Tuesday, 30 January 2024
Volume 773
Sitting date: 30 January 2024
TUESDAY, 30 JANUARY 2024
TUESDAY, 30 JANUARY 2024
The Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.
Karakia/Prayers
Karakia/Prayers
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.
Resignations
Golriz Ghahraman, Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand
Golriz Ghahraman
SPEAKER: I wish to advise the House that I have received a letter from resigning her list seat in the House with effect at 5 p.m. 18 January 2024.
List Member elected
Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand—Celia Wade-Brown
SPEAKER: I have received from the Electoral Commission a return declaring Celia Wade-Brown to be elected a member of Parliament to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Golriz Ghahraman from her list seat. I understand that Celia Wade-Brown is present and wishes to make an affirmation of allegiance. Would she please come forward to the chair on my right.
Members sworn
Members sworn
CELIA WADE-BROWN (Green): Ko ahau, ko Celia Wade-Brown, e kī ana i runga i te pono, i te tika, i te ngākau tapatahi me te whakaū anō ka noho pirihonga, ka noho pūmau ki a Kīngi Tiāre te Tuatoru me tōna kāhui whakaheke e ai ki te ture.
[I, Celia Wade-Brown, solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles III, His heirs and successors, according to law.]
Resignations
Hon Rino Tirikatene, New Zealand Labour Party
Hon Rino Tirikatene
SPEAKER: I wish to advise the House that I have received a letter from, resigning his seat in the House with effect at midnight, Sunday, 28 January 2024.
List Member elected
New Zealand Labour—Dr Tracey McLellan
SPEAKER: I have received from the Electoral Commission a return declaring Dr Tracey McLellan to be elected a member of Parliament to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of the Hon Rino Tirikatene from his seat. I understand that Dr Tracey McLellan is present and wishes to make an affirmation of allegiance. Would she please come forward to my right?
Members Sworn
Members Sworn
Dr TRACEY McLELLAN (Labour): I, Tracey Lee McLellan, solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles III, His heirs and successors, according to law.
Obituaries
Sir Michael Hardie Boys
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON (Prime Minister): I seek leave to move a motion without notice on the death of former Governor-General of New Zealand Sir Michael Hardie Boys.
SPEAKER: Is there any objection to that course of action being followed? There is none.
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: I move, That the House express its sympathy and its condolences to the family of Sir Michael Hardie Boys, and pay tribute to the outstanding contribution he made to this country.
The Rt Hon Sir Michael Hardie Boys died in Waikanae on 29 December 2023 at the age of 92. It was with sadness that I heard of the death of this eminent New Zealander, respected jurist, and constitutional expert who guided New Zealand during its transition to an MMP electoral system.
Sir Michael had a distinguished career in law, and practised in his home town of Wellington before being appointed a High Court judge in 1980. He was appointed to the Court of Appeal and became a Privy Councillor in 1989, and in 1994 he was elected an Honorary Bencher of Gray’s Inn, London. He was a council member of the Wellington District Law Society, and president and a council member of the New Zealand Law Society. He was also a member of the legal aid board, and its chairman.
Sir Michael was appointed as New Zealand’s 17th Governor-General in 1996, ahead of New Zealand’s first MMP election. Sir Michael saw public education as vital if confidence in the electoral and political system was to be maintained, and in the lead-up to that election, he spoke widely on the constitutional role of the Governor-General under MMP, having examined proportional representation systems all around the world and overseas. With a distinguished background in the law, his constitutional knowledge and adept stewardship proved invaluable in an extraordinary period of change for New Zealand.
Following his term of office as Governor-General of New Zealand, he continued to concentrate on supporting young people and community groups; Sir Michael was an enthusiastic volunteer in Kapanui School’s literacy programme for over a decade. He was a trustee and later chair of the New Zealand Portrait Gallery as it was settling into its new premises in Shed 11, and at an age when most others would consider retiring, Sir Michael served on the Court of Appeal of Kiribati.
For his dedication to public services, Sir Michael was appointed New Zealand’s first Knight Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit when it was established in 1996, a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George, an additional Companion of the Queen’s Service Order, and Knight of the Order of St John.
For his coat of arms, Sir Michael chose the Latin motto “Certus et Constans”, meaning “sure and steadfast”. This was the motto of the Boys’ Brigade, an organisation I belonged to—a youth organisation—and which Sir Michael helped to establish in Wellington, and which he supported in many various decades as a result.
Sir Michael will be remembered as sure and steadfast in his many areas of service to New Zealand. He brought intelligence and he brought calm thoughtfulness to his official roles, as well as generously giving up his time and his talents to support a range of community organisations. The thoughts of the Government are with Sir Michael’s family, and I hope that they feel incredibly proud of the contribution and the legacy that he leaves New Zealand.
SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to.
Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Leader of the Opposition): On behalf of the Opposition, can I join with the Government in extending our condolences to the family of Sir Michael Hardie Boys and also acknowledge his significant service to the people of New Zealand.
Sir Michael Hardie Boys was a man of firsts. He was, of course, our first MMP Governor-General, selected for that role because of his legal background and training and because of the new and potentially challenging circumstances that a Governor-General under MMP may face—or perceived challenges that a Governor-General under MMP may face—as they were envisaged back in 1996. Now, of course, for the political tragics in the House now, this may not seem as significant, but back then there was great concern about what would happen following our first MMP election if no Government had achieved a majority. Of course, there’s actually only been one one-party majority Government in the entire history of MMP in New Zealand, but there was concern back in 1996 about whether or not this would politicise the role of the Governor-General and that they may have to choose who got to be the Government—of course, it turns out that the man who gets to often choose the Government is still here. But no crisis was ever established, and we have successfully had MMP Governments, and Sir Michael Hardie Boys led us through the process of Government formation not once but twice after our first two MMP general elections.
He was also our first Knight Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit—something many people would be unaware of. His career was underpinned by a pretty common theme: change. He was on the Court of Appeal when the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act was enacted by the Parliament. He’s been described as astute, gentle, fair, and courteous. He did, as Governor-General, on occasion challenge the Government of the day. I want to reflect on one of his final contributions during his departure speech as Governor-General, and I want to read a quote from him: “Our very identity as a people requires us to commemorate our beginnings. How can we build a nation if we treat our founding as unworthy of celebration? How can we properly understand our present or intelligently plot our future without an understanding of our past?” Sir Michael Hardie Boys was a very thoughtful Governor-General who challenged New Zealanders in a very polite and gentle way, and I’m sure that his words will continue to do that well beyond his passing.
Hon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would like to extend condolences on behalf of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand to the family, friends, and community of Sir Michael Hardie Boys on his passing. He was, of course, as has already been noted, the first MMP Governor-General, which was when the Green Party entered Parliament, first as part of The Alliance and then under our own steam in the 1999 election, and so we have that connection to him.
I also want to acknowledge, of course, that an entire generation of voters has been born, gone to school, and come of age and got the right to vote since he left that post as well. So for many New Zealanders and many current voters, they won’t have that connection to him, and so there are some things that I would like to acknowledge at this moment.
Sir Geoffrey Palmer said that Sir Michael Hardie Boys was a judge of rare distinction, a man of enormous dignity and human qualities, and I think that it’s hard to go past much higher praise than that. As the Leader of the Opposition just pointed out, Sir Michael did believe that Governors-General actually had a duty to speak out about the community’s concerns, and he frequently did so on issues such as inequality, family violence, and child abuse, which, of course, are issues that we are continuing to grapple with in this Parliament and at this time.
He was, as we made that transition from a first-past-the-post political system to a mixed-member proportional political system, a very steady hand during a period of time when we had no prior culture of how to do this, and I think it put us in very good stead.
I do want to acknowledge Sir Michael’s wife, Mary Zohrab, and their four children and several grandchildren. He dedicated his entire life to public service, and outside of that managed to fit in interests like gardening and travelling and so on. We here are very grateful for his service.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you, Mr Speaker. On behalf of ACT, I wish to join with other leaders in supporting this motion to offer condolence and sympathy to the family of Sir Michael Hardie Boys, and admiration for 92 years tremendously well lived. As other leaders have shared, he is somebody who excelled to the top of his profession. But he was also somebody who gave back throughout his career, whether that was being a member of the Law Society in early days, as Governor-General, or helping children’s charities. Long after most people had turned to playing bowls at their village, he was out there helping people, helping as he had throughout his life.
As others have mentioned, he helped New Zealand navigate what could have been, and what many thought would be, a tumultuous time in our constitutional history. Perhaps the fact that that period of uncertainty is such a distant memory, rarely if ever thought of or acknowledged, is actually a tribute to how well the Governor-General of the time was able to handle that situation and reassure the public. To those who survive him, we give our deepest condolences, and to his memory, we give our greatest admiration. May he rest in peace.
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): On behalf of New Zealand First, we would like to join the rest of the members of this House to extend our sympathy and condolences to the family of Sir Michael Hardie Boys. You’ve heard that he had a very distinguished career, becoming member of the highest court back in 1989 in this country and being made a Privy Counsellor.
He was appointed as the Governor-General, as you know, in 1996, and that was critical at a time when we were entering a new environment in widened politics and engagement in this country. He set out, in a series of speeches, conventions around Government formation that still hold force today. Indeed, on one occasion in 2020, when we wrote to the then Prime Minister about delaying that year’s election due to the varying COVID alert levels operating around the country, his wisdom helped inform that constitutionally important letter.
He was a great New Zealander, and one who, through his lifetime of service to the judiciary and our wider constitutional system, leaves us a living legacy of measured guidance and constitutional insight. Now, it’s common in this forum, more often than not, for people to get up and say all sorts of grandiose things about a personality, but in this case, on this particular occasion, these words have a special significance. His wisdom will be missed, but we welcome the chance and the opportunity to remember a great New Zealander.
TĀKUTA FERRIS (Te Pāti Māori—Te Tai Tonga): E te Māngai o te Whare, e te Pīka, tēnā rā koe. [To the Speaker, Mr Speaker, thank you.]
Te Pāti Māori also adds its voice to conveying condolences on the passing of Sir Michael Hardie Boys.
Nō reira tākiri tū ko te ata, e kōrihi ana te manu, koia te wā e rere kau nei te wairua, ka whiti ki ōna otinga. Nō reira ko tēnei te mihi maioha, te reo aroha e tukua atu ana i runga i te rau aroha me te ngākau iti.
Ki te whānau tonu o Tā Mikaere, rātou kua mahue mai ki muri, nō rātou te haepapa nui, he pīkau i tēnei āhuatanga, te mate. I roto i te ao Māori, ka tukua rātou ko te hunga wairua kia okioki i roto i te hāneaneatanga o te wāhi ngaro, ahakoa te whakapono, ahakoa te whakapae.
Nō reira tēnei rā te whakatairanga ake i te matenga o Tā Mikaere Hardie Boys, me te tuku i a ia, otirā rātou katoa te rārangi mate o te tau kua taha ake nei, kia oti atu i roto i ngā atawhaitanga o te wāhi ngaro. Waiho mai ko tātou, e hika mā, e pae nei i tēnei rangi, me ngā mahuetanga iho o tēnei rangatira o tātou, e mihi, e tangi mō rātou kua ngaro.
Nō reira tēnā tātou katoa.
[And so the dawn breaks, the birds sing, that is the time that the spirit takes flight, and transcends to its culmination. And so these are my kind regards, and condolences that I impart with compassion and humility.
To the family of Sir Michael, they who are left behind, who have the great responsibility of bearing this phenomenon, of bereavement. In Māori society, they, those who are now spirit, are sent on to rest in the comfort of the beyond, whatever the faith, whatever the belief.
And so I would like to honour the passing of Sir Michael Hardie Boys, and to send him on, indeed all of the ranks of dearly departed of the year that’s passed, to spend eternity in the benevolence of the beyond. Leave us, my friends, that sit here today, and the legacy of this noble leader of ours, to acknowledge and to grieve for those who have passed on.
And so greetings to us all.]
SPEAKER: I thank members for those comments. For those of us who knew him, he was truly a great New Zealander.
Motion agreed to.
Ministerial Statements
New Zealand Defence Force—Red Sea Deployment
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence): Mr Speaker, I wish to make a ministerial statement. Thank you. I rise to make a ministerial statement in support of Cabinet’s 23 January decision to deploy six New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) personnel to support any future military action against Houthi targets in Yemen and the Red Sea, as part of coalition efforts to uphold maritime security in the Red Sea. The decision to deploy NZDF personnel was made in response to Houthis’ actions which threaten commercial shipping, and it represents the commitment of the Government to defending our national interests and supporting our international partners.
The Houthi attacks against commercial and naval shipping are illegal, unacceptable, and profoundly destabilising. More than 50 nations have been affected in more than 30 attacks by the Houthi on ships in recent months. The international community, including New Zealand, has repeatedly demanded the Houthi cease their attacks on Red Sea shipping to no avail. The coalition response is an inevitable consequence of the Houthis’ very deliberate actions in the face of these warnings.
New Zealand’s interests are global, and include vital trade and economic interests. Freedom of navigation is an integral part of New Zealand’s national prosperity and trade security. Disruptions to shipping in the Red Sea and Suez Canal mean higher costs for New Zealanders—in fact, nearly 15 percent of global trade flows through this shipping lane.
The NZDF personnel being deployed will support coalition forces to carry out precision attacks on identified Houthi military targets. They will be in roles in operational headquarters in the wider Middle East region and elsewhere. None of our personnel will enter Yemen. Our personnel are highly trained, and this latest deployment will see them work alongside our traditional security partners to defend our values and protect our vital interests.
New Zealand’s contribution has already been appreciatively welcomed by coalition partners. Such collective action demonstrates our commitment to support efforts to address a serious threat to international stability. New Zealand cannot enjoy the benefits of global security without making a contribution when we can and when it is in our clear security interests. This deployment to the international coalition is operationally very separate, but complementary, to New Zealand’s longstanding and enduring contribution to the combined maritime forces in Bahrain. Both deployments support New Zealand’s interest in the freedom of navigation in the Middle East region.
Finally, I would like to conclude by again acknowledging our NZDF personnel and their families. I know that I speak for all New Zealanders when I state how appreciative and proud I am for their sacrifice and their service.
Hon PEENI HENARE (Labour): Any Government that makes the decision to deploy New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) personnel does not make those decisions lightly. It’s always made with a clear decision-making framework and a clear rationale. I can speak with experience with this particular matter. In my time as the former defence Minister, my colleagues and I made the decision—and it was the right decision—after the fall of Kabul to evacuate. In those circumstances, in August 2021, the rationale was quite clear. Then again, of course, the conflict in Ukraine, where we as a Government at the time decided that we would train, we would also supply, and we would also focus on humanitarian support in that conflict. With that having been said, with respect to humanitarian support, there is the urging of this side of the House for this Government to never turn their back on the need for humanitarian support across the wider Middle East during this time.
The Labour Party has made their position clear: that we should not be involved in this conflict. There’s no UN resolution in favour of such actions, and there are countries in Europe and Scandinavia that are against joining this conflict. We have to be very mindful about getting involved in such conflicts, and I don’t believe that the Government have made a clear case for it. The New Zealand reputation is respected worldwide. This, however, cannot be taken for granted and neither should the New Zealand support. The Government need to have a clear answer for New Zealanders who share in this belief that we should not be getting involved. With that having been said, I acknowledge that there are many of our NZDF personnel who are deployed right around the world, and we wish them safety and all the best in those deployments.
My questions to the Minister will continue to flesh out that rationale and making sure that this Government makes a very clear case for this particular deployment. With that having been said, my first question to the Minister is: given the Minister’s ministerial statement, and I quote, “Cabinet’s 23 January decision to deploy six New Zealand Defence Force personnel to support any future military action against Houthi targets in Yemen and the Red Sea, as part of coalition efforts to uphold maritime security in the Red Sea.” My first series of questions to the Minister is: how long is this deployment intended for? Is it costed, and when can the families of these personnel expect them home; sooner or later?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence): Thank you very much. Very happy to advise the member in the House that the deployment will be finishing before or on 31 July this year, so that’s when, after that, I’d expect families will be able to see their loved ones again, and the costing is around $500,000, and that’s being paid for within NZDF baselines.
Hon PEENI HENARE (Labour): In light of those answers, the Minister in media statements today also said that “we are going to need money in the future.” Does this send an indication to New Zealanders, and indeed to the House, that further NZDF deployments in the Middle East will be in the pipeline in the future?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence): No, the member should not take it as being that. What he should take it as is being that the New Zealand Defence Force has been left in a very difficult position after six—well, actually, the last three years of neglect, and that, clearly, promises that were made by a previous Minister, himself, to Defence around capital funding have not been complied with. So it is outrageous that this debate is being used to attack Defence on funding when, in fact, he’s left Defence in the position that they are. I’m really proud of what Defence has been able to do with what they have, and clearly the economy was left in a state pretty similar to what Defence was.
Hon PEENI HENARE (Labour): Given that the Minister raised that particular matter, is the Minister now, then, committing to all of the capital projects that this Government—the Labour Government in its time—committed to, in the past six years? A second to that, the other question that this House has is: what were the other options that the Cabinet Minister presented to Cabinet for consideration with respect to the US and the UK’s bombing of Yemen?
SPEAKER: Might I just say at this point that while this exchange is free flowing, it is related entirely to the ministerial statement, and all commentary from both sides should relate to that ministerial statement.
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence): Well, I’m sorry but there was so much noise coming from the other side that I actually missed the last part of the member’s question that might have actually related to the statement.
SPEAKER: We’ll hold the time and you could ask the question again.
Hon PEENI HENARE (Labour): Thank you. My question was: what other options did the Minister present to Cabinet for consideration with respect and response to the US and the UK’s bombing of Yemen?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence): I’m sorry, it was in relation to what?
Hon PEENI HENARE (Labour): What other options might the Minister have presented to her colleagues?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence): Oh, right. Well, there are two options: one was to deploy a number of personnel, and the second was to deploy six, so those were the options and Cabinet agreed.
Hon PEENI HENARE (Labour): In the Minister’s statement she talked with respect to adding hugely inflationary costs to New Zealanders. My question to the Minister is: what evidence does the Minister have to suggest that attacks in the Red Sea and Panama Canal are indeed adding to inflation and cost of New Zealanders, and, if that is the case, when can New Zealanders expect a relief in the cost of living that currently impacts this country?
SPEAKER: That’s slightly wide at the end.
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence): Sorry, but the member clearly wasn’t listening to the statement I just read out. I didn’t actually make that statement. I’m happy to remind him that 15 percent of world trade goes through there, and if anyone really wants to know what happens when our shipping lanes and our supply chains are interrupted, just think back to what happened to New Zealanders and to their lack of buying power when we had the COVID-19 situation.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: That contradicts Nicola Willis; she said it was all our fault.
SPEAKER: Well, hang on—good on you.
Hon PEENI HENARE (Labour): Just to remind the Minister, in her own statement today she clearly sets out that this means higher costs for New Zealanders, which is the thrust of my question. My final question to the Minister with respect to this statement is: given the challenges that she even pointed out in the line of questioning that I’ve presented to her, given the challenges to the New Zealand Defence Force, does the Minister think that this is indeed the priority for the Defence Force?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence): Yes, thank you for that question. Yes, can I just tell the member and the House that the Defence Force are delighted to be trusted to undertake this deployment, that the morale seems to be improving, they are getting to do the work that they came to Defence to do, and they are so happy that they’ve got a Minister who’s on their side. The country is coming back on track. [Interruption]
SPEAKER: It was all going so well.
Hon MARAMA DAVIDSON (Co-Leader—Green): I promise I’ll keep that vibe going. Mr Speaker, thank you very much. Aotearoa has a proud and long custom and history of being a voice for peace and humanitarian concentration and efforts across world conflicts. We the Greens consider that we need our actions to continue to be focused on de-escalation of violence instead of supporting further fuelling of conflict where it is ordinary people who will be most affected. This Government’s denial—which will lead to some of our questions that I have—that this conflict in Yemen is connected to the war in Gaza is naive and dangerous—at best, wilfully ignorant—because we have seen, quite clearly across the world, that the Houthi have stated that their attacks on shipping are in response to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and will only stop when a ceasefire is reached. This Government is getting drawn into a situation with complex interests from a range of parties, without sufficient consideration and without a public mandate. Most importantly, this threatens the longstanding and robust agenda of an independent foreign policy approach rather than hooking our trailers up to States and nations of the world who are furthering and risking escalation of violence.
The decision to send the New Zealand Defence Force personnel to the Red Sea has already been agreed, by many different global international relations experts, here and around the world—that it has every chance of escalating violence. Now, that is not even up for debate. That seems to be something that people both in support of deployment and people against deployment are at least agreed on, that particular notion that there is more than a 50 percent chance that violence and conflict will escalate.
So I am putting to the Minister of Defence: why is our country wanting to be involved in escalating further violence when our country needs to remain and actually protect our long held independence and our long held values and tradition of focusing our efforts on peacekeeping and enduring justice?
This is now going to one of the statements I have been referring to—I have been referring to this Minister’s statements the whole time, but one particular one that I do want to pick up is: the Minister said just now that “collective action demonstrates our commitment to support efforts to address a serious threat to international stability.” and to uphold legality. Is there nothing quite as threatening to stability and legality as the ongoing violence and genocide that is happening to Gaza, where we have actually withheld our discretion to make massive mandate deployment decisions so far and have not sought to use everything possible to call for a ceasefire? And yet, for this, for these attacks on the shipping, from Yemen in the Red Sea, we are then using discretion. How does the Minister decide when to be concerned about threats to security and stability and when to be concerned about legality? Where does she cherry-pick and choose to not be concerned about threats to stability? My first question there.
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence): Well, I think I found a question in there. I think the point, really, the member needs to remember is that decisions are made on the best interests of New Zealand and New Zealanders, and every New Zealander who is going to be finding that the costs of this extra 10 to 15 days’ sailing and the extra insurances, being paid for and demanded to be able to have any shipping coming through, is going to be paid for by New Zealanders. So we also look to the legality; we look to principles that we have around making sure that New Zealand does what we can to be able to help ensure that New Zealanders are better off than we would be if we didn’t.
I’d also remind the member that New Zealand has been involved in matters around the Red Sea since 2013. It’s been going on for quite a long time, and no matter what the Houthis may say is their reason for doing what they’re doing, there are 50 other nations that are affected by this. And she’s also asked some statements, somewhere in there, around independent foreign policy. Well, I suggest to her that she looks at that, compared to her statements about how global commentators should be, obviously, influencing our foreign policy. Of course New Zealand has an independent foreign policy. By the way, so does every other State and territory that I’m aware of. We are one of many countries with an independent foreign policy, and I don’t note that it’s going to be set by commentators who like to comment from the sidelines and are not prepared to actually pull their weight when it comes to being a global citizen.
Hon MARAMA DAVIDSON (Co-Leader—Green): What is the Minister’s end game? Does she believe that this deployment into the Red Sea is what is going to find enduring peace in the Middle East? Does the Minister believe that our association with the US and the UK—who are already seen to be meddling right around the world—will de-escalate violence, and does she believe that escalating violence is truly in the best interest of New Zealanders?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence): I’m very happy to tell the member that I absolutely support the New Zealand Defence Force in what they’re doing. This is the right decision. New Zealand is not a freeloader. New Zealand is not going to—and the member may wish to, as she has today—express support for the Houthis. I do not, and nor does this Government. We do not support piracy; we do support New Zealanders’ freedom of navigation, being good citizens of the world, and we’re very proud of the people who are doing that.
Hon MARAMA DAVIDSON (Co-Leader—Green): Does the Minister support calls to end genocide and have a ceasefire and end further harm, and, on that, then, where was the public debate? If the Minister feels truly and confident that she has New Zealanders’ best interests at heart, where was the big debate?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence): Look, I don’t think any of that has anything to do with the statement that I’ve made today. But I would say to that member that we all love world peace; we’d just like to see a bit more of it.
MARK CAMERON (ACT): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in support of the ministerial statement from the Minister of Defence, the Hon Judith Collins, and as part of the coalition Government. The ACT Party supports the deployment, announced 23 January, of the six New Zealand Defence Force personnel to the Middle East to help and assist our partners with current and future military actions against the Houthi targets based in Yemen and the Red Sea.
The multiple Houthi attacks against merchant naval shipping are both highly illegal and extremely damaging to our freedoms and that of international trade furthermore. Freedom of navigation is a core tenet of the international rules-based order. The attack on vessels in the Red Sea by the Houthi rebels is eroding the sovereignty afforded to all law-abiding countries that transit the Red Sea and the Suez Canal whilst in international waters.
ACT fully supports the deployment of our military personnel to help aid and assist our allies and our international partners nullify this threat. New Zealand, like so many other countries, rely heavily on our trading relationships and our ability to access markets around the world. The disruptions in the Red Sea are having a profound effect on the 15 percent—and I clarify that nearly 15 to 16 percent of all the global trade uses these traditional shipping lanes.
ACT stands proud in support of the New Zealand Defence Force personnel and those that have been deployed to assist in this vital mission. We, as a country, cannot wish the evils of the world away. We must stand as a partner in a global society and play our important part in it. This deployment signals our commitment to our shared values of protecting all things democracy, global security, and the importance of global trade.
SPEAKER: Thank you. Other speakers? In that case, the Minister has a brief right of reply.
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence): Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Well, it’s easy, isn’t it, when things happen a long way from New Zealand, to think it’s not our problem? But this is our problem. It’s our problem because these indiscriminate attacks by the Houthi on ships of all nations are hitting all of us in the pocket—all Kiwis. That’s you, me, our family, and our friends. These attacks are actually forcing ships to take the long route around the Cape of Good Hope, and that’s adding 10 to 15 days on to that journey—10 to 15 days of extra fuel and of wages—and it means fewer journeys.
So what does this mean for a country that sits at the bottom of the supply chain? It means fewer goods, and it means price increases. We saw what happened during and post COVID when supply chains were disrupted; costs skyrocketed, and that was if you could even get the item that you needed. I’m sure none of us wants to have a return to those days, and nor can we afford to at a time when so many people are struggling to make ends meet.
But this deployment isn’t just about money; it’s about doing the right thing. New Zealanders are not freeloaders—certainly not under this coalition—and that’s not going to happen. We will not sit back and wait for someone else to sort things out for us. We are fair-minded people, and we want to do our bit, and we want to contribute. We’ve made it very clear that we’ve been asked to assist. We are a partner with the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and other like-minded countries when it comes to playing our part. New Zealand has long done this, and it’s the right thing to do. We have a defence force for a reason. They are highly trained, and they’re ready to step up and do the job they signed up to.
We cannot just sit in blissful ignorance and naivety and think that everyone else needs to protect us and protect our shipping lanes. We cannot sit back and wait for someone else to sort it out for us. So, for the benefit of members opposite, I’ll say it again: New Zealanders are not freeloaders; we are going to do our bit.
Petitions, Papers, Select Committee Reports, and Introduction of Bills
Petitions, Papers, Select Committee Reports, and Introduction of Bills
SPEAKER: Petitions have been delivered to the Clerk for presentation.
CLERK:
Petition of Jas Mcintosh requesting that the House make attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder assessments accessible and affordable for all entitled to healthcare in New Zealand
petition of Muhammad Dahlan requesting that the House urge the Government to create a temporary special category visa for Palestinians in Gaza who have family members in New Zealand
petition of Mohamed Soliman requesting that the House urge the Government to limit the diplomatic relationship between New Zealand and Israel.
SPEAKER: Those petitions stand referred to the Petitions Committee. Papers have been delivered.
CLERK:
2022-23 annual reports of the:
Accreditation Council
Commerce Commission
External Reporting Board
New Zealand Green Investment Finance Ltd
New Zealand Post Ltd
Oranga Tamariki
Retirement Commission
Te Puni Kōkiri
2023-24 statements of performance expectations for:
Callaghan Innovation
New Zealand Green Investment Finance Ltd
Reserve Bank of New Zealand Monetary Policy Statement and Financial Stability Report
reports in relation to selected non-departmental appropriations for the year ended 30 June 2023 for the following portfolios within Vote Business, Science and Innovation:
emergency management
research, science, and innovation
report of the Registrar of the Environment Court for the 12 months ended 30 June 2023.
SPEAKER: Those papers are published under the authority of the House. A select committee report has been delivered for presentation.
CLERK: Reserve Bank of New Zealand Monetary Policy Statement November 2023, report of the Finance and Expenditure Committee.
SPEAKER: The Monetary Policy Statement is set down for consideration. The Clerk has been informed of the introduction of bills.
CLERK:
New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill, introduction.
European Union Free Trade Agreement Legislation Amendment Bill, introduction.
SPEAKER: Those bills are set down for first reading.
Oral Questions
Questions to Ministers
Question No. 1—Finance
1. DAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote) to the Minister of Finance: What recent reports has she seen on the cost of living?
Hon NICOLA WILLIS (Minister of Finance): Last week, Stats New Zealand released the Consumers Price Index for the final quarter of last year. This showed that inflation was 4.7 percent in the year to December. While that is an improvement on the 5.6 percent inflation in September, it is still far too high. What is really striking is when one looks over a longer time frame: the Stats NZ figures show, for example, that over the last three years, prices have risen a total of 19 percent. That 19 percent in only three years represents a cost of living crisis that has eroded the real value of people’s incomes and savings and has made their lives much more expensive.
Dan Bidois: Is New Zealand’s inflation rate being driven by overseas factors?
Hon NICOLA WILLIS: To some extent, yes—
Hon Grant Robertson: Judith Collins just said yes.
Hon NICOLA WILLIS: —but to a greater extent, no.
Hon Grant Robertson: Oh, you’d better tell Judith.
Hon NICOLA WILLIS: Mr Robertson should listen because I think he’ll learn something. Inflation is influenced by global disruptions that raise the price of imports. Right now, for example, supply chains are under considerable strain from the Red Sea attacks and the Panama drought. But global factors are not the main contributors to inflation. The Stats NZ figures from last week show that tradables inflation, covering goods and services that are imported or that compete with foreign goods, has dropped significantly. On the other hand, non-tradables inflation has stayed stubbornly high. So domestic factors, rather than global factors, are playing the greatest role in driving inflation right now.
Dan Bidois: What has the Government been doing to help bring down inflation?
Hon NICOLA WILLIS: Last year, the Government introduced legislation which this House passed to bring back a single mandate for monetary policy—that mandate is price stability. Having a single price stability mandate has served New Zealand well since its introduction more than 30 years ago, and the experiment of the last five years of having a dual mandate failed spectacularly. This Government went back to a single mandate to ensure that monetary policy decision makers and those observing them have no doubt that busting inflation is our goal and that they are to have an unerring focus on achieving price stability.
Dan Bidois: What else is the Government doing to help with the cost of living?
