Thursday, 31 July 2025
Volume 785
Sitting date: 31 July 2025
THURSDAY, 31 JULY 2025
THURSDAY, 31 JULY 2025
The Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.
Karakia/Prayers
Karakia/Prayers
TEANAU TUIONO (Assistant Speaker): E te Atua kaha rawa, ka tuku whakamoemiti atu mātou, mō ngā karakia kua waihotia mai ki runga i a mātou. Ka waiho i ō mātou pānga whaiaro katoa ki te taha. Ka mihi mātou ki te Kīngi, me te inoi atu mō te ārahitanga i roto i ō mātou whakaaroarohanga, kia mōhio ai, kia whakaiti ai tā mātou whakahaere i ngā take o te Whare nei, mō te oranga, te maungārongo, me te aroha o Aotearoa. Āmene.
[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 and humility for the welfare, peace and compassion of New Zealand. Amen.]
Business Statement
Business Statement
Hon CHRIS BISHOP (Leader of the House): Today, the House will adjourn until Tuesday, 12 August. That week, the House will consider the first reading of the Antisocial Road Use Legislation Amendment Bill, the second reading of the Public Works (Critical Infrastructure) Amendment Bill, and the remaining stages of the Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Bill and the Local Government (Water Services) Bill. Tuesday will be extended into Wednesday morning for the consideration of Government business.
Petitions, Papers, Select Committee Reports, and Introduction of Bills
Petitions, Papers, Select Committee Reports, and Introduction of Bills
SPEAKER: A petition has been delivered to the Clerk for presentation.
CLERK: Petition of Southland Recreational Whitebaiters Association requesting that the House urge the Government to lengthen the whitebait season so it runs from 15 August to 15 November.
SPEAKER: That petition stands referred to the Petitions Committee. No papers have been delivered for the Clerk to present. Twenty-three select committee reports have been delivered for presentation.
CLERK:
Report of the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee on the 2025-26 Estimates for Vote Business, Science and Innovation (excluding appropriations related to the Health Research Fund and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise)
reports of the Environment Committee on the:
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Conservation
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Environment, and
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.
report of the Finance and Expenditure Committee on the 2025-26 Estimates for Vote Revenue
reports of the Governance and Administration Committee on the:
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Office of the Clerk and Vote Parliamentary Service
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Prime Minister and Cabinet, and
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Public Service.
report of the Health Committee on the Medicines Amendment Bill
report of the Justice Committee on the Regulatory Systems (Courts) Amendment Bill
report of the Māori Affairs Committee on the Māori Purposes Bill
report of the Primary Production Committee on the 2025-26 Estimates for Vote Agriculture, Biosecurity, Fisheries and Food Safety
reports of the Social Services and Community Committee on the:
2025-26 Estimates for appropriation within Vote Education Review Office related to the Independent Children’s Monitor
2025-26 Estimates for Appropriations within Vote Internal Affairs that are the responsibility of the Minister for Community and Voluntary Sector and the Minister for Ethnic Communities
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Arts, Culture and Heritage
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Disabled People and Vote Disability Support Services
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Housing and Urban Development and appropriations within Vote Building and Construction that are the responsibility of the Minister of Housing
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Oranga Tamariki
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Pacific Peoples, and
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Social Development.
reports of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee on the:
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Building and Construction
2025-26 Estimates for Vote Transport, and
review briefing on the 2023-24 annual review of the Electricity Authority.
SPEAKER: The bills are set down for second reading. The review briefing is set down for consideration. No bills have been introduced.
Oral Questions
Questions to Ministers
Question No. 1—Women
1. Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston) to the Minister for Women: Does she stand by her statement, “My top priority as Minister for Women is to support women to economic empowerment because not only does it give women more choice, but it has a ripple effect on families, communities, and the economy”; if so, is fair pay critical to economic empowerment?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Attorney-General) on behalf of the Minister for Women: Yes, and yes.
Hon Carmel Sepuloni: Did she advocate for a pay offer for nurses that keeps pace with the 4.6 percent rise in food costs over the past year?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Well, of course the Minister is not involved directly—and nor is any other Minister—in any pay negotiations. That would be most unfortunate and wrong for them to be so.
Hon Carmel Sepuloni: How can a 2 percent pay offer—an effective pay cut for nurses—align with her promise that a National Government would be aspirational for women?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I think the member’s getting well ahead of herself at the moment, as I understand that the Nurses Organisation has left the bargaining table.
Hon Carmel Sepuloni: Did she advocate for a pay offer for secondary school teachers that at least keeps pace with the rising cost of living?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Well, I think I’ve made it pretty plain: Ministers are not involved directly in negotiations, and I would be pretty concerned if they were.
Hon Carmel Sepuloni: Point of order. The Minister for Women is in charge of the Ministry for Women and has an advocacy role across Government agencies, and so I think it’s fair to expect that she would be advocating for the closure of the gender pay gap and for wages to lift in workforces where there are predominantly women.
SPEAKER: Well, you may well think that, but the Minister’s addressed the question.
Hon Carmel Sepuloni: How can a 1 percent pay offer—an effective pay cut for secondary school teachers—align with her commitment to support women’s economic empowerment?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I’ve made it pretty clear, haven’t I, that the Minister does not engage in negotiations at the bargaining table, and nor, might I say, does the Nurses Organisation, having walked away from the bargaining table.
Hon Carmel Sepuloni: What is the point of a Minister for Women who doesn’t advocate against pay equity changes, doesn’t advocate for nurses to get a fair deal, and refused to advocate for teachers to get the pay they deserve?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Well, actually, under the National Party, we’ve always considered the position of Minister for Women a very important role. In fact, I note that it was the National Party that established the position in 1949, and something the Labour Party eventually got on to.
Hon Carmel Sepuloni: Is she concerned that the legacy of this Government will be a higher gender pay gap, more women in poverty, more women without a place to call home, and more women leaving for work in Australia for better pay?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Well, no. In fact, I’m sure that many women—and obviously, most women are taxpayers; in fact, all women are in some form taxpayers—would very much appreciate that this Government is taking account of the fact that lowering inflation means that more New Zealanders have more buying power and, by the way, it brings down interest rates. Strangely enough, these women are also mortgage holders; the one thing they want is for this Government not to waste their money, and nor are we.
Question No. 2—Energy
2. SCOTT WILLIS (Green) to the Minister for Energy: What actions, if any, has he taken to reduce power bills for energy consumers, and how much have power bills reduced on average, if at all, as a result of these actions?
Hon SIMON WATTS (Minister for Energy): Well, to list just a few: this Government has cancelled Lake Onslow, which had a chilling effect on investment in energy; we’ve passed fast-track legislation, which includes 22 renewable energy projects representing 3 gigawatts of new generation; we’ve initiated the Energy Competition Task Force to increase competition in the market; and we’re breaking down barriers to increase rooftop solar by requiring electricity companies to pay a fair price for feeding back energy into the grid. Forward electricity prices have dropped around $100 a megawatt hour in May, and spot prices have also decreased compared to the start of this year. We know that there is more work to be done, because household electricity bills are increasing, but we’re getting on and dealing with the mess that we inherited and getting it sorted.
Scott Willis: What does he think would reduce New Zealanders’ power bills quicker: a $200 million taxpayer subsidy for fossil fuel corporations that will not make any impact for a decade, or directly investing in new renewable energy infrastructure and requiring the gentailers to reinvest dividends?
Hon SIMON WATTS: Firstly, I don’t agree with the assertions at the first part of that question. This Government, as outlined in the answers to my primary question, is putting significant investment and effort around increasing the amount of renewable energy generation in this country. There is a significant amount of that coming through in the pipeline. In parallel, we are also dealing with the chilling effect that is a result of prior Governments’ policies in energy. That is a significant factor in energy investment, and we are tidying up that mess.
Scott Willis: Does the Minister recognise the urgency in the energy affordability crisis, given that electricity prices are up 8.4 percent compared to last year, and consumer complaints about power bills have increased by 48 percent?
Hon SIMON WATTS: Let me be clear: I am not satisfied with the level of competition in the energy market. That is why this Government put together the Energy Competition Task Force, and we’re also doing other work like ensuring retailers give a fair price for rooftop solar that’s fed back into the grid. The Electricity Authority is also delivering a next-generation power switch platform to help Kiwis get the best price for electricity. Unlike the last Government, we don’t shoot—
SPEAKER: No, you don’t need to—supplementary question, the Rt Hon Winston Peters.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Can I ask the Minister: how long would businesses in New Zealand last if, as the Greens demand, the Government directs their dividend spending?
SPEAKER: Sorry, sorry—I missed the last part of that question, sorry.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Very slowly.
SPEAKER: Yes.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: How long will businesses in New Zealand last—
SPEAKER: Yeah, I got that.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: —if, as the Greens demand, the Governments direct their dividend spending?
SPEAKER: Yes, it’s most certainly not the Minister for Energy’s responsibility. Scott Willis.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: It’s a debating chamber.
SPEAKER: Yeah, it’s a debating chamber.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Point of order, Mr Speaker. You allowed that Green member to make the statement as a demand of the Minister, and then when someone sought by supplementary question to examine the value of it, you’ve ruled it out. How does that work in a Parliament like ours?
SPEAKER: Well, pretty simple: that’s what happened.
Hon Chris Bishop: Point of order. Mr Speaker, I just wanted to support the Rt Hon Winston Peters. He was asking a supplementary question specifically related to the supplementary asked by Mr Willis. So if it’s in order for Mr Willis to ask that question, it must also be in order for the Rt Hon Winston Peters to ask a supplementary along the same lines. If one’s in order, the other must be in order too.
SPEAKER: Well, the fascinating thing is there are so many people in this House who appear to be pretty good at the job I’ve got at the moment. Happy to swap anytime. [Interruption] No, not you.
Scott Willis: When, if ever, will he release Frontier Economics’ review of the electricity market, and how much more will New Zealanders’ power bills need to increase before the Government takes any meaningful action?
Hon SIMON WATTS: Well, as I outlined in the answer to the last question, we are not satisfied with the state of competition in the New Zealand energy market. The Government is currently considering that report that the member notes and will release it in due course. Unlike the last Government—as I said before—we don’t shoot from the hip and damage the energy market. We are working very hard in order to ensure that we have a credible energy market, and I won’t be drawn on any specifics of that report until we release it in due course.
Scott Willis: Is his understanding of certainty in the energy market enabling the gentailers to continue to rake in $7.8 million in daily profits while, at the same time, in May, 485,000 New Zealanders were behind on their bills?
Hon SIMON WATTS: It is obvious that people are doing it tough. We know that energy bills are a household expense that many households are struggling with at the moment. That is why this Government is focused on getting more renewable energy and generation online to lower energy prices and to improve competition and efficiency in the market, in order to give Kiwis a better deal. We’re already seeing positive movements in regards to that action, and that is because the work that we’re doing in conjunction with industry is working and that is passing on benefits to consumers.
Scott Willis: Does he accept that energy is a fundamental public good and essential service; if so, how long will he allow the major energy companies to reap exorbitant profits from households for this public good in a cost of living crisis?
Hon SIMON WATTS: Well, what we do understand on this side of the House is that energy is a significant and critical component of economic growth, and we need to ensure that that energy cost and input into our economy is as low as possible. We need affordable energy prices in New Zealand and, importantly, we need energy security. Those are my two key focuses and my two main priorities—and on this side of the House, we’re taking action to deliver both of those.
Andy Foster: I’d just like to ask a question: what is the impact of oil and gas on energy prices of—[Interruption]
SPEAKER: Sorry, Mr Foster—we’ll just stop while the House seems to be distracted to my left. Now that it’s quiet, you can resume.
Andy Foster: What is the impact on energy prices of cancelling oil and gas exploration?
Hon SIMON WATTS: It has a significant chilling effect. What we know is that, as a result of those decisions by prior Governments, investment in terms of energy generation basically stopped. That is a significant implication, and we saw that play out in energy prices reaching over $2,000 per—[Interruption]
SPEAKER: That’s enough across the House—that’s enough across the House.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: What has been the effect on the long-term guarantee of fuel supply in allowing Marsden Point to be cancelled?
Hon SIMON WATTS: It is very clear that we need a diversity of fuel sources in order to power our economy, and when the rain doesn’t fall and the sun doesn’t shine, we do need thermal energy capacity in order to keep the lights on. The area in the region in which that member has noted is one of the areas of potential, and this Government is focused on unlocking those energy generation projects, wherever they are in this beautiful country.
Question No. 3—Health
3. Dr HAMISH CAMPBELL (National—Ilam) to the Minister of Health: What recent announcements has he made about strengthening primary care?
Hon SIMEON BROWN (Minister of Health): Well, this Government is putting patients first by delivering record investment into primary care to support patients to get the timely, quality care they deserve. Just last week, I was pleased to announce that we’re reweighting the capitation funding formula for the first time in more than 20 years to reflect real patient need in primary care, including critical factors like multimorbidity, rurality, and deprivation. I also announced that the Government, through Health New Zealand, will be fully funding training and exam costs for GP registrars to ensure they are supported the same way other specialties are when it comes to training. These important steps are another part of our plan to strengthen primary practice, to reduce wait times, and to make sure that patients get the access to primary care they deserve.
Dr Hamish Campbell: Why is the Government making changes to the capitation funding model for primary care?
Hon SIMEON BROWN: We are making changes to the outdated capitation formula to better reflect the real needs of patients. Since 2002, funding has been based only on age and gender, ignoring critical indicators like chronic illness, rural isolation, and deprivation. Our new formula incorporates these factors based on data from over 2 million enrolled patients. This will ensure that more funding flows to practices serving high-needs communities, particularly our rural communities, so patients get fairer, faster access to care. This is about targeting funding where it matters most and ensuring all New Zealanders have access to the timely, quality primary care they deserve.
Dr Hamish Campbell: What action is the Government taking to strengthen the GP workforce?
Hon SIMEON BROWN: We are investing in a stronger GP workforce to futureproof our health system. For the first time, the Government, through Health New Zealand, is fully funding training and exam costs for GP registrars, supporting around 400 additional trainees each year. We will also be covering Fellowship Exam preparation for another 200 doctors, removing barriers and recognising the value they make to general practice. This will support the growth of our general practice workforce, with more GPs qualified to train graduate doctors. This is a Government focused on backing GPs and putting patients first.
Dr Hamish Campbell: How is the Government supporting the nurse practitioner workforce to improve access to care for patients?
Hon SIMEON BROWN: Good news: we’re backing nurses to take the next step in their careers and help deliver faster, more consistent care for patients. That’s why expressions of interest opened today for up to 120 registered nurses each year to train as nurse practitioners, highly skilled clinicians who can assess, diagnose, treat, and prescribe. Applications are also open for primary-care employers to recruit and support up to 400 graduate nurses each year. Funding includes up to $20,000 for rural employers to take on new graduate nurses and $15,000 for employers in urban environments, growing the workforce where it’s needed the most. This is a Government focused on strengthening primary care, supporting the front line, and putting patients first.
Question No. 4—Finance
Hon BARBARA EDMONDS (Labour—Mana): Tank yu tumas, Mr Speaker. To the Minister of Finance—[Interruption]
SPEAKER: Just hang on—hold on, hold on. I know it’s Thursday; everyone’s got lots to say—keep it quiet while questions are being asked.
4. Hon BARBARA EDMONDS (Labour—Mana) to the Minister of Finance: Does she stand by all her statements and actions?
Hon CHRIS BISHOP (Associate Minister of Finance) on behalf of the Minister of Finance: Yes, in context.
Hon Barbara Edmonds: Does she stand by her statement, from July last year, “My simple message is this: the cost of living relief is on its way.”, and, if so, how many families have received the full $250 tax cut as promised by Christopher Luxon?
Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Yes, because three years ago inflation was at 7.3 percent and it is now back within the band. A year ago, Kiwis got tax relief—for the first time since 2010, New Zealanders got a tax cut. So, yes, I do stand by that statement. [Interruption]
Hon Barbara Edmonds: Supplementary.
SPEAKER: Now, look, we’re just going to calm, and that barrage is the last one for the day.
Hon Barbara Edmonds: How can she say cost of living relief is coming when Lani Hunt, an advocate in Taranaki, has said, “We’ve been feeding, clothing and checking in on our whānau for 10 months and the numbers have doubled.”?
Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, there’s no doubt that there are people doing it tough in this country. I mean, the member highlights that there are people doing it tough because New Zealand has gone through a prolonged cost of living crisis and has endured a recession created by the profligate fiscal mismanagement of the last Government. It takes time to turn around six years of neglect of this economy, rampant increase in spending, record debt, record inflation, and record spending. It takes time to turn that around, but we are making progress. Clearly, there is more work to do.
Hon Barbara Edmonds: Does she agree with Aaron Hendry, an advocate for homeless youth in Auckland, who said, “The government’s spin about tax cuts and GDP growth ignores the basic truth: our tamariki are freezing. Our whānau are freezing.”?
Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, I have a lot of respect for Aaron Hendry and the work he does in Auckland around homelessness, and as has been—
Hon Carmel Sepuloni: Shame the Minister of Housing is failing them.
SPEAKER: Right, just calm it right down.
Hon CHRIS BISHOP: In relation to that outburst from Carmel Sepuloni, the member might be interested in the story that was in Stuff yesterday, in which a paraplegic man with a four-year-old son has finally moved into a social house out of a motel after four years of waiting. The reason he is able to move out of that motel is because of this Government’s Priority One policy, which says that families in motels with kids go to the top of the social housing wait-list. The member might also reflect on the following fact—
SPEAKER: Sorry—sorry, Mr Bishop. Minister Bishop, just stop there. You can’t have one side of the House ask questions and then have the same side of the House attempt to answer them. Rare and reasonable interjections.
Hon Kieran McAnulty: Point of order, sir. Just in response to that, sir, that entire contribution between gaps was in response to Carmel Sepuloni. So if the Minister is able to respond, then he’s going to be getting responses himself. If it was in direct response to the question, then you’d be absolutely right.
SPEAKER: Well, if you think about the sequencing here, the question was about to be answered and there was an interjection. It’s not unreasonable to refer to someone who makes an interjection. What I can also say is that the question itself put out a speculation—nothing more than that. There’s nothing before the House that would back that up; it’s a supplementary. It’s reasonable for the Minister to answer in the vein that he has. We’ll have no more of that barrage.
Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Can I just finish the answer, which is: I think members should reflect on the other part of that story, which people may not have read, which is that it took 18 months to get resource consent and building consent to retrofit the property so that it was wheelchair friendly. What does it say about our planning system and our building consent system when it takes 18 months to retrofit a social house to put wheelchair ramps in it? That’s why we’re reforming the Resource Management Act (RMA).
