Volume 704 Week 12 - Wednesday 25 March 2015Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeVolume 704 Week 12 - Wednesday 25 March 2015[Sitting date: 25 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2563. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Wednesday 25 March 2015Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.Prayers.MotionsBlack Caps—2015 Cricket World CupHon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister for Sport and Recreation):I seek leave to move a motion without notice in relation to the Black Caps’ performance in the Cricket World Cup.Mr SPEAKER: Is there any objection to that course of action being followed? There does appear to be none.Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I move That the House express its admiration for the New Zealand Black Caps’ performance during the 2015 Cricket World Cup to date and wish them good luck for the final on Sunday. Last night New Zealanders had the privilege to witness the greatest finish to the greatest day in New Zealand’s one-day cricket history. There will be a period when we can reflect on the wider benefits of this Cricket World Cup but right now it is all about the team. New Zealanders have been enthralled for the past 6 weeks by a range of stellar performances which have absolutely uplifted the country. We have seen Brendon McCullum leading from the front taking apart various bowling attacks ably supported by a great seam attack—people like Trent Boult Tim Southee and Kane Williamson stepping up when needed; Dan Vettori putting in a consistent string of excellent performances; and of course last night when it really counted when it was really stacked against the team Grant Elliott otherwise known as the “Hairy Javelin” stepping up to guide New Zealand to victory with an outstanding 84 not out off 73 balls. I do not think there will be a New Zealand cricket fan who witnessed that last night who will not take the image of that final six over long on to their graves.That was a wonderful performance but this is a wonderful group of young New Zealanders and I think the way they reacted with humility in victory their graciousness and the way they talked to the Proteas afterwards who were obviously very disappointed with what was a shattering experience for them point to the character of this team. Brendon McCullum is an outstanding leader. Mike Hesson has coached that team fantastically. We are in the World Cup final in Melbourne on Sunday and 4.4 million New Zealanders are behind that team. As Brendon McCullum says on TV: “Dare to believe.” We do dare to believe and I think this team is going to do very very well on Sunday. So go hard go well and go the Black Caps in Melbourne.Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South):On behalf of the Labour Opposition I want to join with Dr Coleman in his best wishes for the team. It is a slightly unusual approach. In these circumstances we normally wait until after the final but I can see that he wanted to get in while the Prime Minister was away. They are a magnificent team and I think we are all growing to believe that they can do it. I have noted as one does—one goes back on the Facebook feeds—that Grant Elliott was described by a member of this House as an “ageing bit-part player” when he was selected. I want to say as an ageing bit-part player that sometimes the less mature people do not quite appreciate what we can do.METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green):It was a hell of a match. I too was glued to my seat last night but because I was stuck in meetings—important ones—I also had my finger glued to Twitter which provided me with an in-depth and increasingly hyperbolic analysis of the game especially the descriptions of everybody’s mums who were either in the kitchen hiding and cringing or were shouting at the TV it seemed. But I was yesterday in the company of thousands of New Zealanders who revelled in the victory and who join us in congratulating Brendon McCullum and the New Zealand Black Caps on reaching finally the final of the International Cricket Council World Cup.New Zealand is a world-beater. We are a tiny nation of underdogs and we consistently punch above our weight. We are a people who bravely push the boundaries and in the case of the Black Caps—in their efforts last night—who score them mercilessly as well. I want to make special mention of the “Hairy Javelin” Grant Elliott who compiled a superb innings of 84 not out including hitting the winning six. I note that Grant and the Greens share a passion. I learnt from Twitter last night that his profile says he is into energy efficiency and a green future. This makes me doubly proud and I will quite happily buy him a coffee any day. [Interruption] Jealous!A match that has it all as yesterday’s did does not happen unless both teams perform superbly and I express my commiserations to AB de Villiers and his South African team. South Africa played a huge cricket game last night. They did not deserve to lose; their problem was that New Zealand deserved to win. So now it is off to Melbourne and the Black Caps’ first ever World Cup final. On behalf of the Green Party I want to wish them all the best and to bring it back—no pressure. Kia ora.MAHESH BINDRA (NZ First):I rise to take this call proudly on behalf of New Zealand First. What a game! Cricket used to be in every New Zealand Indian’s bloodstream. It is in our bone marrow now. I do not have many nails left for Sunday. It was an emotional roller coaster that was mesmerising sickening and pulsating—all at the same time. For anyone who has played cricket at any level this game had it all. I had text updates and at the 30-over mark when South Africa was batting I genuinely thought we were looking at a run chase in the mid-300s. Then God put his black cap on and it rained.I wonder whether some babies born in 9 months’ time will feature Duckworth-Lewis in their name. In response Brendon McCullum blasted and then fell. We had a run-out as our heroes from previous matches fell. There were starts but we needed a partnership to win. Step up Grant Elliott and Corey Anderson. Step up Daniel Vettori who somehow squeezed that impossible four when we most needed it. But the best comment goes to Grant Elliott whose modus operandi was as he put it: “See ball hit ball.” It worked. He became the “Beaver” of this World Cup. The match was like two old ships of the line slugging it out where one mistake can be cruelly punished.Can I pay tribute to the South African team. The cruelty of sport was written over their aghast expressions as the ball sailed high and wide and into the stands for six. These two exceptional teams played hard but fair. This ought to have been the final because both teams deserved to be there. But only one can be there. So we are in the final for the first time ever proving that rankings and the history books count for nothing in the here and now. The Black Caps now face one of the two other dynamos of world cricket—India or Australia. It is somewhat like Northland where Winston Peters is fighting both history and the sledging of National but I digress. [Interruption] Does it hurt?Last night proved that underdogs do win and that fairy-tale endings can happen. To AB de Villiers who must be reliving every loss unfortunately from last night I say: “Don’t.” You sir and your team were gentlemen for your country and the sport of cricket. South Africa proved as gallant in defeat as I know it would have been in victory. I think one English commentator wrote words to the effect of: no sledging; it is possible. To the Black Caps but especially to coach Mike Hesson and captain Brendon McCullum I say: “You have done our nation proud.” Go the Black Caps!MARAMA FOX (Co-Leader—Māori Party):I want to add my congratulations with all of those who have taken up the sport of tipney cricket in the backyard who have pulled out their esky and chucked it on the beach and bowled googly little things—this is the extent of my cricketing knowledge you understand—and googly little overarms that pass as something that looks like a bowl at the cricket down on the beach. I was just like everybody else amazed at the performance. I am a loyalist at heart. I will back the underdog for ever. I am not sure whether you have noticed that but it is something about me.I watched the team and we got to about 10 overs out. I was doing the back-of-the-envelope maths and I thought we could do it. I have to admit I fell asleep. Shame I know—a sin. But I was woken by the screaming and the jumping up and down. I did try to watch the riveting debate on the Harmful Digital Communications Bill and that might have been what put me to sleep but I did wake up in time to see that it was all down to the last two balls. Like everyone else all over the country children were being woken from their sleep wives were being disturbed from their rest and women were jumping up and disturbing their husbands who might have been trying to watch something else.But I want to note this. I went straight to Twitter and this is what AB de Villiers tweeted last night: “It was an amazing game of cricket. This was probably the most electric crowd I have ever played in front of.” He also tweeted: “I couldn’t ask any more from my boys. It’s hurting quite a bit but we gave it our all.” I thought that sense of fair play the distinguished way in which they took this very hard loss points to the calibre of that team.I do not want to put the “hoodie” on our team—Hon Member: The what?MARAMA FOX: The “hoodie goodie”—I do not know what you call it but that is what we call it. I do not want to tempt fate but I want to add my best wishes along with everybody else to the Black Caps for the upcoming final. I know we can do it. Go the boys.Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future):As Dale Steyn prepared to bowl those last couple of balls to Grant Elliott last night a most irreverent thought crossed my mind and that was that I hoped he bowled them overarm. It did remind me of a great occasion in the past when a lot was riding on the outcome of a match and a certain incident occurred. Then I thought that actually that would have been totally inappropriate in the spirit of that game because of the camaraderie the intense competition and sheer delight of all who took part even though the South Africans were reduced to grief and tears at the end—and that was the sheer emotional outpouring of what had been an extraordinary occasion. When you looked around the scenes in the crowd and you saw people standing there with their hands to their cheeks for those last couple of overs a bit like Munch’s famous painting the reality was that this was a country riding on the outcome of this spectacular occasion. Grant Elliott long the butt of criticism did that great New Zealand thing of defying the critics by coming right and hitting the winning runs.But that achievement last night extraordinary wonderful and uplifting as it was is a memory today. There is a bigger challenge ahead on Sunday. We wish the Black Caps every success at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. We wish them good fortune. We wish them favourable weather conditions—and forget the Duckworth-Lewis for once—and we wish them success and triumph. When we resume in this House next Tuesday let that be the victory that we celebrate. Let that be the occasion for the letting off of a huge amount of support and hysteria and maybe if the Government saw fit today to move this motion on the semi-final it may choose to adjourn the House in celebration for the week once we win the final so go the Black Caps on Sunday.DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT):I think the views have been fairly well canvassed but on behalf of the ACT Party I would like to congratulate the boys on a sensational performance—from both teams last night—and without jinxing anybody wish our team the best of luck come Sunday. If you were to make one observation about this game and our success so far it is not so long ago that there was a serious debate about whether or not we could afford to leave a particular star player out of the team when he was not fitting into the team. I think what this team has shown is that you cannot afford to rely on just one star player when you have a large team. In fact I think it is fair to say that the New Zealand First caucus has demonstrated this pretty ably recently too. However what the New Zealand cricket team has shown is that a playing team will always beat a team of players and on Sunday they go with our blessing. Thank you.Motion agreed to.Questions to MinistersState and Social Housing—Sale of Housing Stock1.PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū)to the Minister for Social Housing: What reports if any has she received about the Salvation Army saying it felt pressured into carrying out expensive time-consuming research on buying unwanted State houses because the Government repeatedly referred to the charity as a likely buyer?Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Social Housing):I have not received any such reports. What I have seen reports of though is the Salvation Army saying that it is supportive of the Government’s intentions to have community housing organisations involved in the management of social housing. Ironically a similar statement has been made in the past from that member himself. The Salvation Army has said that it is keen to pursue housing partnerships between itself the Government and other groups and that is exactly what our social housing reforms are all about.Phil Twyford: Was she consulted before Bill English cynically politicised the good name of the Salvation Army to sugar-coat this Government’s crumbling policy to flog off thousands of State houses to property developers; and if she was consulted why did she not stop him?Hon PAULA BENNETT: The only thing that is crumbling is some of those houses because of the neglect from Labour for so long on the maintenance of them so that this Government is having to play catch-up. That is actually the state of those State houses. So yes we have been putting in literally billions into maintaining them and making sure that they are warm and that they have got the right things. But at the end of the day that is what is crumbling and it is that member’s past history in State housing.Phil Twyford: Given the Prime Minister’s statement that “This is not about selling to developers” and Bill English’s statement that “We are in talks with developers.” where does she stand on selling State houses to property developers?Hon PAULA BENNETT: This Government has always been very clear that it is likely to be a housing consortia that get together that it will be community housing providers that are leading that and they must be registered and when we are looking at the sales of these houses we are also looking at the tenants that are within them and that is the difference with it. Yes we imagine that community housing providers will go into partnership with some developers. I see that happening already and we already see some quite impressive developments going on that are working alongside community housing providers. It is consistent with what both the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have said.Paul Foster-Bell: What reports has she seen about support from the community housing sector for the Government’s social housing reforms?Hon PAULA BENNETT: During our national consultation I saw just how much support there is from the community housing sector for what the Government is doing. I have also seen a press release from an approved community housing provider Accessible Properties which says that “Accessible Properties remains committed to pursuing the purchase of housing from the New Zealand Government … ‘We’ll keep talking to the Government and to the private sector in our commitment to help people in need into good quality homes.’ ”Phil Twyford: Does she agree with the Prime Minister’s promise that houses sold on would have to be retained for social housing or with Bill English’s statement this week that this would no longer be the case; and was she consulted on the flip-flop?Hon PAULA BENNETT: There has been no flip-flop and I know the member has struggled to understand the policy that we have when it comes to housing tenants and that is what this is actually about. So the member might count houses and think that the job is done but actually we have a number of New Zealanders who have been living in completely unsatisfactory conditions for generations and to my mind have been neglected. We will do better than this.Phil Twyford: So you weren’t consulted on the flip-flop?Hon PAULA BENNETT: Trust me I am consulted and working the whole way through this policy.Paul Foster-Bell: What other reports has she seen about support for the Government’s social housing programme?Hon PAULA BENNETT: I have seen a report agreeing with the direction the Government is taking with housing and it says “we need large scale urban developments backed by private sector developers and community organisations. Such developments cannot happen without the Government playing a role. Private sector developers will invest”—it says—“and do what they do best: designing and building great places for people.” And that of course ladies and gentlemen was from Phil Twyford himself.Phil Twyford: Is it not true that by contrast her policy will allow private developers and speculators to buy these houses at knock-down prices sit on them for a short time kick out the tenants flog off the houses and pocket the capital gain; and how will this policy help poor and vulnerable families who need secure State and social housing?Hon PAULA BENNETT: Absolutely not; none of that is true.Phil Twyford: Can she confirm that her emergency housing boost announced today is a full $500000 less than the cost of a two-bedroom unit an hour out of Auckland; and how will that make up for the damage done to Kiwi families living in garages and camp grounds on her watch by her State house sell-off?Hon PAULA BENNETT: By the very policy—if it was true which of course it is not; it has not even started yet. So the $500000 which I am quite proud of is to support those providers that are providing emergency housing now while we work through a longer more sustainable funding process.Child Protection—Social Workers2.DARROCH BALL (NZ First)to the Minister for Social Development: Does she stand by her statement “Every child has the right to be safe from abuse and neglect and these guidelines will help us build a stronger culture of child protection across New Zealand where the safety and security of children is paramount.”?Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development):Yes. I made that statement when I launched two new guidelines Safer recruitment Safer children and Safer organisations Safer children in Hamilton earlier this month. These guidelines are important and will assist organisations employing people working with children by outlining the steps they should take when recruiting as well as developing good child protection policies.Darroch Ball: How can she say that the safety and security of children is paramount when of the 18000 individuals who recognise themselves as social workers in New Zealand more than half either are not qualified or at best hold a certificate level qualification and only around 4000 of them are actually registered?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I think that is a good question and one that I have had discussions about already with the Social Workers Registration Board. It was an issue that was raised in its briefing to me and it has gone away to first review its Act and second come back to me at the end of the year in concert with the work that we are doing around the modernisation of Child Youth and Family and also the roll-out of the children’s teams. I think the board agrees with me that that is the appropriate time to then be looking again at this issue which has been current ever since the Social Workers Registration Board was put in place.Darroch Ball: Does she then share the concern of the Social Workers Registration Board about the number of front-line Child Youth and Family staff who are not currently registered social workers; if so what does she plan to do about it?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: As I said to the member there is a process that we have put in place now with the registration board and those are issues that we will be discussing but Child Youth and Family has worked very hard over the years to support its staff to get the training and the necessary qualifications in order to become registered and it is working towards full registration of all the social workers that it employs.Darroch Ball: How are our vulnerable children protected when under this current voluntary registration regime there is no protection for the title “social worker” whereby even if an individual is deregistered for malpractice they can simply start social work again outside your ministry’s oversight?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I think that those are very good issues to be discussed and they should be discussed by the Social Workers Registration Board. I am sure that not only will that form part of the work that it does but also through the Child Youth and Family modernisation process it should also be addressed. So as I say by the end of this year I think the discussion will have been had. The term “social worker” is used very widely in the community and one of the things that we might be doing is looking at how we define that better and then make sure that we have qualified staff.Darroch Ball: Will she ensure that the Vulnerable Children Act stipulates that all social workers working with our children are under mandatory registration given that the public rightly assumes that this is already the case; if not why not?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Under the Vulnerable Children Act there is a very clear process laid out the first part of which I launched in Hamilton which the member’s primary question referred to. So that was the guidelines and the advice for organisations on how to make sure that they are employing people who are safe to work with children. The second part of that will come into force when the regulations come into force. That will mean that all State agencies that are employing people who work with children will have to go through a very rigorous employment process part of which will relate to their registration but not all of it will relate to that. So the member just needs to hold his breath and wait for those regulations to come into force.External Debt—Government and Household Debt3.JAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany)to the Minister of Finance: What reports has he received on progress the New Zealand economy is making in reducing its external debt position?Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Associate Minister of Finance)on behalf of theMinister of Finance: The latest balance of payments data issued by Statistics New Zealand shows that New Zealand is making some good progress in reducing its external debt. Our net external debt fell by $900 million in the December quarter of 2014 to 59.4 percent of GDP. That is the lowest level for 11 years. In addition the maturity profile of New Zealand’s external debt has lengthened considerably which means that we are less vulnerable to short-term changes in global financial markets. The report also shows that the current account deficit in the year to December was 3.3 percent of GDP. Although this was an increase on the previous quarter largely due to falling dairy prices the deficit is much less than half of that delivered by the previous Government in the late 2000s.Jami-Lee Ross: How is the savings behaviour of households contributing to New Zealand’s overall improving debt position?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Households are making a positive contribution to New Zealand’s improving overall position. In fact households have had positive savings for 5 consecutive years now in the 5 years to March 2014. That has not happened since the early 1990s. The Statistics New Zealand figures show that before 2010—so that period from 1995 to 2010—household savings had been negative in all but 1 year. Household savings totalled $11.6 billion over the last 5 years which is a major turn-round on the $15.5 billion in net borrowing over the 5 years previously. This was the result of resilience by households a Government policy of encouraging savings and a rebalancing of the economy.Jami-Lee Ross: What economic factors have influenced the ability of households to make these household savings?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The growing economy is continuing to support more jobs and higher incomes. Statistics New Zealand figures show that in 2014 there were 80000 new jobs created across the country. Average wages rose 2.5 percent last year. Since this Government came into office in late 2008 average wages have increased by more than 20 percent to $56000 compared with the rate of inflation which over the same period went up around 11 percent. In December 2014 the labour market participation rate increased to a record 69.7 percent and unemployment at 5.7 percent is lower than most other developed economies. The growing economy is helping New Zealand families in many ways but the Government still has more work to do to drive further gains for the longer term.Dr David Clark: Can he confirm that this Government has borrowed more money than Muldoon’s and in fact more money than any other Government in New Zealand history?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: No I do not have those numbers for the member today. But I would say to him that given we had the global financial crisis and the Canterbury earthquakes it would make sense to have borrowed some money. And given the value of the New Zealand dollar now compared with then that would also make—if the member is suggesting that we should not have borrowed for the Canterbury earthquakes that would be news to the people of Christchurch. If he considers we should not have borrowed for the global financial crisis that would have been news to vulnerable New Zealanders.Dr Shane Reti: How is the growing economy helping regions such as Northland?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Good question. Recent figures across a range of indicators highlight the benefits to regions like Northland from the Government’s strong economic management—in particular strong GDP growth above the national average in the year to March 2014 and 7500 new jobs in the region across a range of roles in the last year including 6600 full-time positions. That is the second-highest employment growth in the country for the December quarter last year. These are all strong signs of a positive turn-round under this Government in the Northland region. But of course we are not done and we will continue to help regions through initiatives such as the Korean free-trade agreement which will deliver real benefits to exporters in regions like Northland allowing them to invest in more jobs and deliver higher wages.David Seymour: How would New Zealand’s net external indebtedness be affected by a large increase in low-quality Government spending and therefore the non-tradable sector as it did between 2004 and 2009?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: That is a very good question the member raises. He is right to raise the period 2004 to 2009 because what we saw was a big increase in low-quality spending a big increase in external debt a crowding out of the private sector and big increases of our net international liabilities towards 80 to 85 percent of GDP.National Library—Curriculum Topic Loan Service4.JACINDA ARDERN (Labour)to the Minister of Internal Affairs: How will his decision to cut funding by $392000 a year to the specialist non-fiction service provided by the National Library affect access to educational resources for rural schools?Hon PETER DUNNE (Minister of Internal Affairs):The member’s question is based on a false premise. There has been no cut in funding to the National Library nor have I ordered one. The service that she is referring to will be an enhanced service ensuring that more books and resources from the National Library go to more schools rather than sitting on the library shelves in Wellington gathering dust.Jacinda Ardern: If there has been no cut why is the National Library claiming it will save $392000 through these proposed changes and that it will loan up to half the number of books that it currently loans under the specialist non-fiction service?Hon PETER DUNNE: There are two points. The National Library currently loans around 655000 books per annum. That will continue in the future. As to the argument about this alleged cut there has been as I said no cut. [Interruption] She is now changing her language to “savings”—it is a bit like changing from black to white. It shows economic illiteracy. The reality is that there has been an estimate provided by the library which has yet to be quantified that there would be a saving of around that figure from this new service. But the point of the matter is there have been no cuts ordered. This is about enhancing the service offered to schools and it will be better all round.Jacinda Ardern: At what point will all schools be in a position to take advantage of digital resources equally given the digital divide that many of our rural and low-decile schools face in regard to information and communications technology resources; and will it be in time for these dramatic changes?Hon PETER DUNNE: Around 90 percent of schools are on track to have broadband uptake so the issue is resolved for those 90 percent. For those schools that are not in that category the library will be working with them with targeted programmes to ensure that they continue to receive the service that they have and can convert to the new service as soon as it becomes available. There are no losers from this plan.Tracey Martin: Did the Minister consider the findings of the 2012 Inquiry into 21st century learning environments and digital literacy which identified that although schools may have connectivity to ultra-fast broadband access to individual student devices both at home and school continue to be a barrier before signing off on these changes; if not why not?Hon PETER DUNNE: Yes the 2012 changes informed the 2013 round of consultation on the impact of those changes and it was on the basis of those two considered pieces of work—which covered I think in the first instance around 159 different organisations and a significant number of people in the second instance—that the changes were made with confidence with support from educators that this was in the best interests of children moving forward into the digital environment.Tracey Martin: Will the Minister consider establishing an implementation phase for the new reading engagement service for any schools still challenged with accessing connectivity and digital devices from term 3 of this year; if not why not?Hon PETER DUNNE: I do not think that the member understood or heard correctly my earlier answer. In those cases where schools do not have the level of connectivity at this point in time there will be a targeted programme to ensure that they can continue to receive the service that they do and that none of their students will miss out.Jacinda Ardern: If there are no losers with these changes as he claims why have the School Library Association; the History Teachers’ Association; the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA); countless schools including those who are isolated and in rural communities; countless teachers; and more than 20000 New Zealanders all signed a petition opposed to the changes he is recommending; or does their opinion not count?Hon PETER DUNNE: Of course their opinion counts. The fact that the Labour Party has stirred up a campaign of misinformation and then when I offered the Labour Party a briefing it said: “Yes thanks but not for a month yet because we are running this campaign in the meantime.”Jacinda Ardern: We took the briefing; we are still right.Mr SPEAKER: Order! Just ask the supplementary question.Jacinda Ardern: How can he claim as he has in this House that the changes he is proposing were based on “wide consultation with teachers librarians and the community” when his own answers to written questions show that during the consultation process the changes he is making were not mentioned once.Hon PETER DUNNE: I make the claim because it is correct. I make the claim because it is right. I make the claim because the changes being made are in the best interest of equipping our children for the digital future ahead of them. If the Labour Party wants to play politics with kids’ futures let it do so but the reality is that this is about improving service. Let me add one other thing. The member cannot go on playing two games. She cannot go on—as she did last week—thanking my office for the information that it provided her on a particular instance and then raise the issue again in the House today. It is pure naked politics designed to appease the Post Primary Teachers’ Association.State and Social Housing—Reform5.Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National)to the Minister for Social Housing: What are the next steps in the Government’s social housing reform programme?Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Social Housing):Good progress is being made on the Government’s social housing reform programme which will deliver more social houses of the right size and in the right place to families in need. We have announced an extra 3000 income-related rent subsidies so more families can be housed and we are working with Housing New Zealand to speed up its build and redevelopment programme. We have also started the tenancy review process which sees people who can afford to leave social housing move on to make room for someone in more need. So far 37 people have moved into private rental and four have actually moved into their own home that they have purchased. The next steps including the release of the Ministry of Social Development’s purchasing intentions about where and for how much they will be buying social housing places will be announced very soon.Dr Parmjeet Parmar: How does the reform programme help those in need of emergency housing?Hon PAULA BENNETT: The Government’s reforms will help people across the housing continuum from those wanting to buy their own home to people living in tents and cars. Today I announced details of the $500000 cash injection for emergency housing providers. The funding will go to 16 providers and will help them continue to support vulnerable families while we do a thorough review of funding to the sector. This comes on top of the Government already contracting with two community housing providers in Christchurch who are housing single people and families in short-term accommodation.Dr Parmjeet Parmar: What feedback has she been getting about the Government’s social housing reform programme?Hon PAULA BENNETT: We have held six public meetings around the country and the feedback from the community sector has been positive inquisitive and quite challenging. It is very keen to get involved. Another positive piece of feedback about the Government’s plan to diversify social housing by growing community providers was that “Tenants with high and complex needs may be better off being transferred to a community housing provider …”. That support of course is coming from Phil Twyford himself.Greenhouse Gas Emissions—Increases between 2008 and 20126.Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green)to the Minister for Climate Change Issues: Does he stand by the Prime Minister’s answer that it is “misinformation” that New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 20 percent between 2008 and 2012; if so by what percentage did New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions increase between 2008 and 2012?Hon SIMON BRIDGES (Acting Minister for Climate Change Issues):Yes I stand by the Prime Minister’s statement in the context in which it was made. The member has been highly selective with his data.Dr Russel Norman: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. There were two legs to the primary question.Mr SPEAKER: Can I invite the member now to repeat the second leg to that question and we will expect an answer.Dr Russel Norman: If so by what percentage did New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions increase between 2008 and 2012?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. That was not the second half of that question.Mr SPEAKER: Order! The question is on notice. There are two parts to it: does the Minister stand by the Prime Minister’s comment and he answered yes; and then the second part is “if so by what percentage did New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions increase between 2008 and 2012?”. I invite the Minister to answer.Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. That is not what he said but I will answer the question—Mr SPEAKER: Order! I invited the member to repeat just the second part of the question because the Minister—[Interruption] Order!—failed to answer the question in his first attempt. I am now inviting the Minister to answer the question.Hon SIMON BRIDGES: The reality is that there was a significant reduction in the rate of deforestation with the introduction of the emissions trading scheme in 2008. Focusing only on the trend of fluctuations in net emissions between 5 years is misleading. If the member looked at net emissions in 2012 they were approximately at the same level as they were in 2007.Dr Russel Norman: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The question was on notice. It is a very simple question. The Minister has still not addressed the question.Mr SPEAKER: No I think the Minister has addressed it. Whether there is accuracy in the answer that he has given he has addressed it and he quoted I think effectively stable emissions over that period of time. If the member wants to make more progress he now does that by using supplementary questions.Dr Russel Norman: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. Sorry to take your time again. The Minister referred to the period 2007 to 2012. The question is on notice. It is very specific. It is 2008 and 2012.Mr SPEAKER: Order! I appreciate the point the member is now making. The way forward is that I will allow the member an additional supplementary question.Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The issue we have here is that effectively what the member has done is ask two questions in one question. I have answered a question that he has asked in his initial question. You have then asked him to ask again the second limb and in fact I have had a go at that question. With the greatest respect that was not what he asked but in any event the tape will show that.Mr SPEAKER: Order! I have heard enough from the Minister. The member has a perfect right to ask a primary question with two legs to it. In the first instance the Minister made no attempt whatsoever to answer the second part of that question. I invited the Minister to do so. There is some discrepancy now around the years that he used and that becomes a debatable item. The question has certainly been addressed by the Minister—not to the satisfaction of Dr Russel Norman. I have allocated an additional question to Dr Russel Norman and Dr Noman can now proceed with those questions.Dr Russel Norman: Can the Minister now please answer the second leg in the primary question which is: by what percentage did New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions increase between 2008 and 2012?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: Yes but the member is being tricky. He is being entirely selective with—Dr Russel Norman: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. This was a very simple non-political question. The Minister immediately attacked the questioner. It is a very simple question.Mr SPEAKER: I do not think it is a non-political question but it would be helpful if the Minister could simply address the question to the best of his abilities.Dr Russel Norman: By what percentage did New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions increase between 2008 and 2012?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: As the member has said by 20 percent but he is being highly selective with his data to the point of being misleading. He is trying to arbitrarily line up climate figures with electoral cycles when in fact emissions have no regard to that. Over the 5 to 6 year period to 2012 emissions are broadly the same. Net emissions that we are seeing today are really as a result of sustainable harvesting and then replanting over a 28-year cycle and that is where we are at today. We are seeing harvesting but we will see replanting.Dr Russel Norman: So for clarity the Minister is now agreeing that New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas—Mr SPEAKER: Order! That question is just going to lead to disorder as the member sees. The Minister has clearly given an answer. It has taken some time to get it but the member now has the answer. So—[Interruption] Order! I would appreciate it if the member would sit down. If the member can now proceed with his questioning without a repeat of the answer—he has got the answer he has been wanting. He should now proceed with further supplementary questions that are in line with the Standing Orders.Dr Russel Norman: Given that the Minister has said in his answer that there was a 20 percent increase in New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions from 2008 to 2012 does he accept any responsibility for that increase in emissions?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: The Minister is responsible for climate policy in this country and what we have seen actually as a great marker for success is emission intensity reducing over time in this country which is precisely what you would want to see in a country with effective settings. I repeat that what the member has been doing is being tricky with the data and the facts.Dr Russel Norman: With regard to the Minister’s answer is he responsible for the increase in New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions since he has been in Government—and the key markers for that would be the year before he was in Government 2008 and the last year for which we have official data which is 2012?Mr SPEAKER: Order! The question I will not rule out but again the member needs to understand the level of disorder that will be created. The effect of the question is whether the Minister is accepting responsibility for that particular increase in net greenhouse gas emissions.Hon SIMON BRIDGES: The Minister is responsible for climate change policy. The member is being trickier than Winston Peters on a bad day. The figures here over a 5 or 6-year period to the latest figures in 2012 are flat. They are the same.Dr Russel Norman: Does the Minister believe he is achieving the Government’s own stated objective of reducing New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions when over the years that he has been in Government 2008-12 comparing those 2 years the net greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 20 percent according to his own Government statistics?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: Yes absolutely. We have a comprehensive emissions trading scheme one of the best if not the best in the world. We show global leadership internationally in a wide variety of areas which the member knows whether it is the Global Research Alliance whether it is fossil fuel subsidy reform or whether it is the Climate and Clean Air Coalition—I could go on. We also in terms of our complementary measures do a host of things in this country over and above what many other countries do. But as I have made quite clear to the member in a direct response to his question we are part of a sustainable forestry cycle over a 28-year period. Right now what we are seeing is sustainable harvesting and that explains almost entirely the figures he wants to cherry-pick and be misleading with.Dr Russel Norman: Why have New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions increased so dramatically by 20 percent under this Government? Is it because the Government fundamentally weakened the emissions trading scheme resulting in close to a zero price for carbon and hence incentivising the cutting down of—Mr SPEAKER: Order! That question is now out of order. It is simply too long. I have warned this member on many many occasions. He must abide by the Standing Orders. He needs to refer to Standing Order 380. Questions must be concise. They are not an opportunity to raise a debating issue like that. They are not an opportunity to effectively have the general debate before question time finishes.Dr Russel Norman: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: Is this relitigating a point I have just made?Dr Russel Norman: No it is a different one.Mr SPEAKER: A fresh point of order—Dr Russel Norman.Dr Russel Norman: You have repeatedly during this session said that if my questions cause disorder then you will say that that is a problem. The disorder comes because Mr Brownlee starts shouting in Parliament instead of—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. The disorder comes because the question is simply too long and it is full of imputation and allegations. If the member would go back to his office and practise asking short concise questions he would make far more progress in question time.Hon David Parker: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. That same ruling or Standing Order applies to answers Mr Speaker and I would ask that you apply the same ruling to answers particularly from Mr Joyce. [Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! That is a reasonable point. Where I allow longer answers is when I get a very long lengthy question with a lot of political innuendo. But generally speaking answers should also as the Hon David Parker pointed out be in accordance with the Standing Orders.Hon David Parker: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: A fresh point of order?Hon David Parker: Yes there is. That is an explanation sometimes in respect of Opposition questions but the length is also apparent in Government members’ own questions to their own Ministers.Mr SPEAKER: I will address it on the occasion.Dr Russel Norman: Does he accept that if the rest of the world followed New Zealand’s example by increasing greenhouse gas emissions net emissions by 20 percent then we would fry the planet and leave our children an unlivable future?