency is declared or other circumstances, such as a major health crisis or an international incident occurs. The guidance makes clear that the collaboration should be directed at achieving an outcome that benefits consumers or is otherwise in the public interest—for example, by ensuring consumers have continued access to goods or services by avoiding a shortage, ensuring security of supply, or promoting a fair distribution to consumers.

Glen Bennett: What safeguards are in place for consumers that such collaborations do not harm competition unnecessarily?

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: The commission has made it clear that it will not tolerate collaborations that have the purpose of profiteering or otherwise taking advantage of an emergency for commercial gain. After Cyclone Gabrielle, many businesses worked well together to ensure essential goods and services reached consumers at a fair price. This guidance builds on that to ensure that the same can happen should another emergency occur.

Question No. 12—Education

12. PENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill) to the Minister of Education: Does she believe the results of the Te Pūkenga network employee survey, which notes one-third of Te Pūkenga staff see no future for themselves in Te Pūkenga, is a positive or a negative representation of Te Pūkenga’s performance over the last three years?

Hon JAN TINETTI (Minister of Education): I have been made aware that staff morale in the organisation has been low, and, as with any organisation going through a significant change and restructure, it creates uncertainty. Therefore, staff dissatisfaction is not necessarily a measurement of performance but a product of the scale of change being undertaken with these reforms.

Penny Simmonds: Why is it that over 80 percent of the mega-merged polytechnic and industry training organisation staff do not recommend working at Te Pūkenga?

Hon JAN TINETTI: I will also note that—from the same survey—it reflects that 44 percent of the staff strongly agreed with the changes taking place that are necessary. Only 14 percent strongly disagreed, and the rest were ambivalent. As I said, change does create uncertainty, and that is the reason why we will be seeing such low morale numbers.

Penny Simmonds: Does the Minister think that Te Pūkenga carrying out a witch hunt auditing outbound emails from staff to try and find who leaked the survey results to the media will improve or make worse the staff culture at Te Pūkenga?

Hon JAN TINETTI: I actually reject the premise of that question. The staff morale survey was leaked. However, it does send a signal of the work that needs to be done, and the chief executive is working through that right now.

General Debate

General Debate

Hon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): I move, That the House take note of miscellaneous business.

Earlier, at question time, the Prime Minister called this House’s attention to the Stats New Zealand report yesterday that the last quarter’s emissions for this country are the lowest in eight years. It is all too easy, I think, to despair at the climate emergency or to think that it’s all too late, but it is not.

The release two weeks ago of the latest scientific evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the climate crisis is certainly very sobering reading. Essentially, what the IPCC report said is that we have to globally halve emissions in the remaining years of this decade and then eliminate the rest of it by the year 2050 at the absolute latest if we’re to have any hope at all of keeping global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But amidst the increasingly dire warnings in that report and all of the ones before that, I think that there was an optimistic note, which is that it is not too late to make a difference.

Ever since climate change was first discussed in the mainstream a little more than 35 years ago, our collective understanding of what the climate crisis is and what we can do about it and the kind of world that we are creating for ourselves has changed dramatically. Over the course of those 3½ decades, it’s also true that half as much climate pollution has been emitted since the beginning of the industrial period. So since we started saying that we needed to reduce pollution globally, we’ve actually emitted as much as we did in the industrial revolution up to that point. So you cannot say as a planet that we have done a terribly good job of doing what we said that we would need to do.

Politicians around the world have known over the course of time what was unfolding. Hundreds of politicians, thousands of politicians, had a chance to stop it, but they did not, and so in that final IPCC report a couple of weeks ago, it did say to us, essentially, this is our last chance. This is it—the time is now. If we do not act comprehensively now, then we will absolutely miss that 1.5-degrees Celsius temperature threshold.

It is time to accelerate our efforts. It is time to meet the scale of the crisis with the urgency and the scale which it demands, and we are making progress. As the Prime Minister said, our last quarter’s emissions were the lowest that they have been in eight years. That is a good sign. Now, it is only one quarter. It comes after a number of other quarters where emissions were up, but the fact that we had one quarter in which the emissions were the lowest in eight years is itself remarkable.

We are going to have to wait for our next inventory report to see what changes in terms of our future projections, but we are starting to get an inkling that the policies that this Government has put into play over the course of the last six years are starting to make a difference. It is starting to deliver results, and the pace of action is—yes, it is still too slow, and I do not want another generation to have to inherit the burden of slow progress. We must push harder. We must do more than we have to date.

I have always rejected the idea that politics is a matter of absolutes and that if we can’t win everything, then we lose everything. It often requires an ability to see past our differences and to find common ground, and over the last 5½ years, there is no one who has done more to show us what that means than the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern. I am one of the fortunate few who has had the opportunity to work with her during the course of this Government. We did not always agree, and sometimes we vehemently disagreed, but there is no doubt that she is one of the most dedicated, authentic, values-driven people that I have ever had the pleasure of knowing or the privilege of working with.

Now, when people ask me if we can do enough quickly enough to meet our emissions reductions targets, I have to remember that before she started as Prime Minister, even the idea of legislated targets seemed completely out of reach. She has changed politics, and once the politics changes, the possible outcomes also change. It is in no small part due to her leadership, her clarity, and her direction that we are where we are. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Deputy Prime Minister): It’s my pleasure to take a call in what is the first general debate of the year. It is a pleasure to take a call, and can I just acknowledge what a whirlwind start to the year we have had. I did not expect in January to be 2IC to the ginga boy from the Hutt in the leadership team for the Government.

I have to start the speech by acknowledging our outgoing Prime Minister, who today will give her valedictory in the House. I acknowledge her for her leadership during what have been very challenging times, I acknowledge her for her friendship, I acknowledge her for the kindness that she not only spoke about but that she demonstrated daily, and I acknowledge her as a woman, as a mother, as a politician, and as a parliamentarian. We wish Jacinda Ardern well for everything that she goes on to do, and we take pride in the way that she has led our country and represented us on the international stage.

It has been a tough start to the year. After getting sworn in, two days later we were hit by floods in parts of the country, including Auckland. What we did see from that was the very best of humanity on the ground, with our community groups rallying together to help the families that had been impacted. We also saw the best of politicians. In the time during an event like that when New Zealanders have been affected, where people come round—shared humanity—we aren’t playing politics; we’re there to support the communities that have been affected. However, the politics, obviously, come later.

We’ve also faced challenges because of the global events that are happening and the impacts that they are having on inflation across the world, including in New Zealand, and we recognise that many whānau were struggling with the cost of living challenges before that. Much of the rationale for why we’re experiencing that is out of our hands, but we’ve certainly done everything that we can to respond to the realities for families on the ground. On 1 April, we were proud to announce what was put in place to support families: superannuitants are better off, students are better off, beneficiaries are better off, the minimum wage was lifted again, and also childcare assistance thresholds were changed so that more whānau could get access to childcare assistance subsidies, and we know that that is one of the biggest in-work expenses that families have.

Also, I’m really proud of the fact that as of 1 April, 8,000 community nurses will get pay parity with the nurses that are in our hospitals, and I’m acknowledging that many of those nurses are Māori and Pacific nurses who choose to work for Māori and Pacific community providers. Many of them have been working in our rest homes and in our hospices. I’m proud to be part of a Government that has finally rectified—fixed—that situation and ensured fairness for those 8,000 nurses.

Much of what we have recently done builds on what we had already done. We often get criticised by the other side of the House with regard to the measures that we’ve put in place over the last five years. Many of those measures were not supported by the other side of the House, and yet how would we as a country have responded and how would our families and communities have been served if we hadn’t done things like invest in our welfare system, like lift benefits, like continually increase the minimum wage, like invest in Working for Families and Best Start, and like introduce the winter energy payment? How would our families have been served during these difficult times if our Government—our responsible Government—hadn’t already done those things?

It’s very rich to listen to the other side of the House talk about the cost of living and the realities for families on the ground when they never supported any of the policies that are actually propping up New Zealanders at this very time. They are still putting out their messages on tax cuts and still opposing the things that really matter and that make an impact on the lives of New Zealand families.

We never shy away from the fact that there is more to do. But we are very proud of our track record and very, very excited about continuing that work.

SIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Well, the track record of this Government is a Government which is arrogant, entitled, and tired. This Government, under the new Prime Minister Hipkins, said that he would focus back on the bread and butter, but what has this Government being doing for the last five weeks? Talking about themselves.

Ex-Ministers—now sacked Ministers—and current Ministers are causing distractions from the real issues facing New Zealanders, who are now facing another 50 basis points increase in the official cash rate, which will put more pressure on family budgets up and down this country, and it will put some people, with their mortgages, to the wall. Some people will be hit to the wall by that increase which we’re facing today.

This Government has lost control of the issues that matter to New Zealanders. They are completely distracted and talking about themselves, rather than trying to fix the issues which are facing New Zealanders. Let’s recap what they have been talking about, shall we? Stuart Nash, Stuart Nash, Stuart Nash—been talking about Stuart Nash four times. Four strikes and you’re out, under this Government. They got rid of the three-strikes Act because they actually think you should have four strikes under this Government before, finally, you’re actually held to account for the decisions that you make. Whether it’s calling the Commissioner of Police, his old mate, to try and help out a mate or whether it’s sharing confidential information with donors—information about what Cabinet Ministers have said around the Cabinet table—it is absolutely appalling, putting it in an email. That is akin to insider trading—that is what this Government has been talking about.

Then they’re talking about Marama Davidson and who causes violence in this world. Marama Davidson’s view of that is “I am a prevention of violence Minister and I know who causes violence in the world—it is white cis men.”

That’s what this Government has been focused on, or Ruth Dyson, who tweets about how she wants to talk about the members of the National Party leader’s office and what they’ve been saying. Or Steve Maharey, who has been writing columns; rather than actually making sure New Zealanders get the drugs that they need through Pharmac, he’s been writing columns in the Sunday papers. That’s what this Government’s been talking about. Or Rob Campbell—Rob Campbell—who should have been making sure that New Zealanders can get the operations they deserve, making sure they get the treatment they get, and making sure they can see a cancer specialist as quickly as possible, rather than talking about his views on co-governance. That’s what this Government has been talking about.

Or what about lobbyists? Their mates David Cormack and Neale Jones and Clint Smith talking about their reckons on Twitter, whilst, at the same time, making sure there’s some cosy access being jimmied through the background, and then they put a dead cat on their Monday afternoon about lobbyists, which is to cover up the fact it’s been their mates who have been helping them out over the last little while.

So this Government is not focused on the bread and butter issues. This is a tired Government. This is an arrogant Government. This is a Government which is completely distracted and out of touch from the issues that are facing New Zealanders.

So what’s National been focused on? We’ve been focused on policies which will make a difference—

Hon Kieran McAnulty: Like what?

SIMEON BROWN: —for New Zealanders, like putting a policy out, doing local water well, Mr Kieran McAnulty. You might want to read it because it might have a couple of ideas which you could pick up, rather than your three waters bureaucracy mess, which no one in New Zealand actually wants.

What about Family Boost? A fully funded policy which is going to help young families pay for their cost of childcare, and guess what! It’s fully funded by cutting out some of the number of wasteful consultants, which has ballooned under this Government. This Government is the Government for bureaucrats and consultants, not the Government for families and making sure that they can deal with the cost of living.

What about Teaching the Basics Brilliantly? That’s our other policy. Making sure our children have one hour a day of reading, writing, and maths—how revolutionary would that be? It’s about focusing on our future generations. Parents up and down this country are so grateful that the National Party is talking about solutions for the future which will help their young people have the future skills that they need. Or Electrify NZ, which is going to help make sure that we have the clean, renewable energy that we need to electrify our economy?

We’re going to lower inflation. We’re going to lift incomes for all New Zealanders. National will build the infrastructure that New Zealand needs. We will restore law and order, which has gone backwards under this Government. We’ll make sure New Zealanders have access to the health and education services that they need.

New Zealanders need change in this election. New Zealanders will get change from a National Government, and we will not only give it; we will deliver it.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON (Minister for Broadcasting and Media): We’re into positivity today. We’re into total positivity, but I think I need to reflect on some of the negativity, to start off with. What a shocking speech from that member Simeon Brown—what a shocking speech. All they can do, National, is put the boot in and try and destroy all the good work we’ve done.

We heard it last week when you belittled the wānanga, belittled the Māori education set-up that Kelvin Davis was talking about. All we heard was “Who cares?” Well, we care. We care about education and, just for the National Party’s information, wānangas look after everybody—Pākehā people, too. More Pākehā attend wānanga than Māori—that’s the case. That’s the case. You set them up, but you forgot all about it. You’ve forgotten all about it, and the nonsense and the race-baiting over co-governance—when is it going to finish?

We believe in natural justice. We believe in supporting people all the way through. All we’re hearing is scare tactics and fear tactics from old Simeon over there and your useless leader.

As for the ACT Party, who don’t even turn up: shame on the ACT Party and their leader for their disparaging remarks on our wonderful leader Jacinda Ardern. No wonder David Seymour is not here. He should hang his head in shame, and Peeni Henare, WillowJean Prime, and Ngāpuhi should excommunicate him—shocking. Shocking is his work in terms of Ngāpuhi. Disparaging remarks of a great leader—Jacinda Ardern—and that’s where we’re talking positivity.

Before I go to Jacinda, what a magnificent job from “Chippy”, our Prime Minister. We’re so proud of him—what a wonderful start. National thought they had it in the bag, and now they’re trailing in the polls. What a shock for the National Party. “Chippy” comes from nowhere and knocks the National Party—knocks them off their feet.

Well done to “Chippy”. We’re really proud of what he’s doing. Everything that’s going—223,000 workers receiving a wage rise as a result of the minimum wage. “Chippy” is refocusing on what matters most: supporting people. This month, it’s increases for those receiving income support. Just fantastic—absolutely bread and butter issues, and embracing everyone.

But when I talk about embracing everyone, we’ve got to talk about Jacinda Ardern. Jacinda Ardern has embraced this nation, and I want to say that she actually embraced me—didn’t she, Andrew Little? I have to say, Mr Speaker, that when I joined the Labour Party, as you well know, I wasn’t exactly embraced by the full party at the start. Andrew Little sort of forgot to tell the rest of the party that I was joining up, but we got there because Jacinda said, “I’ll give you a chance.”, and I’m going to thank her today for giving me that opportunity. Next time, Andrew, have a talk to the rest of the party!

But she gave me an opportunity. I had a bit of a controversial background and past, but she supported me, and I want to thank her today. I want to thank her, also, on behalf of the Māori nation, because she’s been so brave, she’s been so courageous, she’s been so strong, and she’s advocated and initiated kaupapa that some of us could only ever dream of. Who would have ever dreamt that we would have got a Māori health authority—a Māori health authority—within mainstream, or record Māori funding—

Dr James McDowall: Point of order, Mr Speaker.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: —in terms of Whānau Ora.

SPEAKER: Sorry to interrupt the member. Are you trying to take a point of order?

Dr James McDowall: Yes, Mr Speaker.

SPEAKER: Point of order, Dr James McDowall.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: I thought you were just ignoring him, Mr Speaker.

Dr James McDowall: Exactly! Thank you, Mr Speaker. I just wanted to raise a point of order around the Minister referring to David Seymour not being in the House several times in his speech. That’s against the Standing Orders.

SPEAKER: On my hearing of what the member said, I’m not certain he was referencing being absent from the House. I thought he was referencing absence from a particular discussion that he was speaking about. However, if that’s what the Minister meant, then that’s out of order, and he knows that. While I’m on my feet, members shouldn’t be using nicknames, and, for the Hansard, I think the member should actually say who this “Chippy” person is.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: “Chippy” is the Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins.

SPEAKER: The Rt Hon Chris Hipkins.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: The Rt Hon Chris Hipkins, who’s been a magnificent Prime Minister, and he’s just flying in the polls. We’re so proud of him.

But, as I was saying, I want to go back to Jacinda Ardern because so many of us are so proud of what she’s done for this nation. Māori people—you know, the Māori nation—are so indebted to her. She’s talked about, as I’ve said, a Māori health authority. Māori procurement, history in schools—who would have ever challenged that? We know the National Party would never have done anything with regards to that. Record Māori funding—the Minister for Whānau Ora, Peeni Henare, has driven that, and we’ve seen funding go to our communities that we could have only dreamt of and only thought about in the past.

Andrew Bayly: Didn’t National support that and fund it—$60 million?

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: National did nothing. You did nothing—you’re useless.

But in terms of her biggest kaupapa, Matariki, a national Māori holiday, National didn’t want to know about that. No, no, they threw it over. But once the polls changed, oh, they totally supported her.

So I want to thank her because she was brave and courageous, and Rangi Mātāmua is now the New Zealander of the Year. But it took courage; it took bravery. We salute her. She’s just like a star in Matariki. He rite ia ki te whetū o Matariki; ka whiti tōna ingoa—

[She is like the star of Matariki; her name will shine]—

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

Hon KIERAN McANULTY (Minister of Local Government): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I wish to start my general debate contribution today by also acknowledging the contribution of the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern. For five years, she led our nation through some of the toughest times that we have ever experienced, and I am not sure in this House and elsewhere that she has had the full credit that she deserves.

It was pretty disappointing to see the leadership of the ACT Party taking cheap and, I say, frankly, disgraceful pot-shots at the Prime Minister, just as it was pretty disgraceful—well, not disgraceful in this instance, but I think a bit disappointing—to see the National Party heckling the Hon James Shaw in his contribution and his praise for the Prime Minister. On days like this, when former Prime Ministers make their valedictory speeches, they should be treated with respect. That is how this side of the House treated Sir Bill English when he left this House, and I think that is a courtesy that should be extended to all former Prime Ministers.

What the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern did was not shy away from the challenges facing this country. She acknowledged what needed to be done, she was upfront with the population, and she put in measures to deal with it, and that’s exactly what the Rt Hon Chris Hipkins has done, following in her footsteps.

The Prime Minister has acknowledged that the primary issue facing this country at the moment is the cost of living, and he has made that the primary focus of the Government. He’s not taking the lead of the National Party and speaking in slogans. He’s not coming up with policies that already exist and trying to reframe them as new. He’s actually prioritising the Government’s time on ensuring that New Zealanders get through this cost of living issue that we’re facing at the moment, and there is no greater example of a stark contrast to a massive issue facing this country than in water services reform.

We heard in Simeon Brown’s contribution some small reference to something that they are going to do. No details—nothing—because that’s what their policy is: nothing. This country is facing up to $180 billion that needs to be spent on water services over the next 30 years, and their policy, after four years of whingeing and saying no and declining to even accept that there was an issue, is to come out with a policy that’s the status quo.

Nicola Willis: Where’s your policy?

Hon KIERAN McANULTY: They are trying—there’s a reason Nicola Willis is yelling out, because I’m hitting a nerve. I am hitting a nerve here because they know that we’re right. The National Party are trying to convince New Zealand that there isn’t a problem. They are trying to convince New Zealand that councils can deal with this by themselves, and that councils can voluntarily form council-controlled organisations (CCOs) and that will magically sort out the $180 billion that we need to fund. They are deliberately ignoring the fact that many councils cannot borrow more because they are near their cap, and they are ignoring the fact that even in CCOs, those bodies cannot borrow more because it is attached to the council’s balance sheet.

This concept—this false narrative that you can maintain direct control from councils and borrow the money that’s required—is not backed up by facts. It is ridiculous, it is false, and they are trying to hoodwink the nation. That is why their policy is nonsense and that is why they have not been taken seriously by the local government sector. It is true that the local government sector has expressed concerns about the reform agenda under way at the moment, but this Government hasn’t received a fraction of the criticism of the National Party, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because the one thing that local government don’t want is the status quo, and that’s the exact thing that the National Party are promising.

The secret is here: $180 billion. I think they are assuming that New Zealanders aren’t smart enough to figure out that the problem is too big to ignore. That is what Jacinda Ardern took on, alongside the Hon Nanaia Mahuta, and that is what the Rt Hon Chris Hipkins and this Government are going to continue to face.

We won’t try and hoodwink New Zealanders. We’ll be upfront with the facts: we need to find $180 billion over the next 30 years. Councils can’t do it by themselves, and if National got in and brought in their policy, they would be out in the cold and ratepayers would not be able to afford the bills that they’d face—that’s a fact. It is based on the council’s own numbers. It is based on the Water Industry Commission of Scotland report that has been peer-reviewed twice.

Where are the National Party’s numbers? Nowhere to be seen. It’s based on slogans, it’s based on feels—it’s based on absolutely nothing. They’ve scaremongered for four years, and, at the end of it, they’ve come up with absolutely nothing.

Hon WILLOW-JEAN PRIME (Minister of Conservation): Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. It is an absolute pleasure to speak in the House this afternoon, and I want to really focus my contribution on the positive start for the Hipkins Government. I’ve been reflecting back on it because it feels like we have been just doing the job non-stop, and it feels like a longer period of time than it has actually been. It has been only 11 weeks. I reflect on those 11 weeks, as the new Prime Minister—

Hon Andrew Little: Is that all? No, it feels like 11 years.

Hon WILLOW-JEAN PRIME: I know, because there’s been so much to do. But I think back to that first occasion that we had at Rātana Pā, and what a joyous day that was to farewell one Prime Minister and to welcome in the next Prime Minister. But shortly after that, of course, there was the storm event in Auckland and then Cyclone Dovi, and then we had Waitangi week—the biggest week of my political year. Then, shortly after that, we had Cyclone Gabrielle, and our quick response to support those in the emergency response phase and now into the recovery phase. We’ve had to stand up a new committee, we’ve got regional Ministers representing on that committee, we have actioned payments to get out to support our primary industries and our growers but also too our businesses and too our Māori communities: over $15 million. All of those things were stood up in just a really short period of time.

Then I think back to our first week in Parliament, which, sadly, I missed because we were out there in the regions, on the ground with those that were impacted by the cyclones. Minister Kelvin Davis and I were travelling to the four corners of Tai Tokerau to meet with our most remote communities to hear about how they were impacted by the cyclone. In that time that we were away, the Prime Minister delivered his first statement in Parliament, and, of course, that has set the scene for a laser-sharp focus on bread and butter issues.

It is now just past 1 July, or 1 April—July; I’m jumping ahead—where we have seen some of these changes come into effect. I want to take a moment to talk about those 1 April changes, because they benefit more than 1.4 million New Zealanders. This is huge, especially at a time when we have a cost of living crisis. So 880,000 pensioners will get a boost to their super: more than $100 per fortnight for couples. I met kaumātua and kuia in Whangārei on the weekend, on 1 April, and they were saying that they knew that they were about to get that increase and what that would mean for them. The husband was a bit surprised, but the wife knew. I also talked to their mokopuna, who, as a young māmā, knows that she will be getting increases to support her during these difficult economic times when we have a cost of living crisis; where 52,000 students will see a bump in their allowance or their loan living costs.

As we heard, approximately 223,000 workers will receive a wage rise as a result of the minimum wage increasing to $22.70 per hour. Some 8,000 community nurses are to receive a pay increase of up to 15 percent. With the former Minister of Health, who is here in the House with me, as an Associate Minister of Health, this afternoon, and the other Associate Minister of Health here, we are so proud that we can see this coming into effect for our nurses. We have 345,000 families, including 646,000 children, better off through Working for Families tax credits, 10,000 more children are eligible for subsidised childcare, and, of course, the Best Start payment is going up.

Mr Speaker, it has been only 11 weeks. These are really positive changes and a positive start that we are seeing from the new Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins—I was almost going to refer to “Chippy”, but you made a ruling on that earlier. But I have also had the huge privilege of being a Minister for just 64 days and have done a lot in that time, including accompanying the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, and yourself for the Taranaki maunga signing of the negotiation and the agreement on Friday. It was a very special kaupapa to be a part of, and so significant.

There are many other highlights in my short 64 days as a Minister which I do not have time to run through this afternoon. In my final seconds, I too would like to add my contribution to the acknowledgments of the wonderful leader Jacinda Ardern, who is giving her valedictory speech this afternoon. It was such an honour and a privilege to serve with her for our nation, and I mihi to her. I look forward to her final words in Parliament this afternoon and reflecting on those. Nō reira, tēnā koe, Mr Speaker.

NICOLE McKEE (ACT): Point of order, Mr Speaker. Thank you, Mr Speaker. I raise a point of order in regard to the Hon Willie Jackson’s speech that he did at speech four. A point of order was raised by my colleague, who actually referred to the Hon Willie Jackson’s speech where he did refer to David Seymour not being in this House. He actually said that David Seymour should be ashamed and that that’s why he’s not in this House. When the point of order was given, you added to the point of order about the Rt Hon Prime Minister’s name. However, the point of order regarding the member referring to another member who is not in the House was not addressed, and it would appear that it has been ignored.

SPEAKER: That is incorrect. I ruled on it, and the ruling stands.

KAREN CHHOUR (ACT): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Recent weeks have highlighted to me exactly why I came into Parliament. I came here to fight for the most vulnerable. I survived dealing with our State care system while growing up and I know what it’s like to be treated as an identity group first and a person second, and right now I cannot express how utterly disappointed I am in the way our so-called leadership is operating. We’ve seen MPs making posts on social media, saying things like “Let’s go fight some Nazis.”, we’ve seen videos online of MPs and Ministers cheering and dancing while violence and destruction is going on around them, and we’re seeing Ministers having to apologise for their actions far too often.

Just last week, the Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence proudly cried that she knows who is responsible for the violence in the world and that it’s cis white men. New Zealanders rightly called her out on these divisive and utterly factually wrong words. She issued a so-called clarification, just roundabout words which clarified nothing. If you spend five minutes looking at her social media, the Minister was clearly stating her truly held beliefs. The words of someone in her position hold weight, and, as any survivor knows and as we should expect the Minister to know, sexual and family violence is a complex, nuanced, and insidious issue. I was disgusted to see the Minister smirking, painting the issue with such broad, dismissive, and totally incorrect strokes. New Zealanders were right to call her out.

Since that Saturday, I have received messages, many messages, from victims of sexual and domestic violence who feel their trauma was belittled for political points—those whose trauma had not come from white males. What struck me hard were the messages that I received from male victims. Male victims often struggle to come forward when they are assaulted or harmed. There can be such a sense of shame and a fear of being judged, and this can often be made worse for them if the perpetrator is a woman. They feel shame that they were unable to protect themselves or that people just won’t believe them. Many have expressed to me that they feel there is very little support or genuine understanding that men can be victimised, too. They tell me they are just expected to man up, which can be even more harmful and hurtful for them. These are the subtleties which any decent Minister should know and should respect. But the Hon Marama Davidson does not seem to do either.

I’ve also heard from Māori victims who have been victimised by other Māori, and Māori women are disproportionately affected by domestic violence. This does not come just from white men.

How many victims who are suffering did the Minister dismiss just to continue with the blind determination to blame all the world’s problems on white men, and for all that the division the Hon Marama Davidson has caused with her careless words, what has been accomplished? The statistics paint a heartbreaking picture.

