Thursday, 26 March 2026

Start of Sitting Day

Thursday, 26 March 2026

The Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

Karakia/Prayers

GREG O'CONNOR (Assistant Speaker) (14:00): Almighty God, we give thanks for the blessings which have been bestowed on us. Laying aside all personal interests, we acknowledge the King and pray for guidance in our deliberations that we may conduct the affairs of this House with wisdom, justice, mercy, and humility for the welfare and the peace of New Zealand. Amen.

Business of the House

Business Statement

Hon SIMEON BROWN (Minister of Health) (14:01): on behalf of the Leader of the House: Next week, the House will consider the remaining stages of the Racing Industry (Closure of Greyhound Racing Industry) Amendment Bill and the first reading of the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Improving Alcohol Regulation) Amendment Bill. Wednesday will be a members’ day.

TANGI UTIKERE (Labour—Palmerston North) (14:01): I thank the acting Leader of the House for his points there. Can I ask him, as it is the lead-up to Easter next week, is it the Government’s intention to utilise urgency, as seems to be common practice, in order to progress the legislative agenda?

Hon SIMEON BROWN (Minister of Health) (14:01): on behalf of the Leader of the House: I wish the member opposite a very happy Easter in advance. This Government is a very busy Government. I wish all members all the best for Easter next week.

Personal Explanations

Question No. 4 to Minister, 12 March

Hon TAMA POTAKA (Minister for Māori Development) (14:01): I seek leave to make a personal explanation to correct an answer I gave during oral questions on 12 March 2026.

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

Hon TAMA POTAKA: On 12 March 2026, I stated, “We have seen nearly 5,500 Māori come off the jobseeker benefit in the quarter ending September 2025.” I should have said, “We have seen nearly 5,500 Māori come off the jobseeker into work for the quarter ending September 2025.”

SPEAKER: Well, I’m sure that little information for the House is fascinating to the member, but it was clearly using the House for overt political purposes, which is not appropriate.

Hon Willie Jackson: Ask him to apologise, Mr Speaker.

SPEAKER: No, no—he’s not as good at it as you.

Presentation

Petitions

SPEAKER (14:02): Two petitions have been delivered to the Clerk for presentation.

CLERK (14:02):

Petition of Elspeth Baker-Vevers requesting that the House initiate an inquiry into ADHD-related systemic harm and establish a National ADHD Strategy and Annual Funding Plan, and

petition of Keely Kalirai Cairns requesting that the House urge the Government to include Hindi as a language option for NCEA and ensure that resources are available for teaching it at primary, intermediate, and secondary schools.

SPEAKER: Those petitions stand referred to the Petitions Committee.

Papers

SPEAKER (14:03): A paper has been delivered for presentation.

CLERK (14:03): Government response to the petition of Asjid Javed.

SPEAKER: That petition is published under the authority of the House.

Select Committee Reports

SPEAKER (14:03): A select committee report has been delivered for presentation.

CLERK (14:03): Report of the Finance and Expenditure Committee on the Report of the Ombudsman, OIA timeliness obligations: Compliance and practice in The Treasury Te Tai Ōhanga.

SPEAKER: The report is tabled for consideration. No bills have been introduced.

Oral Questions to Ministers

Finance

Question No. 1

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram) (14:03) to the Minister of Finance: Will the update on New Zealand’s four fuel alert levels tomorrow include a change in alert levels, or will it be an explainer of what the levels are?

Hon NICOLA WILLIS (Minister of Finance) (14:04): The latter. We will not be changing the fuel response phase overnight, although it is the case that within a response phase, we will continue to take additional actions, some of which we will detail tomorrow. Tomorrow, we will also provide more information about the criteria we will use to assess when a change in the response phase is required. As the member would expect, these will include things like changes in the amount of fuel in the country.

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Will the alert level framework allow for different alert levels to be applied to diesel, petrol, and jet fuel?

Hon NICOLA WILLIS: Yes.

Hon Dr Megan Woods: How much warning will New Zealanders get before moving along the alert level framework?

Hon NICOLA WILLIS: The member asks a very good question, because what we are determined to do is to ensure that people aren’t in a situation where things change suddenly overnight in ways that aren’t expected. Instead, what we are intending to have is a framework in which we are transparent about the assessment criteria, where we are clear with New Zealanders when an assessment is taking place, and then we announce the decision of what that assessment is. Part of that assessment will include engagement with industry.

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Should New Zealanders expect a smooth, gradual progression through the alert levels, or could we jump through them quickly or skip levels given the current trajectory of some fuel stocks?

Hon NICOLA WILLIS: Our goal is to avoid ever getting to response phase 3 or 4. These are envisaged in the National Fuel Plan as the point at which prioritisation of fuel would be required. Our goal is to be doing enough to source the supply of fuel internationally so that does not become necessary, and, by taking sufficient actions in response phases 1 and 2, that we wouldn’t reach phase 3 or 4. But in direct answer to the member’s question, I would not expect us to be skipping through the response phases.

Hon Dr Megan Woods: What groups has she met with to consult on how the fuel alert levels will operate?

Hon NICOLA WILLIS: I’ve directed my officials at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, together with officials at the Ministry of Transport and officials at the Ministry for Primary Industries, to undertake extensive engagement with industry, both fuel companies themselves and fuel users, and a range of industry-affected entities. This morning, together with the Minister of Local Government, we briefed mayors and their staff from local government. I have individually met or had phone calls with a number of chief executives and other industry representatives.

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Has Shane Jones discussed Crown funding, including using the surplus in the petroleum or engine fuel monitoring levy fund, to increase diesel storage capacity at Marsden Point more quickly than would normally be the case?

Hon NICOLA WILLIS: I’m not responsible for which discussions Shane Jones may or may not have had. If the member wants to ask Shane Jones a question, she can.

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Is economist Brad Olsen right to warn New Zealanders that the crunch on diesel seems to be coming closer quicker, and starts to become worrying, given the importance of diesel to the productive economy?

Hon NICOLA WILLIS: We’re not sure that Brad Olsen has calculated his figures correctly, in that he isn’t able to see the ships that are on the way and the amount of diesel that is in them, and therefore what is required. Critically, what New Zealanders need to understand is that we agreed that keeping a focus on diesel is very important, because obviously that is the fuel that so much of our industry and productive economy leans on and requires. It’s also the case that that is the fuel that, internationally, has been most disrupted by events in the Middle East. And it is the fuel which has, according to all of the studies that have done, the least elastic response to price, which is to say that people don’t tend to substitute it in the way that they do petrol—when the petrol price goes higher, people don’t tend to use as much, whereas diesel users do not have as much choice. All of that, taken together, means we have a real focus on diesel. Something I would highlight for everyone is that in New Zealand, we legally require every company that is importing fuel into the country to have a minimum stockholding obligation (MSO) of at least 21 days’ worth of diesel. What that means is that they face fines of millions of dollars if they breach that requirement. That is intended to provide safety and a buffer, and we would expect to be notified if there was any risk of those MSOs being breached, and we have not had any such notification.

Hon Shane Jones: Can the Minister confirm that the strategy that she refers to will reflect the lessons learnt from the COVID experience and avoid arbitrarily introducing restrictions on New Zealanders?

Hon Willie Jackson: What a stupid question!

Hon Dr Megan Woods: You were sitting at the Cabinet table, Shane!

Hon NICOLA WILLIS: Our goal, obviously, is that we recognise that fuel is very important to our economy—

Hon Shane Jones: Jab! Jab! COVID failure!

Hon NICOLA WILLIS: —and so taking steps now—

Hon Dr Megan Woods: You were sitting at the Cabinet table!

Hon Willie Jackson: You forgot where you were, Jonesy!

SPEAKER: Just a moment. This is a very important matter that troubles a lot of people throughout the country. We will hear answers in silence.

Hon NICOLA WILLIS: We recognise that fuel is vital to driving our economy, supporting jobs and incomes, so that is why we are taking a precautionary and prudent approach now, because it is the case that if we were to reach response phase 3 or 4, then the potential disruption to New Zealanders and industry could be significant. While we are doing everything we can to prevent getting to that phase, in the meantime we are conscious that we have the gift of time to work through what that prioritisation would look like, and we have taken an approach that says we will iterate that together with industry. Noting that, in the past, when arbitrary classifications have been offered by Government, there has been very good feedback and engagement from others who have said, “Actually, that needs to change.” So when we offer our indicative prioritisation, we do expect there to be feedback from a range of stakeholders, and we will be listening to business and industry so that we get it right.

Social Development and Employment

Question No. 2

HANA-RAWHITI MAIPI-CLARKE (Te Pāti Māori—Hauraki-Waikato) (14:10) to the Minister for Social Development and Employment: What funding increases, if any, can food bank and food rescue organisations expect to receive in Budget 2026 to support the one in three households who are struggling to put kai on the table, as reported by the Hunger Monitor, during rising fuel price pressures?

Hon PENNY SIMMONDS (Associate Minister for Social Development and Employment) (14:11) on behalf of the Minister for Social Development and Employment: We know that many families are being hit hard by the global fuel price shock, that is why are delivering targeted support for low and middle income working parents, by increasing the in-work tax credit. I’m unable to comment on Budget decisions prior to the Budget.

Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: Does she accept that rising fuel prices will have a big impact on food prices, and, if so, will the Government be offering any additional financial support to beneficiaries, superannuants, and students so that they can continue to afford kai?

Hon PENNY SIMMONDS: Obviously, the duration of the crisis in the Middle East will determine the impact and the level of impact, but I would note that beneficiaries and superannuants, on 1 April, will have an increase in assistance. I also note that the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) has support available to individuals in hardship that need assistance to meet immediate needs such as food. So there is assistance coming on 1 April, and there is the ongoing assistance that MSD provides.

Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke: If the Government cannot offer any financial support for low-income whānau, can they commit to a 165 percent funding boost for food banks to make up for the 165 percent increase in people receiving food support since 2020?

Hon PENNY SIMMONDS: I did, in fact, in the previous question, note that additional assistance would be available on 1 April—that the Consumers Price Index increase will occur for the beneficiaries, and the superannuation increase will also occur. So there are increases about to occur. However, I note also that MSD still has that ongoing support available for those individuals in hardship that need assistance, and that does include for food.

Education

Question No. 3

CARL BATES (National—Whanganui) (14:13) to the Minister of Education: What announcement has she made regarding New Zealand’s national qualification?

Hon ERICA STANFORD (Minister of Education) (14:14): Today, I announced the first major step in rebuilding New Zealand’s senior secondary qualification, with Cabinet agreeing to major structural decisions to replace NCEA with a new system that is clear, consistent across schools, and internationally comparable. The new qualification across years 12 and 13, and the stand-alone foundational award in literacy and numeracy, will be phased from 2028 with a foundational award; 2029 for the year 12 qualification; and 2030 for year 13. This is about restoring confidence in our national qualification and ensuring it supports deeper, knowledge-rich learning so every student can succeed.

Carl Bates: Why is the Government replacing NCEA?

Hon ERICA STANFORD: Well, for too long the current system has struggled to provide clarity and confidence. NCEA has become increasingly fragmented and inconsistent across schools, and too often students have been able to accumulate credits without building the knowledge and skills they need for the future. It’s not fair on our young people, and it does not give parents, employers, or tertiary providers the confidence that they should have in a school qualification. We’re putting that right by building a system with high expectations, consistency, and student achievement at the core.

Carl Bates: How will the curriculum drive what is being assessed in the new curriculum?

Hon ERICA STANFORD: As we speak, 86 writing groups of writers and subject experts schools across the country are creating a senior secondary curriculum in 175 subject areas. This national curriculum will be internationally benchmarked and will drive what is assessed in our new national qualification. All students will receive deep learning in nationally consistent subjects and ensure they are set up for success beyond school.

Carl Bates: What feedback has the Government received from the sector about these changes?

Hon ERICA STANFORD: This work has been shaped by extensive sector engagement; more than 10,000 New Zealanders took part in consultation, alongside detailed input from a principal advisory group and sector experts. There was clear support for structural change to our national qualification that is simpler, more consistent, and better aligned to what students need for the future. A principal wrote to me following this morning’s announcement to say, “Well done and thank you for being courageous and following through on this. It will make a huge difference and the positive generational shift” [Interruption]—the email; the text isn’t quite right, but it basically says that it will make a huge difference—

Hon Member: Correct it!

Hon ERICA STANFORD: —and a positive generational shift that we’ve been looking for. I would be very careful, the Opposition, making accusations of which principal that came from. We have amazing principals across New Zealand who are all doing an exceptional job and they all deserve our respect.

Hon Ginny Andersen: Will her next NCEA announcement have any of the detail that we were all hoping to see in this NCEA announcement?

Hon ERICA STANFORD: We are taking the time to get the details right. Consultation—[Interruption]

SPEAKER: There’s not much point asking a question if you don’t want to hear the answer.

Hon ERICA STANFORD: Genuine consultation is about making sure you take time to get the detail right, and properly engaging in the complex interplay of technical decisions that need to be taken. We’ve put together a technical advisory group to work alongside our professional advisory group, to take this very complex set of decisions. It’s this good process that’s required to get this right. Perhaps if this good process had been followed the last time NCEA was refreshed, it wouldn’t have been such an unmitigated disaster—take note.

Māori Development

Question No. 4

Hon WILLIE JACKSON (Labour) (14:18) to the Minister for Māori Development: Does the Minister stand by his Government’s track record on Māori employment, and, if so, why?

Hon TAMA POTAKA (Minister for Māori Development) (14:18): Yes, I stand by the Government’s track record on Māori employment, particularly given that between 5,000 and 6,000 Māori came off the jobseeker benefit and into work in the quarter ending September 2025—a fantastic result, in my view.

Hon Willie Jackson: Does he expect the Māori unemployment rate to increase even further, given the announcement of the proposed closure of food-processing plants, including the announced closure of McCain’s in Hastings?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: As this House knows, we have been absolutely focused on enabling a number of fast-track Act projects throughout the country, whether or not they are geothermal, aquaculture, property developments, or others. Some of those fast-track projects—in fact, nearly 25 of the 149 in Schedule 2 of that Act—are either Māori-partnered or -led. It’s absolutely marvellous that Ministers—

Hon Shane Jones: Hear, hear!

Hon TAMA POTAKA: —exemplary Ministers like Minister Jones—have announced matters such as the—

Hon Shane Jones: Mine! Mine!

Hon TAMA POTAKA: —geothermal strategy. Of course, there is a range of other quarrying and mining initiatives that employ Māori.

Hon Willie Jackson: Point of order, Mr Speaker. [Interruption]

SPEAKER: Points of order are heard in silence.

Hon Willie Jackson: Thank you, Mr Speaker. The Minister hasn’t even addressed the question. The question was specific: does he expect the Māori unemployment rate to increase even further, given the announcement of the proposed closure of food-processing plants, including the announced closure of McCain’s in Hastings? He hasn’t addressed it even slightly.

SPEAKER: Well, the question would be: can he address it? I’ve got to sit here and listen—I’ve heard his answer, and certainly what was going through my head was how on earth could he know what the ethnic or racial mix of the employment profile for those particular factories are? He can’t answer it. Have you got another supplementary?

Hon Willie Jackson: Absolutely—thank you, Mr Speaker. To the Minister: what support, if any, will be provided to Māori in South Auckland, where Māori unemployment is at 20.6 percent—almost four times the national average—under this Minister’s watch?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: As this House has heard on several occasions from across different Ministers, there are a number of initiatives that the Ministers in this Government and this Parliament, in fact, have encouraged to ensure that there are more jobs created throughout Māori communities and a range of other New Zealand communities, as well, whether or not that’s through the fast-track processes; through some support around the Regional Infrastructure Fund led by Minister Jones; or through some of the mahi that, ultimately, Minister Stanford has been leading around education to create a whole range of talented, bright, young Māori graduates from schools. They may seek work and build enterprise in New Zealand, or they may go overseas and seek work and build enterprise overseas—and where has the old Willie Jackson gone, when 25 years ago, as an Alliance MP, he came to New York City and saw my overseas dreams and was absolutely encouraging of that.

Hon Willie Jackson: How—[Interruption]

SPEAKER: Just a minute, Mr Jackson. All right.

Hon Willie Jackson: Thank you, Mr Speaker. To the Minister: how will current policies address the needs of Māori in West Auckland, where unemployment sits at 17.3 percent?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: You see, that’s the challenge that the member opposite has on a range of matters: he thinks that the Government is the solution to everything. On this side of the House, we don’t. We think that it is to enable interest rates and inflation rates to come down, to stop the wasteful spending that was curated under previous Governments, and to ensure that the business and enterprise regulatory framework is available to create jobs and not just handouts.

Hon Willie Jackson: Point of order, Mr Speaker. Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would like to ask again: how did the Minister address that question? The question was specific: how will the current policy address the needs of Māori in West Auckland, where unemployment sits at 17.3 percent? Surely, he hasn’t addressed the question.

SPEAKER: Well, he listed some Government policies. Have you got another supplementary?

Hon Willie Jackson: I’ve got plenty of supplementaries, Mr Speaker.

SPEAKER: Well, that’s good.

Hon Willie Jackson: But to the—I still don’t understand that response, but kei te pai, Mr Speaker. To—

SPEAKER: Well, hang on a minute—just a minute. Mr Jackson, you won’t be carrying on if you want to challenge like that. I don’t judge the questions—I do initially with the primaries, but not so much the supplementaries—and I certainly have no responsibility for the answers. But I can work out whether or not there has been a reasonable addressing of the question. That’s what I’m required to do.

Hon Willie Jackson: Thank you, Mr Speaker. To the Minister: what does he say to the Hastings mayor, Wendy Schollum, who said she is “devastated” about the closure of McCain’s and “desperately concerned” about the families who will be impacted?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: No one in this House wants to see large industries shut down. That’s why we’ve been absolutely focused on making sure that we build the infrastructure that this country requires to move and to, basically, build for the future. That’s why I expect members opposite to support all our infrastructure activities around new schools and classrooms across the country; around new roads of national significance; and around a whole range of economic initiatives that this Government is undertaking, including the mahi that Minister Jones has been leading in the regional infrastructure space, like mussel factories and spat factories.

Hon Willie Jackson: How can he keep claiming the Government is delivering for Māori when the clearest delivery so far has been more Māori out of work and things getting worse, not better, under this Minister’s watch?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: On Friday, I had the great opportunity to go with the hard-working East Coast MP, Dana Kirkpatrick, to a wonderful place called Kawerau. It’s a place that welcomes industry, it’s a place that welcomes business, and it’s a place that welcomes hard work. The geothermal facility opened there by Obayashi Corporation, alongside Eastland Generation and Tūwharetoa mai Kawerau ki te Tai, absolutely exemplifies Māori development creating jobs, creating business, and actually moving the country forward. That’s the sort of mahi that this Government is into and wants to support in the future.

Hon David Seymour: Can the Minister confirm that sensible economic management is important and beneficial no matter your ethnic background; that if you have a Government that spends carefully, that manages the economy well, that’s good for everybody, but if you have a Government that splashes the cash and drives inflation and interest rates and puts us all into debt, that’s bad for Māori as much as anyone else?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: Absolutely. It’s absolutely warming that the members of this coalition Government want to see all Kiwis, including Māori, succeed.

Health

Question No. 5

Dr HAMISH CAMPBELL (National—Ilam) (14:25) to the Minister of Health: What recent announcements has he made about preparing the healthcare system for winter?