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: What we have seen there in the talk of frying and in fact in the whole line of questioning here is the member seeking to scare people with petty politics and misinformation on what are issues that need to be taken with care and responsibility. That has been the approach of this Government on this issue. That is why we have kept an emissions trading scheme that is one of the best if not the best in the world. That is why we have shown international leadership in a host of areas where we have comparative answers and do much more than I think any country of our size or many countries of our size certainly and that is why in terms of a host of—Metiria Turei: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. That was an exact example of an extremely lengthy answer to a concise question.Mr SPEAKER: It was but again it followed a very long politically phrased question from Dr Russel Norman even though I repeat my many requests for him to abide by the Standing Orders.Dr Russel Norman: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. I am not prepared to entertain any more discussion on this. If the member has a fresh point of order I will hear it. [Interruption] Order! If it is not a fresh point of order I will be asking the member to leave the Chamber.Dr Russel Norman: Yes it is Mr Speaker. It is the question of when we ask very straightforward questions—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. I have warned the member that we are not relitigating this matter in Parliament today. I have given very clear rulings.Cochlear Implants—Funding7.SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki)to the Minister of Health: What reports has he received in relation to the increased funding for cochlear implants announced in Budget 2014?Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health):Budget 2014 provided an extra $6.3 million over 4 years for a bilateral cochlear implant programme for children meaning that children with profound hearing loss now receive two funded cochlear implants and children under 6 with only one implant are offered the opportunity to have a second funded implant. Twenty-nine newborn babies and children have now received two funded cochlear implants since this additional funding was announced last year and that is really something to celebrate.Simon O’Connor: Has access to cochlear implants been improving and what benefits do they provide to recipients?Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Funding for the cochlear implant programme has been increased over the last few years which has resulted in record numbers of children and adults receiving implants in the last year. In 2007-08 there were 87 patients provided with cochlear implants. In 2013-14 there were 131 children and adults treated. Cochlear implants are life changing. They can significantly improve children’s hearing and learning abilities and the earlier they are fitted the better.Skycity Convention Centre—Design and Cost8.Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North)to the Minister for Economic Development: When did his officials first learn of SkyCity’s desire for a public funding top-up in order for the International Convention Centre to meet the Preliminary Design specifications?Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Economic Development):I am cautious in light of recent events but this is quite a long answer to get some detail out for the member. As I have previously advised the House I was advised of the cost escalation of the preliminary design in a briefing dated 15 October. I am advised that Skycity’s preliminary design was delivered to Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment officials on 6 October. The preliminary design included an estimated construction cost that exceeded the agreed amount by $70 million to $130 million. I made it clear to ministry officials that as much as possible any cost escalations should be designed out in the final design and that of the various options then being discussed by Skycity and the ministry for closing the funding gap our least-preferred option was any form of Government contribution. Following further discussions between officials and Skycity Skycity accepted that position by way of a market update on 15 February 2015 and agreed to amend the design to ensure no financial contribution was required.Dr David Clark: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. This was a question on notice. The Minister has referred to the time when a report was delivered but he has not answered the question which is pretty clear and I think non-political. It is seeking a date: when his officials first learnt of Skycity’s desire.Mr SPEAKER: I listened to the answer. I thought there were some dates given which were reasonably specific. Does the Minister have anything further to add? Otherwise we will move on.Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Perhaps I can by way of explanation. I think the difficulty in terms of the question is that the member speaks of a desire for a public funding top-up. Certainly officials have been through and they do not see that as being actually expressed as a desire. It was Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment officials and Skycity looking at options to address the issue.Dr David Clark: In light of that answer and in light of clause 9.5 of the New Zealand International Convention Centre deal stating that each design phase will be developed collaboratively between the Crown and Skycity why was the Minister kept in the dark during an election year about the possibility of a Budget blowout or the need to downgrade the convention centre’s iconic design?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: For the member’s benefit to give him a bit of a feel for it the preliminary design when it was delivered to the ministry was a total of 10 kilograms of documents that had to be delivered across a whole range of information. So yes there were collaborative elements in terms of discussion with officials but my understanding is that then at the end of that process Skycity goes off and gets its costings and then delivers it and I was advised as soon as reasonably practical after the information was delivered.Dr David Clark: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. That was a question about the collaboration aspect. Is the Minister saying that 10 kilograms of documents were delivered without any collaboration?Mr SPEAKER: That is exactly the way the member now needs to proceed. The question has been addressed. The member has additional supplementary questions. Do not raise them as a point of order; raise them as a supplementary question to the Minister.Dr David Clark: Is the Minister saying that the collaboration was limited between officials and Skycity to the extent that 10 kilograms of documents were delivered before officials had had anything to do with the development of the design?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: No I am not saying that. What I am saying is that there was collaboration over elements of the design as the process continued but actually the costing of the design was done by Skycity as part of the finalisation of that process and that was presented to officials on the date described as 6 October.Dr David Clark: Was the Minister aware that the preliminary design phase was scheduled to run from June to September 2014; if so why did the Minister not inquire as to the prospective changes in Crown costs during election year?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Actually the member may recall that I have been saying in the House previously that in the concept design phase there was a prediction of a smaller cost overrun which it was agreed would be designed out during the preliminary design phase. Officials and Skycity went off to do that and reported back to me as I say on 15 October 2014 at which point they advised that it had not been able to occur and in fact it had come to a larger amount and all this is in the public domain.Dr David Clark: Given the legal expectation that each design phase would be a collaboration between Skycity and the Crown is he currently engaged in the design process?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I have had very little advice in terms of the process that is being gone through currently to control costs around the convention centre but again it is a discussion around potential changes to the design and matters in relation to cost would be determined at the end of that process. In any event it is now to Skycity’s cost but there will be as I said to the member Metiria Turei at some point a balancing exercise at the end which will look at the overall cost and additional benefits for Skycity and making sure that the net cost exceeds the value of the concessions.Dr David Clark: Why do a series of briefings released under the Official Information Act including a briefing for the Prime Minister refer to a September preliminary design?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I presume because as the member referred to earlier—I do not recall the particular briefing but I presume it is because that was the plan. But of course as the member knows it was delivered on 6 October and then I was briefed on 15 October.Dr David Clark: I seek leave to table a briefing for the Prime Minister from November 2014 referring to a September preliminary design.Mr SPEAKER: Order! Is it an Official Information—Dr David Clark: Yes.Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that particular document. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.Document by leave laid on the Table of the House.Better Public Services—Better for Business Programme9.MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri)to the Minister for Small Business: How are small businesses benefiting from the Better for Business - Result 9 Programme?Hon CRAIG FOSS (Minister for Small Business):The Better for Business - Result 9 Programme is a partnership of Government agencies that are working to make it easier and cheaper for businesses by reducing the time effort and cost of dealing with the public sector. Some examples of those benefits introduced to make things easier for small businesses when dealing with the Government include things such as the New Zealand Business Number the employer registration tool and the Compliance Matters online tool. A business reference group made up of 1200 small and medium enterprises has been surveyed over the last 6 months. The latest report shows a net 7 percent reduction in the reported effort required to deal with Government agencies and an improvement in reported performance by Government agencies.Matt Doocey: What other initiatives are under way to reduce red tape which will benefit small businesses?Hon CRAIG FOSS: Silly and sometimes contradictory rules add costs to small business and have a negative impact on their cash flows. They encourage small business owners to make submissions to the Rules Reduction Taskforce. They can do so online. Although the task force is primarily focused on property regulations administered by local authorities unnecessary or pedantic rules administered by central government will also be considered. Reducing red tape will make it easier for small businesses to do their business and help the New Zealand economy grow.Matt Doocey: What other initiatives could impact the cash flow of small businesses?Mr SPEAKER: Provided it is within the responsibility of the Minister I call the Hon Craig Foss.Hon CRAIG FOSS: Of course Mr Speaker. Small businesses work hard and strive to achieve positive cash flows. There are a number of ways in which those cash flows could be negatively affected. For example new and complex taxes would negatively impact small business cash flows across New Zealand and higher than necessary minimum wage costs would. Costs such as those which would have a negative impact on small business cash flows are still the policies being proposed by—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member has no responsibility for another political party.Jacinda Ardern: What will Result 9 save small to medium sized businesses and will it exceed the up to $3000 that the Government could save in small to medium sized enterprises tomorrow or $350 million in total if it reduced ACC levies?Hon CRAIG FOSS: I welcome the question from the member. Small businesses will enjoy the benefits first of all of the existing locked in $1.5 billion reduction in ACC levies committed to and announced by this Government. As small businesses engage with the Government online using tools such as the small business calculator they will go through and see the benefits of such reductions in ACC levies.Jacinda Ardern: What evidence does he have that a reduction in ACC levies would be unsustainable as he so vehemently claimed in the House last week?Hon CRAIG FOSS: From memory—sitting in this House in about late 2008 and looking at the sad state of ACC that this Government inherited and the devastating impact of the changes in those levies as a result of ACC being financially unsustainable at that time. It had a devastating impact and there is solid evidence that those levies need to be managed appropriately as they are allowing $1.5 billion in ACC levy reductions over the term of this Government so far.Schools Canterbury—Redcliffs School Closure10.Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills)to the Minister of Education: What further advice if any did she receive that led to her decision to consult on the closing of Redcliffs School following the advice she received from geotechnical experts in September last year that “with the mitigation measures in place the risk from rockfall is considered to be no higher on the school grounds than on any site remote from the Port Hills”?Hon HEKIA PARATA (Minister of Education):I have made no decision. I have initiated consultation on a proposal. My proposal is based on all the reports I have received. Families want assurances of safety and certainty not just now but into the future. Although the modelling and risk mitigations propose measures of safety they also predict further rockfalls from the cliffs’ ongoing degradation. Periodic removal of the students may be required to ensure that the school grounds remain safe. I am concerned that families cannot be given assurance that this will be a safe school site over time.Hon Gerry Brownlee: Reckless Labour.Hon Ruth Dyson: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I take offence at the interjection from Minister Brownlee and ask that you require him to withdraw and apologise.Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member has taken offence. I ask the Hon Gerry Brownlee to withdraw that remark.Hon Gerry Brownlee: For the offence I withdraw the remark. But it is reckless—Mr SPEAKER: Order! No no—that is where we get into trouble Mr Brownlee. If I ask any member to withdraw they do so without any further comment.Hon Ruth Dyson: Why has she cited safety and uncertainty as the primary driver of her proposal to close Redcliffs School when the MWH Beca and GNS reports all say that a simple and cost-effective bund at the back of the school property would provide a level of safety that is significantly greater than what is required to live in the surrounding houses?Hon HEKIA PARATA: I cited safety over time and in the primary response to the question I indicated that although the engineers have certainly said that they could make mitigations to make the school site safe they have also said that there will be further rockfalls that periodically the bund may not be able to maintain the capacity it has and will need to be repaired and that during those reassessments it is likely that the students will need to be removed from the school site.Hon Ruth Dyson: What specialist advice if any did she receive that led her to say that the reassessment clearing and repairing of the bund if damaged in a possible future cliff collapse could take 2 years?Hon HEKIA PARATA: What led me to say that was reading the reports that had been provided. What led me to say that there was a need for this consultation to occur was because of my ongoing concern for the safety of students on that site and for undisrupted provision of good quality education not only now but into the future. May I repeat that I have made no decision. I have initiated consultation on a proposal.Hon Ruth Dyson: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. My last supplementary was very specific: what specialist advice did she receive—Mr SPEAKER: No it was not. The question was what specific advice if any led the Minister to say that. The Minister obviously just moved to the second part and told the House what led her to say the comments that the member quoted in her question.Hon Ruth Dyson: What advice has she got for the thousands of Sumner Clifton and Redcliffs residents who drive along the main road every day who are at greater risk from the potential rockfall than the pupils and staff of Redcliffs School if they went home?Hon HEKIA PARATA: The advice that I have taken into account relates to the school grounds and as Minister of Education that is my primary responsibility and that is the one that I am discharging.Hon Ruth Dyson: If the Redcliffs community demonstrates through the consultation period overwhelming support for their school to come home will she support that school returning?Hon HEKIA PARATA: The consultation period provides not only for the specific Redcliffs School community but for anyone else to make a submission. I will consider every submission that is put forward to me during that process.Wage Rates—Aged-care Workers11.JAN LOGIE (Green)to the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety: Does he agree with the previous EEO Commissioner Judy McGregor’s statement on aged care that “The sense of crisis that surrounds aged care is partly a reflection of our collective knowledge that we are not being fair and that a large group of workers is being discriminated against.”?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety):I share her wider concerns that workers in lower-paid roles are properly treated and receive fair pay for their important work. Dr McGregor’s comments are from a 2012 report which goes on to refer to pay inequality and in-between travel. I note the Government has acted to resolve the longstanding issue of compensation for in-between travel and that the issue of equal pay is currently being considered by the courts and I am watching that process with interest.Jan Logie: Does the Minister believe that the minimum wage or not much more is appropriate pay for a job mostly done by women that involves caring for the most vulnerable—bathing them helping them to go to the toilet and providing emotional support in the last days of their lives?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: In respect of the minimum wage we have one of the highest minimum wages in the OECD in real terms and as a proportion of the median wage but I do share the member’s concern that all workers are appropriately remunerated according to their skills and experience.Barbara Stewart: Does he agree that aged-care workers who are performing comparable medical tasks to that of nurses such as testing blood sugars checking blood pressures and giving out medication are doing so only because they are regarded as the cheaper option?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: No I do not. There are very strict guidelines around the appropriate discharging of responsibilities in health care facilities and those aged-care workers clearly have a scope of practice that is significantly reduced from registered nurses and that is appropriate given the safety requirements of those facilities.Jan Logie: Does the Minister find it acceptable that while the estimated earned income for men and women is now equal in several countries in the world the annual median gender pay gap in New Zealand as at the 2013 census was 36.7 percent?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: I put those comments in the context of this. From 2001 to 2008 the gender pay gap effectively flat-lined. It has reduced by nearly a quarter since 2008 and I would caution the member to be very careful about statistics produced in international comparisons. I suggest she looks at the health and survival indicators where New Zealand ranks 96th in terms of mortality. Syria is ranked 1st because men and women die at equally young ages. It is very important not to read the statistics on the face of it.Jan Logie: In recognition of Caregivers Week their essential and very skilled work and the absolute importance of gender equality as a human right will the Minister advocate for an increase and ring-fencing of funding to address the exploitation of these women?