Hon NICOLA WILLIS: The Government’s 100-day plan contains a number of measures to help New Zealanders hit by large increases in the cost of living. Nothing—
Hon Grant Robertson: Nothing—that’s right!
Hon NICOLA WILLIS: Well, nothing can instantly make up for a 19 percent increase in costs, but New Zealanders will welcome measures such as cancelling fuel tax increases for the remainder of this term and removing the Auckland regional fuel tax. They will also appreciate the steps our Government is taking to ensure maximum value for every taxpayer dollar spent. Later this year, Kiwis can also look forward to a personal income tax reduction that will put more money in their back pocket.
Question No. 2—Prime Minister
2. Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by all his Government’s statements and actions?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON (Prime Minister): Yes, I do, and particularly our Government’s statements on education—of course, that member was the Minister of Education for 5½ years. The Government is particularly concerned about the state of kids’ school attendance—we have 55 percent of our kids not going to school regularly. So I am very proud of our Government’s statements and actions around education, particularly banning mobile phones; making sure we have one hour of maths, reading, and writing every day at primary and intermediate schools; and, importantly, reviewing the curriculum. We care about our kids. We want them to get well educated so they can have a great future.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Does he agree with Christopher Luxon on recent changes to smoke-free legislation: “We’ve been really supportive. Anything to remove, you know, smoking harm I think is a good thing.”; if so, what’s changed?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: We’re very pleased to see that the current legislation which we’re reverting to has actually driven daily smoking down by two points, back to 6.8, and we’re on track to deliver Smokefree 2025.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Will projected Government revenue from tobacco sales increase or decrease as a result of his Government’s decision to wind back changes to smoke-free legislation?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: This Government’s very committed to continuing to lower smoking. We don’t believe that that Government’s legislation was actually the right way forward. We believe that we can achieve lower smoking rates with the legislation that exists today.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Point of order, Mr Speaker. That may well be the Prime Minister’s opinion; it didn’t relate to the question that I asked him.
SPEAKER: Well, in the end, all ministerial answers are opinions of the Minister. You can ask the question again and we’ll see what happens.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Will projected Government revenue from tobacco sales increase or decrease as a result of his Government’s decision to wind back changes to smoke-free legislation?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Revenue forecasts are Budget-sensitive, but we want lower smoking rates across this country—that’s what we’re going to do.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Supplementary question.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Supplementary question.
SPEAKER: I’ll go there—sorry.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: He’s had three.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Does he agree—
SPEAKER: Hang on a minute. Wait on—wait on. Yes, I know he’s had three, but I’m the one who calls. Rt Hon Chris Hipkins.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Does he agree with Nicola Willis—
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Point of order, Mr Speaker. Let’s get things started right in 2024.
SPEAKER: Well, that’s what I’m trying to do, and, believe me, I’m going to be the one who wins here.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Not if you’re going on principle. Principles should win, not personalities. Can I just say this: he’s had three questions already and the next time he’s interrupted, this should have been given to the other side of the House, surely.
SPEAKER: One of the things that became a convention in the last Parliament was that where the primary questioner continues to ask for supplementaries until their allocation runs out, they’re able to do that. If they sit down and hold one back, that’s fine, but the Rt Hon Chris Hipkins wants to get his all out at one go, and I think that’s reasonable, given the way that we’ve operated over the previous three years.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Does he, therefore, agree with Nicola Willis, who said, “Coming back to those extra sources of revenue and other savings areas that will help us to fund tax reduction, we have to remember that the changes to smoke-free legislation had a significant impact on the Government books - with about $1 billion there.”; if so, why does he think that more people smoking or smoking more is an acceptable way of funding tax cuts?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: I disagree completely. The legislation that we are reverting to is the same legislation that has seen a consistent decrease in daily smoking. If you just look at the last year, it’s gone from 8.6 percent in 2022 down to 6.8 percent in 2023. The legislation was working. It was driving smoking rates down, and that’s what we’ll continue to do in Government.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Could I ask the Prime Minister as to whether or not it’s axiomatic that if there is a dramatic decline, which is now the world’s leading decline in tobacco smoking, then it’s quite possible that the instance of tax will go down as well; and, second, that the legislation about which the Leader of the Opposition is talking was not constructed by him but by New Zealand First, which led to the dramatic fall in tobacco smoking in the first place? And that’s a fact.
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: I agree that the legislation we are wanting to put in place has actually driven smoking rates down and will continue to do so going forward.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Has the Government requested any advice on freezing tobacco excise; if so, why?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Not that I’m aware of.
Hon David Seymour: How much revenue would the Government get from illegally smuggled and sold counterfeit cigarettes that are now dominating the Australian market, with organised crime taking over and the situation getting out of control?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Well, I think the member raises a very good question, which was the problem with the previous Government’s proposed changes to legislation—that it would encourage a black market and would actually lead to increasing levels of crime and ram raids.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: If any Minister or Ministers in his Government have received donations from anyone associated with the tobacco lobby, would he regard that as a conflict of interest and exclude them from decision making on any future changes to smoke-free legislation?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: I’m not aware of that.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I didn’t ask him whether he was aware; I asked him whether he would regard it as a conflict of interest they received—
SPEAKER: It’s a fair question.
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Yeah. I would expect that all Ministers would comply with their reporting obligations.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Point of order, Mr Speaker. The Cabinet Manual makes it very clear that the Prime Minister determines whether or not they have a conflict of interest. I’ve asked him whether he would regard that as a conflict of interest or not, and he still hasn’t answered it.
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: I expect all Ministers to comply with the Cabinet Manual and to declare conflicts of interest.
Question No. 3—Prime Minister
3. TAKUTAI TARSH KEMP (Te Pāti Māori—Tāmaki Makaurau) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by his Government’s statements and policies?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON (Prime Minister): Yes, I do, in the context they were given.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: Supplementary, Mr Speaker.
SPEAKER: Supplementary question—sorry, having to go to my sheet. My deep apologies—I’m sorry about this. Sorry, I’m lost here; someone’s going to have to help me here. My apologies.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: Hana-Rawhiti.
SPEAKER: Hana, my sincere apologies. I do apologise. Please ask your question.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: Does he agree with the Ministry of Justice that his Government’s Treaty principles bill to redefine Te Tiriti o Waitangi goes against the spirit of the Treaty, or the text of the Treaty?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: The Government hasn’t received any Cabinet paper or any draft Treaty principles bill legislation.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: If he has no intention of supporting the Treaty principles bill beyond the select committee stage, why has he appointed a new Associate Minister with specific responsibility for the bill?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: So that the programme can be progressed.
Takutai Tarsh Kemp: By delegating ministerial responsibility for the Treaty principles bill to an ACT Party Minister, is he attempting to distance himself from division that this attempt to erase Te Tiriti o Waitangi has caused, while at the same time leveraging off it?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: I reject the question. We’re not changing the Treaty of Waitangi, nor Treaty settlements. What we have is a coalition agreement which we are actioning. [Interruption]
SPEAKER: No, no comments; just a question.
Takutai Tarsh Kemp: If he believes the Treaty principles bill is unhelpful and divisive, will he commit to voting against it after the select committee stage?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: As has been well canvassed, there is no commitment to support the bill after first reading.
Question No. 4—Housing
4. RIMA NAKHLE (National—Takanini) to the Minister of Housing: What recent concerns has he raised with Kāinga Ora regarding vacant homes?
Hon CHRIS BISHOP (Minister of Housing): Mr Speaker, thank you. Earlier this month, I announced that I had written to the board of Kāinga Ora—Homes and Communities to make it clear that the number of social houses sitting vacant across New Zealand is completely unacceptable. As of late last year, the total number of vacant social homes in New Zealand was 3,906—5 percent of New Zealand’s total public housing stock. Twenty percent of new public homes delivered by Kāinga Ora—Homes and Communities between June 2022 and October 2023 were still sitting vacant in October last year. Kāinga Ora has been planning and building these new homes for years. They were not a surprise. My expectation is that months out from a new home’s completion, they should be getting organised with new tenants who need these homes, and I’m sure they’d much rather be moving into a brand-new home rather than sitting in an emergency housing motel room.
Rima Nakhle: What else was in the letter to Kāinga Ora—Homes and Communities?
Hon CHRIS BISHOP: The letter outlined my disappointment with the numbers, and it made clear my expectation that with over 25,000 families on the social housing wait-list—20,000 more than six years ago—social housing homes should not be left empty for a day longer than absolutely necessary.
Rima Nakhle: What does this announcement mean for New Zealanders on our social housing wait-list?
Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Kāinga Ora—Homes and Communities’ performance impacts every New Zealander—none more so than the thousands on the wait-list living in motel rooms, or sometimes even worse. My letter and the announcement earlier this month instruct Kāinga Ora to focus on efficiently placing tenants into social housing across New Zealand and to work with greater urgency to do so. We are committed to getting Kāinga Ora—Homes and Communities working well so that it can serve those in the greatest need.
Hon Ginny Andersen: Can the Minister please tell me why he is unable to answer how many people in Lower Hutt are presently on the social housing waiting list?
Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, that number is publicly available. From memory, without checking my information, as of 30 September 2023—again, from memory—the number in Lower Hutt City of people on the wait-list was 623, and I would note that that is a fivefold increase compared to October 2017.
Rima Nakhle: What other plans does the Government have for Kāinga Ora?
Hon CHRIS BISHOP: As I’ve mentioned previously in this House, the Government has commissioned an independent review into Kāinga Ora—Homes and Communities, which is currently under way. We’re looking at financial situation, procurement, and asset management, and I’m looking forward to receiving the report in March. As I say, it is critical to the Government that Kāinga Ora—Homes and Communities operates efficiently and effectively and delivers taxpayers value for money.
Hon Ginny Andersen: It’s a point of order, Mr Speaker. I have in response to written question No. 30561 that the Minister stated he advised he was unable to provide the information on the Lower Hutt waiting list. So it is news to us now that he suddenly has that—
Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Speaking to the point of order, I know the precise question the member is referring to. The issue is that the member asked for the number as of a certain week, Mr Speaker. The numbers, as the former Ministers in the Opposition know so well, are not broken down on the social housing wait-list by week; they are broken down as at the end of a month or at the end of a quarter. The information is published monthly and quarterly. If the member is specific about exactly what she is asking, she will get that information. And the other point I would note is that the information is publicly available every quarter. The member just needs to learn a little website: www.google.com.
Question No. 5—Finance
5. Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour) to the Minister of Finance: Is the reported statement from Treasury correct that the 6.5 percent or 7.5 percent savings that are being sought from Public Service agencies include both departmental and non-departmental spending; if so, has she set any criteria beyond that for what spending is included or not included in the savings?
Hon NICOLA WILLIS (Minister of Finance): Agencies have been asked to make savings from an eligible baseline which includes departmental and non-departmental spending with some adjustments and a range of exclusions. For example, in the case of Health and Education, those agencies have had non-departmental spending excluded from their baseline. In looking for savings, agencies have been asked to focus on low-value programmes, programmes that don’t align with Government priorities, and non-essential back-office functions, including contractor and consultant spend. The member should note that not all proposals put forward by agencies will necessarily be progressed by Ministers. Ministers will exercise their judgment to ensure that we deliver on our goal to deliver better front-line services for New Zealanders.
Hon Grant Robertson: Why has she chosen to include the Defence Force in the Public Service cuts after originally not doing so?
Hon NICOLA WILLIS: We have chosen a broad range of agencies to take part in the exercise on the basis that we think everyone should be looking to see whether there are areas where they can do things more efficiently and better. In the case of Defence, I would note that we have recognised they face critical cost pressures and, as such, they have been invited to bid for more funding in this Budget round.
Hon Grant Robertson: Can she guarantee that the cuts to the Defence Force will not affect the wages of Defence Force staff?
Hon NICOLA WILLIS: Yes.
Hon Grant Robertson: Well, we’re on a roll, then. Will she rule out cutting non-departmental funding allocated to Whaikaha - Ministry of Disabled People?
Hon NICOLA WILLIS: I can assure the member that non-departmental spending has been excluded from the baseline for that agency.
Hon Grant Robertson: How can she reconcile the inclusion of Corrections in the departments to be cut with the commitment in the coalition agreement with ACT to increase its funding, or is this going to be another example of David Seymour’s political impotence?
Hon NICOLA WILLIS: Both can be true—and they are. And this actually goes to the fundamental issue, which is that we are asking the Department of Corrections to look at what resources may have become tied up in the back office so that we can move them into the front line in our prisons. It is the case that, in fact, we can both make savings in one area and increase funding in another. And I’d also point this out to the member, and it’s something I would urge members opposite to reflect on: you shouldn’t simply conflate spending more money with getting results for the people we serve. This Government will not fall for that mistake.
Stuart Smith: Why is the Minister embarking on the savings programme across the Public Service?
Hon NICOLA WILLIS: The core Public Service headcount has grown by almost 30 percent since 2018, and Government spending is also expected to have increased by around 80 percent between 2017 and 2024. We have far too few results for New Zealanders to show for that huge increase, and our Government is determined to restore respect for taxpayer money by stopping wasteful spending, improving value for money, and driving resources out of the back office and into front-line public services. Our savings programme in Budget 2024 is designed to find around $1.5 billion in savings per year, which we’ll use to deliver on our policy commitments and fund critical cost pressures.
Hon David Seymour: Minister, how did the Government manage to spend so much more money and yet get so much worse results, and is that an example of the previous finance Minister’s fiscal incontinence? [Interruption]
SPEAKER: Wait on, wait on. No need to go further. That last comment was greatly out of order, as was the question.
Hon Grant Robertson: Has the Minister spoken to the Hon Judith Collins in wake of her comments that she is “going to need money for Defence”, and what specifically in the Defence Force is she aiming to cut?
Hon NICOLA WILLIS: I’ve had many conversations with the Minister of Defence, who shares with me how ignored the Defence Force felt by the last Government. And I can assure New Zealanders that in Minister Collins, the Defence Force has a very good advocate indeed.
Question No. 6—Prime Minister
6. Hon MARAMA DAVIDSON (Co-Leader—Green) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by his statement, “The Government has no plan, and never has had plans, to amend or revise the Treaty, or the Treaty settlements we have all worked so very hard together to achieve”; and if so, why is he proposing to introduce a Treaty principles bill that officials say “is not supported by the spirit of the Treaty or the text of the Treaty”, and for which there has been a lack of consultation with the public?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON (Prime Minister): In answer to the first part of the question, yes, the Government has no plan to change the Treaty or Treaty settlements, and in answer to the second part, it’s part of our coalition agreement.
Hon Marama Davidson: Does he have confidence in the ability of his Associate Minister of Justice David Seymour to engage with iwi and hapū on matters relating to the Treaty principles bill?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Well, we are yet to see a draft Treaty principles bill.
Hon Marama Davidson: Does he think it’s acceptable that the Minister leading this bill who has called for a discussion on Te Tiriti, didn’t even show up to Tūrangawaewae and didn’t show up to Rātana where Tiriti kōrero was actually happening?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: I note that the Minister will be at Waitangi this weekend.
Hon Marama Davidson: What will he say to iwi and hapū leaders on Waitangi Day next week about his plans to introduce a bill that removes tino rangatiratanga rights under Te Tiriti?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: What we will be talking about is actually how we improve outcomes for Māori. To have two-thirds of Māori kids not in school regularly, to see Māori disadvantaged economically, to see poor housing stats, with Māori making up half of people on the social register, those are the conversations that we’re actually having with iwi leaders and with Māori across the country. That’s what they care about.
Hon Marama Davidson: Is he concerned by the assessment of Tiriti expert Dayle Takitimu, who said the Treaty principles bill is “creating unrest, uncertainty, it’s creating a whole lot of misinformation amongst the general population that is problematic.” and if not, why not?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Well, we haven’t seen a draft Treaty principles bill, but what I can tell you is people should be concerned about improving outcomes for Māori and that’s what this Government is single-mindedly focused on.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Could I ask the Prime Minister as to whether or not he knows of anyone who has said seriously in this Parliament that they’re getting rid of the Treaty of Waitangi, and, second, as to whether or not there was a thing called “consultation”, it happened on 14 October last year, called the election.
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: In answer the first part of the question, no.
Hon Marama Davidson: Does he agree with former National Prime Minister Jim Bolger that a referendum on the Treaty principles is a “bloody stupid” idea, and, if so, why is he introducing a bill to enable this in the first place?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Part of our coalition agreement, which we’ve talked about before, is that this Government is going to support the Treaty principles bill through to first reading.
Question No. 7—Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti
7. Hon WILLIE JACKSON (Labour) to the Minister for Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti: What plans, if any, does the Government have to discuss its policies at Waitangi next week?
Hon TAMA POTAKA (Minister for Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti): He pātai wero hinengaro, he whakaharahara hoki tērā. Kāore e kore ka nui hoki ngā kōrero mō ngā kaupapa here a tēnei Kāwanatanga haumi me ngā mahuetanga pōuri a te Kāwanatanga tawhito, ki te ātea, ki te kāuta, ki te pae kōrero, ki te pari kārangaranga ka rangona e aku taringa, kitea e aku karu rongo.
[That is a mind-bending question, and a somewhat terrible one too. Without doubt there will be a lot of discussion about the policies of this coalition Government and the sad leavings of the old Government, on the marae, in the kitchen, on the orators’ benches, and echoing off the cliffs that will be heard by my ears, and seen by my eyes.]
Hon Willie Jackson: Rawe ki te whakarongo ki tō tātou reo. Mihi ana ki te Minita kei te tautoko i tō tātou reo mā te kōrero i te reo. E mihi ana ki a koe e hoa, engari ka kōrero Pākehā ahau kia mōhio ai te Whare katoa.
[It’s awesome to listen to our language. I acknowledge the Minister that is supporting our language by speaking our language. I thank you my friend, but I will speak English so that the entire House understands.]
I’m just mihi-ing to our Minister—
SPEAKER: Yes, I know you have and it’s outside the rules.
Hon Willie Jackson: —because it’s wonderful that he’s speaking our language.
SPEAKER: Just stick to the question, Willie.
Hon Willie Jackson: I’m just saying I want to speak English so everybody understands, and ask him this: who should New Zealanders believe: Minister David Seymour, who says there is no partnership with Māori; or the Prime Minister, who confirmed today that he views the Treaty of Waitangi as akin to a partnership between the Crown and Māori, which has been the position of every Prime Minister since 1984, and will the Prime Minister and the Minister of Māori Development reiterate that at Waitangi?
Hon David Seymour: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I hesitate to interrupt, but I don’t believe I’ve ever said there’s no partnership with Māori; I have said that the Treaty is not a partnership between races and shouldn’t be characterised that way.
SPEAKER: That’s a fair defence of a position that was put. Put the question again, without that in it.
Hon Willie Jackson: From the beginning: who should New Zealanders believe, the Hon David Seymour, who rejects that there is a partnership with Māori; or the Prime Minister, who confirmed today that he views the Treaty of Waitangi as akin to a partnership between the Crown and Māori, which has been the position of every Prime Minister—National and Labour—since 1984, and will the Prime Minister reiterate that at Waitangi?
Hon TAMA POTAKA: New Zealanders should take the time to learn about Te Tiriti o Waitangi—the Treaty of Waitangi—and come to their own views.
Hon Willie Jackson: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I don’t believe the Minister went anywhere near the question or the answer—there was nothing.
SPEAKER: Well, with all due respect, you asked him to venture an opinion on two particular positions; he then answered you by saying that all New Zealanders should come to their own position on those, and I think that’s not unreasonable.
Hon Willie Jackson: Yeah, thanks for that, Mr Speaker.
SPEAKER: If you want further clarification, see me later.
Hon Willie Jackson: Yeah, kia ora, kia ora, Mr Speaker. Does the Minister agree with the very respectable and well-supported National Party members Dame Jenny Shipley, Jim Bolger, Doug Graham, and Chris Finlayson, who all support the partnership principle and are adamant that we should get rid of the Treaty principles bill, and is he planning on discussing that at Waitangi?
Hon TAMA POTAKA: As the Prime Minister has reminded us today, we have not yet seen a Treaty principles bill being brought in front of the members.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Could I ask the Minister as to whether this is the problem about trying to establish what the relationship means, or is it a fact that on 5 February 1840, no one in the British Empire, from which the sun never set, including the people living next to Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace, was in partnership with the Queen, how could the Māori be two days later? So it’s a relationship we’re working on now; not the fiction of some people in this Parliament.
Hon TAMA POTAKA: My response to that reflection and question by the Deputy Prime Minister is: we reiterate that Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi, is an absolute sacrosanct document fundamental to this country’s past, present, and future, and it will help us get the country back on track after what we’ve ended up with in the last three years.
Hon Willie Jackson: Does the Minister’s iwi support the Treaty principles bill, and will he be discussing that with his iwi at Waitangi?
SPEAKER: No, no, sorry; that question’s out of order. He’s only got responsibility for his ministerial position. The member can ask another question inside his allocation of supplementaries.
Hon Willie Jackson: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Are the Minister and the Prime Minister planning to attend and participate in any of the forum tents at Waitangi; if so, which one, and, if not, why not?
Hon TAMA POTAKA: It is scheduled that I will be participating in the forum tent at Waitangi, and I look forward to the humble hospitality of manaakitanga that Te Tai Tokerau is renowned for. Kia ora tātou.
Hon Shane Jones: To the Minister for Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti, can the Minister confirm, during the Waitangi period of time, the Government will be focused on concrete, measurable, key performance indicator - orientated results for our rangatahi, housing, and health rather than transcendental notions contained in the He Puapua United Nations report?
Hon Willie Jackson: Point of order, Mr Speaker. That’s clearly out of line, isn’t it? He can’t answer that. It’s such a stupid question.
SPEAKER: No, no, the problem the member’s got is that the Minister is the Minister for Crown-Māori relations; therefore he must have some responsibility for the Government’s view on the document cited by the Hon Shane Jones. Therefore, the question stands.
Hon TAMA POTAKA: In my Wanganui dialect, ana. Yes, we will be absolutely committed to ruthlessly focusing on the outcomes of education, housing, health, and many other things that have been left behind for our various Māori communities throughout the motu. Tēnā tātou.
Question No. 8—Local Government
8. JAMES MEAGER (National—Rangitata) to the Minister of Local Government: What recent announcements has he made about the voting age for local government?
Hon SIMEON BROWN (Minister of Local Government): On 26 January, I announced that this Government will not proceed with the previous Government’s plans to lower the voting age to allow 16- to 17-year-olds to vote in local elections. Changing the voting age for local government is not a priority for this Government. We want to see councils focused on efficient delivery of local infrastructure and services for their communities.
James Meager: What actions has he taken to give action to the Government’s intentions on this bill?
Hon SIMEON BROWN: I have written to the chairperson of the Justice Committee to inform him that the coalition Government does not intend to support the Electoral (Lowering Voting Age for Local Elections and Polls) Legislation Bill through further parliamentary stages and request that the committee ends consideration of this bill. We intend to focus local government on providing good-quality local infrastructure delivering public services at the least possible cost to their communities and businesses.
James Meager: Why is lowering the voting age not a priority for this Government?
Hon SIMEON BROWN: Well, this would be a distraction for local government when they should be focused on making sure that they are efficiently delivering local infrastructure and services for their communities. Lowering the voting age is not a priority for this Government.
Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Who is correct: the Minister when he said it’d be a waste of Parliament’s time to be progressing a bill and hearing select committee submissions on a bill that we are not going to be supporting or the Prime Minister when he said, “we will pursue a Treaty principles bill to select committee, and that’s as far as it will go.”?
Hon SIMEON BROWN: Lowering the voting age is not a priority for this Government, but we have made coalition commitments around the Treaty principles bill, which we will progress.
James Meager: Does the Minister think that the voting age for central and local government should be the same?
Hon SIMEON BROWN: Yes, it is important that there is a clear and constant age for voting in a democracy. A split age would create an imbalance in terms of the voting ages between central and local government. That is not a priority for this Government. Furthermore, the last Government could not conjure up one single reason why lowering the voting age was a good idea.
Question No. 9—Health
9. Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Labour) to the Associate Minister of Health: Does she stand by all her statements and actions?
Hon CASEY COSTELLO (Associate Minister of Health): Yes—in particular, those that relate to my absolute commitment to the Smokefree 2025 target and to providing practical, targeted help so that smokers who are addicted can quit.
Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall: Is it correct that she indicated she wanted advice from the Ministry of Health on a tobacco excise tax freeze in a document she annotated and signed on 20 December?
Hon CASEY COSTELLO: Yes, in relation to a range of advice, there was a component that asked for the implications relating to the excise tax freeze.
Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall: In that case, why did she deny requesting specific advice on an excise tax freeze for cigarettes in an interview with Guyon Espiner?
Hon CASEY COSTELLO: I did not state that I had not requested specific advice. I had sought advice on a range of issues which included that one.
Jamie Arbuckle: What do the latest statistics say about the smoking numbers?
Hon CASEY COSTELLO: I’m pleased to announce that the latest New Zealand Health Survey figures released in December show that the daily smoking rates among adults have more than halved in the last decade, from 573,000 in 2011-12, to 284,000 last year. Smoking rates have reduced significantly in the last two years; another 55,000 people stopped smoking in the last year alone. This drop in daily smokers is reflected across all ethnic groups, but, significantly, drops have been seen in Māori and Pacific peoples, where we have seen drops from 37.7 percent to 17.1 percent and 22.6 percent to 16.4 percent respectively between 2011-12 and 2022-23. This supports the reasons for continuing on the trajectory that we’re on.
Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall: Is she seriously saying that she requested advice on the tobacco excise tax freeze but because the document canvassed other matters, she was being truthful when she denied having sought the advice to the media?
Hon CASEY COSTELLO: I was being truthful at the time, in relation to that statement. Being offered something and asking for something are two separate matters.
Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall: Was the Prime Minister wrong when he said in statements to Radio New Zealand this morning that she made a mistake?
Hon CASEY COSTELLO: I would never say that the Prime Minister was wrong.
Rt Hon Chris Hipkins: Point of order, Mr Speaker. Earlier on in question time today, I asked the Prime Minister whether the Government had sought any advice on freezing excise on tobacco, and the Prime Minister indicated that he was not aware of that. We’ve now had it confirmed by the Minister that in fact she did ask for that advice, and there are media reports where the Prime Minister has been publicly discussing it. The Standing Orders make it clear that if a Minister makes a mistake in their answers, they have to come back to the House and correct that at the earliest available opportunity. Fortunately, the Prime Minister is still in the House and therefore should be able to correct it now, at the earliest available opportunity.
SPEAKER: Unfortunately, the answer was that there was a range of advice in the paper concerned, so I think the pedantics of how it was answered are a different matter. I’ll hear from the Rt Hon Winston Peters.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Mr Speaker, you’ve had two questions, and one of them a point of order, that don’t seem to be listening to what was said. If you request advice and get other than that advice—extra advice—it does not mean that you requested the second lot of advice that you didn’t seek in the first place. It’s not complicated, and words do matters in this Parliament. And surely they do matter to the media, who’ve so badly reported this matter in the first place.
Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall: Speaking to the point of order, no, I believe the issue under discussion here is whether a Minister made a decision in writing to seek advice on a particular matter. It is not a matter of receiving, as the Deputy Prime Minister has suggested, unsolicited advice.
SPEAKER: I make the suggestion that people consider the Hansard of all of this, and then take any position they want to take to the Speaker in the usual manner.
Question No. 10—Education
10. PAULO GARCIA (National—New Lynn) to the Minister of Education: What is the Government focusing on for the start of the school year?
Hon ERICA STANFORD (Minister of Education): As schools start back for 2024, there will be a relentless focus on lifting student achievement. This Government’s ambitious target of getting 80 percent of our tamariki to curriculum by the time they finish intermediate by 2030 is our North Star. Recent release of provisional NCEA data showed, for the third year, rates of achievement have declined, and we are going to turn this around. As we begin the school year, I am focused on strengthening our curriculum to be knowledge-rich and underpinned by the science of learning, ensuring we spend enough time on the basics, and that we are removing distractions in the classroom so we set our kids up for success at school.
Paulo Garcia: What can parents expect will be in place for students this term?
Hon ERICA STANFORD: Well, around New Zealand, students are returning or starting school this week to find new timetables in place that mean that no matter where they go to school or who their teacher is, they have consistent delivery of at least an hour a day of reading, writing, and maths. I’m already starting to hear stories from teachers with their new timetables promoting literacy and numeracy. New regulations are in place around the use of cellphones at school, requiring them to be off and away all day. School policies must be in place for the start of term 2, but it is my expectation that many of these plans will be implemented by the start of term 1 so that students can focus on their learning and interact with their friends.
Paulo Garcia: What progress has been made by the ministerial advisory group reviewing the curriculum?
Hon ERICA STANFORD: The ministerial advisory group had their first full-day meeting over the Christmas break. This group brings together curriculum and subject-matter experts who will ensure that our curriculum is knowledge-rich, detailed, grounded in the science of learning, and internationally comparable. Their work programme is well under way and on track to be tested with the sector later this year so that we can remain on track with the scheduled curriculum roll-out dates.
Paulo Garcia: What feedback has the Minister received about the changes in the 100-day plan?
Hon ERICA STANFORD: I’ve received lots of positive feedback about our plans, but, in particular, an Auckland high school principal wrote to me saying that he is excited about our plans; that the cellphone ban will “remove a major distraction to learning, reduce cyberbullying, and promote social interaction between students”; and that a timetable focused on the basic subjects will ultimately lift educational achievement for all students. Furthermore, Newshub reported the Cashmere High School principal saying, and I quote, “It’s not healthy for students to come to school and … sit … and be glued to [their] digital device”.
Question No. 11—Police
11. Hon GINNY ANDERSEN (Labour) to the Minister of Police: Does he stand by his guarantee that there’ll be no cuts or reprioritisations to the Police budget in order to deliver 500 extra police; if so, what advice has he received, if any, on the impact the proposed 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent cut to the Police budget would have on public safety?
Hon MARK MITCHELL (Minister of Police): Yes, and none.
Hon Ginny Andersen: Is it the Government’s policy to deliver 500 extra police within two years as per the coalition agreement with New Zealand First?
Hon MARK MITCHELL: The Government’s policy is to deliver 500 additional police officers over the term of this Government, which is three years, and we’ve been very clear that we understand the challenges around that, because, as the incoming Government, we discovered that it was difficult to fill existing recruit wings, that the Australians are here recruiting our police officers, and that we’ve got lots of senior police officers that are coming up to retirement.
Hon Ginny Andersen: Can the Minister be clear that he is walking back on the coalition agreement that is undertaken to New Zealanders that he will deliver 500 additional police within two years?
Hon MARK MITCHELL: No, I’m saying that we have, as the incoming Government, committed to 500 additional police officers over the term of this Government, which, yes, is three years, and that—
Hon Grant Robertson: No, you haven’t. Mark, it’s right here. Two years.