Hon Kieran McAnulty: Point of order, sir. While fully accepting your response to my previous point of order, that question was asking the Minister if he agreed with a quote. Now, the entirety, pretty much, aside from “I have a lot of respect for the person that made that quote”, was about nothing to do with the content of the question. Certainly, RMA reform had nothing to do with whether the Minister agreed with the specific quote in question.
SPEAKER: Well, with all due respect, the question started with a quote from a particular gentleman, but the quote itself was, effectively, making an allegation, which the Minister was responding to. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to talk about a specific incident, which you’d assume is multiplied across a number of people, where there was a practical impediment to that person getting greater help sooner. I don’t think that’s unreasonable at all.
Hon Barbara Edmonds: Why won’t she listen to community service providers from across the country, and those on the front line, who say the cost of living crisis has only gotten worse, not better?
Hon CHRIS BISHOP: Well, on behalf of the Minister: I meet with community providers all the time, and I know many members of this Government do. In fact, I know that the Minister of Housing met with a range of community providers in Auckland just last week to talk about the problem of severe housing deprivation in Auckland. It is true that Ministers meet with community groups all the time, and it is true that there are some—[Interruption] Do you want an answer or not? It is true that there are some New Zealanders doing it tough. The facts are really clear when it comes to inflation, which has come down from very high peaks of 7 percent to back within the band. It is true that food prices have come down. But this is not deflation; it is just less inflation than there was before, and New Zealanders are still grappling with the fact that we had many years of high inflation. The Government is doing a huge number of things to put more money into people’s back pockets, and, fundamentally, to deal with the underlying issue that faces this economy, which, as the Hon Kieran McAnulty pointed out a week or so ago himself, is income growth. The real way to grow this economy and get the cost of living under control is to grow the economy so that incomes rise.
SPEAKER: Good. OK.
Hon CHRIS BISHOP: So far, the Opposition—
: Yeah, that’s OK.SPEAKER That’s good. That’s enough. Thank you.
Question No. 5—Local Government
5. PAULO GARCIA (National—New Lynn) to the Minister of Local Government: What announcements has he made about increasing transparency in local government?
Hon SIMON WATTS (Minister of Local Government): Today, I announced the release of key performance metrics for every council across this country. Ratepayers will now be able to go to the Department of Internal Affairs website to easily compare their council’s spending on core services—like infrastructure, debt, and staffing—against other councils.
Paulo Garcia: Why is this information so important for ratepayers to have right now?
Hon SIMON WATTS: This is crucial because households are doing it tough with the cost of living, and they deserve to know that their rates are being spent reasonably. This increased transparency provides a one-stop shop for ratepayers to ask informed questions around their council rates, investment, and performance. This is a great day for local democracy.
Paulo Garcia: What is the Government’s expectation of councils following this release?
Hon SIMON WATTS: The Government’s expectation is that councils will use this as an opportunity to demonstrate value for money to their ratepayers. We want to see councils getting back to basics and delivering the core services that our communities rely on. We want to see responsible financial management and local councils living within their means—just like the households that they represent.
Paulo Garcia: What further steps is the Government considering to ensure councils manage their finances responsibly?
Hon SIMON WATTS: These new benchmarks are just part of a broader plan to increase accountability and transparency across local government. We know that Kiwis are concerned about how their rates bills are increasing, and that is why we are actively exploring a rates capping system to ensure councils are spending ratepayers’ money responsibly. Our Government is committed to ensuring that the local government sector is affordable, efficient, and focusing on delivery for ratepayers.
SPEAKER: I’ll just make the point, to all members, that it’s not appropriate for members to move from their allotted seat to another seat and then participate in various calls across the House when they are not called to speak.
Hon Kieran McAnulty: Point of order, sir. Sir, that is absolutely right, in the normal context of the House, that someone might move seats to advance their chance of being heard as a heckle, but at the start of question time when seats are allocated—usually to fill a vacancy from an absent member—are you, therefore, saying that anybody that isn’t sitting in their allocated seat from the start of question time is prevented from heckling for the entirety of question time?
SPEAKER: No, I’m not saying that—the Standing Orders are.
Question No. 6—Health
6. Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Labour) to the Minister of Health: Does he stand by his statement that he is ensuring “nurses have the resources they need to provide access to timely, quality healthcare”?
Hon SIMEON BROWN (Minister of Health): In the context it was made, yes. Patient safety is essential to ensuring every New Zealander gets the care they need when they need it, and that’s why our Government is putting patients first in every decision we make. We’ve delivered a record $16.68 billion in additional funding for Health New Zealand over three Budgets to ensure the front line is supported to deliver the timely, quality care that Kiwis deserve. Since 2023, we’ve also increased the number of nurses working at Health New Zealand by over 2,100 and the number of doctors by over 600. This means more people on the front line with more resources to put patients first, to reduce wait times for those who need care.
Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall: Who is correct: the Minister, who describes nurses’ advocacy for safe staffing as “wanting to control the roster”, or nurses, who point out that without that, unsafe staffing is rampant under his Government?
Hon SIMEON BROWN: The point I made yesterday was that Health New Zealand, as the employer, should be in charge of the rostering system, just like all other employers across New Zealand are in control of how they employ their staff.
Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall: Who is correct: the Minister, who boasts he’s hired 278 nurses in the last year, or the New Zealand Herald, who notes that that’s only a 1 percent increase and that there are signs that that doesn’t keep up with need?
Hon SIMEON BROWN: Well, as I said in the primary answer, there are 2,100 more nurses working in Health New Zealand today than when we came to Government, and we’re focused on ensuring that the additional nurses, the additional doctors, the increased resources are going into making sure we’re reducing the wait-lists and wait times for patients, which blew out under her watch.
Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall: Who is correct: the Minister, who claims there’s no hiring freeze, or every nurse I talk to, who has unfilled positions in their department that they’re blocked from recruiting into?
Hon SIMEON BROWN: What is right are the facts, which are that there are 2,100 more nurses and 600 more doctors working at Health New Zealand today than when we came to office, and that is based on the health workforce stats which are released by Health New Zealand.
Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall: Who is responsible for cancelled surgeries: the nurses, who draw attention to 56 percent of day shifts on surgical wards being understaffed, or the Minister, who refuses to staff those wards?
Hon SIMEON BROWN: Health New Zealand is responsible, as the employer, and what I would say is when the union decides to strike and put politics ahead of patients and cancel the care of 1,500 New Zealanders who have had their hip, knee, and cataract surgeries cancelled and 2,800 first specialist appointments cancelled, the union is ultimately responsible for failing patients, and I hold them responsible.
Question No. 7—Social Development and Employment
7. HANA-RAWHITI MAIPI-CLARKE (Te Pāti Māori—Hauraki-Waikato) to the Minister for Social Development and Employment: What, if anything, is she doing to address the 10 percent decrease in filled jobs for 15- to 19-year-olds since June 2024?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON (Minister for Social Development and Employment): Our Government is relentlessly focused on growing the economy and getting people into work. I acknowledge that young people are feeling the impact of the weak labour market, and that’s why our work to grow the economy is so important. We’ve also built a more proactive welfare system. Our Welfare that Works approach means that more young people will get a needs assessment, a job plan, and tailored support, including job coaching. Our message to young New Zealanders is that this Government is focused on building a strong economy. We have put in place the policies to help young people be better placed to take advantage of these opportunities.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: Why is she making it harder for 18- and 19-year-olds to access financial support when there are over 12,000 less jobs available for rangatahi now, compared to last year?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: The policy that we announced in Budget 2025 is about ensuring that 18- to 19-year-olds, from 1 July 2027, understand the expectation that we have, which is that young people will be in work, in further education, or in training. That is an expectation because we want more young New Zealanders to do well, to have great opportunities, and to have more opportunities to earn greater incomes.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: How have the Government’s cuts to the Public Service, to the Apprenticeship Boost programme, and to Te Pūkenga contributed to 96,000 rangatahi being out of employment, education, and training?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: Well, I will focus on the areas that fall within my responsibility as the Minister for Social Development and Employment and say that our Government is unwilling to have young people who go on to a jobseeker benefit under the age of 25 be on welfare for another 18 years of their lives. That is intolerable to this side of the House. That is why we are implementing policies to improve the chances of young New Zealanders to have a better life and a better future.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: Supplementary. [Interruption]
SPEAKER: Just wait.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: Will the Minister commit to increasing funding for initiatives such as the Pūhoro STEMM Academy, which has been helping to accelerate Māori student achievement in preparation for university study and the workforce?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: That is a programme that doesn’t fall within the responsibilities I have as the Minister for Social Development and Employment, but let me reassure that member, because I know that she is as concerned as we are about young people—young Māori people—who miss out on the opportunities to set their lives up for the future. That’s why our Government is absolutely focused on ensuring more young New Zealanders get the support they need to improve their chances, and that’s why we are unwilling to accept that 20 years—two decades—of a young person’s life is as good as it gets.
Question No. 8—Prime Minister
8. TODD STEPHENSON (ACT) to the Prime Minister: What is the Government doing to reduce spending?
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Deputy Prime Minister) on behalf of the Prime Minister: Up and down this country, over the last six years, people and small businesses, farms, and families have had to tighten their belts as the Government unleashed its own. Over the last 18 months, we’ve had a Government that has committed to being as careful with taxpayer money as taxpayers have to be with theirs. For example, in Budget 2025, the Government realised $4.8 billion in annual operating savings and reprioritisations. In Budget 2024, that figure was $4.4 billion, for a total of $9.2 billion in annual savings that the Government has made so far. We’ve also set the road ahead by committing ourselves to only $2.4 billion a year in annual operating allowances. That compares with a $3.5 billion annual operating allowance that the previous finance Minister had allowed himself.
Todd Stephenson: What are some of the tough choices that the Government has had to make to achieve savings?
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: On behalf of the Prime Minister, as I have mentioned, people up and down New Zealand have faced tough choices, largely because the Government refused to make them for too long and spiked inflation, which spiked interest rates. This Government, in the last 18 months, has made choices such as halving the cost of the school lunch programme while achieving over 99 percent on-time delivery and student satisfaction at a rate of 73 percent—pretty good, most parents who prepare lunches would say. We’re building a new medical school, but we’re managing to do that for $200 million less taxpayer contribution than first proposed. When it comes to pay equity, we’ve managed to focus the scheme on actual gender discrimination while saving $2.7 billion per year for taxpayers. We finally have a Government showing the same fiscal responsibility that people in firms, farms, and families have had to for so long, while those guys let inflation out of control.
Todd Stephenson: Why does reducing Government spending matter for New Zealanders?
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: The Government can only get money by taxing New Zealanders. Sometimes it borrows money, but then it has to tax New Zealanders in the future with interest. For example, the additional debt taken on in the period that Grant Robertson was finance Minister is now costing New Zealand taxpayers $3.7 billion per year in interest. We are reducing the burden of taxation on Kiwi families and investing in things that matter, such as giving Pharmac the single biggest uplift in funding for medicines in New Zealand history. Having smaller Government, having less waste, means that the Reserve Bank can take pressure off interest rates and therefore take pressure off families, allow people to spend more, and create more jobs.
Todd Stephenson: Can New Zealanders expect more savings in the future?
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: Not only can New Zealanders expect more savings but they are absolutely essential. If we want this to be a country where people can recognise and realise their dreams to flourish in their own way, they cannot do it with the yoke of the Government on their back, they cannot do it with enormous interest bills on past Governments’ borrowing, and they cannot do it with taxes stretching far into the future. They must have a smaller, more efficient Government that takes less of the pie, leaving more for everyone else.
Question No. 9—Education
Hon WILLOW-JEAN PRIME (Labour): Does she agree with Erica Stanford, who said—[Interruption]
SPEAKER: We’ll just stop. Everyone needs to be quiet, particularly if it’s coming from one of your own members. The Hon Willow-Jean Prime, from the start.
9. Hon WILLOW-JEAN PRIME (Labour) to the Minister of Education: Does she agree with Erica Stanford, who said in 2023 that she was “committed to more” pay for existing teachers; if so, how is one of the lowest pay offers ever, as reported by RNZ, being “committed to more”?
Hon ERICA STANFORD (Minister of Education): This quotation was around the collective bargaining process and committing to more. Collective bargaining is not only about pay but is about pay and conditions. Yes, in answer to the first part of the question, I’m committed to more—more decodable maths books, more resources in our primary schools, a more internationally comparable curriculum, more funding for learning support so more kids get more support more often, more support for teachers through funding more professional learning and development and their teacher registration fees, more funding in schools for on-site training, more classrooms at a lower cost to benefit more students, and more teachers. In response to the second part of the question, as I said before, I’m not going to comment on an active bargaining process.
Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Why does the Government value tobacco companies and landlords more than our teachers?
SPEAKER: No, we went through this yesterday. You can’t assert something like that and expect the Minister, who has no responsibility for that particular course of action, if it were to be true, to answer. Without losing your question, please rephrase it or go down a different track.
Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Why is she hiding behind the Public Service Commissioner—
SPEAKER: No, you can’t do that either.
Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Why? Oh, OK.
SPEAKER: No, no. Look, just ask a question; don’t assert something.
Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Does she stand by her statement that the offer was “carefully crafted to recognise the contribution of teachers”; if so, are teachers only worth a 1 percent pay rise?
Hon ERICA STANFORD: In response to the first part of the question, I was quoting the Public Service Commissioner and I agreed with him.
Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Why is she refusing to front up to teachers on why the Government doesn’t value them?
SPEAKER: No, no. Sorry, you can’t ask a question like that either, where you’re asserting something that you cannot possibly demonstrate, so please have another go. You’re not losing your questions; we’re just going through an exercise of getting them right.
Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Why will she not answer the questions regarding the pay offer on why the Government doesn’t value teachers by only offering them 1 percent?
SPEAKER: Sorry, look, that doesn’t take us any further. Standing Order 390(1)(b) makes it very clear that questions cannot contain arguments, inferences, or opinions. So have another crack, but we’re getting close to the end of it.
Hon Kieran McAnulty: Point of order. We have a situation where yesterday and on other days in the House, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health have been quite happy to answer questions specifically around pay offers that have been made to nurses, but the Minister of Education is refusing to address questions that relate to the pay offer to teachers. So a supplementary question from Willow-Jean Prime that asked why she will not answer these questions is entirely appropriate.
SPEAKER: It was not the question she asked. The question was the assertion that the Minister is not placing a value on teachers. That’s an opinion. Please have another go at the question.
Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Why is she only offering teachers 1 percent?
Hon ERICA STANFORD: Well, the member may well be aware that I am not offering anything. The Public Service Commissioner is undertaking collective bargaining. We are also in the middle of active bargaining, and I cannot comment on that.
SPEAKER: The House needs to be quiet while questions are asked.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Did the Minister say to one of the primary questions that she was caught by the restraints of mediation, and could she explain very carefully to the Opposition what that means?
Hon ERICA STANFORD: As I’ve already said, the Public Service Commissioner is in the middle of active bargaining, and I need to be very careful. As the member opposite and previous Ministers will well be aware, Ministers need to be very careful in their comments around collective bargaining so as not to upset the active collective bargaining process that is under way. We have to be very careful.
Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Why did she commit to increasing teacher pay in Opposition but does nothing now that she is the Minister?
Hon ERICA STANFORD: I’m not sure how many times I have to say this: we are in the middle of active collective bargaining. The member opposite needs to understand that nothing has been concluded and she needs to really listen to the answers that I’m giving.
Hon David Seymour: Is it possible that in the bargaining process, the Government will negotiate extra funding for the teaching of really, really slow learners?
SPEAKER: While the question is probably legitimate, it’s not one that I think the Minister would offer much to the House in answering.
Hon Willow-Jean Prime: How are teachers meant to feel valued when they do so much for our tamariki and yet get rewarded with an effective pay cut?
Hon ERICA STANFORD: I can tell that member that teachers feel valued when an education Minister delivers an almost $750 million package in learning support to deliver learning support coordinators to every single primary and intermediate school in the country that was promised by the members opposite and that they never delivered on. This is a Government that supports teachers in schools and does the things that they ask for. [Interruption]
SPEAKER: Yeah, well, I’ll tell you what—someone is going to go shortly because the interjections are just over the top.
Tim van de Molen: Point of order. Just following that series of questions, I wonder whether you might be able to reflect on this and come back to the House around the very generous nature that you’ve demonstrated in allowing the re-asking of questions on multiple occasions at no cost. I ask this in the context which we’ve seen over a period of time where if a member makes what is an unparliamentary comment and therefore is ruled out of order by yourself, then gets another opportunity to ask a question at no cost, it, I think, has encouraged an increased use of those sorts of comments to be made to have a flick at the Government prior to that. We saw, then, that subsequent question from the Deputy Prime Minister that was not allowed to be answered by the Minister but did cost that member the question. I just wonder whether we can consider the consistency of that.
SPEAKER: Well, thank you—
Hon Carmel Sepuloni: Thank you, Leader of the House.
SPEAKER: Right. Have an early afternoon.
Hon Carmel Sepuloni: Me?
SPEAKER: Yes.
Hon Carmel Sepuloni: This is my first time.
SPEAKER: Yeah, good. You want applause?
Hon Carmel Sepuloni withdrew from the Chamber.
SPEAKER: The point I’d first make to you is that all supplementaries are at the discretion of the Speaker. That’s been there for a long time—Standing Order 397. Further, in this particular case it was a question about education, so I didn’t think my facilitating a bit of learning was such a bad thing.
Question No. 10—Agriculture
10. STEVE ABEL (Green) to the Minister of Agriculture: What steps, if any, is he taking to guard against perceived influence by the dairy lobby on freshwater policy?
Hon TODD McCLAY (Minister of Agriculture): I’m not the Minister responsible for the Resource Management Act reform; however, I can confirm there is no influence on freshwater policy from the dairy industry. The Government’s freshwater policy reform is about restoring balance and confidence, including driving better outcomes for fresh water, and is being developed through a transparent evidence-based process led by officials and informed by public consultation. Public consultation on freshwater national direction ran for eight weeks, closing on 27 July. The Government expects stakeholders to be consulted through the standard process of policy development.
Steve Abel: Does he dispute the findings of the Newsroom investigation—
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Oh!
SPEAKER: OK. Who interfered there? Who interrupted then?
Hon Member: Winston.
SPEAKER: We’ll start again, and the House will be completely silent apart from the questioner asking his question.
Steve Abel: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Does he dispute the findings of the Newsroom investigation that showed the dairy lobby has enjoyed privileged and disproportionate access to Ministers and officials that led to the removal of freshwater protections?