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: As someone who has employed aged-care workers I would join with the member in agreeing that they do a fantastic job for a very important vulnerable section of our community. Pay rates for aged-care workers is the responsibility of providers in district health boards so I have no ministerial responsibility for that but I am advised that despite very tight financial situations the Government has increased district health board funding of aged residential care by 27 percent between 2008-09 and 2013-14. I think that in straitened times that is a very good record.Question TimeCHRIS HIPKINS (Senior Whip—Labour):The rules of the House allow for the lodging of 12 primary questions in a day. I note that no other member has lodged a 12th question and therefore I seek leave to ask one.Mr SPEAKER: The member can seek leave. Leave is sought to ask an additional question on the basis that there are only 11 on the sheet. Is there any objection? There is objection.General DebateRON MARK (NZ First):I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business. On Sunday there will be the final match of the Cricket World Cup and the Black Caps will make history and we in New Zealand will all be rightfully proud of that performance. But the curtain-raiser for that match will be played on Saturday and it will be played in Northland and it will be played as the Northland by-election in an electorate that has been held by National for over 77 years—and that too will produce a result that will be historic.Last week I spoke in the House and I warned this Government that rural provincial New Zealand has woken up to the fact that it has been taken for granted by National for too long that it has been forgotten and that it is becoming increasingly of the view that it is time to send this arrogant Government a message—a message. And indeed the very next day—after I warned long-time supporters and card-carrying members of the National Party that rural provincial New Zealand was angry at the cuts to funding assistance for rural roads at the cuts that are coming through the one-road network through the forced amalgamation of rural provincial New Zealand into super-cities—on the front page of the Dominion Postout came Sir Brian Lochore. And his message very poignant very clear and very fundamental to the National Party was that they have had enough—had enough. In fact the message was so profound and so clear that the same day at a meeting in Wellington of the district councils’ chief executive officers the chief executive officer of Wellington said: “God has spoken.” Unfortunately the only people who are not hearing the message are in this National Government.So on Saturday a very clear message is going to come because the “Force of the North” will enable Northlanders to send that message. And let us be clear: these are not card-carrying members of the New Zealand First Party. They are not card-carrying members of the Labour Party. They are National Party people. [Interruption] We know that this message is very clear Gerry—Mr Brownlee the Hon Mr Brownlee—we know it is very clear because Christchurch MPs have been sent up to Northland to help pull the hoardings down because the campaign has imploded has it not? It has imploded.So what has happened up there? I know one thing that has happened is that the National Government said Winston Peters had “zero chance of winning”. Those were its words. John Key said that. National was so arrogant that it said: “We’ve got 16000 votes. We can’t possibly lose this.” Arrogance—arrogance at its best—supported by the policy of “Simple Simon Bridges Over Troubled Waters” which in actual fact—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will use the proper terminology when referring to members in this House.Hon Simon Bridges: Yes that was hurtful.RON MARK: There we go. So what does it mean? It means that after 77 years people have woken up to the fact that the lowest median income in New Zealand is in Northland; that there are over 800 one-way bridges Mr Bridges—800 not 10—that there are 1100 kilometres of unsealed roads in Kaipara; that 70 percent of the roads in the far north are unsealed; and that there is a rail line that is so bad that it takes 5 hours to shift goods south to Auckland. Forget 4G because most people up there cannot get cellphone coverage just like Greytown actually by the way—try to get cellphone coverage in Greytown. It is a place where the indicators that ought to be good are down and where the indicators that are bad are up. This is a place that after 77 years of National Party representation has its indicators upside down.And the promises—well they have flooded out of Wellington since the by-election was announced and since Winston Peters entered the race. What is this party not going to do with new roads new bridges and broadband? Well heck it is only because Steven Joyce has not had time to rewrite the policy and to put it out there.And what else has National learnt? It has learnt that it has got a candidate whom the National Party people do not actually want. They would have preferred a farmer. It has learnt that it has got a candidate one of whose greatest attributes is that he can lift heavy things—he can lift heavy things. Take all these billboards that have appeared all over the place—billboards with “Hoss Cartwright” on them. And we know what that message says: “Look he’s a lovely boy and he’s a gentle giant but he ain’t particularly bright”. How do we know that he is—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member’s time has expired.Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister of Local Government):If there is any cricket analogy that does make sense it is that Winston is probably the twelfth man for Labour and that means he is good at getting the drinks. Yeah? He would be good as the drinks boy and that is about it. You have got to say that Labour members have got to be pretty antsy and a bit nervous at the moment if Winston Peters is seen as their saviour. Winston Peters is the man who you know strides into town on a bus and those members throw their own candidate underneath it and hope for the best. But if there is one person who perhaps was a little bit worried about that particular debate from that particular member Ron Mark—she has left now—it was Tracey Martin who certainly felt concerned because that was a succession speech if ever I heard one.Hon Simon Bridges: That’s what that was.Hon PAULA BENNETT: Eh? That was a succession speech if ever I heard one from someone who sees himself ready to step up and take the reins of the great bus that is New Zealand First.I was thinking about Brendon McCullum and what a great job he did yesterday. I tell you what there are some weird things that happen in life and one was me sitting alone watching cricket totally engrossed and never believing that I would be that interested in that sport quite frankly or to be as absolutely engrossed as I am. But it does bring up the cricket analogy as well. Just to be quite clear Winston Peters was trying to run for Northland before Brendon McCullum was even born. Yeah? And then he probably has not visited in his aspect as an MP since Brendon actually was born because Winston Peters goes back only for his holidays and not actually to care about the particular area or about what needs to be done. But we will see what happens there and times will be interesting.I will say though that the people of Northland at first were a little bit—I have got to say you know Winston was there in the bus and they kind of stopped and took stock for a moment and were not quite expecting him. But they really have got a bit sick of being talked down to. So at first they did sort of go—they are a bit sick of him. And did you notice that the members’ debate was all about how awful Northland is how awfully things are going how terrible things are and how bad it is—you know it is so bad up in Northland. I actually think that it is one of the most incredible regions in this country as it has more going for it than most of them do and it is pretty damned incredible. So does our candidate Mark Osborne and that is what National stands for. So the little rhetoric of talking them down and saying how bad things are you know might have initially got a bit of TV coverage but the people of Northland they know how great the place that they live in is they know how great they are and they do not believe in the negativity from New Zealand First which quite frankly they are hearing all the time.So Labour really is in a bit of disarray over here. Here those members are sort of struggling along and then the person whom they have got to look at as their great shining light is Winston Peters. So they throw their own candidate Willow-Jean Prime under the Winston Peters bus. She is actually quite an awesome woman from some accounts up north I have got to say. There is quite a bit of respect for her there and they think that she is actually a strong candidate who could do a really good job—those of course who do not support our wonderful candidate Mark Osborne. But under the bus she goes not even overtly but covertly. So they have not got the actual chutzpah to stand up and actually say: “This is what we believe but we will all secretly hope that Winston is our great saviour up there because things are not going so well for Labour itself.”So let us take the housing policy. Obviously the member Phil Twyford is getting ready for his great debate. He is ready to get up there and give it stick. Those members do not know where they stand on housing. So it is State housing that Labour largely ignored—build a couple more houses and the job is done. It does not matter that they are in the wrong place with the wrong people and are not actually addressing the needs of tenants. That is pretty much like: “Just tick that box and we have done our housing policy and everything is all right.” The member blatantly gets up and in speeches says that he supports growing community housing providers. He says private sector investment is part of that—local government and central government. He blatantly says it all of the time. He makes up quite frankly real stories and untruths about this Government trying to flog heaps off to private developers which I right now put on the record as saying is untrue. It is point-blank untrue.What we stand for are tenants. What we stand for and will make a difference on is actually people who have been left behind largely ignored for generations and who now deserve to have the right kinds of services wrapped around them by the right kind of community providers. That takes leadership. It means standing up for something and backing those providers with the right level of funding and the right level of support around them. That is what we stand for and that is what we believe in.PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū):The last few weeks have been very very revealing. What the Northland by-election has exposed is a classically arrogant third-term National Government that is mired in scandal is desperate to hold on to power and is frantically trying to cover up its own shortcomings—in this particular instance the Northland by-election and its chronic neglect of regional New Zealand over many many years. It has basically been like watching a slow-motion train wreck. I do not know what will be the most enduring image of the campaign. On the one hand it might be Simon Bridges Steven Joyce the hapless Mark Osborne and a large black pig trying to erect a National Party hoarding—a photograph that appeared on the front page of the Northern Advocate—and on the other hand it might be the poor candidate Mark Osborne who had been advised not to go into the studio for the Q+A interview with his eyes darting nervously from side to side and Steven Joyce clearly there behind the camera holding up cue cards telling him what to say.So what did National do? It panicked. It panicked after one media opinion poll showed it was likely to lose this by-election. Steven Joyce panicked and he threw $70 million of taxpayers’ money at 10 Northland bridges that the Northland Regional Council had not even been asking for in its regional transport plan. In fact only three of the 10 bridges were even mentioned and of those three only two of them got the lowest possible priority rating. They were not a priority for Northland. But this National Government has never seen a political problem that could not be solved by throwing truckloads of taxpayers’ money at it. And for this Minister of Transport Simon Bridges his reputation has been one of the great casualties of this by-election campaign because he will never ever have any financial credibility or credibility as a transport Minister in this Parliament again. Simon Bridges’ bridges—his reputation has been permanently tarnished. The hapless candidate Mark Osborne could not even name the bridges even though he can see one of them from his front window. He claims it was his idea to think of the bridges in the first place and yet he could not even name them.Matthew Hooton who is not exactly a firebrand socialist has said that the pork-barrel politics practised by this National Government are the worst since the National Government of Sir Robert Muldoon in the 1970s and 1980s. This is the by-election of pork and it will hang around the necks of Steven Joyce Simon Bridges and all the other maestros who have been involved in running the campaign. I have a question: is the pork-barrel politics a sign of how desperate and how panicky this National Government is about losing the by-election this Saturday or is it an indicator of how casual the Government is with taxpayers’ money and of how willing it is to spend it willy-nilly in the pursuit of power and in buying votes? Or is it both of those things? I suggest it is the third.Not only have we seen bribery but we have also seen bullying. And poor Shane Reti who was sent out by Steven Joyce and Simon Bridges to tell the people of Pipiwai in Northland who are simply campaigning to get their dusty roads sealed—a reasonable enough request—he was sent there to bully and intimidate the people of Pipiwai. It is all over the media. He was sent there to tell them that they should keep quiet and that they should keep their heads down for the duration of this by-election otherwise they would get nothing. That is the National Party in this by-election—bullying intimidation pork-barrel politics. He told the people of Pipiwai that he had taken their roads plan to Cabinet and he was forced to retract that statement. The Minister exposed that for the lie that it is.It is not the pork. It is not the years of neglect. It is not the dusty roads the blackmail the bullying and the lying. The thing that really sticks in the craw of the people of Northland is that they were kept in the dark by this National Party about Mike Sabin and the police investigation.Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member knows that that is not a subject that will be raised in this House.PHIL TWYFORD: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I want to point out in relation to that that 3 News published—Mr SPEAKER: Order! I do not care what 3 News has done. I have made it quite clear and the Standing Orders are quite clear that that matter will not be discussed in this House. That concludes the member’s speech anyway.Hon SIMON BRIDGES (Minister of Transport):After years of neglect by the left when Winston Peters was off traipsing around the world and Phil Goff was funding hip-hop tours in Auckland we are back backing the regions. Ron Mark wants to talk about bridges in Northland. They are certainly topical. I really like Bridges. I like them so much I have made two small ones of my own. I probably will not make 10; we will see how it goes.Through the life of this Government we have spent hundreds of millions—actually billions—of dollars more than the left building roads and bridges in regional New Zealand.Ron Mark: Cutting rural road funding.Hon SIMON BRIDGES: We know Ron Mark unlike the left that right at this moment because it is convenient to Ron Mark his party “Winston First” is sidling up to—we know that the way it does roads is that only two or three cities in New Zealand get a look-in. Well it is not what this Government has done. We have supplemented the regions of this country and made sure they get the good Government investments they deserve. They do not see those investments as—to use the words we have heard—pork barrel politics. They see them as quality investments that are essential lifelines to their people.We have been backing the regions. We have done that through the National Land Transport Fund. We have put much more into that really across all of the categories. We have made sure there are categories in it that appropriately recognise the role of the regions because we know that under the way that Labour used to do things they did not get a fair go.Ron Mark says we have cut funding. Well let me give Ron Mark a few little statistics here in relation to what was spent in 2005 to 2008 and what is being spent in 2012 to 2015 in some of the regions in this country. Basically almost every single region has gone up most of them significantly. The Bay of Plenty is up 47 percent from $322 million to $475 million in the National Land Transport Fund. Canterbury is up 200 percent to $1 billion. Hawke’s Bay is up 18 percent to $188 million. Marlborough Nelson and Tasman are up 47 percent. Otago is up 36 percent. Southland is up 35 percent. Taranaki is up 41 percent. Waikato is up 50 percent. The West Coast is up 23 percent. We have spent more in the regions because we know they are an important part of this country. We have been backing them.That backing has not just been through the National Land Transport Programme. It has not just been in other conventional ways. We have also recognised and accepted that sometimes projects that the regions really back and that are vital to those areas need us to come in and make an assessment of what is required. That is why we have done that in the Accelerated Regional Roading Package. That is why in that package we have systematically gone through and chosen many projects all over New Zealand. There is the Kawarau Gorge bridge in Otago which I know that the member of Parliament there is really excited about. We keep going with bridges whether they are the Normanby Overbridge realignment in Taranaki where I was privileged to turn the first sod very recently—my first go in a digger—the bridges in Manawatū and Whanganui; or the one that I know that Anne Tolley has been banging on about for probably far too long. This Government—because the last Government would not do anything despite the fact that it had been a regional priority—is going to do something about the Motu Bridge replacement in Gisborne. It is going to see it double-laned and improved because this is the party on this side of the House that backs the regions.I say to the members opposite that it is all very well to do Winston and do the hooey; we do the “do-ey” actually. We are the ones on this side of the House who for the last several years year on year no matter what metric you choose have spent more in the regions than the left when Winston was propping it up—Mr SPEAKER: Order! Refer to members properly.Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I have got a little friendly advice for the members opposite. If they want to do well in the regions and they want to back the regions they could start by actually just supporting the conventional things we do. The member opposite knows this. He knows that the Pūhoi to Wellsford approach is a good one. We do not call it a “Holiday Highway” on this side of the House. We back the regions throughout this country and we are going to continue to do so.STEFFAN BROWNING (Green):Yesterday an international research study was published by the American Society for Microbiology on its open access journal mBio. The significance of this report is that it found that some herbicides in common garden use in common agricultural use and often in pesticide food residues may undermine antibiotic therapy and increase levels of antibiotic resistance in some disease-causing bacteria. One of the herbicides was Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup and it is familiar to most New Zealanders including those over here. That is right—the ubiquitous Roundup the Roundup in many garden sheds and on most farms and many many vineyards has once again been seriously implicated with effects that could be seriously affecting our children’s health our health and that of animals and even bees.But this study is not on its own. Just 5 days ago we heard that the International Agency for Research on Cancer has identified glyphosate the principal ingredient in Roundup as a probable carcinogen. We need to take this exceptionally seriously. There are numerous other reports that show evidence is mounting that there are health risks associated with Roundup from babies to bees yet we are not seeing evidence that this Government is taking these real risks seriously. There are residues including those in Roundup or its breakdown chemicals in many of the foods we eat and Roundup is widely used on people’s backyards driveways footpaths roads and increasingly whole paddocks and hillsides. We know that the folklore about drinking Roundup is absolutely dangerous rubbish. Roundup is increasingly seen as dangerous right up to the United Nations. It is a probable carcinogen and now linked to antibiotic resistance. Those are just this week’s entries on the list. There are many more effects including birth defects and very concerning effects on the environment including on bees and on the soil biology of our productive lands.Considering the evidence of pesticides affecting human health typically we find that the Ministry for Primary Industries’ total diet survey is done something like every 5 years. It is only a relatively small sample of foods as well—so when will this Government increase monitoring of foods and residues? Unfortunately the Ministry for Primary Industries spins the results of those residue tests and it quotes many many compounds in multi-residue tests that are not even relevant. It does that to statistically inflate its testing effort but it plays down the fact that most fruit and vegetables and imported corn and soy products will have some pesticide residues in them. That is right—most of the foods have some pesticide residues in them.So when will this Government get stuck in and address the fact that consumers want no pesticides in their food? They want no carcinogenic ones none that increase antibiotic resistance none that are endocrine disruptors no neurotoxins—they want none. When will this Government get pesticides like Roundup out of New Zealanders’ food? Almost all the 600 Ministry for Primary Industries samples analysed in the Safe Food Campaign’s dirty dozen list contained pesticide residues. They are impacting on human health even at low residue levels and the Government needs to lift its game to get pesticides out of New Zealand’s food.Other studies are much more direct. Among New Zealanders I am sick of hearing of friends being taken to the hospice—including one of mine today—and hearing of friends and family dying or suffering from cancers significant allergies and ongoing health issues. We all have friends in that situation. It does not have to be that way and it was not once. When will this Government care about our babies and the bees and stop relying on single-ingredient chemical safety tests when we know that the chemicals in each of the compounds also have adjuvants that are not being considered by our food safety experts and that have been