Hon MARK MITCHELL: Well, if the Minister had listened in the House last year, you would have heard me talking to this issue. The fact is that, as the incoming Government and with the advice that we got, it became immediately apparent that there were big issues around recruiting. They can’t fill current recruit wings, the Australians are here recruiting our police officers, and we’ve got senior police officers that are getting ready to retire.
Hon Ginny Andersen: Is this yet another example of broken promises, and will the 6.5 percent cut to the Police budget affect front-line services like it did last time National was in Government and see front-line officers pulled off the street to do non-sworn duties?
Hon MARK MITCHELL: No, I think that, as the incoming Government again, it became very apparent that the Police are under severe financial pressure because of the actions of the previous Government. We’ve been very clear that we’re going to deliver world-class front-line services, and the Police, like every other agency, is asked to look at their corporate services and their back-office services to see whether or not cuts can be achieved.
Hon Ginny Andersen: Will he commit that any cost savings found in the Police budget will remain with Police as stated in National’s Back Pocket Boost policy documents?
Hon MARK MITCHELL: Well, I can confirm for the member that we’re going to make sure that the front line are resourced properly and are actually delivering the service that this country deserves. We’ve got a big job to do, and the Police have got a big job to do, in reducing what has been a massive increase in violent crime in this country over the last six years, and we’re committed to doing that.
Question No. 12—Prime Minister
12. Hon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by all of his Government’s statements and policies?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON (Prime Minister): Yes, in the context they were given. But can I also just extend congratulations to that member for a fantastic career in Parliament here over the last nine years; he announced, obviously, his retirement today. I want to say I hope you know you’re leaving here with some pretty lasting legislation in place with the net-zero legislation. You should be very, very proud about it. That’s going to be enduring. It’s going to last long after you’re gone. I just acknowledge, also, it’s a very sad day for the Green Party, actually, having lost their last true environmentalist.
Hon James Shaw: In response, can I just thank the Prime Minister—
SPEAKER: The Hon James Shaw may of course make a short response to that—but perhaps not focused on the last bit.
Hon James Shaw: No—thank you, Mr Speaker. Can I just thank the Prime Minister for his kind words, and say in response, “Good luck.” Is his Government reversing New Zealand’s commitment, which it pushed for and agreed to as last year’s conference of the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO) to protect 70 percent of high-biodiversity areas, including seamounts, in the South Pacific?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: I’m not aware that we’ve made any change to that yet.
Hon James Shaw: Is he concerned about New Zealand’s international reputation, when organisations like the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition have said that “The New Zealand government may now be the main obstacle to a proposed conservation measure that its own scientists spent the past year developing”?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: I disagree with that characterisation. This is a Government that’s going to be focused on lowering emissions and making sure we meet our climate change commitments.
Hon James Shaw: Does he agree with the previous National Government’s Minister for fisheries, who said that when the SPRFMO convention was ratified under the John Key National Government that “We need to protect these important fisheries for future generations. Ratification shows our strong commitment to sustainable management and ensures [that] we have an important influence on the work of the SPRFMO.”, and, if so, is he concerned that New Zealand is the only country still bottom trawling in the Pacific?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: This is going to be a Government that will balance sustainable fishing along with good economic opportunity.
Hon James Shaw: How can he justify the proposal by New Zealand to allow bottom trawling in the South Pacific to catch up to three years’ worth of total allowable catch in a single season, up to 200 percent above annual catch limits, when this is far more than the 10 percent annual carry-over allowed under New Zealand’s domestic law?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Again, as I said before, this will be a Government that will balance environmental goals with making sure we maximise commercial opportunities.
Hon James Shaw: Does he have confidence in his Minister for Oceans and Fisheries’ ability to represent New Zealand’s long-term bipartisan positions, including those advanced by previous National-led Governments, on international fisheries management, when the World Wide Fund for Nature have said that “There is a lot of concern about New Zealand resigning from the [international] rules-based order. Historically New Zealand has been seen as a good-faith operator, and [then] for a country to turn away from a decision taken by consensus, is quite significant”?
Rt Hon CHRISTOPHER LUXON: Yes.
Urgent Debates Declined
United Nations Relief and Works Agency—Government Funding
SPEAKER: I have received an urgent debate request from the Hon Marama Davidson and Ricardo Menéndez March seeking under Standing Order 399 to debate the Government’s decision on funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. This application did not make out a convincing case for setting aside the business of the House to debate this matter. The application is, therefore, declined.
Address in Reply
Address in Reply
Debate resumed from 19 December 2023.
PAULO GARCIA (National—New Lynn): Mr Speaker, I’m rising for the first time to be able to speak for 10 minutes in the House again. It is such a privilege. I also have the first opportunity this year to congratulate you on your new role. The Speakership is a very immensely complex role, and I can imagine the need for such experience and knowledge and patience and, actually, a lot of good humour to keep so many amazing members of Parliament ticking along in this House.
I also stand to preface my contribution with the fact that, while I am not so new, I remain a new member of this House. I feel like I’m starting all over again, still with the jitters, when coming up to speak and getting ready.
So I wanted to just look back briefly on the fact that I became a member in the middle of the 52nd Parliament. I was the first Filipino ever to be sitting as a member of Parliament, which was not just a great, great honour for myself but a recognition of the very many thousands of Filipinos who have come to make New Zealand their home. It was also brought about by the fact that large numbers of migrants from the Philippines were coming into New Zealand and occupying roles of significance in the dairy industry, in healthcare, in construction, and in so many areas where workers and professionals were needed. This contribution was recognised and valued. The reason that I am here is because of that value given to this community, and it’s such a privilege to be here myself.
Then I come to the fact that I have now become an elected member of Parliament and, after three years of absence, I find myself here again and able to speak, which is such a privilege. It’s an amazing privilege. So now, I’m back as a member, elected on the backs of the hard work of the very multicultural community that New Lynn is—hearing the voices and understanding what people were largely concerned about. That brings me to this Address in Reply debate, where—
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): I’m pleased we’ve got there eventually. Maiden speeches will follow, but I would appreciate you spending the rest of your time now on the Address in Reply, and welcome back.
PAULO GARCIA: Thank you so much, Mr Speaker. So, having been in the community over the past weeks after the start of this Parliament last year, I have had the opportunity to speak to communities, both in New Lynn and elsewhere, and New Zealanders have just become weary and worried on many levels. I rise to say to the public who are able to listen and hear the debates in this Chamber that work is being done to alleviate and to address the matters that concern you. It’s just very important to bear in mind that what we are all experiencing at this time is the result of quite some time of deterioration, and so at this stage there is work being done.
In the law and order space we had many discussions in the community about how people are concerned about people walking out of Countdowns and New Worlds with unpaid items and not being stopped. There is the lack of resourcing for our police to police low-level situations in communities, where people are not helped along or taken away from the situations—the trouble for community members that they are causing, such as bad behaviour, or drunkenness in public spaces.
Police have found that this kind of behaviour, while intimidating and sometimes even threatening to the communities, is not able to be addressed for lack of resourcing, and our Minister of Police, Mark Mitchell—who has just spoken in this House—has confirmed that there are efforts to resource the police on many levels. Resourcing is being done on many levels, from workforce strengthening to giving them the ability to do their work better to be able to deal with the challenges that they are currently facing.
On top of that list of challenges is, really, that the gang numbers have exploded. I would like to ask that people be mindful and that when you are going around and out and about, you are able to see that the number of patched bikers on the roads has greatly reduced, and we are headed towards increased legislation that will ban—completely ban—patches and insignia in public places. While this may be a strong tool for gangs, it is also a strong tool for the intimidation of the communities, and this just needs to stop. The police will be given powers to issue dispersal notices when gangs gather in public spaces.
The Government will also strengthen New Zealand’s democracy. The object of resourcing the police is extensive. It is aspirational and ambitious because we need to get New Zealand back to the place that we all want to call our home, and to not be afraid when we are leaving our houses and are out and about in public.
Also, it is important to note that this situation we find ourselves in is also due to a heightened cost of living and an economy that has been struggling over recent years. There are measures that are to be put in place for the economy to get stronger, including having the Reserve Bank being focused. The Reserve Bank’s dual mandate, which has not worked, will be amended to make sure that its focus is on price stability alone, and on helping the situation with everyone out there who is struggling with day-to-day living and the cost of living—of buying food, and getting around and continuing to live.
So help is coming. These things, they do take a little bit of time, and I ask people who are out there to be patient and give things time for change. Thank you, Mr Speaker.
Hon JO LUXTON (Labour): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take the opportunity to speak in this Address in Reply debate. It is the first opportunity I have had to speak in this House since the general election. I want to acknowledge and congratulate all the new members to this House, here in Parliament, and in particular I’d like to acknowledge James Meager and congratulate him on winning the electorate of Rangitata. I wish him all the best. It is an absolute honour and privilege to serve the people of Rangitata, and one I know that he will take very seriously.
Mr Speaker, I also want to acknowledge you and all the other presiding officers and congratulate you all on your positions. It seems a bit strange to be doing this, this late in the piece, given that the election was nearly four months ago, but, as I say, it is the first opportunity I’ve had to speak in the House since we came back after the election. I’m incredibly grateful to be back here in this House, with and as part of the Labour team, a team that is going to be an extremely strong, united Opposition that will hold this Government to account every opportunity that we get.
I’ll now turn my contribution to the Speech from the Throne that we heard from Prime Minister Christopher Luxon—
Tim van de Molen: Great speech.
Hon JO LUXTON: Yeah, well, that’s debatable. So I went into the Chamber to listen to the speech. I thought I would give him the benefit of the doubt—you know, I’m open to new ideas and different ways of thinking—but I was highly disappointed. There was no vision, there were no transformative ideas; actually, there were no ideas—no new ideas. It was nothing but a speech that was punitive to certain communities and people in New Zealand and it was all about repealing legislation, and I wonder if that is because they have no ideas of their own. All they do or have been doing is repealing legislation that was put in place by the previous Government for the sake of repealing it, with nothing and no ideas to replace it.
So I’m all up for having a change and repealing legislation if there is something that is worthwhile and that it is being replaced with, but we are not seeing any of that, and New Zealanders are not seeing any of that either. In fact, I imagine, and I’m quite certain, there’ll be people out there in New Zealand who are having a bit of buyer’s remorse right now.
During the campaign period, Christopher Luxon said that they would have a laser-sharp focus on the cost of living crisis and on improving the lives of everyday New Zealanders. What we heard in the Speech from the Throne outlines the way in which they plan to do it, and I just want to cover off some of those things that they raised as a way of supporting Kiwis. The first one I want to talk about is repealing the world-first smoke-free legislation. I am unsure how that will help improve the lives of everyday New Zealanders, but we do know that that legislation is being repealed in order to be able to afford the tax cuts that we do know will benefit the rich and the high-income earners. So, yes, I guess they’ll be better off, at the expense of New Zealanders and their health.
Hon Kelvin Davis: Looking after their mates.
Hon JO LUXTON: Yep, for their rich mates. I want to talk about the fact that they will bring back the 90-day trials for every business—every business. As a business owner myself, I exclude that clause from any employment agreement I have because, actually, I trust in my staff and the relationship that I have with my staff. We can have conversations and I can support them through what is called a probation period, I suppose, as well. You can work together, and communication is the key to ensure that you are the right fit together for the business. So I just completely disagree with bringing in the 90-day trials, because that doesn’t help everyday Kiwis with the cost of living—not that I can see.
They got rid of the fair pay agreement legislation—legislation that would simply set baselines and pay and conditions for Kiwis. They’ve repealed that, so how does that help everyday Kiwis with the cost of living? I sat on the select committee that heard submissions from New Zealanders—these everyday Kiwis that this Government professes to want to support with the cost of living crisis. I sat there and I listened to one submission that will always, always stick in my mind: a big burly bus driver brought to tears—brought to tears—in front of the select committee when he told the stories of his working conditions and said that he was having to work several shifts. He hardly ever saw his family, but that is what he had to do in order to make ends meet. And what do we see from this Government? One of the first things that they do is repeal that legislation—the legislation that would quite simply support the everyday Kiwis that they purport to support.
They want to repeal the affordable water reforms—we’ve heard that. When Labour was in Government, we had a plan to fix all the issues that we’re seeing in our water infrastructure, but this incoming Government is simply going to repeal it. We’re not too sure what they’re going to replace it with, but what this Government needs to do is stand up and be honest with New Zealanders about how much its plan will cost them when it comes to councils having to increase rates for ratepayers in order to be able to fix their water infrastructure. I am not sure how that will help everyday New Zealanders with the cost of living.
I want to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart, and that is my sister Teresa, who has Down syndrome. I listened to the Speech from the Throne because I have hopes and aspirations and dreams for Teresa, so I was interested to see what the Government’s aspirations, hopes, and dreams were for people like Teresa—people with disabilities. What did we hear? Crickets—absolutely nothing.
This Government has no hopes, no dreams, and no aspirations for people with disabilities. In fact, we learn that Whaikaha now has to look for 7.5 percent cuts. We heard the Minister of Finance today say that it wasn’t going to affect delivery of services, but that Minister of Finance had also earlier indicated those agencies that would be required to seek cuts, and Whaikaha wasn’t one of them. Whaikaha wasn’t one of them, so how can we believe her when she says things like that?
Hon Member: Broken promise.
Hon JO LUXTON: Yeah, broken promises—completely—from this incoming Government. They talk a lot, as I’ve mentioned, about supporting everyday Kiwis, with a laser-sharp focus on the cost of living crisis, and yet when Labour was in Government, Labour did many things to support people with the cost of living. We increased the minimum wage every year, we brought in fair pay agreement legislation, and we abolished prescription fees. We did many things like that that would help and did help everyday Kiwis with the cost of living crisis. In fact, we were going to introduce 20 free hours’ early childhood education for two-year-olds, which meant for many families that both parents could both be out working, if that is what they chose to do. It would have saved, on average, $133 per week for families in order to go back to work, however that might be—whether or not it was both parents—to be able to bring in additional income to support them.
I want to talk about this Government and the issues around Māori and te reo Māori. When Labour was in Government, we did many things. We introduced the first Matariki public holiday, we increased funding for Whānau Ora by 145 percent, and we introduced New Zealand histories in schools—an opportunity that too many of our previous generations have missed out on, and with me being one of them. So I have hope and I have aspirations for my grandchildren—
Hon Kelvin Davis: They don’t.
Hon JO LUXTON: —that’s right, that’s right—but they are dashed by this Government, which now wants to get rid of te reo Māori language from all Government agencies. What is that telling this next generation of children, who so proudly learn about our history in schools and who so proudly participate in their kapa haka? What is this that we are telling them? That we don’t value them and that we don’t value their language. This Government is shameful.
Hon MATT DOOCEY (Minister for Mental Health): Just say sorry—that’s exactly what the country wants to hear from this Opposition. Just say sorry for what you’ve done to our country. They’ve crashed the economy, law and order is spiralling out of control, our kids are not even going to school, and that’s the legacy of that last Government.
The first majority Government since the start of MMP, and what will they be known for? Abject incompetence—the failure to deliver. They were a Government of misinformation. They were a Government of disinformation. They were a Government that was a failed socialist experiment, because there’s only one trick in Labour’s playbook, and that’s to centralise. The health reforms, the polytech reforms, water reforms, three waters—because, under their book, Labour knows best and Wellington knows best.
I tell you what the public did at the end of last year: they voted for change. They wanted change because they had had enough, and what I won’t stand for now is listening to all these Opposition MPs who have found in themselves a voice. They’re a lion in Opposition, but a lamb in Government. They sat here day after day last term—zip, zilch, de nada. They didn’t say a word on behalf of their electorates when they were ramming through reforms that New Zealanders didn’t want, and we warned them. We warned them that they would die on the hill with things like three waters, and that’s why, when they look around here today, less of their colleagues are back, because they sat here like lemmings and didn’t represent their electorates.
It’s summed up by one Labour MP who got booted out, and when he got vox popped out the front of Parliament, his response was “Oh, my lifestyle’s gone from champagne socialism to lemonade.”, and that’s exactly what was happening: champagne socialism, while everyone out of the beltway of Wellington was hurting. That’s why now we are left in a predicament where this country is facing years of deficits.
But they will be for ever known as the Government of three waters. They’ll be known as the Government of health reforms in the middle of a pandemic that took a wrecking ball to DHBs. Their own Heather Simpson report said to go from 20 to about six to eight, but they went from 20 to zero in the middle of a pandemic, and Kiwis are paying the price now because they’re stuck on waiting lists because of that Government’s focus on growing the bureaucracy.
Think about the lawlessness we’ve experienced in New Zealand: ram raid after ram raid after ram raid. That Government had its head in the sand, and that’s why it’s very clear that the New Zealand public voted for change.
We’re unashamed that we will repeal what that last Government brought in, because it took the country backwards. This coalition Government will take the country forward. We won’t have all the misinformation like with three waters of the misleading advertising campaigns of people turning taps on and green water coming out. When they promised local government that they could opt in, but Official Information Act documents revealed it was an all-in from the very start, they misled New Zealanders, and they should not be returned back to the Treasury benches for a very long time.
It was outlaid very clearly in the Speech from the Throne that we need to grow New Zealand’s economy. We’ve got years of deficits ahead of us. We need to unblock what that last Labour Government did in order to allow New Zealanders to grow and flourish.
Can I also acknowledge the very hard-working people of Waimakariri, who returned me in the last election for my fourth term. People in the electorate of Waimakariri—when you look at the history of it since 1996, they’ve elected Labour and National MPs. They reward hard work, and my commitment today to them is I will continue to work hard for them, as I did in my first term, and now I will in my fourth term.
Can I thank my family for supporting me to be here today, as well as my campaign team and the many people who have supported me over the last nine years, including one gentleman, Roger Bridge, who’s up here in the gallery listening today.
I want to acknowledge my ministerial colleagues as well, who will make a big difference in this country. Why will they make a big difference? Because our Minister of Health is a GP, our Minister of Police was a bravery award - winning police officer, our tertiary education Minister, Penny Simmonds, ran a polytech, a tertiary education institution. The difference is that on this side of the House, we know what we’re doing.
We don’t come here with big, grand slogans that fail to deliver, and nothing worse in their failure to deliver was around mental health. Remember the $1.9 billion, and the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission came out in its first report and said that despite the $1.9 billion, there was no material improvement? It’s very clear when talking to officials that announcements were being made that even the officials knew could not be delivered. It was all about grandstands, it was all about headlines—putting out the latest slogan of transformation. But what they really did was raise expectations for some very vulnerable New Zealanders, and they failed to deliver.
I’m very privileged to be New Zealand’s first Minister for Mental Health, and, as the Prime Minister outlined in the Speech from the Throne, we will get money out of Wellington to the front line. Like our announcement of $6 million for Gumboot Friday. We don’t believe the bureaucracy of Wellington knows best; the front-line community NGOs know best. They know what makes a difference. They’re already delivering, and we will get money to their front line.
Another reason why Labour failed to deliver in mental health was they never understood the issues. It was just all spray and walk away—$100 million here, $100 million there. The reality is, you can announce money, but if you don’t have the workforce to deliver it, no services are going to open. If they’d really done their job and started a pipeline of workforce six years ago, we wouldn’t have a mental health workforce crisis today. The biggest barrier to timely mental health and addiction support in New Zealand is the lack of mental health workforce, and, as we heard the Prime Minister announce in the Speech from the Throne, our commitment is to train more psychiatrists and more psychologists. We’ll work through every discipline to ensure that we open up that pipeline to ensure there’s workers in our mental health services, as well as people with lived experience in the peer support teams that we can roll out, who will make a real difference.
We need to focus on increasing access to timely support. We’ve done a great job in New Zealand encouraging a conversation. We’ve broken down some of the stigma for those who want to come forward. Now they trust us, they take a great leap of faith, and when they do come forward, quite often that timely support is not there. So that’s why we’ve got to focus on getting more money out of Wellington to increase access. We’ve got to reduce the workforce vacancies to ensure that when services are funded, there are people there to deliver them.
But of course, most importantly, it’s not only about treating mental illness; at the same time, we need to promote mental wellbeing. We need to focus a lot more on prevention and early intervention, and that is what this Government will do, because what we will do is actually deliver on our promises.
The time for big slogans is over. It’s about delivery, and that is the difference with this new coalition Government. Thank you.
Hon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, that was a vibrant speech from the previous MP, who’s clearly had quite a lot of coffee today, given the subject material and the passion with which that that was delivered.
I wanted to—with this being a debate—take the opportunity to respond to a few of the points that the Hon Matt Doocey made in his contribution just now. There was a lot of slogans there and a lot of kind of retreading the election campaign from last year—and that’s fine. That’s kind of to be expected, it’s the theatre of the House, and so on. But I do think it is kind of dangerous for the country when we govern by slogans and we don’t look at the facts and the data that sits behind some of those stories.
The Hon Matt Doocey has paid a lot of attention in his parliamentary career to the health system and, in particular, the mental health system, and I commend him for that work. One of the things that he referenced in his speech was around the previous Government’s moves in relation to, essentially, creating a New Zealand health service out of the DHB system, rather than to go with Heather Simpson’s recommendations of reducing it to a smaller number of kind of regional health authorities. Now, the Government did not make that choice to go further than the Simpson report because of some kind of socialist centralising instinct; the Government went further than the Simpson report because the experience of trying to get information and to coordinate a pandemic response through the DHBs proved to be so hard, so challenging, and so nigh-on impossible, it became clear that we were only going to get a nationwide response with a nationwide health service. That is why that decision was taken.
So I just want to encourage Mr Doocey to take a bit of time and maybe go back through some of the Cabinet papers that were around at the time the next time he’s got the temptation to stand up and expound in the House about the evils of socialism, because, actually, if you just spend all of your Government’s time checking out what the previous Government did because that sounds like a good slogan, then you’re not going to leave the country in a better place. That is one of the things that worries me: at the moment, as far as I can tell, the new Government’s agenda is basically a Government of revenge to get rid of everything that the previous Government did.
Sure, you can argue the toss on some of the initiatives of the previous Government—fine. But, surely, having a long-term, stable policy environment and having arguments on the detail around the edges is way better than, every three or six or nine years, completely throwing out all of the work that the previous Government has done, because do you know what’s going to happen next time? Next time these guys get on to that side of the House, they’re just going to do exactly the same thing in response, and all of those grand plans that you’ve got that you’re going to spend the next three or six or nine years developing, they’re just going to get in and reverse them in the first three months, because that’s, apparently, what new Governments do because that’s the standard that’s been set by this Government.
I want to, in particular, draw attention to another thing that the Hon Matt Doocey said, which was around three waters. That, frankly, is an area where the National Party repeatedly got up and said that New Zealanders were concerned. New Zealanders were concerned because the National Party ran a campaign against it. National and the ACT Party campaigned against it, and, fine, you can do that—you know, everybody does that in this House. But let’s not pretend that a political campaign by a political party is the same thing, and I’ve yet to discern a clear plan from this Government for what the replacement for three waters is for the more than $100 billion worth of asset replacement that has to happen in this country when it comes to the three waters infrastructure. Let’s not forget that the reason why that programme was such a high priority for the previous Government was that people died in Havelock North as a result of poor water infrastructure.
People actually died as a result of that—that’s why it was a priority—and the two key principles that drove that programme were one of balance sheet separation, and amalgamation to the point that it would be able to attract the level of investment required in order to be able to deal with those massive challenges. If the first thing that you do is take six years’ worth of work—all of that work by public servants, all of the work that was done by professionals to get that system up and running—and you throw it out and you seem, as yet, to have no plan to replace that programme with anything else other than to say, “Well, we’re just going to return it to communities, but also we’re not going to provide any additional funding to it because this Government’s not about providing additional funding.”—OK; again, you can argue the toss on that—how on earth do you square the circle of saying that you’re going to fix the problem, but not by using balance sheet separation and not by using any kind of amalgamation to get scale for outside investment? You’re not going to do that, right? So it’s absolutely incoherent. Like I said, it’s Government by slogan, and it deeply worries me.
I also want to draw attention to a discrepancy that I perceive between what the Government campaigned on—or what the National Party, at least, campaigned on—prior to taking office, and what it is saying now that it is in Government. I remember the slogan—again, Government by slogan—being deployed over and over and over again during the course of the election campaign, that theirs would be a Government that was relentlessly focused on the cost of living to New Zealanders. Relentlessly focused—so relentlessly focused on the cost of living that I have yet to hear a cost of living initiative from this Government.
In fact, the one thing that I think we can discern from the media since the Government got elected is that the highest priority of this Government is revisiting the Treaty of Waitangi. That is the one thing that this Government is currently known for—right?—and that is a long way away from a cost of living measure. Whatever your point and whatever your arguments are about that, the idea that you want to rewrite the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi—frankly, that is not going to do anything for people who are struggling to make ends meet, put a roof over their head, keep the power on, and put food on the table.
Hon Member: The Government’s cutting the waste.
Hon JAMES SHAW: Now, one thing that I would like to—I love this kind of intervention: “The Government is cutting the waste.” Really? Cutting the waste? Can you tell me what is more wasteful than supporting a Government bill to select committee, getting the Parliamentary Counsel Office to draft it, getting advice from officials—which, so far, appears to be pretty negative about it—taking it through Cabinet, spending the Minister’s time on it, pouring thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Government time and resource into developing a bill, and then killing it the moment it makes it out of select committee? What is more wasteful than that? How does that reduce the cost of living to New Zealanders—I ask that.
Be very careful about your interventions. Maybe rely less on the kind of slogans that you campaigned on in the election campaign, and try and turn yourself to the facts and the data that your own coalition agreements say that you will use as the basis of your Government. But facts and data have so far been absolutely absent in any decision that I have seen coming out of this Government.
Now, because this is the debating chamber and because it’s politics, I’m now going to reverse myself to acknowledge that there’s one area—and I do want to acknowledge the Government on this because I believe in being constructive and giving credit where it’s due. Whilst the Government has, essentially, poured all of its efforts in the first four months or so of its tenure into getting rid of everything that the previous Government did, there is one area where I do want to acknowledge that this Government—and the National Party, in particular—have held the line, and that is around the zero-carbon framework for this country. I want to draw attention to this in particular because the acid test for that piece of legislation—and I want to acknowledge the efforts of the former National Party leader and climate change spokesperson at the time, Todd Muller, who worked on this with me whilst we were in Government. The acid test for that particular piece of legislation was that it had to endure changes of Government over multiple decades, and that is why a number of compromises were made in that piece of legislation, including things I, frankly, was not happy with and don’t support. But, ultimately, they were necessary in order to ensure that it could endure.
I think that is critically important in terms of our overall climate change response, and I thank all parties who were in the House who supported it on third reading, which was everyone in the House at the time. But I do want to suggest that, actually, there are other areas of governance where we should try and find common ground and try and work together so that we can create some enduring solutions, because the kind of activity that we’ve seen from this Government over the course of the first four months is going in the opposite direction.
ARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa):
Manu tiria,
manu werohia
Ki te poho o Te Rāka
Ka tau rērere
Ka tau mai i te ruhi
E tau e koia
Koia, koia
Ko tara-rauriki
Kī mai i Māui
Ehara i te Whitu,
Me te Waru e
E tau, e koia.
Koia!
[Bird of the planting time
bird of the ground-breaking time
upon the chest of Māui’s father
Landing after a long flight
Landing here exhausted,
it will land at our kūmara-digging time.
Dig, dig!
The first kūmara shoots
From Māui are already filling out,
But don’t plant them in November
Or in December
Settle down and dig.
Dig!]
I begin with that waiata, that whakataukī, which has been repeated through the generations of Ngāi Tahu since time immemorial. It is a part of the history we as Ngāi Tahu uri tell ourselves and tell to our children, and today my colleague Rino Tirikatene joins the history of Ngāi Tahu in those things which make us who we are. The Tirikatenes represent three generations of proud Labour MPs who have served this Parliament with dignity, with honour, and with loyalty to their values and to their people.
I want to speak more about my colleague Rino. He’s been really important to me. He’s someone that I’ve held in the highest regard while he served here on the caucus benches with me, and I’ll miss him very much.
Before I talk to my other colleagues—and I’m getting some ribbing from my colleague here, Kelvin Davis, about not speaking about him—let me first turn to the topic of this debate. Around the House, we have heard since question time those criticisms from this side of the House about what this Government is planning to do and what vision we see, but I want to take us back to 2018.
On this day in 2018, I was a young mum. I had a three-month-old baby at the time, and we’d just bought our first house in west Auckland. I was watching the news, and it was the day that the Rt Hon Dame Jacinda Ardern had introduced in this House the legislation that she had talked so much about in her parliamentary career and that she had always wanted to bring to this House, about child poverty reduction, and for me, as a young mum, I saw that piece of legislation as a moment that articulated everything that Labour stood for, for me.
I got involved in Young Labour as a teenager because my family had always been involved in Labour. My dad had been a Labour member since he was at teachers college at Ardmore. This was a moment where Labour was putting forward a vision for a New Zealand that put children first and that centred the needs of the child, and not just those children whose parents could ensure that they could get to school and not just those children who had a good start in life. This was about an Act to hold successive Governments to account, to ensure that everyone in this Parliament had a set of principles and a set of goals that would hold us to ensuring that child poverty was reduced.
Compare that to today, when we’re looking at a Government programme that is full of repeal, that—as the Hon James Shaw has said—is a revenge Government, and that walks back the progress that we have made that was often bipartisan. Around this House, we came to agreements on those big-picture things like the future of our country when faced with the threat of climate change. We are looking now at a Government with no vision, and it is not speaking to those people like me, with a young baby in their arms, looking for something that we could be proud of in the New Zealand that will be our home for many decades to come.
It is a Government of broken promises. Those broken promises are very usefully detailed in the media at the moment. There’s a really useful RNZ story—and I’d recommend that everyone go and have a look at it—about the cuts that are proposed for the different Government departments, and those weren’t necessarily the Government departments that were discussed as needing to look for cuts in the election campaign. So it’s useful for all New Zealanders to know just what we’re looking at here, and those aren’t necessarily just back-office cuts. They’re the cuts to things like public services that people rely upon, and it makes you wonder, when looking at that list and the departments that are up to find a 6.5 or 7.5 percent cut, what kind of services we can expect to be able to rely upon in the future—things that make us pay more for the everyday lives that we already lead.
You have to wonder whether things that have made a huge difference in the lives of the South Aucklanders that I represent in Manurewa are going to stay—things like the school donations programme, which means that parents in Manurewa don’t have to pay the donations that were actually compulsory payments to our public schools. You know, I believe it’s right that everyone should be able to attend their public school, regardless of whether they can pay a donation or not, and so that’s why the Labour Government introduced that programme.