The most recent police annual report shows family violence reoffending trending up. There were over 175,000 investigations into family harm. That’s up 47 percent from five years ago. Police attended a family harm event every three minutes. Charges for sexual assault and related offences are up 47 percent from two years ago.

What is she doing about it as the Minister? In the last 251 days, she’s sent two press releases, both for programmes being launched by other Ministers. She’s brought one paper to Cabinet—one paper in eight months—to set up a working group. I ask the Minister: what does she have to show for three years in this job?

I came to Parliament to fight for those most vulnerable. But Marama Davidson and the Green Party seem to be happy to just divide our most vulnerable by race and gender and to set up working groups, and I feel that New Zealand deserves better.

SARAH PALLETT (Labour—Ilam): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I do have something I will agree on with the previous speaker, Karen Chhour, and that is my disdain for some of the words from my parliamentary colleagues. But in this particular case, it would be those of her leader, who was using very derogatory terms about a woman who has done nothing to deserve that.

She is one whom I admire enormously and whom we are saying goodbye to today, as the former Prime Minister the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern gives her valedictory statement. She is the woman who led us through the most horrendous terror attack, took urgent action to make major gun reforms within just a matter of weeks—within a month—of the appalling mosque shootings, who led us through a natural disaster at Whakaari / White Island, and whose leadership in the COVID response was responsible, at a conservative estimate, for saving between 18,000 and 25,000 lives because of her policies. That was so challenging. Leadership through those times is one of the most extraordinarily difficult things to do. The Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern did this by bringing us together as a country and by reminding us that what matters, after all, is people.

But I’m here today to talk about Labour and what we’ve done for this country, because I do hear, as I go through the Ilam electorate—

Simeon Brown: What have you done?

SARAH PALLETT: —that people will come to us and say that it was fantastic how the leadership change was handled. It really showed maturity and consideration for the people of New Zealand.

So those members say, “But what has Labour done for us?” Well, on 1 April—

Simeon Brown: Nothing.

SARAH PALLETT: —you wait, Mr Brown—880,000 pensioners got a boost to superannuation, including 5,000 veterans. Since 2017, the amount paid to a couple has increased by $326.68 per fortnight. A single person living alone has seen a $212.34 increase.

In Ilam, we have a large population of older people. When I recently visited Age Concern with the Minister for Seniors, the Hon Ginny Andersen, a few days ago, we heard how the winter energy payment has made such an extraordinarily big difference to those who need it most, and I’d note that this winter energy payment is on the chopping block, should we be unfortunate enough to experience the ACT Party in Government.

Then there’s the minimum wage, which Labour has increased again, by a further $1.50, to $22.70 an hour. We’ve raised the minimum wage from $15.75 in 2017, to $22.70, which makes an enormous difference to those who need it the most—people, I might remind the House, who are not mostly teenagers or not “not leading households”, but 75 percent of minimum wage earners are 20 years or older, and 45 percent of them have dependent children, and many of those are women.

So, apart from increasing superannuation for 880,000 pensioners, introducing the winter energy payment, and increasing the minimum wage, what has Labour done for us? Well, let’s talk about women for a minute. Labour introduced the $5.5 billion Families Package, provided $65 extra a week for the parents of newborns through the Best Start programme, increased paid parental leave from 18 weeks to 26 weeks, reinstated the Training Incentive Allowance, and—one of my favourites—introduced the ACC payments for birthing injuries, which will benefit 28,000 people each year—each year. We’ve put free period products in schools, we’ve expanded bereavement leave to include stillbirth and miscarriage, and we’ve introduced child support pass-on to sole parent beneficiaries.

Nurses—many of those are women. We said that we would deliver pay equity for nurses, and we have. After years of falling behind, we’ve increased wages for the largest group of registered nurses by 25 percent since we came into Government—25 percent. I remember many, many years of falling behind in terms of pay increases for nurses, so that’s a really fantastic achievement.

So, apart from increasing superannuation, introducing the winter energy payment, increasing the minimum wage, putting period products in schools, and delivering nurses’ pay equity, ACC cover for birthing injuries, reinstating the training incentive allowance—15 seconds to go. I can’t possibly get through all of it. I have pages and pages of Labour’s increases and benefits for those who need it most in this country. As always, Labour has your back.

NICOLA WILLIS (Deputy Leader—National): New Zealanders have just endured another punch in the gut with a lift in the official cash rate. Interest rates have risen for the 11th time in a row, and what do the members opposite want to talk about? Well, we’ve got Willie Jackson waxing lyrical about co-governance, we’ve got Kieran McAnulty defending the failed three waters reforms, and we had Grant Robertson at question time today making every excuse under the sun.

But the reality is this: today, many New Zealand mortgage holders will be doing the maths and trying to work out how they make it add up in their house when they refix their mortgage this year and it goes from an interest rate of 3 percent or less to double that. They’ll be saying to themselves “That is hundreds of dollars every fortnight that we have to find in our family.” They’ll be saying to themselves, “Where are we going to find it?”, and the unfortunate thing is that some of them won’t find it. Some of them will be forced to sell their hard-earned homes, some of them will go into mortgage arrears, many of them will go into deep financial distress, and we all know the pain that that creates in families. The conflict between parents, the pressure on kids, the opportunities that go lost—that is the reality today.

New Zealanders have endured an unprecedented sequence of lifts in the official cash rate, and why is it happening? It is because we are enduring a prolonged cost of living crisis, with interest rates following inflation that has been out of control for two years because Labour’s big-spending, big-taxing, anti-business approach has delivered nothing but rising prices for New Zealanders.

We had Sarah Pallett, the member just before me, deciding to talk about nurses. Well, let me tell her a little bit about nurses, because this week, 5,000 nurses, we learn, are leaving for Australia.

Let me tell you a little bit about Australia. In Australia, here’s a couple of big factors. Inflation: it’s lower there. Interest rates: they’re lower there. Over there, there isn’t the crisis that we’ve had here, and—yes, the members opposite are right—they are spending a lot more money, this Labour Government. In fact, they’re spending a billion dollars more every week, and that’s why voters say to me, “Nicola, where’s all the money going? Why aren’t there the results to show for it?”

Hon Andrew Little: How much is going on nurses’ pay? Oh, you don’t want that now.

NICOLA WILLIS: Why is it here in Wellington that two out of five people, when they turn up at the emergency department—

Hon Andrew Little: Tell the nurses.

NICOLA WILLIS: —will have to wait more than six hours—Andrew Little. They’ll have to wait more than six hours for care in that emergency department, and it’s because your health reforms have failed to deliver results for New Zealand patients who need them.

As for the $5 billion that’s gone into the education system—well, the average pay of someone in the Ministry of Education might have gone up, but, let me tell you, literacy and numeracy achievement has not, and I’m not surprised, because this is a Government that has become completely distracted. So much for bread and butter! Instead, they’ve been lurching from sackings to scandal to half-hearted apologies. We’ve had Marama Davidson blaming cis white men for the woes of the world. We’ve had Stuart Nash sending secret Government information to donors and calling the ninth floor, the Prime Minister’s office, about it three times—three times—and them at no stage saying “Hey, we probably shouldn’t cover that one up.”, and then we’ve had Kiri Allan forgetting to read the ministerial handbook, too.

This is not competence. This is not standards. This is not a Government that is focused on what matters for New Zealand families. This is a Government that has lost the plot, and New Zealanders are sick of the culture of excuses and cover-ups. We were told—weren’t we?—that we had inflation because it was a global phenomenon. Well, here’s the news: inflation is lower in the United States of America, it is lower in Australia, it is lower in Canada, and, actually, New Zealanders are suffering more than people in those countries because they have a Government that cannot deliver.

Meanwhile, what’s National doing while you deal with all your scandals over there? We’ve been delivering policy—the Family Boost childcare rebate—to ensure that families with kids in childcare get up to $75 more every week in their back pockets, lifting education standards, reducing wasteful consultancy spending, electrifying New Zealand, and strengthening this economy so that we can get New Zealand back on track.

Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): The response by the Government to Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods I think signals an encouraging start to Chris Hipkins’ prime ministership. It was principled, clear, and with our Ministers leading from the front and not shying away from the difficult long-term challenges that our country faces.

I want to dedicate my contribution in this debate to the people that I know in my community who had their homes wrecked by the floods: Andrew and Annabel, Konstantin and Elena, Trushar, Bex, Natasha and Damien, Derek and Elaine, Rakesh, Tracey and Mike, Amrita and Rupinder, Renate and Glenn, and Mark and Robyn. Around a thousand people in my electorate had their lives turned upside down by the floods on Anniversary Weekend, and I want to pay tribute to WAIF—West Auckland is Flooding—the organisation that they’ve set up to be a voice for those communities to ask for the Government, the council, banks, and insurance companies to get together and find some practical solutions for them. They’re now in the unenviable position of having to decide whether to rebuild and repair and wait for the next flood, or to walk away and face financial ruin, unless there is some assistance.

Now, within days of those extreme weather events, at the very time the welfare centres were being stood up, people were being clothed and housed and were getting income support from the agencies, the Prime Minister acknowledged that there would need to be—in his words—difficult conversations about the build back. Grant Robertson, appointed shortly after as the Minister for Cyclone Recovery, spelt it out more, saying that the Government was developing a response that recognised that in some cases—in some cases—it would be untenable for people living in high-risk locations to just build back without a serious effort to reduce the ongoing risk.

Now, this is very significant. With few exceptions, in the aftermath of natural disasters in this country, people are left to clean up, to repair, and to rebuild. It’s something that they work out between them and their insurance companies. The Government, by and large, does not step in and get involved. What the Prime Minister and the finance Minister have signalled is that this Government recognises in the wake of the cyclone and the floods that climate adaptation is a now issue. It is not something for a year’s time, for five years’ time, or for 10 years’ time; as a country, we have to grapple with it now, and a more thoughtful approach to resilience and risk reduction in the wake of natural disasters is what’s needed now.

The extreme weather events taught us a couple of things. The first is that climate change is making these mega-rain events a more frequent occurrence, and, secondly, our cities and our communities are simply not set up and they’re not planned and designed and built in a way that makes them resilient to these natural disasters. There is so much that we have to change.

The work that we’ve been doing in West Auckland has shown that the urban flooding in something around a dozen flooding hotspots is caused in every case by a highly localised mix of local factors: fences and walls that have been built in flood paths, culverts that are too small and blocked, streams that have been damaged by slips, land that’s contoured in a way so that the water naturally flows into people’s homes instead of away from them, and, of course, too many homes having been built in the flood plains.

Now, Minister Robertson and Minister Wood, who is the Minister for Auckland, have said in recent days that they are working. The task force chaired by Brian Roche is working with the insurance companies and the councils to pull together the data and address the risk by location. They’ve signalled that they will have more to say in the coming days, and I hope that that gives hope and confidence to the flooded home owners, who are dealing with the agony of waiting and the uncertainty.

I say to those people that you haven’t been forgotten; the Government is fully aware of your predicament and help is on the way. I think that the way Prime Minister Hipkins and his Ministers have responded to the floods and the cyclone—this very challenging issue of climate adaptation—has been principled, clear, and compassionate, and that augurs well for this country.

MELISSA LEE (National): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise to participate in this general debate, and I begin my contribution with a reflection on what Willie Jackson has said. That first bit was the only bit that I noticed because I was busy with a meeting, and all I heard was that he thought that on this side of the House, we were being very, very negative. He said that we could be positive about it, but you can consider the fact that in the last six years, this atrocious Labour Government has actually performed really badly, and Mr Jackson is one of those Ministers who has performed really, really badly.

But I reflect the words of Christopher Luxon, our leader, who this morning said with regard to the Minister Kiri Allan—and I quote—“We rely on Ministers not to get the personal and public mixed up.” It was appropriate that she apologised, and I hope that she actually takes the opportunity to refresh her reading of the Cabinet Manual, perhaps. I note that Minister Allan has served as an Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage for the past three years, and I wonder whether there was any other occasion where she might have actually misinterpreted the public versus the personal as well.

When you actually consider the fact that when there are issues of potential influence that the Ministers have on Government departments and the perceptions of interference, the undermining of the trust of New Zealand media is one of those things that actually happened. It began, going right back to 2018, with Clare Curran’s actions in meeting with Carol Hirschfeld from RNZ and misleading a select committee, and her further actions that saw her consequently be sacked from Cabinet and resign as a Minister. Then comes a public—

Todd Muller: And who led that attack?

MELISSA LEE: Well! Then comes the $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund started by Kris Faafoi, which multimedia stakeholders, time and time again, say was one of the biggest mistakes ever made by this Government because it has really contributed to the trust factor, or the lack of trust in the media that has actually happened as a result of it, and the catastrophic attempt to merge RNZ and TVNZ into Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media (ANZPM).

Andrew Bayly: And how much did that cost?

MELISSA LEE: Well, it cost—actually, it just got released—$19.6 million, and can I tell you, colleagues, that $12 million of it went to consultants. Not one of those consultants were public media specialists, $2.6 million went into offices and overheads, and $3 million went into reimbursements. Nearly $20 million of taxpayers’ money went to the project.

Although the Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media is actually cancelled, I am quite worried, and it was raised by journalist Pattrick Smellie on BusinessDesk, who said that, potentially, Willie Jackson could appoint people on to the board of Television New Zealand because their contract, basically, comes up and all of them could be replaced by 1 May. Every single one of those board members could be replaced by the board that actually—

Andrew Bayly: The transition rules?

MELISSA LEE: Yeah, the establishment board of Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media. It could be Tracey Martin as the new chair of TVNZ. That is a way that Willie Jackson could, potentially, have his wish to create sort of a different version of ANZPM at TVNZ, and that will be the way that Willie Jackson could actually control the media.

On this note, I’d like to actually say best wishes to the departing CEO, Simon Power. I wish him the very best because he had to actually put up with this and champion the work of TVNZ. But even without Simon Power, from his successes I’m sure that TVNZ will continue to be a cherished entity that New Zealanders love, and I just hope that the Government and Willie Jackson, the Minister for Broadcasting and Media, could guarantee that he would not be interfering by appointing his Labour friends to the board to control the media. Thank you.

IBRAHIM OMER (Labour): Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is my first contribution to the general debate since we got back from the break in 2023, and I appreciate this opportunity.

I also want to start my contribution by paying tribute to our outgoing Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern. A lot has been said about Jacinda, but as someone who comes from the Muslim community, for me, Jacinda is always going to be about March 15 and the way that she handled the tragic terror attacks on Christchurch masjidain. When I say this, I speak on behalf of all the Muslim community, and I just want to say thank you to Jacinda. We are indebted to you. Go well, and see you some time soon.

As the Hon Carmel Sepuloni said, 2023 started really hard. We have seen floods in Auckland and Cyclone Gabrielle, which exacerbated the cost of living that was already raging. Kiwis are having it tough, but this Government has got a plan and we are listening, and that’s why Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has made it his mission that his priorities are going to be about the bread and butter issues that are affecting Kiwis. That’s why we have seen the 1 April increases and 1.4 million Kiwis receiving extra help with the cost of living.

I want to specifically talk about the increase in the minimum wage, which has increased by $1.50. That takes the minimum wage up to $22.70. Since 2017, our Government has consistently increased the minimum wage, on average, by 6 percent. That’s how we are protecting low-paid workers from the cost of living.

I want to talk about the National Party. We’ve seen a lot of screams and a lot of conspiracy theories about what this Government is doing—this Government’s intentions. The average minimum wage increase with nine years of the National Party in Government was 3.3 percent, which is a 50c average, even though the working people were screaming for an increase on minimum wage.

As someone who was on minimum wage for years and years, I know that every single cent helps. We have heard a lot about how the minimum wage is going to cause job losses, which it didn’t, and we have heard that the minimum wage was going to increase inflation, which it didn’t. The low-paid workers, who actually got this country through the darkest time of COVID-19, are sick and tired of hearing about how the dollar pay increase that they get is going to crash the economy, as if the world is going to end.

The National Party has consistently rejected the Minister’s proposal to increase the minimum wage, but what we are saying is that the minimum wage is just an umbrella wage. We’re not saying it’s enough; we’re just saying that it’s something that people can live on. That’s why this Government has made it its mission to increase the minimum wage by 6 percent consistently since 2017.

With fair pay agreements and the other measures that have been put in place, we have no doubt that the struggling workforce in this country is going to get through this difficult time. I’m very proud of this Government’s track record in helping the working people, and Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ positive start is very encouraging.

One last comment I want to make is that we have seen the CEOs’ pay increasing in this country by hundreds of thousands of dollars and we haven’t heard one single word of criticism. When the minimum wage goes up by a dollar, we hear screams. It’s very disappointing and it’s very surprising. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.

Bills

Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill

Third Reading

Debate resumed from 15 March.

KAREN CHHOUR (ACT): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise on behalf of ACT and speak to the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill. I really appreciate that this has been brought to the House. It’s an issue that many parents are very worried about, and it’s important that laws keep up with technology and that we’re protecting our children and our young people from great harm that can happen. No longer is it just past the fence and down the street that your children are in danger; it can actually be on the screen in your child’s bedroom. So I think it’s really important that we deal with these issues. ACT supports this bill and supports the direction it’s going in to protect our young people.

Now, as a parent myself with four children, a few years ago I was really concerned about this kind of thing with my children and what they were seeing online and what they were doing. As a parent with multiple children, it’s really hard to cut off internet access to just one without punishing the rest. So one may be misbehaving online, and you’re saying, “I’m going to cut off the internet.”, and the rest are kind of feeling punished for that behaviour.

So there are multiple things that parents can do on top of what the Government can do to deal with this issue. There are devices you can buy which will allow you to monitor what your children are seeing and doing online and how much time they’re spending on certain sites, in order to keep them safe.

So online grooming involves predator behaviour from people who often disguise themselves as somebody else. With social media and gaming platforms, this can be quite dangerous for our young people, where they don’t know who they’re speaking to on the other side and they open themselves up and they’re very vulnerable. The consequences of online grooming can be very devastating. It can lead to children being groomed for physical harm, sexual harm, and it’s just something that we need to acknowledge is an issue and we need to try and get ahead of this so that we can protect our young ones.

There’s only so much that the Government can do. We can put things in place to try and prevent or to make people think twice before they’re behaving in inappropriate manners, but it’s also up to society as a whole to make sure that they are aware of what their young people are doing online. If they see that their children are upset when they’re coming off the computers or if they’re isolating themselves, ask the questions. If your child comes to you and says that somebody has been inappropriate or wants to meet with them and wants to do something that they feel uncomfortable with, as a parent don’t hesitate—ring the authorities and let them know that this is happening, because we don’t know what we don’t know, and authorities can only deal with this if we’re coming forward and standing up for our young ones. If we see behaviour from people online, the way they are talking to younger people online, it’s also our job to say, “Hey, mate, maybe you shouldn’t be doing that.” We need to be treating each other with respect online.

So this is all about technology in the digital world, which many adults are kind of stand-offish about because we don’t understand it as well as our young people do. But we need to understand that this can lead to fatal consequences for our young people. When they go and meet somebody without knowing who they’re meeting, we don’t know what could happen to them if that meeting happens. So this bill actually deals with that and makes sure that we are making this behaviour illegal and that anyone over the age of 18 that interacts with a person under the age of 16 is held accountable for inappropriate behaviour in the digital world, and it’s about time. Too often, we’re hearing about the pressures that our young people are going through on social media, cellphones, text messages, and even on the online gaming platforms that seem to be taking over at the moment.

So the sexual grooming offence will now align with existing offences in the Crimes Act—which can only be a good thing. It will also allow police a better ability to do their job without crossing any lines that would cause them to not be able to do their job, and so I think that’s really important too, making sure that the in-person behaviour doesn’t actually have to happen before consequences start to kick in. If the intent is there—if you are grooming a young people online and the intent is there—then you will be held accountable, and so you should.

So I’m really happy that this bill has been brought to the House. I’m hoping that it will make a difference when it comes to dealing with people that are behaving badly towards under-16-year-olds online. I hope this also brings to parents’ attention how important it is to actually know what your kids are doing and saying online. So thank you, Mr Speaker.

VANUSHI WALTERS (Labour—Upper Harbour): Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call in relation to this very important bill. I want to start by making some acknowledgments and the first is actually the previous speaker, Karen Chhour, who delivered, I thought, an excellent speech and made some very good points about what needs to happen once—we hope—this bill is passed. She said we need to ask the questions. That is really powerful and that is, of course, something that we’ll all need to think about post this bill passing within this room but also out in communities.

I want to acknowledge the member who brought this bill to the tin, Ginny Andersen—now the Hon Ginny Andersen—and to just recognise her work in this area. By that, I mean this is not the first piece of work she’s brought before the House that concerns the lives of people who are vulnerable, so I am just acknowledging her, and acknowledging the member who is ushering this bill through the House, Angie Warren-Clark, because she is another member who in the past has done a lot of work in the family violence space, including with Women’s Refuge in the Bay of Plenty area. So just a fantastic team who I think is appropriate to bring this bill before the House.

In 2010, the word “catfish” started being used more frequently, and I suspect that was because there was a movie by that name that was circulating at the time. The term “catfish” really is about people who create a fake identity or sometimes multiple fake identities online. Interestingly, for some background, the term derives from the fact that they used to ship codfish in tanks from Alaska to China, and they’d keep them in vats in a ship. And by the time the codfish reached China, the flesh was mush and tasteless. So someone came up with this idea that if you put catfish in the vat with them, then the catfish would keep the cod agile, they’d keep them on their toes, they wouldn’t know what was happening. And so it was this terminology that encapsulates actually quite a broad group of people.

For some people, it’s purely about anonymity and having an anonymous identity online to be themselves. For other people, it’s about fraud, and there have been many people who’ve been subject to various types of fraud because of catfish-type behaviour. For others, it’s more sinister and it’s important where it is more sinister, especially where children are concerned, that our legislative schemes are responding accordingly.

This is a really fascinating bill in many ways, because it’s a bill that entered the Justice Committee actually looking quite different from the way it looked when it came out the other side. So I must also thank the Ministry of Justice officials for coming back to us several times and working with us to identify the true legal gaps in play so that we weren’t duplicating in terms of legislation.

So the bill as it came into select committee, did three things. It introduced two new offences: new section 126A, in clause 4, which would make it an offence in certain circumstances for someone over the age of 18 to digitally communicate with a young person under the age of 16. And the older person would have to have intended to mislead the younger person about their age and subsequently arranged to meet them. It also introduced new section 126B, which would make it an offence for someone over the age of 18 to digitally communicate with a person under the age of 16, intending to cause harm to the young person or being reckless as to whether the young person is harmed. And the third thing it did was it proposed to amend the penalty for an existing offence in the Act that relates to actually meeting a young person following sexual grooming—to increase that penalty from seven years to 10 years.

Now, we had a number of really thoughtful submissions before the select committee, and I may come back to a few of those if I have time. But, again, I really want to credit the Ministry of Justice advisers who came back to us to ensure that we understood the existing offences under the Crimes Act and the Harmful Digital Communications Act. I think what became clear to the committee as we traversed that space with the ministry officials is that much of what was in the bill at that stage was already covered by existing legislation. So the challenge for the committee was twofold. First, we had to identify the actual legal gap that we wanted to address, and we had to decide whether we were comfortable with criminalising something which up until that stage, and indeed this stage now, was, essentially, pre-offending conduct—so the act of grooming. The second test that we had to think about was our comfort level about the scale of penalties and whether they were comparable in terms of other like offences.

We did identify a gap, and one big gap in the existing law was that the law required an individual to travel to meet with the person that they’d groomed or arrange to travel to meet with them, or they needed to already have provided inappropriate material to that young individual. The committee’s view was that grooming, itself, should constitute an offence. The second issue was that the legislation that had been developed up to that stage, particularly under the HDCA—the Harmful Digital Communications Act—was geared to the changing online environment and, actually, the Crimes Act provisions were also geared in that direction. The committee had a long discussion about whether in-person grooming should also be a criminal offence, and this was something we received submissions on. We landed on the fact that it should—it very much should.

The committee worked very hard—again, with the advice of officials—to replace clause 4 of the bill, which had provided for the two new offences, with one new offence. The new offence would, essentially, make it illegal for someone over the age of 18 to communicate by words or conduct with a person under the age of 16, and, in committing the offence, there would need to be an intention to facilitate the young person engaging or being involved in conduct that would be an offence either in terms of the crimes against morality and decency, sexual crimes, or crimes relating to sexual exploitation of the person. So that was the narrow gap that the committee had decided that we were going to criminalise.

We did also look at the penalties scheme. So the initial penalties that we had proposed for the two offences imposed two penalties—one of five years, one of seven years—but when we looked at like-penalties under the Harmful Digital Communications Act, it was very clear that the appropriate scope of penalties was a maximum term of imprisonment of three years. So we amended our new proposed offence so that it would have a maximum penalty of three years. And in addition, we recognised that purporting to lift the penalty for the offence that was already a criminal offence from seven years to 10 years was inappropriate. So we, essentially, proposed deleting that clause in the bill.

A novel issue that we discussed in the room was the fact that we needed to ensure that police officers who were profiling themselves as under-16-year-olds to enable them to gather evidence counted as under-16-year-olds for the purpose of the bill. So that is in there as well.

Now, to close my remarks in relation to this bill, I just want to go back to the point that Karen Chhour made. YouthLaw Aotearoa made the very valid point that the big issue from here is going to be reporting. A lot of young people will not report. They will not report because they have been groomed. They will not report because some of them may have photos circulating of them already or held, and they will be in fear of those being released more broadly if they report. There is an obligation on our policy leadership, on our community groups, on our parents, and all those who support out there to ask the question exactly as my colleague has suggested.

I’ll close by again thanking the members involved. This is an extraordinarily important issue and bill. I thank the committee for their wonderful work in relation to this bill, and I would commend this bill to the House.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: This is a shared call—five minutes.

TAMA POTAKA (National—Hamilton West): E te waha kōrero o te Whare taupatupatu nei, koutou ko ngā rārangi raiona taika hoki ki tēnei whare, rarau mai. E mihi ana ki te Pirīmia tawhito, ahakoa kāore au i tino hāpai i tō ake kete aronui, hoki ora atu ki tō paharakeke kia pūrena tō kapu e te aroha pūmau.

[Mr Speaker, and the many lions and tigers in this House, take root. To the outgoing Prime Minister, whilst our philosophies diverge, return to your flaxroots so that the cup of family love can embrace you.]

Tā te Tari Taiwhenua whakapae, ka nui ake i te 450 tāngata kua kite i ngā kaiwhakawā mai i te 2015 mō te kawe te hanga te toha atu rānei i ngā whakaahua, me ngā hara e kōrerotia nei. Ko wai ka hua ko wai ka tohu te nunui hoki o tēnei mānukanuka. E ai ki a Manatū Wāhine me NetSafe me ō rāua karu whakarongo, 70 ōrau ngā taitamariki e pāngia ana e te kōrero kāore i whakaritea e rātou. Heoi, 20 ōrau i tonoa ki tuku atu tō te whakaahua ā-tinana kirikau, tata ki te kirikau rānei. Ka koromingomingo au i te rongo.