shown to increase toxicity by up to a thousandfold? Roundup is far more than its principal ingredient glyphosate. Let us test food—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member’s time has expired.Hon CRAIG FOSS (Minister of Veterans’ Affairs):In just 1 month from today we will be commemorating 100 years since the New Zealand Anzac troops came ashore at Gallipoli. In just 1 month today it will be the centenary. As everyone in this House knows the Gallipoli centenary is a hugely significant event not only for New Zealand and for our good Australian mates but of course for our friends in Turkey as we all commemorate evaluate and have another look at the conflict of 1915.I will be attending the Gallipoli commemorations along with our Prime Minister and 2000 other New Zealanders. I actually was there about 2 months ago and I can categorically state that it is a very special personal experience and place for any New Zealander—and I am sure for any Australian and Turkish person as well. It is an extremely special place for understanding who we are as a country why we are the people we are and why we have this great relationship with our friends the Aussies. We can give them a hard time but when push comes to shove we stand side by side with them in times of conflict and when necessary. The building of the learning about and the beginning of our nationhood—about just what it means to be a Kiwi—that comes through louder every year as we see more people more younger New Zealanders at Anzac commemorations around our country. I personally think that as well as respectfully looking at the sacrifice made by so many New Zealanders at the time many of whom were about the same age as many of the schoolkids who go to these commemorations are it is perhaps a bit of a search as to who we are as a nation and what formed us.I have had the absolute pleasure today of hosting Ahmet Cinar the Governor of Turkey’s Çanakkale Province who is currently visiting New Zealand. I spoke and met with the Governor as he hosted me in Çanakkale Gallipoli a couple of months ago and I can assure you that we have friends in Gallipoli looking out for and looking after and treasuring that very very special part of the world. I cannot stress enough the cooperation collaboration and the desire for a very successful Anzac service particularly this year that will enjoin the cooperation and hard work from the Turkish authorities both central and local and of course from our Australian friends.I also had the pleasure this morning of laying a wreath with the Governor at the Atatürk Memorial which—if you do not know it—is at the southern end of the airport on the right-hand side as you fly into Wellington. You can actually see it there. If you do not mind for the record for Hansard I really want to put the quote from Atatürk which just sums up better than anything or any words I have seen where we are today with Anzac Day. The quote which is the inscription on the memorial at Gallipoli and here in Wellington reads: “Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears your sons are now lying in our bosoms and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”Those are prophetic words and also just humbling words. Every time I read them I have a shiver down my spine. I have been quite humbled as I have been getting more and more involved in my veterans’ affairs portfolio which was given to me by the Prime Minister late last year. There are good Kiwis good people involved in our services. They have been involved in our services they still are and they will be involved in our services.Many New Zealanders seem to somehow take for granted the sacrifice and the price that many paid—and continue to pay—for the freedoms we enjoy to contest and to vote in democratic elections and to enjoy our way throughout the world with our friends throughout the world. I hope many Kiwis particularly this year—some who perhaps have not paid as much attention as they could as to who we are and what we are as a nation—will perhaps take some time to reflect on this very very special centenary and commemoration. Thank you.KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau):This Government is a bit of a shambles. It is stumbling from scandal to fiasco and back to scandal again. Let me just list a number of the fiascos and botch-ups that it has made. It has botched up the Northland by-election. The by-election which is for an electorate that National has held for decades and decades and decades is slipping through its grasp as we speak. It has absolutely mangled that. It has mangled the roads issue. It has mangled the bridges—the “Simon Bridges” bridges. It has messed up that announcement. It has messed up housing. What about this one: does anyone remember the cycleway—the cycleway that was going to bring jobs to Northland by the thousand? It was going to stretch from the Bay of Islands across to Hokianga—80 kilometres of cycleway. Let me tell you now that if you get on your bike and ride from Ōpua you can ride 7 kilometres. Then you have to get off your bike you have to put it on the back of your truck and you have to drive about 30 kilometres to meet up with the next part of the cycleway. There are no jobs that have been created.David Shearer: How long did that take?KELVIN DAVIS: It has taken 7 years for a 7-kilometre long cycleway.What else has it botched up? It has botched up Tim Groser’s job application for the World Trade Organization. That is part of the scandal that this Government has been involved in. And then there is the reason we are having the by-election in the first place. This by-election should never have happened. I have always wondered why it is that most ambitious policemen get a job in say Kaitāia then they get promoted and go to Whangarei then they get promoted again and they go to a bigger station in Auckland and then maybe they get promoted again and they end up down the road here in Wellington. Instead Mike Sabin started in Whangarei and then his career went in reverse; he went from a big police station down to a small police station. And if the National Party had done its due diligence it would have seen that there were some issues with Mr Sabin.Then there comes the candidate selection. We have heard from Ron Mark over here that National has gone and selected “Hoss Cartwright”—just give the man a stetson and he would look like his twin brother. Not only does he look like Hoss Cartwright but there has also been a bonanza in Northland. There has been a bonanza of bridges—10 double-laned bridges that we have not asked for. Those members would have had a bit more credibility if they had just given us three bridges—but no they are treating us like we are fools. They say: “Here are 10 bridges.” We are all asking: “Ten bridges? Wow that’s fantastic.” We are not going to look a gift horse in the mouth but their own candidate cannot even name the 10 bridges. He could not even name the one that is a hundred metres from his own home. It is not even going to take 5 seconds off the trip from his front door across the river to the Taipā bakery—it is not going to take any time off that. By the end we were thinking: “My gosh after 1 week he’s making a $70 million 10-bridge announcement. Wow this is fantastic! Imagine what he’s going to announce after his second week—maybe an international airport in Te Kao a stadium in Hōreke or a tunnel through the Mangamuka Gorge!”. Anything was possible with this candidate. We even expected him to announce that the capital was going to be moved back to Northland where it started—but no.What Northlanders actually want—if they had bothered to ask us—is stability of roads. In the time of this National Government $36 million has been taken from New Zealand Transport Agency road funding. That is 29 percent of the funding gone. We actually want stability of State Highway 1. If I get in my car at the start of Northland at Wellsford and drive for about half an hour I get to the Brynderwyns. The Brynderwyns are windy on the south side and they have banks that slip down in adverse weather conditions. On the north side they have long and straight curves with passing lanes. We want the south side of the road through the Brynderwyns to be fixed. What does this Government go and do? It has just started to fix the north side which is not broken. Then if we are lucky enough to get over the Brynderwyns to Whangarei there will be a slip at Maromaku on State Highway 1. You now have to go through a little detour. If you get past that detour you get to Kawakawa. When it is raining and stormy Kawakawa gets flooded out and you have to wait for a couple of hours to get over the three bridges. If you get over them you will get to Moerewa and the bottom of Turntable Hill and there will be another flood going on there. It does not matter which road you take up to Kaitāia whether it is State Highway 1 or State Highway 10. There is the Kaeō bridge that gets flooded. There is the Waihou Valley bridge on State Highway 1 that gets flooded. If you double-laned the Kaeō bridge that would be great but it is not going to fix the 500 metres on the north side of that bridge that is flooded.MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri):That member Kelvin Davis had 5 minutes to set out his vision and he squandered it. I learnt more from Steffan Browning’s speech than I did from that member’s speech. Steffan Browning’s speech was more coherent.It does not seem that long ago that I attended the International Cricket Council Cricket World Cup opening in Christchurch. There was a sense of excitement there was a sense of optimism and there was a sense of hope. I would like to acknowledge the fantastic win by the Black Caps over South Africa. Like many New Zealanders I was tucked up in bed last night enjoying a cup of tea and watching a fantastic game. I wish the Black Caps all the best for their game on Sunday. Watching Grant Elliott hit the six on the second to last ball reminded me of the cricket heroes that I grew up with: the big-hitting Lance Cairns; the international all-rounder Richard Hadlee; the talented Crowe brothers Martin and Jeff; and the jovial wicketkeeper turned commentator Ian Smith. It is great that the young people of New Zealand will now grow up with their own cricket heroes.We have our own regional development heroes in the Government: our team captain the Prime Minister; our all-rounder Bill English; our fast bowler Steven Joyce; and a pair of safe hands our wicketkeeper Gerry Brownlee. Not only have we seen the rise of the Black Caps recently but we have seen the rise of another powerhouse: Canterbury regional development. After the devastating earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 Canterbury regional development is getting back on its feet. We saw the Hagley Oval—what a great example of the first completed anchor project. Cantabrians are realising that not only are we building a new city but our infrastructure and our facilities will be the best in New Zealand like the Hagley Oval. Coming up we have the bus interchange the retail precinct the Avon River precinct the justice and emergency precinct the health precinct the innovation precinct and the performing arts precinct.Recovery is not easy; it takes time. Earthquake recovery is a key focus of mine. We are not just talking about bricks and mortar here. With a background in health—and specifically mental health—we know international research tells us that years 3 to 5 post-disaster are the most problematic for social and psychological recovery. I would like to remind people of the Canterbury District Health Board’s All Right? campaign. It is worth repeating that if people are still needing help it is all right to ask for help. I would ask my parliamentary colleagues to ensure that we continue to focus on the Canterbury earthquake recovery in 2015 and provide the support that Cantabrians need but the signs are encouraging. The 2014 Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority well-being survey reported that 77 percent of Cantabrians rated their quality of life as “good” or “very good”. These are the highest results for this survey in the last 4 years.We do need to remind ourselves that it is not the Christchurch recovery; it is the Canterbury recovery. In my electorate of Waimakariri the town of Kaiapoi was hard hit in the first earthquake in 2010. But this year 2015 is the year of milestones and new beginnings in the Canterbury earthquake recovery and in the recovery of the Waimakariri. It has been an honour and a privilege to speak at the opening of the new Ruataniwha Kaiapoi Civic Centre the opening of the Rangiora Town Hall and the opening of the Ashley Bridge and it was an honour and privilege to host the Prime Minister for the reopening of the Oxford Town Hall. These community assets are not only symbols of our recovery but of where we are going in the future. I am proud to be part of a Government that believes in community facilities for strong families and in caring facilities.We are looking forward to another great year ahead and I am looking forward to an open day for affordable housing in my electorate on Saturday where affordable housing is being provided for under $450000. Many of my constituents are looking forward to the KiwiSaver HomeStart loan package. Thank you.Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):Well what a show of “third-term-itis” we have heard in this House today. Opening the batting today we had the Hon Paula Bennett who was out for a duck trying to defend a failed housing policy that is lying in tatters. But it was not just one duck because next up we had the “Minister of Bridges” Simon Bridges playing a defensive game caught on the back foot and unable to make any runs.This is a Government that has run out of ideas. This is a Government that is playing defence and a Government that is severely out of touch. We are seeing arrogance we are seeing bullying and we are seeing a Government that is desperate to cling on to power whatever the cost and whatever it takes. Did we hear speeches today from Ministers sketching out a brave new vision? No we heard speeches trying to play patch up and speeches that did not work in trying to play patch up.Then we had the last contribution from new member Matthew Doocey across the way. This was desperation at a new level. He had said in his office: “Oh I know. It might make us sound a bit better if I can compare us to the winning cricket team. That might make it sound better.” but that just did not work. It was desperation. He talked about the rise of a new power. Well given the state of this Government we have to ask whether that new power is Paula Bennett Bill English or Steven Joyce. Which one are you backing?This is a party where the wheels are coming off. National is about to do the unthinkable—that is snatch defeat from the jaws of victory—and possibly turn a 9000 majority into a loss in Northland on Saturday. This is a Government that really is playing off the back foot. We have got John Key’s increasingly bizarre outbursts which show that this is a Government losing control of its agenda and trying to protect its own neck. This is a Government in disarray as my colleagues have said. It is about scandal about botch-ups and about fiasco. It is making a complete hash of things in Northland and it is making some very very strange statements in the House.But there are some very serious issues that underlie this. We have been seeing for a period of time now the abuses of power that this Government is willing to commit in order to hold—and desperately hold—on to power. It is a Government that is riddled with controversy and a string of these abuses. There is the smear machine that has been run out of the Prime Minister’s office. The Prime Minister himself was shown to be on late-night text terms with his bestie Cameron Slater on the eve of the release of the Chisholm inquiry. We have a Government that is willing to use the resources of our security intelligence agency for its own political ends—first of all against Phil Goff in the 2011 electoral campaign and now we have the Government willing to use our security intelligence agency as a recruitment agency for one of its Ministers. That is not a sign of a Government that deserves to be in power. That is not a sign of a group of people who have a positive agenda for our country and want to implement it.Then we have got the panic—the absolute panic—that is setting in over Northland. I think the National Party are in desperate need of a Corporal Jones within their midst—someone to make the clarion call of “Don’t panic!”. Maybe it will be its whip Tim Macindoe. He has just heard Matthew Doocey shop himself by saying that he goes home early to watch the cricket rather than staying on until the end of play at 12 but it might be his time to rise up and be the Corporal Jones and tell us “Don’t panic don’t panic!” because panic has set in on the benches opposite.Whether Mark Osborne gets over the line or not on Saturday National has already lost in Northland. National has already shown that it is a Government on the way out. It is a third-term Government that people are losing faith in quickly. The people of Northland like people all over New Zealand are showing that they are sick of being taken for granted and of having their needs ignored and they are going to punish National at the ballot box. Whether that is a win or a close call a close call is a loss for National in Northland.BRETT HUDSON (National):Well New Zealand got off to a cracking start in 2015 just like the Black Caps last night against South Africa. We are wishing them the very very best for this Sunday because I can tell you that for New Zealand Kiwis and their families under this Government the success continues to roll on.For the benefit of the aspiring Green Party leaders I would like to point out that in 2014 the New Zealand economy grew 3.5 percent one of the highest rates in the developed world. In the calendar year of 2014 inflation was merely 0.8 percent which was well below average weekly wage increases of 2.5 percent and over the last 12 months 80000 jobs were created and labour workforce participation rates reached a record high. That tells us that businesses have confidence—confidence in what this Government is doing confidence in the future. They are looking to expand and to employ more people. It tells us that the people of New Zealand have confidence. They know that the work is out there and they know that they can improve their prosperity and their livelihoods by seeking it. It all means more work more income and better prosperity for Kiwi families. It is the heart and the start of better times for Kiwi families.This continues under this Government with our Business Growth Agenda creating more opportunities for Kiwis to succeed such as by opening new markets. This week we signed a free-trade agreement with Korea. Korea is currently our sixth-largest export market and contributes $4 billion to our economy each year but under this free-trade agreement we will remove $65 million in duty costs for Kiwi exporters in the first year alone.Todd Barclay: How much?BRETT HUDSON: $65 million. That makes our exporters more competitive and if we are more competitive in Korea and other countries we are seeking to have free-trade agreements with that translates into more exports more jobs and higher incomes.Along with this we are also opening up channels of investment through things like our Financial Markets Conduct Act which passed recently and places a higher cap on funding mechanisms such as crowdsourcing which businesses such as Renaissance Brewing and Invivo Wines have used very successfully. We are also making enormous investments in quality and much-needed infrastructure.Our roads of national significance are improving productivity and unlocking economic potential throughout New Zealand. And we are seeing the benefits of that in Ōhāriu as well. We have got our own road of national significance. We are finally seeing Transmission Gully under way and that is a much-needed infrastructure investment in the Wellington region that will terminate in Ōhāriu. Along with that road we are also investigating a Pētone to Grenada North link road a road that could shave as much as 7 kilometres off the trip from the north through to Pētone and better link the communities of Porirua and Tawa with Pētone. That is good sensible investment.Along with that investment in Ōhāriu we are also seeing a network of highly successful and capable schools that are preparing our children for their brighter future and contributing to the Minister of Education’s goal of five out of five children having success in education. It is a great news story. Ōhāriu is the place to be. Everyone wants to be there and we are helping them with special housing areas which we have agreed with the Wellington City Council in Johnsonville which is the heart of the electorate and in Churton Park a very popular suburb just to the north.Our economy is flourishing along with Wellington’s. Wellington’s economy grew 4.4 percent in the year to March 2014 and Ōhāriu is playing its part. We have got beef and sheep farmers in the valley and they are now farming wind; we have got technology companies that are hugely successful; and in traditional business the Taylor Preston meatworks contributes $250 million of exports to the local economy each year and up to 700 jobs—much-needed jobs–in Wellington. It is a huge player in our local market. Ōhāriu is playing its part and it is reaping rewards. This Government is focused on the things that work with the things that will actually lift livelihoods and incomes for families. This Government is working for New Zealand.PITA PARAONE (NZ First):Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. I just wonder whether I am in the right place because for the last 3 weeks all we have heard about from the other side of the House was Northland and what National was going to do for Northland. And yet here we are in the last week of a “buy-election” and all that those members can talk about is Anzac and that is important; cricket which is important too but Ōhāriu Korea Johnsonville Japan Wellington Korea—I am not saying that that is not important but gosh if I was a member of that party I would certainly be wanting to do my best for the people of Northland.The Northland electorate is currently experiencing a political phenomenon that has never ever been seen before in the last 10 years. The political party that Northland people have pledged their faith in has deserted them and what is National doing about it? It talks about Northland being important and about what it is going to do for Northland but Northland is an example of regional New Zealand—forgotten. However that has all changed. Why has it changed? Because the “Force of the North” has arrived with a simple byline “Send them a message”. We are 3 days