Hon TODD McCLAY: Well, yes, I do, absolutely, because it is not correct. I also think that private money going into news organisations to run stories is, in itself, something that should be considered. Secondly, there has been ongoing consultation since October of last year. Officials have conducted both targeted and private consultation with stakeholders. This has included with the primary sector, irrigators, Māori, environmental non-governmental organisations, foresters, and councils. Indeed, in looking at the list of those that have been consulted in person, it includes the Environmental Defence Society, Forest & Bird, Fish & Game, along with a very large group of other New Zealanders who have an interest in making sure that the harm that was done previously to freshwater policy is undone.
Steve Abel: Does he think it’s appropriate that there is disproportionate access for dairy lobby groups representing commercial interests rather than those who are representing the public, environmental experts, or tangata whenua when fresh water in fact sustains us all?
Hon TODD McCLAY: Well, I think when the Environmental Defence Society, Forest & Bird, and Fish & Game, along with many councils around New Zealand and many iwi groups were consulted, they made their case to officials just as those from the primary sector. Indeed, so far, there have been 20,000 submissions received as part of the wider public consultation. Officials will be charged with going through those and analysing them, and we have announced that there will be a second round of consultation in as far as freshwater changes are concerned. But what I can confirm for that member is that the most consulted sectors, through targeted consultation of the freshwater process, were councils and iwi.
Steve Abel: How can it be the position of his Government that the balance has swung too far towards the environment when, since 1990, dairy cow numbers have doubled, driven by a 600 percent increase in synthetic nitrogen fertiliser use, and resulting in a significant decline in the freshwater health?
Hon TODD McCLAY: That’s not what this Government has ever said. What the Government has said is that the changes that were put in place over the last six years, when that member’s party was in Government with Labour, do not work. We have councils in New Zealand and environmental groups, as well as other water users from the primary sector, saying that the rules that were put there are complex, they are expensive, they don’t work, and nobody is happy with them. We’re going to drive better outcomes through wider consultation, and it is important that we meet our water-quality obligations. But I say to that member and the Labour Party: we can do that without closing down New Zealand businesses.
Steve Abel: Is it acceptable that the 8,000 people who live in Gore city couldn’t drink their water in recent days due to nitrate contamination from a dairy farm, and how will removing the cap on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser and getting rid of freshwater protections help that problem?
Hon TODD McCLAY: That’s actually not what’s happened. I noticed the Gore council, along with the environmental councils in the area, are doing an investigation. They’re also adding to their ability to monitor, so we should wait until any judgment is cast upon exactly what happened there. It’s very pleasing the people of Gore are able to drink water again. But what I would say is unacceptable is Greenpeace sanctioning the graffitiing of the trout that’s down there publicly and then coming out and saying people should do that even more.
Hon Andrew Hoggard: Would the Minister agree that it’s a good thing that the Government actually talks to people who work every day on the ground in rural New Zealand to understand what affects them?
Hon TODD McCLAY: Yes, and that’s the reason there is such extensive consultation around changes that will be proposed around freshwater management in New Zealand. As I’ve said, environmental groups, councils, the public, as well as iwi, and the primary sector have been consulted. We’ve announced that once we have finished going through the 20,000 public submissions that have been received, there will be a second round of consultation on exactly what it is the Government is proposing. I would suggest to all members of this House that, actually, it is in the best interests of New Zealand for us to get the use of water right, because the last Government didn’t. In fact, they held back councils and industry.
Steve Abel: Is the Minister saying that he is more concerned about crosses being put on the eyes of a fish statue in Gore than about the 100 cases of new bowel cancer and 40 deaths every year attributable to nitrate contamination of drinking water, which primarily comes from dairy cow urine?
Hon TODD McCLAY: No. What I’m saying is that member and Greenpeace shouldn’t be sanctioning what is a criminal act in Gore.
Question No. 11—Commerce and Consumer Affairs
11. RIMA NAKHLE (National—Takanini) to the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs: What recent announcements has the Government made to support Kiwis at the checkout?
Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): This week, the Government announced the decision to ban surcharges. It’s a ban that is a real win for customers, and it’s backed by real relief for small businesses, too. We’re scrapping those annoying checkout fees that frustrate shoppers, while the Commerce Commission’s move to cap and reduce fees will save businesses around $90 million a year. That’s a balanced package, because it delivers transparency for customers and lower costs for businesses.
Rima Nakhle: How do these interchange or bank fees affect small businesses?
Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: Well, it’s a good question, because the bank fees are the charges placed on retailers every time a customer pays by using a card. Now, these fees make up about 60 percent of the total processing payment costs, and, for small businesses, that can stack up. The lower cap from the Commerce Commission to these costs brings those costs down to a fair and reasonable level, and that’s been easing pressure on small businesses and, at the same time, helping them stay competitive.
Rima Nakhle: Will this hurt small businesses’ profitability?
Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: Well, in jurisdictions like the United Kingdom and in the European Union, where bans have been put in place, there has been no evidence of increased prices at the checkout. It’s worth pointing out that we know, as of today, that only about 20 percent of New Zealand businesses actually charge a surcharge. So, ultimately, this is a decision about fairness, about transparency. Small businesses get the relief they need from the bank charges, and customers pay the price they expect to pay at the till.
Rima Nakhle: Why has this Government acted decisively on both surcharges and bank fees?
Hon Kieran McAnulty: Point of order, sir. You were very clear earlier that questions should not have assertions, and that is a debatable point, so it shouldn’t have been included in the question.
SPEAKER: No, you can’t say that, because the question was “why”, and—you’re right, actually. Reword it, just so we all keep happy about those things. You can’t assert something. So the bit was that you were asserting that the Government’s acted decisively. One word would change the answer.
Rima Nakhle: Why has this Government acted on both surcharges and bank fees?
Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: Well, we’ve been very decisive. These two decisions are designed to work hand in hand. By cutting the cost of accepting card payments, the need for surcharges in the first place is reduced, and together, the two actions create a fairer system, lower fees for businesses, and more honest pricing for customers at the tills.
Hon Andrew Hoggard: Point of order, Mr Speaker?
SPEAKER: Point of order, the Hon—
Hon Andrew Hoggard: Just responding to the previous—
SPEAKER: Hang on, I haven’t called you yet. Point of order, the Hon Andrew Hoggard.
Hon Andrew Hoggard: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Just in relation to that last point of order, in terms of an assertion, I just refer back to the member Steve Abel’s last supplementary where he asserted that—
SPEAKER: Hang on—wait on; you’re out of time.
Hon Andrew Hoggard: OK. Sorry. I was trying to be respectful to the previous—
SPEAKER: Yeah, I realise that.
Question No. 12—Social Development and Employment
12. Hon GINNY ANDERSEN (Labour) to the Minister for Social Development and Employment: Does she stand by her statement, “The Government is creating the conditions where jobs are created, absolutely”, and would 184,000 New Zealanders have left the country in the past 18 months if this was the case?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON (Minister for Social Development and Employment): Yes, of course there is a range of reasons why people leave New Zealand. Some of them have included things like high inflation, high interest rates, a shrinking economy, and when people have lost their jobs. These are things that happened under the last Government. We are a Government that is relentlessly focused on growing the economy so businesses have the confidence to hire staff. It is, ultimately, businesses that grow the economy, through their decisions to expand, invest, and create more jobs. The Government’s role is to create the conditions for them to do that. Our message to New Zealanders is that the steps we are taking will create a stronger economy—it is economic growth that results in more and higher-paying jobs for Kiwis.
Hon Ginny Andersen: Why are there 22,700 fewer jobs being filled by young people than one year ago?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: As we have said previously, one of the last things to come right after high inflation and high interest rates and economic recession is the labour market. Unfortunately, that is where we are now, with an unemployment rate of 5.1 percent. What I can say is that unemployment rate is no different than what was first forecast in 2022, when that member was in Government.
Hon Ginny Andersen: Why are there 6,400 more young people not in education, employment, or training in the past year?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: I’ll just repeat what I said before: unfortunately, it is the labour market which is the final thing to come right at the end of challenging economic times. Our Government is focused, with a Going for Growth strategy, including developing talent, on providing an environment where businesses have the confidence to invest, to grow, to hire more staff, and pay more wages. That is exactly what we’re going to work on.
Hon Ginny Andersen: Why, then, did she change the criteria for the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs to no longer focus on young people who are not in education or training?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: Well, unfortunately, that member is misinformed. The Mayors Taskforce for Jobs can continue to look after younger people, but it is restricted to 20 percent of those that they work with, because, actually, taxpayers have an expectation that if somebody is receiving a benefit, taxpayer-funded programmes will support them first.
Hon Ginny Andersen: Does she stand by her promise that “jobs are coming”, and, if so, is she referring to the opportunities that await young New Zealanders in Australia?
Hon LOUISE UPSTON: No, and as I said at the start of my question, there’s a range of reasons, unfortunately, why some New Zealanders have chosen to leave. On this side of the House, we’re really aspirational and optimistic that by creating the right conditions and going for growth, New Zealanders will see that they have a greater future, higher wages, and more opportunities right here.
Points of Order
Oral Questions—Interjections Made from Another Seat
Hon KIERAN McANULTY (Labour): Point of order, Mr Speaker. I didn’t think it would be useful for the flow of question time to do this point of order earlier. However, I think it might be useful to have absolute clarity on your earlier response around members interjecting from a seat that is not their usual seat. I refer to Speakers’ ruling 65/1, and specifically Speakers’ ruling 65/1(1), which says, “A member may interject from any seat the member may be occupying at the time, but not while walking about. It is disorderly to change seats to facilitate interjection.” Is it your view that that is still standing as the relevant Speaker’s ruling, or was your guidance today the equivalent of a new Speaker’s ruling that if you aren’t in your allocated seat, you may not interject at any point?
SPEAKER: No, look, I’d like to reassert the particular Speakers’ ruling that you just quoted and indicate that there was—from a seat not normally occupied by a member—a considerable amount of interjection that bordered on barrage. I thought making that point might prevent a more drastic course of action, which I think is not unreasonable.
Oral Questions—Timing of Points of Order
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Deputy Prime Minister): Point of order, Mr Speaker. I respectfully ask you to reflect. The Hon Andrew Hoggard did something very similar, respectfully waiting for a question to finish so that he did not interrupt its flow to raise a point of order, and he was dismissed before he got to explain what the point of order was. I think that if you’re going to take a point of order long after time that’s, effectively, trifling with your ruling, then you could have given the same generosity to Andrew Hoggard.
SPEAKER: Well, the problem here is that he was asking at question No. 12 about a matter that was from question No. 10, and I think there’s the difference we have.
Hon David Seymour: Well, no, it was after question No. 11, which he’d waited—
SPEAKER: Look, the Standing Orders are pretty clear that you’ve got to be timely on those things.
Hon David Seymour: OK, well, be consistent.
SPEAKER: Well, Kieran McAnulty was asking for a ruling; Andrew Hoggard wasn’t asking for a ruling.
Hon David Seymour: But you don’t know what Andrew was asking for, because he wasn’t—
SPEAKER: Oh well, I’m terribly sorry. Next time he interrupts like that, I’ll give him a fair go. Can we have Government order of the day No. 1.
Bills
Crown Minerals Amendment Bill
Third Reading
Hon SIMON WATTS (Minister for Energy) on behalf of the Minister for Resources: I present a legislative statement on the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill.
SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the parliamentary website.
Hon SIMON WATTS: I move, That the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill be now read a third time.
I’d like to acknowledge the Hon Shane Jones for his work in bringing this to the House. I will now outline the key changes in the bill and explain why this Government is pursuing them.
Kiwis shouldn’t have to choose between heating their homes or buying food because of rising costs. New Zealand is a country blessed with its renewable energy system, with around 92 percent of our electricity production today coming from renewable sources; however, we are faced with difficult trade-offs. We have an electricity shortage, and our generation does not always provide the certainty we need. We only need to point to the dry years and the faster than expected falls in gas production to see where prices have soared. The supply has dropped because our energy system is dependent on the wind blowing and the rain falling and the sun continuing to shine. Dry-year price increases could have been reduced if we had enough fuel and electricity generation to supply the energy we needed. The ban on new gas exploration, the drive to try and rapidly achieve 100 percent renewable electricity, along with weaker drilling results from our gasfields, has left us in a difficult position.
The Opposition suggested that the exploration ban had no impact on price and gas availability. That is to ignore the facts. The ban sent a chilling message to the investment community, halting the very exploration that underpins our energy security and leading directly to the supply constraints and price volatility that we see today. At times where renewable production decreases, it is clear that we need contingency options to ensure that Kiwis are not left footing a bigger bill and to ensure that we have sufficient supply.
We are facing an important moment in how we manage our energy now. Our current gasfields are in decline. We are having to compensate by importing overseas coal rather than using domestic gas. Without more investment in existing and new fields, constraints on gas supply will continue. The consequences are already being felt. Businesses are dealing with high energy costs, our businesses are facing closure, and our communities are suffering job losses. We are currently working to increase clean energy production and we continue to work towards our climate goals. As climate Minister, I continue this work.
I will also point out that the previous Government’s push to renewable energy has left us needing to make realistic decisions. This is not a Government turning away; it is about doing what is necessary now. We, unfortunately, live in a world of trade-offs. As we work to reduce emissions, we need to be realistic and consider what needs to be done today with current options and to ensure that we continue to support people with steady, certain, and affordable energy. This is an absolute priority.
The argument that reversing this ban will not yield new gas for a decade is a distraction. The immediate signal that this bill sends to investors is critical now. It encourages immediate investment in long-term exploration and in maximising production from our existing fields, which can deliver benefits far sooner. A secure energy system remains critical for easing Kiwis’ cost of living and ensuring economic security and growth. This bill is one of the steps to ensure that.
The bill introduces reforms to the Crown Minerals Act 1991 aimed at improving energy security, encouraging investment, and streamlining regulation. The bill reverses the 2018 ban on new petroleum exploration permits outside onshore Taranaki. It restores the Act’s purpose from “manage” to “promote” the Crown’s petroleum and minerals estate; it introduces flexible permit allocation, including open-market applications; it makes changes to the decommissioning regime that balances protecting the Crown from significant fiscal risk with supporting investor confidence; and it creates a tier 3 permit category for small-scale, non-commercial gold mining.
The most significant change is the reversal of the ban on new petroleum exploration beyond onshore Taranaki. This will help re-establish New Zealand as a destination for new domestic and international investment. It will send a strong signal that the Government recognises the importance of domestic gas for New Zealand’s energy security. Since the ban was announced, our exploration acreage has shrunk from 88,000 square kilometres in March 2018 to around 6,000 square kilometres of permitted exploration acreage today, on- and offshore. Reversing the ban will allow the Crown to receive applications for petroleum prospecting, exploration, and mining permits across New Zealand, including offshore.
New Zealand is committed to a clean-energy transition and meeting our emissions targets. We have committed to deliver net zero by 2050, including by doubling renewable electricity and removing consenting barriers.
Natural gas remains critical to our energy security. Without gas, we would need to either rely on more coal, which results in around twice the carbon dioxide emissions than natural gas, or face energy insecurity and higher prices. Higher electricity prices could also delay electrification of our wider economy, hindering emissions reductions across many other sectors. Emissions increase from increased gas supply is preferable to relying on imported coal to meet the energy gap left by a lack of gas.
Most of the changes will take effect immediately after the bill is passed; others require staged implementation and secondary legislation, like regulations or amendments to the petroleum programme. I expect that all changes will be operational in September.
I want to thank the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee again for their work and the consideration of this bill. I also want to thank all those that have contributed to the preparation and the passage of this bill.
I look forward to seeing the amended Crown Minerals Act serve New Zealanders now and into the future. I commend this bill to the House.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): The question is that the motion be agreed to.
Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): This bill that we are debating the third reading of is a very potent symbol of the shambles that this Government is when it comes to energy policy. We have a bill that was brought to the House in September last year, and a bill that came back and unprecedentedly had to be recommitted to the House for a major amendment after the committee of the whole House stage. What did industry insiders say about that? They said, “Industry observers were at a loss to understand how officials and the Cabinet had managed to misunderstand the decommissioning amendment to the Crown Minerals Bill had the opposite effect of the Government’s desire.”
We have a Government that does not understand what it is doing, we have a Government that is ill-informed when it comes to energy policy, and we have a Government that is simply wrong. It demonstrates in this piece of legislation that this is a Government that has no plan to make sure that New Zealanders have access to affordable and secure energy to heat our homes, to run our businesses, and to fuel our economy. It shows that Christopher Luxon is leading a Government that is so far out of touch with ordinary New Zealanders and is more intent at doing the bidding of multinational oil and gas companies. It shouts loud and clear that that is where their priorities lie. They will put oil and gas corporations ahead of New Zealand taxpayers every day of the week, and this bill lays that out in black and white.
This is part of a pattern of behaviour from this Government, who in this year’s Budget decided to literally gamble $200 million of New Zealand taxpayers’ money as a subsidy or inducement for big oil and gas to come and try and find something they have already spent billions of dollars looking for. Despite the claims from the Minister who presented the legislative statement, this bill does nothing to increase our energy security.
Let’s have a look at the facts, because in fact what this bill does is it poses a threat to our energy security. What it will deliver for New Zealanders is a more expensive and less secure energy system in the long run. Either the Government, from Christopher Luxon down, doesn’t understand or it is wilfully misleading New Zealanders when it talks about this.
Let’s look at the claim that ending oil and gas exploration in 2018 led to the current energy tightness that we’re experiencing. The problem for the Government is the facts do not back that up. In fact, there was record investment in the existing fields after 2018. Those existing fields—in 2017, $900 million was invested in existing fields; in 2018, $1.1 billion; in 2022, $1.3 billion; in 2023, $1.2 billion. For this Government to claim that it had a chilling effect on investment is simply wrong. What we had was those offshore oil and gas operators looking for every last bit they could eke out of the existing fields, and it is not there.
Then we had Shane Jones saying that this will open up opportunities off the East Coast of the South Island. Well, news flash: billions of dollars have been spent looking for that particular El Dorado, and it simply isn’t there. But no, this Government is going to give $200 million to offshore companies to go and have a look—again—where they’ve already decided there are not commercial finds available there.
The Government needs to front up with some facts to New Zealanders and come clean that what they are doing is right-wing virtue-signalling and it is nothing more than an ideological desire to look to the past instead of investing in the future that New Zealanders need and New Zealanders deserve.
We had the Minister talking about how we have to do this because we need to alleviate the dry-year risk. Well, alarmingly, the Minister that just gave that speech is New Zealand’s Minister for Energy. Actually, I had some sympathy for him having to give this speech. It must have been particularly humiliating for him, given that the Minister that is in charge of this bill is going around the country telling everyone he is indeed the real Minister for Energy, and also that this Minister is also the Minister of Climate Change, who is going to have to front up to his international colleagues and explain why he has got New Zealand kicked out of groups of countries that have ambition. I do have some sympathy for him, but his claim and crocodile tears that this is going to address dry-year risk affordability for New Zealand is nothing short of ridiculous.