[According to the Department of Internal Affairs, there were more than 450 suspects who have faced court since 2015 in relation to possessing, making, or distributing objectionable child sex materials, sexually grooming minors on the internet, blackmail, and indecent communication. Who knows who can tell how extensive or large this problem is? According to a survey between NetSafe and the Ministry for Women, seven of 10 teens have experienced at least one type of unwanted digital communication in the past year, and one in five have been asked to share a nude or nearly nude image of themselves. I am disturbed by these materials.]

Tā tēnei pire kaupapa, he whakatahuri i ngā hara hou i raro i te ture nei te Crimes Act 1961 mō ngā tāngata hara pakake ake i te tekau mā waru tau, e whakamahi ana i ngā rauemi matihiko pērā ki a Pukamata ki te whakararuraru ki te whakanewhanewha i ngā taiohi pakake iho i te tekau mā ono tau. Kei te rārangi 126A me 126B e kitea ana tōna takotoranga e hāngai ana ki ngā hara mahimahi onioni nei. Ki tō mātou whakaaro, me aro atu ngā hara hou ki tō te utu hara e rure ana ki te ture i tēnei wā—arā te rārangi 124(a) o te Crimes Act, me te rārangi 22 o te Harmful Digital Communications Act. Me hāngai ia ture ki ia ture, kaua e noho wehewehe rangirua hoki.

[This bill’s purpose is to amend offences under the Crimes Act 1961 regarding persons over 18 who have used digital communications like Facebook to trouble or mislead young people under 16 years of age. The proposal includes sections 126A and 126B, which more closely aligns with the sexual crimes section of the Crimes Act. In our view, any new offence should carry a penalty that aligns more closely with penalties for existing offences—e.g., section 124A of the Crimes Act, and section 22 of the Harmful Digital Communications Act. Laws should generally maintain consistency, not ambiguity.]

Kua roa tātou e kite ana i te mahi tino hangarau, tino kino rawa ki te hunga tamariki. He wai kei aku kamo, he riri kei taku rae, i te rongo ki ēnei momo kōrero ki runga pouaka whakaata ki runga reo irirangi rānei. Me manaaki tātou i ā tātou tamariki, mokopuna, kaumātua hoki. Tahi rā au ka whakaritea a Qustodio ki ā māua pūru taitama tokorua.

[We have spent many years seeing poor behaviour towards tamariki. Tears come to the eyelid, and anger to the forehead, when you hear about this behaviour by way of television or radio. We should care for our children, grandchildren, and elders too. I just coordinated Qustodio on my children’s devices.]

Kei te piki haere te tokopae tamariki e whai ana i ngā rauemi matihiko, ahakoa ngā mānakanaka o te utu ora. Āku taitama, he kaha nō rāua ki te hono atu ki ō rātou hoa mā te rorohiko, he kaingakau hoki ki ngā kaiwaiata me ngā kaiwhakaari ki runga i a YouTube me ērā momo paetuku. Ka rawe hoki te kemu Minecraft me Roblox, heoi, ka ngana hoki ki te āta mātakitaki te āta rongo ki ngā reo i te kaiwhakaatu a Rewi Attenborough mā. Heoi, he tūraru nui kei te pupu mai i ēnei mahi arā te mahi kirehe a te tangata e hara ana ki ngā kōhungahunga, rangatahi hoki.

[There is an increasing number of young people who are accessing technology, despite rising cost of living. My own sons are eager users of technology to engage with their friends, watch songs and other entertainment on YouTube and similar websites. They enjoy Minecraft, Roblox, and even the sultry tones of David Attenborough. However, there are also many risks and exposures of despicable behaviour by strangers.]

DEPUTY SPEAKER: You’ve now spoken for three minutes. I’d like you to now speak specifically to the bill, please. You’ve spoken in generalities so far. You actually now need to speak to the bill.

TAMA POTAKA: He take nui kei te haere, me pēhea tātou o te ana raiona nei ēnei tātarakihi kohete e whakamaru, e karo, e whakapau hoki i ngā mahi hara ki a rātou. Mārakerake ana ngā tamariki ki ngā kōrero a tēnā, a tēnā. Ka taea e te hunga nei te whakahoahoa mā te rorohiko; ka taea hoki e te hunga nei te uru ki te kapua pōuri, ki te kapua hara hoki.

[A big issue is going on, how do we of the lion’s den shelter and defend our chattering young ones, and also end crime against them. Children understand everyone’s statements. These people are able to socialise via computer; these people can also fall into misfortune, and also into crime.]

He hara nui te whāwhā tamariki mā te rorohiko, mā te rauemi matihiko hoki. Mā ēnei momo pire e whakarure mai i ēnei mahi hei hara i raro i te ture kia piki ake ngā ture whakamarumaru i te hunga tamariki. I tēnei wā, kāre he ture motuhake mō te whāwhā tamariki mā te rorohiko, kāre e taea te here atu i ngā tāngata hara katoa nā te rārangi ture. Tautoko te pire kia whakaputa ki waho moana. Kaua e riro mā ngā moana nehu o te tai pari, engari hoki whakateuta kia mana te kawe atu ki tōna tauranga. Kei te tautoko te Rōpū Nāhinara me te pāti kahurangi nei ki tōna, takoto ai. Kia ora tātou. 

[Child molestation via computer, and via digital resource is a huge crime. These kinds of bills will throw these activities under this legislation as a crime to improve the legislation that protects children. At this time, there is no specific legislation for child molestation via computer, and not all criminals can be apprehended by the range of legislation. Support the bill so that it makes it to sea. Don’t leave it for the rough seas of high tide, but instead return to shore so that the landing at its mooring is endorsed. The National Party and this blue party supports this bill. Thank you.]

TERISA NGOBI (Labour—Ōtaki): Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on this, the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill. Can I also acknowledge Ginny Andersen—the Hon Ginny Andersen now—for bringing this bill to the Chamber but also honouring and acknowledging Angie Warren-Clark, our fabulous chair of the Social Services and Community Committee as well, for ushering it through to this stage, too.

It is an important kaupapa, and while I’m not on the Justice Committee, this is the second time I’ve been able to speak on this bill. As I did then, I would say now that, as a mum of three—and my kids are 12, 10, and seven—the online world for a parent is scary. I’ve said this before, and I’m sure every parent says this every year, but now, in 2023, to be a parent and have to deal with an online world is scary.

That’s what this bill does. It helps to keep our kids safe online—well, safer. It also makes sure that for those who set out to harm our children there are harsher penalties. Hopefully, those harsher penalties will act as some kind of deterrent to those that are wishing to go online, groom, and hurt our babies.

My children, just like everyone else’s, while they’re great and love to go out and play sports, they also love to go YouTube, they love to go on Facebook, they also watch rugby and things like that online, and they also game. Generally, they game with their cousins and their friends—but there are other people in those rooms; those groomers that this bill talks about, those people that are out there pretending to be their peers, but who are actually predators who go in to make relationships with our babies, with our children, in order to hurt them or get them to do something that’s not appropriate and can hurt them.

I think you can do everything you can—and Karen Chhour spoke about this—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Ms Ngobi, like the previous speaker, we need to speak to the bill in front of us, rather than generalities.

TERISA NGOBI: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Karen Chhour spoke about the bill and Vanushi Walters spoke about the bill as well, in terms of making sure that we’re keeping our kids safe—and that’s what the bill specifically talks about; it specifically says, “protecting our children” from those online groomers. Like Karen Chhour and Vanushi Walters said, in terms of teaching your children everything you can in terms of NetSafe, in terms of the tools that they need, there is that online world where you can only do so much and [Phone alarm rings] you’re relying on other people in there to be able to make sure that we’re able to—some digital stuff going on on the side here. We are relying—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: At this stage, you tell us how we’re going to do that in the bill, please, Ms Ngobi.

TERISA NGOBI: Yup, so we’re talking about that as well—we are, Mr Speaker.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, we are going to or we’re going to sit down.

TERISA NGOBI: Yup, Mr Speaker, I will. So yeah, as I talked about, one of the things that we are doing is changing the penalties, as I talked about at the start of this bill, as well, and we do talk about the NetSafe, because the NetSafe is all in the bill. But one of the things that we did do is lift it from seven to 10 years. That, again, hopefully, will make it a deterrent for those that are looking to groom.

One of the other things that we did talk about and the Justice Committee chair talked about was that in terms of people reporting—our children reporting—there is that mā, there is that shame around it. I spoke in the first reading of this bill about one of my whānau members being caught up in this, thinking she had a boyfriend, and, at the end of the day, it was someone older. She felt embarrassed to report, and that was one of the issues that they talked about in the Justice Committee, as we heard Vanushi Walters talk about.

It is about making sure that as parents, and when we do usher this bill through, we remember that and make sure that there’s a safe space for our children to be able to report. The bill addresses some of the penalties for that, but maybe we should be looking at how that pastoral care goes in there as well, to make sure it’s accessible and children are able to be supported. This is a great bill, and I commend the bill to the House.

PENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, I’m pleased to be standing and speaking on the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill in this, its third reading. Of course, National supports the bill.

As we’ve heard, the bill creates those two new offences under the Crimes Act 1961, regarding the person over the age of 18 using social media or some form of digital communication to communicate with an under-age child—someone under the age of 16—with the intent to mislead that young person or to, indeed, cause harm to that young person. As we’ve heard, it is that act of grooming, that pre-offence behaviour, that now is being dealt with in this legislation. It would, I guess, have been a real catch-up to, rather than waiting—having to wait until an offence has occurred. Of course, none of us want to see that happening.

It is vitally important to keep our children safe. We’ve all talked about our children or our grandchildren being much, much more au fait with the digital platforms and the digital communications than those of us that are older are. I watch my four- and five-year-old grandchildren on their devices, and we can easily see how it could be that they could be groomed without having any idea that this is happening to them because—presumably under 16—they would be flattered by attention, and they would not know to think or look further as to whether that person might be intending to mislead them or cause some harm. They would be taking on face value the communications that they were getting.

I would have to say, there is some good work going on out in the sector on educating young people. I was at the Community Trust South, and we gave funding to organisations with the intent of educating young people on what to look for, what to be concerned about. So that ties in with this legislation now—that if they do identify something, then it is an offence and there can be penalties for it which are greater than previously. I was very pleased to hear an MP from the Government side saying that they would expect these harsher penalties to be a deterrent. That hasn’t always been the attitude of the Government about harsher penalties, but, certainly, we would hope that harsher penalties would be a deterrent for those committing crimes, and especially crimes like this.

So we are mindful of the need for this legislation. We are mindful, though, that it is only part of the task. As Karen Chhour and Vanushi Walters talked about, it’s the implementation, it’s the how this is going to happen for young people. So that education component will be incredibly important, that asking the question of our young people will be incredibly important because, quite frankly, having it written on a piece of paper isn’t going to necessarily mean that young people know how to report this happening—they won’t know how to deal with it if they think it’s happening, they won’t know how to get over the sense of shame or the issues around it if they have been caught up in this kind of behaviour.

So we are pleased to be supporting it, but, like others, we note that there will be work to be done afterwards. So we commend the bill to the House. Thank you.

ANAHILA KANONGATA‘A-SUISUIKI (Labour): Kia ora e te Mana Whakawā. It’s always an honour and a privilege to make a contribution in the House, particularly today on this bill, the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill. I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the member who initially brought this bill to the House, the—now—Hon Ginny Andersen. I want to acknowledge Ginny and the work that she’s done, but, at the same time, I’d like to acknowledge Angie Warren-Clark, in whose name the bill now is. She is shepherding this bill to its, now, final reading, and I am the last person to make a contribution on the bill.

I will take time to read out what is says about grooming for sexual conduct with a young person. I want to remind you, Mr Speaker, in case you think I’m reading my speech, that I’m going to read what’s in the bill so that everybody understands what it means. I acknowledge everyone who has contributed on this bill. One of the things that is really scary in the contributions is we talk about digital harm and the popularity of the internet and digital harm to children in their bedrooms with little or no adult supervision at all. In terms of that challenge, the challenge is for all the caregivers, parents, and all us adults to get to know how to keep our children safe in terms of using the internet.

I will now go to some of the evidence that was provided as to the reasons why this bill is needed and why we need to make this into law. As I’ve said before, the popularity of the internet increases harm to children, especially when they are experiencing it now. A survey conducted by NetSafe and the Ministry for Women found that seven in 10 teens surveyed have experienced at least one type of unwanted digital communication in the past. The words that we need to take note of there are “unwanted digital communication”. It also found that nearly 19 percent of teens surveyed experienced an unwanted digital communication that had a negative impact on their daily activities, and the most common of these involved being contacted by a stranger. Nineteen percent of young people surveyed have also been asked to share things like nude or nearly nude images of themselves. This bill makes it a crime to do that.

I want to read section 131AB, “Grooming for sexual conduct with young person”, which is inserted by clause 4. I believe that it’s important that it is noted in the House, and those who are listening will understand what that actually means. So section 131AB(1) talks about “A person aged 18 years or over is liable for imprisonment for a term not exceeding 3 years, if”. So that’s states that that’s an adult—over 18 years. It then goes on to say, “(a) they communicate by words or conduct with a person under the age of 16 years”. So that is defining what a young person is. And paragraph (b) states, “they do so intending to facilitate the young person engaging or being involved in conduct that would be an offence against this Part, or against any of paragraphs” and they are stated. It also states in subsection (2), “It is immaterial whether or not a response is made to the communication by the young person.”

I have read that because I believe it is important that people understand what an adult is—a person over the age of 18 years, and a young person, which is a person under the age of 16 years. And I spoke about the new offences because it’s important that we know that.

The bill as tabled in the House, and in the select committee, had proposed amendments. It increased the penalty from a maximum of seven years’ imprisonment to 10. However, that proposed penalty does not align with similar existing offences in the Crimes Act and the Harmful Digital Communications Act. So the select committee considered that in terms of the new section I have read out.

Today, we are going to hear a former Prime Minister of New Zealand—the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern—make her valedictory speech. I want to quote the former Prime Minister, because this is important in terms of digital harm, protecting young people online. The former Prime Minister said in many of her speeches, particularly the one at the United Nations in New York, that “We want to make New Zealand the best place in the world to be a child.” The reason I say that is because the Labour Party supports this bill, and it is one of the many things that contribute to keeping our and young people safe online.

I would like to take this opportunity to again summarise some of the changes and why we support this. As I’ve said before, I think, if I look around the House, we ourselves don’t know many of the friends and pages that we like on Facebook. We don’t know what’s behind that page. And the challenge that I mentioned in my opening remarks is that it is important that we as adults, we as caregivers, as aunts, as uncles of children and young people, know how to keep our children safe online. When you go online, there are many places that offer tool kits for parents as a guide to keeping children safe online. But the one I particularly liked was FamilyTime. Previously in the House, people had mentioned the question of reporting harm. I think there’s a duty on caregivers and adults to actually know how to keep children safe online. And in order to do that, we need a tool kit because we have to keep up with technology.

So I ask those who are listening to go to familytime.co.nz. It is an online safety tool kit for parents. It is friendly. It has lots of pictures. I know that many of us do a lot of reading, but that website is parent-friendly. We talk about child-friendly, but that is parent-friendly because it has to keep your interest to go past the first page. It is parentfriendly, and I urge everyone to go online to equip themselves so that we can all keep children safe.

So, in summary, our online spaces are increasingly becoming a space, an area, where this harm can occur. As I’ve said before, online surveys give us evidence that children are being harmed online. And I want to go back to acknowledging the Hon Ginny Andersen for her work in this area, shepherding this bill up to the second reading, where she became the Minister; and Angie Warren-Clark, who chairs the Social Services and Community Committee—the bill is now in her name.

As I’ve said before, I acknowledge the former Prime Minister the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern. As a Tongan living in Aotearoa, the Pacific people refer to this former Prime Minister as “the daughter of Niue”. And as I speak, I’m being emotional because she has done us proud as a Prime Minister, and it is an honour and a privilege for me to be in her leadership, and I hope that everything else I do is a reflection in terms of the leadership of our former Prime Minister. This bill, the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill, is an important bill and I commend it to the House. Mālō ‘aupito.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a third time.

Bills

Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill

Recommittal

MARJA LUBECK (Labour): I move, That the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill be recommitted to consider Supplementary Order Paper 331 in my name.

Motion agreed to.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): I declare the House in committee for further consideration of the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill.

In Committee

Supplementary Order Paper 331

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): Members, the House has resolved to recommit the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill to consider Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 331 in the name of Marja Lubeck. Members, this is a limited debate, and all contributions must be relevant to the content of that amendment. The question is that Marja Lubeck’s amendment to the Schedule set out on SOP 331 be agreed to.

MARJA LUBECK (Labour): Thank you, Mr Chair. An issue was discovered with the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill, a member’s bill recently transferred from the Hon Dr Deborah Russell to me. The advice, as we just heard, was to recommit the bill to the committee of the whole House to address that particular issue that was identified. Recommittal is conventionally used for particular and narrow purposes, where repeating the whole committee of the whole House process would be inappropriate.

The objective of the bill: to extend the time in which a person may make a personal grievance claim in respect of sexual harassment from 90 days to one year. The reasons for this have been well traversed. But I will repeat the opening remarks of the Hon Dr Deborah Russell at the first reading of this bill, which were: “This is a simple bill but it deals with a complex and difficult matter of sexual harassment.” So, while it was a simple bill to deal with a real problem in the workplace, the lack of transitional provisions to ensure that there’s no uncertainty with the changes that this bill makes were not picked up during the select committee process. It was noticed by officials before the bill was presented for its third reading.

So that brings me to Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 331. The issue that SOP 331 deals with is that the bill has no transitional provisions related to clauses 4 and 5. Clauses 4 and 5 of the bill amend provisions of the Employment Relations Act, sections 54 and 65. Those are sections that set out what must be contained in the collective agreement and in an individual employment agreement.

The bill requires the new 12-month time limit for personal grievances relating to sexual harassment to be mentioned in the agreement, as well as the existing 90-day time limit for all other types of personal grievance. But without these transitional provisions, the bill creates uncertainty whether every existing employment agreement must be updated to reflect the updated law or whether the new law only applies to new agreements concluded after the member’s bill commences. That could have generated uncertainty about what employers needed to do to comply with the new law, and that is particularly important because there are some hefty penalties that can be invoked when section 65 is applied. Such uncertainty may cause people to seek legal determinations for the validity or compliance of their employment agreements.

In the bill’s present state, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), as the regulator, cannot definitively advise the employers and unions whether existing employment agreements will need to be amended without judicial interpretation and precedent being set. Guidance cannot be used to resolve uncertainty about interpretation; only judicial decisions can. MBIE cannot provide guidance that is relied on by employers but may potentially be a different decision that a court will be reaching.

So while it’s thought very likely that a court will apply the Legislation Act and conclude that only new agreements have to contain the new required content, it could be argued, like lawyers most usually could, that it could be interpreted as requiring all existing agreements to be updated, and until a court decides that particular question, the uncertainty could cause concern for employers about what they need to do to actually comply fully with the Employment Relations Act. I say it particularly because failing to comply with section 65 can attract penalties and they are up to $10,000 for individual employers, or $20,000 for corporations.

The Supplementary Order Paper inserts a transitional provision into the bill. It makes it clear that employers are not required to amend existing employment agreements to include this new time period, and that will give certainty for employees, employers, and practitioners.

Now, before I sit down, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Hon Dr Deborah Russell for entrusting me to take this bill through the House in its final stretch. Dr Deborah Russell had the good fortune, before she became a Minister, to have a very good bill drawn from the House, and she did a lot of work shepherding it through the different stages of the House, through the select committee, and she made very wellregarded representations at each stage of that process. So I thank her for her efforts.

I would also like to specifically mention the officials from MBIE and the Parliamentary Counsel Office for their assistance with this SOP, and the recommittal process in general, which has proven to be not so much of a straightforward process. So thank you.

PENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you, Mr Chair. National will be supporting Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 331, albeit because a shoddy oversight could have left employers in the situation where around 1.5 million employment contracts would be wrong, and employers would have had to have been fined for that, or 1.5 million employment contracts would have had to be renewed and changed. So the disruption to employers and the possibility of fines makes it a purely pragmatic matter for us to support SOP 331.

CAMILLA BELICH (Labour): Thank you, Mr Chair. I want to thank the member Marja Lubeck for her opening comments on this bill—which, as she said, she has inherited from the Hon Dr Deborah Russell, who has now moved to be a Minister in this Government. I actually sat on the Education and Workforce Committee with the member and looked at this bill in quite a lot of detail. We heard a number of submissions from a number of people; and the importance of getting this particular piece of legislation right so that people are able to have a longer period of time to bring a personal grievance for sexual harassment was emphasised by, by my recollection, almost every submitter. So I do think it was very wise of the member to bring this Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) to the House following her shepherding through this bill after the Hon Deborah Russell.

The questions that I have for the member around the Supplementary Order Paper are really about the effect and the value that it will add to the legislation in terms of clarity. We did hear another contribution from another member that this was a “shoddy oversight”—I’d be interested in the member’s view on that. My view, which I’ll offer comment to the member on, is that there was no oversight necessarily in the bill, and I think that the member’s assumption around how the bill would be interpreted—as she mentioned in her opening statement—is likely to be correct, and, in fact, it wouldn’t necessarily cause any direct issues if the bill was passed without the SOP. However, I do see the value in the SOP, in clarity. We often speak in this House about plain language; we often speak about clear legislation which is easy for people to understand and interpret. I think it’s a worthy point to make that it may be that employers, once this law is passed, would need to get legal advice or would be unsure as to whether their employment agreements—be those individual employment agreements or collective agreements—would need to be amended, and if they were amended, at what stage. Having previously practised as an employment lawyer, I know that those are the types of questions which are often asked in relation to new laws that come in. So I do see the value in this, but I wanted to ask the member if she did have any comments on that.

The other thing I wanted to ask the member is that obviously this piece of legislation amends the Employment Relations Act. There is a primary piece of the Employment Relations Act which refers to section 115, and I wanted to just ask her about how this SOP interacts with that primary piece of legislation, section 115, and the primary Act—which this SOP, and indeed the bill that the member is shepherding through the House, would change—which already covers exceptional circumstances for extension of the time of personal grievances. So this is something that we delved into in the select committee in terms of the original bill without the SOP amendment. This SOP obviously amends that provision, or would have effect on that provision again, and so I’m very interested in whether the member has considered the impact of that. I mean, that piece of that particular section is very, very fundamental and very, very important to the operation of the Employment Relations Act, and so if there is an impact from this SOP, it would be, I think, very important for the House to be made aware of that.

The last thing I just wanted to touch on, and I’ll be interested if the member had any views, is the difference between the requirements for amendment—if indeed there are any in this SOP—for collective employment agreements which have provisions in relation to bringing personal grievance claims and individual agreements. We know that there are provisions within the Employment Relations Act which require employment contracts to outline the process for going through a personal grievance in relation to sexual harassment, or indeed any other matter that a person may bring a personal grievance for. So, obviously, this will amend that provision; it’s not specified exactly within this SOP how that amendment would be exactly drafted within the collective or individual employment agreements. However, that is a normal drafting practice, as I understand. But I would be very interested to know if the member did in fact have a view on some of the issues that I’ve canvassed, and perhaps the clarity of the drafting that this SOP would result in.

MARJA LUBECK (Labour): Thank you, Mr Chair. Yeah, I did make a comment in my opening remarks that it is very likely that a court would apply the Legislation Act and conclude that only new agreements would have to contain this new required content. But I think it’s important to really dig a little bit deeper into what the Supplementary Order Paper seeks to change. Currently, sections 54 and 65 of the Employment Relations Act—these were made to both the collective agreements as well as the individual employment agreements—require that both types of these agreements, and it’s specified in the law, must contain a plain-language explanation of the services for the resolution of employment relationship problems, including a reference to the period of 90 days within which a personal grievance must be raised. So what clauses 4 and 5 of the bill do is they amend sections 54 and 65 of the Employment Relations Act. So, in both types of agreement, the plain-language explanation of the services available for resolution of employment relationship problems will need to then include a reference to this new 12month time limit for a personal grievance in respect to sexual harassment. And each agreement also must continue to reference that 90-day limit that applies to any other type of personal grievance.

The question from the member with regards to unintended consequences is a really interesting one. Talking about some unintended impact, potentially leave can be granted for a personal grievance to be raised outside of the time limit, so section 115 is discretionary. The authority is not required to find the lack of provision regarding the 12month period as extraordinary. I guess, what I would add to that is that because section 115 specified “exceptional circumstances”, it includes where the employee’s employment agreement doesn’t contain the explanation concerning the resolution of employment relations problems required by section 54 or 65. So a court could potentially hold that because it was not specified within an employment agreement, the reasons for granting leave aren’t there. So the new law could potentially be affected because the existing employment agreement wasn’t updated. I mean, we had advice on this, and it was said that that was an unlikely decision that the court could come to, but I guess that is where the clarity comes in that we needed to provide, because uncertainty in these areas and in grey provisions would only be helpful for the lawyers trying to argue it.

What was the other question? I spoke about the court that would be likely to apply the Legislation Act, so that also goes to the comment of the shoddy oversight, and there’s no difference in the requirements for collective agreements and individual employment agreements, which I think was the third question on process with regards to personal grievances. So I think I’ve addressed all those three questions. Thank you very much.

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): The question is that Marja Lubeck’s amendment to the Schedule set out on Supplementary Order Paper 331 be agreed to

Amendment agreed to.

Bill to be reported with amendment.

House resumed.

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): Madam Speaker, the committee has considered the Employment Relations (Extended Time for Personal Grievance for Sexual Harassment) Amendment Bill and reports it with amendment. I move, That the report be adopted.

Motion agreed to.

Report adopted.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): I declare the House in committee for the consideration of the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Exemption for Race Meetings) Amendment Bill.

Bills

Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Exemption for Race Meetings) Amendment Bill

In Committee

Clauses 1 to 4

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): Members, the House is in committee on the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Exemption for Race Meetings) Amendment Bill. Before we begin the debate, I’ll advise members that this bill is being treated as a conscious issue and I’ll accept a personal vote on each provision if one is called for. At the end of each debate, I’ll put the question, then announce the result. At that point, any member can request that a personal vote be held. Members, we come now to clause 1. This is the debate on the title.

TANGI UTIKERE (Chief Whip—Labour): Point of order. I seek leave for all provisions to be taken as one question.

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): Leave is sought. Is there any objection? There is no objection. The question is that clauses 1 to 4 stand part.

IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Mr Chair, thank you. I learnt very early in my political career that the simpler one makes something, the more likely you are to get it successfully agreed to, and I’m hoping that will be the case on this occasion. I certainly didn’t expect to have the auspicious audience in the House at the time of one of the smallest bills to go through the House—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: A lot of people like that car park stuff!

IAN McKELVIE: Quite right, Mr Brownlee. So, very briefly, the bill was sent to the select committee, came back for a second reading, and we’re now in the committee stage of the House, and the select committee recommends a couple of changes—very simple changes to the bill, but very sensible ones. Of course, this bill had its genesis in the Rt Hon Winston Peters’ mind at some stage in the night and was picked up the next day by Chris Bishop and turned into a logical bill, which was then picked up by me and brought to the House.

The two changes that are specific to what we’re talking about: updating references to the Racing Industry Act 2020, which, of course, was passed as a result of the Rt Hon Winston Peters’ introduction to the House; that wasn’t in the original bill, and amending section 235(A)(1)(a) to insert the word “small” into the proposed section so that the exemption would only apply to small racing clubs. “Small racing clubs” are defined in the racing Act as racing clubs that hold three or fewer betting licences during a year.

RACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): Thank you, Mr Chair. Thank you to the member for that short introductory explanation. I do just want to commend him on taking this bill, so far successfully, through the House, and it was a pleasure to sit on the Governance and Administration Committee with the member when we considered the bill. I note that the member is also the chair of that good committee.

I wanted to ask a further question about the matter the member raised just now regarding small racing clubs. One of the matters that we grappled with at select committee was the potential for alcohol harm if we allowed people to bring their own alcohol into the boot of a car, as we’ve discussed. With the definition in the Racing Industry Act around “small racing clubs”, it’s specific to the number of events that are held each year. But we know that there are some racing clubs in New Zealand that may only have one or two meets a year, but they are of a very large nature, with thousands of people there. So this particular part of the bill would allow people to bring their own alcohol to a racing event where there were thousands of people. I guess that’s one of the concerns that the committee has grappled with.

So I’m just interested, from the member, if he did consider a Supplementary Order Paper to introduce a new definition or another form of definition that could be used to perhaps limit the implementation of this bill to those meets that were below a certain number so that we could consider limiting the alcohol harm from this bill. So I’m just interested, from the member, if there was any consideration given to that.

TANGI UTIKERE (Labour—Palmerston North): Thank you, Mr Chair. Just a quick question to the member. I note that the Manawatu Harness Racing Club was one of the submitters, and it was good to see the member in charge of this bill at that particular venue last week to celebrate the city of Palmerston North gold cup. But I’m just interested: in terms of the way in which the number of meetings would fall, will this primarily allow harness racing meetings to take advantage of this, as opposed to thoroughbred racing meetings? I’d be interested in a brief response from the member.

IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Perhaps, given my age, I’ll answer the last question first and the first question last. I think, with respect to the Manawatu Harness Racing Club, they of course wouldn’t qualify as they hold more than three licences per annum. And the reason for this bill really was, I think it came out of the smaller racing clubs in the South Island primarily. And of course harness clubs are a large part of that and there are also a large number of harness clubs—or not a large number. Six or seven harness clubs in the South Island run three or less meetings a year and they’re defined as small racing clubs under the Racing Act. So that’s a brief response to that question.

The question that the deputy chair of the Governance and Administration Committee, Rachel Boyack, raised is a more complex issue and it was raised by one or two of the submitters particularly related to harm from alcohol. It was also raised as a matter of, I suppose, interest because some of those events, as you say, are very large events, but none the less they’re run by amateur racing clubs, usually in holiday resorts, and those clubs very seldom have the facilities to cater for a full licensing system. So this type of an event would make it much easier for them to operate. And I think, from a harm perspective, some of us in the House will be old enough to remember the days when there was no alternative but to take your alcohol in the boot of the car or your picnic in the boot of the car. There was no such thing as a licensed bar when I was that age. I think, from a point of view of answering your question, those racing clubs and small harness clubs and those communities are extraordinarily responsible and they do have to—even under this Act, even under the changes that this would bring to the Act—manage those challenges in a manner that I think is totally responsible to the events talked about.

The issue of the large events, and some of them are large events—they can get up to 10,000 or 15,000 people turn up, but they’re none the less very well organised and we heard no evidence in the course of that discussion from either submitters or the police, actually, with respect to any, I guess, damage from alcohol or even a significant amount of trouble from those being caused as a result of alcohol being available at those events. And of course alcohol is currently available at the events. The reason for this bill being introduced is that it’s extraordinarily difficult for small amateur-based racing clubs or in fact every other small rural club has the same impact, the same challenge—it’s extremely difficult for them to comply where a bigger organisation can very easily comply with these things because they have not only the facilities but they also have the people with the resource and the skills and get to navigate their way through the licensing thing. So I hope that’s a satisfactory answer to your question.

DAMIEN SMITH (ACT): Thank you, Mr Chair. I think this is an eminently sensible bill, Mr McKelvie. I think the small racing clubs will really appreciate the flexibility that’s inside the legislation. Obviously, I’ve been to various events of this size and scale, and I think small race meetings—people are eminently sensible. The one question I have is with access to the venue: how will that be managed in terms of bringing the alcohol into the venue, and will it be checked or will it just be turned up in the boot of your car and no one will know? So will there be a monitor or will there be someone on the racecourse that actually checks that in when—normally, people go there and it’s free to go. Secondly, most of these events happen at holiday time, but if you have a big race meeting, obviously the venues default to a licence scenario, but if you have a smaller venue or a smaller race meeting, then—the one thing we’d like to know is just how that gets managed on the racecourse itself. The ACT Party is very supportive of this bill.

IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Very briefly, to answer your question, the racing clubs concerned will have to undertake that monitoring and control of that in a manner that’s prescribed under the Act. So there will still be controls under the Act—that’s how that has to be managed. I think the real challenge in this instance was allowing those small entities to take advantage of an opportunity easily and create, I suppose, what I would have termed as a picnic-cum-family atmosphere, which is certainly lacking when you end up with what you might term those barn-type situations. I think it’s to take the onerous task off those clubs, but, at the same time, they’re still responsible in the same way they would be under any other terms in the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): Thank you very much for the opportunity to take a call. Just in reading through the bill, and acknowledging the member Ian McKelvie, but also—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: That’s a bit unfair.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: —the points that he’s been putting forward—sorry, Mr Brownlee?

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Reading the bill; that’s a bit unfair.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: Ha, ha! The very short bill, being what it is. I just had a few questions for the member. He was just alluding to the fact that there would be controls around the management of alcohol in this BYO environment. However, from my reading of the legislation and the primary legislation which this seeks to amend, actually, in providing this exemption, there would be next to no controls, so I would like him to elaborate on that point that he made with regard to controls.

IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Well, there certainly won’t be no controls. I think most of these clubs that will be using this part of the licence will also have an alcohol licence on the course, which will, effectively, mean they’ve got to have control of this whole situation. So part of their course will run under the normal conditions of the Act and part of it will be exempted under these conditions. I suppose the most obvious one is Canterbury Jockey Club, where they run a separate licensing system for this. But they run a large—effectively, I suppose you could call it a car boot picnic area, and it works very successfully.

A personal vote was called for on the question, That clauses 1 to 4 be agreed to.

Ayes 72

Noes 44

Clauses 1 to 4 agreed to.

The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 49, Noes 44.

[The names “Williams P” and “Ngarewa-Packer” were originally spelt incorrectly in the personal vote; text corrected.]

Bill to be reported without amendment.

House resumed.

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): Mr Speaker, the committee has considered the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Exemption for Race Meetings) Amendment Bill and reports it without amendment. I move, That the report be adopted.

Motion agreed to.

Report adopted.

Bills

Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill

Second Reading

Hon JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki): I move, That the Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill be now read a second time.

Well, the gallery is full. The Prime Minister is here. A lot of our former esteemed MPs and Ministers are here. I see party leaders are here. The place is buzzing with excitement, and none of it is for me. And even worse, I fear that in the second reading of my member’s bill, the Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill, the news for me is going to be all bad. However, Mr Speaker, thank you for the opportunity. And, members, thank you for the consideration that you gave to my bill in select committee. And while I am given to understand—and I too can read the select committee report, which doesn’t give me much hope of support across the House, I just want to say to this House thank you for supporting the bill through its first reading to select committee. That doesn’t always happen in this place. And thank you also to all of you for your considered support of the bill at select committee.

I want to say that I stayed true to what I was trying to—I’m pre-empting the outcome, of course—achieve in this bill, and that was to address the issue of biosecurity threats to New Zealand. Of course, biosecurity—and our native species—is very dear to my heart having until recently been the conservation spokesperson; the best portfolio, can I say, in New Zealand. But also, and, I think, equally, making sure that we give our attention to biosecurity is incredibly important to the future of New Zealand agriculture, viticulture, and, indeed, everything we hold dear in New Zealand. But alas, it would seem that it is not to be.

What I find a little disappointing is that coming out of the select committee, there seemed to be no drive by some members to try and find a solution to take us and take this bill forward. Never mind. We don’t have our day every day. But I do stand by my intent that increasing penalties, and penalties upon conviction for biosecurity breaches, whether they be an omission or by intent, is a worthy thing to do. And on that basis, I still commend the bill to the House.

SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to. We’ve probably got time for one more speech.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): I’ll take a very brief call to explain why the Labour Party is not supporting this bill. The bill proposed to give biosecurity officers the right to refuse entry to people into the country. The Primary Production Committee considered that and found that the power of entry lies with immigration officers, not biosecurity officers, and therefore the legislation was, while well-meaning, not able to be supported by the Government.

NICOLA GRIGG (National—Selwyn): I believe I’m the next on the call sheet, as well, and I wasn’t quite expecting the full House that Jacqui Dean wasn’t expecting either. Look, this is a brilliant bill, written and brought to the House by the Hon Jacqui Dean, a former conservation Minister and, for a long time, the conservation spokesperson for the National Party. Jacqui has shepherded through this Parliament, during her time as a Minister, a number of very, very worthy pieces of legislation, and this would have sought to continue in that vein.

The National Party would absolutely have supported this bill. I sat on the Primary Production Committee and we did, from our side of the round table, agree that it had large merit, primarily because of its intent to strengthen the prohibition and the trying to—I’ve completely lost my words because a far more important person has just entered the Chamber, and I think she’s got more important things to say. So, with that, I conclude my submission to the House.

SPEAKER: Members, this debate is suspended and will resume after the dinner break.

Debate interrupted.

SPEAKER: In accordance with the determination of the Business Committee, the House now comes to the valedictory speech by the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern.

Valedictory Statements

Valedictory Statements

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN (Labour—Mt Albert): Te whare e tū nei, te marae e takoto ana, tēnā kōrua. E ngā mate maha, haere, haere, haere. Ngā tāngata whenua o tēnei rohe, o Te Whanganui-a-Tara, tēnā koutou. Tātou ngā kanohi ora e hui mai ana, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

[The building that stands here, the land that lies here, I acknowledge you. The many who have passed away, rest in peace. The local people of this region, of Wellington, greetings. Those of us, the living, that are gathered here, thanks and greetings to you all.]

When it came time to pen these words, my father suggested that I go back and look at the first ones I shared in this House. I remember writing my maiden speech so well. I was 28 years old. My family were living overseas, and I’d only moved back to New Zealand a few months prior.

If I’m honest, I was probably more than a little shocked to be here, a feeling that even after 15 years never quite left me. But the reasons I came here, they never left me either. They were all there in my maiden speech: climate change, child poverty, and inequality; I am, after all, a conviction-based politician, and I’ve always believed this to be a place where you can make a difference. I leave knowing that to be true.

But, despite that, I’ve become used to my time as Prime Minister being distilled down into a different list: a domestic terror attack, a volcanic eruption, a pandemic; a series of events where I found myself in people’s lives during the most grief-stricken or traumatic moments. Their stories and faces remain etched in my mind and likely will for ever. That is the responsibility and privilege of the role of Prime Minister—a role I never thought I was meant to have.

It’s fair to say that 2017 involved a surprising chain of events. At the beginning of the year, David Shearer announced he would be leaving the Opposition benches and Parliament for Sudan. It was remarked upon at the time that this was apparently a more appealing prospect than being in Opposition.

I found myself in a by-election for Mt Albert, and, soon after that, as deputy leader of the Labour Party. But that was just the half of it. It was 1 August, and we were a mere seven weeks out from an election when Andrew Little stood down as leader of the Labour Party and nominated me to take his place. I’ve always found it hard to explain what that period felt like. It was a cross between a sense of duty to steer a moving freight train and being hit by one, and that’s probably because my internal reluctance to lead was matched only by a huge sense of responsibility. Andrew, I likewise know that you made your decision with that same sense of responsibility, and while I have never known whether to curse you or thank you, I’m grateful for the faith you always had in me.

The seven-week campaign that followed was frenetic. Mike Jaspers, my chief press secretary at the time, recently reminded me that a week into the job, after a very long day, I fell asleep on a plane, woke up with a start, and asked him if I was still the leader of the Labour Party.

Those few short weeks were also a blessing. There was no time to be anything but myself, and I also had the chance to be involved in everything—a real treat for a control freak. I remember sitting at my desk in the home that Clarke and I shared in Auckland, writing a campaign launch speech. I knew I wanted climate change to be front and centre because I believed it would define our generation of politicians. I called it our nuclear-free moment. I believed it then, and I believe it even more now.

When I came here 15 years ago, we talked about climate change as if it were almost a hypothetical. Some didn’t even give it that credit. In 2008, I sat in that lobby as the emissions trading scheme was weakened, and the yo-yo of climate policy continued.

But in the intervening years, we have seen firsthand the reality of our changing environment, from Northland to Coromandel, Tokomaru Bay to Buller, and I’ve seen the people it’s impacted, like the elderly couple on the West Coast who had lived in their home for their entire married lives. They had only recently returned to it after a year’s worth of post-flooding repairs when it was flooded again. “We’re too old to keep doing this”, they told me. They’ve not returned to their home.

Now, I know there is politics in almost everything. This Chamber understands why more than anyone. But we also know when and how to remove it. When crisis has landed in front of us, I have seen the best of this place: an absolute focus on the care of others, on preserving life, and helping people when they need it most.

Climate change is a crisis. It is upon us, and so one of the very few things I will ask of this House on my departure is that you please take the politics out of climate change. There will always be policy differences, but beneath that we have what we need to make the progress we must. We have not just a credible but an ambitious nationally determined contribution to reduce our net emissions by 50 percent by 2030. We have the zero carbon Act, carbon budgets, an emissions reduction plan, and a Climate Commission to guide us. We have business on board and the primary sector working hard on a shared set of goals, and it’s making a difference. We are starting to see our emissions come down, with total greenhouse gas emissions falling to their lowest levels in eight years. But New Zealand needs this place to provide them with certainty that you will keep going: so do. We owe it to the next generation, but we also owe it to ourselves.

To the Green Party, especially James and Marama: I’ve enjoyed working with you immensely, and I’ve seen how tireless you both are, even when you are thrown into your own party processes that, from the outside, look something akin to Squid Game. Thank you for the personal support I have felt from both of you.

A friend of mine taught me early on in politics that there is no point looking back in anger, and I feel no need to when there are so many things I feel proud of, things that I know are different or better because we had a Labour Government, like our work to uphold the Treaty by crossing the bridge more often. The creation of the Māori-Crown relations portfolio under the excellent leadership of Kelvin Davis—thank you, Kelvin—the stewardship of Te Arawhiti, the establishment of the Māori Health Authority, the growth of te reo Māori, the evolution of how we see ourselves as a nation through the teaching of New Zealand history in schools, and the creation of Matariki, our first indigenous public holiday.

The path we travel as a nation will not be linear and it won’t always be easy. But for the part of the trail that I had the privilege of leading, I’m glad we took on the hilly bits. It’s fair to say that, all told, we had a few mountains to climb, though. I always wanted to be part of a Government that had a focus on children. I can’t exactly pinpoint the origins of that passion, but I’ve talked many times of the distinct memories I have of children in poverty during the 1980s, and so it was with much excitement that I was lucky enough to take on the role of the children’s spokesperson from Annette King while in Opposition. Annette had already done a huge amount of policy work, a trait of any sort that she was well-renowned for—almost as much as her relentless attempts to set single people up. But there was still space for further child poverty initiatives. So we got to work creating policy that was ready to be rolled out in the first 100 days of office, including the Child Poverty Reduction Act.

In 2017, when we first formed Government, almost one in five children were living in poverty. Most child poverty measures in New Zealand were going backwards. Now, I am not here to say that everything is perfect now—it is not—but the healthy homes standards, the increases in benefits and their indexation to wages, the winter energy payment, the introduction of Best Start, and the creation of Food in Schools means that as I leave, despite the severe economic conditions, there are 77,000 fewer children living in lowincome households, all nine child poverty measures have reduced, and this winter, a sole parent will receive $212 more per week than when we came into office. But now, you just need to keep going.

Someone asked me recently whether there were things I wish I’d manage to finish. There were definitely projects I would have liked to have seen through—you know, projects like the restoration of the St James, or the beginning and completion of Tokelau’s airstrip, a project I felt strongly about after visiting this beautiful but remote Realm country. I know, as they’d told me in advance, that visiting Tokelau in the absence of a place to dock would instead mean climbing on to what looked like an inflatable rescue boat whilst it’s hanging over the side of a moving ship and then being dropped into the ocean by a very qualified—I am sure—but very young-looking sailor, all while straddling what looks and feels like a unicycle seat whilst wearing a puletasi. I would absolutely still have gone; I just would have worn bike pants.

But aside from such projects, there were very few things that I aspired to do in politics that have a natural end point. Poverty, inequality, ending environmental degradation—if you ever claim it’s job done on those issues, you’ve set the bar too low.

Politics has never been a tick list for me; it’s always been about progress. Sometimes you can measure it, and sometimes you can’t. We won’t ever know the long-term benefits of banning conversion therapy, especially for our young people, or what it means to our Pacific communities that we finally apologised for the Dawn Raids. There will be no list of the lives saved because of the banning of military-style semi-automatic weapons. We won’t know how we left women feeling about the ability to make their own choices when this Parliament decriminalised abortion, or when we improved pay equity, put period products into schools, or reached 50 percent representation of women in Parliament. While these things may not feature heavily in the history books when they write about the years 2017 to 2023—which will likely be a very heavy few chapters—they are still none the less things I feel very proud of.

There are things I feel confident will feature, though. A valedictory is not a place to summarise a pandemic—no one has the time for that kind of group therapy. There is no question it was an incredibly tough experience for our nation at the bottom of the world and, I will concede, a tough experience personally.

I’ve spent the better part of my professional life anticipating risk and worrying about it. The pandemic put that trait into overdrive. For roughly two years, there were certain people that when they called me, I would go into a cold sweat and have to sit down. If I was on the road and in a meeting and any of my staff had to leave the room, it would have the same effect. “Not a case.”, I would quietly think.

I remember all too vividly a visit to Auckland University in August 2021, when then Minister Hipkins got one of the dreaded health calls, the one that led to the Delta outbreak and what was, I believe, the hardest part of our COVID journey. I called Clarke and simply said, “Code red.” He picked up Neve, and we had 30 minutes to pack and get to the airport, not knowing it would be many months before we returned home as a family. It was so long in the life of a small child, in fact, that when we came back to our home in Auckland, Neve asked me where the toilet was.

I’ve often been asked what the hardest thing was about COVID. There were so many, but the unknowns was definitely one of them. I had a call with my Chief Science Advisor, Dame Juliet Gerrard, very early on. I’d been thinking about how we’d manage the border in the future, and so I asked how long she thought it would be before we would have a vaccine that might help us do that. “Well, if we’re lucky,” she said, “I’d say five years.” I slumped into my chair—COVID made me sit down quite a lot, as it turned out. Thankfully, though, we had something better than luck on our side; we had science, and I remain for ever grateful for that.

But that wasn’t the only thing that got me through. Firstly, I always knew there were New Zealanders out there doing it tougher than whatever we were experiencing on any given day, and it was them that we were there to serve. Secondly, I was surrounded by wonderful, smart, compassionate people trying to do the right thing. We didn’t always get it right—I didn’t always get it right—but we were always motivated by the right things. Thirdly, and most importantly—most importantly—we went in as a nation with a goal to look after one another, and we did.

A few weeks ago, to mark my departure, Dame Juliet gave me a mug. It had on it a graph depicting excess lives lost across developed nations. New Zealand had fared the best. If it wasn’t so unorthodox for a valedictory, I’d probably hold it up for no other reason than I love a House prop and to remind everyone what it was all for. You saved people’s lives. Was it hard? Absolutely, but we’ll never know who you kept on this earth to know how truly worth it it was.

To Dame Juliet, Sir Ashley Bloomfield, Dr Caroline McElnay, Dr Ian Town, Grant Robertson, Julia Haydon-Carr, Le Roy Taylor, Andrew Campbell, Holly Donald, Brook Barrington, Rob Fyfe, and Raj Nahna, and, later, “Chippy” and Ayesha, you were part of a core team of people I relied on through that period—you and Alison Holst sausage rolls. Thank you.

We did lose other things along the way. One, in some ways, was a sense of security that we can engage in good, robust debates and land on our respective positions relatively respectfully. But for some, that didn’t happen during the latter stages of COVID, and while there were a myriad of reasons, one was because so much of the information swirling around was false.

I could physically see how entrenched it was for some people. I was in Whanganui when a visit I was meant to make to a vaccine bus was called off because of protest. After a few hours, the protest passed and I went back, not wanting to let the people down we were due to visit. There was one, lone protester still in the vicinity, who, as I left, started shouting at me. They were mostly focused on a particular conspiracy that was completely false, so I stopped, doubled back, and told them that. I was idealistic enough to believe it would make a difference, but after many of these same experiences and seeing the rage that often accompanied these conspiracies, I had to accept I was wrong. I could not singlehandedly pull someone out of a rabbit hole, but perhaps, collectively, we all have a role to play in stopping people falling in in the first place.

This is not a single-issue problem. I’ve seen the same fractured debates based on distorted half-truths and complete falsehoods emerging on a range of different subjects. This is not a question of free speech. Free speech is a right this House is unified in defending.

Those who try to dress up the issue of disinformation as being an attempt to silence people are, ironically, themselves shutting down a discussion that must be had. Debate is critical to a healthy democracy, but conspiracy is its nemesis, and the answers aren’t easy. So, having witnessed what it can do to the corners of our beloved country when perhaps we considered ourselves immune, I can tell you they are answers I will keep looking for.

There were many moments that have left me bereft, though. I still struggle to talk about March 15. There is an image from the day after the attack that was taken of me through a window, and I don’t believe I’ve mentioned what was happening in the moments it was taken.

We’d brought together a group of politicians to travel to Christchurch, and the Defence Force carried us. On the way down, I’d seen the front page of the paper and the image of a member of the Muslim community covered in blood in the aftermath of the attack. It was a devastating picture. As we arrived at the meeting venue in Christchurch, we were greeted by a range of community members. Sitting in the front row was the same person who had only hours before been photographed. As he stood to speak, I did not know what to expect, but what came next was one of the most profound memories I have of that period. He thanked us. Here was someone who had been through the most horrific experience I could imagine, and he thanked New Zealand and expressed gratitude for his home.

There is much we must all continue to do in the aftermath of March 15. I consider the work of the Christchurch Call to Action amongst them, and I feel honoured and grateful to continue work on the issue of radicalisation and violent extremism online. But the most significant task for us all, as a nation, is to live up to the expectations that those who experienced it have of us: to deserve their thanks. To the Muslim community of Aotearoa New Zealand, you have humbled me beyond words. Al salam alaikum.

Having, sadly, seen our nation in horrific moments of grief, I’ve concluded that countries don’t move on from tragedy; rather, they become part of your psyche. But the way these moments weave themselves into our being will be determined by how we confront them.

We’ve never lost more lives in a single tragedy in New Zealand than we did in Erebus. Time may have passed, but the deep loss from that event has not. Apologising for what happened was the right thing to do; now the least we owe families is a memorial.

As for the Pike River families, it was an honour to see through the promise we made to you, but an even greater honour to get to know incredible people like Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse, who I consider friends. Thank you for what you have done to try and help us all learn from your experience, and may it never happen again.

I’ve often said that whatever I did here, I never did alone. It’s quite a literal statement; one of the massive adjustments when you take on this job is you have a new shadow in the form of diplomatic protection. While I never tried to purposefully lose them, like some past Prime Ministers, it was an adjustment, especially when there were some things that I didn’t think needed to change, like the fact that I still liked to make the odd-TradeMe purchase. I still remember them looking a bit shocked when I told them we were off to pick up a chair from a random stranger in West Auckland. They weren’t quite as shocked as said random stranger.

To all of the Diplomatic Protection Services team, thank you for everything, and to the VIP drivers, thank you for your company and your kindness. I’d like to think of your newfound practice of keeping a carsick clean-up kit as a homage to my family.

To the Labour Party, who have been like my family, especially the presidents I had the pleasure of working with—Nigel, Claire, and Jill—thank you.

My nana joined the Labour Party in 1949. My Auntie Marie was the next to take up the baton, and she never passed it to me as such; more like, she whittled a second baton and told me to run with her whilst yelling instructions along the way. I’ve long said that I started as a volunteer in the Labour Party delivering flyers, and that’s where I will return, happily.

To the Mt Albert team and, prior to that, Auckland Central—gosh, you are patient—thank you all. To Therese Colgan, who had served multiple Prime Ministers, but, most importantly, has served thousands of people—you are one in a million. Barbara Ward, who has been by my side through every major political event, but much more importantly, for every major life event—thank you for being my friend.

To those who went before me and taught me much: Helen Clark, Phil Goff, Marian Hobbs, Trevor Mallard, Darren Hughes, and, of course, Annette King, who has become my mentor, friend, and one of Neve’s favourite aunties—thank you.

To the Prime Minister’s office team. My senior private secretary, Le Roy, who flatted with me some 20 years ago, never would I have dreamt when I used to cook you minute steak that one day we would find ourselves on the ninth floor, but I am so glad we did. Jo, my favourite Irish; Rachel, Bridie, and Chrissy; Philippa and Ian, who both led amazing teams; Dinah Okeby, who literally read every piece of correspondence that came our way and still maintained such a positive disposition. The wonderful adviser team I had in both the project management office, but also in the policy advisory group—you were all exceptional.

The tireless, wonderful, tough, and also randomly emotional Andrew Campbell, and the press secs, including the B-team, who had the worst job in the world, given my reluctance to be in the media. Holly, who has the biggest heart but the sharpest mind—your dad would be so proud of you. Same to Zoe and Amelia—to us, you are family—Clare-Louise, for moving your entire life to support me for the better part of a decade. Finally, to my chiefs of staff, Mike Munro, GJ Thompson, who provided the cover we needed, and, finally, Raj Nahna. It’s hard to describe Raj; he likes it that way. He became known in various forums as the guy with the hair, and not just domestically.