You’ve got to wonder whether those things are safe and sacrosanct, given that all Public Service departments are being asked to find these cuts. Things like the maintenance of those walking tracks that the Department of Conservation maintains for all New Zealanders to be able to use over the summer—you know, I walked one of those over the summer, and I’m sure many in this House did. We’ve got to make sure that those things keep on being maintained in our regions so that people in the cities can get out and enjoy our natural environment and have a connection to those spaces.
It’s important, then, to look at those broken promises in the context of what New Zealanders can expect as leadership from our politicians, and again here I speak to those 10,000 people who came and made the pilgrimage to Tūrangawaewae when asked by the Kīngitanga to come and have a kōrero about the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Do you know what struck me then? It wasn’t the sheer number of people who came along to Tūrangawaewae—because it was absolutely overwhelming—but it was the number of young people who came just to listen, just to participate in the youth forum, just to swim in the waters of the Waikato, and just to talk with each other about why they were here and why they had come and what they were studying at school, or where they had come from and what small town. It was an atmosphere of young people expecting leadership not only from elected members but from their iwi leaders and from their local politicians—from the people who seek to make decisions that matter for their lives.
So all the politicians there—and I congratulate everyone who made the time to come along—heard the strong message from rangatahi, which was “Be a part of the ongoing conversation. Listen to us.” We do not need to relitigate the principles of the Treaty, because we have been having that debate for many, many years. For successive generations, we have been defining, as tangata Tiriti, as Māori, what it means for young people to live in a country where the Treaty is a founding document. What we need is a vision for the future from our elected representatives to move forward and define something that not only honours those principles of the Treaty but also realises the dream of the Treaty to protect our taonga, to protect our natural environment, and to have a climate where people can breathe and live in our country. Those are the promises of the Treaty that our rangatahi want elected members to fulfil, and that is the burden we take on our shoulders when we seek election to represent them.
I want, as well, to speak about the contrast between being in a forum like that and having the vision of these young New Zealanders resting so weightily on my shoulders, and then hearing from what is a shambolic and divided approach to the Treaty of Waitangi from this coalition Government. We hear some members calling for unity and other members acting divisively. You cannot have both of those alongside each other—those two things cannot be true.
So it makes me look to those leaders who I admire the most. I got into politics, as I said, when I was a teenager, but it was because of people like Nanaia Mahuta, who I saw carving the way for young wahine Māori in a forum that was often hostile turf. She led on affordable water, and it cost her personally. She was trying to do a set of reforms that we all know in our heart of hearts need to happen. Someone needs to pay for the pipes. The councils can’t pay for the pipes; we should probably pay for the pipes. She paid for it personally, because she had to wear the misinformation, the vitriol, and the personal attacks that come with being out in the public eye because you are a wahine Māori. She did that, and I’m proud of her. We haven’t yet had a chance to mihi to her in here, and I hope that we do.
Another leader in our party is Kelvin Davis. He will give me a growling after this, but when I speak of the history that we tell ourselves growing up in Te Ao Māori about our leaders, about our elected representatives, we will tell his story. I am so proud of Rino Tirikatene and his grandfather and his aunt who have served in this Parliament too, but Kelvin also stands on the shoulders of his tupuna Karaitiana Takamoana, who was a representative of Eastern Māori in 1871. Kelvin has a proud history of leading within his community and within his school. He is someone who is approachable, who is kind, and who always has time for his people and for those colleagues like me, who annoyingly make speeches about him in the House and ask him a bunch of questions.
I’m so proud of the work we’ve done in this House to unite and to bring about a kotahitanga that we can continue to progress and continue to realise under the Treaty of Waitangi and its promises. I will continue to work for that, and I hope everyone in this House can too.
SPEAKER: I now call, to make her maiden statement to the House, Rima Nakhle.
RIMA NAKHLE (National—Takanini): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Ahiahi mārie, good afternoon, masa el kheir. Friends, family, neighbours in Takanini, country men and women, lend me your ears. Lend me your ears, as we take a journey across many oceans, time frames, memories, and faces. Lend me your ears, as we delve into the realm of the here and now, what brought me here, and what’s taking me into tomorrow.
But first, Mr Speaker, I would love to wish you and all gathered here today, in person or beyond these ceremonial walls, a happy New Year. Thank you, Mr Speaker, for accepting this immensely important responsibility of being our Speaker. In the past, Speakers faced the real risk of execution if the monarch disapproved of a Speaker’s message. But rest assured, Mr Speaker, I’m pretty sure that King Charles III will be more reasonable to someone as praiseworthy as you.
Allow me to acknowledge our Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Christopher Luxon. Prime Minister, so many Kiwis gave a great sigh of relief once you were announced PM, because of your unshakable determination to take New Zealand and her children forward and upward. Thank you, my favourite.
Now, to my genesis, because ancestry is important to who I am. I am a New Zealander, born in Australia to parents who were born in Lebanon. One of five children, my blood traces back to an ancient civilisation known as the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were seafaring traders who invented the alphabet, a significant contribution to humanity.
Skip forward a few thousand years to Lebanon. A fifth the size of New Zealand, Lebanon gave me my parents, John Hanna Fahd Rahme and Dalida Watfa Habib Rahme. I’m the daughter of a welder and a florist, and my parents hail from a small village in the mountains of Lebanon named Ainata al Arz.
When Mum speaks of her childhood, it’s with mostly fondness, but there’s an underpinning of pain. From her depictions I know, even though she doesn’t think in these terms, that Mum grew up in poverty. Mum’s childhood was hard but loving, and as I go through life, I see very clearly that the blow of poverty and hardship is somewhat softened when there is an abundance of love in the home.
In 1973, Dad and Mum got married in Lebanon and migrated to Sydney, Australia—a foreign land with a foreign language. But my parents always taught us to be appreciative and to love their adopted country.
I share these pieces of my genesis because to me, one’s ancestry is not just an interesting dinner party topic. It is a deep source of intergenerational knowledge from which we can each draw tremendous strength.
With all the ups and downs of childhood, I recall feeling mostly loved and safe. But there was a specific time of hardship for my family, and I remember boxes of food being delivered to our home by a woman dressed in a navy suit and a navy hat, who I now realise was a Salvation Army volunteer. But my parents worked hard to get through this difficult time. They opened up their florist business decades ago, and us kids grew up helping Mum in the shop after school, whenever was needed: weekends, school holidays, and late into the night. This helped me see, from a young age, that money does not appear by magic but through hard work.
My father deeply laments the fact that he can’t read and write, and always emphasised the importance of education. I was schooled at St Charbel’s College, a Lebanese Maronite Catholic school, where my love for my heritage was cultivated and I was enriched by my Maronite faith. Dad, bayee, thank you for teaching me the importance of education.
I was always drawn towards advocacy, which led me to complete a degree in law. I would like to acknowledge my friends in the gallery who perform this old craft so dutifully, including Lady Donna Hall, Felix Geiringer, Dan Hughes, Richard, and Johno.
Towards the end of my studies, I met the personification of perfection: Roger Nakhle. We entered marriage 12 years ago, and I am so profoundly grateful for the privilege of being able to call Aotearoa my home since 2012.
Like myself, Roger is the son of Lebanese migrants. My father-in-law, Elias Nakhle, came to New Zealand in the late 1960s with very little, and started working tirelessly. He and my mum-in-law, Henriette Nakhle, raised three boys and built a good life for their children while helping many others along the way. Mrs Nakhle’s efforts have been recognised with both a QSM and a New Zealand Order of Merit for her services. I would like to thank my beautiful parents-in-law for all their love and support.
To my brother-in-law David: you are one of the most intelligent people I know. I love you dearly, and I wish you and the soon-to-be Dr Drae the best.
I’m often asked: why politics? By nature, as I said, I’ve always gravitated towards advocacy, towards service. The way that our society functions and how I can help improve the lives of my neighbours in Takanini, and all over New Zealand, through advocacy and service—this energises me every day.
I can’t hide the fact that there are some issues which stir passion quite quickly within me, and it’s those moments that make me question: why? Why do I feel so strongly about personal responsibility? Perhaps it’s because of Mum’s attitude—that despite the material hardship she experienced as a youth, Mum says she never had the inclination to steal from or manipulate others to better her circumstances. Mum chose to go without rather than to steal.
Why is law and order so important to me? Because people just want to feel safe—it’s as simple as that. When order becomes disorder, grandparents stop going out for grocery shopping, parents don’t let their kids walk home from school, and dairy owners have to serve people from within cages. Our police should always be given the powers and resources they need to do the job they do best: keeping us safe.
Punishments should fit the crime, but we need to intervene early to prevent youth from entering a life of crime. I believe strongly in social investment. Social investment in our youth to help build their mental resilience and protect them from the lure of gangs; social investment to combat youth crime, where positive mentors teach our troubled youth self-discipline.
Social investment in housing: when I worked at Te Mahia Community Village, a transitional housing facility in Takanini, I saw the significant drop in antisocial behaviour when social wraparound services are partnered with housing providers. Thank you, Sharon Wilson-Davis and Phil Davis, for STRIVE Community Trust, which does great work in this area. And to the staff at Te Mahia Community Village—Maxine, Oceania, Saras, and the rest of the team—thank you for the amazing work you do, caring for our people and showing what is possible.
We often hear that education is the key to breaking the cycles of poverty, unemployment, and crime, but I ask the House: why is education the common denominator? To me, it’s because if our people cannot read and write to begin with, they risk being shut out from society and the world. To improve the future of our nation, it’s imperative that we place a high value on education. While I strongly commend the traditional school systems, I also place merit in alternative school programmes and alternative education programmes and charter schools, because not every child learns the same way. The outcomes achieved by programmes such as Mātātoa are admirable. Thank you, Frank Haimona, Matua Kingi, and all the team, for your dedication.
Our youth are our future, but our seniors have played a major role in building our beautiful country. I believe we must respect and take care of our seniors, as a matter of duty.
Freedom of speech is an essential component of a functioning democracy. My view is that as long as this right is exercised in a respectful manner, nobody should ever be vilified for having a different opinion.
I am the MP for one of the newest electorates in the country—Takanini—and the outstanding result in last year’s election tells me that most of my neighbours have put their faith in the National Party and in me. I will work tirelessly for our electorate and our country. To our volunteers, who dedicated so much time and energy into our campaign—including our Young Nats and not-so-young Nats—many of whom are seated in the gallery today, I am filled with deep gratitude for all of you. Dr Neru Leavasa, thank you for the service you gave our electorate as the former MP. You are a good man with a good heart.
To my Takanini National Party committee, thank you for all the hours you continue to give in setting the foundations for our new electorate, and for your friendship. Katrina Stent, thank you for setting the wheels in motion back in 2015 with that one question. Daniel Newman, my local councillor in Manurewa-Papakura and my friend, your guidance over the years is deeply appreciated. Much love to you and Lizzie. Marcus and Danielle Kearns, thank you for the fervent love you have for our country.
Takanini is enriched, with over 50 percent of its residents born overseas. I would like to acknowledge all our migrant communities for helping build and grow New Zealand. A few special mentions for the phenomenal work of some of our ethnic community organisations such as the Hindu Foundation, New Zealand Sikh Games, and Takanini Gurdwara that all have representatives here today.
And as we gather here in this debating chamber, which is also a war memorial, I pay homage to our ANZAC men and women, and the brave Māori Battalions, many of whom gave their lives to help liberate foreign lands, one of them being Lebanon. Lest we forget. The horrible truth is that Roger and I have had bloodshed in both our families because of war in the Middle East. For there to be peace—a lasting peace—I believe parties will need to swallow a bitter pill and make some concessions not for themselves but for their future generations.
Hospitality and togetherness is a very important part of my Lebanese culture, and I also found this in the Māori culture. When I met Anne Kendall, now deputy chair of the New Zealand Māori Council, and Tony Kake, CEO of Papakura Marae, I was touched by the constantly warm welcome I received at the marae. My beautiful Anne, you have shown me what it is to serve one’s community faithfully and without judgment. Tony, your dedication to our people knows no bounds, and South Auckland is indebted to you. Tarsh Kemp, now my colleague in the House, thank you for the work you led at Manurewa Marae.
I love our Māori people, our Māori culture, and our Māori language. In politics, messages get muddied when spins are attached to them. But I want to make something very clear to my Māori brothers and sisters: if I felt that the National Party was racist, I would not be part of the National Party. If I felt that the National Party was anti-Māori, I would not be part of the National Party.
Lebanon experienced hundreds of years of occupation and persecution. The Ottoman Empire tried to wipe out the Arabic language in Lebanon. It was the efforts of the Maronite monks that kept the language alive, so I understand the importance of preserving one’s language and culture. I would like to acknowledge Kīngi Tūheitia and thank him for the manaakitanga he always bestows to all who enter the grounds of Tūrangawaewae Marae, as I did recently.
To my nieces and nephews, Rima, Silia, Pio, Zara, Tony, Isaac and John, you are my heartstrings. To my brothers-in-law, Archer, Cyril and George, thank you for treating my sisters with deep love and respect. Nagewa, Jenny, Tanya, and Tony, my beloved siblings, you are cushions on which my heart rests and my mind finds sanctuary. Mum, Oummi, thank you for always making me feel safe in the fortress, al ha, of your love.
Roger, my wisdom, when I was ready to give up, you said the words my soul needed to hear. You ran the campaign the way you wanted, and in Takanini, I’m proud that we achieved the highest swing of the country. I don’t know what good I’ve done in this world to be eternally blessed with you, but what I do know is that I am in constant awe of you. Prime Minister, colleagues, Takanini, New Zealand, I’m at your service. Now let’s get Mill Road done, and let’s get our country back on track. I had to put that in.
Haka
Waiata
SPEAKER: I think we now have people moving out of the gallery for new people to come in. If that could occur as quickly and smoothly as possible, that would be much appreciated.
CAMERON BREWER (National—Upper Harbour): E ngā iwi, e ngā mana, e ngā reo, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
[To the peoples, the preeminent ones, to the representatives, greetings and thanks to you all.]
I arrived as an MP in October, exactly 25 years after I started at Parliament in the National Party’s research unit and then on to the leader’s office. Two big changes I’ve noticed around this place: I have yet to see a drinks trolley being wheeled down a corridor, and MPs can no longer smoke in their parliamentary offices. Today, Parliament is positively healthier, more inclusive, more representative, more supportive, and more family friendly. I congratulate you, Mr Speaker, from transitioning from junior whip to senior Cabinet Minister and now father of the House. I know that you will work hard to ensure Parliament continues to reflect today’s norms while upholding the many traditions that not only make Parliament special but effective.
My motivation for being here comes from the opportunity to be part of a team relentlessly focused on unleashing New Zealand’s potential, and regaining—and, in fact, building on—what we had when we were at our best. Our country is unique here in the south-west of the Pacific Ocean. We are truly ourselves and, what’s more, we don’t have to be like the rest. In fact, let’s not turn into one big monolithic suburb, with all the problems of a big country and a big city. Let’s keep being New Zealand and let’s get back our revered way of life. Let’s grow New Zealand both economically and socially, but let’s stay distinctly ourselves. We know how to be a truly great country. We know the ingredients required, and together we will do it again. Our forebears worked too hard for us not to.
With the best of intentions, this House has tried many things over the years. The public, however, has now demanded we correct New Zealand’s path, and, on this side, we’re up for the task. We have a good majority and strong mandate, with 68 MPs in Government and 55 in Opposition. Change is what most Kiwis want and so it’s change that we must deliver. So I come to this House in support of correcting and creating a New Zealand where our children and their children want to stay and where we are once again one of the most enticing nations on earth for those lucky enough to live and move to.
I would not be here without a lot of people doing the work—the hard mahi. I wholeheartedly thank the electorate committee, electorate chair, my campaign committee, and the many party volunteers who made sure Auckland’s Upper Harbour electorate returned blue. Our local victory belongs to them. I was merely tasked with delivering a sensible speech on election night—one job!
Can I also thank my wonderful partner and my three children, as well as my parents and my two brothers and their families.
In the olden days, three sons meant one on the farm, one in the army, and one in the church. You can only guess where my two older brothers had me! They were good days growing up in rural South Taranaki, near Hāwera, on a West Coast leased sheep farm with local iwi Ngāti Ruanui our landlord. The Brewers were among the early settlers, arriving in Auckland in 1855, with my great-great-great-grandparents buried under the Grafton Bridge. My Scottish first name is a nod to my mother’s side of the family, some of whom landed in Waipū, Northland, in 1858, having first tried Nova Scotia.
I want to thank the many colleagues and friends who supported and encouraged me when I founded community newspaper Inside Otago in 1996, when I worked in Parliament, in the Auckland city mayoral office, as head of the Newmarket Business Association, as an Auckland councillor, and, more recently, as the owner of a public relations consultancy.
The north-west of Auckland has been home for nearly a decade, and, after buying a house, we moved into the heart of the Upper Harbour electorate just last week. Created in 2014, the Upper Harbour electorate stretches from Massey in the west to Wairau Valley in the east, and the likes of Royal Heights, West Harbour, Hobsonville Point, Greenhithe, Bayview, Unsworth Heights, and part of Glenfield in between. It’s one of the youngest electorates in New Zealand, and one of most diverse, with an estimated 40 percent - plus of pan-Asian descent. Upper Harbour is rich with Chinese Kiwis, Korean Kiwis, Indian Kiwis, and Filipino Kiwis. As the new MP, I will work hard to represent everyone, and to be accessible and visible. The pressures of population growth and housing intensification mean we need to do more when it comes to transport infrastructure and services. I will be Upper Harbour’s No. 1 advocate.
With that, I am delighted the Minister of Transport views the construction of the Northwest Rapid Transit corridor—a dedicated busway alongside State Highway 16—as a priority project to help ease Auckland’s congestion. Bring it on! And bring on our new Government Policy Statement on Land Transport.
National’s larger Auckland caucus is strong in its commitment to deliver for New Zealand’s largest city and commercial capital, and Aucklanders are up for it. In fact, Aucklanders were up for it over 20 years ago, with an overwhelming number of them happy to pay a toll or for congestion if they meant quicker travel times. That was when the city was just over 1 million people, and by the end of this decade, Auckland will likely be home to 2 million.
Aucklanders strongly voted for change in the 2022 local government elections and again in the 2023 general election, and that is what must now be delivered. Again, I am here because I have long wanted to be part of such change. It’s great we are getting serious about public-private partnerships (PPPs). That is long overdue, and I believe PPPs should go beyond transport infrastructure.
An example of the possibilities is Auckland’s Spark Arena. As New Zealand’s first major public-private partnership, it was constructed nearly 20 years ago for $94 million, which Auckland City ratepayers partly contributed, but it has since been owned and managed privately. The arrangement is dubbed a BOOT——Build, Own, Operate, Transfer. In the 2040s, 100 percent ownership of Spark Arena will be transferred to Auckland Council. The next generation of ratepayers will, effectively, get Spark Arena in mint condition for free. How good is that! Let’s use the balance sheets of the private sector as we continue to build our country’s infrastructure and public amenities. In many cases, it’s the only way we will do it.
New Zealand is at its greatest when we maximise the power of our communities. We used to be known as a can-do country. Remember? Sadly, we haven’t heard that term for a while. The foundation of the National Party is built on the values of ambition and success; with lower taxes, reward for hard work, and equal opportunity for all at its core. As a member for 28 years, I am proud to be part of a party where strong families and caring communities is a key value and where our philosophy is to empower community organisations, not to compete with them.
Since the COVID-19 lockdowns, many Kiwis have struggled to fully reintegrate both socially and at work, while many of our kids who turned on their iPads have not since turned them off. As parents we all hear ourselves too often say how we used to play much more outdoors, but there are simple things we can do. Sport Waitākere tells me that across West Auckland this summer, at least 17 school pools remain closed—all while temperatures rise to 30 degrees. How crazy is that? It has just got too hard for many school boards with liability and operational costs. Being can-do is actually essential, because being can’t-do is costing us and the next generation much, much more.
I want to acknowledge the thousands affected by the Auckland floods and the cyclone a year ago. In Wairau Valley, we lost lives. In Tōtara Vale, the second storey of some homes were flooded, and at the bottom of Massey, many homes remain abandoned. As representatives and as communities, we must continue to support these people as the pain and loss continues. The buy-outs in Auckland have begun, but many residents remain in limbo, and many impacted simply don’t qualify for assistance. They cannot be forgotten.
Education is a major determinant in people’s lives. We all know the turn-around job is big, but we’ve had a world-class State education system before and we can do it again. No one can argue the worsening statistics of the past 30 years, but we must not accept them. I am proud to be part of a Government that’s unashamedly about standards, a knowledge-based curriculum, and delivering excellence for our children—a Government that will finally tackle the crippling and unacceptable attendance and truancy rates. With me, I have a “Good Attendance Certificate”. It certifies that despite having to ride miles to school every day on her pony in often cold and wet central Taranaki, my eight-year-old grandmother was “present every time the school was open during the period of 12 months ending December the 31st, 1913”. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.
Fast forward to when I was growing up, my parents had a yale key that was permanently in the front door, so you could just turn the key and walk in. When we went away, or as we slept inside, that key always remained in our front door. Also back then, you never lost your car keys, because they were permanently in the ignition! We’ve enjoyed safe communities in my lifetime, and New Zealand can be one of the safest countries again. However, things need to change, and they will. Kiwis have had enough. They want a Government focused on law and order, and that is another reason I am here.
New Zealand is a country of small businesses, and if they weren’t cleaned out during COVID, many have folded since. Not only is National the party of limited government and personal responsibility but another key value is competitive enterprise and rewards for achievement. The farmers, the tradies, the retailers, the moteliers, the cafe owners, and the many others working dawn till dusk in small businesses have kept our country going in recent years and now deserve a break. We value local businesses, and National will always fight for them.
Good news: strong economic performance and lifting productivity have returned as key motivators for the Beehive. Our Prime Minister knows that without economic growth, we simply won’t have the resources to protect our environment and rebuild our healthcare and education systems, let alone retain our best and our brightest, and attract skills and investment.
New Zealand has always been committed to supporting those who find themselves out of work. Tragically, with labour shortages at record highs, a great opportunity was missed in the past few years to get more Kiwis off a main benefit and into a job. Fortunately, getting people who can back into work is once again a key focus. In fact, the very people the previous Government purported to represent were, sadly, the ones who have suffered the greatest. Those hit the hardest by the cost of living crisis are Kiwis on the pension, those Kiwis on the factory floor, those Kiwis trying to make ends meet—it’s Māori, it’s Pasifika—they’ve been absolutely walloped.
In the first few weeks of the 54th Parliament, we then had to endure the Opposition parties’ claim that we are the party for millionaires and even billionaires. I only wish that they had been out campaigning and waving on Glenfield Road with some of us last year. The toots of support were not coming from the rich; they were coming from working New Zealand. Thousands of lifetime Labour voters went for National for the first time ever in October. They felt betrayed, abandoned, and let down. They’re now relying on us to deliver for them and their families.
Out and about this summer break has shown many of us that this Government and its policy programme have great support across rural and urban New Zealand. The 1.5 million Kiwis who voted for this coalition Government like what they see, and now just want us to get on with it. Kiwis voted for change and unapologetically that is what they will get. Over the coming months, and years, we will dig deep to deliver the New Zealand our children and grandchildren deserve—the greatest country on earth and a place where hard work is rewarded. We’ve done it before, and New Zealand can do it again. Ngā mihi nui. Thanks so much.
DANA KIRKPATRICK (National—East Coast): E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e ngā rangatira, tēnā koutou. Tēnā koutou kua huihui mai nei, kia ora koutou katoa.
[To the pre-eminent, to the representatives, to the esteemed leaders, greetings. Greetings to you who have assembled here, hello to all of you.]
Mr Speaker, I stand before you today humbled and privileged to be the MP for East Coast, and to represent a region so vast in size and demographics, and challenges and opportunities, with some of the greatest people in Aotearoa New Zealand. Congratulations on your appointment, and thank you for your commitment to the House. May I also please acknowledge Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, the Hon Nicola Willis, and the National leadership team for their support and commitment. Leadership is the central pivot of an organisation, and I am firmly of the view that our leaders will guide this country to a better place, and leave a legacy that we can all be proud of.
Can I acknowledge all of those who have made the journey today. None of this would have been possible without you, without the support you’ve given me throughout my life, my career, and the pathway that brought us all to this place today. I’m grateful for all that you have done for me. Mum, thank you for your support, holding the fort when I’m not at home and picking up the pieces. Your energy knows no bounds, and I am extremely grateful. Andrew, Tracy, Riley, and Jake—thank you for all that you’ve done. Harold, Jo, Debs, Kaye, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and former colleagues—thank you for being here today. It is humbling that there are people who represent all the different parts of my life journey.
I would like to acknowledge the Hon Tony Ryall, who is not here today but was a huge support during my campaign. The Hon Anne Tolley and Ian McKelvie and former National Party President Judy Kirk for their encouragement and support. To those who could not make it but are making their first foray into the gripping world of Parliament TV—thank you for joining us.
Today, I am also very proud to have representatives from my Haronga and Ruru whānau of Te Aitangaa-Māhaki here. Collectively, the whānau here today covers Mangatu Incorporation, Wī Pere Trust, Te Aitanga a Mahaki Trust, Te Runanga o Turanganui a Kiwa, Toitū Tairāwhiti Housing, and last but not least, our community from Te Karaka who were impacted by the severe weather events nearly 12 months ago, almost to the day.
Lastly, to all of the volunteers and party faithfuls across the East Coast electorate, I have no words for the tireless dedication you gave to the cause, the belief you had in me, and the singular focus you had on changing the Government—thank you one and all. I can’t thank you enough.
It is also great to have my children Anna and Sam in the gallery. You have supported me through career changes and the journey that became “Politics 101” and then the MP for East Coast. Thank you for your patience, your support, and for keeping things real. When I told them I was standing for election, they said, “Well Mum, you’ve got a loud voice and pretty much an opinion on everything so you may as well have a go”.
Lastly, to my colleagues: Katie Nimon, who shares part of the southern Gisborne area with me in an extraordinary electorate boundary, and MPs for Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, Cushla Tangaere-Manuel, and Waiariki, Rawiri Waititi. I’d also like to thank Minister Todd McClay for his help throughout the campaign. Our electorate and its regions have significant challenges, and it will take all of us in order to make a difference and have better outcomes for all.
I am staunchly East Coast, born and raised in Gisborne, Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, in a small village called Pātūtahi in the valley known as Ngātapa. It is a place I proudly call home and always will. My upbringing was quintessential rural New Zealand. My parents worked hard on the family farm that had been settled by my great-grandfather David Kirkpatrick in 1891, passed to his son David, and then to my father, David. You don’t get a prize for guessing names in my family!
The first David Kirkpatrick was an astute Scotsman—a leading stud breeder and farmer. His son—my grandfather—was a World War I veteran serving in the Wellington Mounted Rifles in Egypt from 1917 to 1919. On his return from Egypt, he too became a successful farmer. He married Kathleen Mary Walker and subsequently five children were added to the family.
At the age of 15, Dad developed osteomyelitis in his ankle, and left school to recover and start his farming life. He and Mum took over the family farm, and Dad cemented his reputation as an award-winning farmer, a man of considerable integrity and fairness, a leader, our mentor. He represented New Zealand in sport, and he had a twinkle in his eye. He was the most hard-working, competitive person I have ever met. Dad’s advice always was: be a good person, be fair, humble, and a good sport. If you’re going to do something, for God’s sake, do it properly and give it 110 percent.
On my Mum’s side of the family we are descended from an English immigrant family—the Gaukrodgers—and the distinguished Ruru and Haronga families who are proudly Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki. Charlie Gaukrodger was an exceptional farmer in the very back blocks of Whatatutu with his beautiful wife Katerina Ruru, known as Kath. Remote, difficult, high-country farming with five children. They rode their horses to school in rain, hail, or snow. Kath made all their clothes, wove their school kete, and taught them to fend for themselves.
I am privileged to have grown up in such an awesome family—hard workers on all sides, with a steely determination and staunch integrity. Our family instilled in us a strong work ethic, a healthy competitive spirit, and the ability to walk alongside people from all walks of life as we encountered new and different experiences.
After a wonderful schooling at Patutahi Primary School, I went away to St Matthew’s College in Masterton. Despite best efforts, I somehow managed to carefully avoid committing myself too heavily to the academic endeavours expressed in the school motto, “Ad Astra per Aspera”. But I made some lifelong friends, some of them sitting up there today. I am now hoping that my efforts as a late achiever will make up for my diminished attention sometime in the 1980s. I just got a text today from my former school principal, John Taylor, wishing me well. I’m pretty sure he didn’t see this coming in 1987.
My career took me from broadcasting school through a 10-year career in journalism, into local government. Later, I ran my own PR, communications, and fundraising business for 10 years, where we focused on local and central government projects and raised a lot of money for charities. Then, thanks to a late return to university, I developed a new focus and sought my first general manager role.
This was at Eastwoodhill—the National Arboretum of New Zealand—a globally recognised collection of northern hemisphere trees and shrubs—many on the International Union of Conservation of Nature endangered list. It was founded by an eccentric World War II veteran, a nudist, no less, who wore one gumboot so he could use the spade to plant his trees. The environmental opportunity for Eastwoodhill to be a global safe haven for the world’s endangered tree species is relevant to this day. Borne out of a fear of nuclear holocaust, it remains an untapped opportunity for New Zealand.
I then moved on to Equestrian Sport New Zealand, where I was eventually the CEO in a challenging, high performance sport environment, with 10,000 extremely vocal members. We worked on transformational projects, concussion protocols, drug and alcohol testing, complaints procedures, and the like. I worked alongside a great team at High Performance Sport New Zealand in developing a strategic blueprint for change for elite sport.
There is much to do in sport, but I feel really strongly about the inspiration and the aspiration it provides Kiwis at home and abroad. Whether it is sport at the high level or at the grassroots—a local rugby club—it plays an enormous part in weaving communities together; teaching discipline, focus, and social skills; and providing opportunities for anyone to succeed, no matter the background, shape, size, or ethnicity.
So how come politics? It was during the pandemic that I quite literally found my political voice, and discovered I had begun to shout at the television. During 2020 and 2021, I found myself shouting in frustration more and more at the television, as Government policy and regulation stripped the life out of all of us, and in 2022, it dawned on me: shouting at the television wasn’t working and never would, and if I was to make a difference, I’d have to get elected.
I really wanted to do work that contributed to a positive, innovative, fair, and united country. A country where my children wanted to grow up and bring up their families, and a country where we honoured our service people, where we have the most inspirational teachers, a health system that is functional, and where everyone has opportunities to be educated and to get ahead. So here we are: a privilege, a new chapter, and one of the most important jobs in the world.