Marginal cost of electricity—I thought the Minister for Energy might understand that. When we set the price for electricity, it is set at the price of the highest megawatt that we produce, and that is by burning coal and it is by burning gas. Where we save New Zealanders money, where we deliver affordable and secure electricity, is when we invest in renewable ways of storing. At the moment, we store in coal and we store in gas and we need to stop it. This bill is taking New Zealand backwards to an unaffordable future.
Instead, this Government threw out work that was going on in terms of how we could affordably store electricity and look to our future, but that work has gone by the wayside. What the Government is doing is putting New Zealanders’ futures at risk. We know where the future jobs lie. We know where affordable electricity to heat our homes and relieve cost of living pressures on New Zealanders lies, and that is by investing in the future and not looking to the past.
We also have to look at the seriously negative climate emission implications of this change. The Government’s own officials told them that 14.2 million tonnes of emissions additionally would be put on New Zealand’s ledger by this change. We have yet to hear from the Government what they’re going to do instead, because that’s the way in which New Zealand law works. When you make a change, you have to tell us how it is you’re going to make it up, but this Government is intent on taking us backwards in terms of our emissions reductions.
We’ve heard only in the last couple of days that we’re not going to meet our targets, and this is going to hurt our international reputation. This isn’t just about us feeling a bit sorry for ourselves because other countries don’t think we’re good. This is about putting our future at risk and this is about putting our trade agreements at risk.
The Government was told this by their own officials. A bit that should have been redacted from the regulatory impact statement—but an incompetent Government couldn’t even get that right—came to the floor of the House telling us that there were serious concerns. Let me read from that: “[Legally privileged] MFAT assessed that reversing the 2018 ban would likely be inconsistent with the obligations in several of New Zealand’s free trade agreements”. Farmers need to be worried. Our access to the EU and the UK is being put at risk because of this ideological right-wing virtue-signalling from a Government that has zero plan on how to deliver affordable and secure energy to New Zealand households and businesses.
It does not need to be like this. There is an alternative. There is a way in which we can invest in our future. We can unleash New Zealand’s potential of having some of the most affordable energy in the world. That is because our potential in renewable energy is unsurpassed by many countries in this world, but this Government refuses to see that. It is looking to a 20th century expensive past that is going to consign New Zealand households and businesses to inflated prices for decades to come.
They have no plan, they have no solution, and they are not telling New Zealand’s workers and communities about what the future holds and how their transition can occur. Restarting oil and gas is one of the most ridiculous things I have heard. Their arguments do not stack up. They are putting our futures at risk, and they have shown they’re even incompetent in doing that.
SIMON COURT (ACT): Point of order, Mr Speaker. I didn’t want to interrupt that member’s flow, but I believe that that member has breached Standing Orders. I want to refer to the comments she made where she accused the Prime Minister and the Government’s Ministers of wilfully misleading.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): What’s the Standing Order?
SIMON COURT: Well, in terms of Speakers’ ruling 48/1, “A member may say he or she believes a statement is incorrect, but must not accuse another member of making a statement that member knew to be incorrect.” Mr Speaker, I suggest that you ask this member to withdraw and apologise.
Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): Speaking to the point of order, I did not accuse the Prime Minister or Ministers of wilfully misleading New Zealanders. I asked a question around whether or not they failed to understand or whether they were wilfully misleading New Zealanders. I did not accuse them of wilfully misleading New Zealanders.
SIMON COURT (ACT): Speaking to the point of order very briefly, I think that member is dancing on the head of a pin and I would suggest that whether that member believes they asked a question that made that inference or not, they are still impugning the character of the members that that member sought to impugn by making that statement in her speech.
Hon Dr Megan Woods: It’s a question—
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): Thank you.
Hon Dr Megan Woods: “Imply” and “infer” are two different things.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): Order! Thank you for that. I am going to take the member’s word for it. If, on reflection, it appears differently in the Hansard, there will be an opportunity for the member to come back to the House and to withdraw and apologise. I will take the next call.
STEVE ABEL (Green): In 2011, I was privileged to be part of the Oil Free Seas Flotilla. We arrived on a beach in the tip of the East Cape, about to be welcomed to the Kauaetangohia Marae in that spectacular part of the country where the rising sun first hits these islands through the sea air, and we were greeted by a haka of 500 people.
Simon Court: Is this a haiku?
STEVE ABEL: It could be. Not as good as my folk songs, according to you. That haka was said by Te Whānau-a-Apanui, the iwi greeting us, to be the biggest haka since James Cook had arrived in that part of the country—I’m hoping we were more worthy of it than he was.
We went into an amazing banquet in the wharekai, and there we marked the forming of an alliance between Greenpeace and Te Whānau-a-Apanui to resist the seismic surveying by the Brazilian driller Petrobras in the Raukūmara Basin. For 42 days, the boats harried that seismic surveying ship—and Kylie Matthews jumped in the water with a buoy saying “Stop deep sea oil”—and that seismic surveying ship left those waters never to return.
A couple of years later, they relinquished their permit for Raukūmara Basin, and one of the spokespeople for Petrobras said that in all the 27 nations that they had operated in, they had never encountered such resistance as they did in Aotearoa New Zealand. That was the beginning of a movement of communities, of iwi, of non-government environmental organisations across this nation that, one by one, kicked out the oil majors.
Then, finally, in 2018, the culmination of that seven-year movement was a very wise and progressive and advanced decision by the then three-party Government—New Zealand First, Labour, and the Greens—to get rid of oil and gas exploration in 2018.
As progressive a decision as that was, this decision today is a shamefully regressive position, because if we are to have a future, the oil and gas industry must have no future. That is for the simple scientific fact that fossil fuels—oil, gas, and coal—in their combustion produce carbon dioxide that heats the planet’s atmosphere in a way that causes a destabilised climate and extreme weather events and sea level rise and all sorts of catastrophes that are an existential threat to life on this planet—not just for us but for all species that live on this planet.
The Government’s misplaced assertion that somehow our pathway to energy security is to go searching for that oil and gas is so wrong-headed and archaic it is laughable. You would have to laugh if it wasn’t true that they’re actually doing it. It’s kind of extraordinary that here we are, this many years later, and they’re bringing back oil and gas exploration, after our nation was celebrated around the world for its vision.
What is more, it is so obvious now, as this Government also wants to spend $200 million investing and supporting the bringing back of that oil and gas—which is a resuscitation of a zombie that will not come back to life—that money would be much better spent on renewable energy, clean energy. Solar power and onshore wind are markedly lower cost than oil, gas, and coal, and they give us greater energy security. The fuel source is free. There are a trillion terabytes of energy that hit the Earth every instant from a giant hydrogen nuclear reactor in the sky, and, lo and behold, we have the means to capture that energy. Is this Government investing in that instead of putting $200 million into gas? No, they’re not. They like looking down into the hole in the ground for that unsustainable fuel.
Just to clarify, for the Government’s sake, the oil companies and corporations that quit New Zealand before the ban came into place—as I said, Petrobras quit on 5 December 2012. On 6 February 2010, Greenpeace began our Stop Deep Sea Oil campaign—“our”. I say “our”—my former “our”. On 1 November 2010, Exxon Mobil abandoned its Southern Ocean oil and gas hunt, and they said, “Exxon has spent three years acquiring state-of-the-art seismic data in the basin. But its interpretation of that data indicates the acreage has a high technical risk, increased by the remote location and harsh operating environment of the Great South Basin.”, and Exxon Mobil left. Petrobras left on 5 December. On 13 May 2014, Anadarko, the massive Texan oil driller who brought their ship off to the west coast of the North Island, quit their permit on 13 March 2014. On 14 October 2016, Statoil, the Norwegian company later to change their name to Equinor, quit their Northland permit. On 16 March 2018, Shell sold all its remaining assets to the only remaining oil major in this country, OMV.
On 11 April was the oil and gas ban put into place. It was the final nail in the coffin of an industry that was already declaring its own demise in this country, because they came, they prospected, and they found nothing. They found nothing but overwhelming public opposition from the people of this country, and they decided they are better to be not here.
That is why it is a futile effort on the part of this Government to try and bring this industry back, because this industry knows full well that when this side of the House is back on that side of the House in 18 months’ time, the ban on oil and gas is coming back into place. What industry would be foolish enough to spend millions of dollars on trying to dig up oil and gas that isn’t there when they know the ban’s going to be put back into place? What is more, the Green Party is committing to even revoking the permits issued by this Government.
On 18 June 2019, after the ban, Chevron and Equinor—formerly Statoil—quit their 15-year permits due to bad data. Bryn Klove from Equinor, New Zealand’s country manager, said that “people will likely speculate that the decision to exit was driven by the change in government policy towards exploration. But he said the choice was simply driven by the data to date. The firm has bigger opportunities in an international portfolio that covers 30 countries and now also includes solar and wind.”—even Statoil’s investing in solar and wind, but not this backward Government.
That is the way forward, and it’s very clear from the assertions recently in the United Nations that the opportunity in the clean energy sector is huge. It is for us as a nation to seize that opportunity. There is no future in oil, gas, and coal. There is a future in clean energy for all of us, and we will join and support any political progress towards community-owned, distributed, affordable, clean, renewable energy being developed. But oil, gas, and coal—no way, not any day. That is not getting our support, and we will make sure it doesn’t come back.
It was a real privilege to be part of that movement over those seven years, and it showed the weight of deep concern that the people of this nation have for our future, have for our environment, have for our oceans, our coastlines, for the stability of our climate. We want to be part of the solution to that existential challenge. We do not want to see offshore oil drilling brought back, the pollution caused by gas and oil drilling, and the risk of catastrophic oil spills, as we’ve seen all around the world and in the Gulf of Mexico where the Deepwater Horizon blew up. That is not the future we want for our country. We do not need this backward, retrograde, archaic attitude that the only way to make a living is to extract and destroy and exploit our nature and our planet.
That is why this Government will be a one-term Government and this issue that we are voting against today will be one of the issues on which New Zealanders go to the polling booth in 18 months’ time and choose to kick them out, because they want a future based on clean energy and sustainable treatment of this beautiful planet on which we live. Thank you, Mr Speaker.
SIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Today marks the end of an era—a really bad one. It marks the end of a six-year reign of economic vandalism and energy illiteracy by the previous New Zealand Labour Government. In 2018, Labour didn’t consult the public, they didn’t consult any experts, they didn’t even take it to Cabinet until after the decision was taken. They simply stood at a podium, banned offshore oil and gas exploration, and then declared victory over climate change. That wasn’t leadership; that was Instagram environmentalism, and Kiwis saw right through it. Even the Hon Shane Jones said at the time—bless his soul—that ending oil and gas exploration “is the only scenario.” When he stood at that podium, I was shocked. I’m pleased that Minister has come to his senses but profoundly disappointed that the Labour Party still has not.
They thought banning exploration would make emissions vanish. Instead, we burned more coal, we imported more fossil fuels, New Zealand’s carbon dioxide emissions went up. Their policy was so self-defeating it would be humorous if it hadn’t cost Kiwis an estimated $7 billion—a hit to their households and businesses—
Hon Dr Megan Woods: Oh, rubbish.
SIMON COURT: Under Labour, energy security wasn’t just ignored, it was sabotaged, Megan Woods. They turned their backs on natural gas, and they pretended we could have a modern democracy and a modern economy running on vibes and wind turbines. Turns out it’s not true, is it? When prices spiked, when industries like the smelter cried out for energy security of supply and blackouts hit the central North Island, they shrugged. They called it the “energy transition”. They said, “embrace your future”. Well, we in the ACT party, in Opposition, called it a crisis, because it was, and this bill now reverses that damage.
It repeals Labour’s exploration ban, and it also updates the Crown Minerals Act to promote the use of our natural resources for the benefits of all New Zealanders—
Steve Abel: Dreaming.
SIMON COURT: Mr Steve Abel, I tell you how important that is for you and even people in the Green Party: it’s those critical minerals that this bill will enable to be extracted and developed that power your solar panels, your satellites, your mobile phone; that keeps humans, like all of us, even people in the Green Party, connected and on social media, on TikTok. It’s not just good economic policy, Steve; it makes common sense.
Now, I want to compare us to Australia. The Australian Labor Government kept natural gas exploration and development going. Why? Because they understood what the New Zealand Labour Party failed to: that Australian natural gas powers businesses, homes, schools, hospitals, and, actually, it is the transition fuel towards a renewable, more sustainable way of generating energy. And they did it without collapsing their economy. Meanwhile, the New Zealand Labour Party chose press releases over new pipelines. They thought leading the world meant leaving reality behind, Megan Woods.
Let’s also talk about sovereign risk, something Labour either didn’t understand or didn’t care about, which is worse. Their snap decisions shattered investor confidence. They created a regime with their changes to the Crown Minerals Act, a regime of infinite trailing liability that meant anyone, any person, any director who’d ever been responsible for holding a permit was indefinitely responsible. That’s not regulation; it’s a form of punishment. It told the world, “Don’t invest here in New Zealand.”
ACT has pushed for this reform because we believe sovereign risk is real. If businesses can’t trust Government policy to stay grounded, they simply won’t invest. They’ll take their capital and the jobs that that delivers elsewhere—
Steve Abel: Which is what’s going to happen with this.
SIMON COURT: This bill puts an end to all of that—
Steve Abel: No, there’s still political uncertainty.
SIMON COURT: It restores certainty, credibility, and confidence, Mr Abel, to our resources, our minerals, and our oil and gas exploration sector. It, again, opens the door not just to hydrocarbon investments but to investments in critical minerals and natural resources development that is absolutely vital for not just for our economy but our community, connection, our way of life.
Let’s be clear: this is not opening up a free-for-all. New Zealand demands very high environmental standards. But protecting the environment doesn’t mean banning progress, like the previous Labour Government did. It means managing resources and the environment responsibly. This bill replaces ideology with evidence—imagine that—it ends six years of economic damage from Labour’s damaging economic policies, and it tells the world that New Zealand is once again open for investment and energy investment in all parts of our economy, including resource development. It also tells the world that in New Zealand, again, we believe in common sense. I commend this bill.
Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): Point of order, Mr Speaker. There was a point of order raised, so I’d just like to clarify for the House that I’ve had the Hansard checked on what I said. I did not say “the Government was wilfully misleading New Zealanders”. I said, “Either the Government, from Luxon down, doesn’t understand, or it is wilfully misleading New Zealand when it talks about this”. Thank you, Mr Speaker.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): Thanks for that clarification. I’ll take the next call.
Dr VANESSA WEENINK (National—Banks Peninsula): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise in this third reading of the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill. We’ve got here at last, and this Government is returning some sensible pragmatism back to our economy. This is not something that we do just on its own. This is one of a number of things that we do to improve our energy sector. We’re also investing in super-critical geothermal energy as a form of energy production.
We’re doing things in a way that will stabilise the sector. This is also about creating a new tier of gold and other mining speculation, a new tier 3 to allow smaller scale non-commercial gold operations. I know that that’ll be great for many people on the West Coast. I am glad to see that we are getting some pragmatic decision-making back into this economy. I commend the bill to the House.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): The next call is a split call.
TĀKUTA FERRIS (Te Pāti Māori—Te Tai Tonga): Tēnā koe e te Pīka. Māku ngā kōrero mā Te Pāti Māori mō tēnei pire.
[Thank you, Mr Speaker. The Māori Party’s statements regarding this bill are for me to deliver.]
I spoke at the first reading. I called it the old truck and trailer, this one and the fast track—quick access, no regard for anything te iwi Māori had to say about it. There were 80-odd hapū and iwi who opposed it back then. There are still 80-odd iwi who oppose it today; no regard to that given—none at all.
You know, Te Pāti Māori, we’re a whakapapa-based movement, and so in all of our thinking we think about, “Gee, what’s the right decision I’ve got to make for my mokopuna, my grandchild, my grandchild’s grandchild, way into the future?” Unfortunately, we just see this short-sighted economic return, imperative-only action from this Government, and that’s got us pretty much nowhere. If you look around the world, team, there are some alarming—alarming—things going on. Whilst we come in here and we all jabber on about making money because that’s what’s going to fix everything, I’ll conclude this kōrero by talking about some of the things that are really happening—and those things aren’t going away, by the way.
For our mokopuna, we’ve got to invest in the future of energy, not the past—energy’s future, not its history. I’ve mentioned Te Tiriti o Waitangi a lot in this bill. Like all the other ones, it gives it no consultation or consideration at all. In fact, it just steamrolls straight over the top of it in putting corporate libertarian interests in front of a founding interest of this Parliament—interesting. We just, obviously, can’t and don’t support that. So short-term profit for long-term risks, which are known across the world now—ignoring them; well, that’ll just be on your record, not ours.
Ignoring hapū and iwi input, allowing the granting of permits where hapū and iwi don’t even need to be consulted, not even if it’s on Māori land or in a Department of Conservation reserve that they’ve got the tangata whenua mana whenua rights to—all of this carry on, it’s got to stop. It’s got to stop.
We’ve heard that, oh well, you know, they’ve buggered it up. They buggered it up in the beginning, and it turns out the drillers were going to have to pay more, so they pulled the handbrake on it, gave it another eight months. A pity they didn’t give any other bills eight months, like the Regulatory Standards Bill—nope, only gave that one four months. They couldn’t give the Māori wards eight months—no, only gave that one four weeks. They couldn’t give pay equity eight months—no, they only got a day. So here we are—so here we are.
They turned around to fix their mistake—fix their mistake. Now, they’re going to invest all of the power into the resource Minister and the finance Minister to decide who pays to clean up the mess when it arrives—because, unfortunately, as many iwi and hapū have had to live through around our country, we’re the ones who are lumped with the bill, except we don’t get any money. We’ve just got to go and do the work to clean it up. Go and ask what Whakatōhea did through Rena.
All of these things are just consistent—roll on, keep going. It just rolls on, rolls on. I think Mr Jones already experienced a dip in investor confidence around all of these things. They know, just like all of them pulled out—all of the ones who are considering drill, drill, drill. They’re thinking, “Oh, well, how’s that going to go?” Well, I can tell you how it’s going to go. All of the iwi and hapū in the marae around this country will be in their face so much that they won’t make a dollar ever. So good on them.
What I wanted to talk about is the impacts of all of this stuff. The impacts of not investing the future of energy are plain to see for New Zealand. I spoke about the oceanic heatwave we experienced last season, last summer—the hottest ocean ever recorded, team: 24.5 degrees Celsius in the Southern Ocean. Right now, there is an ongoing algae bloom disaster in South Australia; it’s been going on for about eight months. Everyone thought it would cool off by the winter because that’s how algae blooms tend to go, but no, this one’s charging on straight through the middle of winter.