I recall with some fondness visiting Europe to further our free-trade agreement (FTA) aspirations. We met with what for the purposes of this story I will describe simply as a leader within the European Union. At the beginning of our meeting, he greeted Raj as the one whose hair he’d admired in the bios he was given. Clearly, admiration from afar was not enough, and by the end of the meeting he could no longer restrain himself. Rather than shake Raj’s hand, he reached up and zhuzed Raj’s hair as if he were a hairdresser in a Pantene commercial. I put at least some of our FTA success down to that head of hair.

Raj, I hand-on-heart believe you sacrificed as much of any of us for five years—you and your beautiful family, Jane, Magnolia, and Saffron. You preferred to be behind the scenes, but I want it to be on record that New Zealand owes you a debt of gratitude. You were there for March 15, for Whakaari, for the pandemic, and you were there for me. Thank you.

To my family. People knew we were connected, and you copped a lot of flak. My dad stopped watching the news for five years. Mind you, he comes from a long line of media protests; my nana used to turn the television off whenever Muldoon came on.

My mother took a different approach. During COVID, she took up the practice of sending me her own personal thought for the day. They were so uplifting that on occasion I’d read them out at our small staff meetings. That was with the exception of one, which I thought was a bit grandiose, even for a dedicated mother. It read, “Remember, even Jesus had people who didn’t like him.”

To my family, thank you for all your patience, your love and support, and that goes especially to my wonderful mother, my wonderful father, and my beautiful sister, Louise, but also the Gayfords, the Dussans, the Cowans, and Frasers—I love you all.

To my darling girl, Neve. Gosh, I love how independent you are already—she’s up there; she’s just on the floor somewhere—and it means you won’t grow up being known as the ex-Prime Minister’s daughter, but, rather, I will happily be known as Neve’s mum, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And to my love, Clarke. Not many politicians have a partner where when they say “I’m thinking of leaving politics” reply, “I think you should stay”, but that’s who you are. You’re fiercely loyal, and you always had my back, but you are also a fighter. You believe in three things fiercely: social justice, protecting our oceans, and that a good tea should have decent brew time. Thank you for keeping my cup full, and for personally enduring so much rubbish. You’re a keeper.

And finally, to this team of people around me. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I have never worked with better people. I know without a shadow of a doubt that you were here for the right reasons; I saw it regularly. Every Tuesday at the end of caucus, I would read a letter of the week, something from the large correspondence files that captured what was going on in people’s lives. It reminded us all why we were here, but you never needed reminding.

I leave behind great friends among many of you. But I do want to pay special tribute to Grant Robertson. Grant has been both an office mate when I came in to work in Parliament, and then a bench mate. He often credits himself with having taught me to swear, when it suits him. I recently had a wee slip of the tongue in this House when referring to David Seymour, and I didn’t see him take any ownership of that wee comment, despite, I should add, being caught on the mike agreeing with me rather profusely. It’s fair to say I took the title of Deputy Prime Minister very literally. For me, we were a team. That is how I’d like the history books to record the major milestones and challenges that we faced. I did not take them on alone; I took them on with great people, and especially with Grant. Thank you for the role that you have played and will continue to play for New Zealand. You are a brilliant finance Minister and a brilliant friend.

I know I leave this place in good hands, especially with the leadership of Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni and Prime Minister Hipkins, or “Chippy” to me. I was thinking of ways that I could summarise who “Chippy” is for me. It’s not just who he is in a crisis; it’s who he is in life. In the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle, I called “Chippy” to see how he was. I could hear I was on speaker phone as he described another busy day. “What are you up to now?”, I said. “I’m making the kids’ lunches for tomorrow”, he said. He then went on to describe in quite some detail what he was planning to put in each corner of their bento box. It’s fair to say he lunchbox-shamed me. “Chippy” is thoughtful, focused, and—importantly—he’s caring. We’re all in good hands.

Now it’s time for me to leave this place to the amazing people around me. But I want to spend just the last few moments I have here talking not about why I joined them but why others should—and not just in Parliament but in leadership.

Most of you know my story. I don’t consider myself to have had anything in my life that made me especially extraordinary. I was a child of the 1980s, born to the son of a drainlayer and the daughter of a farmer. My parents worked hard—really hard. My father was a policeman; my mother ran the canteen at the local school. They also ran an orchard for a few years, all while working full time. My sister and I were the first in our family to attend university. I was anxious about taking a student loan on, so I worked multiple jobs and entered speech competitions—or, to be precise, my mother entered me into them to try and earn a little extra money to put myself through university.

I was a worrier. I anticipated that everything that could go wrong, would. Some might say the worst possible character trait to have as a politician, or the best, depending on how you cut it. While I convinced myself that you cannot be a worrier and be in this place, you can. You can be that person, and you can be here.

I’m sensitive, or, as Maggie Barry once called me, “a precious petal”. I remember in my early days being thrown by the odd nasty comment or negative commentary. I even went to Trevor Mallard for advice on how to harden up. I thought that I would need to change dramatically to survive. I didn’t change. I leave this place as sensitive as I ever was, prone to dwell on the negative, hating question time so deeply that I would struggle to eat most days beforehand, and I am here to tell you: you can be that person and you can be here.

I am a crier and hugger—it’s instinctive to me. I remember going into the aftermath of Whakaari and seeing a comment about how I was just going in to hug people again. It stuck with me, so much so that when a first responder was emotionally telling me about their experience, I had an internal argument with myself as to whether I should comfort them when I knew I would likely be criticised. I would rather be criticised for being a hugger than being heartless, and so hug I did—a lot. You can be that person, and you can be here.

I’m a mother. I obviously didn’t start out that way. When I ran for Parliament in my 20s, I remember being afraid that I was choosing a path that meant I wouldn’t get to have children, because who has a personal life in Parliament? I was lucky. The job brought me to Clarke, but having kids was a whole other challenge.

When I was 37 years old, I was told there were a range of factors that meant I hadn’t been able to get pregnant, and stress was probably one of them. We decided to use the help of science. But, as so many couples experience, that wasn’t straightforward. I’d not long experienced a failed IVF round when I became leader of the Labour Party. I thought that I’d found myself on a path that meant I wouldn’t be a mother. Rather than process that, I campaigned to become Prime Minister—a rather big distraction, as far as they go.

Imagine my surprise when a couple of months later I discovered I was pregnant. There is no question, I’ve had incredible support to be the mother I wanted to be, from the office team, who tried to get me home for story time, and Neve’s village, who were there when I wasn’t. But I leave knowing I was the best mother I could be. You can be that person, and you can be here.

Now, I cannot determine what will define my time in this place, but I do hope I’ve demonstrated something else entirely: that you can be anxious, sensitive, kind, and wear your heart on your sleeve, you can be a mother or not, you can be an ex-Mormon or not, you can be a nerd, a crier, a hugger—you can be all of these things, and not only can you be here; you can lead. Just like me.

Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

[Applause, hongi, and harirū]

Waiata—Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi

Karanga

Waiata—Paikea, Toro Mai, Te Aroha

Sitting suspended from 6.10 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Bills

Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill

Second Reading

Debate resumed.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: When the House adjourned, we were on the second reading of the Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill. The next caller is—

STEPH LEWIS (Labour—Whanganui): Steph Lewis.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: It’s been a long day.

STEPH LEWIS: It has been a long day, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to take this call on the Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill, a call I’m somewhat surprised to be taking this evening, but, alas—

Hon Michael Woodhouse: Not “alas”; we’re all looking forward to it.

STEPH LEWIS: We are looking forward to it, and as the chair of the Primary Production Committee, I’m really excited to talk about this bill that we very, very carefully scrutinised through the select committee process, with thanks to our advisers from the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). They were very diligent and thorough in their advice to the committee.

Angela Roberts: Even though it’s a member’s bill—great officials!

STEPH LEWIS: They are great officials.

I would like to acknowledge and commend the idea of the Hon Jacqui Dean to find ways to support our biosecurity system here in Aotearoa. It’s something that I wholeheartedly agree with as someone who comes from a primary industry background, because in the primary industry sector, we are so reliant on having strong protections at our border to prevent and catch preventable biosecurity incursions, and that’s why last year I took through the House, this very House, the Biosecurity (Information for Incoming Passengers) Amendment Bill, which is now the Biosecurity (Information for Incoming Passengers) Amendment Act.

Just to slightly digress a wee bit, the fundamental premise of that bill was to make sure that passengers coming into New Zealand are being provided with excellent, top-notch, easy-to-understand, easy-to-digest information about our unique biosecurity arrangements here in New Zealand. At the time the bill was introduced, that was optional. It is now mandatory and will come into effect in October of this year.

The reason that I bring that up—and bringing it back to the Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill—is because, unfortunately, we on this side of the House, although we support Jacqui’s desire to see stronger protections at our border, are not supporting this bill through to the next stage. Because the advice that we have received from officials is that this bill will not achieve the desired result—and that is to add another layer of protection at our border and prevent individuals coming here to New Zealand from bringing in your apples or your beef jerky or something that they’ve put in their bag before they hopped on the plane or on the cruise ship, and then when they disembarked here in New Zealand, they’d forgotten was left in there.

So what our officials from the Ministry for Primary Industries did tell us, though, was that education is one of the three things that makes the biggest difference in preventing people bringing in—accidentally or otherwise—goods with them when they disembark the plane here in New Zealand. That is exactly what my bill last year—now Act—aims to do, to provide that education to passengers arriving here in New Zealand. What the MPI officials advised the committee was that data they collected between May 2009 and April 2010, which is the last time that the fees—or the penalties, rather—were increased under the Biosecurity Act for incoming passengers. At that point, they were increased from $200 to $400. But the data that they collected between the time that those penalties were raised showed a very negligible impact on the number of people bringing stuff accidentally in their backpacks through the border. It showed that offending only decreased with the increase in fine by 0.01 percent. And yet the administration costs and burden of increasing the actual fines and notifying passengers etc. weren’t worth the decrease that we then saw.

What the officials did tell us is that the three most effective motivators for encouraging passengers to remove prohibited items from their bags—or, preferably, not even pack them in the first instance—is to make sure that they understand why items are considered a biosecurity risk. We here in New Zealand, as we all know, are bordered by water, so we are free from many of the pests and diseases that we see in other countries across the globe. So that is why it is crucial to our native ecosystems, our wildlife, our ecosystems, as I said, that we do protect them and we do prevent those pests from coming into New Zealand. So that’s why we need to be informing passengers—as they’re on their way here to New Zealand and, again, right before they hop off the plane and set foot on New Zealand soil—that we have a different set of biosecurity requirements here in Aotearoa and it’s really important that they help us protect what we hold so dear here.

Also, coupled with that, though, we can’t make our system so cumbersome that we’ve got passengers waiting in line for hours and hours and hours. We need to make sure that passengers still understand how they can pass through our border quickly. So that, as I said, is what MPI has said is the biggest factor for making sure that passengers don’t bring in prohibited items to New Zealand—you know, like we said, the apples with the Queensland fruit fly, etc. We don’t want those here in New Zealand. We need to make sure that they are removed from their bags before they set foot on New Zealand soil.

I thank all of the organisations and the individuals who took time out of their busy days to submit to the Primary Production Committee; we really appreciated your considered submissions. What some of those submitters and, in fact, MPI officials also alerted us to is that if you’re a traveller who has been on a plane—a very long journey, potentially; you’ve got tired, hungry kids with you as well, and you’re feeling a bit scratchy yourself—you get here and you’ve packed the kids a little snack pack before you hopped on the plane, and you forget to take it out of their backpack, and then you get to the biosecurity desk and, ping, you’re fined. What that would do in terms of Brand New Zealand Inc., in people’s perception of New Zealand and the feeling that they get when they travel here is that that will diminish our reputation, and that is absolutely not something we want. We want every traveller who comes here to Aotearoa to have the best possible experience when they arrive here.

I’d like to touch on a couple of other discrepancies. So we did talk about, in the select committee, the options of increasing the fee by the amount of inflation, but that would have created a very strange discrepancy with the other fees and penalties within the Act. The bill also proposes to allow biosecurity officers to deny entry of a passenger to New Zealand if they are found with prohibited goods in their bag, and that is inconsistent with current legislation. Currently, the only officers who have the power to restrict people from entering New Zealand are immigration officers. So, again, that would create another discrepancy that we as a committee, or the members of the committee on this side of the House, didn’t think was appropriate, and would create uncertainty where there wouldn’t, as advisers told us, be any increased benefit. In fact, as I said, there would be potential for passengers to have a worse experience coming to New Zealand and getting pinged for something that is an accident. So, unfortunately, I am unable to commend this bill to the House. We do not support this bill advancing. Thank you.

TEANAU TUIONO (Green): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Greens to speak on this Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill, the second reading, and congratulations to the last speaker, Steph Lewis, for taking longer than the last three speakers in the House. It moved so quickly that I was wondering whether I was going to have to jump up, but the former Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, walked in to stop me from doing that, so ka pai.

I want to acknowledge the intention behind this bill and I want to acknowledge the intention behind the member’s reasons for wanting this bill. I think we all want that around the House. We want to protect our wild spaces. We want to protect our ecosystems. And for those of us that live out in the regions, we want to be able to protect our food and fibre sector, the engine room of our economy and our country out there, out there in the regions.

At the first reading, we didn’t support this bill and the main reason for that is that if you’re going to increase the penalties for something, you need to have a good reason. You need to have a good reason why you’re going to do that, so I want to thank the Primary Production Committee for actually taking that on board. And I do note within the select committee report you measured it against inflation and I saw the differences between different numbers and so on and so forth. What I was expecting possibly was—if you’re going to, like, increase the fees, increase the penalties—to have actually had a bit more of a rationale for why you would do that and whether that would actually moderate behaviour, whether that will actually have an impact in protecting biosecurity. I didn’t see that in the select committee report. But I do agree with the sentiments around education. Education is fundamental to making sure that when people come here, we make it available in the best way possible so that people understand what it means to actually come to Aotearoa. And so we also supported the bill that the previous member who spoke as well—because education is actually key to that.

The new element for me, in terms of the work that the select committee did, was around the immigration officer part as well. Biosecurity officers have a very specific type of role that they have. And during the deliberations of the select committee, it was found that actually biosecurity officers have a completely different mandate and they don’t have the right to detain, and so on and so forth, Minister, if I’m reading this right, under a different Act. So that was a new element for me as well.

But I just wanted to add, in terms of my kind of insight, in terms of a conversation that I had actually with the biosecurity officer—I was interested to know how complex the job is, what they actually did in terms of their day to day. This biosecurity officer that I talked to had a science background as well. So I was interested in all of the different things around different species that may come in and be harmful to the environment and harmful to the economy. And it seems to me that if all of a sudden we start plonking on top of them an extra workload, what would be the flow-on impacts of that? You’re going to be talking about extra training, you’re going to be talking about compatibility for the new roles, and all of these other sorts of things. It compounds the work.

So I totally support the intention behind the bill. We need to do these things. We need to stop fruit fly and stop foot-and-mouth. And what would probably be useful for politicians in the House would be if someone came up with a way to stop foot in mouth, because that happens a bit around the House—probably have done it myself a few times! So I just want to once again acknowledge the intention of the member, wanting to have stronger biosecurity measures to protect Papatūānuku, to protect our environment, to protect our food and fibre sector, but, unfortunately, this bill does not do that.

ANGELA ROBERTS (Labour): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is an honour to rise and take a call on the Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill. Like everybody else who has spoken before me, we absolutely support and applaud the member’s concerns and attempts to address those concerns around improving biosecurity at our borders. As someone who lives in a rural community, I can remember, in a former life as an economics teacher, actually doing assessments with my senior economics students about the impact of M. bovis. And not just the economic impact but the impact it has on our people; on our farmers and our rural communities. So it isn’t just about the numbers but it is about the people involved, right?

We absolutely applaud the intent of this bill. Unfortunately, when we went to the experts—and it was really great, we had a lot of interest and input not just from officials but from Federated Farmers and other organisations. And I think that reflects how important it is that we get it right. I think something that the Federated Farmers talked about, actually, was that our regime is robust, but it can always be improved. So I think, at the very least, the opportunity to check in and make sure that things are working as well as they can be and supporting our officials in order for them to do the best that they can do to support and protect our rural communities and our primary industries is really, really important.

So the penalties for breaching the Biosecurity Act, as “the Feds” said, is a key plank in our robust border-control system, and there must be credible deterrence. So that was an interesting question that was raised by the member who brought this bill to the House, and a really good question. The officials came back to us and they talked about deterrence and there was a whole pile of psychology. I don’t know if anyone’s watched Border Patrol, but, you know, I think everyone’s got an opinion about how well or not our deterrent system works—maybe better than Australia’s but, you know. So it’s really interesting; we’ve all got an opinion about what will get people to fess up that they’ve forgotten the apple in the bottom of their bag. So it is a really great opportunity to discuss this and test it and make sure that it’s OK.

So the Federated Farmers are concerned about it being a really good deterrent, and I think that’s a really, really valid question to be asking. Horticulture New Zealand also asked about whether or not an increase in the fines will actually be reflected in a change in practice by people coming through the border. And I’m sure, Mr Speaker, you know much more about criminology than most of us in the House, but at some point there is a bit of a tipping point where, actually, if the fine is great enough and you’re in that line and you kind of feel like you’re at the point of no return, are you going to risk it because the fine potentially makes it worthwhile to try? So we had a lot of information about the psychology of this from the officials, and Horticulture New Zealand asked that question—it’s a really good question. If the fine says that the disincentive is not actually improving compliance, then, kind of, what’s the point? They suggested that is done after the fact. But, actually, I think the stakes are too high for us to just give it a crack and see if it has a positive impact. So they did actually very helpfully recommend that—Horticulture New Zealand recommended exploring alternative approaches and tools that are supported by evidence to obtain improved national biosecurity. And I think that was provided to us by the officials that turned up. They showed us what happened. We’ve heard from previous speakers in the House tonight about what happened the last time they increased the fine and they showed us that there wasn’t an increased impact on compliance.

So Horticulture New Zealand believe that not just the fines but the opportunity, or the risk, I guess, or the price to be paid with amendments to the Immigration Act to refuse entry—they were concerned about that. And they believe that such a serious price to be paid should be kept for those who are intentionally smuggling. So I think these submissions that were made really reflect the level of expertise that is right across—the high level of understanding about what’s going on and how we best protect our primary industries and protect our biosecurity.

As well as that, we have heard about the changes that—those tools that Horticulture New Zealand talked about, you know, and we’ve already heard about how education has such an important role to play. We heard from one speaker saying it doesn’t matter about whether or not somebody has made a mistake; if they didn’t know, they cannot make a decision about whether or not to declare. So, actually, the officials were really clear about this as well, that actually what you need to do is make sure they understand the why. And they reflected that, actually, as a nation, when we are inviting our whānau and our friends to come and visit us, we remind them or educate them as to why it’s important, how unique we are.

I can remember being on a plane once, coming home, and sitting next to a lovely young backpacker who was telling me about the snake she’d killed in South-east Asia—and she’d kept that trophy. And we were on our way to Auckland and we had a wee conversation about how that might not be something that she wanted to just keep in a backpack but might want to have a conversation with the officials at the airport. She simply didn’t know. Unfortunately, she hadn’t done really good geography at high school and didn’t really get that we weren’t Australia and that we didn’t do snakes. So, you know, she was a lovely young backpacker who really was quite horrified when she quite innocently told me, shared her story of her trophy in her backpack. She was so proud. But as soon as she had learnt of the impact that bringing in a dead animal to New Zealand would have, and probably wouldn’t have declared it, thinking it wasn’t a big deal, you know, she was horrified.

So education is absolutely critical, and we as New Zealanders have an obligation to remind anyone who’s coming to visit us, our friends and our whānau, before they arrive, how important and why it’s important that they protect us and they protect our environment and they protect our economy by making sure that they do the right thing.

The other thing we’ve heard about is, you know, then what? Being really clear about educating and making sure we’ve heard about the tools that are already being provided and the tightening up of making sure that people understand what it is that they can’t bring in is really, really important. And making that really streamlined. It is tempting, you know: do I go in this line? Do I go in the red line or do I go in the green line? Do I have a conversation about my tramping boots?

Chlöe Swarbrick: Always the green line!

ANGELA ROBERTS: Maybe the red line. I don’t know; I like the red line. Having a conversation and skiting about where I’ve been, you know, snorkelling and tramping on my trips or whether I’ve been really boring and sat in a conference centre. So having a really open conversation and a really healthy place for people to really genuinely put their hand up and ask questions is so much more valuable, and it is so much more the way we do things, and it is so much more likely to deliver what it is that the member who brought this bill to the House really, really wants.

So I encourage all of us to make sure that we are educating our visitors before they leave home and we make sure that we protect our fabulous primary industries and our fabulous flora and fauna, and that we make sure that things are great.

So I do acknowledge the member who brought this bill to the House, the Hon Jacqui Dean, and I do acknowledge the significant effort that all of the submitters made on the bill, because everybody understands and is committed to having a fabulously secure border. And, yeah, the select committee did a great job. You know, we had a good wrangle over how to progress this bill or how to progress the intent of this bill. One of the great things about the Primary Production Committee is that we are very united and clear about who we are working for. And it is because of that that I’m afraid we cannot support this bill.

Dr JAMES McDOWALL (ACT): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT to talk about this particular piece of legislation, member’s bill, in the name of the Hon Jacqui Dean, and I acknowledge her for getting it to this stage in the House. It’s pretty rare for an Opposition bill to go through and for good intentions behind the bill, because those, as other people have spoken about tonight, are very important to protect New Zealand’s biosecurity. I thank the officials and the Primary Production Committee for the work that they did; it ended up being pretty valuable.

As others have stated, this bill amends the Biosecurity Act and the Immigration Act, the latter of those two being in my particular wheelhouse. It increases the fine from $400 to $1,000—and I’ll touch on that in a moment—and it also grants Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) officers the ability to refuse entry or revoke a visa, which is a fairly significant change from the present. Nevertheless, as a sign of good faith, ACT will be supporting this bill at second reading, with the idea that with the committee of the whole House stage, the issues that we do have with the bill could be addressed at that point with Supplementary Order Papers.

A couple of points around the fine increase: as others have said, as a mechanism of deterrence, as officials presented, it hasn’t actually had a particularly great effect. The last time this happened, I think it was a 0.01 percent decrease in offending, which is an interesting point, because it makes you wonder if we should just actually go back to the old fine and lower it; it really had no effect at all, and if it added costs in enforcing the regime. But, nevertheless, that’s not what this bill’s about. The fee increase will affect people. It’s not always like Border Security, which is a great show—it’s not always like that. You know, these are mostly accidental cases where people are bringing things in, and, you know, this penalty would apply predominantly to them. So we’d need to address some issues there. The obvious reputational issues—so if this regime kicked in, then we would need to have a think about how we how we enforce discretion, how we apply that so that it wasn’t too heavy-handed, so that we could somehow look at deterrence but not to the point of making no one actually want to come to New Zealand.

The immigration changes were quite significant, and this is probably the issue that—well, an area that I’ve got more of an issue with, with the MPI officials. The point with this particular consequence is that if a visa is revoked and entry refused, then, you know, that leads to a turn-around or deportation, which could actually lead to an exclusion period from New Zealand. That is a fairly significant issue that we’ve got with the bill, but, again, it’s one that we could address in the next stage.

I also wonder about—I talked about discretion before, and perhaps an unintended consequence there where, if a fine is so high and we’re talking about visa consequences, where a visa could be revoked, you might have a situation where officials are actually giving too much discretion because the consequences are so high and they let more things slide. So it could actually have the opposite effect.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot of good intentions with this bill. As I said before, biosecurity—incredibly important that we look after our primary industries and our horticulture and agriculture. A few issues with this; we could’ve ironed it out, but with that, in good faith, we’ll commend it to the House. Thank you.

CAMILLA BELICH (Labour): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s an honour, as always, to rise to speak in this House, and this bill is no exception: the Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill. As members would have heard from contributions from other members of my party, it’s not a bill that we will be supporting at this stage. I do acknowledge the member the Hon Jacqui Dean for bringing this bill, and I join with other members of the House in acknowledging the good reasons, I’m sure, why she put this bill in front of the House. We did support it at first reading.

The Primary Production Committee did examine this bill, and I’m not a member of that committee, but I do want to acknowledge the chair, Steph Lewis, who spoke earlier on the bill, and the other members of the Primary Production Committee, who did look very seriously at this bill and whether it should proceed. I’ve had a look at the report of the select committee and I can see that there is genuine consideration of whether this bill would meet the objectives that it has in protecting our unique biodiversity in New Zealand, and I think other members of the House have mentioned that this is something that every member of the House would agree is very important, and, indeed, one of our members—Steph Lewis, who I mentioned earlier—had a bill that was supported by this House, the Biosecurity (Information for Incoming Passengers) Amendment Act now, as it was. And that showed, I think, the strength of feeling around the House on how important it is for us to protect our unique environment, because we do face serious threats due to the relative isolation of our biodiversity and the different aspects of our biodiverse environment.

I’ve travelled quite a bit in my younger days, and I have to say that one of the unique things about New Zealand that you first notice when you arrive is how seriously we take Customs and protection of our biodiversity. I think that that’s not something that anyone who has travelled here will probably quickly forget, and it’s often a surprise, I think, to people when they first arrive. Having travelled often back to New Zealand from shorthaul trips and then travelling through Europe, I myself was very surprised at the lack of checks in most other countries when you first arrive—kind of walking off the plane and thinking, “Oh, which line do I go into?”, and just realising that you can just enter without having anything scanned or any declarations or anything. So, I think, sometimes it can be easy for us to forget how unique that is and how, perhaps, the stringent requirements that we have do genuinely come as a surprise to visitors to our country.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have those important checks. Those checks are very, very important for protecting our environment. I support the systems that we currently have, and I know it can be a very difficult job for the public servants who work in Customs and on the border, and the immigration officials, to make sure that all of those stringent checks that we do have in New Zealand are complied with.

So, in terms of this bill, the main aspects of it that we’d seek to introduce are, obviously, increasing the fees. I note in the select committee report that this was focused on in some detail. There is a significant rise in the amount of money that would be required for those people bringing in items which are not allowed to be brought into New Zealand. The fee that they would pay would be significantly higher. That seemed, to the select committee, incongruous with a lot of other fees that we have, and so it was noted in the report at that time.

Hon Michael Woodhouse: The majority.

CAMILLA BELICH: For the majority of the select committee. I’m sure that there are members opposite who will speak to the minority view of the select committee in due course.

However, that was one aspect that was due to change had this bill been successful through the House; another aspect of it was visa denial. It was proposed, as I understand, in this bill, that a refusal of a temporary visa would be done by biosecurity officers, which is not currently, as I understand it, how it works at the moment. Obviously, the Immigration Act allows immigration officials quite wide-ranging powers in terms of visa refusal. So one of the aspects of the bill that was examined by the committee and found to be wanting was that change in who would be enforcing the denial of a visa, and perhaps an acknowledgment that that was quite a significant power that would be given to a biosecurity officer.