Hon SIMEON BROWN (Minister of Health) (14:25): Last week, I announced that Health New Zealand will invest an additional $25 million to prepare our healthcare system for higher demand over the busy winter months by boosting hospital capacity and increasing staffing. This important investment in preparation for winter will deliver up to 378 additional front-line staff, 71 extra winter hospital beds, and up to 567 short-stay beds in aged residential care to free up hospital capacity. The plan focuses on four key priorities: prevention, strengthening primary care, improving emergency department (ED) and hospital flow, and supporting timely discharge. By planning early, expanding capacity, and supporting our front-line teams, we are providing the tools needed to better manage increased demand during winter and deliver the care New Zealanders need.

Dr Hamish Campbell: How will this investment support improved performance in our emergency departments?

Hon SIMEON BROWN: We know that following the reintroduction of our health targets, Kiwis are spending less time in EDs across the country, with the latest quarterly results for October to December 2025 showing 74.2 percent of patients being admitted, discharged, or transferred within 6 hours, up from 72.1 percent at the same time the year before. However, we know there is still more work to be done, particularly as we head into the winter months. Our hospitals will face increased demand during winter due to a growing aging population. By increasing capacity and front-line staffing, we’re helping to prepare the healthcare system for this.

Dr Hamish Campbell: What role does prevention have in improving performance over winter?

Hon SIMEON BROWN: The plan to prepare our hospitals for winter ensures a stronger focus on prevention. We know that prevention is key to reducing pressure on our hospitals. That’s why this plan is prioritising more flu vaccination opportunities, targeted support for older people and those at higher risk, access to anti-virals, stronger vaccination support in aged care, and easier access to multiple vaccinations in a single visit. This is alongside our work to strengthen primary care by launching a 24/7 digital consult service and expanding urgent and after-hours care clinics up and down the country.

Dr Hamish Campbell: What else is the Government doing to ensure hospitals can better manage demand over winter?

Hon SIMEON BROWN: Alongside increasing capacity in our hospitals, this plan to prepare our hospitals for winter places a strong emphasis on improving patient flow and supporting timely discharge. That includes expanding Hospital in the Home services so more patients can recover safely at home, increasing the availability of transitional and aged residential care beds, and strengthening allied health support to help patients return home sooner. We’re also improving weekend discharge processes and ensuring better coordination across the system so beds are available to those who need them the most. I want to thank our hard-working doctors, nurses, and allied professionals in our hospitals, who work incredibly hard each and every day. This plan is to support them and the incredible work they do.

Housing

Question No. 6

TAMATHA PAUL (Green—Wellington Central) (14:28) to the Minister of Housing: Is he concerned about the report from Cotality that showed the average rent-to-income ratio is as high as 28 percent; if not, why not?

Hon TAMA POTAKA (Associate Minister of Housing) (14:29) on behalf of the Minister of Housing: I am advised that rent-to-income ratios were 27.9 percent in quarter four 2025, according to Cotality, a reduction from 28.2 percent in quarter four 2023. The measure has stayed relatively flat during our time in Government. I’m also advised that under the previous Government, the measure grew from 26.1 percent to 28.2 percent in 2023. This matches with other measures that prove that under this Government, rents are plainly more affordable for many. The social housing register is down, the share of first-home buyers in the market was at record levels at the end of last year, and we have far less tamariki and whānau in emergency housing. The member may also read the rest of the Cotality report, which shows that housing affordability has improved to its best level in almost a decade due to stable housing prices, rising wages, and falling mortgage rates. It says that in quarter four last year, the house-price-to-income ratio was 7.2, down from above 10 in 2021. This Government doesn’t just talk about it; we deliver on housing affordability.

Tamatha Paul: What does he think would be an affordable average rent-to-income ratio?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: What we know is that housing affordability and rent affordability has come down, whether or not it’s come down from 3.1 percent in the year to January 2026 according to TradeMe data or a range of other data and evidence-based facts that show that rents have either stabilised or are coming down slightly.

Tamatha Paul: Is the Government making progress on rental affordability when renters in places like Rotorua, Gisborne, and Tauranga are spending more that 30 percent of their income on rents?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: What we know is that a range of data points show that credible measures of rent price changes show that rents are flat, whether or not it’s the stock measure, which is the most well-known measure for rental affordability, which shows rents are just under 1 percent in the year to January 2026, which is lower than inflation. What we won’t do—what we definitely won’t do—is start going around putting rent controls on everyone.

Tamatha Paul: What evidence does he have that rent controls would do anything other than put a limit on rents that New Zealanders already can’t afford?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: How many cities need to try and fail at solving their rental challenges through rent controls for the Greens to learn? Rent controls don’t work. The Greens’ housing plan, in general, would make the housing market in New Zealand much worse.

SPEAKER: No, no. Just talk about the Government’s answer.

Hon TAMA POTAKA: OK. The member claims to believe in evidence-based policy, but, in fact, the evidence shows that rents have stabilised or come down over the last couple of years. Actually, we’re really proud of not only doing that but seeing the social housing register come down and also getting rid of motel generation, birthed long-term by the opposites, of course.

Tamatha Paul: Does he have confidence that his Government’s policies are working to lower house prices when Treasury is forecasting house prices to increase between 6 to 7 percent a year for the next four years?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: What I am confident about is under the leadership of the Minister of Housing, Chris Bishop; and the Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, we’ve seen the average per square metre build rate of Kāinga Ora come down, unlike the previous group.

Tamatha Paul: What policies does the Government have to permanently lower rents besides engineering a recession and scaring 200 New Zealanders out of the country every single day?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: That comes from a very dark and dank place, that comment—very dingy. What we’re all about is making sure we’ve got the basics sorted, infrastructure in place, better energy prices, e mihi ana ki a koe e te Matua Tararā [I congratulate you, Dalmatian gentleman], and all the necessary steps and phases to ensure that, actually, housing is affordable. Guess what! That facts say so. The evidence says so.

Social Development and Employment

Question No. 7

Hon WILLOW-JEAN PRIME (Labour) (14:33) to the Minister for Social Development and Employment: How many people, if any, receiving benefits or superannuation have children in their care and are also in paid employment?

Hon PENNY SIMMONDS (Associate Minister for Social Development and Employment) (14:33) on behalf of the Minister for Social Development and Employment: I can advise that there are more than 47,000 working-age people who receive a main benefit from the Ministry of Social Development who have children in their care and who are receiving some other form of income.

Hon Willow-Jean Prime: How many people who receive superannuation or a benefit have children in their care and who are also in paid employment will get the $50 a week fuel relief?

Hon PENNY SIMMONDS: We acknowledge the impact of the global fuel price shock on families and households and businesses right across New Zealand. The $50 increase in the in-work tax credit is aimed at low and middle income working families with dependent children. We know that around 143,000 families will receive the full $50 weekly increase. That will include 48 percent of children in material hardship. The policy is targeted, timely, and temporary to minimise inflation.

Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Has she informed the Minister of Finance that there are many families on a benefit while working and caring for children, given the Minister of Finance’s statement that “I’d also note, working families face the obligation to get to and from work each day. Beneficiaries do not face that obligation.”?

Hon PENNY SIMMONDS: Well, on behalf of the Minister, I’m sure the Minister of Finance is very aware of that, and we are very, very careful to ensure that what we are doing is targeted, timely, and temporary to minimise inflationary pressures. We have learnt from the excesses of COVID—

Hon Shane Jones: COVID. Fail—fail.

Hon PENNY SIMMONDS: —and we are ensuring that we are supporting our low and middle income working families with dependent children.

Hon Shane Jones: Feral—feral.

SPEAKER: That’s enough. Just a moment.

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Well, that’s actually—he’s calling out—

SPEAKER: I beg your pardon.

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Don’t worry. I’ll talk to you later.

SPEAKER: I’m certainly not worried.

Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Did she advocate for additional support for struggling sole parents, disabled parents, parents of disabled children, and grandparents raising grandchildren who are receiving superannuation or a benefit but are also working part time?

Hon PENNY SIMMONDS: As I noted in one of my earlier answers, approximately 1.5 million New Zealanders will receive an increase in their assistance from 1 April through the annual general adjustment.

Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Does she accept that the 1 April changes will not be enough for people receiving superannuation or benefits to adapt to the fuel price increases, as they are based on previous inflation and don’t take into account this current pain?

Hon PENNY SIMMONDS: We are acknowledging that the impact of the global fuel price shock is going to be on families, on households, on businesses, and on industries right across New Zealand. There will be an increase in 1 April for beneficiaries and superannuitants. Our targeted, temporary, and timely $50 tax credit increase is targeted at middle income working families with dependent children.

Hon Willow-Jean Prime: Why, when the whole country continues to struggle with the cost of living—now exacerbated by the fuel crisis—did the Government not ensure that financial support go to the most at risk of poverty to get to and from work, retain their employment, and to get their kids to school?

Hon PENNY SIMMONDS: We have learnt, from the past excesses of the COVID responses, that if the response is not targeted, timely, and temporary, the whole of New Zealand will suffer with increased inflation.

Housing

Question No. 8

RIMA NAKHLE (National—Takanini) (14:38) to the Associate Minister of Housing: What recent announcements has he made about improving outcomes for rentals and landlords?

Hon TAMA POTAKA (Associate Minister of Housing) (14:38): The Government has announced proposals to develop new legislation to establish a light-touch regulatory regime to address issues with property managers within New Zealand’s rental market. The proposed regime will introduce minimal standards for conduct and competence, provide effective complaints and disciplinary processes, and support better dispute resolution but not be over the top. This supports the Government’s priority of improving the rental market to make it easier to be a landlord and easier to be a tenant. I look forward to introducing a bill to the House and welcome the one and only thing that I saw in the Greens’ housing plan, which suggests—

SPEAKER: No, no. That’s enough. Thank you very much.

Hon TAMA POTAKA: —creating a national register of these property managers. Thank you.

SPEAKER: Thank you very much. We’ll move straight away to question No. 9.

Housing

Question No. 9

Ricardo Menéndez March: To the Associate Minister of Housing: Does he accept the findings of the Auditor-General’s report into emergency housing; if so, will he give any direction to the Ministry—[Interruption]

SPEAKER: No, just a moment. Questions are heard in silence. Please start again, Mr Menéndez March.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green) (14:39) to the Associate Minister of Housing: Does he accept the findings of the Auditor-General’s report into emergency housing; if so, will he give any direction to the Ministry of Social Development to change their practices?

Hon TAMA POTAKA (Associate Minister of Housing) (14:40): I welcome improvement ideas from the Office of the Auditor-General and want to tautoko the Auditor-General’s acknowledgement of the progress made to date. There are now clear pathways and systems for those in genuine and immediate need to access housing assistance, not just hurling people into emergency hotels like on Ulster Street in Hamilton. More so than ever before, agencies are collaborating to identify, address, and prioritise these needs. Tēnā tātou.

Ricardo Menéndez March: How many applications for emergency housing were unfairly declined for “unreasonably causing or contributing to their immediate emergency housing need”?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: It is noted that in the Auditor-General’s report, there was a call for more consistency around the declines, but the vast majority of people who apply for emergency housing either get emergency housing—between 60 percent and two-thirds of applicants—or they receive some sort of housing assistance. I welcome further inquiry into that.

Ricardo Menéndez March: Does he accept that in the third quarter of 2025 in Auckland, for example, the decline rate for emergency housing applications reached up to 63 percent?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: I’d recommend, for a specific quarter in a specific town and a specific decline rate, that that matter is put through the written parliamentary questions process. But what I will say is this: the vast majority of people who seek some sort of housing assistance through the Ministry of Social Development get it, and we have seen an absolute reduction in the number of kids and whānau living in emergency housing to be in social housing, in private housing, or in transitional housing. I think that’s something that the Green Party and others should acknowledge us for.

Ricardo Menéndez March: Is he confident that in our biggest city in the country, most emergency housing applications are approved?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: As we know, emergency housing is a last resort for those with genuine need for short-term assistance and temporary accommodation in most towns and cities in New Zealand. It is not a first resort—what it was between 2017 and 2023. That’s why we’ve seen a huge decrease in the number of whānau who are living in the dark, dank, dingy conditions in places like Fenton Street in Rotorua and emergency hotels throughout the country. The vast majority of applicants for emergency housing get supported in some way, shape, or form—and for that, I am very thankful.

Ricardo Menéndez March: Will he, following the Auditor-General’s report into emergency housing, restore discretion to case managers so that they can consider whether declining an emergency housing application will worsen someone’s situation?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: The member opposite should take some time to actually read the eligibility criteria for emergency housing before such questions. But what I will say again, and repeat for this House, is that the vast majority of people who seek emergency housing get supported, and I’m very proud to see the number of people on the social housing register decline massively after quadrupling under the previous Government.

Ricardo Menéndez March: Is it accurate to say that the vast majority of people in Auckland are getting access to emergency housing when they apply for it?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: Again, that is a matter very specific to a town—that I recommend the member sends a written parliamentary question for. But what I will say is this: hundreds—nay, thousands—of Aucklanders in the central area of Auckland receive some sort of housing assistance, whether or not it’s emergency housing, social housing, living in places like Te Mātāwai and HomeGround. And, actually, we will continue to provide that level of support.

Prime Minister

Question No. 10

SIMON COURT (ACT) (14:44) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by all of the Government’s statements and actions?

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR (Deputy Prime Minister) (14:44) on behalf of the Prime Minister: Yes, absolutely—particularly the stance that the Government is taking on education and school attendance as we approach a challenge around fuel supply. In the past when there’s been disruptions to normal life, Governments have been, in our view, far too quick to put education down the totem pole of priorities in our society. We are very clear that no matter what challenges we may face, we will aways put the education of our children at the top of our priorities—

Hon Member: Not their lunch.

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: —because that is what we are investing in: the future. I just had someone say, “Not their lunch.” Well, actually, we are delivering a healthy school lunch programme at half the price that they did and we are having the same percentage of lunches sent back, which suggests the quality is the same for half the price. If they had thought like that a little bit more when they were in Government, maybe there’d be a bit more money to go around in New Zealand right now, but, sadly, they didn’t, and that’s why we’ve got to keep them over there and these good people over there—so it doesn’t happen to New Zealanders’ finances again.

SPEAKER: That is a perfect example of what happens when there is an interjection called so deliberately across the House.

Simon Court: How is the Government preparing for potential downstream impacts of the Middle East conflict?

Hon Willie Jackson: Doing nothing.

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: We’ve just heard from Willie Jackson that we’re doing nothing, and I can only imagine that he is relating what he did when he was in Government. As Shakespeare once said, “Measuring the minds of others by his own.”, and in Willie Jackson’s case you don’t need a very long ruler to make that measurement. This Government is taking the situation much more seriously than Willie Jackson has taken anything in his entire life. We start with the supply of fuel, and when it comes to the supply, what we are doing is ensuring that we are in touch with our friends around the world, we’re monitoring the shipments, and we’re looking at regulatory barriers. We’ve already seen Shane Jones change the regulations around fuel so we have more options and access, and we’re ensuring that New Zealanders will have a supply-side response. Then there is demand. There is a possibility that we will have to restrict the demand within New Zealand, but we are not catastrophising. We are talking to people behind the scenes.

Hon Priyanca Radhakrishnan: Details.

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: We’re getting the details right, as we just heard from one of the Labour members say—who I can’t remember the name of—and we are ensuring that we have a plan ready to go if we need it and that we’re prepared so we don’t need it. It is far better to do the work behind the scenes so you’ve got a plan, than jump up to the podium without a plan, because we all saw how that ended, didn’t we.

Simon Court: What did the Government consider when making decisions on providing financial support for low to middle income working families?

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: On behalf of the Prime Minister, we considered a number of important factors. The number one factor is that we need to ensure that Government behaviour does not add to inflation that we may see through this oil shock, because we’ve seen what can happen when the Government indiscriminately splashes the cash, increases inflation, increases interest rates, and leads to a recession that costs people their jobs. When we saw the Fitch rating on the weekend, we recognised that the dashboard lights are flashing and we must make careful use of taxpayer money. That’s why the relief we are giving will come out of the Government’s Budget that we had already selected years ago. Second of all, we wanted to help people who are in the greatest need so we said that this is for people who are on the lower end of the income scale and who have children and who work, because those are the people that most often have to drive, that have the greatest need, and we linked it to petrol prices so that if petrol prices come back down, we stop spending the money. That’s how you do responsible policy making. Listen and learn, guys.

SPEAKER: I’ll just remind the acting Prime Minister that—

Hon Willie Jackson: Useless, useless, useless.

SPEAKER: I think I take offence at that. You’re obviously directing it at the Chair. I just remind the acting Prime Minister that it’s a Government question, so concise answers would be preferable.

Simon Court: Is the Prime Minister saying that the Government will stick to its present course of trying to bring the books back to health?

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: Thank you for that question. On behalf of the Prime Minister, that is absolutely the point. We have a Minister of Finance who is strongly supported by her Cabinet colleagues to repair the damage to this Government’s finances that was done in the years before we were elected. And that means that we set a $2.4 billion a year operating allowance and then we keep to it, because we’ve seen the alternative—a Minister of Finance who set an operating allowance of, if I remember, $3.5 billion, but not only was it bigger, he couldn’t keep to it.

SPEAKER: Good. Yep.

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: He was, as I remember at the time—

SPEAKER: Just bring it back to the Government.

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: —fiscally incontinent. Our new Minister of Finance does not have that problem.

Simon Court: Has the Prime Minister seen any comments from Government spokespeople about the impact that the Middle East conflict might have on education and school attendance?

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: Yes, I have. On behalf of the Prime Minister, from my Deputy Prime Minister, who is responsible for Government policy on school attendance, I saw him pointing out that, in recent days, attendance has been as high as 91 percent of students at school. That is a very good figure, and there’s a salutary lesson in this: that there is always the temptation for people to take an event like somebody not showing up and to try and view it through the lens of a perceived crisis and then catastrophise it into a moral panic. This is how these things get going, especially if a Government lets them. We are sticking to the facts that New Zealanders have been prioritising getting their children to school, because the most important determinant of our country’s future is how educated the next generation is, and the most important determinant of that is how many children go to school each day.

Tākuta Ferris: Does he continue to have confidence in the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries given the significant public push-back over proposed fisheries reforms to remove minimum size limits on fish such as snapper, kingfish, and many others?

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: On behalf of the Prime Minister, I absolutely have confidence in the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries because he has listened to feedback and changed course. He’s listened to what people out there are saying and actually adapted his course to do the right thing. Now, I would say to that member that the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries is setting a very good example, because I suspect he gets a bit of feedback from the people of Te Tai Tokerau and he should listen, and when he changes course, he’ll be hearing them say, “Bye, bye, bye, bye.” [Interruption]

Tākuta Ferris: Supplementary from Te Tai Tonga—

SPEAKER: Just wait for the House to calm itself down.

Tākuta Ferris: Will he rule out further supporting the fisheries reforms and commit to returning to open consultation, including customary and recreational fishers?

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: On behalf of the Prime Minister, it would be almost impossible for any Minister to rule out further supporting the fisheries reforms because that would amount to saying that the Government would never change any fishing policy at all in the future. Furthermore, that’s contradicted by the second part of the member’s question where he said we should consult on changing fisheries policy, which suggests he actually does want the fisheries reforms to be made. The good news is that the bill is before the House and will soon be before a select committee, which he may know is a form of open consultation where the public can have their say. It’s been a real honour to answer what’s probably his last ever question. Bye, bye, bye!

Pacific Peoples

Question No. 11

Hon JENNY SALESA (Labour—Panmure-Ōtāhuhu) (14:53) to the Minister for Pacific Peoples: Does he stand by his statement that “this Government is committed to improving the lives of all New Zealanders, including our Pacific communities”; if so, how many more Pasifika are now unemployed compared to December 2023?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Defence) (14:54) on behalf of the Minister for Pacific Peoples: Yes, and in respect to the second part of the question, I’m advised by Stats NZ that the number of unemployed Pacific people in New Zealand rose by 13,000 people compared with December 2023, but the positive news is that from December 2024 to December 2025, in Auckland alone, Pasifika employment rose by 7,000 people.