Here’s the other side of that: the Northern Hemisphere are currently in their most extreme oceanic heatwave ever experienced also. By the time the Earth tilts back to the Southern Pole and our ocean heats up, I predict that we’ll have the hottest ocean on record. You know why? There was a blue marlin caught in Waihau Bay in the middle of winter in New Zealand in 2025. If you needed any more evidence, I don’t know how much more you could be given.
What that means for us, e te iwi: kina, pāua, crayfish, kuku, tuangi, pipi—the lot are on the chopping block. Kia ora tātou. We don’t support the bill.
SCOTT WILLIS (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. The Government’s Crown Minerals Amendment Bill proposes reopening New Zealand’s territorial waters to oil and gas exploration. As my colleague Steve Abel has said, we strongly oppose, in no uncertain terms, this legislation. But we’re also saddened by the tragic climate denialism that has taken root at the heart of this Government. Climate denialism is simply tragic. The British environmentalist Sir Jonathan Porritt, who chaired Air New Zealand’s sustainability panel when Christopher Luxon was CEO and also worked with the Prime Minister when he was soap salesman at Unilever, has called out the hypocrisy. We have a Prime Minister who speaks out of both sides of his mouth. The world is watching our own mini-Trump—who wears a “Make America Great Again” hat at select committee meetings—embarrass us on the national stage.
There is no future in fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has predicted demand for oil will peak well before 2030. A 2023 report by Shell projects fossil fuel use dropping rapidly in coming decades, while BP says oil demand for combustion has already peaked. But the progression from prospecting new oil and gas wells to exploration and mining takes decades. This bill just doesn’t add up, even if you’re a climate change denier. It’s the fevered hope from fevered minds to establish some sort of neo-medievalist future where the power of the State to govern legitimately is limited and non-State actors such as the fossil fuel criminals see their power increased so they can run roughshod over our communities in their greed.
The IEA stated that we don’t need any more fossil fuel exploration or development because there are plenty of projects already in place—unfortunately—and new research agrees, saying Governments around the world should stop issuing new oil and gas and coal licences now because we want a livable planet, not a planet on fire.
But this Government is also weakening the law that requires oil and gas permit holders to pay for the decommissioning and clean-up of wells. In 2021, taxpayers had to pick up a $400 million bill for decommissioning the Tui oil field after the collapse of the company. It is simply astonishing that this Government thinks it can get away with weakening the law that requires oil and gas permits to pay for the decommissioning and clean-up of wells. Weakening these laws opens the risk to all of us to pay for the clean-up. The Government may be weakening the laws to try to attract drilling interests, but big oil and gas is rightly hesitant about investment because they know what the downward long-term trend is, and they know that in 2026, there’ll be a Green Government that’ll kick them out.
Our fossil gas fields have been yielding less than forecast. We can use the dwindling gas supply with the new renewables we’re going to build to smooth the energy transition, to build increased capacity, to ensure that we have hydro and chemical storage for our dry winters. But the problem we see is that this Government doesn’t know where the hell it’s heading because it wants to kill off even offshore wind by allowing Trans-Tasman Resources to dig in the seabed in the same place.
We can move away—and we should move away—from the fossil fuel disaster that this Government wants. We need to invest in the energy transition, decarbonisation of industrial heat, subsidising low-emitting vehicles, charging high emitters, better public transport, bike lanes, increased electric vehicle charging, and urban mining—that’s the recycling of batteries and other technology that is currently filling our rubbish dumps. I could loan members opposite a couple of books.
Dr HAMISH CAMPBELL (National—Ilam): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise in this third debate of the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill, in this third reading. This debate has been full of insults—very little of a pragmatic, common-sense approach.
In 2018, New Zealand banned the exploration of oil and gas. Now, if we look at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s data on the amount of coal that that led to us importing—in 2017, we imported 466,000 tonnes of coal; 2019, a year after the ban was in place, that was over 1 million tonnes of coal that we then imported; 2021, 1.8 million tonnes of coal—
Steve Abel: Nothing to do with the ban.
Dr HAMISH CAMPBELL: Of course, the Opposition are saying it has nothing to do with the ban. Well, I’ll tell you, if we substitute one energy source, we need to use another.
This debate isn’t about gases versus renewables; we can do both. Gas is a very useful transitional fuel. It is about gas versus coal. Every tonne of coal we burn produces between two to 2.5 times more carbon dioxide—that the Opposition is busy screaming about. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.
Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I think the best word—the least offensive word—to describe the Government’s position on this bill is, well, disingenuous. It’s disingenuous at best. Let me talk that through a little. I regard it as disingenuous not just because of the way they’ve gone about changing the rules around exploration but because of some of the lobbying and the kowtowing to the oil and gas industry that has gone on.
I want to refer in particular to the Amendment Paper that was introduced into this House at 5 p.m. on Monday. The bill had gone through the committee of the whole House stage and then it had sat and sat and sat, waiting for its third reading. Then all of a sudden, on Monday evening this week, an Amendment Paper was introduced, by Tuesday we were debating it, and now it is going through its third reading this afternoon. Given that the Government looks likely to vote for it, it is going to pass into law.
But here’s what is so worrying about this. There’s been a discussion around trailing liability. Now, in the bill, the idea around trailing liability is that when an oilfield is decommissioned, if the current owner, in whatever form, doesn’t clean up properly, then the liability can shift back to the previous owner. If the previous owner doesn’t clean it up properly, then it can shift back to the previous owner and so on, back down the line. What it means is that when an oil and gas company exits from an exploration field or exits from a field that it’s been using, it has to ensure that the entity it sells the field to is responsible. There’s good reason for us to be worried about this. The New Zealand Government had to shell out I think it was an extraordinary sum—about $367 million; maybe it was $347 million, $249 million—to clean up the Tamarind mess that was left behind after the previous owners of the field weren’t responsible enough when they sold it on to Tamarind, after Tamarind exited and left a mess to be cleaned up by the New Zealand taxpayer.
Unsurprisingly, the oil and gas industry didn’t like this. Now, sitting in a supplementary analysis report that was introduced to this House at 5 p.m. on Monday when the Amendment Paper came in, there are these words from the officials: “The sector”—meaning the oil and gas sector—“has been clear that their preference is for no trailing liability in the Crown Minerals Act. They consider it adds significant cost and reduces the likelihood new entrants will come into the New Zealand market.” Well, no kidding. That’s exactly the point.
Then, despite this position—and this is the really stinky bit—in terms of imposing liabilities or in terms of absolving companies from liabilities, these industry participants said that they really didn’t like the current Act and approach in the bill and they preferred ministerial discretion. They preferred to be able to go and lobby a Minister so that they could get away with not paying the clean-up costs from the oilfields that they were using. We asked the Minister repeatedly who he had consulted in terms of actually putting this into law. It says that the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment had consulted with key stakeholders in New Zealand’s oil and gas sector, and that meetings with key stakeholders had taken place from January 2025, and that a consultation draft of the Amendment Paper was shared in confidence in May and June, and that feedback received was incorporated to improve the workability of the drafting. We asked the Minister repeatedly: who did he consult with? Who did his officials consult with? And he wouldn’t tell us—wouldn’t be upfront and open about who was asking for this sort of set-up in the bill.
So we went back through the submissions. Here’s one: “We recommend removing clauses related to trailing liabilities.” Who’s that from? The BusinessNZ Energy Council. Here’s another: “We do not support trailing and perpetual liability on former permit and licence holders. We reiterate that ‘trailing’ liability and perpetual liability of former permit holders is an extreme derogation from the general New Zealand statutory approach to principles of corporate liability”, and so on. Who’s that from? Well, that one’s from OMV. Here’s another one—this one here. It says, “As I am sure … due to pressure from shareholders, banks and other financial institutions are reluctant to fund developments for new petroleum projects,”—well, that’s a good thing—“let alone take the risk of providing financial securities in … operations such as decommissioning.”—people who didn’t like the bill that was written. Who was that one from? Well, it’s from Greymouth Petroleum. Here’s another one, and it says that “trailing liability is redundant with appropriate financial security arrangements”. In fact, it says, in terms of updating the decommissioning provisions, that the original “amendments to the Act to ensure permit and license holders undertake and fund decommissioning were a dramatic overreaction.” That’s what it was—it was a dramatic overreaction, the rules that we put in place, to the New Zealand taxpayers having to fork out to pay for those polluters to clean up. So they feel as though there should not be trailing liability. It says there is an “unequal burden on permit holders” and it “continue[s] to dampen the desire to invest in new exploration”. What is that little gem coming from? Well, that gem is coming from Energy Resource Aotearoa. And on and on it goes.
Of course the oil and gas industry do not want to pay to clean up their mess. Of course they don’t want to do that. Instead, they want New Zealand taxpayers to pay to clean up their mess. In those submissions, those submitters talk about property rights, but they do not talk about the rights of New Zealand taxpayers to live in a pollution-free environment. They do not talk about the rights of New Zealand taxpayers to not have to pay for messes created by other people—somehow those rights don’t matter. Instead, what those people want, what these industries want, is the ability to lobby the Minister. They want ministerial discretion so that they can continue on their polluting ways.
What they refuse to admit is that the industry that they are engaging in is a dying industry. The world is faced with an extraordinary climate challenge and a world where we actually need to stop using fossil fuels. It’s not just use a bit of them here and there and get away with it. We actually need to stop using them. There are ample alternatives available. That is the world we need to move to. The Government talks about the jobs and the economic opportunity afforded by the oil and gas industry, but what about the green jobs? What about the opportunities afforded by a response to climate change that involves itself in promoting renewable energy? What about the jobs that could be created by promoting solar energy throughout this country? What about the jobs that could come into play through using wind farms? What about the jobs that could come into play by ensuring that we have a clean, green economy? Those are good jobs too. Those are jobs that promote growth too and, what’s more, it is jobs that promote sustainable growth, not the kind of growth that results in a climate that our children and our children’s children cannot live in.
The words from that Government, their words of commitment around climate change, their words saying that they care for New Zealand, as I said—disingenuous at best.
CAMERON BREWER (National—Upper Harbour): We didn’t hear the previous speaker Deborah Russell once mention her home province of Taranaki, and I suspect that she’s lost the keys to Whangamōmona.
Back in 2018, New Plymouth Mayor Neil Holdom described Labour’s oil and gas exploration ban as a “kick in the guts” for Taranaki. Last year, he called for Labour to support oil and gas exploration, both onshore and offshore, describing Labour’s ban as a complete hospital pass and hugely costly.
There is still time for the Opposition to support New Zealand’s leading energy province and Taranaki’s leading civic leader, and I call on those members to vote in support of this third reading. Thank you.
RACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Much has been said from the other side of the House throughout the debate this afternoon—
Hon Jan Tinetti: Much?
RACHEL BOYACK: —about the word “pragmatism”. Yeah, I think, apart from the Minister at the very beginning, “much” might be a little bit generous about what has been said from the other side. But many of the speeches have referenced the word “pragmatism”, so I want to talk about the importance of pragmatism.
Where I want to start is about the role that this industry actually plays in New Zealand today, and the fact that it is a dying, sunset industry. That is what the facts actually lay out. For the Government to be repealing the ban on oil and gas exploration, and to also be co-investing in exploration, is the opposite of pragmatism. When you consider that between 2020 and 2024, nearly $1.3 billion was spent on new wells in New Zealand and did not lead to any significant commercial find, this is an industry that is not actually worth continued investment in from our Government.
It speaks to the rhetoric and the messages that come from the National Party, that come from the New Zealand First Party, and that come from the ACT Party, that actually choose to not take the existential threat that is climate change seriously. Is actually a disgrace on this Parliament that after many years of what was cross-party commitments to climate change, initiatives to actually ensure that the people of this country and the people of the world have a future without the type of climate events that we see, without the impact on communities that we are seeing through weather events, they are so willing to undo one of the key pieces of law that the previous Government—with the support of New Zealand First—put in place.
That was a pragmatic decision, because it didn’t go as far as our friends the Greens would have liked, because it only banned new permits—it did allow those ones to be phased out, so I acknowledge that. But it was a phasing-out. It was a phasing-out to ensure that the message was sent to the market very, very clearly that we want to see investment into renewable energy sources, because that is the future in this nation.
I also want to make some comments in support of Dr Deborah Russell’s comments around the process that has been followed. The fact that there has been a hidden process that hasn’t gone through the select committee should put everyone watching this debate on notice that if people want to get the ear of the Minister to get a change through the committee of the whole House without the scrutiny of select committee, they can do that. That is unacceptable, especially on an issue of such importance—such importance—to the future of not only our nation but of others.
We think about our friends in the Pacific who are facing real threats from things like rising sea levels, climate change events. In my own community of Nelson, that is seeing repeated weather events hammer, absolutely hammer, our region, costing us money—significant amounts of money. We need to take the impact of climate change seriously, and that does mean Governments making tough decisions—tough but pragmatic decisions.
This was a shocking process. We still haven’t actually heard from the Minister for Resources exactly who asked for the changes that he made, one of which is around putting the burden of cleaning up messes left by this industry back on to taxpayers. Ultimately, the National Government needs to accept that if they fail to meet our Paris climate change agreements, it will ultimately cost New Zealand more. And where will that burden lie? It will lie on the burden of ordinary taxpayers. That is where the burden will lie. To see them put their head in the sand and become a climate change denier, it is a disgrace to the work of Todd Muller. He would be appalled at what is happening here in this House today. I do not commend this bill to the House.
NANCY LU (National): Natural gas is critical to New Zealand’s energy security because gas keeps electricity supply and prices stable for all New Zealanders. This is what the bill will allow once it’s passed. So, therefore, I support and commend this bill to the House.
Hon PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to begin my contribution with a quote: “The long-term picture is this: the world is changing, climate change is happening, and with that change our planet and our economies are changing. The world is racing to adapt and to stop its most damaging effects. This means that the same old ways of doing things don’t work anymore. We cannot expect to rely on fossil fuels for our jobs and prosperity for ever. The world is moving away from them, and we, as a country, have to be ready. If we don’t change, if we keep relying on these fuels, we’re going to be left behind.” Those are the words with which the Hon Dr Megan Woods began her contribution to the Crown Minerals (Petroleum) Amendment Bill that banned new oil and gas explorations.
I do want to acknowledge Megan Woods for the work that she did to lead long-term—well, it was meant to be long-term, till this Government came along—managed transition towards homegrown, clean energy that will create jobs. Sadly, what we’re doing in the House today, thanks to this Government, is taking New Zealand backwards, because they’re reversing that, they’re repealing that, and it’s pretty sad, really.
I also want to make mention of the significant eleventh-hour change made by this Government. It seems to be typical of the way that they shepherd through, very quickly, with hardly any input—or not allowing input—from New Zealanders. At one point, New Zealand’s Parliament was lauded to be one of the most transparent and inclusive and democratic, because people were allowed to have a say. But not under this Government, anymore, because significant pieces of legislation are being shepherded through quickly, being tabled at the last minute in this Parliament, so that hardly anyone gets to even see what they are trying to do, and then it’s quickly passed through with just pandering to the multinationals. Again, we’ve seen that with this bill. This is just a Government that is pandering to big oil and gas companies, certainly not putting New Zealanders first, because they’re really just selling New Zealand’s interests to the highest bidders. That’s what they’re doing.
I want to also point to the change that was shepherded through so quickly. As my colleague the Hon Dr Deborah Russell has pointed out, the risks of Government involvement in fossil fuel ventures were underscored by the decommissioning of the Tui oil field, which left taxpayers with a $349 million bill after the company behind it collapsed. Now, Labour in Government fixed that; we changed the law to stop that from happening. But now, of course, this Government and their late amendment to the Crown Minerals Bill has moved to change the liability rules so that the Government cannot be held responsible for future clean-up costs when oil and gas operators exit the market.
I also want to point to the $200 million amount that they’ve put aside in the Budget for big oil and gas companies, which even the advice that they’ve received, I understand, shows that there’s a higher—yeah, I’m actually quoting it from an article that goes on to talk about the risks of failure inherent in exploring mature fields. That’s what this Government’s bringing back. That’s why we, on this side of the House, say that this is incredibly short-sighted. It is legislation that’s brought through just based on the pure ideology of the parties that are in Government at the moment.
I also want to make the point that there’s a bit of a pattern here when it comes to eleventh-hour, significant changes made after a select committee has considered a bill. I want to point to the Hauraki Gulf / Tīkapa Moana Marine Protection Bill, because this is pretty much the same pattern that we’re seeing from this Government, again. That was a bill that was recommended by the Environment Committee, from memory, last year. It was introduced by Labour in Government. It was the culmination of 10 years of stakeholders coming together in the environment space to increase protections to the Hauraki Gulf, an issue that is of great significance to New Zealand but particularly to Aucklanders as well—huge amount of work that went on. The Environment Committee recommended, unanimously, that the bill be passed without any substantial change. In the eleventh hour, because of the lobbying from the industry, Minister Jones has decided to bring in amendments that will water down the protections to the Gulf.
We’re seeing the same thing happen here with this legislation, as well, so I do want to point out that this is just not just a one-off. It’s not just one example of the “Coalition of Chaos”. There are multiple examples; this is just one in a pattern of that.
I also want to emphasise something that other speakers on this side of the House have pointed out in their contribution: that this does absolutely nothing for energy security, but it poses a threat to New Zealand—a significant threat.
I want to also counter points made by members opposite. They have got up and read their scripts and said that ending oil and gas in 2018—that there was a “chilling effect”, I think they said, “on investments”. I think Megan Woods has pointed out very clearly that that’s actually blatantly untrue; that there was record investment in existing fields even since the ban was announced, because of oil and gas companies milking what they can from mature fields. So the arguments that members across the House have put forward aren’t even accurate—literally just reading scripts that they’ve been given, which is highly disappointing, frankly, because it is meant to be a debate. [Interruption] Instead of just heckling, maybe stand up and say something of substance for a change.
Two more points I’d like to make before I end my contribution. One, this is yet another step that this Government is taking to destroy our environment—again, one in a pattern of steps. They’ve done absolutely nothing when it comes to protecting te taiao, the environment. All they’ve done is to destroy it, and this is yet another step, and I’ll tell you why. Thirty percent of the Māui dolphins’ marine habitat is currently open—was open—for oil exploration, and the offshore ban that we put in place would have stopped that. I want to quote from an article here that basically says, “The offshore ban will have positive outcomes for endangered marine life. Thirty percent of Māui dolphins’ marine habitat was open for oil exploration and the offshore ban will change this. Seismic blasting for oil can have both physical and behavioural impacts on marine environments. The ban will help to mitigate this also.” Brilliant! It’s yet another step that this Government’s taking to destroy our environment—not to mention, of course, our obligations under the Paris Agreement, and that was also one of the reasons why the Labour Government decided to ban new oil and gas at the time.