The East Coast electorate is enormous and varied. It stretches 13,000 kilometres from Pōtaka to Pātūtahi, Manutuke to Minginui, Murupara and Maketū. Five district councils, two regional councils, many strong and proud iwi, two hospitals, an endless number of wonderful towns and villages, and many hundreds of kilometres of roads—many of them broken. We are home to some of the world’s most productive horticultural and agricultural land and New Zealand’s best orchardists and farmers. We are proudly 50 percent Māori. We have wonderful ethnic groups, and we are rural communities, isolated, self-sufficient, and the hardest of workers.
There are inequities in access to services for Māori and non-Māori in our electorate—particularly those living in isolated rural communities that have gone backwards in the past six years. As a country, it is time we stopped hiffing money around without fixing the core issues. It’s time we stopped marginalising the very people who do the work in this country, who grow the food we eat, provide the jobs, industries, goods, and services—the taxpayers who pay the wages of every person in this Chamber today. The National Party’s focus on reducing the cost of living and getting our economy back on track is at the core of this country’s recovery. It is simply the most important task before us.
I’m proud to be part of a Government that has identified policy and legislation that supports our businesses and rural sectors, understands that local solutions deliver for Māori and non-Māori, ensures basic needs are met, and delivers a thriving, successful economy. An economy where we celebrate food producing qualities, where we’re not afraid to be forward-thinking, innovative, and clever; where we value our environment and collectively work to improve it in a sensible and sustainable way. A country where we understand and support the incredible role that electorates like the East Coast play in the economic and social tapestry of New Zealand, and one where we do not mistake activity for achievement.
Without labouring the point, I’m not sure if I mentioned the roads. State Highway 2 and State Highway 35 are barely a goat track in some places. And I applaud the commitment of the Prime Minister, the Minister for recovery, and the Minister of Transport for travelling Napier to Wairoa and Gisborne by car to understand its real state. I want to reassure the people who live in the eastern part of our electorate that we know how important and significant safe and reliable roading infrastructure is to our region’s future. It supports our productive sectors, our tourism, it keeps us in food and supplies for our industries, and it is the link for our families and communities, for wellbeing and access to specialist services. Without a pragmatic, connected approach to transportation networks, our resilience, our economic viability, and our very existence is compromised.
Notwithstanding that, there’s much to do in the region for cyclone recovery and the land use inquiry. There is no doubt that forestry contributes much to the economic and social outcomes of the region on many levels. But there’s also no doubt among any of the players that the operating environment and the options for land use have changed considerably, and a new environmentally conscious focus is required. The approach taken after Cyclone Bola in 1988 has not been the gift we had envisaged. It’s time to collaborate, rethink this, and develop a better way forward.
There is so much to do in our region. There have been significant investments into areas in the East Coast such as Ōpōtiki, Kawerau, and Whakatāne, and the possibilities for innovation and sustainable sector development are exciting. We must support businesses to grow and find the way to make significant change to the social parameters in places like these to break the inter-generational issues that will hold them back.
As I said, so much to do, including for mental health, for education, for housing, and policing. But, above all, for whatever tenure I have in this House and as the MP for the East Coast, I want us to work together. As a country, we have come a long way, but we have a long way to go. We must find a way to work together, where we can respect each other’s views, debate with maturity, understand the journey we have all been on and the contributions we have made along the way. As the leaders of Aotearoa New Zealand, it is time to show up. It’s time to collectively understand the concept of kotahitanga and that we are so much better in unity. We have to lead the way in treating people better, having mature conversations, and working in partnership. After all, division will break us all in the end.
I am proud to be part of a Government that provides for all New Zealanders, that uses practical common sense, that looks after taxpayer dollars, a Government that understands the benefit of infrastructure over ideology, and one that will fix the roads.
Finally, I thought I’d leave you with a story from the election campaign. Someone wrote a song about me. It was about the new East Coast MP, Danica Patrick—you know the one? The millionaire, racing car driver, and supermodel. Just in case you’re confused, I’m not Danica Patrick—not a millionaire, don’t own a racing car, and clearly not a supermodel, and no, never a whippet, actually, for those of you who know.
But I am Dana Kirkpatrick—mother, volunteer, community person, businesswoman, hard worker, mental health advocate. Someone who fundamentally believes in authenticity, fairness, and respect. I will work hard, listen even harder, and do my very best for the people of the East Coast electorate, because at the end of the day, it’s they who will hold me accountable. I’ll do my best to make my supporters proud and my children pleased that their mum stood up for what she believed in: that hard work pays off and you can’t make a difference by sitting back and shouting at the television. Thank you, East Coast, for giving me this privilege.
Mr Speaker, thank you for indulging me. Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.
Waiata—“Haramai a Paoa”
CARL BATES (National—Whanganui): Tēnā koutou katoa. Ko Ruapehu te maunga, ko Whanganui te awa, nō Whanganui ahau. Ko Carl Bates taku ingoa. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.
[Greetings to all of you. Ruapehu is my mountain, Whanganui is my river, I am from Whanganui. Carl Bates is my name. Greetings and thanks to all of you.]
Greetings, Mr Speaker, and congratulations on your election. Congratulations to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, to our Cabinet, and to coalition partners. Greetings to my fellow MPs across the House.
I grew up with seven of my eight great-grandparents and all my grandparents, including my Nana June and Grandma Shirley, who are in the gallery today, and my Grandad Barry watching from home. I was blessed to learn a lot from their stories of hardship, hard work, and success. In particular, I recall their adage: “Waste not, want not.”
As I enter this House and consider what I want our legacy here to be, I want it to be more meaningful than merely burdening our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren with our debt. Unfortunately, over the last six years, non - COVID-related spending and borrowing increased at unprecedented rates. This has flowed on to higher inflation and higher interest rates, both hurting New Zealanders daily.
I have created companies to achieve outcomes. I believe successful enterprises exist to deliver on a particular promise, to employ people, to pay taxes, and to solve problems—and we need more of them. Creating a company, though, doesn’t come without risk, nor are they always as successful as entrepreneurs would like their own to be. Every dollar these businesses pay to the Government in tax should be treated with the respect and appreciation for the blood, the sweat, and the tears that went into generating it. As should those taxes paid by farmers, teachers, nurses, shift workers, and, indeed, everybody else. As we look to the future, it is imperative that this House is more responsible with New Zealanders’ money. This House must make choices between what the role of Government is and what it is not. We cannot, and should not, try and attempt to solve every problem—and nor should we.
The story we tell our grandchildren of this post-COVID period must be one of recovery: setting New Zealand up for success and providing a platform for them to achieve anything. It must be the story of how this Government got New Zealand back on track: reduced the burden of the State and made us more productive. I commend the Cabinet’s decision to cancel the Interislander replacement contract. It sent a clear message to all those who consider the Government to be a bottomless ATM that this coalition Government will deliver value for taxpayers’ money. Prime Minister, I look forward to your leadership through this critical period in resetting New Zealand’s economic and social story. I am here to be part of making that happen.
New Year’s Eve 2020 saw my wife, Candice, and I sitting in managed isolation and quarantine. We reflected on the year that was and the economic headwinds New Zealand would face. Six months later, I told our team that our business was for sale. Then, with no idea how this journey would end, as I do, I went all in on returning National to the Treasury benches. That New Year’s Eve, Candice and I also celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. Since we swiped right, you have constantly supported me and challenged me. Your mum, Sheila-ann, would be so proud of the amazing mum you are to Angus and Logan. You will be an awesome guide to them as they navigate this unique journey. I love you and I know how much you have sacrificed for us to be here.
Mum, you have been my biggest promoter and my harshest critic—to the extent you could probably get a job in the press gallery! Seriously though, thank you for always being on the other end of the phone, no matter the time zone, and for pushing me to be my best.
Dad, you are an inspiration. Your positive attitude and constant smile, despite everything since your stroke in 2010, is a reminder to us all that life is what you make it.
Thank you to electorate chair Andy Jarden, campaign chair Linde Judd, and the entire and phenomenal Whanganui electorate team for all you did to enable us to win in October. You all kept saying “yes”, and I will never be able to thank you enough for the countless hours you volunteered.
Mr Speaker, 1996 is both the year you were first elected to this august place and the year—as a mere 12-year-old—I started the Whanganui Young Nationals branch with Luke Byers. We vigorously campaigned for the Hon Peter Gresham, who, along with then electorate chair Neil Walker, schooled us in politics. That year, the Hon Chester Borrows and I began our friendship. Chester provided significant support and guidance during my selection, even as his final illness robbed him of a long retirement. I acknowledge Chester as the MP for Whanganui for 12 years, and I thank he and Ella for their service to our region.
The Whanganui electorate is a microcosm of New Zealand: full of potential and blessed with natural assets and innovative people; businesses that service us locally and make us proud globally; organisations and volunteers that ensure we support each other; and, much like New Zealand as a whole, a rural sector that is the backbone of our economy.
The wonderful Whanganui electorate begins at the Whangaehu River and travels through Whanganui, up State Highway 4—which I know we’ll fix—and past Kakatahi. To many people’s surprise, it also runs up State Highway 3 to encompass Hāwera, around Mount Taranaki, and ceases as you enter Ōpunake on the west and encompasses Stratford to the east.
Many ask what binds these places together. Well, at primary school, we learnt of a Māori legend that tells of our deep connection. Long ago, Taranaki maunga and Tongariro maunga fought for the attention of Pihanga. After Tongariro proved successful in capturing her love, Taranaki fled the central plateau, heading for the sea. He left a scar on the land behind him, formed our beautiful South Taranaki coastline, and settled to provide a majestic presence over the region. Two tears then came down from the Sky Father, one forming the Whanganui awa in the path Taranaki had left behind. The people of the Whanganui electorate are connected by our shared history, our economic drivers, and our collective desire to achieve more for the Whanganui, South Taranaki, and Stratford districts.
I believe the role of a member of Parliament is to be a facilitator between one’s electorate and local and central government. I look forward to working even more with my local and regional councils for the benefit of our region for years to come.
Along with many opportunities, our districts also have many critical issues. Today, I will refer to three. Firstly, returning our polytechnic to local control through the disestablishment of Te Pūkenga. I am excited for the potential that this reset holds for our region.
Secondly, I recall being taught at Scouts to “take only photos and leave only footprints”. I am excited, therefore, by National’s commitment to increase renewable energy. For South Taranaki, this could mean the development of offshore wind farms, and I look forward to having input into the creation of a regulatory framework that will enable this.
Thirdly, much is said of rural and provincial connectivity. We are not just crying “wolf”. In Pātea on Friday, I visited a brand new business that struggled for connection to simply take payment. Properly addressing this issue will increase and improve education, business, and employment where it is most desperately required. It’s because of issues like this that I come here determined to be the best advocate for our region.
Born, raised, and educated in Whanganui, during secondary school and into uni, I worked at McDonald’s—a skill set shared by other outstanding members in this House. At 18, while studying at Massey University, I was appointed as an independent director of a specialised aged-care facility. A critical moment in life that determined my career for the next 20 years. At 20, I was elected as a Universal College of Learning council member, and also appointed to Arena Manawatu’s board. At 22, Quality Health New Zealand appointed me acting chief executive to turn it around and that’s what I did.
Following that, and over the next 16 years, I built a professional services firm along with my mum, Raewyn. Sirdar’s focus was guiding boards and growing business, both across the African continent—where I was based for much of that time—and around the world. This provided opportunities for me to serve as a director and chairman of a range of small and large companies—including in the primary industries and animal health, food safety, and manufacturing, retail, and education. Real-world skills I bring into this House.
Candice tells me, though, that my life and my career is not one that can be easily explained in an elevator pitch—but here goes: I have been an employer and an employee; a landlord and tenant; driver of a diesel vehicle and, at the same time, simultaneously, a diligent recycler; a Queen’s Scout and a child of God. I love cooking and red wine, am a chartered accountant—the better of the two professions—and have authored two books. I was named young business person of the year at the 2016 Wellington Regional Business Excellence awards—and got a letter from the wonderful list MP who acted as the local MP at the time, Minister Chris Bishop—and in 2022, I became one of the youngest Chartered Fellows of the Institute of Directors here in New Zealand.
I believe in lifelong learning. I believe that while our failures do not define us, how we learn from them does. I also believe in hard work and reward for achievement—core National Party values. Door-knocking and calling over 9,000 people during the campaign, I met people like the mum on sole parent support in central Whanganui who was feeling the cost of living crisis hit her every time she went to the supermarket; like the superannuitant in Aramoho who cried on her doorstep at the wasteful spending of “our money” at the same time she was struggling to pay her own monthly bills; like the farmer in Stratford who wanted a Government that has farmers’ backs; and like the business person in Hāwera who simply wanted confidence to employ his next apprentice. My promise is to work hard for them and to work hard for every constituent in the Whanganui electorate. I am humbled by, and full of gratitude for, this opportunity to represent them.
Finally, my late grandfather Ken “the Magic Man” Bates once said to me that his goal in life was to ensure his children did better than he did. With some sleight of hand, ultimately my goal in this House is to ensure that I can tell my grandchildren that our great nation has the First World healthcare, education, and social services that we deserve, because we built a productive First World economy that enabled us to pay for it. Thank you.
Waiata—“Te Aroha”
Dr CARLOS CHEUNG (National—Mt Roskill): Mr Speaker, I congratulate you on your election to office. I’m looking forward to learning from you in the next three years. Members of Parliament, ladies and gentlemen, friends and family, kia ora, talofa, mālō e lelei, namaste, salaam, 你好, 大家好, and good evening.
The Bible says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.” I speak to you today as the first ever National Party member of Parliament for Mt Roskill, and only the second Chinese electorate MP in NZ history. This is also the first time a National MP has won this seat since its creation. I am conscious of and respect the history we made.
I will start by thanking all the people who supported me in making our campaign for Mt Roskill a success. I thank the National Party for the honour and privilege of being its representative. I thank our Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Christopher Luxon, for his leadership and passion in serving our country. His example of service is what New Zealand needs, and I am privileged to be part of his team to bring our country back on track. To our president, Sylvia Wood; deputy leader, Nicola Willis; and our campaign manager, Christopher Bishop, I say thank you for an excellent campaign. I also acknowledge all the current and former MPs who took time away from their obligations to help us in Mt Roskill. I especially acknowledge my big sister Melissa Lee, and Paul Goldsmith. They both encouraged me to stand as a candidate, took me under their wings, and never stopped providing the assistance, support, and accountability I needed. I also acknowledge all the candidates, for all the friendship and support during the campaign.
There is no doubt that I had the best campaign team in the country. A special thankyou to my campaign managers, Shu Chen and Deane Jessep. They ran an exceptional campaign; unlike anything Mt Roskill has ever seen.
Thank you to all the National Party board members; our regional chair, Ward Kamo; and my committee chair, Diana Burslem; my supporters; my volunteers, and the Young Nats—many of whom are right now sitting in the public gallery, and many of them watching on the television in their homes.
I also want to take this opportunity to acknowledge my opponent Michael Wood. He ran a clean and respectful campaign, and I am proud to succeed him in serving the people of Mt Roskill as an electorate MP in Parliament.
I would like to say a few words to my Asian and Pasifika communities. It is truly a blessing to receive support from different ethnic groups. I feel blessed to be accepted by you, and will raise your voice in Parliament. To my Chinese community, I know many of you have voted for the first time to support me, even if you live outside my electorate—I know a few have actually texted me and sent me a message saying they can’t find my name on the voting paper, but thank you. 感謝大家一直以來的支持, 我會繼續努力為大家服務,將您的聲音和需求帶進議會. 感謝大家的支持, 這次的勝利不屬於我一個人，它屬於在座的所有人.我們一起創造歷史, 未來我們還需要繼續努力, 為大家服務.
I thank my family: my mum and my dad, Teresa Mak and David Cheung; my brother, Dr Antonio Cheung; Rita Tsai; and my in-laws, Chi Ming, Brianna, Joanna, and Victoria Lai, for their ongoing support.
Finally, it is well known that behind a successful man, there is often a special woman. I’m lucky I have not only one but two: my wife, Fiona, and my little daughter, Renée Cheung. I thank my wife for everything she has done for me. She is my number one supporter, my better half, and my prayer warrior. Fiona had to balance her time on campaigning with her role in local government and taking care of family. Thank you.
Mr Speaker, today, I want to share with you who I am and what I wish to achieve as the representative of Mt Roskill and the people of New Zealand. I am who I am because of my family and the values I have been taught. I was born in Hong Kong. My parents are hard-working, middle-class people. For them, family has always come first. They always want the best for us. I remember when I was young, my dad was away from home much of the time, self-sacrificing to provide for us. My mother gave up her career to look after my brother and me to ensure we have a firm foundation of education and stay away from troubles. They will explore every opportunity for us to succeed. 謝謝你們對我的栽培和付出, 我希望今天的我能讓你們感到驕傲.
Here are three things I learnt from my parents. Number one: the value of education. Education is the key to a better future. When you invest in it, it can break many cycles and shape lives for the better. Leaving very little for themselves, my parents supported my brother and me to New Zealand to seek for better education. Both of us now have a doctorate degree in biomedical sciences. With investment and sacrifice, every New Zealander can reach the same educational heights, should they wish.
Number two: finance management. My parents prioritised their spending, and placed our education as their top priority, even over their own needs and leisure. They never spend more than they can afford. This example has taught me to manage my own money well, just like how we should do in our Government: we need to stop wasteful spending and invest our money wisely.
Third: integrity and kindness. Since we were young, they taught us to give to those in need, even though we were not wealthy. From serving as a boy scout to engaging in volunteer work as I grew older, my parents showed me the importance of serving people with a genuine heart.
This is why I’m here today. After the election, I have heard and seen many saying, “Why is it that Carlos won? Who is he? Is it because of his high educational achievements or perhaps his business experience or maybe his support from the ethnic community?” Though those things are true, it is much simpler to me: I have a heart for service, and, with humility, I display it for all to see and follow if they want.
Over the years, I’ve served in various community groups and have worked with different ethnic and religious backgrounds. It breaks my heart to see families and children in poverty. People receiving benefits have not seen their lives improved; they are still struggling. Many of our younger generations are more afraid to dream big than at any time in New Zealand’s history. That made me realise the policy is not heading in the right direction. We need to break the poverty cycle. We need a new approach. We need to teach people how to fish rather than giving them a fish. This is why I decided to stand as a member of Parliament. It is time for me to do more for my community, to serve them in the one place where we can make the big changes needed. I have seen our grassroots struggles, and now I want to make a bigger and larger difference for the people of Mt Roskill.
We MPs are also here to create inspiration and establish better policies for our nation. As someone who achieved a doctorate, I know that education is critical for firm foundations in life. Our education system should prepare our children for the future and to be globally competitive. This is why our policy of one hour of reading, writing, and mathematics each day is so important; it sets a good foundation for our Kiwi kids.
Education, though, isn’t just about knowledge; it has a fundamental role in creating good mental health and fortitude. We must ensure our children are mentally prepared for the outside world. They need to learn the fortitude to dream big. Yes, we understand the real world is full of challenges and failures. We must teach them to pick themselves up and carry on. Our kids need to learn how to react, how to be resilient when criticism comes their way. We want our next generation to be fully equipped.
Our health system is also failing us. The service needs real change. It should prioritise patient needs, not their race. The previous Government focused on metadata and ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion but never on the root cause of the problems or the real patient outcomes that mattered. Going to the hospital for treatment is usually the last resort for a patient. Our healthcare system should be focused on both treatment and prevention. I’m proud that our Government is willing to invest in our health system by operating a third medical school. We will increase the numbers of healthcare professionals and improve outcomes. We want to build a healthcare system that people can rely on.
To the people of Mt Roskill, I am humbly honoured to be their MP. Mt Roskill is a special place for me. It is my family home. Mt Roskill is a unique electorate. It is one of the most culturally diverse in New Zealand, consisting of over 100 ethnicities, well over 150 languages spoken, and many different religions practised. Nearly half of the Mt Roskill electorate is from the Asian ethnic group, which is one of the highest percentages of any general electorate and over three times the national average. Over half of the population were born overseas, the fourth-highest share in New Zealand. I got to meet so many residents during and after my campaign. I heard their voices, listened to their concerns, and shared their fears.
In the past 12 months, Mt Roskill has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons, with supermarkets being ram-raided, dairy owners attacked, and many robberies. Just last Saturday, while I was practicing this very speech, another sad and unnecessary stabbing happened at one of our local supermarkets. I visited to check on the staff, but, like them, I felt helpless. This is not the Mt Roskill I know, and this is not the Mt Roskill we want. Solutions to these problems must be prioritised right here in Parliament by all of us fellow MPs. None of us can do it alone. We must come together, work together, and make change. We need to be tougher on crime, especially violent crime. People who commit crimes must face real consequences, and, yes, when released back into the community, they also need to be capable of being productive and law-abiding. The police and the justice system must have the support and resources they need to achieve this. Everyone must feel safe living in Mt Roskill.
The economy in Mt Roskill can be better. We need to strengthen it by providing more opportunities for our people to succeed. We need to support our local businesses more and, in return, create more good jobs for our people. Everyone should seize every opportunity to be successful, but first we must make sure they have them. We want to see a thriving Mt Roskill where there are vibrant markets and thriving business hubs.
Housing intensification is also another important issue in our electorate, especially after the floods and Cyclone Gabrielle. It has been one year now, and many people still cannot move back into their own homes. Many houses are empty and unsafe to live in. Infrastructure must be in place for our growing population. We cannot afford to get this wrong. It requires strong leadership from both local and central government politicians, and I’m committed to working hard on this. People in Mt Roskill must have a place to call home for the long term.
Mr Speaker, if you will indulge me, I would like to direct a few words to the next generation in Mt Roskill. Youth of Mt Roskill, you are very talented and gifted, full of energy, and have great potential. You are the future of our country. Dream big and dare to fail. Believe in yourself. Do not be afraid of failures; overcoming them will make you a stronger person, and this is the path to success. Your Government can equip you through education, safety, and opportunity, but it is up to you to seize the day, so back yourself, work hard, and maximise your skills to achieve your highest potential.
I commit myself to serving all New Zealanders, both those born here and those who have chosen to make this beautiful and bountiful country their home. I offer my deepest sacrifice and will give tirelessly in service. I only ask that all other Kiwis try their best to do the same.
I would like to conclude as I began, with a verse from the Bible: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests but also to the interests of others.” Amen.
SPEAKER: We have one more maiden speech to go. We are past the time, but the House has, by way of Business Committee, made that indulgence. Could I please ask people to clear the galleries as quickly as possible so that the next lot of audience can take their seats. Thank you.
MILES ANDERSON (National—Waitaki): Thank you, Mr Speaker. First off, I want to congratulate you on your election to the Speaker’s role. I believe your sense of fair play, respect for democracy, and humour is appreciated by all in this House. All these attributes are essential to the essence of how politics should be played in New Zealand. I wish to congratulate the Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Christopher Luxon, on winning the election and leading this Government. Congratulations also to Deputy Prime Minister the Rt Hon Winston Peters, and New Zealand First, as well as to the Hon David Seymour and ACT. I look forward to playing my part in our coalition Government.
I want to acknowledge colleagues from right across the House with whom I’ve had an association prior to entering politics, Damien O’Connor and Jo Luxton, both of whom I believe share National Party values but have been held hostage by the Labour Party for so long that they suffer from Stockholm syndrome! To the Hon Mark Patterson and the Hon Andrew Hoggard, I have enormous respect for you both and I look forward to working with you as part of this Government. A special mention to my colleague and the fine representative of the Wairarapa, Mike Butterick, who I’ve previously worked alongside in Federated Farmers. I also want to acknowledge the numerous new MPs who have a direct link to the primary industries, the driver of our economy, which I believe has been underrepresented in this House for decades.
I’m here in this place due to the hard work and support of many people. I want to take a minute or two to thank them. To my predecessor, Jacqui Dean, who served the Waitaki electorate since its re-establishment in 2008, thank you for giving such a large portion of your life to the people of our electorate. I wish you well in your endeavours outside of Parliament. As you know, a campaign requires a campaign team and I was fortunate to have a group of friends and family who stepped up to help: Vanessa Porter, Mary Strachan, Nicky Coleman, Jane-Ann McIlraith, and our campaign chair—and my brother—David. I couldn’t have had a better group of people to share the highs and lows, joys and frustrations of an election campaign with. It would be remiss of me if I didn’t make a special mention of Murray Elliot, an Oamaru legend who was generous with his time and put so much work into my campaign. To the numerous others who put up hoardings, delivered leaflets, organised meetings, or gave me encouragement, thank you.
We are a nation of immigrants. Our arrival to this beautiful country started 800 years ago and continues to this day. My great-grandfather William Anderson arrived from Scotland in 1875 and eventually settled in Southburn, South Canterbury, and bought the original block that has been farmed by our family for over 130 years. His wife, my great-grandmother, was a Ryan, whose family emigrated from Ireland in 1886. My paternal grandmother’s family were fascinating people: a mix of French and English who settled in Akaroa. My French ancestors, the Libeaus and Brochieres, arrived in 1840. My English great-great-grandfather Stephen Hunt arrived in 1858 after serving in the Crimean War. The Hunts of Banks Peninsula were a family of 27 children.
Hon Member: Whoa!
MILES ANDERSON: That’s right, 27 children—no telly in those days!—who spread throughout New Zealand and took their love of cards and horse racing wherever they went.
My mother’s family, the Coughlans, arrived in Dunedin in the 1880s and were publicans there for two generations before moving to Winchester in South Canterbury in the 1940s to take up farming. The farm my mother grew up on is still farmed by my cousins today. My grandmother Kit Coughlan was a Lynch. The Lynches and Coughlans are well-known names in New Zealand sport. Both had All Blacks in their ranks and my grandfather Maurice Coughlan was a national wrestling referee, whilst his brother used to provide the radio commentary. Mum’s family would often talk about Lofty Blomfield and his famous “Octopus Clamp”. The extended Coughlan and Anderson families have been a large influence in my life and I’m lucky to have come from such family-oriented people.
My parents, Jim and Mary, are here today and I am in their debt for so much. I am one of 11 children—only one channel, and black and white, I suppose!—and their values have served us well throughout our lives. Mum and Dad worked hard, often going without to provide us with a good home, a good education, and the skills to become productive members of society. Mum and Dad didn’t regard our family situation as remarkable; certainly there were challenges raising a large family, but they regarded parenting as a responsibility that requires sacrifice and total commitment.
Coming from a large family means you have more fun, more arguments, more joy, and more tragedy to cope with. I think it made us all more resilient and independent. To my brothers and sisters, I want to say I couldn’t have picked better siblings to have fought with and laughed with and shared tough times with.
I grew up on the property that, as mentioned earlier, my great-grandfather settled. My primary schooling was at Southburn School and I went to St Kevin’s College in Oamaru for my secondary education. I’m grateful to have been taught by so many talented individuals. St Kevin’s was, and still is, a terrific school.
After leaving school in 1986, I moved to Christchurch and worked in what was known as the commercial affairs division of the Justice Department. We dealt with the regulatory functions of company law and bankruptcies and receiverships. It was during this period that New Zealand was experiencing the greatest change in decades, with Rogernomics and deregulation in full flight. I believe that the pace of change was unnecessarily brutal, and this brutality was masked by the bull run that the share market was experiencing at the time. When the crash came in October 1987, the commercial affairs division was dealing with the tidal wave of human misery that came with it.
The lesson I learnt was that financial regulation needs to be updated regularly to incorporate new products and financial instruments. There are too many unscrupulous people who are more than happy to take advantage of loopholes at the expense of “Joe Public”. As I was interested in farming, in 1988 I headed off to Massey University in Palmerston North, initially dabbling with veterinary science but eventually pursuing an agriculture degree. I finished in 1991 with a Bachelor of Agriculture degree and an overworked liver. The employment environment at the time was fairly grim, so I took a job labouring in a seed-dressing plant 10 kilometres from home.
It was during this time that a group of local farmers were investigating the possibility of using modern ultrasound technology on farm animals to improve production. I was approached to see if I was interested in being involved, and the next thing I knew I was running a pioneering business. Today, pregnancy scanning is a common farm practice; back then, no one was doing it and due to difficult economics, farmers weren’t spending money. However, it was inevitable that the use of the technology on-farm in New Zealand would happen regardless, because it was being incorporated into farm management in the UK.
Following the first season, I headed off to the UK for six months, where I worked for an established contractor in Shropshire in exchange for further training. It was whilst I was in London that I met the woman who was to become my wife, Kim. Starting with next to nothing, we built a couple of businesses in New Zealand and Australia, raised a family, bought a farm, built a house, and have been each other’s champion and critic. Through good times and bad, we’ve managed to muddle our way through life with a good dose of humour mixed in. Kim, I couldn’t have done it without you. Words can’t express what you mean to me, and I love you dearly. Also, happy birthday. With marriage comes extended family, and I couldn’t have asked for better people. Kim’s family, the Wrights, are the best in-laws a man could ask for.
Kim and I are also the proud parents of three adult children: Rose and Cara, who are here today, and our son, Joseph, who is currently working in Ireland. Of all the things that Kim and I have ever done or will ever do, you are our greatest achievement.
In 2004, we took over the family farm, and in 2013, we sold our business. After 21 seasons and scanning 4.5 million sheep, it was time to hang up the tools. Then began a long association with Federated Farmers, which culminated in becoming the national chair of the Meat & Wool Industry Group, and a board member. Federated Farmers is an incredible organisation that does an enormous amount of policy and advocacy at a local, regional, and national level that goes unnoticed by many in the rural sector. Being on the board gave me a good introduction to crisis management because of the myriad of unplanned disasters that occur in any given year, whether they are climatic, bureaucratic, or biological.
When my term ended in 2020, I was drawn into politics, mainly because I feel farming has been given a raw deal by decision makers who, for the most part, don’t understand the first thing about the rural sector. Farming sentiment is the worst I have ever seen. Farmers are leaving the industry due to unworkable regulations. These are costing enormous amounts of money, eroding property rights, and are ridiculously time-consuming. It is the family farms that have been affected the most—generally a husband and wife team who work long hours for not a lot because they love the land, the environment, and have an intimate understanding of their property. To see farmers unfairly targeted by decision makers and NGOs is disgraceful. It has come to a point where a number of my farming colleagues won’t admit they are farmers when socialising in urban settings because of the amount of vitriol they receive from people whose information has come from unbalanced media and NGOs pushing a narrative that is far from truthful. The simple fact is that it’s hard to be green when you’re in the red.
I come to this House as the representative for the Waitaki electorate, an incredible part of New Zealand containing a diverse geography that is unmatched anywhere else in this country. From the Southern Alps to the Pacific Ocean, the landscape has been shaped by the last ice age, where retreating ice sheets have left behind an indelible footprint—lakes and rivers, basins and valleys which provide the electorate and New Zealand income from agriculture, horticulture, viticulture, forestry, mining, electricity generation, and tourism, to name just a few.
