van Velden BrookeHon BROOKE van VELDEN (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): Thank you very much Madam Chair. Thank you all for your lovely contributions. It's very exciting to be here for the first time at the annual review hearing. I just wanted to start by touching on a couple of the topics. The first was from Ricardo Menéndez March asking about the labour inspectorate. In this specific time frame for this review the labour inspectorate delivered 3174 interventions which very much exceeded the 2021-2022 full year result by 39 percent and over their estimated target of 2200 interventions per year for the second year running. That built on a 47 percent increase in output between 2020-2021 and 2021-2022. I have a lot of faith in our labour inspectorate and I think the people who go out and do those jobs are wonderful New Zealanders and they have my full backing. I expect in this year they will also do a fantastic job and they have my full support making sure that labour standards are upheld.I also just wanted to touch on the different type of inspectors which is the WorkSafe investigators raised by the member Camilla Belich asking whether or not we can guarantee that the number of inspectors will increase rather than decrease. I just wanted to alert the member to the fact that under the previous Government which this review is about the number of WorkSafe inspectors dropped from 211 to 195. At the same time the head count for WorkSafe increased exorbitantly. So that is something that the previous Government did: they cut the number of inspectors while the number of people at WorkSafe increased. I have a great lot of faith in our new chair board and the CEO of WorkSafe and I understand that at April 2024 WorkSafe started training another 19 inspectors to join their investigators. I just wanted to touch a little bit on some comments about the 90-day trials and the minimum wage. Now for anybody who might be listening or following along on TV it might not be very obvious from some of the comments made that under the previous Government 90-day trials existed. So all of these terrible terrible comments about 90-day trials; that was the previous Government's policy. All that this Government has done is said Hey it really worked really really well for small businesses. Let's expand that for large corporates and larger companies too. If it worked well for the small companies let's make it work for the big ones."When it comes to the minimum wage and explaining a little bit about how we landed at that 2 percent increase for this year I think that was the right measure to make because it balanced the interests of both workers in a cost of living crisis as well as business owners who are finding it really really tough at the moment even to make sure that they can pay their employees. And so we have made that balance but also taking into account that over the last seven years Consumers Price Index or inflation went up by around 25 percent. At the same time under the previous Government the minimum wage went up by 50 percent. That was really really high in comparison to what the inflation rate was going up at. So we as a Government have sought to rebalance that."