The final point that I will underscore is the fact that we have obligations in our trade agreements, particularly with the European Union and the United Kingdom. Advice that has been given to this Government—that they, I think, meant to redact, but couldn’t even do that—shows that the step that they’re taking here is inconsistent with those trade agreements, as well. So not only are they ruining New Zealand’s future selling it to the highest bidder; they’re ruining our reputation internationally. Everything they’re doing is pretty pathetic, and I don’t commend this bill to the House.
Dr CARLOS CHEUNG (National—Mt Roskill): This bill ensures we have the right settings to address energy security and keep prices affordable. Without natural gas, either we face an energy shortage or we actually risk relying more on coal, which results in higher carbon emission and causes more damage to our environment. This legislation provides a stable transition to renewables. I commend this bill to the House.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the Crown Minerals Amendment Bill be now read a third time.
Ayes 68
New Zealand National 49; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.
Noes 54
New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 15; Te Pāti Māori 5.
Motion agreed to.
Bill read a third time.
Bills
Public Service Amendment Bill
First Reading
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister for the Public Service): I present a legislative statement on the Public Service Amendment Bill.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Jenny Salesa): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I move, That the Public Service Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Governance and Administration Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 1 December 2025.
This bill marks an important step forward for our Public Service as it strives to get back to basics and deliver value for money to taxpayers. The changes in the bill are about sharpening focus, clarifying responsibilities, and lifting performance, all of which will better equip the Public Service for the challenges it faces both today and in the future. One way it does this is by refocusing the statutory purpose of the Public Service to get it back to basics. Delivering services and outcomes for taxpayers while supporting constitutional and democratic Government, political neutrality, serving the Government of the day, and providing free and frank advice are enduring principles of our Public Service and our democracy. This Government is unreservedly committed to these imperatives, and they are retained unchanged.
The bill will give a clear reaffirmation of the role and responsibilities of Public Service chief executives and an increased focus on performance. Chief executives are entrusted with significant taxpayer funding and have a critical leadership role in delivering the priorities of the Government of the day. This bill provides greater clarity around those responsibilities to ensure they are better understood, better structured, and better aligned to the core purpose of the Public Service.
A high-performing Public Service starts with people, and the way we appoint Public Service leaders matters. This bill reaffirms the longstanding Public Service principle of merit-based appointments and strengthens appointment processes. This means selecting the best person for the job, not the most familiar name, not the candidate of least resistance, but the person with the right skills, the right experience, and the right leadership qualities to deliver results.
Strengthening the Public Service Act in this regard is particularly important given the recent Public Service Census found 30 percent of public servants surveyed were not confident that appointments in their organisation are being made on merit. It’s simply not good enough. To support this, Public Service chief executives will no longer be automatically reappointed when their term is up. All future reappointments will be subject to a contestable process. This important change will ensure the Government of the day can draw on the widest possible pool of talent and get the right person for the job.
The bill will also reintroduce key positions, allowing the Public Service Commissioner and other system leaders to be involved in the appointment and performance management of key back-office positions such as finance or digital leadership. This will ensure that we have the right people leading key functions across the Public Service to drive better performance overall.
The Government, on behalf of New Zealanders, also has a legitimate interest in how the commissioner is driving performance across the Public Service. This bill will strengthen the provisions around chief executive and agency performance management, requiring input from appropriate Ministers when the commissioner is setting and reviewing performance expectations and key performance indicators. This will increase the robustness of the process and drive confidence and transparency for Ministers and for the public.
The bill also removes unnecessary duplication in chief executives’ responsibilities. It removes specific provisions relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion from the Act. Why? Because most of these objectives are substantially provided for explicitly and implicitly under other laws, including the Human Rights Act, the Employment Relations Act, the Equal Pay Act, and the good employer obligations already embedded in the Public Service Act. I also consider that these objectives are somewhat more appropriately addressed through the Government of the day’s Workforce Policy Statement.
The emphasis on the Act itself should be on an unbiased, merit-based appointment process. Let me be clear: removing these provisions does not remove our commitment to fair and proper treatment of all Public Service employees, which Public Service agencies will still be required to uphold in their employment policies and practices, as they should.
The Public Service must serve with integrity and maintain the trust and confidence of the public. We must have zero tolerance for inappropriate behaviour and wrongdoing. This bill will require agencies to report to the Public Service Commissioner annually on Public Service misconduct. Increased oversight and transparency will give New Zealanders confidence that the Public Service is upholding the high standards expected of them.
We also find ourselves in an environment of heightened strategic competition and risk, and the Public Service must be better prepared to manage this. While the Act will still allow the Public Service to adopt new technologies, products, and services, this bill will empower the Public Service Commissioner to protect the Public Service from malicious or disruptive actors by restricting access to certain products, services, or vendors. Innovation, technological adoption, and service improvement must not come at the cost of New Zealand’s national security.
This bill is about restoring purpose, discipline, and professionalism to the Public Service. The Public Service is funded by taxpayers to deliver the services needed for a well-functioning society, and it should always remember that. This bill restores that clarity of purpose while preserving the Public Service’s constitutional role as a politically neutral and professional institution. It supports chief executives with clearer mandates; it ensures leadership roles are filled competitively and on merit; it refocuses the Public Service on delivering results, not processes; and it puts the needs of taxpayers—as the people who fund and rely on these services—front and centre. These reforms will not hinder the Public Service’s ability to give free and frank advice or to operate impartially. In fact, by sharpening its focus, it will enhance these fundamental principles.
The Government believes in a strong Public Service. The Public Service is confident and capable of delivering. The Public Service understands its role not as a passive bureaucracy but as an active partner in implementing the policies of the elected Government and delivering better services and outcomes for all New Zealanders. This bill delivers necessary, practical changes. It does not rewrite the foundations of our Public Service; it reinforces them. It is focused, deliberate, and aligned with the expectations of the Government and the hard-working taxpayers of New Zealand.
With these reforms, we will have a Public Service that is clearer in its role, stronger in its leadership, and better focused on its core mission to serve taxpayers with efficiency, professionalism, accountability, and integrity. I commend this bill to the House.
ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The question is that the motion be agreed to.
CAMILLA BELICH (Labour): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Now, I wish I could say that it was a pleasure to be talking on this bill, but, unfortunately, the Government has once again put a bill before this House which takes New Zealand backwards. This is very disappointing and a missed opportunity, I think, from the Minister for the Public Service to build on the incredible work that our Public Service has done for the last 110 years, in which, in all of those years, they have been focused on engaging people on the basis of merit, and there has been little to no evidence produced—apart from a Public Service census, which the Minister was heavily involved in drafting—that there has been any challenge to the fact that people are appointed on merit in the Public Service.
We do not accept that these changes will achieve the goals that the Minister has set out, many of which are goals that we can agree with in terms of making sure we have an efficient Public Service, in terms of making sure that the Public Service is leading on public productivity. These are the things that the Minister came to our select committee and made public statements about this bill bringing into place. Unfortunately, what we see is the reduction of rights for people in relation to two key areas that I want to make sure that I mention in this short, five-minute call.
The first thing is the removal of the requirement for chief executives to work on pay equity and make sure that they get rid of gender bias between male and female employees. Now, the Minister said that this is something that could be more better placed within the Workforce Policy Statement, but when you read the bill, you see that the matters to be included have specifically withdrawn pay equity from the Workforce Policy Statement, so that, unfortunately, just does not stack up.
This is another bill which is walking back New Zealand’s commitment—and in the Public Service, it has been since 1960—towards leading pay equity and gender fairness within New Zealand. It is shocking and, I think, a terrible thing to include that within a bill that could have been an opportunity to really move the Public Service forward.
We don’t object to looking at this legislation. It’s been five years since it’s been put in place. There could have been things that we could have worked together on, but taking New Zealand backwards from its position—especially in the Public Service—as a leader on pay equity is just shocking.
It doesn’t end there. There is also a move backwards in relation to making sure that the Public Service reflects our society. Now, I don’t know why this is a controversial statement. Of course we should have a Public Service that reflects the society that we’re a part of, and, yes, it is possible to have that and employ people on the basis of merit, and that is exactly what our Public Service has been doing for the last 110 years. Putting that in this bill is simply virtue signalling towards those who think that diversity inclusion is something bad and it takes New Zealand backwards. Well, the opposite is true: having a diverse workforce takes the Public Service forwards.
The last main criticism that I wanted to make sure that I covered in my contribution today is the fact that some of these provisions in this bill, unfortunately, move, in my view, away from what has been a bipartisan, agreed position on the neutrality of the Public Service, and I want to mention two examples of that. There is the fact that now there will be an incentive for when chief executives in the Public Service are employed to make sure that they are fitting very, very clearly with the policies and the politics of the Government of the day. Now, of course they have to deliver for the Government of the day—of course that is the job of a neutral public service. But what this will do is it will mean that chief executives who are doing a good job, who are delivering, and who may have worked for successive Governments now have a direct incentive to make sure that their politics and policies match those of the Minister. I hope that that is something that we can improve in select committee, because I don’t think it’s in the interests of anyone in this House to see that moving that way.
Also, another point to that concern around the politicisation of the Public Service is the fact that the people who are employed in the policy advisory group in the parliamentary office that advises the Prime Minister will now be put on fixed-term appointments. These are senior public servants, they do an excellent job, they are seconded in there because of their expertise, they are non-political, and they work in a bipartisan manner. Putting them on fixed-term contracts means, essentially, that they will be more towards serving the Government of the day, rather than providing the Prime Minister of the day—whoever that is—with the free and frank advice that they deserve. This is of huge concern for us, and I hope that it is also something that can be changed within this bill to make sure that the standards of having a free Public Service that provides free and frank advice are upheld.
FRANCISCO HERNANDEZ (Green): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is with pleasure that I rise to oppose this bill. This is yet another bill that takes us backwards. This is yet another bill that’s a pointless distraction. This is yet another bill that fails to accomplish the objectives that the Minister has set out for it.
Now, what are they trying to distract us from? No wonder they have distraction bills like this, because if you open your eyes, you’ll know that things are getting worse out here in Aotearoa. Unemployment is the highest it’s ever been, homelessness is skyrocketing, and the jobs and opportunities are fleeing to Australia.
Hon David Seymour: What about the bill?
FRANCISCO HERNANDEZ: So this bill is a distraction. It’s culture war nonsense that seeks to blame the ills of modern society on the so-called DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—policies.
Now, it’s pointless, because as we have questioned the Minister for the Public Service during the hearing process in the Governance and Administration Committee, when we asked her specifically if there had been evidence that the Public Service was not hiring on merit, she said that there was no evidence—no evidence—that the Public Service wasn’t hiring on a merit basis.
Now, the Minister talks about the benefits of this bill and how it’s going to create a high-performing Public Service. Unfortunately, none of the advice or the analysis that she’s brought to the table actually stacks up with that. If you actually read the regulatory impact statements, it says that the costs of the bill are low but they’re definite, but it says that the benefits of it are uncertain. Now, why are we wasting time debating and putting forward a bill to this House when the Minister’s own advisers aren’t even sure it will actually do anything? It just seems like a pointless waste of time—virtue signalling, if you will.
But what are the costs of it? Now, the costs of it are very real, and some of them have already been articulated by the previous member to speak, Camilla Belich. We do know that this will weaken the existing framework for pay equity. We do know that this will potentially lead to a less representative Public Service—one that’s supposed to actually reflect the communities that it’s supposed to serve.
This is something that the Government doesn’t actually, theoretically, have a problem with. I mean, in their announcement for the Waikato medical school, one of the things that they trumpeted in the media release and the announcement was that how it would lead to a more diverse workplace. So, again, they don’t really have a principle-based objection to the idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion; there’s just sort of a pick and choose.
Another concerning aspect of this bill is how it demotes and weakens the provisions and requirement for the Public Service to operate in the spirit of service to the public. Now, that is concerning, because what is the Public Service for if not for the spirit of service? This bill—and that is something that the previous member already articulated as well, although she probably wouldn’t put it in these terms—puts New Zealand on a pathway towards an American-style politicised Public Service, where every administration they—you know, there’s a lot of churn in the public sector across the different terms of Government.
Look, this is a Government that does love the Americans. They’ve just invited the American Government to set up an FBI outpost here, so this is a Government that is increasingly skewing us towards becoming a vassal state of America. So why not copy their policies in the first place? If they’re setting up colonial outposts here, an FBI outpost here, just bring them here.
Now, let’s talk about—
Andy Foster: What a fabrication of the truth.
FRANCISCO HERNANDEZ: Yeah, yeah—I hope I’m bulletproof. You know what those Yankees do to countries that don’t obey them.
It talks about high-performing public services. But how do you actually get high-performing public services? Well, everything this Government has done has been antithetical to the goal of a high-performing Public Service. They’ve sacked 10,000 jobs from the Public Service. They’ve gone through hundreds and hundreds of redundancy processes. That’s not how you get high-performing services. The changes that they’ve made, the slash and burn cuts that they’ve imposed on the Public Service, have led to doctors doing admin and cleaning jobs in the hospital instead of doing valuable mahi serving their communities. It’s led to an explosion of meth in our streets, as the Customs agencies and border agencies fell. It’s led to Statistics New Zealand repeatedly delaying statistical releases.
We won’t get better public services with this Government. Thank you.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. Just for the people watching at home, that last speech is what can happen if you don’t prepare before giving a speech. You end up standing up and giving a grab-bag of things that you’ve recently read on Twitter. Now, there are some people who want to ban social media for under-16s; I think it’d be good to ban it for that member, Francisco Hernandez, so he could focus on delivering on his actual speech.
Now, I want to take a call on this bill because I think it is so important. In the previous iteration of bringing together this Government, the ACT Party negotiated that the Government would amend the Public Service Act 2020 to clarify the role of the Public Service to drive performance and to assure accountability to deliver on the agenda of the Government of the day. There will be people out there who would think, “Isn’t that what the Public Service is supposed to do?” Shouldn’t the law say that if you work in a Government department, your job is to serve the people that the public elected to run the Government and have people put in jobs to do that because they’re the best person to do it? There’d be a lot of people who would be surprised that this was even necessary, until they heard the speeches from the Opposition, who seem to think that this is some terrible catastrophe. We even heard the Green member say that the bill requires the Public Service to serve the public and—quote—“That’s a problem.”
To understand what has gone wrong here, the previous Government, in the Public Service Act 2020, decided that instead of serving the elected Government of the day to deliver quality services efficiently and affordably for the taxpayer—so you can get your healthcare and get your education and get your infrastructure—they decided that, actually, the Public Service would be a vehicle for a whole lot of other internal political projects. There are some people out there who call that diversity, equity, and inclusion. In other words, they decided that the identity politics of the Government was more important than serving the elected Government and delivering the services that taxpayers paid for.
That’s why I’m proud to be standing for a bill that is going to make those very obvious things that people probably thought that Government departments were already supposed to do—to actually put them into the law. It’s also the solution to a riddle, a considerable riddle. You see, over the six years of the previous Government, they managed to take Government spending from $86 billion a year up to $138 billion a year. They managed to spend an extra $60 billion, almost an 80 percent increase in Government spending. They took the number of people in the Public Service from 47,000 up to over 60,000. If you went back in the days of 2017 and asked an ardent left-wing voter: if we were to increase spending by 60 percent and increase the size of the Public Service by another 15,000 people, increasing the Public Service by about a third, would that solve all the problems? Would that get rid of poverty? Would that put people in houses? Would that get the infrastructure built? I mean, surely for another $60 billion we could solve all the problems.
The amazing thing is they spent all that money and, actually, they didn’t solve all the problems. In fact, for many of them, whether it’s school attendance, whether it’s the state of infrastructure, whether it’s the state of the healthcare system, they actually managed to spend more money and make things worse. Part of the reason for that is revealed in the need for this legislation, that we had a Labour Government—predominantly, with some outriggers—who decided that using the Public Service as a vehicle for identity politics mattered more than delivering for the people who paid the bill and paid their taxes by serving the elected Government of the day.
Today, with this legislation, we bring the answer to the riddle. It is part of a movement that I believe is spreading around the world—that people are just sick and tired of being told that what happens in your life was determined long before you were born, that you’re either a victim or a villain written in a script that you have no control over. Instead, the tide that is coming in right around the world is the simple idea that each of us are deserving of equal dignity to use our time on earth to make the most positive difference that we possibly can for ourselves, those we care about immediately around us, and our wider community. This bill is just a little part of that movement to hire on merit, to deliver for the democratically elected Governments of the day, so that people can choose to use their time on earth to flourish in their own self-chosen way. I commend this bill to the House.
ANDY FOSTER (NZ First): It’s a pleasure to rise to speak to this bill. Under Labour, the core Public Service grew by some 34 percent, from 48,000 to over 63,000, costing about $6.1 billion a year in salaries alone, and I think most New Zealanders would say that services went backwards as a result of that. This bill is about ensuring, amongst other things, driving improvements in the public sector performance, about reducing silos, about increasing transparency, and about reinforcing political neutrality and professionalism, which is quite the opposite of what the Green Party was saying.
Can we be very, very clear that most of our public servants—in fact, I think all of our public servants—get up in the morning to do a great job. The title of “public servant” should be one of the most honourable that there is, being able to get up in the morning and go and serve the public of this great country. The officials that we see here serve this country really, really well—they provide us with great advice, great knowledge, and they work very, very hard. The staff who look after us here, likewise. But they are often let down by the system.
At the Governance and Administration Committee, recently, it was a breath of fresh air to have the Minister, the Hon Judith Collins, come in with the commissioner, Sir Brian Roche, and talk about a culture that they wanted: a culture that is creative, courageous, and customer-focused. Because I’ve been asked to keep it short, I’m going to truncate some of those bits there, but what I would say is that this bill is about delivering that kind of aspiration.
I want to focus on one specific thing, and that is diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The Public Service run a survey every so often, and in 2024, the Public Service survey had extraordinary feedback: 44,737 core public servants responded—that is 68.5 percent of all our public servants; that is up from 63.1 percent in 2021. There were some great numbers in there: 80 percent believe they deliver value for taxpayer money, 87 percent believe they contribute to better outcomes, 90 percent care about their agency’s use of taxpayer money, and 96 percent say it’s important that their work contributes to the common good.
However, the system so often gets in the way, and in this survey—and Radio New Zealand reported this earlier this month, and they’re not usually on the side of the Government—public servants say poor staffing is their biggest barrier to performance and just 44 percent are confident that their colleagues are appointed or are hired on merit—44 percent. That is the public servants saying, about their colleagues, that they don’t believe that most of them are hired on merit. That is not us saying that. That is the public servants responding to this survey saying that. Wow—that is condemning.