It is the water that literally powers our electorate, both in its liquid and frozen states. In researching this speech, I went through the maiden statements of my predecessors. It is not surprising to note that each of them has urged that we use this resource to grow our economy and provide opportunities for following generations. I too urge that we utilise the water, create more storage for the primary sector and industry, and generate more hydroelectric power.
It is somewhat unsettling to note that the last major project of national significance—and not one that benefitted commuters in either Wellington or Auckland—was the Clyde Dam. The dam was completed 30 years ago, and since then, we have collectively hidden behind a curtain of regulation when opportunity has knocked at our door. We have gone from a nation that undertook projects like the Waitaki hydro scheme to a nation that kowtows to activist pressure groups and gives up.
Finally, I want to talk about free speech and democracy. New Zealand has a proud history of championing free speech and democracy. I believe that tradition has been subverted in recent years. It seems that any opinion that isn’t supported by activists and/or so-called progressives is deemed extremist. Why is it that supposed liberals are so illiberal when it comes to hearing opposing views? As I stated earlier in this speech, a sense of fair play and respect for another’s point of view is the hallmark of democracy in New Zealand. We must not lose this bedrock principle of our democratic society in a rush to either extreme wokeness or due to intolerance. We should all be able to agree to disagree in a mature and tolerant manner, and that includes in this House.
I begin my political journey as an unapologetic advocate for the people of Waitaki. I will play my part in free, fair, and frank debate in an effort to carry on the traditions and stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before me. I want to do them proud. Thank you.
Sitting suspended from 6.24 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Good evening, members. The House is resumed for the Address in Reply debate.
Hon SIMEON BROWN (Deputy Leader of the House): I move, That this debate be now adjourned.
Debate interrupted.
Urgency
Urgency
Hon SIMEON BROWN (Deputy Leader of the House): I move, That urgency be accorded the first and second readings and committee stage of the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill.
The Government is moving urgency this evening so that we can pass through the necessary stages of the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill, which will allow the House to pass the first, second, and committee stage of this bill this week. The Government’s priority in this urgency motion is to pass this bill to disestablish the New Zealand Productivity Commission as part of our 100-day plan in order to use the resources freed up to improve the quality of regulation through the establishment of a ministry for regulation.
A party vote was called for on the question, That urgency be accorded.
Ayes 68
New Zealand National 49; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.
Noes 55
New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 15; Te Pāti Māori 6.
Motion agreed to.
The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 74, Noes 49.
Bills
New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill
First Reading
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation): I present a legislative statement on the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: Thank you, Madam Speaker. I move, That the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill be now read a first time.
Technically, this is a very simple bill. The New Zealand Productivity Commission was established by legislation as a Crown entity. The Government now wishes to disestablish it for reasons that I will go into, and therefore it requires legislation for this disestablishment to occur. It repeals those changes that were made in 2010 when the commission was established by legislation. It also has a series of savings provisions, the broad effect of which is that the asset and, for that matter, liabilities of the Productivity Commission will pass to a host agency referred to in the bill as “the Ministry”—in this case, the Treasury.
The Treasury will become the custodian of any assets and liabilities outstanding, and the Treasury will take responsibility particularly for those matters relating to employment of those who will become former employees of the Productivity Commission. We’ve been very clear, as the Government, in our communications with the department that we want to ensure that those people who were working for the Productivity Commission are given every opportunity to find new employment within the Government, that those people do not find themselves unfairly treated throughout this process.
Now, to make some more general comments about the policy intention behind the bill, I’ll make a few comments. One is that this is not, in any way, an indictment on the quality of the work of the Productivity Commission. The Productivity Commission has done some tremendous work over the past decade or so, and that work will remain available as an asset or a taonga for New Zealanders to be a guide for policy formation.
I just make the case that if you look at the five most prominent inquiries according to Treasury, they are things such as housing affordability. I remember reading that report as a young staffer in a ministerial office here in Parliament when it came out in 2012. It remains very good advice for any Government wishing to improve housing affordability. Another one, which I’ll come back to, 2014, regulatory institutions and practices; more effective social services, 2015; new models of tertiary education; New Zealand firms reaching for the frontier. If you look at some of these subjects, they are clearly areas where, despite the best advice, Governments over the past decade, including those members opposite who have recently been retired from the Government benches by the voters, have failed to implement the policy process. The case I make is that we are much better at this point in time to retain the assets that the Productivity Commission has generated in its various pieces of policy advice and make sure that we do a better job of implementing them.
That is very much what the new “Ministry of Regulation” that will, in part, be funded by the funding that would have gone on to the Productivity Commission—approximately $6 million each year—is designed and is currently being designed to ensure that we finally do proper analysis of new regulatory initiatives; something that we have paid lip service to but failed to do with the cost measured not only in the compliance costs of things people do but also the things they don’t do and also the long-term cost of our culture being eroded—the so-called can-do Kiwi attitude being overwhelmed by a culture of no because there’s always a rule saying you can’t do that or it would cost too much to proceed.
That is, perhaps, one of the most important economic imperatives any Government has: to stop eroding the culture, to stop saying no, to stop putting costs on to the things people do, through poorly designed regulation. That is why it is so important that we actually have a part of Government that is there to stop poorly conceived regulatory ideas from the rest of Government, but also to train the staff across Government in regulatory capacity, which has been almost totally neglected by the previous Government, I should add. And, finally, to lead sector reviews to go through existing poor regulations and rules and actually ask the simple question: what is this rule for? Do the benefits outweigh the cost? And if we don’t know and we’re not sure, then maybe the answer is to get rid of the rule and leave people’s actions up to New Zealanders’ judgment again. That’s a novel idea. Let’s see where it might get us to. I suspect that this side of the House will have more faith in New Zealanders’ judgment than the other side of the House. That is why we’re doing this.
But there is an interesting point in the fact that this Government, instead of just ballooning its Budget, every time they have an idea, they decide that there’s more money to spend, because as Fred Dagg once said—it might as well have been Grant Robertson—“We could always borrow a few billion more.” Well, look where that’s got us. That’s why this Government, if it wants to do something new, is casting around saying, “Well, what we can stop doing, to make economies?” Now, this is not a familiar concept to Camilla Belich, who’s earnestly watching, or anyone else who was in the previous Government, obviously. But it’s a very familiar concept to households and firms and ordinary people up and down New Zealand, especially in the last few years. The fact that we’re doing this tonight shows that this Government is actually committed to looking after the taxpayers’ hard-earned money and spending it as carefully as they spend their own. Not a bad concept for a Government to start off with.
Finally, I want to pay tribute to some of the many people who have contributed to the Productivity Commission over the years. Murray Sherwin as the inaugural chair—again, I recall when I was a young parliamentary staffer, in the year I worked here outside the private sector, I remember seeing Murray Sherwin give presentations about the works they were doing in things like housing affordability. Dr Graham Scott, one of the greatest public servants of his generation, former chair of the Treasury, gave his time to be a commissioner. Professor Sally Davenport, Andrew Sweet, Professor Gail Pacheco. Also, the subsequent chair after Murray Sherwin, Dr Ganesh Nana, and Dr William Rosenberg, Dr Diane Ruwhiu, and Vicky Robertson—these are the people who have been commissioners, but supported over the decade that the commission has been in place by dozens of staff who have worked hard to produce this stock of reports which are now an asset for the whole country. I hope members opposite, while working out why they’re on that side and how they could, perhaps, get back on this side, will take the time to ruminate and read, because there’s a lot of quality there and it’s not going anywhere.
But henceforth, we are going to use the money that would have gone to the Productivity Commission for a more active purpose of improving the quality of laws and regulations that New Zealanders are faced with on a day-to-day basis. Without further ado, I commend this bill to the House and I look forward to further debate on it. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The question is that the motion be agreed to.
Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, that was one of the stranger speeches I’ve heard; because whilst David Seymour strikes a knife into the heart of the Productivity Commission, he sings its praises. He tells us about the great reports that it’s done and names numerous people who have served with praise as he twists that knife. It’s absolutely bizarre. And here we are. This has got a certain déjà vu, but worse. It feels like I’ve been here before as the National-ACT coalition dismantles another thing.
But the truly bizarre thing about this is that he is dismantling Rodney Hide’s legacy. So here we have a great ACT initiative, which David Seymour is standing up and saying, “Well, that was pretty rubbish, so we’re getting rid of it.” And I just wonder who the next leader of the ACT Party will be to stand up and say, “I move that the ‘Regulation Ministry Disestablishment Bill’ be read for the first time.” It won’t be long—it won’t be long. And I’m sure it’ll be another ACT Party member, because the fact of the matter is that this is absolute chaos—the absolutely Kafkaesque attributes of disestablishing a Productivity Commission to set up a commission for red tape, a commission which is to overlay the work of the Legislation Design and Advisory Committee, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, select committees, ministries and departments, and the Attorney-General’s office because we need another look.
Now, if you wanted to put yet another barrier in the place of good and effective legislation, you’re doing a good job, David Seymour. The fact of the matter is that that is a vanity project and it will have absolutely no effect. Just like his Treaty principles bill, it’s going to be a dead letter. It will be of no effect.
And what’s worse is here is a party which talks about the importance of private property, the rule of law, and sanctity of contract. Have a look at clause 11 of the bill. What does it do? All employment contracts are terminated. “We don’t care that you’ve entered into an employment relationship bound by the rules of New Zealand, we are Parliament, we are Government, we decide otherwise, you’re all fired. That’s the end of that.” That is absolutely reprehensible. You have an entire body of people employed by the commission and that party—the ACT Party—doesn’t care. It doesn’t care that there’s a whole lot of people in there who have jobs, who have families, who have mortgages, who are actually the very same hard-working New Zealanders who their coalition partners want to protect, and they’re gutting them, with absolutely no remorse whatsoever.
Because that’s not a party for all New Zealanders. This is a party who’s out to look after themselves and their mates, and they’re trying to get rid of the Productivity Commission. They say that it’s done good work, and yet, they’re absolutely getting rid of it overnight. It makes no sense.
And, of course, how much is the ministry of regulation going to cost us? We don’t know.
Hon Grant Robertson: Way more than this.
Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: And I can tell you that because I’ve asked. And you’re right, Mr Grant Robertson, way more, because it’s going to be a much more large and lumbering organisation. It’s going to be a ministry of its own and it’s going to have a whole lot of machinery around it. But the only really important thing is David Seymour’s going to be top of it. It’s going to be his show, it’s going to be the little David Seymour show, and he’s going to be able to pontificate about how effective rules and regulations are. Well, bad luck, it’s not going to last long—another vanity project.
But the real tragedy of this is that this commission has done good work. Productivity is one of the things that we need to work on in this country. This is an entity whose mission is to improve productivity. And this bill shows what the ACT Party really thinks about it and what this coalition Government thinks about it. It doesn’t care. It’s just more interested in making its own way, in making its own mark. Ideology and dogma—that’s what this bill is. So I’m looking forward to debating it further in the night. There’s a lot more to say about it. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
Hon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, the night is yet young. I want to just start by framing what I’m about to say that there is a layer—or multiple layers—of irony with which we approach this bill. I wanted to just pick up some of the points that the Hon David Seymour made in his speech. He did spend quite a lot of time talking about the proposed new ministry of regulation or deregulation—or whatever it’s going to be called—which is, of course, how he intends to spend the money that he’s saving from the disestablishment of the Productivity Commission.
But the debate tonight isn’t about whether or not we should have a ministry of regulation or deregulation, and whether or not that’s a good thing. The debate tonight is about the disestablishment of the Productivity Commission, and so we should look at that entirely on its merits and whether or not that’s a good idea. We can have a debate subsequently about whether it’s a good idea to establish a new ministry, but the two things are actually distinct apart from the financial flow from one to the other.
Now, I note that the Green Party opposed the establishment of the Productivity Commission in the first place, because we thought that it would be a neo-liberal anti-regulation stalking horse which would shape future Government policy. I did say that this was going to be a speech laden with irony! So, having now had the experience of working with the Productivity Commission in Opposition and in Government, I just wanted to look at some of its advantages and some of its disadvantages.
It has, as the Hon David Seymour said, actually done some really good work. Some of that we disagreed with in terms of the slant of it; some of it we agreed with strongly. I wanted to mention, in particular, the “fair chance for all” report—we think it was superb. It also did a very substantial piece of work under Steven Joyce called “towards a net-zero economy for New Zealand”, which actually provided a lot of the basis for what became the zero carbon Act, the Climate Change Commission, and amongst its many recommendations suggested a feebate scheme for electric vehicles, which became the Clean Car Discount. So one of the ironies, of course, is that the Clean Car Discount was established by a Labour-Green Government on the recommendation of a neo-liberal stalking horse set up by the ACT Party. And, of course, that Clean Car Discount is also being disestablished by the parties who established the commission that recommended it in the first place. So it is kind of Kafkaesque how we’re entering here today.
One of the big disadvantages of the way that the Productivity Commission was designed, of course, was that there’s no requirement upon the Government to respond to its reports. It did some very, very good work, but because its findings were very inconvenient to the Government of the day—and it was largely ignored by both left and right Governments for many, many years and there was no requirement for those Governments to respond—a lot of the time that good work just fell on deaf ears.
When you set up an establishment which says, “How do you improve productivity in the country?”, and we kind of know what the answer to that is, but the answer is very inconvenient to the kind of cheap imported labour and record untaxed housing speculation - based economy that we have—then the Government of the day is not necessarily going to be interested in doing what the Productivity Commission says, because that would be against the vested interests that support the Government in the first place.
So that is one of the disadvantages of the way that it was established. But on balance, now that we’ve seen the work that they’ve done over the years, we actually think that it would be a shame to disestablish the commission, because it does mean that there will be less research and informed debate on complex issues facing the country. In our mind, if you were just to look at it on its actual merits, we would suggest that there would be improvements to the legislation governing the Productivity Commission, such as a requirement on the Government to have to respond to its recommendations and to require Government agencies to respond to its recommendations.
So, in conclusion, the Green Party will be supporting the continued existence of the Productivity Commission—despite the fact that we opposed its establishment in the first place—because it wants to do all of the things that the people who established it don’t want to do. Thank you very much.
STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Thank you, Madam Speaker, and it’s great to speak in the House for the first time in 2024, although I had a supplementary question this afternoon—I don’t think that actually counts. But it’s great to be back.
I commend Minister Seymour for bringing this bill to the House. Actually, like him, I have huge respect for the original commissioner Murray Sherwin, and I think they did fantastic work. Unfortunately, the work that they did didn’t transfer into actions, and actions actually matter. Having a regulations ministry gets to the pointy end, the bit that makes the difference, the little bits that actually unblock the blockages and allow people to actually get on and be more productive. So it’s far better that that revenue be directed—because what we are talking about is directing tax revenue to the best use, and, in my view, the regulations ministry is a far better use than the Productivity Commission, so I commend this bill to the House.
Hon MARK PATTERSON (Minister for Rural Communities): Thank you, Madam Speaker. New Zealand First rises to support this New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill. Essentially, the Productivity Commission has become superfluous, replaced by the new ministry of regulation. I’d actually like to commend the Minister, the Hon David Seymour, for actually walking the talk. I think he’s been someone that’s been quite outspoken about the need to cut red tape, and this is really hard, detailed stuff. I think all New Zealanders would wish him well in getting to the bottom of a lot of this stuff. We have simply become a country that is incredibly good at writing reports and setting up working groups, but it has become impossible to get anything done. This is part of a suite of policies that the coalition Government is bringing forward. It’s complementary particularly, I think, to the fast-track consenting legislation that the Hon Shane Jones will be bringing forward. It’s a piece of the puzzle, and New Zealand First supports this bill. Thank you.
Hon Grant Robertson: Madam Speaker—because no one else seems interested—
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Sorry, has there been a transfer?
Hon Grant Robertson: No, no; there wasn’t anyone taking the call.
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour): Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to speak to, as has been indicated, what is a very odd bill that has come forward. Mr Seymour described it as simple; I think it’s silly and sad. Mr Patterson, who just sat down, said that the ACT Party now believed the Productivity Commission was superfluous. Actually, that’s not what Mr Seymour said at all. There’s total confusion across the House as to why the Government has decided to bring a bill to the House to get rid of an organisation that was the brainchild of the ACT Party.
Unfortunately, I’ve been here long enough that I spoke in the first reading debate on the establishment. Mr Shaw is correct that his colleague—David Clendon, I believe it was—spoke quite eruditely in opposition to it. We supported it, at the time, on the grounds that we thought we could make it better while it was in operation—we probably had some idea that we were going to be in Government a bit quicker than what turned out to be the case. And so it survived as it did—in the words of Mr Shaw, as a “neo-liberal stalking horse”—for somewhat longer than we had thought it would.
But in all seriousness, the Productivity Commission has produced some important and useful reports. Mr Seymour himself began listing them off—again, a somewhat odd thing to do, when you’re about to disestablish the very organisation that produced them. I know in my time, when I was the Minister overseeing its work, the frontier firms report that it did is an excellent piece of work around how New Zealand can establish stronger export businesses, how we can make sure that we have a stronger role for Māori in our exporting and trade area. It did some really good work around innovation policy. In fact, the follow-up work it then did on that has led and influenced the last Government’s innovation policy. Similarly, around immigration, the report that the Productivity Commission did on immigration provided significant challenges to all sides of that debate, and that’s exactly the kind of thing the Productivity Commission was useful for.
We don’t have many organisations in our government system who have the specific mandate to step back, to look at the bigger picture, to ask the big questions. Day to day, most of our public servants spend their time on the short term, on the things that need to be done now. So actually having an organisation, albeit established in circumstances that might have been different from what I would have done, was really important. Now, was it perfect? No. I agree with Mr Shaw; I don’t think that the way it was set up helped in terms of the way recommendations were adopted. There is a lot that could be done.
I’ve heard Mr Seymour, in the media, say that he thinks the Productivity Commission had been politically hijacked. I, obviously, reject that. But if that’s what Mr Seymour thinks, there’s a really simple way of dealing with that: change the commissioners, and then carry on with the Productivity Commission. It’s an utterly bizarre position for Mr Seymour to take—that something established by his own political party that has produced reports that he himself has just told us were valuable, he now comes and says, “Oh, no—actually, just going to kill it off.” Now, he himself has said, “Well, this is all so that the money can be used for the ministry of regulation.”, which, in itself, if I want to add another layer of irony to this debate, is one of the great acts of centralisation in the history of Government: to try and bring all of the work on regulation that’s done across all of the ministries into one place. And we can come back to that, as Mr Shaw indicates, when that work is actually done.
So it is, for me—you know, I said it was silly and it was also sad. I do feel sad for the people who do the work at the Productivity Commission. There are some extremely bright and talented people there. I heard what Mr Seymour said about wanting to give them every opportunity to find their way into other parts of the public sector, but I also note the comments that Dr Duncan Webb has made about the fact that the bill brutally cancels their employment contracts without any say-so back. So, on this side of the House, we continue to support the work that the Productivity Commission has done. This is the direction that the Government wants to go in, but it seems to be a particularly bizarre act from David Seymour, and I just wonder whether Rodney Hide has followed in the line of Roger Douglas of disowning Mr Seymour. Perhaps this is Mr Seymour’s attempt to get back not only at Roger Douglas but also Rodney Hide. It’s a very strange bill. I look forward to debating it across the rest of the evening, but I simply don’t understand what the Government thinks it’s achieving here.
CATHERINE WEDD (National—Tukituki): I support this bill. There’s no doubt that we need to increase productivity in this country. That means increasing our exports so we can strengthen our economy and afford the public services that we need. But that is not achieved by the Productivity Commission; it’s achieved by supporting our food producers and primary industries. I represent the food producing region of Tukituki. Hastings is the engine of horticulture in this country. In fact, our apple industry is the most productive in the world. Yet our growers have been restricted by regulation, compliance, and red tape. The best way we that we can improve productivity in this country is by reducing red tape and reducing regulation. We need to drive productivity by less regulation. This would be a better use of the resources and funding, so I commend this bill to the House.
Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Labour): Well, there’s clearly some confusion in the House tonight. We’ve heard David Seymour, the Minister responsible for this bill, describe the Productivity Commission’s advice as a taonga. He’s recognised its highly cited reports as assets for the whole country, and yet he is getting rid of it. My colleagues on this side of the House have already spoken on the irony of some of those changes, but I would just like to make the simple point that, surely, improving productivity to drive prosperity for all New Zealanders would be something everyone could agree on. And it seems like we are all in agreement that the Productivity Commission does excellent work to this end. So why is it that they are being disestablished?
One of the opportunities I had was to visit innovative businesses and scientists around the country when I was Minister for Research, Science and Innovation. The Productivity Commission did multiple pieces of work in this area, as my colleague Grant Robertson has already outlined, and there is so much opportunity for us to raise productivity in New Zealand that is unrealised. We have had pieces of work done that can create robotics for picking fruit, for example, that would mean that we would not be so dependent on the vagaries of international labour supply for doing that job. And yet industry has not been able to take that up. Now, I was lucky also in my role as Minister of Research, Science and Innovation to be able to visit a country that took that work seriously. I visited Singapore, where they had a programme, an $800 million multi-year programme, to improve the uptake of artificial intelligence (AI) by industry in order to improve productivity. They were doing things like reaching out to small business and building small businesses’ skills in artificial intelligence, as well as making sure they had world-class scientists to be able to help their big firms take up the latest opportunities in AI.
There is plenty of work to do in improving productivity, and yet it seems like this Government is closing the door on those opportunities for all of us. And if we’re to believe David Seymour’s rationale for why he’s doing this, he’s doing this so he can have a ministry of regulation. While my colleague James Shaw has made a contribution saying that isn’t the point, it’s about the only point we have to go on in this argument, so we’ll look into that. Well, it would be great if we had the opportunity, for example, as this ministry has intended to do, to look into regulatory impact statements. I’d love to see a regulatory impact statement on this bill. That would be fantastic—not to mention all of the other things that this Government is repealing, all of the legislation across health and across justice that is being repealed without a regulatory statement. It just shows the complete hypocrisy of this Government when it comes to making good regulation and that this is just a mere fig leaf for the fact that, as my colleague has said, David Seymour wants a little piece of the Public Service to call his own and something to lord over his predecessors.
The case has not been made for the removal of the Productivity Commission. There is no shortage of work to do to improve productivity. There is a number of good economists and other scientists who have done work in this area, and yet we see that while complimenting them the Minister is cruelly disestablishing their jobs. This remains an important area of work for our country to work on to make sure that there are opportunities for all New Zealanders to participate in the economy.
I can’t help but think that there’s some truth to the allegation that my colleague cited in the press about the politicisation of the Productivity Commission’s advice. I wonder if the Government is threatened by receiving reports that point to persistent inequality in our community as a sign of poor productivity and high housing prices as a barrier to everyone being able to participate fully in the economy. It does seem like there’s a fear of receiving advice, amongst this Government, that means that the sources of advice that are challenging, unpopular—but are actually what needs to be heard from time to time—are being disestablished. This bill will be no good for New Zealand, and I’m proud to have had the opportunity to speak against it tonight.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill be now read a first time.
Ayes 68
New Zealand National 49; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.
Noes 55
New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 15; Te Pāti Māori 6.
Motion agreed to.
Bill read a first time.
Voting
Correction—Urgency Motion
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Members, just before we move forward to the second reading, I have a correction of a vote here. So, members, the result of the vote on the question that urgency be accorded to the first and second readings and committee stage of the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill was incorrectly recorded as Ayes 74, Noes 49. The correct result is Ayes 68, Noes 55. The record will be corrected accordingly.
Bills
New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill
Second Reading
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation): Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise in support of this bill at its second reading.
Hon Grant Robertson: Point of order, Madam Speaker. Far be it from me to help the Minister, but he’s got to move the second reading.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Oh, yes, I know; I was just going to actually take care of that. So have you got the words there to move the second reading?
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: Yes, I thank the member for his assistance. I move, That the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill be now read a second time.
I have been listening very carefully, and I’ve got to say that if a competent Opposition is essential to democracy, then our country is in big, big trouble. I listened carefully to Duncan Webb, the lead critic on this file from the largest Opposition party, and what I got from him was that he thought that it was a contradiction to praise the work that has been done, to note that it will still be available, and yet decide there are better uses for the funding going forward. There is no contradiction. He said it was a contradiction, and several people echoed this, that it was an ACT Minister who introduced a policy and an ACT Minister who got rid of a policy. Well, let me just reflect on that for a second. There was someone, John Maynard Keynes, who said, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” I think it’s actually a good thing that politicians are allowed to change their mind. I think it would be a good thing—and I think, just giving a bit of free advice to the Opposition, if they want to be back in Government this decade, then they may actually need to change their mind about a few things they got wrong. So I don’t see it as a bad thing to change your position on a policy occasionally when the facts change. I think it’s highly revealing of the Opposition that they work themselves into a lather because someone’s done that. We believe the money can be better used for a ministry of regulation, and that is the policy that the Government is now undertaking.
I have to thank James Shaw for a much more constructive contribution. It’s certainly true that any policy can be improved over time. It’s certainly true that there was not a statutory requirement for the Government of the day to respond to Productivity Commission reports, and I agree with him: had there been, perhaps the reports might have got a little bit more coverage and attention. On the other hand, James Shaw was a Minister in a Government for six years—in fact, many of the people who have spoken tonight had six years to do exactly that thing. I thank them for making the contribution now, but it’s about six years too late.
I heard Grant Robertson echo that the set-up wasn’t perfect, but he actually didn’t say anything new that we hadn’t already heard from Duncan Webb. And then there was Ayesha Verrall, who I don’t think had anything particularly new to say other than a series of political attacks, but what she did manage to say is that there should be a regulatory impact statement on this bill. Well, let me be clear: one of the things I intend to do in this Government as the Minister for Regulation is make sure that regulatory impact analysis is focused on regulation that actually puts restrictions on the use and exchange of private property. There is no need to do regulatory impact analysis on the Government deciding it’s no longer going to operate and spend money on a department—
Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Rubbish—Rubbish!
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: —because that is not affecting the use and exchange of private property out in the rest of the society. There’s Duncan Webb yelling and yelling away, and I suspect the reason that he is so angry is that while he cannot quite bring himself to say anything positive in this debate, he has to reflect on all the things he didn’t do in the fleeting chance that he himself had as a Minister. In fact, there was a little bit of that in Ayesha Verrall’s speech. I heard her make the bizarre accusation that the reason I want to establish the ministry of regulation is not because, you know, over-regulation, poorly made regulation, is one of the biggest challenges facing the New Zealand economy in people trying to work and produce each day; it’s because I want to “lord it over my predecessors.” There’s another person that is nice to quote from time to time, a guy called William Shakespeare. I think he would’ve said that she’s measuring the minds of others by her own. I think that comment probably tells us more about how Ayesha Verrall thinks about policy. It’s not because there’s serious problems we need to solve; it’s because we’re trying to get one over another politician. I thought that was a sad contribution.
I gave the rationale and the Government’s reasoning in my first reading speech. In this second reading speech, there having been no amendments at select committee, obviously, I’ve tried to respond to some of the contributions that have been made by the members opposite. I make these comments because I know that soon we’ll get to the committee of the whole House stage, and that will be to debate whether the wording of the bill reflects the policy decisions made on this second reading. The members opposite, if they have policy points to make, I highly recommend they make them in this reading where they failed in the first, because if they don’t have any good policy points to make in the second reading, we won’t be entertaining or replying to them. I can tell them I won’t be replying to them in the committee stage, because that has a very specific and technical reason.
Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Arrogant!
Hon Grant Robertson: What an arrogant man.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: And they say, “How arrogant”—to actually read the Standing Orders and understand what each part of a debate is for! I mean, imagine that—reading the Standing Orders and understanding the place we’re a part of and actually following the rules! In fact, I would say that’s the opposite of arrogant. But I tell you what—I tell you what—it sure does make the Opposition angry. All I can say to the Opposition is: try being a little bit constructive, talking about the policy, talking about the bill, fewer of the personal attacks, and you might just finally get somewhere. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, the difficulty is that the policy of this bill is simply to disestablish a perfectly good agency.
Hon David Seymour: Oh, the member can sit down then.
Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: And here we have a member who stands on the hustings and talks about scrutiny and good law and good regulation and putting things through their paces and then doesn’t want to send this to a select committee, doesn’t want an examination of it, doesn’t want to hear from the public on it, doesn’t even want a regulatory impact statement on it. And, I mean, I’ve got to give him credit—he does seem to be running the show right now. He’s got his way with this, and he’s got his way with this ridiculous Treaty principles bill, and the Prime Minister’s all over the place trying to answer questions on it.
So it’s no wonder he’s looking smug, but the fact of the matter is that this is just a switcheroo. He’s got a vanity project called the ministry of regulation, and he’s gone into the coalition negotiations and said, “I want my ministry of regulation, and I want it now.”, and the Minister of Finance has said, “Well, we can’t pay for it. We’re going to have to take something away; we’ve got to put a line through something.” So they’ve done a dirty deal. They’ve said, “We’ll take away this little ACT vanity project and give you that ACT vanity project.” That is really what they’ve got. Because that’s what the ACT Party is—it’s a party of individuals. They’ve all got their little projects, their favourite little things, they want to achieve. And here we have it: this is David Seymour’s legacy—abolishing a perfectly good Crown agency that has evolved over time; that, by his own admission, is doing great work in helping us become more productive so that he can have a ministry of his own.
Now, that’s just one of the many reasons we won’t be supporting this bill, and, if Mr Seymour isn’t going to answer our questions in the committee stage, it could be a long night.
Hon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I’m going to take the Hon David Seymour up on his challenge and make a couple of policy proposals based on what I heard in the first reading and in his debate contribution just now. He was extolling the virtues of changing one’s mind. So I’m going to suggest that perhaps he might want to take that advice and change his mind about the bill that we have in front of us here tonight.
Madam Speaker, I also would make a request of you. There is a proposal from the Government to establish a ministry of regulation and do regulation or some such. That is not for debate tonight. It is outside the scope of this bill. We shouldn’t be debating whether or not there should or should not be such a ministry. It is simply not on the Table here. So in terms of referring to the Standing Orders, I’m also going to ask the Minister to constrain the debate and his points in the debate to the merits or otherwise of the disestablishment of the Productivity Commission, because that is what this debate is about. That’s all that this involves—
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Can I just say to the member: that basis is fine if everyone across the House wants to constrain themselves to the points that are in this piece of legislation; both ways.
Hon JAMES SHAW: Very well, Madam Speaker—
DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’m not pointing—
Hon JAMES SHAW: No, no, I understand.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’m not pointing to that particular member, because you’re doing well.
Hon JAMES SHAW: Thank you very much. Golly.
Hon Grant Robertson: They only say that when you leave.