Another aspect that I just wanted to touch on is the existing powers that we do have in New Zealand, which are quite stringent. So if you knowingly bring in a prohibited item, there are, as I understand it, existing provisions in the Biosecurity Act which would give it harsher penalty than if you did so in an accidental manner. So there are also, for people who are well versed in our immigration laws, quite clear penalties for knowingly bringing in something. So what we’re really talking about here, and I’m sure members who are in the Primary Production Committee will correct me if I’m wrong, is the unknowing, mainly, bringing in of an item, as some other members have said, a lunchbox or an apple at the bottom of the bag that people haven’t remembered about, and bringing in quite high—and, I think, the majority of the committee found that they were disproportionately high—fees for that type of penalty. I think most members of the House would have seen when celebrities have done this.

In New Zealand, there’s often been stories about so-and-so celebrity came in and received a penalty; they forgot that they had a piece of fruit in their bag. We would have probably heard stories of other people that we might know, or friends of friends, who have maybe done the same thing. This is not necessarily behaviour which is intentional. We know that when you come to New Zealand, you have to come on a very long flight before you arrive, most of the time, unless you’re coming from—well, even Australia is relatively long in terms of the flights that people take, and other countries, or people that live in Europe take between countries. So we do know that, often, people will be tired, they will be fatigued, they may have had to take extra food on the plane due to people in their family having different dietary requirements. I know that my children refuse to eat food on the plane, so I often have to bring food for them to eat on the plane to prevent them from not eating for a very long flight. So it’s a situation that I think we can all understand. These are not necessarily people who want to do ill to New Zealand, and that’s why we have such stringent biosecurity laws in place already.

I think that the fact this was supported at first reading, and the thoughtful, considered report of the select committee, unfortunately for the member, determining that this would not be something that the majority would support—but I do want to commend, again, the member for bringing an important issue to the House. We’ve seen that sometimes bills do not succeed, but that does not necessarily mean that the work and consideration that was done on them was in vain. I’m sure that when, or if, biosecurity laws or legislation relating to that, or members’ bills relating to biosecurity laws, are again examined—as I’m sure they will be at some point by either this House or by the Government—the thoughtful consideration of what was proposed in this will be of extreme value in whatever law or legislation or changes to the rules will come next.

So I do again want to commend the member for bringing this important issue to the House, but, unfortunately, it’s not one that we can support.

JOSEPH MOONEY (National—Southland): Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak on second reading of the Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill, and I want to commend the honourable member Jacqui Dean for bringing this member’s bill before the House on a very important issue that has been important for a long time, and will continue to be important for a long time to come.

I do want to acknowledge and thank the members of the Primary Production Committee, who have considered this, and the Clerk and the staff, members who have done a lot of hard work on this, and the officials who have provided helpful advice on this member’s bill. We’ve been trying to get to the right place on it, and we haven’t quite got there, but I just wanted to step through a little bit about what this intends to do.

So the purpose of the bill is to better protect our border by deterring people from bringing in illegal biosecurity risk items, such as fruits or other food, by increasing the immediate fine, and giving officers at the border stronger authority to refuse entry. In some cases, pre-COVID-19, there was and certainly will be again in the future once international travel increases more—and we’ve certainly seen tourism coming back in a strong way this summer, though still nowhere near the level it was pre-pandemic, but it still has been a strong season in parts of the country. Prior to the pandemic, there had been a 35 percent increase in arrivals of people entering New Zealand every year, and this bill aimed to try to strike a balance in terms of just increasing the penalty for bringing in fruit or other food that could place our primary sector at risk.

I just want to note the importance of both of those sectors because, prior to the pandemic, tourism had a total annual expenditure of $41.9 billion, so a very, very significant and important contribution to the New Zealand economy. Obviously, that’s come back a very long way due to the last almost three years that we’ve had since the borders closed in 2020. But it has come back in a strong way, particularly in parts of New Zealand that haven’t been affected by the bad weather that, unfortunately, particularly the North Island has experienced. Bad weather is probably an understatement as it’s been the Cyclone Hale and then Cyclone Gabrielle, which have had a huge impact on local communities and, certainly, on the tourism industry. Though I would note that Tourism Hawke’s Bay is getting out the message that they are open for business, that there’s a lot of great opportunities there. It’s a place that people should be visiting, and I just want to note that because there have been a lot of stories about Hawke’s Bay being very badly damaged, and certainly parts of it have, but there’s a lot of Hawke’s Bay that’s open for business, and want to see tourists and have a lot of great opportunities. So I’ll make that note there.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, speaking of opportunities, it’s an opportunity to speak to the bill now.

JOSEPH MOONEY: Thank you, Mr Speaker, which brings me back to this bill and the primary industry exports. We’re forecast to hit a record high of $55 billion in this year, and so this bill is trying to protect those exports by ensuring that people who come to New Zealand declare their fruits or other food which could place those industries and those exports at risk, which are hugely important for New Zealand. In particular, the National Party was of the view that the infringement fees for failing to clear a biosecurity risk item upon entry to New Zealand be increased from $400 to $1,000, and conviction fines for the same offence increased from $1,000 to $2,000—just trying to get that message across that there can be risks in fruit.

Look, I’ll just maybe share a little anecdote from my childhood, and risks you don’t even know you have in your fruit. I remember eating an apple and a wasp being on it and getting stung in the mouth as a kid—maybe an example towards the extreme end of the scale, but there can be risks in fruit, and something that we want people to be aware of and to think about when they’re coming into the country. So we want people to be very, very aware that it’s hugely important for our economy, that our economy is not stung by an organism coming into the country. [Interruption] Thank you, Mr Woodhouse. We don’t want our economy being stung and being badly impacted. So that’s the point of this bill, and I’d like to commend the Hon Jacqui Dean for bringing this very important issue to the forefront of all our minds and the opportunity to have a debate on it tonight in the House. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

RACHEL BROOKING (Labour): Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to speak on the Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill. I just heard a heckle, which was, “Which fruit is the riskiest?”

Hon Member: Tell us. Tell us.

RACHEL BROOKING: I’m not going to be able to tell the members what fruit is the riskiest. This is not the heckle I was expecting today.

This is the first opportunity I’ve had since today to speak in the House other than asking a question, and so I do wish to, of course, acknowledge Jacinda Ardern leaving us here at Parliament, and her very wise words in her valedictory speech, which, of course, interrupted this bill. Good to hear her talking about climate change and environmental issues in that speech.

I was able to speak on the first reading of this bill, and in that first reading the Hon Jacqui Dean, who, of course, is the member for the beautiful Waitaki, spoke—of course, it being her bill—and I also spoke. And Joseph Mooney will also know, as will Michael Woodhouse, who I see over there, that the Otago Daily Times (ODT) pays close interest to the speeches that Southerners make. In the first reading, there was some discussion of how we look at the column that appears on a Saturday morning, but a number of our speeches referred to this. Then I want to let the House know that Jacqui Dean and I won the bipartisanship award from the ODT on 24 December last year, because, of course, at that stage, everybody was supporting the bill.

As the other speakers have said, we all know that our primary production industry is incredibly important to New Zealand—forecast for the year ending in June is $55 billion expected to be traded in exports in food and fibre, and that is, obviously, a huge amount, and this is important to the whole country. We also know that biosecurity risks can do a lot of damage to that, and we’ve seen that in the past. Of course, we are an island nation, so we can be a fair bit more feisty on biosecurity than other places can be.

In the first reading debate as well, there was a lot of talk of the Border Patrol TV programme; we heard mention of that just before by Angela Roberts. I did say in the first reading speech, though, that I was intrigued and I would watch it. I still haven’t done that, but will aim to do that.

This bill, then, is doing this good thing about biosecurity, caring not only about that $55 billion but also, as the member said before, about New Zealand’s ecology as well. Of course, the Hon Jacqui Dean has been the spokesperson for conservation for National for some time, and I know that’s something she cares deeply about.

But, unfortunately, when it went to the Primary Production Committee, it seems that rather than just the focus on biosecurity, which we’ve had some discussion about, the bill does, of course, amend the Immigration Act. The select committee, in its report, does then discuss how the Immigration Act and the Biosecurity Act both at work together at the border. Of course, the immigration offences are important and detailed in immigration laws, and that’s not something that I can pretend to be an expert in; I do tend to be more on the biosecurity side of things. But the select committee said, “Well, what’s going to happen here is that those immigration officials, those border officials, they might have to say no to somebody because of a biosecurity breach. And those immigration officers, they are not necessarily trained in biosecurity, and so those provisions don’t link nicely together.” That’s covered on page 3 of the report.

Of course, also, there was mention of the increase in the infringement fee. This is very much within the purview of the Biosecurity Act. You’ll see that the bill is very short. There are but nine clauses, and clauses 3 and 4 relate to the Biosecurity Act. Clause 4 was going to replace $1,000 with $2,000. And then in Part 3 there are amendments to the Biosecurity (Infringement Offences) Regulations, and that’s clauses 8 and 9. The other clauses—5, 6, and 7—relate to the Immigration Act. So at clause 9, that regulation was going to be amended from $400 to $1,000—and my time is up.

VANUSHI WALTERS (Labour—Upper Harbour): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Like my colleague Rachel Brooking, I’ll begin my contribution by recognising the extraordinary contribution of our former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, her extraordinary speech, but also the extraordinary legacy she leaves.

I wasn’t part of the Primary Production Committee, who considered this bill, but I would like to thank them for their work. In my eyes, again, this is a demonstration of a bill where the select committee went in genuinely looking at the issues in front of them. So our thanks to Steph Lewis, the select committee chair, and also to the members. I want to also recognise Jacqui Dean, the member who brought this bill to the House and who I had the pleasure of getting to know on an Inter-Parliamentary Union trip. I do think that the values that sit behind the reasons why she brought this bill are very, very important. And so I hope that she doesn’t consider me a pest for speaking against it in this instance.

So, to cover some of the points within the bill, the proposal within the bill is that the biosecurity officers are granted power or discretion to refuse entry on a breach of biosecurity rules. But as members have pointed out, immigration officers already have this power. And in fact, my view is that it wouldn’t be appropriate for a biosecurity officer to hold these powers. If you will, there’s a legitimate boundary or border, if you like, between the powers of a biosecurity officer and an immigration officer. The other issue that the committee legitimately identified is that putting biosecurity in primary legislation and not putting other factors that immigration officers must consider when they’re exercising their powers appears to elevate biosecurity above the other issues that immigration officers need to consider—things like declaring goods or smuggling as well.

I just turn briefly to the proposed increase of financial penalties. And my sense, in terms of the member’s intention, is that this isn’t about laying a trap, if you like, for individuals who are entering the country. The intent is to draw people’s attention to the scale of the cost to them. Now, unfortunately, the select committee did find that there was no evidence to suggest that the increase would change behaviour of erroneous breaches. I understand that in terms of the analysis of the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), penalties were ranked the seventh most effective tool for declaring or disposing of risk goods. According to research conducted by MPI, the three most effective motivators were an understanding of why items are considered a biosecurity risk, a greater understanding of what must be declared on arrival, and an understanding of how to pass through New Zealand’s borders more quickly.

So ours is a system that isn’t intended to be a snake in the grass, if you like. It is not about surprising people with unfair penalties; the penalties must be reasonable. If we are truly intending on growing compliance, it really is about information provision but also creating opportunities for people to dispose of those goods when they realise that they are carrying them with them—so the signage, the bins that we all see so frequently at the airport. There might be a case to increase those, because that’s the practical way; if you like, providing a moth to the flame kind of solution that creates practical ways that people will be drawn to, in terms of disposing those goods.

Now, I’m not a member of the select committee. However, I did read the select committee report and I read the National Party minority view. I agree that we must put in place the measures that we can so that we don’t get an incidence of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). And while I’ve possibly played lightly in some of my contributions earlier today, I do think that is a serious issue that will impact New Zealand severely should we get it.

However, I then went from the National Party minority view to the MPI website, where I looked at the measures they’re currently putting in place to respond to the FMD outbreak in Indonesia. What they’re doing at the moment is they’ve changed some of their measures to ensure that we’ve got a more robust biosecurity response to people coming through Indonesia. So passengers arriving on direct flights from Bali, for example, use a dedicated biosecurity lane. This is all fairly new; I understand this only happened since March this year. They also face additional risk assessment questioning from officers and may be directed to undergo baggage searches; it’s required for their footwear to be disinfected. The measures have been really built on the enhanced measures that were put in place in July last year, so there are practical things that biosecurity are doing to respond to the increased risk.

Advice is also provided to those who are heading to Indonesia. They’re advised to wear close-toed shoes for their arrival back to New Zealand rather than open-toed. That’s really aimed to speed the process of disinfecting their footwear, coming back into the country. That advice and communication is absolutely happening by the New Zealand Government. There are other pieces of information provided to people travelling. I’m speaking specifically to Indonesia, but there’s no reason that this sort of system can’t be replicated to other countries where there are FMD outbreaks. They’re told to avoid wildlife and livestock such as cattle, pigs, or goats. They’re told to avoid visiting farmland or rice fields, and, again, to make sure that their footwear and clothing is free from dirt on their return. They’re specifically told to avoid bringing back risk items, including animal-based food products and skulls or untanned leather souvenirs, and they’re also told to stay away from New Zealand farms or livestock for at least a week after arrival. These are practical things that will really make a difference.

I understand also that there are specific questions asked of passengers when they’re coming through biosecurity, if they’re coming via Bali or Indonesia. They include: “Have you been in contact with any wildlife or livestock such as cattle, pigs, or goats? Have you visited any farmland? Do you have any shoes or equipment contaminated with soil? Do you have any animal products such as food items?” Some things are best done by law. I’m a lawyer and now a politician, so I do agree with that. Some things are best done by policy or, if you like, our “Customs”—the things we put in place to ensure that there are practical steps that we can take to truly, in an evidence-based way, ensure that we’re protecting New Zealand’s borders.

I’ll finish, just by mentioning that not only are we taking those proactive measures but there’s also an FMD task force, which I’m sure that members opposite will be aware of, set up in 2022. It’s not an ideal, but it’s a task force based on providing solutions should we ever have a case. It’s nothing we want; it’s nothing we want across this House. But what we do want across this House is evidence-based solutions to ensure that we protect our border.

I cannot, unfortunately, commend this bill to the House this evening. But I do commend, again, the member who has brought the bill to the House. I do think her intentions were entirely in the right place and I do think that this is one of those issues where we should be working cross-party to ensure we protect New Zealand borders. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Here’s my first grizzle—actually, it’ll be my second grizzle, apart from the terrible puns that are being put out tonight. As a dad, I would be proud of those as dad jokes. But I’ve been in this place nearly 15 years, five of them as a Minister, so 10 years in that time, being eligible to have a bill in the member’s bill ballot—haven’t had a single one drawn out; not a single one. There are some people in this House that are very greedy—well, very lucky, I suppose—David Clark, Louisa Wall. Annette King, I think, didn’t have a single one in her 33 years—she would be with me. But when we do, it’s quite something—it’s quite something—because it’s usually something that the member feels passionately about, and certainly Jacqui Dean feels passionately about the conservation and biosecurity of this country. I think it was Rachel Brooking that reminded us that the food and fibre sector is $55 billion.

You know, we’ve had incursions. We’re never very sure how they come in, but painted apple moth, fruit fly, we’ve got the stink bug—what was that called? A marmorated stink bug—and Vanushi Walters has just talked about foot-and-mouth disease. The impact of these incursions could be devastating, not on human and animal health alone as a direct consequence of those incursions but the ongoing economic and social harms that they cause, because the earnings from those exports pay for our hospitals, they pay for our schools, our social development programmes, our law and order. We thrive on primary industries. For Ms Walters to talk about the risk that this bill elevates biosecurity above other matters for determination under the Immigration Act I think is certainly not the way I would describe it. I think what Jacqui Dean was trying to do was to bring biosecurity up to a common level with other grounds for refusal of entry, denial of visa, and deportation.

So I like the idea, and I’m sure, as Steph Lewis said, the Primary Production Committee was diligent in doing its job, but the question really seems to have been asked through the lens of: is the bill in perfect shape? The answer to that was clearly no. It was pointed out in the general policy statement that the commentary talked about giving biosecurity officers a stronger ability to refuse entry to New Zealand when, in fact, that power only vests with the Minister of Immigration or his or her delegated decisionmakers, warranted immigration officers. It was just a minor technical error. The bill itself was correct in providing powers to immigration officers, not biosecurity officers. Those are things that could be fixed.

So my question, my suggestion, to the committee isn’t what was right or wrong with the bill but how could we get the bill into a shape that would make it better and make for better law. It seems like people have talked, including officials—I don’t want to sound critical, but the departmental report is quite revealing, I think, in the sense that they’ve taken a technical look at this and said, “Oh, well, section 109 of the Immigration Act is probably not the right one to fix.” Well, the right one to fix was probably section 22, which lists the immigration instructions that can be written, because it is true that most of these guidelines aren’t set in primary legislation but are set in instruments called immigration instructions. So let’s make a change to that. And it wasn’t.

But I think the most telling part of this, kind of, ambivalence about the bill, despite it being an incredibly important area, was this kind of inference that—well, it wasn’t an inference; it was stated by a couple of speakers—the Immigration Act already provides for the denial of entry for people on biosecurity grounds. OK, so why did the select committee not ask officials to say: if that’s the case, please tell us how many individuals under current law have been denied a visa or refused entry into New Zealand on biosecurity grounds? I looked in the departmental report; it wasn’t there, and I wonder if the committee asked that question. It would’ve been an obvious one to ask. If the Immigration Act provides these powers and they are elevated to a point where everybody knows about them, has a single person ever been denied entry on those grounds?

Maybe Jacqui Dean’s attempt is a belts and braces approach, a “for the avoidance of doubt” amendment to the Immigration Act, but I think it’s a pretty good one. It’s a good one to the degree that the biosecurity risks to this country are so great—and our biosecurity officials, frankly, do a great job—that it should be made more prominent; I don’t think more prominent than the other aspects, other criteria for refusal of entry, but just to put them on a par, and if we don’t support this bill, we lose the opportunity to do that.

You know, I also watch border control shows from time to time, and one of the things that really grinds my gears is when I see two types of border stop by biosecurity officials. One is the inadvertent, accidental—as Camilla Belich talked about—sandwich in the bag, the apple at the bottom of the suitcase, you know, after a long flight.

Hon Paul Goldsmith: Mandarin.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Mandarin?

Hon Paul Goldsmith: A friend of mine had a mandarin.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Really? Did it cost him $400?

Hon Paul Goldsmith: It did.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: It did. Right, excellent point, Mr Goldsmith. Contrast that with the deliberate offender with suitcases full of produce coming from source countries. They’re often fruits, they’re often animal products, bird products, feathers, traditional medicines that they may think that they can’t get here in New Zealand. The suitcase is open and there is a plethora of illegal product in there and biosecurity risk, and the fine, Mr Goldsmith, is how much?

Hon Paul Goldsmith: $400.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: $400—$400 for a mandarin; $400 for a deliberately concealed high-risk suitcase full of product. Maybe $1,000 per fine was a little high. Maybe the answer is to reduce the fine, not raise it, but make it clear that the scale of offending needs to be reflected in the infringement that is given, because I don’t agree that—well, I do agree with Vanushi Walters on the point that she said that the fine is about the seventh most important or effective barrier, but that’s possibly because it’s so low. The Ministry for Primary Industries were very interesting in their departmental report where they talked about the last time the fine was raised, in April 2010, that compliance meandered along and then significantly improved; the number of infringements and detections dropped. Now they’re saying that wasn’t due to the fine because it was too far after the change. Well, I’m not so sure that’s the case. But the point is I think fines as a deterrent and the promotion of that—you go from Singapore to Malaysia, and what’s the first thing you see, a sign at the border that says “death to drug importers”. I tell you what, that’s a pretty big deterrent. You’d have to be pretty, I don’t know, dumber than a bag of nails to ignore that sign. Several thousand dollars of fines at the border at Auckland Airport or Christchurch Airport could well be a significant deterrent to people who wanted to take a risk and then decided it wasn’t worth it financially.

So I am disappointed that we haven’t, as a House, found a way to say yes to this. I think everybody agrees on the goal: improve our biosecurity, reduce the risk to human and animal welfare, and to our economy. Let’s not forget, as I say, this is what pays our bills. I commend Jacqui Dean for her passion on this, but I think there was a way for us to get to a place where we could have done both, and I’m disappointed that we’re not going to be able to tonight.

ANNA LORCK (Labour—Tukituki): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I tend to agree with Michael Woodhouse on how serious biosecurity risk is to our country. In fact, I would put it up there as one of the greatest challenges we have, to continue to protect our borders as a duty to this country. And I know this, because it’s been a passion of mine since I worked, a few years back now, on the foot-and-mouth New Zealand campaign for educating New Zealanders and farmers when there was a foot-and-mouth outbreak in the UK. One of the jobs I had was to travel with a UK farmer around the region, talking to farmers about what the experience would be like if foot-and-mouth came to New Zealand. What that taught me was that education is one of the greatest ways to protect our borders. If passengers and people know about the risks to New Zealand, we have a far better chance of protecting our borders.

Another job I had on that was to go to Auckland Airport, where they had the beagle dogs who were trained in sniffing out fruit in the airport. And during that time, there were signs everywhere showing up where people needed to be reminded about remembering to throw out those apple cores before they came through our borders. Now, those dogs were a very good way of educating passengers to be able to see, “Oh, those dogs are reminding me that I’m not to take through anything that could be a biosecurity risk.”

When I first read this bill, I looked and went, “Oh, great. I think this is fantastic. We’re going to tighten our penalties and increase our penalties, and it is coming to the Primary Production Committee, which I am on.” I was looking forward to hearing the submissions, but, unfortunately, Cyclone Gabrielle struck, and I was back in the region when the submissions were being heard. So as the last speaker in the House tonight, I’ve been able to pick up a lot on what was said in the submission process, and I was surprised to find that an increase in fine did not see a decrease in the number of people being prosecuted. And I looked at that, and I thought, “Well, that sort of actually backs up that education is the best way to keep us front and centre of protecting our borders.”

We’ve talked a lot about protecting New Zealand’s $55 billion primary sector industry. And over the course of this Government, we have invested a huge amount of taxpayer money right into protecting our borders. In fact, it’s one of the investments that I think, across the House, people would agree is a good investment, one that we should continue to do, because heaven help us if we ever had an incursion of brown marmorated stink bugs—brown marmorated stink bug, is that right? I hope I’ve said it right. And we do have to put up the strongest armour to do so. Again, when I think about education, if you spot one of these brown marmorated stink bugs, you need to know what it looks like, and you need to know where to report it.

During the speeches tonight, we have heard some interesting stories, and none will stick further in my mind but that from Joseph Mooney, who happened to eat a wasp on an apple. Man, that must have hurt if it stung him. By crikey, it’s no wonder it’s become a childhood memory. In fact, one could use that in an advertisement for educating around biosecurity, so “Let’s just make sure you leave those apples and wasps behind: wasp what you’re thinking.”! Now, that would go down a treat, wouldn’t it?

Hon Member: There’s a stinging ring to it.

ANNA LORCK: A stinging ring to it. Gosh, it’s all coming to me. I don’t even have to think about them. They just bring them on. And then, of course, we had foot in mouth—in mouth—rather than foot-and-mouth.

Look, the intention of this bill was there, but we’ve seen that a fine would not see a significant decrease in the number of people bringing through apples by mistake, or more intentionally as we heard from Mr Woodhouse. But I would like to pick up that if someone does deliberately make an incorrect or false declaration to try and conceal items, the consequences are more severe. In fact, if someone is convicted of deliberately smuggling, they could be fined up to $100,000 and be sentenced to up to five years in prison. So if we were to take that suggestion of Mr Woodhouse about harsher penalties—perhaps saying, at our borders, that you can face five years in prison if you deliberately smuggle in something illegal into our country that has a biosecurity risk—then that would work as well.

So, all in all, everybody in the House agrees we must keep biosecurity risk and biosecurity education front and centre when travelling into New Zealand. Again, I can say to Steph Lewis, who was speaking prior to me, how we had put through a bill of hers not that long ago around ensuring we have more videos on planes and have them, perhaps, in other languages as well, so that when passengers are watching—

Hon Michael Woodhouse: They’re already there. They are there.

ANNA LORCK: Yes, that was the legislation. That’s the sort of deterrent—education, education, education.

I must say another way of making sure that they learn early is when you are travelling with your young ones, as I have done myself, and you suddenly find that they are about to go through Customs and they open the pencil case and out comes the pair of scissors. I remember this well where Livia had taken her pencil case to go on a trip with us, and suddenly she lost her scissors because she’d forgotten to take them out of her pencil case. Now, I don’t think she’ll ever forget that, because she was quite attached to those scissors. She uses them quite a lot, and it’s cutting into my memory! Yes, that’s right. But it’s those things that if you learn once when you are young—just like that wasp in the mouth—I think that you would never bite back. So, on that, I commend this bill—I don’t commend; we’re voting against this. We’re voting against this bill. But on that, there you go.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill be now read a second time.

Ayes 46

New Zealand National 34; ACT New Zealand 10; Te Paati Māori 2.

Noes 74

New Zealand Labour 64; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 10.

Motion not agreed to.

Bills

Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill

First Reading

Debate resumed from 7 December 2022.

ARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Mr Speaker, kia ora. Talofa lava, mālō e lelei, bula vinaka, fakaalofa lahi atu, kia orana, sat sri akaal, salaam, and warm South Auckland greetings to you and my colleagues around the House. Labour MPs tonight are voting in accordance with our conscience on this bill, and if you’ll allow me my time in the House tonight, I’ll tell you how my conscience and my community has led me to make my decision on how I will be exercising my vote tonight.

This is a policy issue that I care about. The regulation of alcohol and the reduction of alcohol harm in communities was something that I worked on before entering Parliament, and so it was a surprise to me in May 2021 when I was sitting on the stage in the Banquet Hall with the late Hon Chester Borrows, who had worked on this issue during his parliamentary career. Fiona Patten, member of the Victorian Legislative Council; Kathy Errington of the Helen Clark Foundation; and members of the New Zealand Drug Foundation were the packed audience of people who do this for a day job—they get up in the morning to help people recover and move on in their lives from addiction.

I was right beside the member Chlöe Swarbrick, who is in charge of this bill, when she announced that she’d be submitting this member’s bill into the ballot. I love members’ bills; I think they’re an important part of New Zealand’s parliamentary process, and a few weeks before that announcement from my colleague Chlöe, I had had a version of this bill drafted that made the amendments to local alcohol policies that I also care about—it hadn’t done the second part, but that’s the way our parliamentary process works with members’ bills; you’re first in, you’re best dressed.