As I said, that is not from any political party but from the public servants themselves. That is the result of DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion. All of those are really, really good things in themselves, but if they take away from appointment on merit, what that means is that they prevent the Public Service from doing the job that it should do, as well as it should be doing it, for the people of New Zealand. That is why this bill is there and is making the change that it is making.
The Government and the commissioner have been clear. Being a public servant is an important role. It needs the best people for the job. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are all important, but being capable of doing the job and doing it well is the most important—our public servants themselves say so. Our taxpayers deserve the best. Our public servants deserve the best. I commend this bill to the House.
TOM RUTHERFORD (National—Bay of Plenty): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. It gives me pleasure to rise and speak in support of the Public Service Amendment Bill. This will drive improvements in Public Service performance and ensure that the Public Service can efficiently and effectively serve the Government to deliver value for money for all New Zealanders. I commend it to the House.
Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour): I want to use my speech to draw attention to an aspect of this bill that has been glossed over—glossed over by the Minister, glossed over in the regulatory impact statement, hidden away in what is supposed to be a streamlining change. But is actually quite a significant change, and it’s the change around long-term insights briefings.
Now, the previous Government introduced the concept of a long-term insights briefing. It said: our public servants are an extraordinarily diligent, well-educated, thoughtful group of people who spend years grappling with some of the problems that this country faces, that have a whole lot of knowledge to bring to that, but all too often, they are not able to bring that knowledge out, because they are responding to the very immediate needs of the Government of the day. More to the point, all too often, too, they can’t put stuff out because it doesn’t fit with the Government’s political programme. Now, that’s fair enough; they are there to serve the Government of the day, but that means that there is a huge untapped resource of knowledge and insight.
Our Government said that, actually, we want to give those superb public servants a chance, every three years, to focus on a particular issue of their choice, to consult with the public, to analyse it, and to present us with a long-term insights briefing. Each Government department was going to be able to do that. This bill removes that from individual Government departments and concentrates it all in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC). It says—and it’s quite well hidden, actually, in the bill. Sitting in the Minister’s legislative statement, there is an analysis that says that clause 45 streamlines the requirements for long-term insights briefings, requiring DPMC to coordinate one briefing every three years, and to issue guidance to support agency capability for long-term thinking.
It’s about streamlining, according to the Minister’s legislative statement. But in actual fact, it’s not just streamlining. It is removing the capacity for individual departments to make a decision about what their briefing will be about; about how they will go about developing that briefing; about how they will report it to their Ministers. It turns out those briefings are often not particularly convenient to the Government of the day.
So—and I can only speak in terms of the revenue portfolio here—in the last term of the Government, the first Inland Revenue long-term insights briefing was produced, and, much as the Minister of the day wanted it to focus on the overall fairness of the tax system and the taxation of capital and how that relates to the taxation of income, Inland Revenue went their own way as independent public servants and produced a report on whether our tax settings affect our productivity. That was not very convenient to us as a Government, but it was a great report to get. Then the current long-term insights briefing being prepared by Inland Revenue is actually around the taxation of capital—not very convenient to the Government of the day, but a fantastic long-term insights briefing to have.
These long-term insights briefings may not be convenient, but they add so much value to our country overall. So I thought, well, surely the regulatory impact statement would have some assessment of this, but no; sitting in the regulatory impact statement is a little tick saying that it was exempt from the regulatory impact statement. And why is that change exempt from a regulatory impact statement? Because the Ministry for Regulation—in other words, David Seymour’s little pet toy—granted an exemption for it, but no reason was given for it. There is no cost-benefit analysis on whether losing these long-term insights briefings and concentrating them just in the department of DPMC will make a difference—no cost-benefit analysis, no assessment of the impact for the long-term future of this country.
Now, this is something we pride ourselves on in our Public Service—that they are independent; that they do serve the Government of the day; that they are capable of working between one Government and another; that they give of their best. This Government is working directly against that.
Hon MELISSA LEE (National): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Reinforcing the core principles of political neutrality, appointment on merit or positions and professional competence is something that I actually support. When that side of the House introduced a tick-box exercise of including diversity, equity, and inclusion, it did not actually improve public service. I commend this bill to the House.
RACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s not a pleasure to take a call on this bill, because many of the things that it does really undermine the role that the Public Service play in serving the Government but specifically serving New Zealanders, which is what they are there to do. Can I just acknowledge the many public servants across New Zealand, particularly those going through difficult times at the moment in terms of restructures and having their work, in many cases, changed in a way that I know is frustrating many of them. I just want to acknowledge the many hard-working and loyal public servants that we have in New Zealand.
I also want to talk briefly about the long-term insights briefings, but before I get there I want to talk around the changes being made to the role chief executives play in terms of pay equity. I want to talk to that briefly, because what we’ve seen from this Government is a Government that doesn’t value the pay of women. Just this year, we had a bill rammed through the House that changed the rules around pay equity, that removed a significant number of pay equity claims that were on the table. We’ve got pay offers for nurses of 2 percent this year, 1 percent next year, and a pay offer for teachers of 1 percent. Many of these workforces are female dominated, and instead of genuinely trying to find other ways to achieve the importance of pay equity for women, this bill actually makes it worse again.
What it does is it repeals section 73(3)(i) and (j), which removes the requirement for chief executives to have employment policies that recognise the importance of pay equity between female and male employees and that ensure decisions about remuneration are free from bias, including gender bias. We’ve just heard from speakers talking about not making decisions based around gender. There are policies in place in the Act that say remuneration decisions have to be made free of bias from gender, and that has been taken away—
Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Crazy.
RACHEL BOYACK: —and claims are being cancelled. It is crazy, Dr Webb. It is reinforcing the very decisions being made by this Government to undermine the pay of women in New Zealand.
When I read that in this bill, I was shocked, actually, because I thought this was a National Party in particular trying desperately to show the public why they still support women being paid well, but everything we are seeing from this Government—the scrapping of pay equity claims, the shocking offers made to nurses and teachers, and now the plan to remove pay equity policies from the role of the Public Service chief executives, who have so much influence over what employees are paid—is an absolute shocker.
I also wanted to talk briefly about long-term insights briefings, because in the previous term of Parliament I sat on the Governance and Administration Committee, and we were the receivers of all of these briefings before they were sent to committees for their observations and their thinking. We put together a couple of reports around long-term insights briefings, and those reports, I’ll be frank, did have some criticisms that perhaps there were too many—having 40 every three years was perhaps too many; that perhaps some agencies didn’t necessarily do a good job of choosing the right topic that genuinely was a long-term issue that New Zealand had to grapple with; and there could’ve been more collaboration between agencies to come up with topics that worked across multiple agencies. So I am not personally opposed to some changes to how many, but going from 40 to one that is only driven by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, in my view, is a missed opportunity, and it actually goes against what was a cross-party, unanimous report that included members of the National Party as well when we wrote our reports on long-term insights briefings.
I would encourage the members of the National Party to go away and read the reports of the Governance and Administration Committee, because there could be some changes made, but this is going far too far. It takes away the ability of the Public Service to think long term for New Zealanders, which is one of its roles. I do not commend this bill to the House.
Dr HAMISH CAMPBELL (National—Ilam): Excellent—thank you. It is a great honour to rise in support of the Public Service Amendment Bill in its first reading. I do just acknowledge the previous speaker, Rachel Boyack, who did acknowledge that change was needed. This is about driving improvements in our Public Service performance, ensuring that our Public Service can efficiently and effectively serve the Government to deliver value for New Zealanders. I commend this bill to the House.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the Public Service Amendment Bill be now read a first time.
Ayes 68
New Zealand National 49; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.
Noes 54
New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 15; Te Pāti Māori 5.
Motion agreed to.
Bill read a first time.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is, That the Public Service Amendment Bill be considered by the Governance and Administration Committee.
Motion agreed to.
Bill referred to the Governance and Administration Committee.
Instruction to Governance and Administration Committee
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Is there a Minister that’s going to move the report-back date?
Hon SIMON WATTS (Minister of Local Government) on behalf of the Minister for the Public Service: I move, That the bill is reported back in four months and one day.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: So, we’ve got some wording here, which the Clerk will bring over.
Hon Kieran McAnulty: Point of order, Madam Speaker. The motion has been put, and it’s been put incorrectly. There was no Minister ready to put this. There was an adequate period of time for them to be able to be organised and to be able to put it.
Hon David Seymour: Speaking to the point of order, none the less, a Minister has risen to his feet and moved the motion. I see no problem with that.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just a moment, I’ll just take some—it was put not as planned, but I accept that. I’m just going to take some advice here.
OK, so the advice that I’ve been given is that even though the Minister used the incorrect words, the effect was the same. So I put the motion that the Minister moved.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the bill is reported back in four months and one day.
Ayes 68
New Zealand National 49; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.
Noes 54
New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 15; Te Pāti Māori 5.
Motion agreed to.
Bills
Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill
First Reading
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Associate Minister of Education): I present a legislative statement on the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: I move, That the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Workforce Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by four months and one day after the bill receives its first reading.
Early childhood education (ECE) is one of, arguably the most, important sectors that the Government is responsible for. The reason for that is not that around about $3.1 billion of taxpayer’s money goes into it. It’s not that parents stump up a comparable amount for their side of the funding, although those are significant amounts of money—around $6 billion. The reason it’s so important is that early childhood education has such a big influence on the development of young New Zealanders and their potential as they move on to participate in primary and then intermediate and then secondary and then tertiary education.
Now, I recently learned that three-year-olds have 85 percent of adult brain matter. Some people ask why three-year-olds don’t take more responsibility! On the other hand, it shows just how much of a young person’s development happens in those early days and it’s that that early childhood education can affect. That’s why it’s so important that the Government gets the regulation right. I think it’s fair to say that the early childhood education sector, for whatever reason—people could come up with their theories—has been badly neglected when it comes to Government policy. People that run these centres—around 4,000 of them up and down the country—are being frustrated, driven to distraction, by conflicting rules; by a really dictatorial approach; by really minor rules that are none the less enforced on pain of being shut down, given a notice, they can no longer continue; and by inconsistent enforcement.
The Government’s response actually came from the Ministry for Regulation to do a sector review, to go out and hear from the people affected and ask them, “What are your problems?” and then compare the rules that the centres are subjected to with good regulatory practice. After listening to literally thousands of people; going away, working with other Government departments, with the Education Review Office, with the Ministry of Education; listening to the people that run all the kindergartens, the big chains, the small cottage—you might say—early childhood centres, the home-based carers, what was found was that there needed to be about 15 different changes.
In fact, there were 15 recommendations from that report the Government adopted. If I was to simplify them, I would say that it comes down to simplifying the rules, improving the way the rules are enforced, and changing who enforces the rules. Those are the three changes that we’re going through. Ninety-eight licensing criteria are being crunched down to a smaller number, and many of those that remain will be greatly simplified to give people running ECEs an easier time, while making sure we have a laser focus on children’s safety.
There will also be a change from the Ministry of Education to the Education Review Office as the specialist enforcer. But it’s the bit in the middle—the way the rules are enforced—that we’re talking about today, in particular the establishment of a Director of Regulation, somebody who is accountable—
Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Oh, another bit of bureaucracy.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: Someone said, “Oh, it’s more bureaucracy.” Well, the thing is, there’s already a person doing this job, but what is changing is that they are going to have statutory responsibility, principles of why the Government regulates early childhood centres and how it regulates early childhood centres, put into law so that people who actually run these centres, people who invest in them, people who actually do the hard work every day, if they feel that they’re getting an unfair deal, there’s one person who’s responsible under law to regulate responsibly, and that person is making sure that the rules are consistent up and down the country. That is something that I believe people want. In fact, I know that they want it, because when we went out and did a sector review, they told us that they wanted it.
We’re going to see a set of principles put in place that say child safety is at the centre of everything when we regulate—so is the children’s education. But, critically, there’s the principle that the regulation should be done in such a way that it has the least impact; that it’s proportional to the purpose; that people don’t get the run-around and have to fill out forms and papers just for the sake of it; that they don’t feel intimidated; that they don’t feel they’re going to be shut down immediately—they’re going to face a graduated approach, where it’s not one high-stakes decision; that there are actually processes and five steps of warning people if they have made a transgression, and then escalating from there, rather than what happens sometimes to unfortunate centre operators, with no warning: being shut down and losing their licences.
This is the kind of approach that people want the Government to take. They don’t want open slather. They do want regulation. But they also don’t want a punitive approach where rules that they may not have known about, that were inconsistently enforced, suddenly show up on their door with a punitive approach that takes away their basic rights. That is why this piece of legislation is so important. It forms a part of the Government’s response to the regulatory sector review. By the time this bill’s done, the changes from the Ministry of Education to the Education Review Office are done, and the new rules are put in place, we will be able to say that in less than two years the Government has gone in, listened to early childhood educators, looked at the rules they’re subject to, streamlined the rules, laser-focused on child safety, and ensured that people can spend more time investing in the potential and the growth of the next generation of young New Zealanders and less time dealing with bureaucracy and paperwork. With that in mind, I commend this bill to the House. Thank you very much.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to.
Hon JAN TINETTI (Labour): Thank you, Madam Speaker. There’s not much that I agree with that member on, on the other side of the House, but I do agree that the early childhood sector is one of the most important sectors that Government does have the oversight of. It is the formation of our young people’s learning starts, although I would probably, actually, argue that it starts prior to that, in the womb, but it is where we see the biggest learning of our young people over that time.
I’m pleased to hear the member start to show some facts about his understanding of early childhood development. One thing that I would say, though, in that speech, is that I’d have to go back and check in the Hansard, but I’m not certain that I heard the word “teacher” anywhere in the actual speech, and that does concern me.
This Government has had an attack on early childhood since they started in office, and it has been one thing after the other. I was going through the member’s press releases and having a look at the different areas of where they’ve attacked. Everything—every month there has been something where they have got rid of something. It’s been based on an ideological basis rather than on quality education, and often there has not been that mention of the people who are the most important, that make the biggest difference to our young people in those early childhood centres, and that’s the teachers.
This bill puts the control of early childhood education in the hands of a Director of Regulation rather than focusing on the outcomes of quality early childhood education. It is only going to be the children at the heart of this, and their whānau, who are going to be the losers. As a country, we need to have a laser focus on high-quality early childhood education and the drivers for that. If we lose that focus, if we start to use some distracting information, then we’re going to be all the worst in our system. We have a system, as it is now, that has been lauded worldwide. We have a system that the rest of the world has looked at and said, “This is an absolutely amazing early childhood education system that you have in your country. How do you get that?”
I know this because I’ve had conversations with Ministers of Education across the globe, including in jurisdictions where we look up to them for what they do, such as the Scandinavian countries. They have held us in awe of what we do, but actually, now, they’re starting to ask us, “What on earth is going on in your system, where you are putting kids second and putting centre owners first?” That’s what I heard in that opening speech—that the Minister had had lots of conversations with centre owners. But I ask how many conversations were had with teachers who work with those children, one-on-one, during the day? How many conversations—or one-on-10, or whatever their ratios are. It is really hard for them out there at the moment.
That is one of the key reasons why we are losing so many good quality teachers out of the profession: because we are simply not looking after them and not giving them the status of the professionals that they are. If we are saying that this is one of our most important sectors in Government, and we heard the Minister say that here this afternoon, then why are we not putting quality early childhood education front and centre, and putting those teachers—those qualified and skilled teachers—front and centre?
Hon Kieran McAnulty: I’ll tell you why: profits.
Hon JAN TINETTI: That’s absolutely right: it is about profits. This is all this Government is doing at the moment, is siding with the people who are making the profits and not the people who are actually working and doing and delivering that quality education.
I really feel for those teachers. I asked the Minister how many centres he has been around lately, because I’ve been to quite a number, and in those centres people’s morale is low. It is quality teachers, who are absolutely stressed, and they are crying out for them to be recognised and their sector to be recognised as an area that this Government needs to really home into that quality early childhood education.
We’ve already had a number of academics in this country—really amazing academics in this area—who have spoken up and said what they think about this piece of legislation, and I look forward to seeing them. I’m sad that it’s going to select committee, but I look forward to seeing and hearing from them there. I do not support this bill.
Dr LAWRENCE XU-NAN (Green): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Let’s be clear: when it comes to early childhood education (ECE), I think we can all agree that the education of our youngest and of our mokopuna and our tamariki is paramount. It is important when we want to ensure that we have the development, the education of our children at the heart of our decision making. It is important for us to know the impact and the kind of nurture that is relied upon of our teaching force when you’re looking at early childhood education, or education in general.
However, what is quite laughable about this bill is the fact that when we are looking at some of the Cabinet papers, “children”, “teacher”, “education” are rarely found. Instead, what we do see in Cabinet papers: “reduce cost to business”. This is the paramount goal of the Associate Minister of Education on introducing any bills when it comes to early childhood education.
Now, there are a number of concerns that we already know in the ECE sector. We know about the high cost of fees to parents, the kind of racketeering that we see despite the 20 hours free that is being offered. We see teacher-child ratio being at an all-time high so that there are too many children per class and teachers are struggling. All of this is despite the fact that we have a world-leading—literally world-leading—education strategy in early child education in Te Whāriki.
The idea of setting up a director in this is adding more yellow tape—let us be clear about that. It is setting up, also, that director to fail without fundamentally changing the levers and changing the way we address early childhood education. How is that director going to be able to fulfil the requirement of health and safety and wellbeing of children when you have higher and higher teacher-student ratios, when you no longer have qualified teachers, when ECE teachers have just lost out on $22 million, as has been lately reported?
All of these should be concerning for parents and for the people of Aotearoa New Zealand when it comes to bills such as this. This bill does ignore major, major systemic issues that we are currently seeing, but not only that. I think it’s really important, in this case, to actually challenge the Minister on the fact of whether he will genuinely listen to submitters in the select committee on this bill—a challenge to the Minister to take some actual responsibility and accountability for bad decisions that have been made under that Minister.
To give an example, when the Education and Training Amendment Bill was first introduced, part of that that affected ECE was the removal of network management; 96 percent of the submitters opposed it, yet that did not sway the Minister in any way, shape, or form. The Minister doesn’t care about what the New Zealand public thinks—just cares about who the Minister’s been talking to, who are the businesses of ECE, and the privatisation of ECE.
Other decisions that are made—what we have found recently today: that the vast majority of the feedback on the Minister’s school lunch programme, for example, is negative, overwhelmingly the feedback is negative, and that was done through an Official Information Act request. The Minister must be able to be held accountable for introducing something like this into the House, and we are looking forward to seeing the submitters on this.
The Green Party recognises the issue that we have, that ECE is facing in Aotearoa New Zealand, and we have the Green solution for it. In our Green Budget, we stated that we are wanting to see changes to ECE, changes that this bill proposes to do, but it cannot be done by introducing a director. It needs to be done from a system level and from a funding level. What we want to see is to ensure that we are no longer privatising our ECE. That is the crux of the issue. We should not be able to commercialise the bookends of our lives. So the Green Party will not support this bill, but we’re looking forward to the select committee stage.