Hon JAMES SHAW: Indeed, indeed. My ears are burning. What I would like to say is there are a couple of points that were raised by the “Minister for disestablishing the commission”, one of which was perceived politicisation of the commission itself. There is quite an easy fix for that, and it is not just to appoint people who you think agree with you. It’s actually to change the governing legislation to establish an independent nominating committee such as that we have for the guardians of the super fund, or, frankly, for the Treasury board, or for the Climate Change Commission, and so on. It just creates a sort of arm’s length away from the Government in terms of those appointments.
So I would suggest to the Minister that, actually, given that this House is, it seems, universally agreed that the commission is a good thing and does good work, we should retain the commission. That’s point number one; and two, we should amend the governing legislation so that it has an independent nominating committee. The third proposal is one I floated earlier, which is that we also require the Government and Government agencies to respond specifically to the recommendations of the commission.
This is a proposal I made when I was a Minister in terms of the changes to the Environment Act, where the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment finds themselves in a similar situation, where they produce extremely good work, some of which, kind of gets legs and, you know, various Governments and parliaments run with it. But, actually, if there was a requirement upon the Government to have to respond within a reasonable time frame—say 12 months—to those reports, then you would actually get a proper policy response from within the Government to that work. So that would be my third point—to require a response.
Included in that, if a Government or if a Government agency disagrees with the Productivity Commission’s recommendation, is that they not just to say they disagree, or produce some kind of weasel words to kind of get out of it, but that they have to find a justification to say why they disagree, why they will not be adopting that or recommending to Ministers that they adopt that recommendation. I think if you were to take that package, you know, three or four simple reforms, then, actually, we would get a great deal more from the Productivity Commission, and that really good work would not go to waste.
So I think those would be the proposals that I would take forward within the constraints of this debate on this bill, which is whether or not to disestablish the Productivity Commission. Because as far as I can discern, everyone who has spoken in this House has extolled the virtues of the Productivity Commission, and thinks that it does good work. Whilst everyone seems to have expressed disappointment that some of their best work has fallen by the wayside because Governments, essentially, have ignored it, that is not an argument for getting rid of it. That is an argument for improving it, and making sure that Governments and parliaments have their feet held to the fire. We have very few independent think tanks in this Government which provide the sort of independent, thorough research that really assists the quality of debate. Ministries provide, you know, kind of their views and so on and so forth. But there are very few places that you can look to that are like the Productivity Commission, which will produce work which actually is inconvenient a lot of the time and does challenge Governments and the rest of the us to say, “Well, actually, have we got this right?”
To my earlier point from my first reading speech, sometimes those recommendations are about fundamental shifts in the economy. That includes things like shifts in our tax system and so on, which Governments don’t want to do because it is inconvenient for their voter bases and so on.
I think that’s important, that we can have that function as an important part of our democracy, and, actually, there aren’t very many other places in our governmental system where we can have that. So I do think, actually, on balance, that I would implore the Minister to change his mind, based on the fact that there is kind of universal support for the work of the Productivity Commission here, and that we say, “Actually, we’re going to continue that.”
I know that the response to all of this will be, “Well, actually, none of those arguments matter because we needed the money to do this other thing”. That is kind of a budgetary decision. But the amounts that we’re talking about, within the grand scheme of, you know, $120 billion - plus that the Government spends in any given year, this is, effectively, a rounding error. I would say that we should be able to walk and chew gum. If the Minister also wants a ministry of regulation, the effect of which, he suggests, will actually be to reduce Government spending, then the savings in Government spending that the new ministry is able to do should pay for itself, and shouldn’t require the disestablishment of the Productivity Commission to get going.
So those would be the main points I would say that we want to take into the rest of the debate, because I do worry that we are slipping into an era of Government where we don’t have facts and evidence available to us for debate. And I say “facts and evidence” quite specifically because that’s a quote drawn from the coalition agreements that pull this Government together. Both of those coalition agreements include reference to basing decisions on facts and evidence. The Productivity Commission has been one of the chief sources of facts and evidence, sometimes inconveniently so. If we weren’t to have it, it reduces the fact and evidence base for this Government to be able to do the work it says it wants to do in the coalition agreements that it has signed amongst the various parties that make it up.
So I do think that we should reject the bill and retain the Productivity Commission, but I do think we should do so with the intention to make those improvements. So when we do get to the next stage, as the Minister has asked, I’ll just repeat those policy proposals: (1) that we retain the Productivity Commission; (2) that we create an independent nominating committee to de-politicise appointments; (3) that we require the Government to respond to each of the recommendations within a reasonable time frame, including justifications for why the Government disagrees with any recommendations. That would enable us to have a high-quality institution which gets a great deal more traction than it has been able to over the course of the last 10 years or so.
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour): Point of order, Madam Speaker. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I just want to raise a point of order in the context of the comments made by the Minister in his second reading speech and the view that he expressed around what members of the House need to do in a second reading in order for him, as the Minister in the chair, to respond during the committee of the whole House stage. The Standing Order that the Minister is referring to is Standing Order 310(1), which says—it’s quite brief, so I’ll read it out—“A committee of the whole House considers a bill to determine whether the bill properly incorporates the principles or objects of the bill as read a second time by the House.”
That Standing Order quite clearly simply refers to the state of the bill at the end of the second reading, not the second reading debate itself, as in the debate in the committee of the whole House will be about the bill as it looks at the end of the second reading, not what people said during the second reading. So you might want to take some advice on this, but I don’t think what Mr Seymour said is at all accurate, and I think that, actually, it’s important for the House that we get a very clear understanding of what that Standing Order means.
There is a relevant Speakers’ ruling as well, which is Speakers’ ruling 125/8 by Speaker Rurawhe and also Jacqui Dean as well, and that also speaks about the particular circumstances of a committee of the whole House stage when there has been no select committee process, at which point there has, in the past, been some leniency about what material is introduced. But my primary concern is that the way the Minister described what is allowed to be debated in the committee of the whole House stage is not what is in Standing Order 310(1).
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you for that point of order.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation): Speaking to the point of order—thank you, Madam Speaker. I fear that Grant Robertson may have mischaracterised my point, which is simply that the next stage—the committee stage—is a debate on whether the bill as passed at the second reading incorporates the principles and objects that were agreed at that reading. I make the point that if someone can’t be bothered bringing it up in the second reading, then you have to wonder if they’re sincere bringing it up in the committee stage.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, look, what I’m going to say at this stage is to go to the second part of your point of order first, and Speaker Dean’s ruling about the fact that there has been no select committee. We are in a different environment under urgency. I will take advice on your first point of order, and before the committee stage, I’ll make sure I come back to you. Thank you.
STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Madam Speaker, thank you for your patience. I would like to begin by commending the Hon James Shaw. I thought that was an excellent speech. I don’t agree with his conclusions, necessarily, but he raised some very interesting points. I’d also like to acknowledge that his standing down from the leadership of the Green Party—I mean, he’s actually made a significant contribution to this Parliament and to New Zealand politics. I think that needs to be acknowledged, and it will be at some point, but I got in first, so there you go. We haven’t always seen eye to eye on everything, James, but I do absolutely respect you, so I want to have that noted.
I do agree with a lot of things that the Hon James Shaw said. The problem we have had is that the Productivity Commission actually came up with some really good reports. It did a lot of good work over its years, and, as I said earlier, I have the highest respect for Murray Sherwin. But their problem is transferring those thoughts into actions and actually getting a result. I mean, if we want a good example of productivity, putting this bill to repeal the Productivity Commission through urgency is highly productive. We’re doing it all virtually very, very quickly. So that’s one example of productivity, but it’s not what we’re aiming to achieve.
But the regulations ministry—and I know that that is not what we’re debating, as the Hon Grant Robertson has said, but the reality is it is related. I remember very well in the term 2014-17, when Madam Deputy Speaker Kuriger and I entered Parliament, the Hon Grant Robertson would ask questions at question time focused on our poor GDP per capita—productivity, actually; our numbers—and they’ve not improved over time. It’s not just down to a Government; it’s been a long-term problem trying to get our productivity up. It’s actually something we all have to acknowledge, because we’re all part of it.
Earlier in the day, Miles Anderson gave his maiden speech, and he touched on the very issue about farmers, and how farmers are disenchanted with the world, and quite rightly so, because they’re being overwhelmed with paperwork. Now, that paperwork has a noble end, which is to ensure that the externalities that farming activity has are dealt with and minimised to the maximum potential for them to maintain their right to farm—their social licence to farm. I can’t disagree with that one little bit, and I don’t think anyone in this House would agree with it. The problem is that we’re actually plucking the goose so much that there’s the maximum amount of hissing rather than the minimum amount.
That’s a real problem for us, but it’s not only a problem for us. We’re seeing the same issue in France. At the moment, Paris is blockaded by tractors, which farmers have got in—
Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Oh, come on! How is this about this bill?
STUART SMITH: This is productivity, Duncan Webb. France is being blockaded by tractors because farmers have had it up to here with the paperwork that they have to do to ensure that they can maintain their place in their society and get the subsidies, quite frankly, that enable them to survive.
We’re seeing the same thing in Germany, and it is also farmers, who are the lifeblood—and, actually, we have to go back to World War II. The lack of food during that period through the Second World War—and the First World War, of course, played a major part in that—led to the formation of the European Union. They wanted food security, and so they have ensured their food security by giving out subsidies to ensure that their farmers are financially viable.
Now, we can complain about that, and quite rightly so, because we’re actually badly impacted by that. When the British joined the EU, that had a significant impact on New Zealand’s economy, but they are building up their own lack of productivity in that sense. But this is a worldwide trend where costs are being added through needless bureaucracy. We need to get to the ends, so there’s a noble goal behind that sand in the gears that’s going into our economy. But it is such a restraint that it is demotivating people to enter farming, which is our major industry. In fact, most New Zealanders don’t realise how important farming and the primary sector is to their wealth and health, quite frankly, because there’s a very close relationship between GDP, life expectancy, and wellbeing, which, after all, seems to be a major driver from the other side of the House.
The UK is in a similar position. They also have their farmers up in arms over the same issues. It goes way beyond farming. It goes into every sector in New Zealand. I really have already had a contribution towards the Hon David Seymour with his ministry when my local council came to me with an issue about productivity and the regulations that are about to start on 1 February. The regulations state what councils must only and cannot pick up for kerbside recycling. We have a whole lot of waste that goes into productive enterprise that can be recycled, but they’re now allowed to pick it up at the kerbside, because that’s the regulation. It’s a crazy regulation. So we could get the Productivity Commission to write a report on that, and that would be great. I’m sure they would look at it from all sorts of angles, get a lot of information, and do a great job, but it wouldn’t change the regulation, and the regulation is the thing that’s causing the problem. The regulations ministry will have the opportunity to be able to look at those sorts of things and ensure that we actually get on top of the issues that are causing our lack of productivity.
There’s a lot of investment needed to generate productivity, as Catherine Wedd said earlier in the evening about the apple industry. Our apple industry is highly productive, and it could be more productive with more investment in new machinery, all sorts of—
Catherine Wedd: With IP varieties, robotics.
STUART SMITH: Yes, varieties, and all the intellectual property (IP) involved in—actually, like the kiwifruit industry coming up with their own IP around new varieties that are more attractive to consumers, which is a great thing. But you could in fact breed new plant varieties that are less susceptible to diseases. Therefore, they’d be more productive, with lower costs and so on. But we don’t get that from the Productivity Commission; it has come from industry itself. So we’ve got to find new levers.
The lever of the Productivity Commission, as we’ve already shown, is not doing the job. They’re very good people, well intentioned—and agreement across the House. The honourable Minister, as I’ve said earlier—the former Minister the Hon Grant Robertson—was very passionate about our poor productivity for years, prior to becoming the Minister of Finance. We tried, he tried, and our productivity is well below our peers’, and we must get it up. There is no option, actually. If we don’t get it up, our best and brightest are going to leave our shores and go elsewhere, and we can’t have that. We’ve got to do our best to keep the best and brightest here. As it happens, we’ve retained a large number of them on this side of the House. So with that, I commend the bill to the House.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just before I call the Hon Mark Patterson, I just want to clarify a point under Standing Order 310. The main point is that amendments to the bill are limited to the principles and objects determined at the second reading, so the Hon Grant Robertson is correct in that regard. Thank you.
Hon MARK PATTERSON (Minister for Rural Communities): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to continue to support this New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill. I’m kind of listening to the crocodile tears across the aisle and, essentially, well, what is the Productivity Commission? Essentially, it’s an independent, statutory body that writes reports about productivity. I think the Minister’s made the case that we actually haven’t been actioning the reports that they have been producing, no matter how meritorious they may have been, and I think that’s the core thing here. We’re a Government of action; we want to actually put some of these reports and some of these recommendations—actually get some stuff done, and there is a repository of advice that sits there that we can refer to in our endeavours.
The other thing that has perplexed me a little bit about the protestations over the aisle is that we actually have a massive army of bureaucrats sitting in our—particularly Ministry of Business, Innovation and Enterprise; how many are in there now? There’s 6,500 fine, skilled, and capable New Zealanders over there, highly qualified, that give us exactly this advice. We have the capacity to do that within—and it’s free and frank. It is totally apolitical; they are free to give us exactly what advice they choose based on a very, very well-resourced bureaucracy over there. In my own capacity as the Minister for Rural Communities and as associate agriculture Minister, we have the Ministry for Primary Industries that also have significant capacity; some 3,500 people over there.
Hon Scott Simpson: A lot of talent.
Hon MARK PATTERSON: A lot of talent; a lot of very good people and I’ve enjoyed engaging with them. I’ve been learning about a lot of the work they’ve been doing, reading the reports. There’s some very good stuff in there. We do not lack the capacity to write reports. What we lack is the capacity to actually enact anything and get some productivity going, as Stuart Smith has just pointed out in his previous contribution. Our productivity is woefully lacking. It’s been an Achilles heel of this country for as long as I can remember following politics. It’s always been the thing that’s been wheeled out as being one of our impediments, and why we’ve continued to slide down the scale of OECD economies. It’s why we can’t deliver the Government services that we’d all like. We have to make some pretty hard choices, and we’re in the process of having to do that right now over on this side of the House. It’s because we’re not generating enough income as a country, so we’ve got to prioritise and make some fairly tough decisions, and that does come down to productivity, but that actually comes back to some action and acting on some of the advice that we’ve had in the past. Again, Stuart Smith—and Catherine Wedd, when she spoke—referred to the primary sector—
Hon Scott Simpson: Backbone of the country.
Hon MARK PATTERSON: —the backbone of the country—and just the absolute frustration at the regulation that is holding them back. They’re spending so much time in the office, and there’s uncertainty around what they’re going to have to do, rather than being actually out on their farms farming and putting up the fences and doing the riparian planting and the like.
Hon Scott Simpson: Strangled by red tape.
Hon MARK PATTERSON: They’re strangled by red tape, as the Hon Scott Simpson mentions beside me, and it is a real problem. We’ve had tractors in the street. We’ve had, as Miles Anderson of course pointed out in his maiden speech today, sentiment at an all-time low. And these are incredibly productive people. Actually, one of my favourite statistics from the agricultural sector—and as I might point out, National Lamb Day is coming up on 15 February. What an important industry that’s been for New Zealand, but the red meat sector has—we were at nearly 80 million sheep in the early 1980s; we’re down to about 25 million now, but the actual amount of red meat we’re producing from those sheep is actually very similar. That is productivity above and beyond almost any other sector in New Zealand, and it’s been done at a time when most of the best land has been converted to other land uses, either dairying or horticulture.
This is a sector that knows a lot about productivity; they know how to do productivity. What they can’t handle is the regulation and I think that’s what the honourable Minister is really trying to get to here, and I note that farming regulation is one of the higher priorities on his list. So they haven’t needed the Productivity Commission to tell them how to farm but they do need the Government to get out of the road in terms of the regulations. So New Zealand First does continue to support this bill and—
Hon Member: For very good reasons.
Hon MARK PATTERSON: For good reasons, and also, as a Government and as an incoming Minister, you’re not short of advice; not only the official advice and the excellent advice you get from your ministry, and obviously your constituents, but there’s an absolute platoon of economists and sector groups out there. There’s the unions, there’s a lot of information, there’s a lot of reports, there’s a lot of advice coming from different angles, from different sectors, from the NGOs, that side of things. So we’re not short of advice. What we’re short of is action and a clear pathway to cutting red tape and getting stuff done because we’re just not getting stuff done as a country. I think Miles Anderson made the point that the Clyde Dam was the last piece of major infrastructure in the region. So that’s the stuff that’s going to get this economy moving, that’s the stuff that’s going to grow our GDP, that’s the stuff that’s going to grow the tax take, that’s the stuff that means we’ll be able to deliver some of those extra public services that we know we want to do over time.
So we think this bill is eminently sensible. It’s taking out a group that has done some good work. Their work is going to be subsumed into the ministry of regulation under Minister Seymour, but there is inordinate capacity within the public sector to give us the advice, to look at various issues as they come up. I know we’ve got, I think, the Rt Hon Bill English looking at Kāinga Ora—Homes and Communities about why it costs something like $6,500 a square metre for them to build a house—a public house—when the private sector is doing it for about half of that. So we can still do those things; we’re not restrained in our capacity as a Government to pick issues to look at and to respond to.
So New Zealand First continues to support this bill and we look forward to the committee stage. Thank you.
Hon BARBARA EDMONDS (Labour—Mana): Thank you, Madam Speaker.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Sorry, this is a split call.
Hon BARBARA EDMONDS: Split call. Yes, thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s good to be able to take a call, and I’ve just sat through what I believe really encapsulates what this bill is about, and that was encapsulated in the speech by the Minister. I have never in my Public Service career or in my time in this House heard such an arrogant speech. It was an arrogant speech. And then I realised this is what the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill is about. This bill is about control.
The Productivity Commission was set up to provide a high level of debate, which Bill English in 2010 did say. That was the whole point of the Productivity Commission. It wasn’t about implementing actions—that was very clear in the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act. It was about being able to provide a high-level debate. Since 2011, there has been a number of inquiries into different areas: housing, frontier firms. They’re currently in—or they were in the middle of an economy review. But what I heard in that second reading speech by this Minister is about controlling the evidence that’s coming towards him, because they didn’t want to have a high-level debate where the public could submit, or have a high-level debate where other experts and where sectors can come together and talk to an independent body—yes, funded by the Government but still very independent of the Government—to be able to provide evidence and reviews. So, for me, that only points to one thing, which is this Minister wants to control the evidence that is brought to him, because he can control it if it’s a department which he controls and which he’s the Minister for. The Productivity Commission was independent. This bill is all about control.
I do not support this bill, and that Minister needs to be aware he is no longer in Opposition. You are a Minister of the Crown. Take with that the responsibility. If you’re not even going to allow select committees any more—because it’s, again, another bill under urgency—provide the public the ability to submit so we can have high-level debate for intergenerational problems that are affecting our country. I do not support this bill, and I really, truly wish that the Minister could take the time to be able to absolutely have that debate, but he doesn’t want to because he wants to control this debate.
INGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): “Isn’t it ironic?” Sorry, Madam Speaker, but I am so reminded of the Alanis Morissette song listening to the debate in the House tonight—1996, for those of you who might not be as old as some of us in these chairs. It is so humorous, or it would be if it wasn’t for the implications of clause 11 of this bill, the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill, and what it will do for the staff of the Productivity Commission.
The irony is that this commission was set up by the ACT Party, and now it is the ACT Party that actually want to disestablish it. And while they disestablish it, the ACT Party are singing its praises while taking a knife and committing hara-kiri to the very commission that they set up, and they’re doing this, ostensibly, to be able to fund a ministry of regulation. Now, I don’t put “the ACT Party” and “regulation” together normally in one sentence. For a libertarian party, it’s a strange dichotomy, and I actually wonder whether the ACT Party should be called the “hij-ACT Party” because they seem to have hijacked the Government agenda not only with the Treaty principles bill, but now with this bill—with 8 percent of the vote. So I do tip my hat to the Minister, David Seymour, for doing an incredible job as the de facto Leader of the Opposition.
When I think about “Why would they be doing this?”, there can be only one reason. As my learned colleague, the Hon Duncan Webb said, this is about a vanity project. It is about a Minister wanting to control a ministry so that he can have a legacy because he is not probably sure how long his time in this House will be, given that we will be election-ready in 18 months’ time. The Prime Minister needs to be held accountable for this. Because even though, tonight, all of the focus has been on David Seymour, at the end of the day, as Grant Robertson quite rightly said, it is the Prime Minister’s circus; it is the Prime Minister’s clowns. We cannot support this bill. We do not commend it to the House.
CATHERINE WEDD (National—Tukituki): I support this bill. We’ve talked a lot about productivity tonight, and, you know, I’ve come from an industry—the horticulture sector in Hawke’s Bay—which is really, really driven by productivity. During my time in the past 10 years, I’ve really seen this industry grow hugely. We were targeting at one point to be a $1 billion industry. It was up around $900 million, back in 2017. But growers have just found it so tough in the past six years, with just so much regulation, red tape, compliance, cost—it’s been really, really difficult to grow. And I just want to touch on some points that you made, across the House, in relation to immigration, because immigration is a really, really important part of the horticulture sector. I want to touch on the Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme, because this is an incredible scheme where we see a lot of Pacific Island workers coming into Hawke’s Bay and across New Zealand every year, for up to three to six to nine months, where they help the industries and the communities and then they’re able to take the money that they earn back to the Pacific, and they build schools—
Hon Dr Duncan Webb: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker.
CATHERINE WEDD: —and they build local water—
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just a moment. I’m just going to take Dr Duncan Webb’s point of order—I think I know what it is, and the speaker is coming to the point of the productivity—
CATHERINE WEDD: Yes, and so this is—
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Soon.
Hon Dr Duncan Webb: I’ve heard about apples and I’ve heard about immigration, Madam Speaker. I’m yet to hear anything about a repeal bill.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yeah, she’s coming to it.
CATHERINE WEDD: Thank you very much for that point. What I’m doing is I’m building a picture here of what drives productivity in New Zealand, and it’s not a Productivity Commission that drives productivity; it’s actually supporting the food producers and the growers in our agriculture sector. As my colleagues here have already mentioned, that’s what’s going to drive productivity. So we do need to focus on our workforce, and we need to focus on those labour shortages and empowering some of these industries to drive productivity, which is, essentially, going to enable us to afford the public services that we desperately need. And so those are things like within the industries—[Interruption]
No, but it is actually relevant, because I do have here—I will alert my colleagues from across the House here—an actual Productivity Commission report that was actually a submission by New Zealand Apples & Pears. They were actually very, very disappointed with some of the reports that were written by the Productivity Commission. And to the point—I’m bringing it back to it. They talk in this report about how the New Zealand apple and pear industry is the most productive in the world, producing 61 tonnes per hectare in 2017. That’s 48 percent higher than our nearest competitor, South Africa—you know, 161 percent higher than the world average of 23.4 tonnes. So this actually all comes back to productivity. This is a submission here where they talk about the industry creating value through innovation, supported by well-paid, well-looked-after migrant workers who are also transforming their community, which is what I just did touch on. So that is the relevance of it.
But what happens here is the Productivity Commission is creating these reports and they’re creating some recommendations that don’t necessarily work in practice, on the ground, in the orchards, in the productive sector. So I’m saying that what would be more beneficial is that if we’re using those taxpayer dollars to fund certain organisations or areas, we would be better to focus on reducing regulation and reducing red tape, reducing a lot of the cost and compliance that our growers and our farmers and particularly our primary sector are facing at the moment. You know, it is really, really tough out there, and we need to support better infrastructure around that too. I mean, we need to look at ways that we can drive productivity on the ground. I would say that if we looked at, you know, water storage—I mean, water storage in Hawke’s Bay is a must. At the moment, we’re seeing our Hawke’s Bay Regional Council reducing the allocations of our water supply, and—
DEPUTY SPEAKER: The bill—just bring it back to the bill.
CATHERINE WEDD: Yeah, but I’m getting to the point of the productivity, because if we’re going to drive productivity, we need water, and, at the moment, we don’t have enough water. So it seems practical that we store the water in the winter so that we can use it in the summer, and the only way that we can do that is by creating water storage. So I think that this certainly needs to be a priority. This will be something that I certainly will be advocating for.
But there are other ways that we can improve productivity. I mean, just last week I was actually at the port of Napier, and it was just incredible to see the exports going through the port from forestry, from apples, from horticulture. We’re actually just about to start onions and squash in Hawke’s Bay as well. This is millions of dollars, and I suppose the more that we can add value to these products, the better. I suppose this, again, is driving productivity.
And so I think that we need to be smarter in the way that we drive productivity in this country, instead of wastefully spending money in bureaucracy in Wellington with people making rules at desks—and then we kind of find out, in the community and the real world, where we’ve got our gumboots on and we’re up the ladders in the orchards of Hawke’s Bay. It’s tough, and I think that the rules that are being made, we need to really focus on are these good rules or are they just creating more compliance than regulation. And so that’s why, if we focus on regulation and how much of it and where it’s being applied to, I think that our provincial New Zealand would certainly welcome a focus in this area rather than more reports and more bureaucracy and more recommendations, which don’t necessarily get quantifiable results. The National Party and on this side of the House, we’re all about results, we’re all about outcomes, and we’re all about driving productivity, and so this needs to be our focus. So I would definitely support us focusing on the key issues, which need to be reducing that red tape and reducing compliance—
DEPUTY SPEAKER: And back, back, back to the bill.
CATHERINE WEDD: —and ensuring that we’re focusing on the things that matter—
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Would the member come back to the bill, please?
CATHERINE WEDD: —and that’s looking at better infrastructure as well.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Back to the bill.
CATHERINE WEDD: Back to the bill? OK.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: The bill.
CATHERINE WEDD: And so I absolutely commend this bill to the House.
HELEN WHITE (Labour—Mt Albert): For the benefit of the public at home, who must be bemused by the filibustering that’s going on by the coalition Government, that would be because their productivity isn’t that great and they’re not ready.
So what I’m going to do is cut to the chase here. This is a really serious issue because we have an economy that has been really built a long time ago on very low wages. And one of the things that happened in that time was that the ACT Party, in fact—the predecessor to David Seymour—proposed the Productivity Commission. And you could hear tonight some of the comments that were made about the scepticism over that.
But I, for one, have been very convinced by the work of the Productivity Commission. I have one report here. You can see it’s rather dog-eared—that’s because I read it. That’s because it’s really important to the work that I need to do in my portfolios, which includes the small business and manufacturing portfolios. And those are areas where we have woeful issues of productivity. We have a lot of little businesses. The average business size in New Zealand is less than four fulltime-equivalents.
Stuart Smith: How many?
HELEN WHITE: Less than four, Stuart—less than four. And we need those businesses to build up and we need them to be high wage. And we’re not going to do it through cups of tea and what we saw at the port; we’re going to do it through good evidence. That’s what we need. Not cups of tea, not what my nana would have told me at the rest home.
I would like to actually hear from people who know this stuff and can do deep dives, and that’s what our Productivity Commission was doing. It wasn’t following an ideology; it was independent. So it’s a tragedy to lose something that maybe we could have done better and strengthened. Maybe we could have listened to it more. It’s a tragedy to lose that for something that is, in fact, as many people have said tonight, a vanity project—and it’s one based on arrogance. Because in this situation, we have not even had a select committee look at this. We have not had any chance for the public to take part.
I suspect there are some people on the other side of the House who think that it is about a cup of tea. It’s what they learnt from the people who were their mentors in the 1980s and 1990s, and that’s all they have to do: just apply a paint by numbers approach. Well, it didn’t work. It’s meant we’ve got a low-wage economy—I’d like to see a stronger one. So I am very sad that we are looking at this repeal tonight, and I do not commend this bill to the House.
RYAN HAMILTON (National—Hamilton East): Thank you, Madam Speaker. We’ve heard a lot tonight about arrogance and control. I wonder: did the Productivity Commission ask the previous Government to bloat the Public Service? Did the Productivity Commission ask the previous Government to increase the jobseeker benefit by 66,000 over the last six years? Was that arrogance or control?
I might be new here, but I thought I heard the Hon James Shaw talk about a rounding error of circa $6 million. I’m not too good at my maths, but I’m pretty sure $6 million is more than a rounding error. He did make some good recommendations, though, and I’m sure Minister Seymour will be taking note. He mentioned things about amending the policy to inform the incoming Government, and they could maybe listen to those recommendations. I think that’s an incredibly good idea. I just wonder why he didn’t suggest it six years ago, when the Productivity Commission was already up and running.
A coalition Government established the Productivity Commission 13 years ago, and it was quite effective for a season. But that season has now passed. In the interest of productivity, it is actually now time to reset and innovate. We’ve been told that it’s ironic and arrogant, but I’d submit to you that it’s actually called leadership and humility.
Productivity is at the heart of this coalition agreement, and, indeed, a refocused ministry will have the tools to cut through red tape that the Productivity Commission didn’t, especially as the last Government didn’t really listen anyway. There’s a proverb that comes to mind: “hōhonu kakī, pāpaku uaua”—“long on words, short on action.” I think that sums up a lot of what we’ve seen over the previous few years.
We know that housing affordability is inextricably linked to productivity. What have we seen in the housing market over the last few years? Did the Productivity Commission say, “Remove the interest deductibility.”? What happened there? Did the Productivity Commission say, “Remove interest deductibility.”? Did that seem like a good idea? We’ve got more empty houses than we’ve ever had in New Zealand, and yet we’re in the middle of a housing crisis.
What would productivity look like from a policy-setting point of view? Let me give you a few good examples under the coalition’s going for housing growth example. We’ll remove rounding errors of $6 million—they don’t factor in.
Hon Rachel Brooking: Getting rid of medium density, is that going to help?
RYAN HAMILTON: What about—sorry, there’s a chirping noise going on from the other side there. Value capture—what about value capture and passing the benefit of when a rural property becomes into residential-zoned land and that value shifts, what about sharing some of that with first-home buyers or the housing market? That would be a great idea. What about housing growth that would provide enough residential-zoned land for the next 30 years? That would help housing affordability. What about allowing overseas investment to help our infrastructure deficit? That will unlock infrastructure and housing. Well, here’s a good idea: what about the infrastructure funding and financing legislation?
Hon Grant Robertson: Point of order, Madam Speaker. I know the member has tried hard by starting each sentence by saying, “Did the Productivity Commission do X?” That, however, doesn’t make it relevant to the bill. I could see by the look on your face, Madam Speaker, that you were feeling the same way as I was about that.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’ll be responsible for the look on my face, thank you. Look, the member was building the picture around other ways to do productivity as the reason for removing the bill. So as long as the member keeps coming back to the bill, my face will be fine.
RYAN HAMILTON: Thank you, Madam Speaker. Just going back to the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill, the infrastructure funding and financing legislation—the IFF—has been in place for some time, and yet the previous Government has done nothing with it. We can’t wait to unlock the infrastructure funding and financing that will undergird the housing and help productivity across New Zealand.