As member for Manurewa, this is an issue that had come up in my community a lot. I did that because as the local MP, it’s important to my community. That local alcohol policy for Auckland Council isn’t in place now, and that means alcohol sales in South Auckland are completely under-regulated. It’s the wild west; a libertarian paradise, because National’s Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012 let the alcohol industry indefinitely hold up the regulation that communities like mine were promised in the courts by the alcohol lobby.

So I had a version of this bill, and partly the drafting instructions had been prepared by barrister Grant Hewison. I want to mihi tonight to him and the Communities Against Alcohol Harm group that he represents, as well as other community organisations who have campaigned alongside him, particularly the Turehou Māori wardens, who are the Māori wardens for South Auckland. They represent Māori communities who have long been left out of the process for making their voice heard at local licensing committees about where alcohol shops can go, when they should be allowed to sell alcohol, and have consistently had their standing in these forums challenged by lawyers on the other side who did not want to hear them present their evidence.

So I mihi to them. I mihi to Grant Hewison—who has been working on this for years—and also to the local boards who have been working with those groups. Māngere, Ōtāhuhu, Ōtara, Panmure, and Manurewa local boards have been supporting this work that those community organisations do for many years, because they see, as locally elected members of both Labour and National persuasions, that it does not serve the South Auckland communities they represent when the local alcohol policy—that should be in place at the Auckland Council level—is not there.

So, speaking to this bill, why is this change needed? Well, most of the time, alcohol is about celebrating and having a good time. But it’s no fun when those things that should be fun are hurting us. Things like broken bottles in our streets, glass in our parks, latenight drinking on street corners that wakes the kids up, alcohol ruining people’s health and their relationships. We need good rules to rein it in; to make it work for everyone. Even if my colleagues on the other side don’t agree with my policy positions, look, they can respect the hustle of a local MP—and let me tell you, I have been out there. I’ve been to Rowandale Reserve, where the mums of the local early childhood education centre right next door have told me that their playground is being ruined by the bottles that clog it every morning because that park is used as a drinking spot for teenagers buying singles at the alcohol store that is right next to the playground. I’ve been down to Sharland Ave, where it’s a hang-out spot for people who go to buy a six pack and then walk straight down to the reserve and use that park as a place to drink; smashed bottles mean that the local kids can’t use it. Finlayson Avenue Reserve, right by the Manurewa Marae, is regularly clogged with alcohol rubbish that flows into the Manukau Harbour, and during the Auckland floods, there was a pile as tall as I am in the stream of alcohol rubbish and other rubbish that had washed down into the harbour right next to our marae, which is charged with protecting that awa and standing up to the people of our community.

I’ve been to local licensing hearings as a local representative and had my own challenge to my own standing to be able to represent those people who have come to me and said, “We want change here”. In the Manurewa town centre, I opposed a licence for renewal in 2020-21. We negotiated an outcome of that; that was a good negotiated outcome, but the bottle store owners there were able to come to the table and actually have conversations around when their opening hours should be. Local alcohol owners in the town centre told me that they wanted rules to regulate the sale and supply, and that they were only open until 11 o’clock at night on weekdays because the guy down the road was.

You know, if we had working local alcohol policies that the Auckland Council was able to implement, they would have those rules. They wouldn’t have had to have those arduous meetings, and they wouldn’t have had me in the main street with my placards. Sharland Ave: we also negotiated an outcome. Countdown on Browns Road: we negotiated an outcome there, where the opening hours changed—they knocked off an hour of their closing time because the community made themselves heard. Ranfurly Road: in 2022, also a negotiated outcome, and resulted in a community clean-up which brought people together.

But all of this community action puts a pressure on our local organisers. And it puts pressure on to the Turehou Māori wardens who should be able to be out there with their communities doing positive things, not fighting against a system that is stacked against them—standing in cold community halls where they are up against well-paid, wellresourced alcohol lawyers, ripping them apart; putting them in their place, asking them questions which make it very clear that they are not wanted there, that their voices are not wanted in those forums. Well, I stand here today as their local MP and I say, “That’s not on”. We have to change this process. We have to design a process which empowers our communities and which makes our community representatives feel that they are heard.

Now, you know, my thinking around this bill has not come down to whether this bill or the Government bill fixes those processes better. The Government bill, which is in front of the Justice Committee right now, does make those procedural fixes, and it makes them well—and it’s also really useful to have the Government programme behind those changes so we at select committee are able to get the advice that we need to strike that balance correctly, because there are trade-offs to be made here. The submissions that have come to committee have asked us to create that balance and to make sure that we are getting it right, because we also acknowledge that the alcohol shop owners and our community deserve a voice in that process too, that they do not deserve to be burdened by a bureaucratic system. That is the balance that we are able to strike in the Justice Committee when we are hearing the Government bill right now and will continue to do so. And it makes sense to do that as a Government piece of work with the full suite of advisers.

But then there is the second part of the bill, and I commend Chlöe Swarbrick for bringing it to the House. It is something where the evidence is under dispute. I acknowledge the concerns of my colleagues around the evidence that our community organisations—our community sports organisations in particular—will be affected by the way that sponsorship from alcohol is in their clubs at the moment. I have met personally with my Manurewa sports clubs; I’ve been in touch with many of my big organisations, and for my community, I can tell the House that that is not a big problem for my sports clubs. My sports clubs are waka ama, our rugby club, our football club. They have gotten out of alcohol sponsorship because that’s not what they want for the community of South Auckland that they serve. And these are committed community leaders with a heart for their people; that’s why they get into sports in the first place and that’s why they’ve moved out of it. But I acknowledge the concerns of my colleagues around the numbers of sports, and I know that everyone in this House wants to support those community organisations going forward. But for me, given that I want action on this now, that Manurewa needs action on this now, and that our sports clubs tell me that they want action on this now, I will be voting for this bill and I encourage my colleagues to do the same. Kia ora.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to speak briefly on this bill, which the National Party, as a caucus, has decided not to support, and—

Chlöe Swarbrick: Why’s that?

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: —thank you—I will outline the issues as we see it. Now, I think everybody in this Chamber is concerned about the public health—

Chlöe Swarbrick: Some of us are just willing to do something about it.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: —thank you, thank you—concerns around alcohol and the impact that it has in society. Alcohol has been with us for centuries and millennia, and, indeed, most human societies have found some way to partake in drinks along these lines. So it’s brought great merriment and also great social problems as well, and, over time, societies have tried to do various things to have a prohibition against it and fight against it.

So what’s been proposed here is two things: first, the doing away with special appeals around local alcohol plans. The issue that we have here is that we do not stand here and say that the current arrangements work perfectly well—they don’t. It’s been a long, slow, drawn-out, expensive process that hasn’t worked perfectly. Now, our response to that is to say, well, let’s have a look at the process and improve it. The current proposal by this bill is just to throw out the whole process of appeal—

Chlöe Swarbrick: No, special appeals—not judicial appeals.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: —special appeals—and that, fundamentally, rests on the assertion that local councils will always make good decisions that don’t need to be tested in that light. I think the only point I’d make there is that anybody vaguely acquainted with councils throughout this country wouldn’t assume that councils always make the correct decisions.

So that process hasn’t worked well, but we think that this is an overreaction to it and have outlined all that, and we’ve already heard in the select committee process from a Labour Government bill on this in relation to it automatically making the local alcohol plans that a local council passes take effect, including when it comes to renewal of licences. So we’ve heard from people who have had a business for 30 years in an area and have put their heart and soul into it, and under this bill and under the Government’s bill, if a local alcohol plan decided that they’re going to have a sinking lid and not have any renewals, then that business could be shut down overnight, irrespective that they might be the best—

Chlöe Swarbrick: That is not true.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well, they can be. They will not have their licence renewed, and so they will not be able to carry on in their business.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Well, that’s not shut down overnight; that’s community willpower moving through a legal process.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well, and so—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order!

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: What is going on with this?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The member in charge of the bill is passionate about the subject. This is a members’ day, but it’s getting a little close to being a barrage, so maybe just calm it down a bit.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Thank you, Madam Speaker. The second point is in relation to the—so we’re not convinced about that, and we think that’s not an appropriate way to deal with what is a real issue. There is a real issue around community voices being heard on alcohol policy. What was developed by us in 2012 hasn’t worked perfectly, and so our view is that you should review it and amend it so that it does work, rather than going the step that this member has done in terms of abolishing those appeal rights.

The second thing is around advertising, and the point I’ve made to the member and others is that it is a kind of arbitrary focus on sport, although with some equally arbitrary exclusions. For some reason, the young people of this country will be driven to drink by advertising in a rugby game, but they won’t be by advertising in the yachting, which has been excluded. So there’s no logic to that, and when it comes to going to a music event, for example, advertising’s fine, but for rugby, it’s not. There are all sorts of activities where alcohol sponsoring can continue, but she’s just chosen one, and—

Chlöe Swarbrick: It’s disingenuous.

Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well, it’s not. It’s actually—that’s the bill that you’ve drawn up.

So the bill that has been proposed by this member is inadequate on those two fronts, and that’s why we won’t be supporting it. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

LEMAUGA LYDIA SOSENE (Labour): Talofa, Madam Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity to speak on the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill.

Just before I begin my contribution, I do want to acknowledge the former Prime Minister the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern as a daughter and a friend of Aotearoa but, especially, also the Pacific nations.

I’m really delighted to be able to speak on the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill as one of the Government’s representatives. The reason why I’m pleased to speak is—probably over a decade—I in my previous role in the local community, we had a lot to do with mobilising the community participation in our local community of Māngere-Ōtāhuhu in South Auckland. This bill that is before us is a very important piece of legislation. I do want to thank my colleague across the House—Chlöe Swarbrick—just in terms of bringing it to the House. But I can tell you now, after being cross-examined in the district licensing process and being declined and being challenged and going through that process, hearing after hearing after hearing—it was really demoralising.

I want to acknowledge the tremendous support of our community—not just elected members of Auckland Council; I want to acknowledge our marae, our Māori wardens, our kaumātua and kuia, and especially our young people—our young people who are really concerned because in Māngere, in South Auckland, when our team came together as the Māngere-Ōtāhuhu local board, we did not realise the proliferation of these alcohol shops in our local area. What came about was: why is that so? Why is there permitted activity, as such, where a proprietor who has the economic wellbeing can set up shop in your local area and, basically, get away with it?

So I do want to acknowledge all of those people because what happened all those years ago was—I was one of the team—that we had to come together. And in terms of mobilising the community, this bill identifies two parts. But, in my view, the bill does not go far enough. The reason why I say that is because the principal Act, the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012, allowed people with the economic wellbeing to set up shop wherever they wanted to. It was a piece of legislation that was difficult to interpret. It was also difficult to access resources, and for us in the role back then, it was to speak to Auckland Council, who actually tried to shut us down.

I come back to the bill. The first part is the local alcohol policy. When I was under the Auckland Council in a previous role, it was very difficult to try and interpret what the community could do to stop these off-licence shops setting up shop in a local community. But the second thing was: the community who are of heart, lots and lots of aroha, and wanting to do something proactively—how do they stop this? So, just very quickly, Part 2 talks about the sponsorship and alcohol advertising.

Just very quickly, I want to thank the colleague across the House—Chlöe Swarbrick—for the private member’s bill, but the Government made an announcement on 30 October 2022. Minister Kiri Allan—we went around the South Auckland community, we heard a lot of hui with members from South Auckland. I understand that that is before the Justice Committee and that will be reported back in June.

So, on that note, the current draft, or the bill as it is, needs to be improved under the current conditions. I commend the member, but I will not be supporting this bill. Thank you, and I oppose it.

BROOKE VAN VELDEN (Deputy Leader—ACT): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise tonight on the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill at its first reading, and I rise on behalf of my ACT Party colleagues in opposition. I do want to note that this is a conscience vote but all 10 of my ACT colleagues have suggested to me they are voting in opposition, and I am here speaking on their behalf.

I wanted to only raise three main objections to this bill tonight, but firstly, for context, I think what Chlöe Swarbrick has done here has had really good intentions of wanting to reduce harm related to alcohol, but just having a good intention does not always mean that it will be a good policy, or it will be a good outcome. I want to raise three points, and the first is natural justice, the second is the reality of sports clubs up and down New Zealand, and the third is a little hint of hypocrisy.

I’ll start with the first. I think it’s important that we shouldn’t remove natural justice in law just because you don’t like a certain product, or you don’t like a certain type of company. In clause 15 of this bill, it removes part of the appeal process by removing section 170(c) which requires the licensing authority to consider and determine appeals against elements of draft local alcohol policies. There are many Kiwi families and Kiwi small-business owners who work really hard to create a company and create a business, and they could end up in a situation where a lot of hard work that’s gone into their business is for naught because the local council decides to change plans, and there’s nothing that they can say about that.

I think it’s really important that where businesses are affected they do have a right to appeal, and a right to actually have their say. I think it’s important no matter what that company is—whether it’s alcohol or otherwise—it’s important that we have natural justice in our laws. There are consequences of this bill on our small businesses and members of our community, and they have a right to their voice.

The second is about the reality of Kiwi sports clubs. This bill wants to ban a lot of sports advertising, especially where it comes to alcohol advertising at sports, and it says in Part 2 that it would prevent any sponsorship of sport in New Zealand by alcohol brands, going from affecting players to teams to venues to broadcasting to merchandise. A lot of sports clubs in New Zealand rely on fundraising, but they also rely on money from organisations giving them sponsorship, and one part of this that we wholeheartedly oppose is the idea that, within six months, small community organisations and sports clubs will have to find new ways to raise funds when they might be in the middle of a sports season and find that they don’t have any revenue for next year to keep their club open and operating because this law says that within six months of coming into force those clubs wouldn’t be able to take alcohol advertising.

That’s going to have a real-life impact on our small clubs that operate in our communities, and that will have a detrimental effect on people who genuinely want to give back to their community, and people who genuinely want to have good sport in their community, for their entire family.

Number three is a really important point here in new section 396H, inserted by clause 17, which says there’s an exemption for participation in certain events, notably what seems to be boats participating in international races when New Zealand is a port of call for that race. It has been raised by many of my ACT Party colleagues that it seems that Chlöe Swarbrick wants to ban alcohol advertising in all areas of sport except that one little part that’s right in the heart of Auckland Central—the America’s Cup. We oppose this bill.

JAMIE STRANGE (Labour—Hamilton East): I’m not sure that the previous member, Brooke van Velden, has actually read the bill—but I’ll get to that in a moment. I appreciate the opportunity to take a call on this bill tonight: Chlöe Swarbrick’s Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill.

Members in this House will, I’m sure, know by now that I tend to vote conservative on issues like this. I voted conservative on the euthanasia. I voted conservative on abortion, primarily because my mother was offered to abort me in in 1975—she obviously didn’t go through it! But it’s very personal. Alcohol is also an area that it’s very personal for a lot of people. So it’s absolutely right that this should be a conscience vote. I’d like to acknowledge that process around conscience votes. I think it’s a really important part of our democracy.

There are a couple of aspects to this bill. The first part is around abolishing appeals on local alcohol policies in order to provide proper local control over alcohol regulation. I’m the member of Parliament for Hamilton East. Hamilton City Council met with Chlöe Swarbrick, and they unanimously voted to support her bill. That’s quite a rare thing, to be honest, in terms of Hamilton City Council, because they know that they need an aspect of control to be able to listen to and protect their communities.

Now, the previous member from the ACT Party spoke about natural justice. The reality is that there is still a right to a judicial review if the process is flawed. In the same way that anyone has the right for a judicial review on anything council does—any by-laws. So that argument is not very well-thought-out, unfortunately. I’ll get on to the second part soon.

In terms of my personal view—in terms of Part 1, I wholeheartedly support the member on that. As I said, I’ve certainly heard it from my community—the amount of harm that has been caused by alcohol outlets in the community, particularly in lower socio-economic areas; you know, the amount of outlets is really not supporting those communities well. Councils are spending millions of dollars fighting supermarkets on this. Auckland Council has spent well into the millions trying to fight supermarkets, simply because the council don’t want the outlets, but big business does. At times, big business, I think, needs to have a look at itself—and in this area, I think it is an area that they particularly need to do that. It’s fairly obvious, the harm that alcohol causes in our community. I feel like I don’t even need to really give examples, because we all know that.

Now, the argument: people will say, “Well, look, it’s personal responsibility. It’s personal choice. People just need to learn to manage their alcohol.” The reality is that a lot of people can’t manage their alcohol—and that’s just the reality of it. They do need the support. They do need the option actually taken away from them.

I acknowledge that the members opposite are voting as a bloc. I am disappointed with that—I am disappointed. Look, every member needs to make up their own mind in this House, and it is disappointing, to me, when a party does decide to vote as a bloc on a conscience issue. I personally don’t agree with that, but obviously each party can do what they want to do.

So the first part of the bill, I absolutely support the member; the second part, I’m not as strong as the member is on this. I’m a patron of a football club: Melville United Football Club. There you go, I’ve just put Melville on Hansard! It’s a fantastic football club; came fifth in the national league last year. Look, clubs do need finances. That’s the reality of it. Clubs are very dependent on grant funding. However, I do acknowledge that grant funding and alcohol does seem to be waning. When you look at our club, we regularly apply for funding with the likes of pokies, we apply for funding from the TAB; we don’t apply for funding from alcohol, or very small amounts of funding. So, I mean, look, I could be wrong, and I stand to be corrected by this in the House, but I do sense that alcohol funding is very much dying away.

However, I don’t really support the member on Part 2, but I will support this bill because I think it needs to go to the select committee where they can work through it. So I commend the member and commend the bill. Thank you.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Sometimes we have debates in the House where, because a party or individual doesn’t support the solution to a problem, it’s claimed that the member or party is in denial that a problem exists. I hope we don’t get to that in this debate, because I acknowledge the member for bringing this bill to the House, and I agree with her to the degree that the local alcohol policy (LAP) part of the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012 isn’t working as intended.

Now, Arena Williams kind of sheeted that home at the feet of the previous Government, and I think that’s probably half right, but I think we put some sections into that Act where it was—for example, appeals by people who might have had a greater interest than the general population. I think it was intended that that be the communities—not far-off, distant communities, but the communities into which the policies were being developed. It’s been interpreted quite the opposite, and the alcohol industry has used that, I think, in a way that is not becoming.

Speaking to the Government’s bill that seeks to change the local alcohol policy, which, again, for considered reasons we didn’t support, I criticised my own home city of Dunedin for this kind of approach of throwing up their hands and saying, “We can’t do anything.”—well, they can’t do more than they have. Actually, they can, I believe, and they can be more strident. We’re aware that there are a significant number of councils around the country who haven’t even implemented a LAP, 11 years after the bill was passed. So I’m not denying there’s a problem, and I think we need to improve the Act, but to remove the rights of appeal, in the way that Ms Swarbrick’s bill will do, I don’t think is the right approach.

Now, in respect of sponsorships, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and some members of the House will have had presentations made to them by researchers, including at the University of Otago, who have put cameras on kids and observed the number of times their field of vision comes into contact with alcohol sponsorship or branding. The results are quite startling. I can’t remember, but there were tens or hundreds of thousands of images presented to kids that, consciously or subconsciously, they get them—well, I won’t name the brands, but the beer sponsor on the poster for the Hurricanes or the Highlanders. It’s ubiquitous and it’s everywhere.

The question, then, is: is one causing the other? Firstly, is there harm? Yes. Is it going up or down? I’ll come to that in a minute. Thirdly, is that exposure the cause or a cause? So, firstly, yes, there is harm, and it disproportionately affects our young, and certain socio-economic and ethnic elements of our community.

Is that harm going up or down? Well, we’re drinking, on average, 25 percent less than we were on the 1970s and 1980s, according to the best data I could find.

And thirdly, it kind of renders the last question slightly redundant, because there’s a correlation-causation paradox, which is, I don’t know, for example, I could plot the rise of one-parent families positively correlated with the rise in the use of fridge magnets. One is not causing the other, and that’s on a positive correlation. What we’re having in the sponsorship is that there may be an increased exposure to sponsorship images at the same time as our overall alcohol consumption is going down over the same period of time. So is one causing the other? I’m not convinced. Is it appropriate to try and find alternatives to alcohol and gaming sponsorship? I think so. Should the State mandate that it is a door that then becomes closed to community sports clubs? I don’t think so.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Broadcast sports, Michael.

Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Well, you can say that, but that’s not where it’s going to stop. I think the point is still the same. If consumption is going down at the same time as exposure to images is going up, are we solving the right problem? I’m not convinced we are, and, for that reason, I can’t support the bill.

INGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): It’s a real privilege to be able to contribute to this thoughtful debate, and I hope that my contribution is useful. First, along with acknowledging the sponsor of this bill, Chlöe Swarbrick, I’d like to also acknowledge my colleague Lemauga Lydia Sosene for all the work she’s done over many years in this very vexed space, I would say. The reason that I am supporting this bill is because I feel that, fundamentally, it redresses an imbalance over processes relating to access to justice, and there’s three elements to that.

First, really, when I look at the bill around local voice and localisation, I do think it’s really important that local communities set their own rules and that they do have voice and that they are not subdued into silence through a lack of means to be able to challenge appeals that are lodged against them through the local alcohol policies. National, when they introduced the legislation, said it would be a level playing field, that hasn’t been the case. So that’s my first point.

Secondly, around alcohol advertising, as the Hon Michael Woodhouse has said, there’s evidence to show numerous exposures to alcohol advertising, and, I would say, the normalisation to many of our children—and I attended the same presentation that Chlöe gave to members, and I really thank her for providing a strong evidence base for the argument that she had. There are members of my own party, for whom I have great respect, who have said that the problem is around the void in sponsorship, but, actually, we had the same debate around tobacco sponsorship many years ago, and, also, there is evidence to suggest that perhaps some industries or sectors like the IT sector would be very quick to fill that void. So I cannot accept that argument.

Thirdly, just around timing, the Government has got the Hon Kiri Allan’s alcohol harm reduction work as well, but I am also really mindful that this debate has gone on for a number of years, many years, and there is always a reason why the urgency of the problem, that has been presented to us by communities both in South Auckland but also in Dunedin—and this bill is supported by the Dunedin City Council. The urgency is something that really speaks to me, and so if I felt that we were able to perhaps get the urgency that we need through a Government bill, I would not necessarily support this one, but I can see that the member who’s presented this bill is acting with urgency, has done her due diligence, has presented really cogent arguments. I also know that the South Auckland communities have been calling for this for years and years and live with the impacts of children walking to school and being confronted with up to five or six alcohol outlets on their way, even, to school, let alone on their way home. That gives me a sense that, really, the time for us to be dealing with this is right now; it cannot wait. So that weighs on me as well.

The other aspect is the Dunedin City Council. I am the member of Parliament for Taieri. I take very seriously the views of people in my electorate, and the fact that the council themselves have come out to publicly support the member’s bill gives me great confidence to know that they have done their own due diligence and research and that they too wish to carry the voices of the people that they represent.

So, in summary, I just want to really acknowledge the member Chlöe Swarbrick for the really detailed research and work that you did, the extensive lobbying. It’s not easy lobbying and corralling members. This is a very fraught area, and, in different circumstances, I might vote a different way, but for all the reasons that I’ve outlined, I wish to give this bill my support, and I really want to thank members across the House for the really considered, thoughtful, and respectful debate that we’re having on this matter tonight. I commend this bill to the House.

MAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I rise to speak on the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill in its first reading here tonight. The National Party is taking a joint view in this conscience issue and will be opposing this bill. As we’ve heard from speakers on this side of the House, we oppose certain aspects of this bill, one of them being the special appeals process and the fact that it’s not going to be appealable; any of the decisions that are made won’t be appealable by the applicant. We just find that that is an imposition on natural justice, and they’re the sorts of things that a real democracy enables. I did hear some of the earlier speeches talking about how big players can afford to go and make these appeals. The right to justice is not balanced against people’s ability to pay; it is about the outcomes that we seek.

But, of course, we do all acknowledge the serious harm that can happen to some people in our communities as a consequence of exposure and, of course, the drinking of alcohol. But that is, for some people, a problem; it is not for the whole of the population that this is a problem. And the problem we have got with this piece of legislation is that it dumbs down the population and treats everyone at the lowest common denominator. I think we need to remember that, actually, we have adults in this country that can make up their own minds and that are not easily influenced because an alcohol sponsor advertises in broadcasting sports. We think that grown-ups should be able to make up their own mind.

But there is a fixation in this bill about focusing solely on broadcasting at sports games. And I don’t know why that particular aspect has been singled out, because there are other aspects. Like, for instance, we’ve just had one of the biggest festivals on the West Coast; it’s the Wildfoods Festival. It’s renowned for its big sponsorship, but it’s also renowned because it’s one of the most enjoyable festivals that you can attend, and I might be a little bit biased in that, but there is a huge amount of sponsorship that goes on and one of them is from an alcohol company. It’s no particular one, because they actually bid for that right. So we have to wonder why there are things like festivals that are singled out or not included in this. And the other one, of course, is the concerts, where concerts are sponsored perhaps by advertising for alcohol and they will display the advertising at those events.

The exposure to the public of those is also equally as intrusive, if you like to think of it. But then we have the other aspect, of course, which is the internet, especially online gaming or, you know, other search engines that you might like to go to, which also can have alcohol advertising. So you have to wonder—well, I certainly had to wonder—if the broadcasting and advertising at sports events is just going to be the thin edge of the wedge and we are going to see the slow creep towards the banning of advertising and sponsorship making its way into a lot more aspects of our lives.

I heard my colleague the Hon Michael Woodhouse talking about how alcohol has been around for millennia, and it has. We’ve had alcohol dug up in the pyramids, with the tombs down there. I mean, people have been exposed to it for a very long time. But I have to think that there are some “mummies” that think that they have to dictate to the rest of society, and that’s just not the case. But I think the biggest irony of this bill is the sponsor, Chlöe Swarbrick, who wants to ban alcohol advertising in broadcast sports—this is the very same person that thinks it’s OK for marijuana to be legalised. So a drug inducer, a mind-altering drug is OK but alcohol sports advertising is certainly not OK. I think that the double standard at play here is such an irony. And I think that if we’re going to all be treated like nuns and priests, the sponsor should probably start in her own backyard. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

HELEN WHITE (Labour): I really wanted to take a call on this matter, and I value the opportunity I have, as a party that has honoured the conscience vote rules here, because we will have different opinions on this, and it’s very important we’re respectful of those opinions. They come from really deep places in our own experience.

My experience was with a family member who was very addicted to alcohol and it made a huge difference and it harmed people around me. I have thought deeply about this issue—probably as a consequence. I know the reality of addiction, and I also know the reality of the normalisation of something that can harm you in this way and how insidious it is.