away from an election but the Government has already received the message so that is very good. The people of Northland are certainly taking the opportunity to send their message and the reaction from that side of the House certainly indicates that they have. It is great to note the members who are present in the House. Obviously they are the favoured few because the rest of the team are all up in Northland getting ready to pull down the hoardings.We know that the people of Northland have been promised 10 two-laned bridges. I am from the north and I am really sad. Although it may be good news for some people in the north I am really saddened that the bridge in Mōtatau the bridge in Opahi the bridge in Pokapu and the bridges at Matawaia Pipiwai Otiria—all within the Ngāti Hine boundary—have not even been included on the Government’s list. Those people who are living in those communities certainly do not believe that they have been considered. However once the New Zealand First candidate put his name into the hat all of a sudden the fruits the baubles of office started to fall down on Northland. That is just an indication of the pulling power of our candidate whom Northland people will certainly provide their support for.Talking about history was it the National candidate who said that he would take the Government back to Northland? Well I just want to let you know that the New Zealand First candidate has already beaten him to that. He has established his headquarters in Russell just down the road from Ōkiato the original capital of New Zealand. So not only is he preparing himself to represent the good people of Northland but also he is indicating that there is a sense of history in all this a history that will see that 70-odd years of representation by one political party in this House for the people of Northland will come to an end.I have just one final thing to say. The Government had the opportunity to show how sincere it was towards the people of Northland. In Northland there are 71 schools with a decile rating of 1 to 3. Last week the Government had the opportunity of supporting two bills that would see assistance given to families who were having difficulties feeding their children. What did the Government choose to do? Ignore it—ignore it. And the history of this country will show that all the filibustering that the National Government has done towards helping Northland has been just that: filibustering. Kia ora.JONO NAYLOR (National):I have got to say it is fantastic to be associated with a Government that is assisting New Zealand families to get ahead. We are doing better and there is more on the plate that is coming. On 1 April we are going to see paid parental leave increase by a further 2 weeks. This is great news for families. We are going to see again on 1 April the parental tax credit for low-income families increase from $150 to $220—more great news for families. The HomeStart scheme is going to be up and running and we are going to see more and more first-home buyers being able to access the market. We are going to see free doctors visits extended not just for those who are under 6 but for those who are under 13 years of age. This is great news for New Zealand families. This is great news for our country as we build on our successes of the past and continue to do more.This is not a Government that has run out of steam. This is a Government that has got energy. This is a Government that has got vision. This is a Government that wants the very best for New Zealand families. Although we are making great progress in these social areas in terms of the assistance we are directly providing to families there is more we can do and there is more we are going to do particularly to empower families to be able to provide for themselves because that is ultimately the outcome we want to see. We are going to do this by continuing to grow the economy. We are going to continue to do this by growing jobs and we have got a good record in that over the last little while. That is something that is happening right across New Zealand.I hear constantly on the other side of the House people talking about a two-speed economy where if you are not in Auckland or in Christchurch then you are forgotten. The regions of New Zealand have not been forgotten. The regions of New Zealand in fact are doing very very well. We see the recent growth statistics that have come out about regional development in New Zealand and we see that things are going incredibly well things are growing at a greater rate and we are in good shape.If we are going to continue to grow the economy in the regions it does take a little bit of extra effort. Over recent times we have seen that extra effort go into regional growth studies that have been occurring right across different parts of New Zealand—particularly so far in the Bay of Plenty in Northland and also in the Manawatū–Whanganui area where I come from. These regional growth studies are working very hard to identify particular areas that will be great opportunities for those particular regions. I know that in Palmerston North and in the Manawatū in particular we know we do some things better than pretty much anyone else in the country. We are developing and working alongside this regional growth study to enhance those opportunities further. We are seeing great expansion in the area of food research and development. With the help of the Government through New Zealand Trade and Enterprise in cooperation with local authorities we are starting to see more jobs grow in our region in this area. We have been able to attract overseas companies to come and set up in the Manawatū creating more jobs for locals. We are seeing New Zealand companies like New Zealand Pharmaceuticals expanding their operations. They are exporting more and the region is going to do better as well because of it.We are also the best place in New Zealand—the Manawatū—out of which to operate logistics-type operations. The investment this Government is putting into the MacKays to Peka Peka diversion around Waikanae and Paraparaumu is well on the way and is going to increase the connectivity between the Manawatū and Wellington. Transmission Gully is not too far away either. These particular roading projects are absolutely connecting the region I live in to the capital city of Wellington. We know it is going to have good pay-offs for us in this region and is something we will be very proud of.Also in terms of regional roading funding the Foxton trestle bridge is due for an upgrade. Unfortunately at the moment it is unable to take high-productivity vehicles along it but when that bridge is done up we are going to see high productivity from the produce that is grown right around New Zealand getting better access to the markets.I want to finish by reiterating that this is a Government that is going forward. This is a Government that is very keen and committed to growing jobs growing the economy and seeing better outcomes for New Zealand families.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) BillIn CommitteeTIM MACINDOE (Senior Whip—National):I seek leave for the debate on the bills that we are about to commence to be taken as one debate with clauses to be voted upon separately.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There appears to be none.Clauses 1 to 11PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū):I look forward to debating this bill through the Committee stage taken as one question. I want to begin by speaking to clause 6 of the bill which is the operative clause for what I think is the most significant thing the bill sets out to do which is to enable members of KiwiSaver schemes to withdraw not only their own contributions but also the member tax credits or the Government contributions in a KiwiSaver scheme in order to get a deposit together that would enable them to take advantage of a Welcome Home Loan. This bill is an enabler of the Government’s HomeStart subsidies which were announced during last year’s general election campaign.We are going to focus our discussion this afternoon on the clauses in this bill but let me just note in passing that members on this side of the House—Labour members in particular—have been very critical of the policy for which this bill is an enabler. If I can just summarise briefly our criticisms we agree with many of the highly critical things that have been said by the Reserve Bank Treasury and so on about the effect of increasing homeownership subsidies in a market that is already supply-constrained where there is already significant excess demand compared with supply. Many commentators including the officials from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment Treasury the Reserve Bank and the officials who briefed us in the select committee were clear that those were the problems associated with this bill.Labour as we have made clear in earlier debates is going to be voting for this bill because putting aside for a second the HomeStart policy and the expansion of homeowner subsidies which we think will drive prices up and will actually make housing more unaffordable the bill itself is at best I suppose slightly benign. But as I was saying clause 6 is the one that basically amends the KiwiSaver scheme rules and I suppose the question in relation to clause 6 is what difference is it going to make to aspiring homeowners—to first-home buyers? Our calculations are that at best it will allow possibly a couple of thousand or maybe a few thousand extra dollars to be contributed to a deposit.Put that in the context of what is happening for example in the Auckland housing market where over the last 12 months the average house price increased on average by $1700 every week—$1700 every week. A bill that is going to enable people to add just a few thousand dollars of their own retirement savings—so this bill gives people the opportunity to raid their own kitty and really to pay the price of this Government’s failure to address the housing crisis. But the quantum is all wrong. So at best it is going to allow people to withdraw a few thousand dollars extra. It might be the equivalent of 2 weeks or 3 weeks of Auckland house price inflation and I think that puts it in perspective. That shows how incremental how marginal the benefit from this bill will be.I want to point to some of the comments that have been made by officials in relation to the expansion of the subsidies including the ability to withdraw one’s own retirement savings in order to put a deposit together. Treasury advised the Government in July 2013 about the earlier change to the rules around eligibility for the KiwiSaver home deposit scheme. Treasury said that “The KiwiSaver Home Deposit Scheme increases the cash available to homebuyers for deposits. Increasing eligibility may encourage buyers to take on more debt/seek more expensive houses. This could exacerbate house price pressures.” That is what we are talking about here.Later that month Treasury advised that increasing KiwiSaver withdrawal subsidies would have an impact on the very same financial and macro-stability issues that the Reserve Bank Governor comments on on almost a weekly basis. Treasury said that the impact on financial stability would be negative and that it would undermine the effectiveness of loan-to-value ratio lending restrictions which is the main tool that the Reserve Bank has brought in to try to reduce the financial stability risks of an out-of-control Auckland housing market. Treasury said: “Government subsidies for home ownership are low value for money and tend to be regressive.” This is advice that Treasury has given elsewhere. They are low value for money and they tend to be regressive. So by raising the price caps and increasing the subsidies and the eligibility the Government is actually reducing the targeting and the value of the policy to make a difference to the people who need it most and it is expanding the pool of people who are likely to take it up.On the draft Cabinet paper—again on the previous changes but I think they are just as apposite for this bill—Treasury said: “Experience with homeowner grants in Australia suggests that such programmes tend to push prices up in a supply constrained environment by supporting greater demand rather than improving affordability.” and there is a risk that by expanding eligibility—as this bill does and as the wider policy does—for the KiwiSaver deposit subsidy the Government will end up undermining affordability for first-home buyers.So I think that is a pretty good summary of the official advice about the implications of clause 6 which allows the member tax credit or the Government contribution to be withdrawn. I think it is pretty clear that the benefit here is very very small compared with what is happening to house prices which are up by 1700 bucks a week in Auckland. But the median house price for the whole of New Zealand has been going up over the last 12 months by $1000 a week on average—$1000 a week. So the benefit of this bill for aspiring first-home buyers is pretty marginal and is probably the equivalent of about 2 or 3 weeks of house price inflation. Thank you.RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First):I rise to take a brief call on behalf of New Zealand First and on behalf of my colleague Fletcher Tabuteau as we debate in the Committee of the whole House the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill.As we have outlined previously New Zealand First does support this bill albeit with some minor reservations. I want to focus on one part of the bill that we do not believe has received as much attention as it warrants in terms of its importance to a very specific and very important sector of society—that is our returned service people our veterans. I am talking about clauses 8 to 11. We have a concern that this bill—rather than being remedial as it is intended to be and correcting certain anomalies—as it is constructed will have the effect of compromising the potential income of some veterans. This would be our single greatest concern and I am sure the Minister in the chair the Hon Anne Tolley will take the opportunity to rise as she is wont to do in order to allay this concern because we are certain it is not the intention of the Government to in any way compromise the financial position that our veterans may find themselves in.We understand that the intent of the bill is remedial with regard to veterans’ support payments that it is intended to tidy up parts of the Income Tax Act 2007 so that income replacement payments under the Veterans’ Support Act 2014 are treated the same way for tax purposes as are payments provided by ACC and that they are taken into account as regards social policy calculations so that they do not trigger the application of rules relating to auto-enrolment and the compulsory employment contributions to KiwiSaver. This is admirable and it is only proper and right and we wholeheartedly support that. However we do hold a concern as my colleague outlined earlier in this debate that it may in fact have the opposite effect under certain circumstances and we would very much appreciate the Minister taking time to address this.The Veterans’ Support Act 2014 was legislation that adopted most of the recommendations of the 2010 Law Commission review of the War Pensions Act 1954. The commission made 170 recommendations and the Government adopted 132 of them which is admirable we believe. The Act required reviewing because it was outdated. It was designed to deal with the physical risks and effects of deployments but it did not cover the psychological or environmental risks and ongoing repercussions faced by veterans—by service people who would become veterans. It focused on disability compensation but did not provide for rehabilitation.So the 2014 Act sought to address these anomalies but as is all too often the case the law of unintended consequences saw it falling foul of some unforeseen traps in other pieces of legislation notably tax law which is what we are dealing with in this bill. New Zealand First’s concern then is around the benevolent margin and it is this I would very much like the Minister to provide some further assurances on.The War Pensions Act was a form of workplace injury compensation in the days before ACC and some veterans qualify for compensation payments under the both that Act and ACC while others qualify only under the older scheme. The RSA submission to the select committee stated: “The benevolent margins for veterans which so obviously was a part of parliamentary thinking when ACC was established has not in fact been delivered as intended. Sometimes the letter of the law does not always manage to quite capture the spirit of its intention.” I very much hope the Minister will undertake to ensure either by way of amendment or directive to clarify the position of that intent.The 2014 Act provided that “Veterans who are under the age of retirement and unable to work because of any medical condition are able to receive a higher rate of income compensation than is available under the 1954 Act and surviving spouses or partners children and dependents continue to receive the same types of compensation as under the 1954 Act.” We very much want to be reassured that the higher rate of compensation provided for under the 2014 Act is able to survive the changes to tax law brought about by this and preceding Acts because if there is one group of people in society who deserve the best deal possible it is our veterans to whom we all owe a collective debt of honour.In closing I reiterate that New Zealand First will continue to support this bill. I look forward to the Minister’s very erudite contribution which we hope will be reassuring as well.Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):There are two important matters in this bill and in my first call I guess I will look at the area I have a particular responsibility for which is veterans’ support payments. I think there are a number of questions that the Committee needs to know about and actually the country needs to know about. It seems to me that the changes that are being made in this bill to veterans’ support payments are way under the radar. I rang the RSA this afternoon just to see what its view was. It did not know about the changes being made in this legislation. The chief executive officer of the RSA did not know about this and until I saw this bill I was not aware of it.On the surface this bill dramatically decreases the income of veterans through their lump-sum payment through their weekly compensation payment and through their weekly payment to the dependent spouse of a deceased veteran and to children and dependants. It dramatically reduces their income because it makes it taxable.I had to really look through the regulatory impact statement to find out what was happening here. I read the Minister’s statement from the first reading and the Minister who spoke at the second reading did not even refer to it but it appears that there has been a massive cock-up. That cock-up is the fact that the Government did not get it right in the first place. A veteran reading the Veterans’ Support Act would believe that the income they were going to get was going to be non-taxable and suddenly they find that their income will go down by a third from what the Act apparently gave them and what is more it increases the obligations facing veterans in terms of student loans and child support obligations. It reduces veterans’ Working for Families entitlements.This has been conveniently swept under the carpet and the excuse given is: “We got it wrong. We made an error in the original Act.” This is an error such that if any veteran picked up the Act and looked at it they would believe they were entitled to far more than they are going to get as a consequence of this remedial piece of legislation.My questions to the Minister are straightforward but I would really like to get some answers to them. That is the whole point of the Committee of the whole House stage. My first question Minister is this. How did the Government make this stuff-up? How is it that it got it wrong in the Veterans’ Support Act? What went wrong why did it go wrong and why did it take so long to discover that? My second question is this. What efforts have been made to communicate this error to veterans and their families? Have any efforts been made? It seems to me that people will have been misled by the legislation originally advanced by the Government—the Veterans’ Support Act.Thirdly I take it from the regulatory impact statement but I am not sure that payments have already been made to veterans. I would really like the officials to advise the Minister as to whether any payments at the wrong level have been made to veterans. If those payments have wrongly been made to how many veterans were they made to and what was the sum of money involved? Is this legislation retrospective? Will people who have been getting more in payments than the Government now says they are entitled to have to repay that money?None of these questions has been addressed in any of the material I have seen advanced. I am hoping that the payments have not started and that there will not be any requirement to pay money back. I will understand if the Department of Inland Revenue made a genuine error but I think that when you make an error you front up you admit it you explain how you made it and you apologise for making it. I want to know from the Minister whether any of those things have happened.I had to as an experienced legislator search through the information that has been provided by the Government from every source to find out that that was actually the reason. It was swept under the carpet. The Government did not want to acknowledge it and it did not want to admit it. When the RSA says to me that it did not know about it I think there is something fundamentally wrong with how our system is working.I think they are fair questions Minister and I hope that you will take the opportunity before this debate proceeds much further to get up and answer those questions so they can be clarified. Depending on the answers you give of course we may have some further questions to ask.The second area I want to speak on is the HomeStart-related clauses clauses 3 to 6. I am asking these questions on behalf of my constituents because I want to know how much these changes are going to help people in my electorate. My electorate is Mt Roskill; it is on the Auckland isthmus. It is the area in which I grew up and it used to be an area where people could come and buy their first home. It was a working-class area. People could aspire in the old days to homeownership they could have it and it would be affordable.The really frightening thing as I went around my electorate last year and knocked on doors—doors that I had knocked on before; that I had known always for the last 40 years