Hon Jenny Salesa: Is it improving the lives of Pasifika communities when an additional 5,300 Pasifika are unemployed in Auckland just in the last year alone?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I’m sorry, but that doesn’t concur with the figures I have been given by Stats NZ, which show there are now 7,000 more people of Pasifika ethnicity who are employed in Auckland, from December 2024 to December 2025.

Hon Jenny Salesa: Is it improving the lives of Pacific communities when, on his watch, 21 percent of young Pasifika—more than 17,000—are not in education, employment, or training?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: What I think that people need to remember, of course, is that there was the same issue prior to this Government, except that it was worse because, under the extensive and overdone lockdowns in Auckland, the home of most Pasifika people in New Zealand, many young people were denied their education. In fact, I recall, as the member of Parliament for a particular area, an electorate where heavy Pacific numbers are, having a discussion with a school principal in December 2021 who told me that attendance rates were a mere 17 percent. I look at what I hear today about attendance rates and I can say that things are going to get a lot better.

Hon Jenny Salesa: Is it correct that the Game On programme will deliver a maximum of 57 employment opportunities instead of the 1,300 people helped a year by the programme he slashed $22 million from?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I think the member needs to get with the programme. The programme is about gaming, and many young people, including Pasifika people, are absolutely excited about the prospects, not only the prospects but the real jobs and incredibly great pay, that come with the gaming industry. New Zealand, as the member should know, is actually doing very well in this area. I am very excited about the million dollars over four years into the Game On initiative, with industry partners matching this funding, and I know this will mean the starting careers for these young people are between $65,000 and $80,000 to start. I actually reckon that’s pretty good to start.

Hon Jenny Salesa: Has he kept his promise that this Government would reduce the cost of living, given that beef mince is up by 23 percent and white bread is up by 57 percent since just last year?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: My experience of the Minister is that he always keeps his promises. He’s a very a decent human being, and frankly, I only wish that everyone would recognise that instead of asking such stupidly loaded questions.

Hon Jenny Salesa: Does he consider it a failure that, on his watch, 13,000 more Pasifika are now unemployed, 10,000 more Pasifika children are in hardship, 17,000 young Pasifika are not in education, employment, or training, and more and more families are struggling to pay the bills each week?

Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Absolutely not. In fact, as we’ve just explained today, there is so much that is being done in terms of Pasifika employment, but also in training young people. What we do know is that we had a situation, that we inherited, of massive inflation, up to over 7 percent. Debt—just the interest rates alone that the Minister of Finance is having to find money for—of $11 billion a year extra every single year; basically, borrowed money paying for borrowed money. It shows what happened with the COVID overspend and the complete wastage of young people’s education, particularly in South Auckland. That member should know better, because I know the MP for Papakura knows what’s what on this.

Mental Health

Question No. 12

DAVID MacLEOD (National—New Plymouth) (14:59) to the Minister for Mental Health: What recent progress has been made against the Government’s mental health targets?

Hon MATT DOOCEY (Minister for Mental Health) (14:59): More good news for mental health. Our mental health plan is delivering faster access to support, more front-line workers, and a better crisis response. The latest quarterly data shows we’ve reduced wait times and are growing the mental health workforce. Eighty-three percent of people are being seen within one week for primary mental health and addiction support; nearly 82 percent are being seen within three weeks for specialist support—both exceeding the target of 80 percent. When someone takes the brave step of reaching out, we’re making sure that support is there.

David MacLeod: What is the Minister doing to address workforce shortages in mental health and addiction services?

Hon MATT DOOCEY: I’ve always been open that one of the biggest barriers to timely mental health and addiction support is too many workforce vacancies. The latest quarterly data shows we’ve exceeded our target for training 500 mental health and addiction workers a year, with 514 in training over the past year, up from 457 in the previous year. This result includes occupational therapists, social workers, registered nurses, clinical psychology interns, and registrar trainees for psychiatry. Workforce should never be a barrier to accessing timely mental health and addiction support. That’s why we’ve grown the front-line workforce by over 11 percent since coming to office.

David MacLeod: What progress has been made in growing the mental health and addiction workforce, particularly in psychology and psychiatry training?

Hon MATT DOOCEY: One of my top priorities is to grow the mental health and addiction workforce. We’ve increased the number entering training in clinical psychology and psychiatry, which will grow both workforces. We’ve funded 74 clinical psychology interns, exceeding the 2025 target of 60. We’ve also seen a record uptake in psychiatry, with 48 first-year registrars entering training last year, up from 33 in 2024. That’s a 50 percent increase. Growing the mental health workforce is a priority for this Government, and we are delivering that.

David MacLeod: How is the Government prioritising prevention and early intervention in mental health?

Hon MATT DOOCEY: One of my top priorities is strengthening prevention and early intervention. For the first time, the Government’s target of 25 percent of the ring-fenced mental health and addiction funding has been invested in prevention and early intervention. We know the difference prevention can make. By getting in early, we can help prevent issues from escalating. Mental health support has traditionally intervened at a crisis point and far too late. We’re changing that. We’re investing in early intervention to prevent mental crises, not just respond to them, and what great news for a Thursday afternoon.

SPEAKER: That concludes oral questions. We’ll take 30 seconds while people who have to go to other business leave the House quietly, without conversations on the way.

Bills

Taxation (Annual Rates for 2025–26, Compliance Simplification, and Remedial Measures) Bill

Legislative Statement

Hon CHRIS PENK (Minister for Building and Construction) (15:03): on behalf of the Minister of Revenue: I present a legislative statement on the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2025–26, Compliance Simplification, and Remedial Measures) Bill.

SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Third Reading

Hon CHRIS PENK (Minister for Building and Construction) (15:03): on behalf of the Minister of Revenue: I move, That the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2025–26, Compliance Simplification, and Remedial Measures) Bill be now read a third time.

This Government is moving quickly to support low to middle income working families impacted by rising fuel prices. An Amendment Paper to this bill was released yesterday to ensure that the in-work tax credit can be increased by 1 April. We are implementing a temporary $50 per week increase to the in-work tax credit for one year or until the price of 91 octane petrol drops below $3 a litre for four consecutive weeks. This temporary boost will deliver support to 143,000 working families who are under significant cost of living pressure without making inflation worse nor driving up Government debt.

The policy is carefully targeted to families in the squeezed middle. That’s parents who are working hard for a living, are not eligible for main benefits, and yet have modest household incomes with which to support their children.

Looking ahead further, the bill also includes changes that will make it easier for New Zealand businesses to access capital and talent. New Zealand’s thin capitalisation rules have been revised to ensure that they will not act as a barrier to attracting overseas investment into New Zealand’s infrastructure projects. The thin capitalisation rules are an integrity measure to guard against foreign investors allocating excessive debt to their New Zealand investments to reduce the amount of tax paid. However, the rules may be too restrictive in certain circumstances and could be deterring foreign investment into New Zealand infrastructure, which can sometimes support a higher level of commercial debt than is possible with other business activities. To address this issue, we are proposing changes to ensure that qualifying infrastructure projects and businesses can take on third-party debt beyond the general thin capitalisation thresholds without a thin capitalisation income adjustment, as long as certain criteria are met. This will help make investment in projects to build a new wind or solar farm or to upgrade the electricity distribution networks a more attractive prospect to foreign investors.

Stuart Smith: That’s great news.

Hon CHRIS PENK: We will benefit from that. As my colleague and friend, Stuart Smith, says, “great news”, and, indeed very timely, I would note. It’s a worthy addition to the bill therefore, which already contains measures to promote growth by supporting companies trying to attract and retain talent.

We’re revising the foreign investment fund rules to include a new revenue account method. This will allow new migrants and returning New Zealanders to be able to use a new taxation method that taxes realised returns rather than estimated gains.

We’re helping start-ups and listed companies by improving the rules for employee scare schemes—share schemes; we don’t want scare schemes, not even by 31 October being Halloween—by providing more flexibility on when tax must be paid.

We have changed the rules for digital nomads, allowing overseas visitors working in New Zealand to stay longer before being taxed—that was a subject of much discussion in the committee of the whole House stage last night and, I think, if I may say, an enjoyable discussion indeed.

This bill also has a strong focus on New Zealand households and businesses by simplifying and encouraging compliance with tax obligations—for example, it introduces an income tax exemption for income from a household sale of excess electricity back to the grid. From 1 April, individuals will not be required to file a return nor pay any tax in relation to this income. This is because, in many cases, the compliance costs of filing a return were likely to outweigh any tax revenue owing.

Many taxpayers make use of tax pooling as a way to meet their tax obligations. We want to see if an extension of time to use tax pooling for tax income debt can have positive outcomes for compliance. The bill includes a proposal to trial extending the period for using tax pooling to pay income tax debt for a defined group of taxpayers. This will test whether a tax pooling period improves income tax debt collection and, if successful, will inform whether this should become a permanent feature of the tax pooling regime.

Other measures focus on improving compliance. One area of concern is the low level of compliance among student loan borrowers who are based overseas. Borrowers living overseas have interest applied to their loans. Over time, this can drive significant debt accumulation. In some cases, interest owing has become so large that these borrowers disengage from Inland Revenue and their repayment obligations altogether. The bill grants the Commissioner of Inland Revenue a limited discretion to increase flexibility around negotiated settlements. This discretion would be exercised on a case by case basis—as the phrase “discretion” would imply—when it is equitable and its use will depend on the borrower’s situation. To qualify for any relief, the loan must be paid in full, either in a lump-sum payment or through a short-term instalment arrangement.

And, as is standard for a taxation bill, there are a number of remedial amendments to help ensure the tax system keeps pace with technological developments and changing business models. Collectively, these changes support the Government’s aspirations to lift the economic prospects for all New Zealanders. I am very pleased, therefore, to reach the end of this speech and commend the bill to the House.

SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour) (15:09): When this bill was presented to the House—six months ago, I suppose—the Labour Party, at that stage, did not support this bill, and that position to not support the bill continued through the second reading of this bill. At the committee stage and at this reading, we have changed our position on this bill, and we will now be supporting it.

The reasons for opposing it are there still there, and I do intend to traverse them, but they have been outweighed by the Amendment Paper that was presented to the House yesterday, which puts in place the Government’s package for giving some limited relief to working families in respect of the fuel crisis at the moment. While we think things could have been done better or done differently, we are not going to oppose getting those extra dollars into families’ pockets. That is our reason for changing our position on this bill.

We had a good discussion of this bill at the committee of the whole House stage. It was an interesting discussion, especially today when James Meager, who, as I understand it, is the Minister for hunting, shooting, fishing, and all those sorts of things, was in the chair, and the Hon Matt Doocey, who I understand is the Minister for Mental Health, was in the chair. These are not tax specialists, but they nevertheless attempted to grapple with the bill as well as they could. It did make the committee of the whole House stage a bit difficult this morning.

However, there were some interesting things to discuss. In terms of the fuel package, even though we support it, there is a question of who doesn’t get it. There are, I think, some real issues around people who are on benefits, and in work, who are supporting children who will not be eligible for this relief package. Now, that’s a common enough situation—we think there’s about 47,000 families who might be in that position. I think the Government needs to pay attention to that particular gap. If families are on benefits and also in work and supporting children, they are surely feeling the pinch right now. One of the most difficult examples of this will be grandparents raising grandchildren, and they won’t be eligible for this. That is a problem with this package, and I urge the Government to find some way of addressing that. That would be a very important thing to do at this time.

As I said, overall, we will support it, but we would like to see the Government do more and better there, especially for our very lowest-income families. Even beneficiaries who are not in work, many, many of them are obliged to attend appointments and obliged to be going into Work and Income or whatever it is these days—to be engaging with the commitments that they are supposed to meet thanks to receiving a benefit—but they will not be getting any extra assistance to get into those appointments. The Government has told us, well, they get an annual increase in their benefit on 1 April, but, of course, that is a backwards-looking increase, and it certainly is not going to help to deal with the real pressures of fuel prices at the moment.

There was a measure that arrived on the Table just this week, an Amendment Paper, that had two major items in it. One was a set of rules around thin capitalisation in infrastructure. We had discussed some of this at the Finance and Expenditure Committee, but only at a high policy level. What we had not discussed was what it was going to apply to. What this change does is it makes it easier for inbound investment into New Zealand—it makes it easier for overseas investors to invest in New Zealand infrastructure and get a tax deduction for their interest costs.

Let’s look at what kind of infrastructure investment is allowed there. New section FE 7C(8), lists the qualifying infrastructure—the things that we’re happy to have inwards-bound investment for and to give tax deductions for. If there is inwards-bound investment, we expect that they are making a return on it. Energy infrastructure: that sounds like a good idea, provided it’s limited to renewables and non-fossil fuel energy. Water infrastructure: that’s a little bit worrying; we’ve always had water infrastructure publicly owned in this country, and it’s a bit worrying to find out that private investors might be involved in it. Telecommunications infrastructure: that’s all right. Waste infrastructure: yep, you can do that.

And then social infrastructure: this would enable private investment into public assets and people getting a tax deduction for private investment into hospitals, into schools, into libraries, into prisons. Since when have we wanted private investment in our prisons? Since when do we want people to be able to earn a profit out of our prisons? When we imprison someone, we take away their freedom; it is one of the most serious powers that a State has. One of the only ways that we can ensure we do that fairly and justly is by ensuring that those prisons are well run, but we know the history of private investment in prisons. I think that’s a shameful measure sitting in this bill.

The other shameful measure sitting in this bill, and the reason that we opposed it at first reading, is the provisions around information sharing. There’s about three sets of provisions here which all go to this issue around what information is collected and held by Inland Revenue and where it is shared. On the one hand, this Government has repealed, is repealing, section 17GB of the Tax Administration Act, the section which allows Inland Revenue to collect information for policy purposes—that’s one change.

Another change is that it’s repealing the provisions that allow Inland Revenue to collect information about trusts. In both cases, the Minister in the chair during the committee of the whole House stage asserted that the reason for doing this was to do around the privacy of tax information, but, on the other hand, this bill gives Inland Revenue a whole new power to share the information it holds with other Government agencies—to share the information it holds with Government agencies such as the Ministry for Ethnic Communities, such as Police, such as the department of social welfare. Tax information is traditionally very tightly protected, and Inland Revenue holds it very tightly. There are guardrails around how that information may be accessed and used.

You could see in the report that was presented—I’m not sure if it was today or a previous day—in a public hearing with the Commissioner of Inland Revenue, the commissioner went through how they protect taxpayers’ information within Inland Revenue. He stressed that, over the past five years, there have been, I think, 107 investigations into allegations of misuse of information by Inland Revenue staff, and those allegations were investigated very seriously, and there were 75 dismissals because people had inappropriately accessed information. They take their role of protecting taxpayers’ information very, very seriously, but how do we know that this information, when it is sent out to other agencies, will be protected so tightly? This is a very risky change for the privacy of tax information.

On the one hand, they assert that it’s important not to collect information, because of the issues around the privacy of information, and, on the other hand—on the other hand—they don’t care about the privacy of information when it gets spread out to other Government departments. This is a worrying change. Something that really worries me about it is the extent to which it could be used for phishing investigations by other Government departments.

I’m disappointed that New Zealand First, who was, in previous years, so strong in protecting the privacy of taxpayers’ information, simply could not do it this time. I think they need to have a look at their history.

There were some really interesting changes around student loans; I, alas, don’t have time to talk about them. It’s a mixed measure. It’s probably a good enough situation, but a good enough solution in a space that is hard to find good solutions.

The rest of the bill—good tax measures; we’re happy to support them. We are deeply, deeply disappointed and upset by the information-sharing provisions and the way they go against each other; worried about that infrastructure provision around prisons; but, on the whole, because of the fuel package, we are supporting this bill.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green—Rongotai) (15:19): At the committee stage, we did support two Government Amendment Papers. One of them was a bit of a surprise, and that was the changes around student loan debts so that for overseas New Zealanders who have racked up huge amounts of interest, there can be some incentives for them to be able to pay back their loans without having to face that huge burden of interest debt. I think this is something that my colleague Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan and others in the Green Party have been campaigning for for a long time, so it was good to see that provision in one of the Amendment Papers earlier today.

The other Amendment Paper that we supported is the $50 a week payment. However, we do know, and my colleague Ricardo Menéndez March has been raising this quite a bit in the House, that more than half of the families in Aotearoa living in material hardship—this is people with children who cannot make ends meet, and some of them will be working—will not receive this payment, and they’re the ones who need it most. So I think it’s disingenuous of the Government to claim that they are looking after those who need the most help when, in fact, more than half of the families in material hardship are not eligible for this payment, and they will be suffering.

There was a story on RNZ, some of you may have heard, about a single mother who works part-time, who also receives the benefit, and who’s therefore not eligible to receive this payment and is struggling because of higher fuel costs. Of course, we haven’t yet seen those higher fuel costs flow into higher costs for food, which is very likely to happen in the short to medium term. So it’s not just about filling up your car or your diesel ute or whatever; the shortage of diesel and the impacts on diesel prices are going to flow through to higher prices for food and other goods, in the next few weeks.

The Government has taken this extremely short-term, inadequate step to try to help people. This is after two years of policies that have demonstrably made our economy more reliant on fossil fuels and on diesel. We could have spent the last two years decarbonising transport, which also makes us more energy-independent and means we have a more energy-efficient transport system, which would mean we’d be in a better position to face this current fuel crisis, as well as having less pollution in our air, as well as helping meet our climate targets.

So because of the irresponsible and ideological approach of Luxon’s Government, which has, against all of the economic evidence, sought to make us more reliant on fossil fuels, our country is going to suffer more, and here they’ve just given us this very inadequate approach that’s only going to help about 150,000 families in New Zealand. So there’s a whole lot of families who are doing it tough who are going to be doing it even tougher.

The Green Party put on the table—our co-leaders, Marama Davidson and Chlöe Swarbrick—on Monday this week a proposal to the Government to offer our votes in support of some measures that would go much further and actually make a much bigger difference to the entire country, because if we fund free public transport, for example, that not only helps the people who can take public transport; it reduces the amount of fuel we’re consuming now, which puts us in a better position as the supplies dwindle, and they are dwindling. That offer is still on the table for a Government that would actually take some useful measures, but so far it seems that Luxon’s Government is going to completely fail to meet the moment—they’ve already demonstrated no comprehension of the benefits of—

SPEAKER: I just remind the member that we don’t just use surnames; we use the member’s full name or their title—one of the two.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s Government is failing to meet the moment, has demonstrated no real understanding of the benefits to Aotearoa New Zealand of decarbonising and making us more independent, less reliant on fossil fuels, and having a transport system that’s more energy efficient.

Also, not calling out the genocide in Gaza, not calling out the extremely chaotic and destructive actions of the United States and Israel—these unprovoked attacks that have now resulted in the fuel crisis that the whole world’s facing—and not seeing the opportunities to create a fair society by reforming the tax system, and so that’s another thing that’s in this bill, which is a deliberate change to repeal new section 17GB and the disclosures around trust.

Let’s be honest about what this is about: this is about secrecy for the ultra-wealthy. They know that if the public realise just how unbalanced our economy is, and that that wealth is being concentrated in the hands of a very tiny percentage—we’re talking 1 percent, or maybe less than the 1 percent: the 0.1 percent—who are, at this point, mathematically accumulating wealth at the expense of ordinary New Zealanders whose living standards are falling. Their standards are falling, because once people have a certain amount of accumulated wealth, all they can do is buy up assets, and that makes housing less affordable for ordinary working New Zealanders.