So I want to go first to the second part of this bill, which is about the sponsorship for children’s sports. This kind of issue is really about the normalisation of something that we don’t want our children to think is normal. We want them to take this really seriously, because it’s that kind of normalisation that leads them into a vulnerable situation where they become addicted to something. It isn’t just about adults making adult decisions; it’s children becoming adults and hurting other people around them, including other children. It’s that serious, and I’ve seen it, I’ve had that experience in my own life, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. So that’s a really important part of this bill for me.

One of the parts of the debate here has been: well, is it something where there will be a vacuum and something else will come in and fill the gap, etc., or will it, in fact, leave a vacuum in children’s sport? I had a discussion with a friend recently who said to me, actually, what they used to do for their softball club was they used to walk down the main street and get sponsors from the hardware store or from the supermarket. That I’d be happy with; that kind of response to sponsorship will fill this gap if necessary. I don’t want to see sport being used as a conduit to our children and also to those who are watching those children. I don’t want it to be normalised. So that’s Part 2 of the Act.

I want to talk about Part 1 of the Act, which is the local control, and I want to talk about the central issue that we’ve talked about tonight, which is: is this a natural justice issue? I think we need to think really seriously about this, not just here but everywhere. I am a big, big fan of natural justice, but I’m not a fool. I know when that term is being used to actually squash what is actually going on, which is power imbalance, because if you put a bells-and-whistles “natural justice” around everything all the time, what you end up with is a way of big corporates actually doing quite a lot of damage in our society because they can afford the lawyers. They can tie up the system, and it’s not a myth. There are six-week cases on alcohol hours, etc.; little communities do get overwhelmed, poor communities get overwhelmed by this stuff. This is really serious.

So it is horses for courses here. We are intelligent human beings. We can work out the difference. We can design systems where local communities can have their say. And, yes, sometimes that means curbing the amount of natural justice. But what’s natural justice about? It’s about justice. And there’s ways and means of doing that. And sometimes justice needs to be found in a different way. And this is actually a response to that.

So though I love the work that the Labour Government has done in response to this issue, too, it isn’t here yet. So I’m going to vote for Chlöe Swarbrick’s bill, and I’m going to vote for both parts very happily.

I just wanted to talk about the difference between this and the bill that we just had from Ian McKelvie, because in my first speech on this, I said that I’m actually not a particularly judgmental person. I don’t mind making things easier for people in social situations, etc.; that is not the core of what is going on here. The core is the harm that’s going on. And our duty as lawmakers is to look at a situation intelligently and not chase the rabbit of “natural justice” or find the excuse that we are just not being pure enough. This is practical, this has to happen, and I am going to support this bill. I commend it to the House.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): Point of order, Madam Speaker. I seek leave to table the many letters that I have written to Christopher Luxon, Nicola Willis, and the Hon Paul Goldsmith about the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Leave is sought for that purpose. Are there any objections? There are objections.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): Speaking to bill, what an interesting range of debates that we’ve heard this evening. I want to thank my colleagues for engaging on this, largely, pretty fulsomely and with a very strong evidential and personal experience basis.

I guess, to bring this back to what we’re talking about here, we’re talking about a drug. We’re talking about a drug that is the most widely consumed drug in our society—80 percent of adults consume it; 20 percent of them to quite harmful ends. Alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen. It is involved in 26 percent of suicides, and half of suicides for young people. What we’re talking about is a substance that, like all substances, the Green Party believes should be addressed not with a criminal prohibition approach but with an evidence-based, harm-reduction approach.

So just to outline the spectrum of regulation that’s available to us as policy makers when we’re talking about substances—substances which members across this House have acknowledged have existed for time immemorial, whether they are alcohol, tobacco, or cannabis. At one end of that spectrum, you have criminal prohibition, which, of course, is exemplified in this country by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975—that absolute dog of a law which continues to result in very unjust ends. At the other end of the spectrum, you have a complete legal free market. At both ends of that spectrum, you have the extremes of harm, because you have a situation where you have entities—whether they are criminal organisations or commercial organisations—that are incentivised to exploit vulnerable communities in order to make a quick buck, to shift or to sell as much of that product as is possible.

So how do you pull it back from those extremes? Well, you do it through sensible regulation. I’m so glad that the member Maureen Pugh raised the spectre of cannabis, because this is what consistency with legally regulating cannabis would look like. I would invite members of the National Party to look at the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill, which, of course, went to a vote in 2022, which had very specific limitations, and, in fact, prohibition, of sponsorship and advertising of cannabis, because we recognise inherently that there is always going to be a problem when you have any substance that has the potential to cause harm—for that substance to be super-powered by commercial interests to be glamorised and normalised, and, therefore, sold to the biggest extent that is possible. So this is consistency with that evidence-based approach on cannabis.

I just need to respond to a number of the points that were raised by members—particularly members of the Opposition—because I am so gutted. I am so gutted because they are, frankly, in such bad faith. I have tried to engage, and it’s the reason that I sought to table and release those many, many letters that I sent over a year and a half, trying to engage with successive National Party leaders and successive National Party spokespeople on the issues of police and justice and health, and I was stonewalled again and again and again. I finally got to sit down with the Hon Paul Goldsmith, after badgering the National Party leadership, and responded and answered with evidence to all of the points which he reiterated tonight. So that’s why I’m so frustrated that this stuff is in such bad faith, because it is just consistently being parroted not from a position of actually trying to, as the Hon Paul Goldsmith spoke to, deal with or care about this issue, but from a place of just absolute dogma and partisanship. If you care about this stuff, then take it to select committee and have the opportunity to fulsomely unpack it.

So we’ve had the point raised about concerns with regard to special appeals, as many speakers have outlined. We’re talking about special appeals; we’re not talking about removal of judicial appeals. We’re talking about something that is baked in as a power imbalance for commercial entities in this country. It doesn’t exist for vaping. It doesn’t exist for tobacco. It doesn’t exist for gambling or any other form of social harm. It exists especially because you guys baked it in in 2012. Here’s the chance to fix it.

Then we had the issue of natural justice raised—which, again, we’re talking about special additional rights that exist in the space of alcohol.

We had the issue of hypocrisy raised by Brooke van Velden. Again, frankly I’m gutted that was raised, because I said exactly to her, just before she got up and spoke, that “I hope you don’t raise the same point as has been put out in your press releases.”, because in 2014, the ministerial forum commissioned by the former National Government recommended exactly this form of drafting.

This is a can that has been kicked down the road again and again and again. The evidence is clear. I hope that we get 49 votes from members of the Labour Party, because, guys, we can do it—let’s do this.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The subject of this vote is being treated as a conscience issue. In this case, I know there are members who want a personal vote, and I’m prepared to accept one. This is the process we’re going to follow: I’m going to put the question, I’m going to announce the result, and, at that stage, any member can ask for a personal vote. The question is that the motion be agreed to.

A personal vote was called for on the question, That the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

Ayes 30

Noes 89

Motion not agreed to.

The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 29, Noes 85.

Bills

Housing Infrastructure (GST-sharing) Bill

First Reading

BROOKE VAN VELDEN (Deputy Leader—ACT): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I move, That the Housing Infrastructure (GST-sharing) Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Finance and Expenditure Committee to consider the bill.

Every week, ACT MPs are in the community, hearing from Kiwis at public meetings, local shops, at street corners, or visiting local businesses, and we hear many concerns that we bring to Parliament, and our job is to represent everyday New Zealanders. We hear concerns about rising levels of crime and rising costs of living, but there is one concern that I hear often, and it’s whether young Kiwis will ever have the chance to own their own home and feel like they have a future in this country. That’s a real concern that my member’s bill addresses. From Northland to Southland, I’ve met Kiwis who’ve said, “I’m not sure I will ever own my own home.” Too many people put more and more money aside every week and feel like they get nowhere closer to putting an offer on a home. They can’t see a future where they have a shot at the Kiwi Dream. We hear young Kiwis and their families say that it might be better for them to move to Australia, and that is saddening.

We have a housing crisis in New Zealand. There aren’t enough homes for the number of people who want and need a place to live. My bill, the Housing Infrastructure (GSTsharing) Bill, would fix this. It provides an environment for more housing development so more Kiwis can have access to a warm, dry, affordable home. Over the past few years, we’ve seen successive attempts to address the housing crisis, from the KiwiBuild failure—the Government’s flagship promise to build 100,000 new homes, which failed to get off the ground—thousands of Kiwis placed into motels, the Government’s attempt to tilt the housing market away from speculators and towards firsthome buyers by increasing costs to landlords and tenants, and the Government teaming up with National to create a new law that would allow three three-storey homes built on any section.

Everyone—and, I believe, everyone—can accept that there is a significant housing shortage in New Zealand. What is causing this frustration is the lack of enduring solutions being proposed to actually fix it. None of those policies that I mentioned come anywhere close to addressing the housing crisis and making it easier for builders to build or Kiwis to have stability and a future where they can own their own home. That’s because they’ve misdiagnosed the problem. They don’t address the problem that’s preventing houses from being built.

The housing crisis is an infrastructure crisis. Infrastructure is expensive. Councils don’t have the funds for the vital infrastructure needed to connect new homes to the community. Councils face poor incentives to build. Every new development that goes in involves costs to existing ratepayers to provide new roads, water, sewerage connections, which acts as a disincentive for councils to approve new homes and subdivisions.

The Housing Infrastructure (GST-sharing) Bill works like this: the Government would share 50 percent of the GST revenue of a new house with the local council that issues the consent to help them cover the infrastructure costs associated with new housing developments. This would provide the environment for local councils to approve more housing consents and enable builders to build with less delay. The GST-sharing scheme is estimated to deliver over $1 billion every year to support local development - enabling infrastructure. But councils that consent more will get more—it’s that simple. ACT has realised for a very, very long time that the housing crisis is an infrastructure crisis, and the idea behind my member’s bill, the Housing Infrastructure (GST-sharing) Bill, is that it would change the incentives that councils face for building and development.

The only time that you get prompt service from a council is when they’re issuing you a parking ticket. They’ll come to you anywhere, anytime, because there’s money in it for the council. Imagine how many consents councils would issue if there was money in it for them. I’ve spoken to too many builders to count that say it takes longer to get consent to build than it actually takes them to build a home. Imagine how much faster the process would be, and how much faster a family could make a new house into a home, if councils faced the right incentives to allow for building and development.

This is an idea whose time has come. ACT has been campaigning on this bill since 2017, and a recent poll, released within the last few months, showed that an overwhelming number of Kiwis support it—70 percent support versus 15 percent opposition. I’m not surprised by that at all; Kiwis recognise practical solutions are needed to address the housing crisis that we face.

Currently, councils have to come cap in hand to the Government and hope to get a grant for infrastructure from the Housing Acceleration Fund. The problem with this is that it means that central government, essentially, has total control over what projects get the go-ahead and which ones get put on the scrap heap. The Government shouldn’t be picking and choosing winners; councils should be allowed to set plans that work for the local community and to plan for the infrastructure for that community.

This transfer of funds from central to local government that my member’s bill proposes would be a long-lasting solution that would ease the imbalance that local councils face. Central government currently gets all of the benefits, while the local councils stomach all the costs, and that is wrong. Under my bill, every time a new home is built in the area of the local council, they would receive funding for the vital infrastructure to connect that home to the community—and that is the right thing to do.

We know that there is a need for better infrastructure. We also know that councils don’t have the money for it. Councils are crying out for the funding to connect homes to the community, to have money for that vital infrastructure. If we care about getting more houses built faster for more Kiwis to live in, we need real change. We need this bill to become law so that Kiwi homeownership dreams can become realities.

Parliament tonight has the ability to support a practical solution to free up infrastructure funding and get houses built for the next generation. Other parties here should vote in favour of this bill. It would be a vote for better housing for the next generation. We don’t need more central planning; we need incentives to consent more developments. Because there are Kiwis living in motels, struggling to compete for rentals, and finding the dream of homeownership slipping away, I am bringing this bill to Parliament to create a better environment for building and investment so that everyone can have a better future in New Zealand, and more Kiwis can know that they can achieve the Kiwi Dream.

I commend this bill to the House, and I hope and urge all of my parliamentary colleagues to support it. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

SHANAN HALBERT (Labour—Northcote): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s my pleasure this evening to speak on the Housing Infrastructure (GST-sharing) Bill. The points that my colleague Brooke van Velden raised tonight—there are some good ones in there. We all have hope and aspiration for young people to buy their first home. We all acknowledge that there is a housing crisis. The infrastructure crisis is somewhat something else, but I acknowledge the point there that there is a dire need for better investment in infrastructure, particularly in cities like Auckland.

While it’s well intentioned, this bill, this bill is an example of how the only thing that National and ACT delivered in housing between 2008 and 2017—the only thing that they delivered—was a housing crisis. Despite the eye-watering annual cost and price tag, this bill would only deliver the wrong types of homes in our city and in our community. And that’s only if the funding ends up being spent on infrastructure, while this Government is already providing much-needed targeted investment in essential infrastructure, like roads and pipes and the $1 billion infrastructure package in the Infrastructure Acceleration Fund. [Interruption]

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! Members may not want to actually hear the speech, but I would like to be able to hear what the member is saying. Other members will have an opportunity to make their own speeches soon. Thank you.

SHANAN HALBERT: Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s good to keep us all awake at this time of night. And while our approach under this Government is about investing in essential infrastructure, like roads and pipes, it’s important that, as we do such things like this Government with record consents in cities like Auckland, the thing that our community does ask for us is, alongside that, to ensure that we have good infrastructure.

I have one of the best housing stories in the country, in Northcote—one of the best housing infrastructure stories in Northcote. And I can acknowledge that, yes, the housing policy of Northcote development did start under Helen Clark and, yes, I can acknowledge that it was held by Bill English and by John Key for seven years. For anyone that lived in Northcote at that time, that project was on hold, because what we know—and under that policy, we all acknowledge it now and all take certain ownership—is that the story of the Northcote development, which in my view is a great housing development, is great community design, and it has the desperate infrastructure that growth in Auckland desperately needs. But what we know is that that development—1,700 new homes for families in Northcote; that’s from 315 old, tired State houses that were demolished and that have been rebuilt. We’re about a third of the way through the development. Alongside that, not only have we built 350 new State homes for families in need but we’ve also built another 250 for first-home buyers on the open market, and we’ve still got hundreds to go.

But what my community tells me is, yes, that infrastructure is important. And it’s great that the Opposition is highlighting the importance of better infrastructure for growing places like Auckland. This is one of the conversations of why we’re talking about water infrastructure reform. One thing that we all agree about is that we need to invest in the pipes, that when we build houses and we go into the hundreds and into the thousands of new homes, actually we do need to have good water infrastructure. And that’s exactly what the Housing Acceleration Fund has done.

I’ll use another example in Northcote, because it’s such a great national story in housing. What we saw in the floods at the start of the year is the sad case of Wairau Valley. Sadly, we lost lives, because we have poor, ageing water infrastructure in Auckland that did not cope with a significant weather event. In the Northcote development, thanks to the Government’s acceleration fund, we have fitted new water infrastructure that, within 24 hours, the floods had raised the amounts of water in the area and, within 24 hours, that water had disappeared—that water had disappeared out of the community. That’s the difference of great water infrastructure.

And just last weekend, we opened Te Ara Awataha, which is the stream down the middle. It opens up the whole community, and the ecological matters that used to be below the ground have now been brought out as the centre of the design of the Northcote housing development. It backs on to new schools that the Government has built: Onepoto Primary, $19.5 million; 12 new classrooms for Northcote Intermediate. And on the back of that are new classrooms that come into the beautiful ecological areas of our awa in our backyard.

Now, I share this story, because the things that we do agree on is that we want to build houses. And I’m really proud that our Government is doing that, particularly in Northcote. And you’ll hear me in this House, when people talk about a housing crisis, I’ll say, “Come to Northcote, come to Northcote, come to Northcote.”, because I am proud that it is one of, if not, the best housing developments and designs and communities that this country has ever seen.

And so the Opposition, the Nats, can take some acknowledgment that they have contributed to that, but the reality is that this Government has not only built houses, not only increased the number of consents for houses in Auckland but we’ve also invested in the pipes in the ground. We’ve also invested in the schools around it. We’ve also invested in our awa. We’ve also invested in playgrounds for our tamariki to play in. That’s the level of planning that’s required.

I acknowledge the good intention of the member that’s putting this forward, but if we sliced that off—and it’s not just about saying “let’s build more houses”, because we all agree on that, but it’s about how do we ensure that that infrastructure is allocated to what is needed. And we know, when it’s privatised, that money isn’t always used for what is needed. That’s one of our biggest fears of water infrastructure reform: that it’s privatised. We don’t want that to happen. We want to ensure that it’s retained in New Zealand ownership.

I’ve rattled on. I have to say once more: the Northcote housing development—and if anyone in this House hasn’t been, I’m happy to host you. The design elements, the infrastructure, the forward-thinking, the short amount of time that this Government has been able to accelerate the number of houses to be built, both for families in need, for first-home buyers, and for those on the market has been significant.

Sadly, tonight, this isn’t quite the bill that we’re looking for. I’m confident that we’re getting on with building houses. I’m confident that we’re getting on with building communities, and we need to push on ahead. I do not commend this bill to the House.

SIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): Labour’s track record on housing is one of incompetence and failure. That last speaker, Shanan Halbert—his speech was an absolute disgrace in terms of what is a track record of six years by this Government that has failed at every nail they’ve attempted to put into a piece of wood to build a house in this country. At every opportunity, they’ve missed the nail—they’ve missed the nail—with that hammer and they’ve hit their thumb, and they’ve hit that thumb every time. That last speaker’s speech, while at times was an eclectic bit of a laugh, was a complete waste of time and actually forgot about the bill that’s on the Table.

So let’s have a little chat about the bill on the Table, the Housing Infrastructure (GSTsharing) Bill first reading. Brooke van Velden, well done on this bill—a sensible piece of pragmatism, which is sorely missing in this House. I get the feeling that while on this side of the House, National will be supporting this bill because there is a little bit of sensibility left in this House, the other side continue to reinforce their incompetence when it comes to housing. So we’re going to talk a little bit about this bill and we’re going to let it go for a little while, but not too long. But I think it is important to recognise that the backdrop in which it is required is that we need some fundamental levers that are actually going to address the underlying problem that we face in regards to encouraging the increase in housing in this country.

This bill—while National are supporting it, it is fair to say that we do think that there are some areas of improvement, but I’m sure that’s what the select committee process will go through. One of the challenges of a bill such as this is that it can be challenged around “is it targeted enough in regards to what it’s trying to achieve?” The reality is that while GST is collected, as are all taxes, those taxes do fund Government expenditure. So while we use that mechanism to collect the revenue, there is a quid pro quo in terms of where that revenue is spent. While this bill articulates that it will be spent on infrastructure, the unintended consequence or the consideration around that is what doesn’t get funded as a result, and I think it is just more around the mechanism to acknowledge this is how this bill will go.

The other aspects which I think the select committee—on the basis that this probably isn’t going to see the light of day, based on what we heard from the other member. Sorry, Brooke, but it sounds like it isn’t. But the other consideration is obviously in regards to some of the definitions around—you know, with Statistics New Zealand, in terms of determination around some of those numbers.

There’s also some elements in regards to Kāinga Ora. I think, for the record, Kāinga Ora’s probably in the same basket case as this Government’s housing policy, and I think we probably agree on that. I mean it is a basket case of an organisation. It’s got 60 years of unmanageable debt, modelling shows that it’s, basically, insolvent, and it’s got no hope in hell in terms of being able to repay its $28.9 billion debt within the next 60 years. So the challenge with that organisation, when you try and get that part of a mix of a solution, is you’ve got a few issues on the horizon to deal with.

But, irrespective of that, I think the principle is sensible—we need to invest in more infrastructure. We actually need to be able to remove the bottlenecks in bureaucracy to allow growth and to allow us to build more houses—a lot of red tape in that regard, and this Government are pretty good at putting more red tape to block that process. But never fear, in 202 days from now, hope is on the way. On that basis, National will be supporting this bill and we wish it all the best.

INGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): I’m quite surprised, actually, that the National Party is supporting this bill, because I thought that they had a little bit more of a sophisticated understanding of the problem around housing and also what the solutions will entail, and I think the speech by the previous member, Simon Watts, has highlighted, actually, that they have taken a position without possibly knowing the contents of the bill or really understanding what it is that they’re supporting.

My main message to the member is: congratulations for having the bill drawn, but there are no silver bullets for housing. This bill attempts to be a silver bullet and it simply isn’t tenable. It’s $1.3 billion worth of taxpayer money that is not going to help solve what is a complex problem and where significant progress is already being made. The member Brooke van Velden talked about incentivising, and I agree that there does need to be the correct incentives. Whether it’s the councils that need to be incentivised is a really interesting proposition and I wonder if the politics is playing into that in terms of appealing to councils at a time when some of them may be feeling uncertainty around water infrastructure, and this could be a bit of a political ploy, because, actually, the ingredients for a comprehensive solution to the housing problem involve having enough land, which has been a decades-long issue, having a resource consent system that works and is pragmatic and is timely, having adequate infrastructure and also a tax regime that actually provides the incentives as well in terms of allowing enough supply of houses. And that’s certainly something this Government has addressed.

So the previous member did raise some issues himself, actually, around why this bill won’t work. One of them, as he said, is that it wasn’t targeted. It’s also impractical, and it doesn’t have decent outcomes; in fact, it’s got quite poor outcomes. One of the reasons that it is not targeted is it’s just not geographically nuanced. The housing scenario around New Zealand—there are different factors for different areas and it’s OK to say, “Let’s incentivise councils.”, but, actually, what will happen with the market is that developers and councils who want to take advantage of this will go to where the upfront costs are cheaper and that is going to disadvantage small councils. So, yes, as my colleague Shanan Halbert said, it’s going to be great for Auckland. It’s not perhaps going to be great for places in the South and the communities that I serve down in Taieri.

It’s also impractical and, as Shanan Halbert said, it’s not necessarily all going to be spent on infrastructure. There’s nothing in the bill that says that the money collected will go into infrastructure, and that’s a real problem. The poor outcomes as well—it’s hugely expensive and, really, if we look at what is already happening, the progress that we are making is more cost-effective than this $1.3 billion of expense, and that is through the direct investment that this Government is making through the Housing Acceleration Fund of $3.8 billion, but also the systems reform, and that is comprehensive reform around water infrastructure, around transport, around resource management, and around the build-to-rent incentives.

That is why this Government has embarked on such a comprehensive suite of reforms, because we know that there are no silver bullets. Actually, what is needed are incentives; it is access; it is the supply side around land; it is around the demand side which is providing the changes to the tax system, including the reduction of the tax deductibility, interest deductibility, but also then carving out exemptions so that there is incentivisation around building to rent. That is exactly what this Government has done.

The Minister of Finance has always talked in this House about having a number of different levers that are required to deal with the housing crisis. We have seen those come into play. We are looking at statistics at the moment which show that house prices have dropped significantly, and that is good for first-home buyers. That is taking the heat out of the market. That’s what we want to see. A silver bullet approach, like the one being offered by the member, while it may seem very attractive in a superficial level, simply isn’t going to cut it.

So, as I said at the beginning, I’m surprised that National is supporting it. I thought that they may have interrogated the bill before them more thoroughly. On this side of the House, we certainly won’t be supporting this bill—I don’t commend it.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): E te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. Interesting to hear some of the points raised across the House on this Housing Infrastructure (GST-sharing) Bill. I just want to take a moment, as is custom, to acknowledge Brooke van Velden for the luck of the draw.

But I do want to say that the reason that the Greens will be supporting this bill tonight is not because in any way, shape, or form, it’s a silver bullet for the housing crisis; I think that that would be absolutely absurd and preposterous for any of us to pretend that any single piece of legislation, even the housing-enabling legislation which we passed through was, by itself, going to solve the housing crisis. The reason that the Greens are supporting this is because, actually—similarly to the bill that was being debated just before, the Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Bill—successive Governments have commissioned successive reports, reviews, inquiries, and advice that have told them precisely the same thing, which is that local government in this country does not have adequate resources to get on with the mandate that we, as a Parliament, have actually provided them and continued to expand.

So, to give some context to that, I don’t have the most recent figures, but, off the top of my head, I recall from 2016—when an annoying 22-year-old candidate was running for the Auckland mayoralty—the average amount of spending that occurs at a local government level as a proportion of local and central in the OECD is approximately 30 percent at that local government level. Here, in Aotearoa, though, it’s less than half of that, at 11 percent. You can see where we get to this issue of those infrastructural deficits and, actually, some of the issues that we’re currently grappling with in Tāmaki-makaurau with the slash-and-burn budget proposals from our current administration, who are pointing out that the only meaningful lever that they have at their disposal to increase their revenue is to increase rates. And that, of course, is a constant annual battle that local governments across this country are forced into. And, of course, what we’ve seen by virtue of the democratic deficit at that local government level—that is, not enough people engaging in that process—is that, time and again, local governments have largely and on the whole, in a trend, chosen that austerity pathway. That, of course, has been a real problem for the infrastructural deficit that we’re seeing today, and that’s the general premise or reason that the Greens are supporting this bill, because we will support the progression of any idea, any premise in this Parliament that takes us to a place in select committee where we can robustly discuss the need for more resourcing at a local government level.

The fact that this is limited just to housing, and obviously just to GST sharing, to that respect, I think needs to be expanded, and I think that we should be looking at, actually, potentially—as has actually been proffered by other parties in this House in the past—GST sharing, on the whole, when we’re looking at potentially all forms of goods and services and transactions that occur in certain territorial authority areas.

But just while I’ve got the ears of the House and we’re talking about housing development and the opportunity of where and how to build—and also, actually, the point of infrastructure—I need to use the example of Auckland, because obviously it’s my city, it’s my home, but it’s a perfect example of where we’ve done housing and infrastructure terribly for the past few decades—terribly. So terribly, we’re one of the largest cities in the world land mass - wise, and there’s been a doggedly concerted effort, for some reason, for the past few decades to expand out into all of it, to decimate our critical soil for food resilience. Not very smart or forward-thinking there. It’s not very good in terms of our carbon emissions—obviously, transport has the largest emissions profile in Tāmakimakau-rau, but it’s also the largest growing emissions profile nationally, but also for infrastructure: the more that we continue to perversely sprawl further and further out, the further that people are away from job opportunities, from education opportunities, from their families, from their communities—I know this; my old man just moved down to Cambridge because of the housing crisis—but, also, the more expensive it is to build that infrastructure to service those communities and provide those amenities, not the least our front-line emergency services.

So while we’re encouraging this conversation progressing, and we think that the baseline premise needs to be more revenue or resource sharing with local government, because we need to empower them to get on with the mandate that we legislate for, we need to bear in mind that the types of housing and the types of infrastructure that we’ve been building, particularly in our largest city with a third of our population, is just frankly daft, and we can do it a lot better. The Greens commend this bill to the House.

Debate interrupted.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): This debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow. Pō mārie.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.