Let me finish with three good reasons why this is a good bill and I will be recommending it to the House. The coalition Government has started to work on the quality of regulation and on reducing Government spending and wastage as part of our 100-day plan. This includes identifying a preferred approach to the establishment of a new regulation agency, and we’ll be using the money that’s currently tied up in that Productivity Commission. So it’s using existing resources, not bringing new money to the table.
Two, part of the new ministry’s role will be to engage in a sector review that will identify the source of red tape that is contributing to poor productivity across New Zealand and Aotearoa, and propose omnibus legislation that will amend such statutes and repeal regulations. This will ensure the ministry has the tools to reduce red tape—tools that the Productivity Commission doesn’t have.
I know, thirdly and finally, that the residents of Hamilton East will be looking forward to better productivity—for example, a more efficient and productive roading network, such as Southern Links. I highly commend this bill to the House.
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m just taking the opportunity of a call in the second reading—
DEPUTY SPEAKER: That is a split call. This is a split call?
Hon Member: Yes.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes, it is.
Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Ah! It is. Fair enough. I’m taking the opportunity—I don’t know who I’m splitting it with, but that’s good. I might split it with myself. We’ll see how we go. But I did just want to take an opportunity in the second reading to raise the point that at this stage, we would normally be discussing what had been put up at select committee from the many members of the public who would have come forward and put in submissions about what they felt about the disestablishment of the Productivity Commission. I imagine we would have been overwhelmed at the Finance and Expenditure Committee by members of the ACT Party saying, “What are you doing, destroying this thing that Rodney Hide brought to Parliament?” They’d be coming and saying, “What’s going on here? We heard our leader, David Seymour, talk about all the great reports that the Productivity Commission had produced, and for some reason, there’s a piece of legislation here disestablishing it.” I think members of the public would have enjoyed that opportunity to come forward to this House and put their views on the table, but they are not being given the opportunity to do that.
I have heard many times, while I have been in this House, David Seymour rail about the use of urgency, and I do want to quote from him towards the end of 2020 when a bill was being passed in urgency. And he says the reason for urgency that was given by the Leader of the House on this legislation is, “Well, we campaigned on it, and we want to do it really quickly.” So forget checks and balances and forget the right of the public to have a say; it’s another case of “We won. You lost. Eat that!”
So adding to the layers of irony and hypocrisy that have been present in the House tonight is the Minister in charge of this bill—who used to rail about the use of urgency, who used to tell us it was undemocratic not to give the public a say—here tonight with a silly and sad piece of legislation that he hasn’t even sought to justify. If we take the Hon James Shaw’s guidance here, this is a bill about disestablishing the Productivity Commission. All we’ve heard from around the House tonight is that the Productivity Commission is a good body that’s done some good things. Mr Shaw has offered up some ideas about how it could be changed. Those are indeed the kinds of things that could have been considered at a select committee when we had this bill. Is it time to change the way the commissioners are appointed? Is it time to change the way in which the Government has to respond to a Productivity Commission report? What other ways could we engage? When this was first done, there was a lot of talk about engaging with Australia and the Australian Productivity Commission, doing joint inquiries. Why haven’t we done that? What could we do to facilitate more work in that area? All of those options—ironically, the kind of thing that you might see in a regulatory impact statement if there had been a regulatory impact statement for this bill—are not here at all.
The only other point I really want to make in the second reading speech is the false equivalence of the Productivity Commission’s work and the work of a ministry of regulation. The idea that, somehow or other, one is an automatic replacement for the other is utterly ridiculous. There may well be a case for a ministry of regulation; I look forward to hearing it made by Mr Seymour at some point. But the case for the Productivity Commission is actually about big-picture thinking. It’s about grabbing the big ideas and talking about how we can then translate those into things that improve productivity.
Actually, on a serious point—and this was a point made in the first reading; I think, it may have been by Mark Patterson—every Government in New Zealand has faced the productivity challenges that New Zealand has, and we’ve all worked to try to improve them, and we all continue to do that. To have an institution that actually supports that conversation, provides the big-picture issues, gives people an opportunity to input on that, and gives its thoughts and recommendations to the Government is a different job than a ministry of regulation. It’s a different job than the Ministry for Primary Industries. And the fact that the ACT Party are prepared to trade that away for the vanity project that is the ministry of regulation that David Seymour has put forward is indeed very sad.
JAMES MEAGER (National—Rangitata): It’s a real thrill to follow my fellow Otago graduate, the Hon Grant Robertson—proud Otago University Students’ Association alumni, passionate about Otago University, and I hope, with the spare time he’s got on his hands now, he spends a lot more time down there this year.
Madam Speaker, as this is my first contribution on a bill in this House, can I just give you my heartfelt congratulations on your ascension as a Speaker in this House. Can I acknowledge Minister Seymour for bringing this bill to the House. As a member of what we like to call the powerful Regulations Review Committee, I look forward to the Minister’s focus on fewer, more high-quality regulations for us to review. And can I just acknowledge the Hon James Shaw, a fellow James in the House, for his service to this House. I wish him well, but I do note, speaking of irony, the irony in the phrase “neo-liberal stalking horse”, which is, of course, how many of his critics have described his membership in the Greens over the years.
The fine people of my electorate, Rangitata—the best, beautiful, and most productive electorate in this country—do not need a Wellington bureaucracy to tell them how to work smarter and more efficiently. This is an electorate where, in South Canterbury, 1.2 percent of the country’s population produces 7.3 percent of our food and fibre exports. That is productivity. It’s not the State that is the key to solving our productivity problems; it is people like my friend and my neighbour Miles Anderson, who many of us have spoken about tonight, the member for Waitaki, who himself took a punt on sheep scanning technology, and 4 million - odd sheep later the productivity gains in this sector speak for themselves.
If members opposite were so concerned about productivity, why did they spend six years strangling the most productive part of our economy? Consultants’ and lawyers’ fees don’t pay the bills, I’m afraid; it’s what we make, it’s what we produce, it’s what we grow, and what we sell to the world that pays the bills. If members want to know how we improve productivity without a Productivity Commission, you can go to www.national.org.nz/national_act_and_new_zealand_first_to_deliver_for_all_new_zealanders, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and check out the National and ACT agreements and the National—
DEPUTY SPEAKER: And now the bill.
JAMES MEAGER: —and New Zealand First agreements. There you will see the actions that this Government is taking in lieu of a Productivity Commission, actions like reforming the Commerce Act market studies to reduce barriers to competition. They are the things that stifle productivity in this country. It’s not the report writing from the Productivity Commission, it’s not the Wellington bureaucracies that write the reports, the 89-page report that was written in October and produced last year—and nothing happens to any of those reports. It’s things like rewriting the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act, the CCCFA—an Act which has its own acronym and is either incredibly popular or incredibly unpopular, and I’ll let members opposite make the decision for themselves.
This is a Government that stands for action in this area. This is a Minister who is focused on improving productivity in this country, and when we look at what this repeal bill does, it is a very simple bill. It is a very straightforward, simple bill. It takes what was originally a decent, good, well-intended idea which unfortunately has run its course. The Productivity Commission was built with all the best intentions in the world, but report after report, Government after Government—struggle to see what we could get from those reports that is going to actually make this country tick, what’s going to make the boat run faster.
I can tell you what’s going to make the boat run faster: it’s New Zealanders. It’s the people running our farms, it’s people running our businesses, it’s the hard-working people of the Rangitata electorate, it’s the people who struggle with things like the former Resource Management Act (RMA) and the now-repealed Natural and Built Environment Act.
Hon Rachel Brooking: Now RMA—we’re just back to the RMA, James Meager.
JAMES MEAGER: The member opposite says we’re back to the RMA. Well, not for long, because this is a Government of action. This is a Government that’s getting this country back on track. We will be introducing legislation which respects property rights and which allows New Zealanders to get on with the job of building businesses without unproductive and unnecessary regulation. We are going to allow New Zealanders to live in an environment and work in an environment where our regulations are sensible and reasonable and where we all get on together as one people. I commend this bill to the House, and I thank the members for their contributions.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is—
Joseph Mooney: Madam Speaker?
DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’ve actually started taking the vote—
Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Point of order. The vote had begun?
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes, that’s what I just said.
Hon Dr Duncan Webb: OK.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes. Thank you.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill be now read a second time.
Ayes 68
New Zealand National 49; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.
Noes 55
New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 15; Te Pāti Māori 6.
Motion agreed to.
Bill read a second time.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: This bill is set down for committee stage immediately. I declare the House in committee for consideration of the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill.
In Committee
Part 1 Preliminary provisions
CHAIRPERSON (Maureen Pugh): Members, the House is in committee on the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill. Members, we now come to Part 1. Part 1 is the debate on clauses 3 to 7, “Preliminary provisions”, and Schedule 1. The question is that Part 1 stand part.
Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): I won’t trouble the Minister too much, but I’m just interested in Schedule 1. In particular, it does seem to me that in Schedule 1, we’ve got this new ministry assuming the obligations. Members of the public will have entered into contracts with the Productivity Commission on the basis that they’re entering into a contract with the Productivity Commission. It appears that no one’s entitled to cancel their contractual arrangements on the basis that they’ve got a new entity, even though they don’t want to contract with the ministry—whatever ministry that might be. How does that gel with freedom of contract and the ACT Party’s approach to freedom of contract?
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation): Well, it’s very simple: the schedule provides that contracts will be honoured. The identity of the counterparty will change, but what they get will be delivered as if the Productivity Commission was still the counterparty.
Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Well, thank you.
Hon Grant Robertson: You’re on your own now, Scott.
Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: Oh, I don’t know about that, the Hon Grant Robertson. I think that we are in good company as we debate Part 1 of the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill.
I know that the Minister in the chair will be keen to explain—in some detail, I hope—what the purposes listed in clause 3 of Part 1 are actually intended to do. Because we’ve heard during the debate on the first and second readings of this legislation a whole range of good reasons from this side of the House about the ineffectiveness of the Productivity Commission. So I’m wondering if the Minister in the chair can please enlighten the committee of the whole House as to why, in his view, he thinks it’s important that the purposes of the bill listed in paragraphs (a), (b), (c), and (d) are important—and maybe for the benefit and the enlightenment of members opposite.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation): Thank you, Madam Chair. I thank the member for his question, but, sorry, I didn’t quite hear the exact clause he was referring to. I wonder if he could just repeat himself.
Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): As I understand it, we’re on Part 1, and it’s clause 3, the purposes. And particularly I’m interested in paragraphs (a), (b), (c), and (d). For the benefit of the Minister in the chair, paragraph (a) reads: “repeal the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act 2010;”; (b) says, “disestablish the New Zealand Productivity Commission;”; and (c) says, “provide for the consequences of that disestablishment;”; and (d) says, “make consequential amendments to other Acts.” So this is a wide-ranging poise of questions there for the Minister in the chair.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation): Well, thank you very much, Madam Chair. And I thank the member for his question. Now, fully clarified, it actually sounded better and clearer the second time. Clause 3 sets out the purposes of the bill. And it says that the purposes of the Act are actually four—I think he asked about three, but I may give him a bonus—are to repeal the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act. And that is a piece of legislation that brought into force the Productivity Commission—a Crown entity which must be established by legislation, as the year would suggest, back in 2010. And that piece of legislation would remain on the statute book even as the Productivity Commission was shut down. So we want to remove what would otherwise be, I guess, a kind of zombie piece of legislation without a purpose. So that, for the member’s benefit, is the purpose of clause 3(a).
Clause 3(b) says, “disestablish the New Zealand Productivity Commission;”. Well, that is certainly the core objective of this legislation tonight. In turn, that will have, I guess, a kind of win-win in that we preserve all of the great works that have been done by the Productivity Commission—even though, as members have noted, they haven’t always been followed as well as they might—and yet also free up around $6 million per year of funding that can be used for better—ironically—more productive purposes.
Clause 3(c) describes how the legislation has a purpose of providing for some of the consequences of the disestablishment. No doubt we will get to some fulsome discussion of some of those consequences.
Hon Grant Robertson: Oh, I hope!
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: I hear Grant Robertson saying that he hopes that will happen. For example, the Crown Entities Act and the Ombudsman Act both have references to the Productivity Commission for the purpose of scrutiny under the Official Information Act and so on. That, obviously, would be a nonsense if the commission was to no longer exist and yet the Ombudsman and the Official Information Act were to be charged with scrutinising something non-existent. So that would be an example—and there are others—of consequences of the disestablishment of the commission which must be dealt with.
And paragraph (d), to “make consequential amendments to other Acts.” So you can see that this is quite a carefully drafted bill that carries out the many details that need to be attended to in order that something like the Productivity Commission can be ended.
Hon Grant Robertson: Waste of time.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: I hope that there’ll be more searching questions about the details of this legislation, for Mr Robertson’s benefit, exactly as the committee of the whole House stage is supposed to be used.
JAMES MEAGER (National—Rangitata): Well, Madam Chair, thank you for this call. As we all know, the committee of the whole House stage is probably the most important stage of the passage of a bill. If we remember our first-year law classes from Otago University, it is the stage where you get to interrogate a bill, clause by clause, line by line, comma by comma, to make sure that what comes out of this House is the most high-quality, clean, clearest, unambiguous legislation that this House can produce. So it’s a real pleasure to be speaking in the committee stage with all of my colleagues across the House, and I look forward to everyone’s contributions to this debate.
Now, I have a few questions for the Minister for Regulation—about 31 minutes’ worth of questions, I reckon. The first question is around the interpretation clause, because it’s interesting to put an interpretation clause into what is, essentially, a repeal bill. I think that’s possibly because the Minister is a very intelligent, clever, experienced Minister, and he knows that what you want out of legislation is to avoid as much ambiguity and uncertainty as possible. So when we see things like the interpretation clause defining what “assets” are, it’s very important to define these terms to make sure that bills like this aren’t open to costly, lengthy judicial reviews tied up in the courts if Ministers are making decisions, or officials are interpreting the bill, in a way which isn’t in line with the interpretation. I’m very, very interested to know: what was the thinking and the process behind having this interpretation clause?
Then, of course, we’ve got things such as “employee”, which is quite an important interpretive section in this clause. It reads: “employee has the same meaning as in section 10(1) of the Crown Entities Act 2004”. Now, I haven’t had the chance or the opportunity this evening to look up the Crown Entities Act 2004, but that’s an indication, to me, that we might not be talking about your bog-standard, sort of run-of-the-mill definition of “employee” that you might run into in Black’s Law Dictionary or some sort of legal dictionaries you use, but you have to actually go to the Crown Entities Act 2004 to determine what an “employee” means in this instance.
Perhaps the Minister can elucidate—which is a word I’ve recently learnt in the Regulations Review Committee—on why this particular definition was put into this Act. Perhaps it has something to do with the nature of the employees at the Productivity Commission. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that there’s going to be a transitional period and we need to understand whether we’re treating employees in the Productivity Commission differently or providing them any extra benefits or protections than what we are to employees in other Acts. For example, I can imagine that the Employment Contracts Act or other types of employment regulation and legislation may well interpret “employee” in a different way. So I’m very, very interested as to why the Minister has put this particular part into the interpretation clause.
Finally, possibly the most interesting one in this interpretation clause is the end one: “Ministry”. Now, we’d all sit there and we’d all think that it’s obvious what a ministry is. The Hon Duncan Webb has been to a ministry. The Hon Ayesha Verrall—many, many members opposite have seen ministries, been in ministries, or they’ve, in fact, run ministries. So it’s interesting that we have an interpretation clause which is asking us to actually define what a “Ministry” is. So I’d be very interested to know: what was the thought process behind that? Why did the Minister decide to put this interpretation clause in there?
Then, just before I end, I will be seeking another call because I’m really interested in the self-repealing part of the Act too. So I’ll touch on that later.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation): Well, I can inform the member that interpretation sections are normal. They are in every piece of legislation that I’ve ever seen and probably every piece of legislation that he will ever see. Why, for instance, was “employee” defined as having “the same meaning as in … the Crown Entities Act”? Well, that would be because the Productivity Commission is a Crown entity, and so, therefore, the employees are employees of a Crown entity.
Why do we have a definition of “Ministry”? Well, I think the concept that the member is—I mean, this is the problem with going to Otago: you’ve got to really spell it out for them. But it’s what we’d call shorthand, so it’s so that we can just use one word to refer to a more complex concept elsewhere in the legislation. It saves paper, and that’s something that James Shaw, no doubt, will be enthusiastic about, just as much as the member is.
STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Well, thank you, Madam Chair—that was a tough choice! But thank you—thankfully, I won that one. I would like to turn the Minister’s attention to Schedule 1, Part 1, “Registers” clause 2(1), which says, “The Registrar-General of Land or any other person charged with keeping books or registers is not required to change the name of the Commission to the Ministry in those books or registers, or in a document, solely because of the provisions of this Act.” I’d really like to know some detail around how the Minister came to the decision to word that clause in such a way. Was there widespread consultation with the register of land or other entities—are they the right entity to actually be charged with this entity? The Minister might like to take some advice—perhaps the officials might like to give him some advice on that. But I think it’s a really important point because this is an important bill and the technicalities are the meat of this, and if we get this wrong, well, we won’t be very productive and that would not be the whole point of it. I think the “commission” to the “Ministry”—the name—what is the implication of getting that right or wrong; and the registry. So if the Minister could address that, I’d really appreciate it.
JOSEPH MOONEY (National—Southland): Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Minister, I just want to ask you another question on Schedule 1, just in terms of clause 1(1), where it says “All proceedings or any other matters involving the Commission that are yet to be determined or completed at the commencement of this clause are to be determined or completed by the Ministry as if the Ministry were the Commission.” Now, my understanding is that this is the Ministry of Regulation, and—no? Well, I stand to be corrected on that. But if I could have that clarified, that would be useful.
I would just say, related to that, Minister, just the purpose which was touched on a little bit earlier in some detail by the Minister, but just in terms of how that relates to the intention behind repealing this bill. I say this from the perspective of small businesses—the majority of businesses in this country are small businesses—and someone who comes from a background of small business, before I became a lawyer. Actually, that’s what got me into studying law, because I was one of those people who was building businesses, employing people, working until 2 o’clock in the morning, and then trying to figure out how to comply with legislation. So I know from lived experience the reality of how important regulation is and how that can actually constrain the activity, the mental capacity, and the ability for business owners to actually develop something that can employ people, help them put food on the table, provide something useful to this country, and give people a chance to get ahead.
In fact, most small-business owners, as I was, spend most of their time being largely unpaid, effectively, for much of the work that they do, so that they can actually employ their staff and give them that opportunity in the hope that they can build something eventually for themselves and their families that will last the test of time and, effectively, give them an opportunity going forwards.
But the experience I had from that is that, effectively, good regulation, good law is the DNA of our society, so if we have good regulation and good law, that creates a good body politic, a good society, and if we don’t have it particularly effective, then it doesn’t. So the question here is: how is this going to ensure that we help address the productivity problems that have been identified for decades in this country? The Productivity Commission was initially set up to try to identify them, but here we are in 2024 with more regulation, more challenges.
I represent the great area of Southland where we have heard at length for the last three years about unworkable regulation. I have talked to hundreds, probably thousands of people in the farming sector who have spent a huge amount of their time trying to figure out how to actually run their farms but, at the same time, comply with regulations that are changing at such a rapid pace and with such complexity that their sector bodies can’t keep up, let alone the mum and dad farmers who are taking care of their land, taking care of their animals, and taking care of the environment. But, again, the many, many, many small businesses in New Zealand that form the backbone of our country, provide a huge amount of employment for New Zealanders, those small-business owners are spending so much of their time trying to deal with this regulation.
So just the intention of this bill—how is that going to ensure these people we’re talking about, these small-business owners around the country are going to see some relief at the light at the end of the tunnel?
ANDY FOSTER (NZ First): Thank you, Madam Chair. Look, I’ve heard a lot, in this discussion, about an entity which has, in some cases, been seen to have run its course. There are others, on the opposite side of the Chamber, who are saying they’re very concerned about its loss, which I find slightly ironic. But I’m really interested to ask the question to the Minister. In clause 3(c), we have, “provide for the consequences of the disestablishment;”, and we’ve got a lot of administrative consequences which are written into the bill, but, I think, really, the important thing—we just heard that comment being made by my colleague behind me—is that we’ve all been focused very much on productivity. We know the need to improve productivity in this country, because, if we don’t do that, we can’t afford all the things we that we want to do, all the great public services we want, we can’t afford to pay ourselves the sort of wages that we want to pay, and we are all the worse for it. But I’m really interested in the Minister’s responses to what are the strategic consequences of the disestablishment of the Productivity Commission, because my understanding is that, by in large, the Productivity Commission has produced a lot of great work, but not a lot has been done with that work. So I’m really interested in the Minister’s response as to the impact of the disestablishment, and how that great kind of work will be carried on elsewhere.
Hon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Thank you, Madam Chair. I just wanted to build on the point raised by Andy Foster just there, which is that one of the central arguments for the disestablishment of the Productivity Commission is that successive Governments have ignored some of its more important findings and recommendations, and still acknowledging that some Governments have picked up some elements of some recommendations of some of the work that the Productivity Commission has done, but, on balance, that that has been ignored. I just wanted to build on this point because you can make the argument that New Zealanders continue to get sick and therefore we should disestablish the health service because we haven’t healed everybody yet, and, actually, that argument doesn’t follow that just because Governments are too self-interested or captured by vested interests to act on recommendations isn’t a good reason to get rid of the people who thought of the recommendations. It is a reason to try and ensure that Governments are actually accountable for doing something with that work.
So my question to the Minister for Regulation, which he did appeal to us in the second reading debate, to come back to some of the policy decisions, which is not easy to do within Standing Orders, clause by clause here, which maybe is why he suggested it, in order to ensure that we had as little debate as possible about the substance of the bill. Then, given that Mr Foster raised this point about the consequences of repealing the Productivity Commission, can I ask the Minister whether he considered other options, given that the central argument for its disestablishment—other than to use the money somewhere else in Government—so far that’s been outlined tonight has been that Governments don’t listen to it. I would argue, and I have argued in previous readings, that that is not an argument for getting rid of the Productivity Commission; it’s an argument for improving the framework within which it sits. If he did consider those options, what were they, and, if he did not consider those options, why not?
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation): Just in response to a few questions and points raised, we had a question from Stuart Smith in relation to—I think it was Part 1 of Schedule 1, and specifically clause 2 about registers. It considers the possibility that if a keeper of, say, property titles had a reference to the Productivity Commission, they would not be required to update their register to, say, the Treasury, being the ministry that will now take on the roles and duties—or at least the obligations—of the Productivity Commission commercially. So it’s simply to remove a potential small administrative obligation on to people that have little to do with this. And I was asked about what my thought process was for including that. I’d love to tell you that I thought of it, but, actually, that is a job of the Parliamentary Counsel Office, who are absolutely brilliant—and I think some of them are here—in the work that they do to anticipate the impacts of legislation on other pieces of legislation across the Government statute book.
Then there is a question—well, it wasn’t really a question—from Joseph Mooney. It sort of started off autobiographical, then his speech sort of got into the pseudo-philosophical, and then he made the point that red tape and regulation are bad for business when it’s done badly and when it’s excessive. I agree with that, and we’re going to be doing a lot to ensure that that is less and less the case over this term of Government. But, as James Shaw has rightly pointed out, this is a debate about the Productivity Commission, rather than the new ministry for regulation.
Then I had a question from Andy Foster about clause 3(c) of Part 1 and, in particular, the purpose of the bill being to “provide for the consequences of that disestablishment;”. The consequences being provided to, that are referred to in this bill, are not the wider policy consequences that both he and James Shaw have tried to refer to—for example, were there other ways to achieve a policy objective? As I’ve said earlier in a speech, it’s very simply to deal with the knock-on consequences in legislation. For example, with any contracts that the Productivity Commission may have entered into to ensure those persons’ interests are served, they still can expect the ministry, the Treasury, to take over the obligations of the Productivity Commission to make good on those obligations. So potentially there’s a bit of confusion about what that word “consequences” means in the context of this bill.
SIMON COURT (ACT): Minister Seymour, I’m interested in what is the fate of some of the assets that the Productivity Commission may be generating, even as they proceed to the end of their agency. I note, in clause 4, “Interpretation”, under “assets”, it “includes real or personal property of any description whether tangible or intangible (for example, intellectual property), money, rights, or interests”. I note, with interest, that the commission is working on a report on improving economic resilience, which is due to be finalised in February 2024.
In terms of work that the commission was asked to do and where there may be some value to it, such as this report—an inquiry into the resilience of New Zealand’s economy to supply chain disruptions might be quite useful. Now, the people of New Zealand issued their own opinion on economic resilience, supply chain disruptions, and all the negative effects on that, on 14 October, 2023, when they indicated to the previous Government that the way they managed the supply chain—all the red tape they imposed on the economy, or costs on employers, or raising the minimum wage without increasing productivity at all—were unacceptable to New Zealanders, who voted to remove the last Government. However, the work the Productivity Commission was doing to improve economic resilience, to understand how the New Zealand economy can be made more resilient to supply chain disruptions, is, no doubt, one of those assets that, if it is published, may yet become another taonga of the commission and their body of work. So, Minister, I’m interested in terms of Part 1, clause 5, “Transitional, savings, and related provisions”.
When we look at Schedule 1, in terms of its Part 1, clause 1(1), it says that “All proceedings and other matters involving the Commission [that are] yet to be determined or completed at the commencement of this clause are to be determined or completed by the Ministry as if the Ministry were the Commission.” So, Minister, I’m interested in respective work that the Productivity Commission has yet to table or finalise. Would the Minister expect that that work—this particular report improving economic resilience, I mean, sounds laudable. That sounds like something that may well be of value and may well turn out to be one of the taonga that the Productivity Commission is leaving for us in perpetuity. Is it your view, Minister, that that report would be completed by the ministry? And which ministry is that, just to be clear, Minister?
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation): I think I’ve created a monster! In answer to the member’s questions, first of all, the commission will be wound down at the end of February—interestingly, 29 February; can’t do that every year.
Second of all, the final report the member’s referred to, I’m advised, will be reported back around mid-February. So that report will be added to the set of assets that New Zealand will always have from the great work that has been done by the Productivity Commission to date.
Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you, Madam Chair. I did have a number of other questions that I thought I would ask. One of my questions perhaps is more a global question about the bill generally, and that is the budget implications, because, obviously, as has been made clear throughout the debates tonight, this is related to, and the funds will be used for, a new ministry. I’m interested to know exactly what the savings are, but not just what the savings are, because that’s just a budget line, but also when that will occur, because, obviously, there is the disestablishment process. I’m also aware, as in my original question it was pointed out, there are a number of liabilities of the commission, and it may well be that given this change in the affairs of the commission, those liabilities may be greater or lesser, in the sense that if the employment arrangements, for example, are terminated and they’re one-year or two-year contracts, then that will have salary implications, because I’m assuming that the Crown won’t renege on its promise to pay people under an employment arrangement. So I’m interested in the degree of certainty, and the Minister for Regulation may or may not want to comment on whether the budget savings made by this will all be used for his new endeavour or whether it will be less, or whether, indeed, he will be going and asking for more than that.
I’m also just curious, and I still can’t quite understand, why we need to repeal repeal Acts. I mean, the repeal Act has done its job—many Acts do do their job—but to repeal a repeal Act seems to be fundamentally an unnecessary legislative step and a little confusing. Of course, the ultimate question is this: we’re assuming that the Productivity Commission won’t rise from the ashes, but I’m just not clear where we get that from. So if the Minister could clarify what the effect of a repeal of a repeal is, that would be really useful, because if a repeal of a repeal then restores what we had before, we’re going to be in all kinds of trouble on 30 June 2025.
I am still curious as to why it is that the bill intervenes in contractual relationships even when the relationship might be a personal one. So you might have a consultant who the chair of the commission has arranged to give advice—it’s a personal relationship of trust, it’s one that’s quite personal; might even be a solicitor-client relationship, and yet that relationship can’t be terminated because of Part 1 of Schedule 1, clause 1(2)(b). I won’t do a Scott Simpson and read it out word for word, but it does seem odd to me that this legislation intervenes into contractual relationships regardless of what it says. It’s actually very, very heavy-handed, and I can see why people could be quite upset if they’re saying, “Well, hang on, I contracted with the Productivity Commission. I contracted with the current chair on the basis that it was a relationship of trust and he valued my advice; I valued our relationship. Now I’ve got some boffin in Treasury who I report to who I don’t have that relationship to.” It does seem to me that there are relationships like that, particularly those advisory relationships, which are quite likely to exist in the Productivity Commission. So there’s a series of questions there.
I won’t go through all of the interpretation clauses like Mr Meager did, because I don’t think they’re actually there, but the liabilities one is important, because, once again, in terms of those liabilities, there’s a real interventionism here, and I’m curious as to how the Minister can, essentially, require all of those transfers quite apart from the contractual relationships we’re in—it totally contravenes what I understand his party’s kaupapa to be. So I’m very interested in his responses to those questions.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation): Look, just for the benefit of the children watching up and down New Zealand tonight, I think we’ve just seen that anyone can grow up to be a law professor. What will the savings be? Very simply, the commission has some cash reserves. It will be able to apply those to any liabilities it may have. If there are liabilities exceeding those cash reserves, they will become, as the bill says, a liability of the Treasury. I’m advised that the cash reserves will be adequate for its liabilities.
What sort of funding will the new regulation ministry have? That is a matter that is currently being worked through in the Budget process. Duncan Webb asked, as a law professor, why repeal this Act. Well, actually, the law that’s being passed tonight will self-repeal, and the reason for that is that in a years’ time, when all of the transitions and savings have been done, the business has been wound up, there is no longer a need to have this Act. Would that lead to the Productivity Commission somehow coming back into life? A law professor should know: no, it wouldn’t. The act of repeal has been done. The non-existence of this Act does not change the other legislation that will no longer give rise to a Productivity Commission.
Other than that, we had a question of what about personal relationships? The Productivity Commission—I mean, it’s not a place that has personal relationships; it’s a Crown entity. The Crown is going to honour its commitments made through the Productivity Commission through another entity—in this case, the Treasury. From the point of view of those counterparties to contract, nothing changes.
Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (Senior Whip—National): I move, That the committee report progress.
Motion agreed to.
Progress to be reported.
House resumed.
CHAIRPERSON (Maureen Pugh): Madam Speaker, the committee has considered the New Zealand Productivity Commission Act Repeal Bill and reports progress. I move, That the report be adopted.
Motion agreed to.
Report adopted.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Barbara Kuriger): Members, the Government has indicated that it no longer wishes to continue with urgency. Accordingly, the House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow.
The House adjourned at 9.58 p.m.