Living standards are falling: this is not just happening in Aotearoa New Zealand; it’s happening in the United Kingdom. That’s why a wealth tax is so popular now in the United Kingdom. It’s happening in the United States. It has accelerated from the 1980s, and it’s totally unsustainable. It’s not good for people, it’s not good for the economy, it’s not good even for the environment and climate change, because we see the ultra-wealthy are responsible for funding fascism, firstly, and politicians who are going to continually bring us into wars which cause more carbon emissions; but it’s also the ultra-wealthy who are creating far more carbon emissions than most people, and so we need to do something about inequality.

Members opposite may claim to care about equality of opportunity, but unless they address the structural inequities in our economy through progressive taxation, then there is no equality of opportunity. The ultra-wealthy will continue to accumulate wealth at the expense of ordinary working New Zealanders, and that is the reality. And, unfortunately, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his coalition partners are totally ideologically opposed to doing anything practical about this because either they don’t understand it—which is entirely possible: so far, it’s pretty obvious that for a lot of people on the Government benches, you know, math is not their strong point; I’m being very diplomatic here. Not everybody is, you know, mathematically inclined in their reasoning, and it’s obvious that the members in the Government are not mathematically inclined. So maybe they don’t understand it or maybe they represent the interests of the ultra-rich.

You know, they own more properties than the average New Zealander, and they have, therefore, a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. And, of course, they get donations from the ultra-wealthy. So, you know, there are all these different reasons why the Christopher Luxon Government is failing to meet the moment, failing to take action on the things that would actually help New Zealanders in this incredibly challenging time.

So this is why the Green Party is not going to support this bill, because it does nothing to address the issues that—well, it does some very, very minor things to address issues. I maybe neglected to mention the changes around domestic solar. Of course we support that—of course. But overall, this bill is not taking action that we need to have a fair society. It’s not taking the action we need to make sure that children are not living in poverty, to make sure that a huge number of New Zealanders who are suffering because of the fuel crisis are going to be able to make ends meet. We continue to see an irresponsible Government who has taken irresponsible policy actions from the very beginning of taking power, which now puts us in a more difficult situation as a country.

We have enough—we have enough wealth and resources in Aotearoa to end child poverty. We could do that. It’s a political decision not to do that. It is true that we do not have enough petrol and diesel, and we are probably going to run out of diesel in the next few weeks. The Government has not demonstrated any awareness of this. We’ll see in the next coming few weeks if they actually take some action to conserve fuel, but we could be conserving a lot more fuel, and that would be beneficial for us economically, but obviously the last two years, with a failed policy, have set us up for a much more difficult time during this time of fuel crisis.

The Green Party has a suite of very practical, evidence-based solutions, but most of all, we have the values of most New Zealanders because we know we can end child poverty, we can reduce pollution, and we can have better lives.

LAURA McCLURE (ACT) (15:29): It’s quite ironic listening to the other side of the House talking about sensible spending. I have to laugh, because over on this side of the House, I support this bill, and I support this bill because we are giving targeted relief to families, to the middle class, the mums, the dads, that get up every day, drive to work to put food on the table, drop their kids off at school, and they, over the other side, are complaining because we are not borrowing any money to do this. In fact, we’re not borrowing a cent to provide this relief at all. The other side of the House would rather just absolutely waste away your taxpayer money and borrow money to put us into significant debt. It’s absolutely ironic. I support this bill and commend it to the House.

Dr DAVID WILSON (NZ First) (15:30): I rise to speak to this bill on behalf of New Zealand First. We welcome the solar amendments for the sale of excess energy back to the grid. We think this is very good. We also welcome making it easier for inward investors and digital nomads to enter New Zealand, and we welcome the Minister’s relief for working families, hard-working families, in the lower to middle income brackets during this energy crisis.

Now, I move to something that perhaps was a little more, shall we say, controversial through the debates, the repeal of section 17GB. I also take note of the comment about this side of the House not being so literate in terms of mathematics, so I’ll pull out a figure for you: the top 70 percent of income revenue in New Zealand comes from the 20 percent of those in the higher income brackets. I hope you can remember those numbers.

The other one that I brought out was the famous Thomas Sowell quote that in the 1920s in the US they taxed the rich people at 76 percent and wondered why they weren’t getting much income. When they reduced it to 24 percent, the income skyrocketed. There’s some interest in there. I’m not rising away from anything that the Hon Deborah Russell did not affirm in her debate around this when she quoted Mr Nixon. I was quite impressed with that. I wondered where this was going. There seems to be some kind of interesting debate there following that contribution—particularly in her ruminations on the widening of the tax base and how, sometimes, the inverse relationship between income and tax revenue is right there in front of us.

None the less, I thought the crowning moment of her contribution was when she started to ruminate on whether or not we should reduce the corporate tax rate. That’s very interesting, coming from the other side of the House. Thank you very much for that contribution. On that note, I commend this bill to the House.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: This is a split call—Francisco Hernandez.

FRANCISCO HERNANDEZ (Green) (15:32): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I thought I would have a little bit more time to draft my speech while the two previous speakers were speaking, but, unfortunately, that is not the case.

Hon James Meager: Think on your feet, young man!

FRANCISCO HERNANDEZ: I’ll just have to think on my feet, young man, as Mr Meager said, even though I think we’re the exact same age.

I want to start with some positives about the bill. First, I want to echo the praise that my colleague the Hon Julie Anne Genter has already given around the limited relief around the overseas student loan borrowing. I want to commend, in particular, the efforts led by my colleague Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan and the campaign that the Global Greens ran around this issue. It shows that when you get together and when you work with people, you can make a difference, even in a limited form. The second thing that I want to praise—and it’s something that my colleague the Hon Julie Anne Genter rightfully praised—was the income exemption from the renewable energy generation. That is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing in this crisis. I acknowledge that this bill was drafted well before the crisis and that it wasn’t intended to attend to respond to this crisis, but it is exactly the sort of measure that the Government should have been doing more of on this bill.

The sorts of measures that stimulate renewable energy generation and lessen and break our dependence on fossil fuels are really necessary. We’ve heard from colleagues that keeping Marsden Point open would have affected the fuel crisis here, but, in fact, countries, like the United States, that are net exporters of oil are being affected by this crisis and are having their fuel prices increase as well, because fossil fuel is a global commodity in traded in global markets, whereas local renewable energy generation, such as this bill is encouraging through the renewable energy income tax exemption, is traded locally and means it’s exempt from the global oil shocks that we are seeing, sadly, today.

I want to turn to another aspect of the bill, which is the fossil fuel relief package that the Government passed as part of this package. Look, it’s better than nothing. It’s a far cry from what the Greens called for at the start of the week on Monday when my co-leaders, the Hon Marama Davidson and Chlöe Swarbrick, called for universal public transport, which would have aided in fuel conservation and also really helped households quite a bit. The second aspect that they called for was for a universal payment for everyone who’s making under $70,000. It’s, unfortunately, a half measure because less than half of the children in households in material poverty are actually going to get this relief because more than half—52 percent—are in benefit households. We do know that 150,000 families that do get this are a drop in the bucket in terms of the 1.8 million households all around New Zealand. We know that the people who didn’t get this are some of the most vulnerable and the communities most affected by this crisis.

My colleague Ricardo Menéndez March called it the “crushed bottom” yesterday. The crushed bottom continues to be crushed even further by this Government. I was speaking to a student earlier in the week. She’s a PhD student at the University of Otago, and she’s a single mum. She has to commute to Otago to do her lessons. She’s not getting any cent of this relief package, and people like her are struggling. People like her students and people on the benefit aren’t getting this money, and this Government hasn’t done anything for them.

I want to conclude by talking about what could have been done better. I’ve already spoken about the need for the universal public transport that the Greens were offering and also making the universal payment to those earning under $70,000, but it could have been funded through a windfall profit tax according to a study done. Unfortunately, this bill removes the measures that would have allowed IRD to get the information so that they could charge a windfall profit tax. Thank you.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Cameron Brewer—you were lucky you moved on time.

CAMERON BREWER (National—Upper Harbour) (15:37): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s with great pleasure to stand for this third reading of our annual administrative taxation bill. I want to put in highlights the piece in the legislative statement from the Hon Simon Watts that points to the in-work tax credit. As we know, this bill proposes and will seal the temporary increase of the rate of the in-work tax credit by $50 a week, paid by the IRD. It estimates that 143,000 New Zealand families will receive the full $50 a week increase. It’s timely, it’s temporary, and it’s targeted. It will be paid out from 7 April. Let’s get on with it, let’s pass this bill, and let’s get the relief to where it’s needed. I commend the bill.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The Hon Dr Megan Woods—I’ll give you the same courtesy and ask that the other speakers be on alert school for the rest of the afternoon.

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram) (15:38): Thank you. I was just expecting that the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee might give a more fulsome contribution to the House on such an important piece of legislation. I was deep in conversation with my colleague the Hon Dr Deborah Russell about tax, because there is nothing that the Hon Dr Deborah Russell likes to discuss more than tax. It’s the thing that she will talk ad infinitum about.

Labour finds itself in quite a unique situation with this piece of legislation. It is a piece of legislation that, at this reading, we are supporting, but that does not mean we support everything in the bill. The Minister’s Amendment Paper 560, which delivers relief to some families in New Zealand in terms of the current fuel crisis that we’re in, is our reason for supporting it. This does not mean that we don’t have questions about that specific measure in terms of the relief that is going. I do want to run through some of the other elements of this legislation and the changes and the way in which they were discussed at select committee.

Nothing says omnibus bill like a tax bill. It is free-ranging; there are a lot of non-intersecting parts and changes that are made when you do come to look at the taxation legislation. There are several things that are tidying up. Some of them, actually, are really positive, in terms of looking to future and the way our tax system needs to sit: forward-facing and ready for an economy that is operating in the 21^st century. We’ve got provisions in there on how we deal with taxation on income derived from people that sell electricity back into the grid, from generating it off solar panels on their homes. We’ve got taxation rules in this bill that deal with influencers coming to Queenstown to do promotions of particular areas; digital nomads are fulsomely discussed in terms of the changes that need to happen there.

But there are some other changes in there that led Labour to oppose this bill at earlier stages, and this largely revolves around the information sharing. So while there is a loosening of the ability of agencies to share information—for IRD to share with other Government entities that information, and as my colleague the Hon Dr Deborah Russell has gone through, the IRD has a long history of having very strong provisions around the protections of people’s personal income tax data and making sure that that is locked solid and can’t be used for nefarious purposes or used for any other purpose other than it was collected.

So it is quite a major change for this information sharing from Inland Revenue with other Crown agencies to happen. This is happening in the same piece of legislation in terms of the changes to trusts and the information that is collected around trusts. We heard from the Minister that the reason that these changes and the loosening of the information and the downgrading of the information that we will collect around trusts is because we need to protect privacy. Now, no such consideration was given to income and wage earners when it came to the information sharing between IRD and Government agencies, so that is a concern for us. Trusts need to have transparency. People need to be able to see inside trusts and see what is happening and I think that is something that makes us a stronger and a better country, when we can do that.

The other thing that this piece of this legislation does is it gets rid of the work that IRD was doing: collecting tax data for the purposes of making policy; understanding from a real-world perspective how it was that some of our income earners needed to be treated. It wasn’t collecting it for the purposes of taking tax; that information was collected for the purposes of making tax policy. I would like to think that we have an Inland Revenue Department that is making evidence-based policy, that is using real-world New Zealand examples—not just theoretical models, but understanding the tax system and the way it’s operating in New Zealand, in order to generate fit for purpose 21^st century tax policy in this country.

These were the reasons that we were not supporting the bill, and then along came the committee stage and amendments. There were three major amendments. There were the changes to the student loan provisions which we supported, then there were the changes that are around the thin capital markets. I think that my colleague Dr Deborah Russell raised some very important concerns in her speech on this around what this is actually creating: quite a fundamental change to be dropped in by a ministerial Amendment Paper, rather than something that is traversed through the normal course.

I think one of the things that the Finance and Expenditure Committee, when it comes to examine tax legislation—because it is so technical, it is so detailed. Not only do we have our departmental advisers but we also have the advisers that come in and advise us on the legislation. They produce fulsome commentary on the bill that I think goes above and beyond other legislation that we see coming through this House, because it is technicians that need to give advice on this, in order for people like myself who have not dedicated myself to tax, Deborah, to be able to understand what this means for New Zealanders, how it’s going to play out. I think the concerns that were raised there around how we may be setting ourselves up for the selling off of some of our social services is concerning. It is concerning that has come through in an eleventh-hour Amendment Paper.

That brings us to the reason we are supporting the bill, and that was the Minister’s Amendment Paper 560 which puts in place the provisions to help 147,000 New Zealanders. I think it’s 7 percent of New Zealand households that will receive support through these provisions, from rough calculations on that. We support it; we think it’s a start, but we think there are some really significant gaps that sit there, and they’re the other things that we traversed in the committee stage of the bill.

We heard in the House today, during question time—because the mechanism for transferring this money to households is an in-work tax credit. It means anyone who receives even some small amount of benefit is not eligible for that. So what we had Willow-Jean Prime asking in the House today was how many people are working but still receiving a small amount of benefit. This deems them ineligible for this tax credit. All the reasons that the Minister of Finance has given for why some people are getting this and not, like people who are working have to get themselves to work, they’ve got that added expense. So do these, I think it was 47,000 New Zealanders—I think this was the number that was given in the House—have to get themselves to work. They’ve got their expense. We have concerns around that.

We also have concerns that obviously superannuitants are missing out on this. We know in this country there is a large number of grandparents raising grandchildren. These grandparents have those expenses of a working family, in many respects. They need to take the kids to school, they need to ferry them around, they’ve got all the to and fro. But they’re grandparents and they’re superannuitants, therefore they’re ineligible. They’re on a very fixed income and they’re going to be doing it incredibly tough at the moment.

The other group that I’m concerned about—and I asked questions at committee stage and we didn’t get any numbers on it—is how many of our home care and support workers fall outside of the provisions. They might not have children, they might be receiving some form of benefit, they might not be working 30 hours. Home care and support workers, by definition, often are part-time workers and they are often women that have reentered the workforce. So how many of our home care and support workers who are having to use their own vehicles, their own petrol, in order to do their jobs, looking after some of the country’s most vulnerable are missing out?

So these are all questions that I think we need to continue to ask because we know for many people, they were doing it tough before this war broke out. They were struggling; they couldn’t pay the bills and that is only getting worse. Things are getting worse, not better for people, and we need to make sure we’re supporting everybody who needs it.

DAVID MacLEOD (National—New Plymouth) (15:48): Thank you, Madam Chair, and I’m very pleased to stand and talk to this bill in question, the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2025–26, Compliance Simplification, and Remedial Measures) Bill. Not being part of the committee, one of the challenges for all other members when you’ve got a substantial bill is to come up to speed with many of the arrangements that are included within it. I think the complexity of it was evidenced by the lengthy committee of the whole House stage that occurred for this bill. We saw lots and lots of questions being asked of the Ministers in the chair, and it was good to hear those questions and learn a bit more about this.

Two areas that I am familiar with that I wish to talk to: first of all is the fact that anybody that has a residential house with solar on top is going to be excluded from tax for any of the income they derived from potentially selling some of that electricity out into the distribution network. I think a lot of people may not actually have known that they were due for that, but that sounds like a very practical outcome for it.

The second area I wanted to talk to, which has been traversed by a lot of speakers already, is the in-work tax credit. We talk about targeted, timely, temporary, and this particular clause in this bill is exactly that. The fact that it is timely—we just heard from the previous speaker, Dr Megan Woods, that there is a lot of hardship out there, particularly with the increase in petrol cost, fuel costs, and all that. So it is timely.

It is targeted because it is targeting working families with dependent children, and it is temporary; it ends on either 31 March 2027 or when 91 octane petrol prices fall below $3 a litre for four consecutive weeks. That sounds very practical to me. I’m pleased to commend this bill to the House.

REUBEN DAVIDSON (Labour—Christchurch East) (15:50): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s an absolute pleasure to be able to take a call on this bill. I’m disappointed that it’s only a five-minute one because, having spent some time over what has become a long day in the House, it’s been really good to go through it and get a better understanding of the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2025-26, Compliance Simplification, and Remedial Measures) Bill.

I am ultimately standing to support this, and my colleagues have spoken, from this side of the House, about why it is that we are supporting this bill. A number of people have also acknowledged that we had in the chair Minister Doocey and Minister Meager, who took questions on the bill and provided some answers on the bill, and acknowledge that perhaps it’s not an area of expertise for either of them. We do appreciate them giving us those answers, and it’s not the first time we’ve seen someone who’s not in their area of expertise trying to provide answers; we saw that just yesterday from the Prime Minister speaking to the fuel plan and how stepping through the various stages of that may work. We are none the wiser for having listened to any of what his so-called answers to the questions asked yesterday.

There are two points I wanted to focus on specifically in this bill. I did ask some questions, but I think it’s worth drawing attention to these as we move through this stage of the bill. The first is in Part 2, clause 15, where we’re talking about digital nomads. A few people have talked about digital nomads and the huge potential that initiative has to bring people into New Zealand and some of the benefits from that. But there was some confusion around this section not applying to the income of what was termed a public entertainer, and just a lack of clarity around what the definition of a public entertainer was. A number of the examples included in the material to provide the types of tax scenarios that digital nomads might be looking at in New Zealand included influencers, many of whom could also fall into the category of public entertainer by way of hosted events or appearances that they may make while they’re in New Zealand, therefore creating some confusion about which tax category they might fall into.

The other point was really in the share schemes components of this bill—once again, Part 2, but this time in clause 39. That was really concern for our innovation sector, to ensure that it’s very clear there that that’s a sector that has enormous potential and can achieve a huge amount. A lot of the time, the incentive for employees or people within those organisations or companies or start-ups is the ability to take shares as part of their income or their salary package. I just want to make sure that that’s absolutely in the best possible shape for that to be happening and for those people to be benefiting.

Most importantly, the reason that we are supporting this bill is that we know New Zealanders are doing it very tough at the moment. Our support enables the limited support that the Government have so far committed to offering. What we still have concerns around is some of the privacy and the information-sharing provisions. A number of colleagues have referred to concerns voiced by members of the public who would be concerned about the removal of those protections of people’s privacy through that information-sharing and, very importantly, the potential for that privatisation push that’s coming in there. Once you see schools and hospitals and libraries in prisons listed in that category, all New Zealanders should be very concerned about that.

Most of all, I think what all New Zealanders should be concerned about is the fact that there are 47,000 New Zealanders who are receiving welfare, are in work, and have children, and are ineligible for any support from this Government. Not only that, 52 percent—that’s a majority, for those who don’t know—of children living in poverty will receive no support from this Government.

CARL BATES (National—Whanganui) (15:55): Thank you Madam Speaker. There’s an amendment in this bill that enables the $50 targeted weekly increase to the in-work tax credit. It’s going to enable low and middle income working families in the wonderful Whanganui electorate—including South Taranaki, Stratford, Ruapehu soon as well—to get the support they need. It is timely, it is temporary, it is targeted, and therefore I commend this bill to the House.

Hon GINNY ANDERSEN (Labour) (15:56): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call. There are some good parts of this bill and there are some not so good parts as well.

The parts that we do not like involve the ability for Government agencies to share information if Ministers agree it is needed to determine entitlement to Government assistance, or if it would help the detection and prosecution of crime. We think this is one of the issues that is problematic. My experience in working with approved information-sharing agreements (AISAs) was during the time I worked at New Zealand Police in the establishment of a gang intelligence centre. In that case, an AISA takes around 18 months to set up, and it sets up a clear, agreed way of information sharing between Government departments.