Dr VANESSA WEENINK (National—Banks Peninsula): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise as a member of the Education and Workforce Committee to speak in support of the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill. There will be some changes that will make it easier to do the work of early childhood education without as much tanglement of red tape, and I commend the bill to the House.
ANDY FOSTER (NZ First): It’s a pleasure to rise to speak in support of this bill. We heard a lot from the Opposition about somehow this bill is not about the welfare of children, but look at the following objectives of Part 2: number one, to protect the health, safety, and wellbeing of children receiving early childhood education; and number two, to improve educational and developmental outcomes for those children. What is that about “other than looking after those children”?
New Zealand First supports the reforms that prioritise children’s wellbeing, while bringing clarity and confidence back to public regulation. I commend this bill to the House.
TOM RUTHERFORD (National—Bay of Plenty): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. It gives me great pleasure to speak in support of the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill. There are many, many positive changes being proposed in here that many of our colleagues have already articulated tonight, and I’m looking forward to it commencing itself to the select committee. I commend it to the House.
TANGI UTIKERE (Labour—Palmerston North): Kia orana, Madam Speaker. I didn’t think I’d get to my call so quickly, given the nature of this issue, but it is what it is. It’s a pleasure to take a call on this bill that touches on the education sector. It’s unfortunate that the nature of the content in the bill is something that doesn’t give me a lot of pleasure in having to talk about.
We heard from the Minister responsible for this bill that, you know, this is around basic rights being taken away of those that are involved in the operational functionality of early childhood sector operations—no, it’s not, actually. What’s really important is that tamariki, our learners, our ākonga are actually in safe learning environments. That is what is really important.
We’ve heard from my colleague the Hon Jan Tinetti around the fact that quality education is vital, it is important. We are well known all around the world for the way in which we not only treat those practitioners in that sector but the way in which we go about ensuring that our sectors are connected to the community and also connected to whānau, because that is absolutely important. That is what is vital.
I started out my training as a secondary school teacher, as an educator, and I cannot underscore the absolute value of making sure that when kids go to a learning environment, they get the best possible chance that they can in that environment. My hat goes off to all of those in our primary sector, to colleagues that were in the secondary sector, but also to those who do the hard yards in the early childhood education (ECE) sector as well, because teachers, regardless of where you are—whether you’re ECE, primary, secondary, or tertiary—will notice the huge difference if the learning environment in those ECE opportunities is such that it’s not actually giving young folk the best start in life.
I’m sure we’ve all had an opportunity as members of Parliament to go out into different learning environments, whether it be a kindergarten or an ECE, to see and to really understand the hard work that those practitioners, those teachers do on a daily basis, who go beyond what is expected of them on a standard day. I’ve had a chance to visit a number of Pacific ECEs, actually, operating around this country. The real passion that parents, uncles and aunties, grandparents, siblings, cousins, and others have around the real intimate nature that those ECE opportunities provide is something that cannot be taken for granted.
What this bill does is it basically just cuts through all of that. This is coming from someone who also holds the regulation portfolio. It is ironic, actually, that this is going to introduce a new Director of Regulation in the ECE sector. This is going to create more red tape into the sector. This is something that basically flies in the face of what is good legislation, but it is no surprise to me because, if we look at the track record of this associate education Minister, not only is he wanting to pursue these changes; he’s already said—as a colleague has already mentioned—that the changes to the lunches in schools programme is a problem. It is really something quite negative, where he’s blaming local government as a sector for the issues around school attendance and saying that they need to do more, when they are absolutely connected to their communities.
This sense that it is some form of dictatorship under an existing regime is absolute nonsense. What this is doing is sending a very strong and clear signal to those who are in the early childhood education sector at the moment that, actually, the work that you do, the understandings that you bring to the role that you undertake, is something that is not valued. This is a bill that is not sending any sense of valuation to those involved in in the sector.
It is disappointing that the Government seem to want to look at those who are working really hard in the ECE sector and say, “We don’t actually value the fact that you’re trained. We don’t value the fact that you’re qualified. We don’t value the fact that you’re skilled, and we certainly don’t value the fact that you are experienced.” If this Government did, they wouldn’t be looking to cut through many of the exciting opportunities, actually, that exist in our kōhanga, that exist in our kindergartens, that exist in any early childhood centre. This is something that we will continue oppose even through the select committee.
MILES ANDERSON (National—Waitaki): It’s a pleasure to rise this evening and talk about the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill, and I really look forward to the Education and Workforce Committee’s report back to the House. I commend this bill.
Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Kia ora, Madam Speaker. Thank you for that. Well, what’s this bill really about? This is a classic piece of ACT Party legislation, where they put in a series of kind of complicated Orwellian double-speak clauses. If we think about it, the cover is this Director of Regulation for early childhood education (ECE). Why we need to have a new Director of Regulation is beyond me, but, in fact, the ACT Party seems to like clipboard holders, so we’re going to have one, or probably more.
The interesting thing is that this director has, under the Act, a whole lot of duties, and it’s got statutorily independent functions and then functions which are not independent. If you go to new section 27C, inserted by clause 7, it makes it clear, as you’d expect: “In performing their statutorily independent functions, the Director of Regulation must act independently of the Minister”. Now, what’s the inverse of that? That when you are exercising any other function, you’re not independent of the Minister. That is to say, you’re to act under the direction of the Minister. Once again, this is the ACT Party reaching deep into the Public Service and seeking to direct it for its own political ends.
You see that it uses words which, on their face, sound relatively innocuous: take a “risk-based, proportionate, fair, and transparent approach”; avoid “imposing unnecessary costs on parents, caregivers, and service providers.” Now, that might be OK if you gave it to an independent public servant to interpret, but when you give it to an ACT Party Minister to interpret, it means “Do away with the rules”. When you come to dealing with complaints and issuing guidance on the regulatory approach and regulatory strategy, they are not statutorily independent; the Minister can direct the Director of Regulation as to how that should go about.
That is the invidious kind of intervention that the ACT Party has into our Public Service. Carrying out “proactive, regular, risk-based monitoring”—what does that mean? Well, what that means is that the Minister for early childhood education can set parameters as to what kind of ECEs will be subject to scrutiny at a particular level, and which kind will be subject to—shall we say—light-handed scrutiny. Perhaps the ones that are a part of a large network of ECE providers will be subject to lighter scrutiny than small, independent, and community-based providers. I don’t know, but that might be what we’d see. This here is just part of a programme of deregulating ECE and other important sectors for the benefit of a few. The suggestion that the safety of children is being put first, frankly, doesn’t lie easily in the mouth of the Minister who spoke at the first reading moments ago.
What we see here—and it is truly ironic that we have the Minister for Regulation with his Ministry for Regulation now speaking to having a Director of Regulation—is a proliferation of regulation positions. It’s absolutely outstanding, and Mr Hernandez’s point about it being a sea of yellow tape is a good one. I wish I’d thought of it. In fact, what the ACT Party are doing is just creating, time and again, bureaucracy upon bureaucracy, which are actually there to push their own ideological and political agenda. That they’re starting with our children—with our youngest children, our early childhood education—is deeply concerning.
Of course, when we see these new regulations come out, when we see them having less scrutiny of children’s welfare—of nappy changes, of medication being delivered, of how much they’ve eaten, the bottles they’ve had; all those things which, as parents, we know are important, that we want to know about—what’s going to happen then? That’s what we’re going to get from this kind of bill. I certainly don’t commend it.
RIMA NAKHLE (National—Takanini): I’m the final speaker in the first reading of the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill, and it’s really sad to hear the other side of the House making out as if there’s some really deep conspiracy theory going on. The functions of the Director of Regulation, as proposed, are: enforcing compliance by service providers, providing information to parents, carrying out risk-based monitoring of compliance by service providers, and helping improve the knowledge of parents. There’s no conspiracy theory. We commend this bill to the House.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.
Ayes 68
New Zealand National 49; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.
Noes 54
New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 15; Te Pāti Māori 5.
Motion agreed to.
Bill read a first time.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is, That the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill be considered by the Education and Workforce Committee.
Motion agreed to.
Bill referred to the Education and Workforce Committee.
Instruction to Education and Workforce Committee
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Associate Minister of Education): I move, That the Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill be reported to the House by four months and one day after the bill receives its first reading.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the motion be agreed to.
Ayes 68
New Zealand National 49; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.
Noes 54
New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 15; Te Pāti Māori 5.
Motion agreed to.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: I call on Government order of the day No. 4.
Hon David Seymour: Madam Speaker—
DEPUTY SPEAKER: Oh, just one second. [Clerk announces next item of business] I like prompt action, but with this, we’ve just got a few procedures to follow, so thank you.
Bills
Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill
First Reading
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Minister for Regulation) on behalf of the Minister of Internal Affairs: I think you’ve said enough, Madam Speaker! I present a legislative statement on the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.
Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: I move, That the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Governance and Administration Committee to consider the bill.
I’m pleased to be here today to present the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill. This is an omnibus bill which amends 23 different Acts, with the overarching purpose of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the regulatory systems overseen by the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA). The bill addresses a wide range of minor errors, gaps, and inconsistencies in legislation. It also addresses overly prescriptive and out-of-date provisions. While most of the legislation being amended falls within the internal affairs portfolio, amendments are also being made to legislation in the community and voluntary sector, local government, justice, health, and land information portfolios.
Internal affairs—and I’m reading this—is a big beast. It touches the lives of every New Zealander through the issuing of birth and death certificates, it preserves our country’s history through the National Library and Archives New Zealand, it deals with some of the darkest corners of the internet through countering child sex abuse material and terrorist material online, and it monitors our all-important fire and emergency service to ensure it is delivering for New Zealanders.
This bill makes a number of small but meaningful changes within Internal Affairs to make Kiwis’ lives easier and increase the efficiency of the Department of Internal Affairs. I would like to draw the House’s attention to just a few examples of these changes.
The bill makes a handful of changes to the Gambling Act that are intended to reduce harm and clarify expectations for gambling operators. One of these changes is limiting the sale of lottery tickets to those aged 18 or older, which aligns with the sale of other lottery products such as Instant Kiwi, or scratchies, as most people know them. While adults are allowed to gamble as they wish, I’ve been clear that I do not want to get children to gamble, and this amendment will introduce a consistent age restriction on Lotto tickets in line with other gambling products.
One of the most important roles that the Department of Internal Affairs plays is the monitoring and removal of objectionable content online, including child sex abuse material. I know that the department’s digital safety team work very hard to identify perpetrators and safeguard victims of this horrible crime. Currently, the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act is overly restrictive on how the department can share information about objectionable content with international law enforcement agencies. An amendment in this bill will allow for more direct information-sharing with our international partners. This will improve the coordination and efficiency in the department’s operations as they work across borders to counter the spread of this illegal content.
The bill also streamlines the process for organisations who want to offer RealMe to electronically verify the identity of their customers and staff. Many of us will be familiar with RealMe, the digital identity service used by over 1.5 million New Zealanders for activities such as opening a bank account or signing up with an education provider. Currently, organisations that are deemed acceptable to use the service and that pass all the requirements for privacy and security must wait for Cabinet to sign them off in a process that can take weeks or months. This bill proposes that organisations that meet all the requirements can be granted access by the Department of Internal Affairs, rather than waiting for politicians to sign them off.
The bill also makes a few simple and common-sense amendments such as allowing people to cancel their passports if their personal data has been compromised and allowing a sperm donor’s personal information to be updated in the case of their death so that offspring are aware of any possible hereditary diseases, and it modernises language such as updating the term “child pornography” to “child sexual abuse material” to better reflect the appropriate terms used by law enforcement agencies.
I could stand here all day and tell you about all the changes that this bill is making, but with 23 different changes that would be excessive. I will conclude by saying that this bill makes a range of mostly small but valuable amendments to the statute book. It will help ensure that the DIA continues to operate very well in the modern environment and that the legislation it oversees remains fit for purpose.
I’d like to thank the people who have worked on this, both within the Department of Internal Affairs and within Minister van Velden’s office—particularly Abigail Johnson, who has worked as her adviser on all of this very detailed work. It is very easy to make a new rule or a regulation; to remove them and make people’s lives easier and better through more seamless and logical and common-sense interactions with Government—that is actually harder work than is commonly appreciated. With that, I commend this bill to the House.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to.
Hon BARBARA EDMONDS (Labour—Mana): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a call on the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill, and, as the Minister did say, generally, regulatory systems bills—well, actually, he didn’t say “regulatory systems bills”, but he said that this bill makes small and minor technical changes, which is quite the convention when it comes to regulatory systems bills. Generally, they are omnibus bills, and they make small tweaks to different pieces of legislation—as the Minister said, over 20 pieces of legislation. It’s because of that reason that Labour stands to support this bill for the first reading.
However, there are some issues, though, that I do want to raise, which we will probably traverse during the select committee with officials, which we can do in confidence, because there are some little flags for me, particularly because this is supposed to be a regulatory systems bill that makes only minor and technical changes. There are some changes in this bill on which I think officials should provide, if the Minister agrees to having officials as advisers—that the select committee should be aware of.
As the Minister has said, there are some good changes in this. One change is to restrict the purchase of all lottery products to under 18-year-olds. So, for example, back in—
Hon David Seymour: Over-18-year-olds.
Hon BARBARA EDMONDS: Over-18-year-olds—thank you very much, Minister. So, as most people understand, when it’s Father’s Day, Christmas, you know, Lotto has those big draws, and sometimes children buy lottery tickets for their grandparents, or for their father for Father’s Day. So that is—
Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Well, that would be nice!
Hon BARBARA EDMONDS: That would be nice—well, my children are very nice to me. But, ultimately, it now restricts a person who is under 18 from being able to buy those tickets, and so they’re going to have to ask their grandparents or an adult who is over 18 to purchase them on their behalf, and still write a nice little card. I get cards, which is also a good thing.
There is also a good change to the Passport Act 1992—in particular, the change to the issuance of emergency travel documents. Sometimes, as much as you want your systems to work, and—I know this from having been a Minister of Internal Affairs—there are incidents where the system doesn’t actually produce the passport in a certain period. This particular provision allows the department to issue emergency travel documents, so that is a good change.
However, there were a couple of red flags which I did raise, which I think that members of the select committee—I’m sure it’s the Governance and Administration Committee—should actually traverse a bit better with officials. One is the fire service levy changes. It says in the regulatory impact statement (RIS) that the only people who—sorry. Actually, it wasn’t in the regulatory impact statement, and so, first of all, that’s an issue. It was not in the regulatory impact statement. But in the disclosure statement, however, it says that the only people who were consulted as part of those changes were some insurance companies and insurance brokers, and so I think it’d be good to have some submissions from the general public and other interested parties as to the impact of the changes to the fire service levies within this bill.
There’s also another change in the regulatory impact statement, and that’s on page 10, in relation to amending the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act. It’s around the information sharing of historical information with genealogy websites. My concern is that there is advice that has been redacted within the regulatory impact statement for the reason that it is to protect the free and frank advice of Ministers and officials. If it’s enough to redact that advice, then why is it in this bill? That is a good question that the select committee should be asking officials at the time when it comes through the select committee.
The second thing, as well, which is another red flag for me, is that on page 17 of the regulatory impact statement, there are a number of changes to the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act. A number of pieces of the advice that are in the RIS have been redacted as well, and it’s quite a serious reason as to why they’re redacted: it’s under section 6C of the Official Information Act. Section 6C, basically, means you can withhold this because either it is sensitive for the country or it’s sensitive for other particular reasons. If it’s so sensitive, why is it in a regulatory systems impact bill? That’s a fair enough question. It should be something that the select committee should be asking officials, and it can be done as secret evidence. They should be asking officials about why this information and advice has been redacted. What is the problem statement that the Government is trying to fix, because at the moment you can’t really go off much, based on the advice that’s in the bill.
The Labour Party, I say again, does support this bill through first reading. There are some flags that have been raised as part of this, and I question why they’re in this particular bill, but I’m sure the select committee will traverse that.
FRANCISCO HERNANDEZ (Green): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a call on the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill. Like my colleagues in the Labour Party, we will also be supporting this bill, with some important caveats that they’ve raised.
We do note that this bill is an omnibus bill that does make a lot of changes to legislation—around 20—and a lot of them are fairly non-controversial, such as the changes to the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021. Those changes there relate to overseas divorce or dissolution, name changes, and historical information, and there are some small changes to the functions of the registrar-general. I think the overseas divorce or dissolution is particularly important, because as Aotearoa moves towards a sort of more multicultural society with an increasing proportion of the population having been born overseas, it’s important to make sure that we have provisions related to that.
The bill also makes changes to the Charities Act, such as clarifying functions regarding searching the Charities Register, requiring information to be published online regarding the charities review authority, and revoking some regulations. That level of transparency is quite important, so we support those changes in that regard.
It also makes changes to the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993 and associated regulations, such as removing consultation with the Minister of Internal Affairs and the Chief Censor, removing references to the Office of Film and Literature Classification, and changing some of the terminology around that.
It also makes changes around the Fire and Emergency New Zealand Act 2017. The changes in that section will remove the definitions of “personal property” and “residential land”, replace the definition of “residential property”, and add new definitions, and the bill also updates regulations relating to the Fire and Emergency New Zealand levy and payable rate calculation.
One of the other changes that the bill makes is to the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act, which requires providers to accept updated information from donors and allows the registrar-general to tell providers the number of donor offspring births for a particular donor.
I could go on—I’ve got notes for days here—but I think I’ve talked long enough. Thanks for the time.
TOM RUTHERFORD (National—Bay of Plenty): It gives me great pleasure, again, to speak on the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill. I’m looking forward to consideration of this at the select committee, and therefore I commend it to the House.
Dr DAVID WILSON (NZ First): Madam Speaker, fa‘afetai lava. I stand on behalf of New Zealand First to support the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill. New Zealand First is backing this bill because it is a classic case of good change. It does not attempt to invent anything; it simply makes the present system function more effectively. This bill is about good management. It’s about making sure our laws are not only written clearly but are also functioning clearly and effectively. New Zealand First is happy to support it, and we recommend this bill to the House.
MILES ANDERSON (National—Waitaki): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m very thrilled to take a call on the Regulatory Systems (Internal Affairs) Amendment Bill in its first reading. Like most of these omnibus bills, it is tidying up bits and pieces of legislation that need to be tidied up, and so, with that, I’ll be very pleased to commend this bill to the House.
DEPUTY SPEAKER: This debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. on 12 August 2025.
Debate interrupted.
The House adjourned at 5.58 p.m.