The reason for that is a very good one. The basic principle about privacy and people’s personal information is that if you provide information to a Government department, it’s only able to be used for the purpose for which it was provided. If that’s health information, it’s used for a health purpose; if that’s housing information, it’s used for a housing purpose. What this bill does, in fact, is it lists a whole lot of agencies where, instead of having an AISA in place, it means that, at the behest of Ministers, private information is able to be shared between different ministries. This is through New Zealand Police, ACC, Kāinga Ora, private health information can be shared, New Zealand Transport Agency, National Emergency Management Agency, Ministry for Ethnic Communities, and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. In other words, all of that information can be used for policing purposes.

The regulatory impact statement on the Table there shows that the only consultation undertaken with respect to this measure was with the Privacy Commissioner—none of the people and none of the communities impacted by this change. The only options examined were the status quo and the Minister’s option, and the new rules were created at the Minister’s direction. The ability for the Commissioner to collect information for the purposes of informing tax policy will also be repealed. This was a rule that enabled there to be information collected for high-wealth individuals—and we all remember the coverage that got at the time. There were many people who were unhappy about this process. Officials suggested that instead of repealing the rule, it could be retained with strengthened protections around the information collected. They also have said that repealing the rule will reduce Inland Revenue’s ability to collect information solely for the purpose of policy development, which could affect the quality of future policy advice.

Two things have happened within this bill: the ability to share information between Government for those purposes, and then the removal of that right to check in on high-wealth individuals. In a nutshell, rich people get to hide their information, and poor people will be subject to information being disclosed at the whim of a Minister. That’s exactly what this bill does. On top of that, as if that wasn’t enough, the disclosure information about trusts will also be repealed by the changes made around trusts. Once again, this means trusts will be able to be a way of hiding. This hole means that a heap of information about who is settling assets on trusts, and who is getting assets and income from trusts, will no longer need to be disclosed—probably helpful for quite a few members on the opposite side with their pecuniary interests.

It means that trusts can be again used to shelter and hide income, rental properties—a whole range of things you could put in there. It can hide income and assets, and it will no longer be possible to trace who really benefits from those trusts. The information collected by this provision was really helpful in understanding how people use trusts and where, sometimes, they get things wrong.

This bill also makes changes—it’s a big mop-up—to the FamilyBoost and it will be able to be made through Order in Council. This will largely enable Ministers to fix the stuff-up that initially got caused because no one was able to claim it at all; there wasn’t able to be one single family who actually benefited from FamilyBoost. So it means that primary legislation will be able to be changed through Order in Council so they can hopefully some more families who might be able to benefit from it.

One of the concerns that has been raised in and around the $50 in-work tax credit that this facilitates, as we’ve heard in question time today and by subsequent speakers, that there are many, many New Zealanders who may receive a main benefit, even superannuation and also who are working. Those people do not receive the benefit of the in-work tax credit, even if they’re working part-time. That is a real concern for us on this side of the House, because those people are even more marginalised than those who are able to receive the $50.

It is even more concerning, I think, that some of those people may recently have found themselves out of work due to the multiple closures we’ve seen, the high levels of liquidations, not only in the Wellington region but recently in Hastings and up that way as well, that people who will be finding themselves unemployed—more than ever those people need assistance to go to a job interview. More than ever those people need assistance to be able to feed their families and get groceries. It does seem a real concern that there is a large proportion of people who need assistance in this cost of living crisis who are not receiving it through this legislation.

We know that those fuel prices are soaring. The real view is that this Government has not prepared enough; that this Government’s choices have actually assisted to drive up prices. We’ve seen record lifts in things like basic staples like white bread, mince we’ve heard as well, butter we know—many of these basic items that used to be part of your weekly grocery shop are now unattainable for so many New Zealanders.

Now, on top of this, we’ve got higher petrol prices on top of all those things that were pushing people more and more into poverty. That is a real concern. Because diesel prices are a big factor and a big threat up in the future, those are the ones that are going to push up food prices even more. So for people who have seen a 60-odd percent increase in white bread and a 23 percent increase in mince, how much further will those items be pushed out of people’s reach? And how much, even if you do get $50 a week, will that actually even help when people are struggling to be able to feed their families?

We believe that this Government has absolutely the wrong priorities for the past few years. The fact that we’ve seen tax breaks provided to tobacco companies—we know that that half-price public transport has been axed at a time instead of providing that funding in that space. Half-price public transport would have been a far better investment to make sure that people can get to work, that people can get access to what they’re doing.

Also, there’s a massive concern that there was no real help in terms of electric vehicles, the clean car subsidy being scrapped. Even this week in the House, we heard how there’s going to be all these great electric chargers around the country, but unfortunately no one’s purchased a car to be able to plug it in to. So I think they’re maybe for toothbrushes, I don’t know.

This annual taxation bill includes tax rates for the year as well as a number of other measures. We think the Government could have done better. We could have done a whole lot better for a country that is now facing so much uncertainty in terms of not just food prices, not just rent prices, not just the fact that wages aren’t keeping up with the price of food, but we have now uncertainty in terms of our energy supply. We felt that if there had been investment into areas that assisted that transition instead of just focusing on fossil fuel, New Zealand would’ve been far more equipped for the crisis that we are now seeing going on. That is a big worry.

What we’ve seen is that time and time again, this Government has tried to say that they’ve steadied up the ship in a bleak time, but the reality is that jobs have gone down, their poor decisions on cutting key infrastructure projects right across the country have increased unemployment, they’ve driven down wages with damaging legislation that has undermined workers’ rights and wages, they have scrapped pay equity, and they have made life in New Zealand even worse than ever before.

We are not well prepared for the rainy day that is coming. We are well under-prepared. It is the hard-working people in New Zealand who can’t afford to buy food, who can’t afford to drive their cars. I hope that they look to this bill and say, “Thank you for the $50 but you could have done a heck of a lot better to help prepare New Zealand for the situation we face.” All we see is those opposite looking after their rich mates but not really giving a damn about the rest of the people who can’t afford to buy the basics for their children each week.

Dr CARLOS CHEUNG (National—Mt Roskill) (16:06): The rise in petrol costs is putting pressure on the working families in Mt Roskill and we understand that we need to support them. That’s why this Government is willing to provide a temporary increase in the rate of the in-work tax credit by $50 a week. This policy will help ease the pressure on hard-working families in Mt Roskill. I commend this bill to the House.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2025–26, Compliance Simplification, and Remedial Measures) Bill be now read a third time.

Ayes 102

New Zealand National 49; New Zealand Labour 34; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.

Noes 19

Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 14; Te Pāti Māori 4; Ferris.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a third time.

Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill

Legislative Statement

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The Hon Chris Penk. That was very prompt.

Hon CHRIS PENK (Associate Minister of Immigration) (16:08): on behalf of the Minister of Immigration: Thank you. So keen, Madam Speaker. I present a legislative statement on the Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

First Reading

Hon CHRIS PENK (Associate Minister of Immigration) (16:08): on behalf of the Minister of Immigration: I move, That the Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) 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 14 August 2026.

Immigration is critical to New Zealand’s and New Zealanders’ success. Put quite simply, without immigration, New Zealand cannot thrive, grow, or deliver the aspirations that we have for future generations. Smart, targeted, and fair immigration settings make New Zealand richer in every possible way. Since coming into Government, we have taken steps to change settings so that the immigration system is more fit for purpose, address migrant exploitation, prevent the erosion of the social licence for immigration, and rebalance our approach to risk and verification.

We are at the challenging intersection of needing to facilitate genuine migrants and employers, while adapting to new and innovative ways that some people use to try to get around the checks and balances that protect New Zealand. That is why, even as we have made the system smarter, faster, and fairer, producing processing times, refining the accredited employer work visa, improving investment settings like Active Investor Plus, and making the skilled migrant category more facilitative to help employers retain the skills our economy needs, we have also strengthened integrity and consequences where rules are abused.

Last year, we passed the Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Act to close gaps on exploitation, respond to the recommendations of independent reviews, and ensure the immigration system can’t operate flexibly and as fiscally sustainable. I am proud of the improvements that the Government has made—and, of course, these have been in the name of our colleague and friend the Hon Erica Stanford—but there is more to do to protect the integrity of the system and to maintain social licence.

The geopolitical context is changing, and immigration risks are increasing in scale and complexity. It is important that settings are tight to manage immigration risk, clamp down on exploitative behaviour, and ensure that our immigration settings are working for New Zealand. Nothing erodes public confidence faster than a sense that rules are being ignored or that serious offending goes without consequence. This bill provides practical, targeted improvements so that our immigration system can detect, deter, and respond to risk in a firm but fair way, welcoming those who contribute while being clear eyed about misuse and criminal behaviour.

The bill has three objectives: (1) to increase the effectiveness of immigration compliance and enforcement, (2) to improve the integrity of the refugee and protection system, and (3) to improve the operation of the wider immigration system. It complements the improvements already made through the Immigration (Fiscal Sustainability and System Integrity) Amendment Act by sharpening front-line tools, modernising processes, and having consequences that are fair and proportionate.

I’ll now talk through the key proposals briefly. Residence in New Zealand is a privilege, not a right, and it comes with responsibilities. These include respecting our laws and the safety of others. The bill extends the period during which a resident visa holder may become liable for deportation following criminal offending from 10 years to 20 years. This change retains the graduated framework, with deportation liability scaled to the seriousness of offending and the length of time the person has held residence. At the same time, it ensures that longer-term residents who commit very serious offences, such as murder or sexual assault, can no longer evade deportation liability.

The bill also makes minor changes to clarify existing deportation liability settings. It strengthens the consequences for migrants providing false or misleading information at any stage of the immigration process and makes clear that this can trigger deportation liability. Other clarifications include: that serious historic offending can give rise to deportation liability; when deportation liability resets after extended periods overseas; and that a person may be liable for deportation if a visa was granted unlawfully under the Act.

The bill also expands victims’ rights to submit on deportation liability proceedings, so that any victim of a migrant offender may provide submissions on that offender’s appeal against deportation, not just the victims of the specific offence that triggered deportation liability. Migrant exploitation causes significant harm to individuals, undermines fair competition, and damages the integrity of our immigration system. In short, it will not be tolerated.

The bill increases the maximum penalty for migrant exploitation to 10 years’ imprisonment, better reflecting the harm that exploitation causes. It also extends the practical time frame for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) to issue employer infringement notices to six years after the offending occurred, recognising that exploitation is often reported only after an employment relationship has broken down and that complex investigations can take time.

The bill also establishes two new employer-focused infringement offences: first, for providing incorrect or incomplete information—for example, in an accreditation or job-check application—and second, for failing to provide wage and time record documents when requested. These changes strengthen the tools available to address non-compliant employer behaviour and enable timely action.

To improve the effectiveness of immigration compliance activity, the bill adjusts the threshold under which immigration officers can request basic identity information. This will enable immigration officers to request information when they have good cause to suspect a person may be liable for deportation or turn-around or may be in breach of their visa conditions. This change will make an existing power workable. It is not, and will not become, a general stopping power or a tool for random checks.

The bill removes humanitarian appeals rights to the Immigration and Protection Tribunal—known as the IPT—for all visitor visa holders and for temporary visa holders who have committed criminal offences. This recognises the different status and expectations of temporary versus resident migrants and reinforces the expectation that people who are here temporarily comply with their visa conditions and the law or face timely consequences.

The bill allows border staff to refuse entry to some people who are usually treated as having automatic permission to enter New Zealand such as air crew or maritime arrivals found to be smuggling goods or drugs. This enables swift and efficient action at the border.

To improve the integrity of the refugee and protection system, the bill removes the ability of an asylum claimant who withdraws their asylum claim from applying for other visas while they remain in New Zealand. This change is intended to prevent misuse of the system by individuals who make unmeritorious claims to access alternative immigration pathways.

The bill also shifts residence and reporting requirements agreements from being “absolute discretion” to “discretion” decisions, implementing the final legislative recommendation of Victoria Casey’s 2022 review into the detention of asylum seekers. This will ensure that these decisions are accompanied by reasons and subject to oversight.

The bill modernises information-sharing provisions in the Act to better support compliance and risk management, with appropriate transparency and privacy safeguards. It also clarifies MBIE’s ability to issue and contribute to digital credentials for identity and immigration status verification, enables in-progress resident applicants to opt into new policy settings without withdrawing and reapplying, and allows deportation liability notices to be served electronically where a person has no known physical address.

The bill was developed with input from a wide range of stakeholders. Their feedback has strengthened and improved the bill, and I know that the Minister of Immigration welcomes further robust scrutiny at the select committee stage.

In addition to the amendments already in the bill, she has also recently tabled a parliamentary paper outlining seven amendments to improve the integrity of the refugee protection—that is to say, asylum—system. New Zealand continues to experience a large number of asylum claims, consistent with global trends. There are some 4,000 claims on hand. At first glance, it would appear that many of these claims are manifestly unfounded, which puts pressure on the system, disadvantages genuine claimants, and risks the system’s social licence. The changes that are being proposed now will protect the integrity of the refugee and protection system and support efficient processing. To ensure appropriate scrutiny, the Hon Erica Stanford has written to the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee and requested that they seek public submissions on these additional proposals at the same time they call for submissions on the wider bill.

This is a practical and measured bill. It equips MBIE with modern, proportionate tools, protects migrants from exploitation, secures the integrity of the refugee and protection system, and ensures that New Zealand has an immigration system that is welcoming to those who contribute as well as being firm with those who abuse it. With that, Madam Speaker, thank you, and I commend the bill to the House.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū) (16:17): Thank you. Labour is very open to supporting reforms that make our immigration system fairer, more transparent, more efficient, and run in the interests of New Zealand, and our voting record in this House shows that. This bill contains a couple of dozen mostly small changes to the immigration system—and be assured that we will carefully scrutinise the bill at select committee to see if any of these reforms will genuinely improve the system—but we will not be voting for this bill, and here is why.

This bill is a pretty naked exercise in election-year politicking at the expense of migrants and refugees. The Minister of Immigration wants to look tough. She came back from the Five Country Immigration Ministers’ meeting in London late last year, where all of the talk was about irregular migration pressures, visa abuse, and removals policy, and where, along with Erica Stanford, Ministers from Australia, Canada, the US, and the UK all agreed they needed to get tough, and get tough together.

This is not a bill that is based on fixing any particular real-world problem; what it is is performative election-year politics. I am pretty sure that it was after one of these Five Country Immigration Ministers’ meetings when Erica Stanford came back to her officials and said, “Look, we’ve only got a tiny fraction of the irregular migration of those countries, but let’s get tough anyway. Let’s crack down. Get me a list of the things that we can do to show that we’re not a soft touch.” That list of things that her officials came back to her with is now this bill. We will genuinely dig into it at select committee and here at committee of the whole House, and we will hold them up to the light.

But this bill’s removal of the right to appeal deportation on humanitarian grounds by people who hold visitor visas will do damage to our immigration system. Remember, this is a right to appeal. It is the right to a fair process and an even-handed justice system. Last year, nearly 50 percent of successful humanitarian appeals—successful appeals, remember—were made by Pacific people dealing with exceptional humanitarian circumstances. That’s the description in the legislation: exceptional humanitarian circumstances—for instance, families needing support, raising children with disabilities.

Having been an Associate Minister of Immigration, and as an MP who does a lot of immigration advocacy, I can tell the House that there’s no shortage of cases where Immigration New Zealand has made a sequence of poor decisions, where the interests of the children have not been given the weight required under our international treaty obligations. Justice is, in a significant number of cases, only finally delivered through an appeal to the tribunal on exceptional humanitarian circumstances.

There’s Simon Graham from the New Zealand Law Society, who says, “Current policy balances individual rights and the public interest, but [this] proposed legislation would shift the goalposts against vulnerable people, especially children and families”. He goes on to say, “You could have a child born here, only ever gone through the New Zealand educational system … [now] being asked to return back to a country [where they’ve never lived], [facing] language barriers [and a] different educational system”.

I say to the Minister, think carefully before you shut down that avenue for appeal. Our social cohesion in New Zealand is too precious to be put at risk by this cheap politics. We cannot survive and we cannot thrive without immigrants coming to this country. They make us better and stronger, and in New Zealand we have a pretty decent track record of respecting the rights of refugees. Stunts like this bill put all that at risk.

Can I get 10 minutes?

DEPUTY SPEAKER: It’s the first reading, so you only get five.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green) (16:23): Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a Trump administration - inspired, MAGA-loving piece of legislation that deserves to be put in the bin. If you heard the Minister’s contribution, you would think that this is a completely different bill from the one I have in front of me. In the bill itself, it’s quite clear: this is a bill that seeks to demonise and target undocumented migrants by giving more powers to our immigration officials to target them if they suspect that they may be in breach of their visa conditions.

The scenes that we’ve seen in the United States with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement—which the closest thing we have here is called Immigration Compliance and Investigations—where families are being separated, torn apart, and lives are being destroyed, did not happen overnight. The scenes from the United States were the product of successive Governments dismantling the rights of asylum seekers and migrants, and giving immigration officials more powers to target migrant communities.

I particularly want to focus on the provisions that give immigration officials more power to target migrant communities for just simply being “suspicious” or looking suspicious, because, in Erica Stanford’s own words, when she was trying to justify this provision, she said, “We have a big overstayer problem, tens of thousands more than we suspected”. Shortly after, she had to apologise for literally misleading people, trying to make them believe that there were tens of thousands more undocumented migrants in this country when that was not the case—exactly the types of tactics that the Trump administration uses, where people simply make up figures to justify punching down on migrant communities. She had to apologise to the media shortly after.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I think we might want to be a little bit careful of accusing. People could make mistakes. I think you’d want to be careful—

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: And they should be careful, I agree, Madam Speaker—

Carl Bates: Come on!

DEPUTY SPEAKER: —of saying this was deliberate. Excuse me, I’m actually speaking. I’m just asking the House to be careful when making an accusation about somebody, whether it may have been a mistake or accusing someone of it being deliberate—and referring to politicians in other countries, as an example. I’ll just ask the member to just tone the language down, please.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: We deserve far better than a Minister scapegoating migrant communities to justify a bill that will target them. Madam Speaker, I make no apology for calling out the Minister for continuously punching down on migrant communities, particularly undocumented migrants, when it is politically convenient.

The bill itself, you would believe it’s about migrant exploitation and addressing criminal behaviour, but as the previous speaker noted, this bill takes away the right of migrants to appeal on humanitarian grounds when they’re on visitor visas, which is actually one of the last precarious stages that migrants may find themselves in before becoming undocumented, often because they experience trafficking or they may have experienced exploitation themselves. As somebody who has fought both Chris Penk and Phil Twyford in the previous Government in trying to stop deportations, I do know, too, that many times the Immigration and Protection Tribunal does not consider the rights and the wellbeing of children when it comes to these appeals, and I know for a fact that Associate Ministers of Immigration often fail to do so themselves.

I am astounded, as well, by the examples we’ve been given to justify these additional provisions to grant immigration officials more power. To use examples like creating and conjuring scenarios where migrant sex workers may be found in a home where, for example, a compliance officer may be going into, just reeks of scapegoating—some of our migrant communities that are actually most vulnerable to exploitation because we have decided to criminalise their existence. This bill does very little to actually address migrant exploitation, and if the Government was serious about addressing migrant exploitation, they would have not cut the support that migrants who have been exploited can receive by cutting the duration of the migrant exploitation protection work visa in half.

This Government, for as much as they want to claim that this is not about targeting migrants, received advice explicitly telling them, when it came to population impacts, that Pacific communities are more likely to be targeted by these provisions, because they are already targeted by deportations. We know that this bill will increase systemic discrimination that brown and black communities face here in Aotearoa, and we deserve a Minister that is upfront and clear about the intent. She can’t go on the media and talk about how overstayers and undocumented migrants are a big problem, then have her Associate Minister here tell us that this bill is just, basically, a boring piece of legislation.

The Green Party will be opposing this bill, and we make it clear that if the Government wants to lift working conditions of people, they can do so by lifting wages, by creating jobs, and by treating migrant communities with the dignity and respect that they deserve.

Andy Foster: Fast track.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: This is the “Fast Track to Deportation Bill”—

Andy Foster: Fast track mining.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: —and mining has nothing to do with it.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member’s time has expired.

Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (ACT) (16:28): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m taking this call on behalf of the ACT Party to support the first reading of the Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill.

I’m not surprised that the Green Party is opposing this bill, because this bill is about strengthening our immigration system. We know that immigration is important for us. Immigration is an area which is evolving really fast. We are learning a lot of things as we go, and we want to make sure that our immigration system is able to respond to the kind of risks that we are seeing out there, the kind of exploitation cases we see, and all kinds of serious wrongdoing.

Immigration is important, as I said before, and, of course, there will be some people who will be looking at me and saying “Of course she’s going to say that immigration is important, because she’s an immigrant.”, but let them think what they want to think. I want to say this, that it is the reality of our nation; we need people coming from other parts of the world to New Zealand to support our economy, to support our communities. This is actually our identity. We have people, those who have been their five years, 10 years, shorter than that; other people who have been here for 500 years, 700 years, as migrants and generations of migrants.

We need to ensure we have enough safeguards to ensure that people, those who are coming here, are able to deliver according to the expectations of New Zealanders and the standards that we apply here.

And especially those people who come on temporary visas, and including those who have a residence class visa. The trust in our immigration system is really important. That’s why this bill is really timely. This bill actually strengthens our immigration system.

There are a number of changes that this bill makes. There is just one change that I want to talk about in this bill, because I’m proposing an amendment to one of the provisions in this proposed legislation. This is regarding the extension of deportation liability for residence class visa holders. If they commit criminal offending which is punishable with a sentence of imprisonment of 10 years or more, there is deportation liability of 10 years. In this proposed legislation, it is being increased from 10 to 20 years. Now, the question here is: why should consequences expire after 10 years or 20 years if somebody is on a residence class visa? I am proposing an amendment that it should be an unlimited period—the extension of deportation liability should be for an unlimited period—and I’m talking about serious criminal offending. It’s a change that the ACT Party is proposing. After my contribution—my speech here in the House—I will be writing to the Minister for her consideration of my proposed amendment and I’ll be sending a letter to the select committee as well, so that this amendment can be explored in the select committee process too.

Overall, we want to make sure that there are enough safeguards in our immigration system to protect New Zealanders, to see that those who are coming here understand our laws, they understand that we have some expectations of those who have residence class visas and those who come on other visas as well. But this is particularly about residence class visa holders. With that, the ACT Party is supporting the first reading of this bill. Thank you.

Hon CASEY COSTELLO (Associate Minister of Immigration) (16:32): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill, and, hopefully. to bring some proportional response back to the emotive language we’ve heard already in the House. Our immigration system is robust. New Zealand First has always put New Zealand and New Zealanders first, and our immigration system should reflect the fact that we support and protect New Zealanders and those who call New Zealand home.

This immigration amendment bill is about bringing some proportional controls back to protect the integrity of the system, not just to protect the system but to protect those who are in the system. This is what has been lost in the narrative we’ve heard today. We need to ensure that abuse of the system is held accountable, that those who are here as refugees and migrants are respected because everyone knows that they have complied with the process and the rules, and those who do not apply by those rules and abuse New Zealand laws are held accountable for it. This is a long-held New Zealand First principle. That is why we are fully in support of this legislation.

In closing, because I think it is important we get this bill through the House today, is that we have to recognise, as the philosopher Russell Kirk said: “Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility”. This piece of legislation will ensure those duties and responsibilities are upheld. We commend the bill to the House.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The Hon James Meager. We’re having some close calls this afternoon!

Hon JAMES MEAGER (Minister for Hunting and Fishing) (16:33): I was waiting for another party to take a call. If this isn’t Pol Pot calling the kettle black. In 2015, the Labour Party has a policy whereby they blamed people with Chinese-sounding surnames for the housing crisis in Auckland. In 2017, the Green Party had an explicit immigration population cap as part of their policy, saying that it would be limited to 1 percent of population growth—once you hit the cap, no more immigration.

That is the quality of argument from the other side of the House. This is a sensible change to immigration laws, which is reflected in countries like, Canada, led by the Liberals; in countries like the United Kingdom, led by the Labour Party; and countries like Australia, also led by the Labor Party. It’s good policy. I commend it to the House.

Hon GINNY ANDERSEN (Labour) (16:34): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. This bill is really concerning in some areas. I think we’re right to highlight the concerns that we have. I’m really looking forward to the select committee process and to drilling down into some of the ways that this bill is actually going to operate. Many of the bill’s provisions seem petty and pretty punitive, with no clear evidence base or policy provided to justify them. But, nevertheless, we will give them serious scrutiny as a select committee. It’s always important, with our immigration system, to get that balance right between having risk to our general population, but also making sure that we have a fair immigration system. That’s what the select committee is for: to make sure that this bill does get that balance right.

But the Minister’s rhetoric alone in announcing this bill has been quite concerning. She says that New Zealand is currently a soft touch, which we do not agree on. She talked about refugees and asylum seekers in the same breath as mentioning murderers and sex offenders. The number of such offenders are so tiny, and our criminal justice system and immigration system can adequately deal with them. She did promise a hard-line crackdown right off her overseas trip. The Minister is really quite fond of going overseas and importing some other ideas, not only in our immigration system but also in our education system.

Our social cohesion in New Zealand is too precious to be put at risk with this kind of cheap politics. What this bill actually does is it doubles how long someone on a residence class visa is liable for deportation following criminal offending from 10 to 20 years. It expands who can be deported based on false and misleading submissions, historic crimes committed overseas, and also administrative errors. This bill also removes the ability for visitor visa and temporary visa holders to appeal deportation to the Immigration and Protection Tribunal on humanitarian grounds. As a previous Associate Minister of Immigration who had to consider those individual cases of people that come before you, it is really important that there is a humanitarian focus to our immigration system. We know that when things are put through the machine of immigration, they don’t always get it right. There are instances where families, where children, where seniors are put in absolutely unacceptable conditions. We believe that we should preserve that human element within our immigration system and not remove it.

This bill also ensures that victims of serious offences committed by migrants will have the right to be heard during their offender’s deportation proceedings, whether or not the offence against them is the basis of the offender’s liability for deportation. In terms of migrant exploitation, it extends the maximum prison sentence for migrant exploitation offending from seven to 10 years, and it creates new employer infringement offences relating to providing incorrect or incomplete information to the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment (MBIE). This extends the time frame that MBIE has to issue infringement notices and also to serve employer infringement notices.

It’s really important that we say that Labour is open to supporting reforms that do make our system fairer, that are more efficient, and run in the interests of New Zealand. But on a first read of this bill, we’re not sure whether that balance is struck. We will carefully scrutinise the bill to see if any of these reforms do genuinely improve our immigration system. But, on the face of it, this bill’s removal of the right to appeal deportation on humanitarian grounds by people who commit serious crimes will do damage to our immigration system, for it removes that ability to have a human face to understand it.

This bill is going to be one where I’m sure we’ll get a wide range of submissions from different parts of New Zealand, and we really encourage everybody who has a view, who is impacted, and has advice to make sure those submissions come to select committee. I’m looking forward to hearing them and we’ll wait and see exactly what the detail is on this bill.

CARL BATES (National—Whanganui) (16:39): The first half of Phil Twyford’s speech was more fictional than the children’s book I’m going to read to my kids when I get home this evening. It didn’t even reflect the reality of the journey that this policy has been on in order to get to this House. You see, work started on this bill in March last year; Cabinet decisions were taken mid-year, in June and July; and key policy decisions were released in October.

People on temporary visas can still appeal to the Associate Minister of Immigration. Phil Twyford needs to read the bill, get with the programme, and support the bill. Therefore, I commend it to the House.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central) (16:40): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Look, it’s just a little troubling to hear the kind of—I don’t know—vitriol coming from the other side, because—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, it’s come from both sides, but I’m not going to say it’s come from the Labour Party team, because it hasn’t—OK?

Tim Costley: Oh yes, it has.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Not vitriol—no.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: Who’s doing this debate?

DEPUTY SPEAKER: You are.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: Ha, ha—OK! This is actually a really important issue. Here we are, talking about new New Zealanders of a number of classes, and when their right to be in New Zealand can be taken from them, and, obviously, asylum seekers and refugees are a really important class. New Zealand has a proud history of accepting people who are from conflict zones or who are oppressed in their home country and giving them refuge here, including people who arrive and claim asylum, and so I think that we need to be really cautious when we start amending those frameworks.

For example, I’m looking at one change where individuals won’t be allowed to apply for a visa if they’ve claimed asylum and have then withdrawn that claim for asylum. Now, it strikes me that that may have some perverse outcomes. A really good example would be where someone comes to New Zealand and claims asylum, and then, by dint of being in New Zealand for some time, qualifies for another visa class. They might be going through the asylum process—which can take many, many years—and at the same time they might marry a New Zealand citizen, but they couldn’t apply for a partnership visa if they were to withdraw their asylum application, which seems madness, because it’s much more sensible to say that they don’t need asylum any more because they are in a relationship with a New Zealand citizen, and the law would recognise an alternative pathway for them to reside here rather than the arduous asylum pathway, which requires a lot of investigation.

The other thing was that I was troubled to hear was Parmjeet Parmar talking about having an unlimited period of time for which a criminal conviction would result in deportation. I have actually worked in this space—not a great deal, but I’ve done a number of cases in this area, both as a lawyer and as an MP—and I just wanted to point out that this is where we get to with the 20-year rule, right? If we have someone who arrived in New Zealand as a six-year-old who has a student visa through to university and who has a residence class visa from leaving university young, at 20, then, until they are 39, that person will have held a residence class visa for 19 years whilst having been in New Zealand since they were six. Now, my question is this. Are we going—and if that person commits an offence, don’t get me wrong: I agree that we should deport serious criminals who are new to New Zealand and who have abused that. But for someone who arrived at six and who is now 39, that is a 501 situation—the 501 situation that we have vilified our Australian cousins for, and I’m not sure we’d want to put ourselves in the same situation of then reducing appeal rights.

We’ve had debates in this House about what’s going on in the world and the need for a rules-based order and the importance of the rule of law. The ability to challenge, not at the behest of a Minister’s discretion, but on the basis of established principles of what is a humanitarian ground and how to balance the family—because these humanitarian grounds are often, in fact, about the interests of the wider family. An offender may be a caregiver for young children. They may have a network of relationships and they may be the only earner, and so if that person is deported, their family is left parentless and incomeless.

Those are the kinds of things that that Government doesn’t want to be under consideration, and so, as my friends have said, we will look at this closely. We’re not opposed to any change, but we do think that real care is needed to be taken.

Dr VANESSA WEENINK (National—Banks Peninsula) (16:45): Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on the Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill in its first reading. This will be coming to the Education and Workforce Committee, on which I sit. One of the changes that I’m looking forward to seeing—which I think is very sensible—is that if there are new changes to the immigration instructions that happen while somebody is having their application for residence looked at that would be beneficial to them, then that is automatically applied to their application. I think that that is a very sensible change, and I commend the bill to the House.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

Ayes 68

New Zealand National 49; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.

Noes 53

New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 14; Te Pāti Māori 4; Ferris.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

Referral to Select Committee

DEPUTY SPEAKER (16:47): The question is, That the Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill be considered by the Education and Workforce Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Education and Workforce Committee.

Instruction to Select Committee

Hon JAMES MEAGER (Minister for Hunting and Fishing) (16:47): on behalf of the Minister of Immigration: I move, That the Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill be reported to the House by 14 August 2026.

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 53

New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 14; Te Pāti Māori 4; Ferris.

Motion agreed to.

Commerce (Commerce Commission Reform) Amendment Bill

Legislative Statement

Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs) (16:48): I present a legislative statement on the Commerce (Commerce Commission Reform) Amendment Bill.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

First Reading

Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs) (16:49): I move, That the Commerce (Commerce Commission Reform) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. In doing so, I nominate the Finance and Expenditure Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported back to the House by 27 July 2026.

This review of the Commerce Commission was prompted by a thorough and very timely review led by Dame Paula Rebstock in association with Professor Allan Fels and David Hunt, and I thank them for their work. The Commerce Commission is New Zealand’s competition and consumer protection agency. This Government is committed to growing the economy and improving outcomes for New Zealand businesses and consumers.

The competitive and well-performing markets that we aspire to provide one of the foundations for achieving this goal. To do this, we need world-class competition laws and competition institutions. In December 2025, I introduced the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill to strengthen and enhance New Zealand’s economy-wide competition law. Today, we are considering a bill which reforms the Commerce Commission’s governance and decision-making arrangements to further lift its performance.

This bill gives effect to the Government’s response to the independent review of the Commerce Commission that was led by Dame Paula Rebstock, which I’ve already mentioned. The commission is a quality regulatory enforcement agency, which has a high degree of public trust and confidence. However, the external environment in which the commission operates increasingly raises significant challenges for regulators and the New Zealand economy. These include significant technological change, disruptions to trade and supply chains, structural shifts as we move to a low-emissions and increasingly service-based economy, and, of course, our primary producers and others exporting to the world. These significant challenges make it critical to have a knowledge-based regulator that invests in capacity.

The growth of the commission’s regulatory responsibility has put its traditional commission governance model under strain. The dual role of commissioners as both governors and regulatory decision makers is not easily scalable. With the expanded mandate, commissioners are being drawn deeper into complex and time-intensive decision-making in their respective areas, often compartmentalised and in organisational silos. The review found that this compromised commissioners’ abilities to focus on the commission’s strategy and governance issues and to hold each other to account. Given the full-time nature of the commissioner’s expanded role, there is no strong outside-in perspective at the governance table, nor is there a flexible means to draw on additional external expertise and commercial experience in regulatory decision-making. This has the propensity to compromise the quality of the commission’s engagements with its stakeholders and the commission’s effectiveness overall.

Ultimately, this can draw out decision-making processes and undermine a whole-of-commission approach. The commission is working to address some of those issues identified in the review. However, legislation is required to improve the pace and direction of change. To the bill: this bill makes structural changes to the commission’s governance and decision-making arrangements while retaining the commission’s statutory independence. A board will be established as the governance body for the commission, consistent with Crown entities and their framework. Board members will be mainly part time and able to bring an outside perspective, including commercial nous and savvy, to the commission’s strategy and performance.

In addition, the sector-specific named commissioner mechanism will be phased out to promote a whole-of-commission cohesive focus at board level. Regulatory decision-making will primarily be performed by expert regulatory committees under delegation from the board. These regulatory committees must comply with a charter and all relevant policies and procedures set by the board to promote timely and action-orientated decision-making. A new panel of commissioners will be established—people with relevant expertise and experience to perform the commission’s regulatory functions. These commissioners will be the core of the membership of the regulatory committees. These regulatory decision-making arrangements will ensure that decisions are made by persons with the relevant expertise and experience based on best information. Regulatory decision-making will also be aligned to the commission’s overall strategy and organisational plans and subject to appropriate board and judicial oversight.

I want to spend a moment talking about the transitional arrangements for this new structure. It’s intended that this new structure will come into effect on 1 July 2027. As a transitional measure, the current chair, Dr John Small, will be the inaugural chair of the new board and chief commissioner. The current deputy chair of the commission will also be a member of the new board and the inaugural deputy chief commissioner. Other existing commissioners, including the telecommunications and groceries commissioners, will be transitioned to the new panel for the remainder of their terms.

As members may be aware, the commission routinely publishes guidance material that sets out how it interprets and applies the Commerce Act in its investigations and decisions. This guidance provides clarity and predictability for businesses, consumers, and the market. However, courts are not required to have regard to the commission’s guidance. To support greater certainty over time, I’ve asked the select committee to consider options for elevating the status of the commission’s guidance for Parts 2 and 3 so that guidance plays a more formal role in promoting certainty and predictability across the Act. This could involve, for instance, amending the Act to provide that courts must or may have regard to the guidance when interpreting or applying the Act.

In conclusion, I consider that these new governance and decision-making arrangements will lift the overall performance of the commission, moving it from good to great. I want to thank John Small and the commission for their cooperation with these reforms and all staff for their dedication and thorough diligence. I also, again, want to thank Dame Paula Rebstock, Professor Allan Fels, and David Hunt for their hard work on the independent review of the commission. Colleagues, I commend parties with an interest in the commission to participate in the select committee process and to consider the bill at select committee. I commend this bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): The question is the motion be agreed to.

ARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa) (16:57): An affordable New Zealand depends on an economy that is delivering for everyone, and competition is a key ingredient in that. What do we have here from the Government? An opportunity to make a once-in-a-generation reorganisation of our regulator, which should be tooled up with not only the regulatory tool box that it needs to take swift and decisive action against anti-competitive behaviour and the funding it needs to do so clearly, with good information. This is a missed opportunity, though. We had a panel here that the Minister has ably described as well equipped to undertake the review—Dame Paula Rebstock and Professor Allan Fels, who is something of a hero of mine, a titan of the council of trade unions in Australia and the author of an excellent report on price gouging.

Instead, what we’ve got is a Minister that has made decisions to step back what could have been an excellent piece of reform that would have given us the regulator that we need—tough but fair—and that small businesses can look to and say, “We don’t like every decision that they make, but they are making decisions in the interests of New Zealanders.” But, no, we’ve got this outside-in perspective where New Zealanders will be left wondering whether there is more and more politicisation of the regulator going on and more and more decisions which see the grocery commissioner being walked right back; the telecommunications commissioner, who was introduced into a market that was not working for Kiwis and has made significant contributions while their position has existed, walked right back. Now what are we left with? A body that is being appointed by Ministers directly making decisions that New Zealanders will struggle to have faith in. I will get to that more—about why that really matters for our economy.

At this point, Labour cannot support this. We will go to select committee, and we will listen to these matters, and, hopefully, we can make change that means that more New Zealanders are able to have faith in their regulator, because we need it. We need an economy where everybody feels like they are getting a fair go, where people don’t think that lobbyists have a back door into Government and the regulator to get exactly what they want to the detriment of small businesses and mums and dads who are out there competing on price and quality, because larger corporates can command high prices over time by keeping others out. That is not the economy that we need. It is an economy where there is a significant drag not only on productivity but also on the consumers who Labour is on the side of. This is not a reform that is on the side of consumers.

This is a missed opportunity for the consumers who need us most when we are facing prices continually rising at the pump, when fuel is a huge source of anxiety for every person in our country right now, and when there are no pricing mechanisms being introduced by this Government. We’ve asked the commission nicely to look at any price gouging while, in fact, taking away their funding and taking away the specific tool that makes the commissioners the powerful operators they are in the economy. Whether you like it or not, whether you think the telecommunications commissioner or the grocery commissioner roles are working as they should at the moment, shouldn’t we all be able to agree that these are industries that are not working and where the regulator needs special enforcement powers and a way of taking a good look under the hood about whether New Zealanders are getting a good deal? I think so, but this bill does the opposite of that.

So let me tell you about what Labour will be looking for when we work through this bill at select committee. We’ll be looking at whether the removal of the dedicated sector commissioners is in line with any evidence that those roles have not been working as intended in the markets where persistent consumer harm has already been identified. You might remember, Mr Speaker, that the introduction of the telecommunication commissioner came on the back of real persistent consumer harm in the telecommunications industry, and the break-up of that industry did occur. A third market entrant has made huge gains for consumers and now telecommunications prices, particularly the prices of phone contracts for New Zealanders, are within reach and there is sharp competition in that market. Is that because we have a tooled-up regulator. Is that because the rules were fair? Is that because there was more competition? Yes. Over time that has been the case, and more and more we see corporate margins being taken on other products within that. But the things that are regulated by the telcos commissioner are sharply priced and that’s something to be proud of. Why would we walk that back? Why would we not continue a regime that is working?

The groceries commissioner was also created in a market that was not working well. Are we now hearing from the Government, after tough, tough talk about the supermarkets, that they don’t want to see the grocery commissioner actually making a difference? This is a big backdown from the Government and we want them to explain why. This will lead to higher prices in grocery, in telco, and in the markets which will not be properly regulated. This is a bad step in the wrong direction.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green—Rongotai) (17:02): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. New Zealand is a very small market. It’s a small country far away from other parts of the world, and what we see over and over again is that we have a tendency for form oligopolies. It’s either oligopolies or monopolies, and that means that New Zealanders are paying higher prices for things, and it’s part of our productivity problem. We can see it with fuel. We can see it with supermarkets, a duopoly. We can see it with banks, only four banks—mainly, four big banks, mainly, sucking profits out of the country and into Australia. We see it in construction supplies and vertically integrated construction companies having a monopoly on importing certain things, and then people pay more for it.

It’s actually quite ironic, because while the parties on the right claim to be for competition, the truth is that we see over and over again that they generally implement policy that is in the interest of the status quo, the big players, not the small businesses, and that is a big part of our productivity problem in New Zealand.

One of the things we have to realise is that naturally because we’re a small country and so far from things, and because we’ve had all these ridiculously liberal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s that enriched a very small percentage of people and made child poverty worse, that has dragged our productivity for quite a long time.

In that circumstance, if we’re going to not be able to get true competition, we would be better off to have a regulated sector or have the Government as a big player, and that’s one of the reasons why the Green Party has proposed a green Ministry of Works again—because we’ve seen with infrastructure that the costs have massively .

Tim Costley: Now who’s going back?

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Well, look at what’s happened with infrastructure costs over the last two decades, starting under Steven Joyce when Steven Joyce was transport Minister. We’ve seen massive inflation in—

Hon James Meager: He released the letter.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Yeah. It’s been out for years. What are you talking about? It’s like, update your negs, man. God, you’re so out of date.

So we’ve seen infrastructure costs increase significantly. This is partly because we can’t increase capacity and just have different consulting and contracting firms supposedly competing with each other. They’re actually just bidding each other up and poaching staff off each other. Actually, New Zealand could have better-value infrastructure if we had a more coordinated approach and we didn’t chase this dream of having massive competition when we are 5 million people far away from everywhere else. I mean, that’s just like basic economics. Oligopolies are not good for productivity and they’re not good for consumers. And our Commerce Commission, I will admit, has not really had the tools that it needs to address this.

I have a friend who worked for the equivalent of the Commerce Commission in Scotland, in the UK, and the powers they had there were far greater to actually investigate than what we have here in New Zealand. It’s this light-handed regulation, we never resource proper enforcement, and who does that benefit? It benefits the big players who are milking it, who are making tonnes of money at the expense of ordinary New Zealanders.

So, look, I think the jury’s absolutely out. The Green Party had long, long recommended something like what we have—this commissioner on supermarket competition. I think 20 years ago, Sue Kedgley was announcing the Green Party policy of an ombudsman on supermarkets, and we saw some version of that finally get implemented.

So I think it is unfortunate that we’re losing our named grocery commissioner and telecommunications commissioner. I have a deep distrust of this Government for understandable reasons, and while the Green Party, based on the review, will be listening carefully to the submissions and determining what our position is following the select committee, needless to say, we need more enforcement of the laws that we do have, more and better enforcement, and we actually need a bigger role. There’s a bigger role for the public sector to play in ensuring that New Zealanders, Kiwis, have the basics, that those are affordable and sustainable and in the long term, for public good, not private profit.

SIMON COURT (ACT) (17:07): This bill is about fixing what matters and that is the cost of living. Too many markets in New Zealand aren’t working properly. When competition is weak, prices rise, choice shrinks, and Kiwi families pay the price. These changes strengthen the Commerce Commission’s ability to promote competition and hold dominant players to account. That matters because competition drives lower prices, better choice, and, of course, innovation and the type of services that are available to Kiwis. This bill improves enforcement tools, provides clearer rules, and creates more certainty for business. It means those who compete fairly can succeed and those who try to block competition can’t get away with it. ACT has been clear that if we want to lower the cost of living we must promote more competition. We’ve seen it in groceries, in building materials, and in banking—where barriers are high, prices stay high. That’s why stronger enforcement is part of the answer, but so is removing the red tape and the regulation that stopped new players entering markets. This bill moves us in the right direction. It backs free markets, clear rules, and personal responsibility because when markets work properly, Kiwis get a fair deal. That’s what ACT is all about. This is fixing what matters.

Dr DAVID WILSON (NZ First) (17:08): I rise to speak on the Commerce (Commerce Commission Reform) Amendment Bill. I’ll start off by saying that the Commerce Commission do a very good job. Structural change in the Commerce Commission’s governance and operational mandate primarily seeks to transition the organisation from a model where commissioners handle both day-to-day governance and regulatory decision making and silo divisions, to a more robust board-led governance structure. This we fully understand.

Good governance is really very important in this context and that kind of separation from governance, strategic policy making and so on, and operations is absolutely vital in this context also. We also appreciate the transitional arrangements that the Minister has talked about. However, I also hear the concerns of the member Arena Williams around the potency of such an organisation and what we need it to do in the public interest in New Zealand, but governance is none the less extremely important in that respect.

Along those lines, though, what we’ve heard is there are challenges confronting New Zealand at the moment and AI, blockchain, organised crime, sophisticated fraud, monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies that are currently confronting us. The member from the member ACT Party was talking about how markets will take care of this; sometimes markets are not enough. Sometimes there is market failure, which is why we absolutely need a strong Commerce Commission and we absolutely need good governance in that respect as well.

We expect the private sector to be held in high standards in their governance standards, and so we can expect the same in the public sector. I commend this bill to the House, and on some of those notes, I look forward to the select committee process where we can address some of these challenging things for New Zealand as a whole. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

CAMERON BREWER (National—Upper Harbour) (17:11): It’s great to talk on this Commerce (Commerce Commission Reform) Amendment Bill, and as our Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, the Hon Scott Simpson, has said, this has directly come out of an independent review led by Dame Paula Rebstock. The Finance and Expenditure Committee is looking forward to handling this bill and is grateful that it’s been directed towards us. We have a good relationship with the Commerce Commission, led by its chair, Dr John Small, and it’s very good that he is going to be a big part of this transition, as the Minister said. So we will give this full consideration and we are grateful that this Government is following up from the review that was led by Dame Paula. We look forward to hearing more from submitters and coming back to the House at the next stage. Thank you.

REUBEN DAVIDSON (Labour—Christchurch East) (17:12): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m standing to take a call on the Commerce (Commerce Commission Reform) Amendment Bill. This is a bill that we oppose on this side of the House. I’ll start by echoing the words of one of my colleagues Arena Williams, who spoke at the beginning and said, “An affordable New Zealand needs an economy that delivers for everyone.” I’m repeating her words because they’re very important and I think they’re lost on the other side of the House because the other side of the House believe in progressing an agenda that continues to leave people behind, but not as an unintended consequence of the agenda they’re pushing; it is, in fact, on purpose. And that is the very worst kind of politics.

Now, on the topic of leaving people behind, I can’t let this opportunity pass without giving a shout out to Pam from Aranui, who’s run a campaign to bring the bus back to Aranui. She’s taken her plea to the regional council this week, and the regional council have committed to bringing a bus back to Aranui. Now, that’s fantastic for Aranui, but it flies in the face of what this Government have done by walking away from committing to vital public transport that New Zealanders need, especially during a fuel crisis. [Interruption] But this Government want me to get back to the bill—or those members left here on a Thursday afternoon. So that’s what I’ll get back to, but these are the same members who campaigned around the country saying that they were going to fix the cost of living and have gone on to make it a whole lot worse.

Now, they’ve also talked big about supermarket competition, but this bill—this very bill—removes one of the key institutional reforms that was designed to and was successfully keeping pressure on the sector. The Grocery Commissioner was created because the supermarket duopoly was failing consumers, suppliers, and competitors. Even this Government’s own material acknowledges that named commissioners provide visibility and prioritisation in sectors with significant consumer harm.

But, instead, this Government is stripping out the parts of the system that are working already, and doing nothing—absolutely nothing—to improve the rules in favour of competition.

Now, let’s have a look at another market where this is particularly essential: the telecommunications sector in New Zealand—a clear example of where strong regulation has been essential to opening the market and improving prices and service. Instead, this Government wants to remove the Telecommunications Commissioner, weakening the specialist oversight in another concentrated sector. I mean, this is another market where strong and expert regulation is necessary to prevent firms with market power from extracting excessive profits. The new governance model adds layers of board control and process around regulatory committee. This is a slower, less focused, and less visible enforcement of competition rules. Repealing restrictions on delegation also makes it easier for important decisions to move further away from identifiable specialist regulators and move further away from the affordable New Zealand that New Zealanders need from the economy that will deliver for everybody. Instead, this Government continues to push this through, and it continues to wilfully leave people behind.

This week, Kiwis are worried about putting fuel in their car and they’re worried about putting lunch in their kids’ lunch boxes and they’re worried about putting groceries in their supermarket trolleys, and the other side of the House are worried about putting Robbie Williams into a stadium. That’s all you’ve got: Robbie Williams into a stadium. Newsflash, even the promoter couldn’t say that Robbie Williams wouldn’t have come here without the millions of dollars paid out by this Government to bring him to New Zealand after seven dates in Australia. Desperate, desperate.

At the time they’re doing this, the pain that people are experiencing is the National Party’s fault—the National Government’s fault. Christopher Luxon continues to make it worse.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): Just to say that the member’s got quite a few behind him in the pecking order now. He’s probably ready to start not reading his speeches quite so much and setting an example for his colleagues.

DAVID MacLEOD (National—New Plymouth) (17:17): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m very pleased to speak to this Commerce (Commerce Commission Reform) Amendment Bill. Competition in New Zealand drives economic growth and innovation, as well as productivity, but it’s not always been the case, as we’ve experienced here in New Zealand. This bill is going to be forwarded to the Finance and Expenditure Committee. I look forward to seeing whether they come back with an even stronger bill, because it is essential for our economy here in New Zealand. I’m very happy to commend this bill to the House.

DAN ROSEWARNE (Labour) (17:17): It’s a pleasure to be back in this House. I must admit it’s taken me two attempts to get here—a bit like School Certificate. I had two cracks at that as well. But fortunately—fortunately—I’m getting the opportunity to sit the exam again, and hopefully with a better result this time.

Some people, especially on the other side of the House, get through life with straight As; some of us take more of the scenic route—

Hon Jan Tinetti: Hang on. You know, some of us got straight As, thank you.

DAN ROSEWARNE: Absolutely, but in my case, it means crawling through a bit more barbed wire than most, but it teaches resilience, it teaches endurance, and that is important when we embark on a career in this House.

But anyway, let’s get back to this bill, because if this was an exam, the Government would be failing miserably. New Zealanders are doing it tough right now: at the supermarket, at the petrol pump, and when bills come in at the end of the month. The cost of living is biting hard and families are making difficult choices about what they can afford and what they can go without and how much they must stretch their pay just a little bit further each week. Instead of stepping up to ease that pressure, the Government is actually making it worse. This bill is a perfect example of that failure because at its heart, it’s not just a technical reform of the Commerce Commission; it’s a political choice. It’s a deliberate choice to weaken every watchdog that helps keep prices down for Kiwi families, and that matters because we already know that the system isn’t working as it should.

We know that a handful of supermarket giants dominate around 80 percent of the grocery market. We know that this level of concentration limits competition and keeps prices higher than they need to be, and we know that suppliers are often afraid to speak up for fear of being squeezed out.

We know that when competition is weak, prices go up, and families pay the price. That’s exactly why Labour acted and that is why we created the Grocery Commission, to shine a light on that anti-competitive behaviour, to give suppliers a voice, and to hold those big players to account, and, ultimately, to drive down prices for everyday New Zealanders.

Sunlight matters, accountability matters, and strong regulation matters when markets fail. What does this Government do? They scrap that role, they remove that focus, and they water down enforcement. They expect New Zealanders to believe that, somehow, magically, prices will fall as a result. That’s not credible. In fact, it defies both logic and experience. Weakening oversight in a concentrated market does not lead to better outcomes; it leads to higher prices, less transparency, and more power in the hands of the few.

It’s happening at the worst possible time, because, right now, the global situation is getting harder, not easier. The war in Iran is already driving up oil prices, disrupting supply chains, and pushing inflationary pressures across the world. Energy prices are rising, and we all know what that means here at home. It flows directly into transport costs, the costs of getting goods on to shelves, and, ultimately, into the weekly shop. We’re already seeing fuel prices spike internationally, putting pressure on households and businesses alike, and when prices face high import costs, those costs don’t just disappear; they are passed on to the consumer.

It doesn’t stop at the pump. That same conflict, right now, is pushing up the cost of fertiliser, freight, and food production. It is making it more expensive to grow food, to move food, and to sell food. That means higher grocery bills are coming next, whether this Government acknowledges that or not.

Let’s be very clear about this: New Zealanders are being hit hard by global pressures—pressures that they cannot control. They cannot control war overseas. They cannot control global oil prices. They cannot control supply chain disruption. But what they should be able to rely on is a Government that is actually firmly on their side, a Government that strengthens competition and doesn’t weaken it, and a Government that actually cracks down on excessive profits, not turns a blind eye. So it’s a pleasure to take my first call on this bill because it’s absolutely important that Kiwis get a fair go.

RIMA NAKHLE (National—Takanini) (17:23): As most of us in this House know, one of the main aims of the Commerce Commission is to promote competition and protect consumers; one of the aims of this bill is to make the Commerce Commission more efficient and more effective so that eventually it can reach that role. The other side of the House had six years to do something about competition, so that they could bring grocery prices down. It didn’t happen in six years; at least on this side of the House, we’re moving. I commend this bill to the House.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Commerce (Commerce Commission Reform) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

Ayes 82

New Zealand National 49; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 14; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.

Noes 39

New Zealand Labour 34; Te Pāti Māori 4; Ferris.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

Referral to Select Committee

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor) (17:24): The question is, That the Commerce (Commerce Commission Reform) Amendment Bill be considered by the Finance and Expenditure Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Finance and Expenditure Committee.

Instruction to Select Committee

Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs) (17:24): I move, That the Commerce (Commerce Commission Reform) Amendment Bill be reported to the House by 27 July 2026.

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 53

New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 14; Te Pāti Māori 4; Ferris.

Motion agreed to.

Public Finance Amendment Bill

Third Reading

Debate resumed from 12 March.

SIMON COURT (ACT) (17:26): Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is a simple bill that treats taxpayers’ money with respect, because for every dollar that Government spends, that’s a dollar that a family doesn’t get to keep. ACT believes this bill is fixing what matters, it’s cutting waste, and respecting the taxpayer.

Right now, too much of public finance just runs on autopilot. There’s not enough accountability for each dollar spent. Kiwis are feeling it in the cost of living, and they expect better discipline and greater transparency from their Government. In line with what this coalition Government was voted in to do, there’s going to be a far sharper focus on value for money and it’s going to be clear who’s responsible for spending that money when this Public Finance Amendment Bill passes. I commend it to the House.

Dr DAVID WILSON (NZ First) (17:27): I rise to speak on behalf of New Zealand First on the Public Finance Amendment Bill. I noticed through the earlier parts of this reading that some people were saying—or at least one member in particular said—that GDP and GDP per capita were deeply contested measures.

Hon Julie Anne Genter: That’s true.

Dr DAVID WILSON: That’s not true. They’re consistent and able to be measured universally across OECD countries, and yet we wanted to have the wellbeing measures there put in place.

So the wellbeing measures—can I say?—the only way that they’re vaguely consistent is in New Zealand. The comparators with other countries are missing and they’re using proxies, which makes the whole thing internally inconsistent. So I think we need to take that distraction away from Treasury and allow them to do their job, and so that we can have a public finance Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update, Budget Economic and Fiscal Update, and all the rest of them, coming through where they’ve basically focused on what matters to New Zealanders, and that is running the country.

I would remind those people that think that GDP is not consistent that, actually, the public sector has a multiplicity of agencies who are quite adept and will be able to address those wellbeing measures particularly with the Public Service Amendment Bill, which is looking towards outcome performance and will perform this function amicably well.

For too long, the previous Government cluttered our public finance reports as wellbeing measures that often served more as an ideological exercise in a practical, economic tool. This bill fixes that by repealing those requirements and returning our focus to the core fiscal variables. We commend this bill to the House.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green) (17:29): Thank you, Mr Speaker. There are some inconsequential bits of this bill that we are more than happy to support, but, on the whole, I think what this Government fails to genuinely do is take into account the genuine and actually quite big risks that exist, for example, to our liability for not taking action on climate change, and the money that we would have to pay offshore in relationship to that.

Simon Court: No one’s paying the money.

RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH: Well, that is a choice that maybe the Government would choose to make, but we would be none the less liable for it. I think this is part of the challenge that we have: that the Government can either choose to be responsible and represent that liability accurately, whether they choose to pay it later down the track or not or, simply, ignore it. We do think that when it comes to the way that we represent risk, we should be accurate in putting forward those risks and having them reflected. Then the Government can choose to be upfront with the public as to whether they intend to pay them or not.

I think one of the challenges that we have, and the previous speaker talked about it, is the GDP per capita measurements that we have. They are a blunt instrument for measuring the state and the wellbeing of a society and an economy. We can have GDP go up, and sometimes even GDP per capita goes up, at the same time as the country is experiencing growing household debt, increased material hardship for children, and longer delays for people to access things like basic healthcare. I will be the first one to admit that some of these wellbeing objectives could have been implemented and reflected better in Government policies, but I do think, at the end of the day, that there was an attempt in recognising that the state of our economy and our society cannot simply be measured by these blunt instruments that do not reflect, for example, the state of inequality and how our most marginalised and structurally left behind communities may be feeling.

Again, we do think that the inconsequential changes around the rules for departmental and multicategory appropriations for Estimates documents—the requirement for a tax expenditure statement and clearing up the rules in relationship to multicategory appropriations and strategic intention requirements—are all well and fine. But at the core, this is about returning us to more blunt instruments to measure the state of our economy.

Ultimately, the economy is all of us: it’s the state of our poorest, it’s the state of our rivers, it’s the state of our children growing up, and the state of those children within the first 2,000 days of their lives. These need to be better represented in our Government objectives, the way that we put them in the Budget Policy Statements, and how we guide decisions made by Ministers as a result of this.

For example, I see Budget Policy Statements from this Government that talk about reducing unemployment but then mostly focus on business confidence, for example, and the Finance and Expenditure Committee report, which has, in my view, very little to do with actual job creation. We don’t have a set of measurements that allows us to genuinely reflect how well people in our community, particularly those that have the least, are genuinely doing. Instruments like GDP, including GDP per capita, don’t necessarily tell us a full picture of our country. So this is why we’re not voting for the bill.

I think what the Government could have instead done is refined and committed to a broader set of measurement tools, beyond the wellbeing objectives, but, none the less, ones that actually tell us a more fulsome picture that can be accurately represented in the Budget Policy Statement. Again, I do not have faith that even extending the sort of risks that get covered will lead to a Government that takes issues like climate change seriously, that takes issues like poverty seriously. I do not see that reflected, for example, in even the current Budget Policy Statement, and I don’t think this bill will do much to change the direction that we’re seeing from this Government, where more people are being left behind.

So the Green Party is not supportive of this bill. We acknowledge the more inconsequential changes that are happening as part of this bill, which we can commend and put aside, but, on the whole, I think this bill, and the principles of this bill, do take us backwards and ignore some of the biggest liabilities we’re facing—that this Government claims they’re refusing to pay anyway.

CAMERON BREWER (National—Upper Harbour) (17:34): It’s great to stand up for the third reading of the Public Finance Amendment Bill. We are legislating to make it harder to hide unfunded fiscal cliffs, and we remember them well. The incoming Minister of Finance, the Hon Nicola Willis, had a long list, and we remember having to find money for Pharmac, and we remember having to find money for the school lunch programme. We’re also repealing the wellbeing statements, the necessity for Budget Policy Statements, and the Treasury to deliver on wellbeing reports and wellbeing statements. We remember those Wellbeing Budgets and their huge operating allowances. I commend the bill.

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram) (17:35): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I am pleased to take a call on this and reiterate that Labour opposes this bill. We oppose this bill for several reasons, which I’ll go through. There were some changes, and we think there could have been more changes, that were made at select committee and at the committee of the whole House.

One of the fundamental things that has come up in this debate is the removal of the wellbeing objectives. This is a Government that came in with the intent to remove them because they were something that Labour had put in place—or so they told us. But what this belied was that, actually, the wellbeing approach to budgeting, for us looking at something broader than just the simple traditional economic measures, was work that had begun when Bill English was the Minister of Finance. This is the work that Treasury had begun as far back as 2011, because around the world, economists understand that if we’re going to understand how Governments need to prioritise spending, then we need to understand it in a broader context. This is the work of the Living Standards Framework that economists at Treasury started under Bill English in 2011.

But this is not the National Party of Bill English. This is not the party that is making considered decisions in the best interests of New Zealanders; this is a National Party that came in and was just intent on rolling back anything because Labour had done it, and that is a big part of what is being done in this bill that we are debating today: to remove that wellbeing framework.

Around the world, the wellbeing framework that New Zealand had put in place—and bear in mind this is work that had been going on for a substantial period of time within Treasury—was not just something that Labour dreamt up and put in place; this was continuing and accelerating work that was going on around the world and held up to be a gold standard.

Budgets are where Governments make decisions about their priorities. It is important that Governments spell out what their priorities are to New Zealanders. Having wellbeing objectives makes it plain and clear, and needing to report against those objectives makes it plain and clear to New Zealanders what a Government prioritises, what it thinks is important, and what it doesn’t think is important. So when I read through Budget Policy Statements and I don’t see the words “climate change” come up once in a Budget Policy Statement from Nicola Willis, I know that’s not a priority. But let’s have a framework we can compare across Governments. Let’s have a way of actually having that transparency and measuring that across Governments.

I think one of the things that we were looking at—if we look at the Labour Government’s last Budget Policy Statement and the things that we were looking to say we were prioritising—was transitioning New Zealand to a low-emissions economy, and making sure people’s jobs were protected as we went through that. Physical and mental wellbeing, the future of work, equipping New Zealanders for the future, Māori and Pacific peoples, and child wellbeing—they were a priority. These are the kinds of things that Governments do need to lay bare. And look: voters can make decisions about the kind of Government they want and the kind of wellness objectives they will have. We live in a democracy, but Governments should at least be upfront enough to put those down on paper and say, “These are our priorities for how we are spending our money.”

But it didn’t just scrap the wellbeing objectives and take those out of the way in which we report; it did some other things too, and a couple that we agree with and that we think are useful. So one of the things that it does do is it increases the publication window for the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update—the PREFU—and increases the time that commentators and the public have with the information that is in the PREFU. Now, the PREFU is an important part of an election campaign; it is an opening of the books, where it is laid bare how much money there is.

It’s incredibly important for Oppositions who don’t have access, under normal circumstances, beyond the half-yearly fiscal update. It’s going into an election saying, “This is how much money there is. Parties need to campaign and make their promises based on this fact.” So we think opening up that window and getting that information out there for a longer time is good for our democracy and we can support that.

One of the things that it did that I thought was interesting comes under the banner of “supporting fiscal transparency”. On the face of it, it sounds like a really good measure. I like a bit of transparency—I’d like to see more of it from this Government, in fact. But what these, essentially, were were changes needed to help Nicola Willis read a Budget. Nicola Willis came in and claimed that her Government was set up with all these fiscal cliffs—these fiscal cliffs that had been hidden from them—that they had no way of knowing about them. They were so hidden and so covert that the Labour Government had put out press releases about them, saying it was time-limited funding.

When it came to housing, where she claimed that it was unfair that her Government might have to make some commitments about funding social housing in this country and that she didn’t know it had been, she could have picked up a press release and read that was exactly the case. There was time-limited funding, because elections are times for Governments and parties to nail their colours to the mast and say what they are going to do. This Government made a decision not to fund public housing. We haven’t seen serious amounts of new funding going into public housing since they’ve been in power. The houses they claim to have built were all funded in Budgets put under a wellbeing framework from a Labour Government. So let’s actually know what that fiscal transparency is. If it helps people who can’t read a Budget, then fine. It’s not something we’re necessarily opposed to.

But one of the other changes that is in here are the changes to the ways in which we can express the surplus. So this is the provisions in here and changes to the way we can report on the Government’s books. So the changes in the Public Finance Act are what allow the invention of the operating balance before gains and losses, excluding ACC revenue and expenses (OBEGALx), which is a new measure of the health of the Government books, brought in in 2024 by this Government. Operating balance before gains and losses (OBEGAL) is a way in which the state of the New Zealand economy has been measured across Governments for decades. It is a measure that you can look and you can see the OBEGAL figure over a number of years, and you can compare them as apples with apples with apples. It was an accounting standard, if you like, that meant there was consistency.

But what happened in these changes and in 2024 is that Nicola Willis invented a new way to express this: Begala. Essentially, it’s a new measure that is creative accounting to make the surplus look closer, because, essentially, what Nicola Willis didn’t do was fix the books; she simply went and crossed out ACC.

Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Oh, is that the “x”?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: Yep, that’s the “x”. It’s crossing out ACC. So while every other Government for decades before had carried the ACC liability in terms of the way that they calculated the health of the Government books, Nicola Willis decided, “I know. I’ve got a cunning plan. I’ll make surplus look closer. I’ll just put a big x through the ACC transactions and discount that from the way that we report on the economy.” That does not do us well as a nation. We need to be able to have those transparent and clear measures to be able to compare the economy over a period of time to look at the health of it.

So while she’s saying she needs help reading a Budget by putting fiscal transparency measures into this because she can’t pick up a press release and see what time-limited funding looks like, what she has done is created a new way of expressing the health of the Government books that makes it look like surplus is closer than it would have been for any other Government before this Government. I think that’s something that it’s incredibly important to remember.

So Labour cannot support this. This is a bill that takes New Zealand backwards. It doesn’t measure whether or not our economy is working for our people.

TIM COSTLEY (National—Ōtaki) (17:44): Virtue signalling over wellbeing doesn’t help pay the bills. I have visited the schools that were told they were going to get new classrooms, except there was never any money put aside for it. The Freudian slip from Megan Woods, when she said, “Oh, but we put out lots of press releases.”, that’s the problem. Putting out a press release saying something’s happening, but not allocating money, doesn’t deliver anything. It’s all talk, it’s a fiscal cliff, and that’s what we’ve got to fix. I commend it.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Reuben Davidson—it’s a split call, by the way.

REUBEN DAVIDSON (Labour—Christchurch East) (17:45): Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a split call. That, by my calculations, means that I have five minutes to speak on this. Unlike the previous member, who wasn’t able to fill his 10, I’m more than happy to go through and make full use of the five minutes that I have to speak in opposition to the Public Finance Amendment Bill. And not just simple opposition, but strong opposition—

Tim Costley: At least look up once!

REUBEN DAVIDSON: —because what this could be called, Mr Costley—I’ll look you in the eye and say this. What this could be called is the “We Don’t Care Bill”, because that’s what it is. This is the bill that says, “We simply do not care.”

Now, other members have spoken to this bill and they’ve talked about what this bill does. So what this bill does is it makes some of the measures—[Interruption] Madam Speaker, I realise I’m speaking to you.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I can’t hear a word any of these people are saying, because they’re all talking at once, but I can hear you.

REUBEN DAVIDSON: Well, you are in a far more enviable position than I, Madam Speaker, because whether it’s in barracking or in speeches they deliver in this House, not much of it is worth listening to, I can assure you of that.

But what this bill does is it puts in place some greater transparency, so that the current Minister of Finance can read the Budget more easily—something she claims not to have been able to do prior to the election. As other members have pointed out there were a large number of media releases and there was a large number of budgets available to be read. It’s all in the skill applied to the reading of the Budget that enables the reader to get a good understanding of exactly what that Budget is committing to.

Now, there was a member who shouted out before: “Show us the press release.” He’s still in the House. I’m very happy to, at some stage, show that member exactly how you can access press releases, going back in time, that made very clear what was funded and those funding commitments. The reality is that members on the other side of the House know what was committed to, because they celebrate the cutting of ribbons at the social housing, at the public housing, at the hospital wards, at all of the schools and the classrooms, all of the commitments that were made and funded under the last Labour Government.

But the important thing to focus on here is not what this bill does, but what it removes—that is the five wellbeings. Let’s just go through those. I’m going to read the headings for the wellbeing, and then I’m going to make some comments about them, because this week, of all weeks, the just transition and supporting New Zealanders to transition to a climate resilient, sustainable, and low-emissions economy seems more relevant than ever, in a time where we’re seeing fuel prices really spiral out of control and out of the cost and affordability for a lot of New Zealanders. That is not something that this Government wants to see considered in the Budget.

The physical and mental wellbeing—supporting improved health outcomes for all New Zealanders, with a specific focus on the mental wellbeing of our young people; yet they don’t want to see this factored into Budget decisions any more. You don’t have to go very far to see stories in your own electorates or across Aotearoa of the challenges and difficulties we’re seeing in the mental health space, but you don’t want to factor that into the Budget. At a time when AI is presenting all manner of opportunities, but also disruption to the workforce, there’s no interest in looking at the future of work anymore. You only have to go back to question time today to see the staggering statistics around unemployment and how negatively it’s impacting our Māori and Pasifika communities, but let’s not look at that in any of our Budgets going forward.

Perhaps, most staggeringly, child wellbeing. Child wellbeing should no longer be considered when you are putting together your Budgets. That’s the message from this bill. That’s the message from those members on the other side of the House. I believe, as it says in our wellbeing Budgets, that New Zealanders want us to measure our success in line with their values: the importance of fairness, the protection of the environment, and the strength of our community. This bill steps us away from being able to do just that.

DAVID MacLEOD (National—New Plymouth) (17:50): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m pleased to stand in this third reading of the Public Finance Amendment Bill. One of the surprises for this Government when we came into the Treasury benches was opening the books and seeing fiscal cliffs from time-limited funding. We had unfunded promises left, right, and centre, and it’s got to be better than that for any Government that comes into the Treasury benches. These amendments here, there are a lot of technical amendments, but there are a lot of improvements in gaining greater transparency, improving the fiscal responsibility, and improving the practical outcomes of the Act itself.

I see that there have been a couple of amendments made by the Finance and Expenditure Committee. That tells me that the committee has done a great job of returning the bill in a stronger position than it was actually received in. I’m happy to commend this bill to the House.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central) (17:51): The members on the other side who talk about fiscal cliffs, it really just shows their own ignorance, because anyone who reads the actual Budget—not just some press release on it but that Budget—will see that it tells you year by year how much is allocated. If it doesn’t say out-years, then those further years aren’t funded. The fact that Nicola Willis and her peers can’t open a Budget and say, “This funding ends in 2023 or 2024 or 2025.” is a reflection not on the budgeting of the Labour Government but on the innumeracy of the National Party.

But what’s really concerning about this bill is the fact that it is throwing out the wellbeing objectives. I can see why they want to get rid of them, because the wellbeing of New Zealand has gone backwards. It’s not just GDP that has gone backwards under this Government, but the wellbeing of New Zealanders has as well.

We know, for example, that this Government should have a greater focus on jobs—and the Labour Party absolutely will—because when people are in jobs, not only is their income better but their mental health is better, their social connectedness is better, their self-esteem is better. But they are not the kind of things that that Government wants to measure. They want to stop measuring how well we are doing. All they want to measure is cold, hard cash, and they can’t even do a good job at running an economy.

If we think about social housing and the fact that that Government defunded—stopped building—3,500 social houses, one of the reasons they can pretend or they can turn a blind eye to the misery they’re causing is that they don’t want to measure the misery, because that’s what a wellbeing approach does. We need to measure—in our wellbeing Budget, in our wellbeing report, Treasury needs to measure how many of our people are living in damp, cold homes; how many of our people are homeless. That Government doesn’t want to measure that because it doesn’t want to face up to the fact that under that Government, the wellbeing of New Zealanders is going backwards.

If we think of where to spend money, if we think of the health system, if we think of how hard it is to go to a GP—and we know that one of the best ways to keep New Zealanders healthy is to go to see a GP, but they don’t care that the cost of going to see a GP is approaching $100 and sometimes exceeding it. That’s why we think three free GP visits is a good idea: because we know how to measure wellbeing.

That Government wants to get rid of wellbeing measures because they know that escalating primary healthcare costs are undermining not just people’s tertiary health needs but people being able to lead a good life. If you need a little bit of medical assistance to get over the flu or to address some pain issues so that you can go for a walk, so that you can interact with your family, that’s actually what wellbeing is about.

Let’s talk about another wellbeing measure: social cohesion—social capital. How are we doing as a nation? Well, under that Government, we are the most polarised we have ever been. I was on the forecourt with 50,000 others when that Government was tearing the country apart over the Treaty principles bill. Now, they don’t want to measure social cohesion. They don’t want to know how you are getting on with each other. They don’t want to know how much racism there is in our community, because under Christopher Luxon it’s got worse.

The fact of the matter is that the wellbeing Budget was a world-leading idea. It was well established. The OECD absolutely was watching what was going on in New Zealand because they wanted to know, how do you measure things that really count? Let’s not just measure how big the surplus is or how big the GDP is, because one of the questions is where it goes. Is it being spread equitably across the country or is it going to fat cats? Is it going to insurance companies, banks, and grocery stores? Well, under that Government, that’s what’s happening. But we want to measure not just GDP; we want to measure how the wealth is distributed in our country and how well everybody is doing.

The OECD was looking with great interest, saying, “How do you measure things like social cohesion?” Let’s be clear: it wasn’t a straightforward process. The Treasury was working very hard on exactly how to look at things like how do you compare how you get on in a community, the welcoming nature of your community, with the health needs of children in Northland or clean water in Geraldine. All of those things are trade-offs. But if you don’t measure it, if you don’t try and compare those things, you can’t make good Budget choices, and that’s what the wellbeing Budget was about.

Now that Government is left with a cold and brutal measure of how we’re doing. It will look at jobless figures, but it doesn’t ask what the wellbeing effect of joblessness is. It will look at declining house prices, but it won’t ask what the effect of declining house prices is on homeowners. It will look at high GP costs, but it won’t ask the real question: how does that affect the wellbeing of New Zealand?

They just don’t want to report on it. I mean, I’m surprised they didn’t get rid of the Child Poverty Reduction Act as well while they’re at it, because child poverty has got worse under this Government as well. It got worse and is getting worse, because this is not a Government that cares.

We agree that fiscal responsibility is important. We agree that transparency is important, but that’s the fringes of this bill. The centre of this bill is the gutting of the most innovative economic measures that have been seen not only in New Zealand but around the world. We should be hanging our heads in shame as a country that where we were leading the world in a wellbeing approach, with a living standards framework which was measuring what was good about New Zealand and being a New Zealander and what was bad about what was going on in New Zealand—

Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall: The enshittification.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: I can’t say that, Ayesha Verrall. Absolutely, we have made New Zealand worse. We’ve made the reporting standards worse. Whilst there are some technical amendments, the fact of the matter is that that Government is not interested in measuring what really matters. It’s interested in measuring GDP. We know, as Robert Kennedy said, GDP goes up when there’s a war. GDP goes up when there’s an earthquake. GDP goes up when there’s a car accident and the car has to be repaired. Those are not good outcomes. We should be measuring essentially how healthy, how happy, and how much we get on with each other, and they should be our budgetary objectives, not simply growing fat cats and watching monopoly profits go.

It is with considerable sadness that I look at this bill and I see that the work of Grant Robertson and the many scholars who assisted in Treasury and who came to the Finance and Expenditure Committee—as Megan Woods said, the Key-English Government actually started this work, because the Key-English Government had some faults, but they were genuinely interested in improving the lives of New Zealanders in their conservative, traditional way. They wanted to measure what could be done and what was good, but this Government wants to see no evil—and it’s certainly evil that it’s doing as it undermines social cohesion, the health of New Zealanders, the equity of New Zealanders, and really what’s going on in New Zealand. They’re turning a blind eye. They don’t want to measure it. They don’t want to report on it. You can sit down—I’ve got a full 12 seconds; I wouldn’t want you to get worn out standing up.

Here we are, sad day for New Zealand as we see this Government trying to force through yet another retrograde step.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Rima Nakhle.

RIMA NAKHLE (National—Takanini) (18:01): Thank you, Madam Speaker. Actions speak louder—

Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Point of order, Madam Speaker. Point order. Madan Speaker, it’s 6.01 p.m. and under Standing Orders, the House rises at 6 p.m. unless it’s necessary to extend it under Standing Order 53 for the purpose of not interrupting a member. Now, you’re not interrupting a member by adjourning the House at this point.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, I’m not interrupting a member by adjourning, but also I have some discretion between five to and five past—

Hon Dr Duncan Webb: No, well, Madam Speaker, Standing Orders say—[Interruption] To speak to the point of order, Standing Order 46 is very clear that the House on a Thursday rises at 6 p.m. except when Standing Order 53 applies when you may interrupt the business up to five minutes before to avoid interrupting a speaker. To allow the speeches to continue now would be to not be consistent with Standing Orders.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, technically Mr Webb, you are correct in that that’s what the Standing Order says. I do have sole discretion, and one of the things that I struggle with is: would we come back and debate, for a very small portion of time, on another given day—the House time—on a very small piece of legislation that’s left? I struggle with that and I’m happy for the member to speak again to that point of order.

Hon Dr Duncan Webb: I’m not going to defy the Speaker, obviously. If you think you have that discretion, that’s for you. I note, however, though, that there is not only a National Party call but also an additional call to be had because the Māori Party didn’t take their call. So you’ve now got two additional speakers to be heard.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yeah. On that basis—and given that we’ve just had a point of order, and given that there is another call after the Te Pāti Māori call, I’m going to make the decision to close the House for the weekend.

Tim Costley: That’s terrible!

DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, it’s a relevant point because we do have another full call that we could have. On that basis, the House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 31 March.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 6.04 p.m.

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