to be owner-occupied—was I found that they are now investor-owned and they are being rented out. They are being rented out. Homeownership has gone from nearly 75 percent in my electorate and in Auckland to 61 percent. That is a serious serious indictment on what is happening in housing because we all believe in the Kiwi dream of being able to buy your own home. I am asking these questions because I want to know whether what is in this bill will address that problem of housing affordability.I would love my kids to be able to buy on the isthmus of Auckland. They cannot. They cannot afford it. When I bought a home—and probably when you bought your home Mr Chairman—it was three times my income. That was the cost of my first home as a first-home buyer. My kids are now paying six or seven times that income and they have to rely on help from the family to be able to raise the deposit.When I look at what is happening in Auckland with prices I see the prices are going up by $1700 a week. Put yourself in the position of being a first-home buyer. You are paying out high rent because of a housing shortage and you have got to find $1700 a week more just to keep up with house prices. You cannot do it. Actually a lot of Auckland house prices have gone up by $90000 in the last year—$90000.What do we do in this bill? We alter HomeStart so that we can give people their tax credits back. It is $500 a year. That is what this bill provides to a first-home buyer—$500 a year—and house prices are going up by $90000 a year. So I ask whether this is a genuine effort by the Government to address the problem of more and more people in Auckland not being able to afford to buy a home of their own. Five hundred dollars a year—Carmel Sepuloni: It’s pathetic.Hon PHIL GOFF: Yes yes—it is $10 a week and house prices are going up by $1700 a week.So I say that this is a drop in the bucket as an answer to a serious problem. But I say more than that. When I read Treasury’s submission on what the Government is proposing it said that this will be counter-productive. It said that in a supply constrained environment putting more money in in this way is like putting petrol on a fire to put it out and that all this will do—and it quotes the Australian examples—is further push up prices and that the poor prospective homeowners being promised that they are going to get something out of this bill will just find that homeownership is further and further outside their reach.The statistics do not lie—75 percent of Aucklanders owned their own homes back in the mid-1980s; today 61 percent do. What difference will this bill make? This is tokenism is it not? It is tokenism at best. Yet everyone in this House would say that an important part of our democracy and our community is that people should have the right to own their own homes. Well because of the housing shortage they are paying more rent and because of the housing shortage house prices are going up more and more. Who benefits from house price increases? Not the first-home buyers—they are the victims. The property investor benefits. With at least 40 percent of the houses sold going to property investors they are making thousands of dollars a week on every property they own. That would be OK if it were not for the fact that they are making it out of the hide of the people who are desperate to get into a home of their own.Is this House working for property investors and not working for first-home buyers? Obviously it is. We are introducing something here that will not provide real assistance to the first-home buyer. The first-home buyer is falling further and further behind and the Minister of housing or all three Ministers of housing insults them by saying: “Here is something that will help you.” when it will not help. Things are getting worse.JAN LOGIE (Green):I rise to take a short call in the Committee stage of the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill. I also want to put a few questions to the Minister in the chair Jo Goodhew specifically in relation to clauses 8 to 11 and the changes for veterans. I did say in the first reading of this bill that I was slightly bewildered to have this legislation in front of the House after just last year when the House spent such a long time considering the Veterans’ Support Bill which was in turn the result of a very extended Law Commission report on the need to modernise our veterans’ support system. Parliament spent many many hours on that legislation.I have to say that at the very least I am bewildered to be here less than a year later I think with a bill that talks about remedial matters and is in fact from what I can read in it proposing quite significant changes to what have been described as mistakes in that piece of work. It is I say again a disturbing trend that seems to be happening in this House where we are fixing up mistakes in the legislation of this Government. I would like to hear clarification about exactly what the in-the-hand impact of this change in legislation will be for veterans.I did sit through the Social Services Committee meetings and I am concerned. After all the care we took in that committee listening to veterans about the hardship they were experiencing particularly as we are coming up to—and I am not one to celebrate war—the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli I am concerned. There has been so much attention to remembering the lessons of that war and giving honour to the tragic losses and the harm done to people sent into those conflict zones by this House and the fact that we could potentially be passing legislation that would reduce their incomes and the support available to them under the title of “Remedial Matters” is deeply disturbing to me and I really do hope to have that issue positively clarified to us in the Committee tonight.I would also like to speak about this bill in terms of a measure that National cited during the election campaign as one of its key responses to the housing crisis—the crisis that nobody on that side of the House seems to acknowledge is a crisis. Clause 6 enables people to access their tax credits in their own KiwiSaver account if they are eligible for the HomeStart provision and have the ability to access their KiwiSaver savings. As has already been mentioned I think it amounts to about $521 a year which in the very very best-case scenario is around $5000 if they are old enough and enrolled in the scheme at its first inception in 2007. So we are not talking about very much money. We are not talking about any new money at all because it was money that the Government had already contributed and put into people’s KiwiSaver schemes. So it is just enabling people to access a little bit more which also means they will have less in the hand at retirement.It is critical to recognise how big the housing crisis is in this country. I think the average age of first-home purchasers in the 1970s was 25 from the best evidence that I can get from the library. The most up-to-date information we have got tells us that the average age is now 34 or 36 and I would suspect it is quite a bit higher in Auckland because that is a national figure. I know I am very lucky living in the wonderful Porirua East to have been able to buy a very cheap house but I know that is not the reality in most of New Zealand. In fact the average house price in Auckland is now over $650000. Can you imagine that? That is more than three times my house price and it requires a significant deposit. If you need 20 percent in order to have a deposit on the average house it is over $120000. When you think about how expensive rents are in Auckland—and in many other places in the country—and about what people have left over and their ability to save for a deposit it becomes clear that it is impossible.I was speaking with some caregivers up in Auckland on Monday night and they were talking about working full time caring for their kids and living in Auckland. They found a place close to their work but after they have paid their rent they have less than $200 a week left to cover all the rest of their costs and care for their children. You are not going to be able to save for a deposit—you are going to struggle to feed your kids when that is the reality.So $520 which you already have from the Government is not going to enable you to get anywhere near $120000. I do not think that clause 6 lives up to the Government’s election promise. To consider this measure an answer in terms of home affordability and people’s ability to buy their first homes is a bit of a joke but we are supporting this bill because—and it feels weird even saying this—we know that for some people somewhere in the country that little bit of money might be just enough to put them over the edge into being able to buy their first house. It would feel curmudgeonly to not support that. But in terms of integrity in terms of this being a response to home affordability and in terms of this being a response to the housing crisis then the answer is no it is not.I cannot imagine that anyone in this country listening to any of this debate would have a sense of gratitude to the Government or even a sense of confidence in the Government’s ability to respond to the real issues facing this country at this time. So we offer our very provisional support and look forward to hearing the Minister answering the questions around veterans’ support because that in fact may change our position on this bill. Kia ora.DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East):This bill the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill is something that is—there will be a lot of discussion around homeownership and—Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Tell us about markets again like last time.DAVID BENNETT: Yes well I will tell you about it. You might learn something as well. That is for the member over there who has no idea what it is actually like to run a business or do anything like that. The important part of this bill is around that tax credit that homebuyers will be able to access now. As many speakers have said it is a small amount of money compared with the purchase price but still when you are getting the deposit together any bit of money is very valuable. That is the whole point of the matter and it is why people would be wanting to take advantage of this piece of legislation.The wider context of this is that the Opposition parties are basically saying here that this is ineffective in addressing the homeownership issue. That is what the Opposition parties will be pushing along. But members of the New Zealand public realise and understand that the biggest cost they face in homeownership is actually interest rates—the interest rates on the property. I just want to remind New Zealanders of what the Opposition policy would actually give you in interest rates and that is 9 percent interest rates—9 percent. National’s policy gives you 6 percent interest rates—6 percent against 9 percent for the biggest cost that you will have in purchasing a property. That is the point that underlies all the arguments you will see from the left. Basically those members say that the homeownership issue can be dealt with by 50 members of this Parliament making certain decisions and then dictating how the market will operate.In the Labour case it is definitely a case where it believes that it can just go out there and wave a magic wand and build 30000 houses overnight—30000 houses that will not exist will not last and will not deliver for New Zealanders. The Green Party for example thinks that 30000 houses will just pop out of the sky—that you do not actually have to build them. The Greens think that they come from just talking in this House and they will sort of come about. The New Zealand First Party—I think that it thinks that 30000 houses—Stuart Nash: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I do understand that this is going to be a wide-ranging debate etc. etc. but actually I do think that the member talking about Labour’s policies New Zealand First’s policies and the Green Party’s policies is probably a little wide even in terms of a wide-ranging debate.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Thank you. The member is quite right; the debate is wide-ranging. We are looking at all clauses together as one. Speakers so far have ranged across the gambit of those clauses—Phil Twyford: Were you going to say “rambled”?The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I was about to say something I probably should not have—the member is quite right. So we will call David Bennett.DAVID BENNETT: Mr Chairman I am giving the context of the arguments that are made so that when New Zealanders are listening to this debate they will understand the context of the arguments that have been made. So it is very relevant. I know Labour policy is hard to talk about but I have tried my best to encapsulate what little policy it has.Looking at it from that perspective New Zealanders have a choice over how you deal with the homeownership issue. You can see that one side of the argument is that the Government itself can dictate the solutions the Government itself can build those houses and the Government itself will provide all those solutions. That has never been seen to actually work. It has never been seen to actually have been effective and it is something that is a dream that has come apart for the Labour Party and that was not voted for by the public of New Zealand.New Zealanders understand in terms of their homeownership that the biggest cost you will have is interest rates. This Government has dedicated itself to having strong economic management so that we are able to provide the economic environment that enables low interest rates. That is the crucial thing; that is important. Although we are talking about a small part of that deposit that will come through the tax credit it is a wider issue in regard to homeownership that has been debated in this House tonight and we will continue to do so through the rest of the debate. The ability to withdraw that member tax credit—Hon Clayton Cosgrove: How much?DAVID BENNETT: —up to $521 a year so—Hon Phil Goff: How much are house prices going up a week?DAVID BENNETT: What did you say?Hon Phil Goff: How much are house prices going up a week?DAVID BENNETT: Well under Labour they went up 96 percent in the 9 years that it was in Government and they went up 28 percent in the 4 years that National was in Government up to 2014. So 96 percent compared with 28 percent—that is how much they went up Mr Goff. Under your party they doubled basically and you did nothing about it. So it is a bit rich for you to come into this House and talk about house prices in that regard when you were in Government and did nothing about it—did absolutely nothing. So now it is quite rich for those members to come into this House and talk about it.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour):There must be some sort of anatomical block with that member David Bennett because he just does not quite get basic mathematics. So I will try my best to explain it for him. See that member—we are here to debate his policy not previous Government policies—has been in Government for 7 long years and the best he could do today is dredge up what happened 7 or 8 years ago. So let us deal with the maths using all his fingers and toes and explain it to him. He would have the New Zealand people believe that this is a wonderful gift and that people should be so grateful to this Government for this huge big hit that it is providing New Zealanders with to get them into their first homes. If you listened to him and his ilk you would think they were giving away millions of dollars to people. You would think that they were saying to people: “Look we are going to give you the biggest gift you’ve had since Christmas in monetary terms to get into your first home.” But let us try to get the maths right even if we have to get out the Cuisenaire rods for that member.So here we go. The maths goes like this: the benevolent National Government will allow you the New Zealand people to withdraw $521 of your superannuation through your KiwiSaver account—your money not theirs; yours—once a year to contribute to a first HomeStart. So have you got that? It is $521 per year. Yet we know—and that member could not name it—that Auckland house prices are going up by $1700 per week. Now wait for it—that equates to $90000 per year which in people terms funnily enough is in theory the number of people whom the Government over there says it is going to help. It says it is going to help 90000 people. There is also another 90000—a $90000 per year increase in Auckland house prices—and the generous National Government is going to allow you the New Zealand public to use $521 of your future superannuation to try to get you over the top and into a first home.I do not know whether that is clear enough for Mr Bennett. I do not know whether we have to get out the Cuisenaire rods and the abacus and a few other things to make it clear for him but if he and his ilk think that the New Zealand people should get down on bended knee and thank him and his ilk for allowing them to withdraw $521 per year to try to help them get into a first home when that amount is expunged in less than 3 to 4 days and when Auckland house prices are going up by $1700 per week which equates to $90000 per year—I do not know. I did get through standard 4 maths; it is pretty simple to me.I am no sort of genius like that member is when it comes to market forces and great issues of economics but I reckon that if you walked down the street and waved clause 6 of the bill and explained it to the average Kiwi person struggling to get into a first home one they would get it. Two if you asked them: “Do you feel great about this? Do you sort of feel warm in your old age? Should you be getting down on bended knee to the National Government and thanking it for its generosity in allowing you to use your own retirement savings small amount though it is?” I suspect—but I am happy to be corrected or if somebody has got an opinion poll—that people when they realise what piffle is in this will actually be quite outraged.Then the next question is is this the big hit—because that is what it is being portrayed as—by the National Government to solve the housing problem? Well if you look at those basic figures—521 bucks when Auckland house prices are going up by $1700 a week—you would have to say that actually this bill is not even worth the credibility of being called a political pamphlet. It does not even stack up as decent propaganda because people will look at this and know that this is not even a drop in the bucket.What I would be interested in from the Minister and maybe from some of his other erstwhile colleagues who are on the Finance and Expenditure Committee with me is whether somebody could get up—because those figures are not in dispute—and you could talk about what previous Governments have done and have a battle of percentages. But I have got to tell you team this is your policy your legislation and your Government. You are either proud of it—I say through you Mr Chair—and they will stand up and they will be proud of the fact that they are giving people a few hundred dollars a year while prices are going through the roof or they are not proud of it. And if they are proud of it I would ask the Minister in the chair Jo Goodhew this. Can she tell us whether she believes that that is a realistic contribution—or any sort of realistic contribution—to going some way to solving the housing crisis?We will support the bill because as the Green colleague said it gives some money pitiful though it is. It actually does not give any of the Government’s money; it gives people the ability to use their own retirement savings so the Government should not take credit for that benevolent though it is in allowing people to use their own dough. We will support the bill because as the Green colleague said something is better than nothing but you know we have not advanced more than a millimetre over the “nothing” line.So I would be really indebted to the Minister—or the new Minister Nicky Wagner who has just come to the chair—if either of them could actually stand up and explain to the people of New Zealand what impact this is going to have. Treasury of course told the Minister and told the select committee as Mr Goff pointed out that “increasing deposit subsidies is likely to stimulate demand and thus increase prices in supply-constrained markets thereby undermining housing affordability.” I will say it again for Mr Bennett’s benefit. It is “thereby undermining housing affordability.” That is not me saying it. That is not the Labour Party or any Opposition parties in this Committee saying it. This is Treasury and the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and the Government’s own advisers saying it. If you were a Minister and you said: “Look I want a policy that will help first-home buyers into their first home.” and your officials came back and said: “It will undermine housing affordability.” you would think that a Minister with half a brain would say: “Hang on that is exactly the opposite of what I want to achieve with this policy.” You would think so would you not?Phil Twyford: And who was the Minister?Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: And who was the Minister? It was Nick Smith was it not in or out of Cabinet. I would think that you would do that but you know I am an old-fashioned guy. But not this Government—it ploughed ahead.And when the officials it bears reference to say came to the select committee and we asked them: “Look guys is this actually going to be a big bang? What effect is this going to have in a positive way for homeownership?” etc. etc. they said: “We are tentatively positive about this bill.”I would propose that in the title clause maybe we should change the name of this bill to the “Nick Smith Tentatively Positive Bill” because when officials come up to you and say: “We’re tentatively positive.” they are not even enthusiastic. They are not even convinced in their own minds—and they are the experts not us politicians—that this will have any major impact at all. The best they can do after you just sort of draw the analysis out of them like razor wire is to say: “We are tentatively positive.” Is there anybody on that side—well maybe the Minister could say whether she shares the officials’ view and that she is tentatively positive about the impact or lack of it that it will have.This is a very mean-spirited bill. Mr Bennett should realise that this bill is not about the market; this bill is about the National Party in Government trying to portray itself as doing something—anything—after 7 years about a housing crisis that it does not admit is a housing crisis. When you unbundle the basic figures—and I hope that Mr Bennett might have taken a few notes down; he might be on the calculator as we speak trying to work it out—this bill does nothing actually. It does nothing for those people who are trying to get into their first home. It gives them $521 a week of their own money their own retirement savings which is wiped out in about 48 hours when you look at Auckland house prices going up by $1700 per week or by $90000 per year.I have got to say that if the National Government wants to carry on with the masquerade that is fine but you have got to understand that people out there in Struggle Street are not stupid Mr Bennett. They are not stupid. They can see through the wool and the smoke and they can actually add up because they do. They write their own budgets. They write their own budget every week with their housekeeping as they go out and try to keep their families and buy food and clothes and shelter and the various things that they need. They know how to budget possibly I would say—even though he is a market and economic expert—better than Mr Bennett does because they have to do it in order to survive. But I will bow to his superior intelligence and I will make a deal with him. If he can rebut those figures I am quite happy to yield to him now in the short time that I have left or I am sure that somebody else will because these figures are real.This is a mean-spirited bill—mean-spirited. As I said last night it is mutton dressed up as mutton and no speaker over there—and it is interesting that the Minister will not take any questions—has been able to knock those figures over.STUART NASH (Labour—Napier):As the Hon Clayton Cosgrove and Phil Twyford and a number of members have alluded to we are supporting the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill but I do have a couple of questions around this. If I may make a comment and I do not know whether I am allowed to or not this is my fourth year in this House and I have done a few Committee stages and every now and again members have relevant questions. I must admit that Peter Dunne who I think has been in this House probably longer than anyone—when it is one of his bills he sits in the chair and he listens intently. More often than not if there is a genuine question he stands up and he answers it. I thought that that was what the Committee stage was about but maybe I am a little old-fashioned. I am sure Mr Chair that when you were in the chair and this was a bill that you were passing through Parliament you would try to do the same.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! You are not allowed to bring me into the debate. Thank you.STUART NASH: Oh sorry. I meant a former Labour Cabinet Minister who is now the Chairman I suppose.There are a couple of clauses here. Clause 6 for example is “Schedule 1 amended (KiwiSaver scheme rules)”. All it does is it changes the words a little bit. It adds the term “under section 226” of the KiwiSaver Act 2006. I am not even too sure why that is in there because in clause 8(4)(a) of schedule 1 of the Act it talks about Crown contributions anyway. All section 226 does in the bill is define what Crown contributions are. So I am not too sure why that is relevant but anyway that is part of it.I suppose one of the things I would like to talk about to start with is clause 5B which inserts new section 239. This talks about “Protection from non-compliance:” and this is obviously with regard to the new amendments around the HomeStart policy put forward by this Government. This has added a whole new section on the end of the KiwiSaver Act 2006 after section 238 and this is a section at the end of the Act. There are a couple of things that I just think we need to be very careful about because what we have come through—not just the global financial crisis—and what we have seen is what I believe is a lot of unsavoury unethical or whatever behaviour that went on in our own market. We tend to talk about the global financial crisis as one of the great catastrophes in the modern economy here but we forget that it was actually a lot of the stuff that went on in the mezzanine finance sector that actually destroyed somewhere between—I have not heard an exact figure—$4 billion and $6 billion of savings out of Kiwis’ back pockets. So the global financial crisis might have led to that but in New Zealand the rules around mezzanine finance and prospectuses and investor statements I think we all would agree were quite lax to the point where people really did not know what was going on and they were misled.If you look at new section 239 as mentioned this is a new provision to the KiwiSaver Act. The slight concern I have is that it talks about “Non-compliance with an enactment related to securities is ignored if the non-compliance—(a) results from the enactment of section 6 …”. All section 6 does in the KiwiSaver Act is it outlines who is eligible for KiwiSaver: the definition of employee and employer whether you are a Kiwi and whether you count as an employer etc. etc. So there are no problems there. When we talk about non-compliance in new section 239 it is about how you are protected from non-compliance. We talked about this a little bit in the Finance and Expenditure Committee. In new section 239(b)(i) it says that non-compliance is ignored if it relates to “a prospectus that is registered under the Securities Act 1978 before 1 April 2015:”. So what I am reading this to mean and I could be wrong is that it does not have to be a prospectus or an investor statement or a product disclosure under the Financial Markets Conduct Act if it is lodged on or before April 2015. It is just a little bit confusing. Maybe I am reading this wrong but if I am reading it wrong then perhaps so are a lot of other people because I sat on the select committee. What we need to do is ensure that the people who are putting their money into KiwiSaver or the KiwiSaver providers are mitigating the risk enough so that people I suppose do not have to suffer the risk of incompetence or negligence. That is what I am trying to say I suppose and that was a long way of saying it. That is a major risk I think that we now do not have to face and I hope we never have to again.There are a couple of other things that I would like to talk about in this bill that cause a little bit of concern and a little bit of frustration to be honest. If we look at clauses 3 4 and 5 they are sort of remedial. For example clause 4 is “Section 4 amended (Interpretation)”. This is just an interpretation of salaries or wages. Mr Goff and Jan Logie have talked about veterans. It says here in clause 4(a) “in paragraph (a)(i) replace ‘(6)(b) to (bd)’…”. Well I did what I was instructed to. I went to the Income Tax Act to find out what “(6)(bd)” was and it says it has been repealed. So I had a look at the statute book which if the computer system goes down and the lights go out is supposed to be what we can go to and it is not in here. So I went online and it said in the online version that “(6)(bd)” has been repealed. I then wondered how this could be because it mentions this in this Act. So I went to the top of the Act online and it says that this Act might not incorporate some of the amendments that have gone through Parliament.How frustrating is that for a member who is trying to do a little bit of work to find out what the changes in legislation are actually going to mean—to find they are not even there. Maybe it has been repealed. I cannot imagine it has been put back in in another piece of legislation. But if it has then this is just a little bit sloppy. If “(6)(bd)” does not exist and I can show you the piece of legislation then why is it even in here? I found this a little bit frustrating and I suppose it goes back to a lot of what we have been talking about for a number of weeks now—that is I suppose the sloppiness of a lot of the legislation that we are now seeing in front of this House.I am going to jump around a little bit here. We can go to the title. All I am seeing in a lot of the legislation I am speaking on is amendments or if not amendments then it is legislation to tidy up sloppy legislation that has gone before under this Government. So the title of this could be the “Yet Again Tidying Up Sloppy Legislation Bill” especially around veterans’ affairs.Mr Goff did talk about veterans’ affairs but goodness me if I was a veteran and I had read this Act as it came out—was it in 2013 or 2012 Mr Goff?Hon Phil Goff: 2014.STUART NASH: It was 2014 and we are already amending it. I was on the Finance and Expenditure Committee and I said to the representative of the Defence Force who was at the committee: “Now are there many veterans who are going to be affected by this?” and she said: “Don’t worry. We’ll communicate with them. We know who they are and we’ll do this well.” I said: “Please be sure you do.” because the major concern I had about this was that I got the feeling that this part of the bill was sneaking in under the KiwiSaver HomeStart portions of this bill.This is part of the Government’s core policy. The Government knew that the Opposition parties would go hard on this which we have done. But then in there at the back of it is the stuff about veterans and it actually makes quite a bit of difference. If you have a look at section CF 1 in the Income Tax Act it talks about a veteran’s pension. So what it is actually doing now is inserting the phrases “a veteran’s pension” and “a retirement lump sum paid”. So what it is actually doing is it is taking a lump sum that is being paid to a veteran and now taxing it at a point—it is like giving something and then taking it back. So what this actually does is it means that veterans who have received these lump sums are now subject to taxation. Their Working for Families entitlements change. Their student loan—their requirement to pay these things back changes. And everything like an ACC lump-sum payment will change.The thing that I find a little bit ironic about this is we have just debated in this Chamber and we are debating this out in the public at the moment sending 143 troops away to wear the New Zealand badge and serve in Iraq. Yet what we seem to be doing with those whom we treasure the most with those whose battles line the walls of this Chamber is saying: “Sorry guys we got it wrong again. The money we gave you because you were incapacitated”—and this is in another part of the bill—“we are now actually going to take some back. Oh don’t worry about it. We got it wrong.” In fact worse still we are going to sneak it in under legislation.JAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany):Once again the Government side of the Chamber is completely surprised—actually no we should not be surprised; we are disappointed—at the Labour Opposition members’ approach to this particular bill the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill. Yes they are saying that they are supporting it but it appears from their contributions that they simply do not think that allowing New Zealanders to get together a deposit to be able to buy their own home is a good thing. That is what this bill is all about doing.They complain about the fact this bill makes some changes to the KiwiSaver legislation that is in place but they forget about the other changes that the Government is putting in place to allow more Kiwis more young first-home buyers to purchase properties.This is actually going to make a significant difference for people who wish to buy their first home because it will significantly increase—Stuart Nash: What clause of the KiwiSaver legislation?JAMI-LEE ROSS: Well we are debating the whole bill. You should keep up Mr Nash.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I have been keeping up thank you.JAMI-LEE ROSS: OK Mr Chair. I am hoping that Mr Nash can keep up because we are debating this whole bill.We are working hard to ensure that more Kiwis are able to access their own money in KiwiSaver. On top of that we are also doubling—doubling—the amount of grant that they are able to take up. The Labour Party members like to talk about housing in Auckland they like to talk about housing affordability around the country; if they really cared about housing affordability in New Zealand they would be embracing policies like this. To be able to purchase homes New Zealanders need to be able to have the ability to have a deposit. The changes that this Government is putting in place will vastly increase the ability of New Zealanders to access funds to put together a deposit. On top of that the policies we are putting in place to ensure that more homes are being developed in New Zealand particularly in Auckland will mean that supply is increased considerably and it will also mean that New Zealanders will have greater access to homes.The reason why I am talking rather widely about housing is that this has been the theme of the debate so far. If it is OK for Mr Twyford and if it is OK for Mr Nash and Mr Cosgrove to criticise the general housing policy of the Government then I am going to be responding.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! No you are not. I have been listening to the debate for the last half an hour both for the last part of the previous Chair’s time and for my time. There have been some clear signals to come back to the bill that have been applied to Opposition members and I think we have moved away from a general second reading robust debate to one that is on the details of the bill. I think the last two or three speakers have done that very well and I ask the member to give it a go.JAMI-LEE ROSS: I am more than happy to talk about the KiwiSaver changes that are being put in place through this bill because allowing New Zealanders to access their funds through the KiwiSaver provisions is important.When the Government looked at housing in New Zealand particularly in Auckland one of the main problems that New Zealanders have is the ability to put together a deposit and there are vast amounts of money in the KiwiSaver programme. On top of that there are grants that the Government has in place already through the KiwiSaver programme to ensure that people have a bit of a boost when it comes to the deposits.Hon Clayton Cosgrove: How much? Give us a number.JAMI-LEE ROSS: Well Mr Cosgrove it is going up from $5000 to $10000. We are actually doubling—we are doubling—the grant through the KiwiSaver scheme. A couple who are earning $50000 a year and who have been contributing to KiwiSaver for 5 years will be able to access around $35000 of their own funds through the KiwiSaver scheme. Add on top of that the $20000 combined they will be able to get through changes in this bill and other changes the Government is making and that is a deposit of about $55000 that a couple—lower to middle income New Zealanders—will be able to access.The Labour Party members think that is a gimmick. The Labour Party members think that will do nothing. But I challenge them to go out and talk to some real New Zealanders living in electorates like mine in Botany or in Hunua the electorate that Andrew Bayly represents and ask them whether they think that the changes that the Government is putting in place to allow those earning $50000 and who have been in KiwiSaver for 5 years to get a $55000 deposit are nothing.There will be 90000 New Zealanders who are expected to benefit from these changes over the next 5 years. There will be 90000 New Zealanders who will be able to access greater funds. There will be 90000 New Zealanders who will have a greater ability to afford a home and purchase a home in New Zealand. That is why we are supporting this bill.Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):I just want to pick up on the comments of the last speaker Jami-Lee Ross. What this bill does under clauses 3 to 6 is it allows a person to withdraw their tax credits. Those tax credits are about $10 a week—$10 a week under this bill in I think clause 4 or 5. So $10 a week goes to the prospective homebuyer and at the same time house prices in Auckland are going up by $1700 each week. So $1700 a week is the increase in house prices and this bill benevolently allows a person to use $10 a week of their own money to bridge that gap. The gap is not bridged; the gap gets wider and wider which is why today instead of 75 percent—or three-quarters—of Aucklanders owning their own homes it is 61 percent and falling. The fundamental problem with this bill is that it does not go far enough. The changes made in clauses 3 4 5 and 6 do not make a real difference to the dilemma that a person in Auckland wanting to buy their own home faces.Homeownership is dropping. It is becoming harder for people to buy their own home and this bill is far from helping people to do that. If we look at the Treasury commentary on this bill it says that the Government will end up undermining affordability for first-home buyers. That is what Cabinet was told by Treasury I say to Mr Ross. That is what Treasury told the Cabinet was going to be the result of the clauses that we are now debating. Will it make it easier as the member just claimed? No. According to the financial advisers of the Government it will make affordability harder for first-home buyers. It will undermine them and it will undermine them because when you put more money in and increase demand but you do not increase supply. All that happens is the prices go up and homeownership moves further and further from the grasp of the people who desperately want a home of their own.I want to come back to the other parts of this bill—from clause 8 on—that are addressed in the title of this bill where it says “Remedial Matters”. We are told that this part of the bill is the result of a colossal stuff-up that the Government has made in what it promised veterans in the Veterans’ Support Act. An hour ago I asked the Minister in the chair for answers on specific questions that this Committee is entitled to and the Minister has not yet taken a call despite the fact that notes have passed from officials to the Minister. I think this Committee is entitled to answers to these questions. Firstly why did the Government make the error that promised that the veterans would get the gross amount of the money paid to them when in fact they are going to get only the net amount? That cuts income expectations by one-third for some veterans. How could the Government have made a mistake of that dimension?Secondly when did the Government discover when that mistake was made and what did it do to communicate to the veterans and the organisation representing veterans the RSA that the mistake was made? When I spoke to the RSA this afternoon it did not even know that this bill was before the House. It did not know that this bill was before the House.Next question: having made that error how much money if any has been paid out wrongly under the Veterans’ Support Act which this bill seeks to correct and to how many veterans? Will this bill be retrospective? Will people be required to pay back money? I do not know the answers to that question. Minister you have access to advice that can give us those answers. Our veterans surely deserve first of all an explanation; secondly an apology from the Government for getting it so wrong; and thirdly some advice about whether if they have been paid more money than they will now be entitled to the money that they have been paid will be required to be paid back.They are simple questions the Minister knows the answers to those questions and I am asking the Minister to take the time in this Committee—which is why we have a Committee of the whole House stage—to answer the questions that members genuinely have about this. She knows that under the Veterans’ Support Act the payments were not to be taxable. Now we find under this legislation that the payments being made to them are going to be taxable. That makes a huge difference to the money actually received in the hands of the veterans. To add insult to injury this bill also takes away further from veterans in a couple of different ways. It reduces their Working for Families entitlements—it reduces their Working for Families entitlements. Why is it that this bill has been debated twice before in this House and no Minister has got up and told the House what the bill does and how veterans are affected to their detriment by having their entitlements—promised in the original legislation—taken away?I accept that that was a mistake by the Government. It does not make it any easier for the veteran who believed they were going to be paid at this level to find that now they may be getting a quarter or a third less. It does not make it easier for the veteran who loses his or her entitlement to their Working for Families entitlement. It does not make it easier for the veterans who now find that their obligations in regard to student fees and child support have gone up. The veterans under this remedial bill are being caught in a double whammy. The actual money they receive in the hand goes down from what the original Veterans’ Support Act gave them and their obligations to pay out money for a whole series of social obligations go up.So you would think that the Government would at least give the Committee the veterans and the RSA the courtesy of an explanation as to how this happened. You would think that there might just be an apology by the Government for making an error of this magnitude. You might think that we could get an explanation as to whether any money has been paid out to veterans—if so how much and to how many—and whether that money will be required to be paid back.I have not finished my speaking entitlement but I am going to sit down now to give the Minister the opportunity to answer those straightforward questions.ALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa):Thank you for the opportunity to take a brief call on the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill. This is not a silver bullet. This is not a silver bullet—Hon Clayton Cosgrove: It’s not a bullet at all.ALASTAIR SCOTT: —for the housing crisis which Mr Cosgrove is looking for. This is part of a multi-pronged approach by the Government that will continue to contribute to supporting first-home buyers. This policy this bill is alongside loan-to-value ratios which as you know first-home buyers are exempt from. If they buy their first home they are exempt from those ratios which is another good thing. The other good thing is the increase in supply of housing areas throughout the country. It is all contributing—Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Ten houses built. Ten houses built nationwide—that’s a sharp prong.ALASTAIR SCOTT: —to the supply side of the housing market. As Mr Cosgrove knows 23000 consents have been granted in the last 12 months. We know that it takes time.Coming back to the bill my point is that there is no silver bullet which the Opposition members are looking for. They instead look for a building programme which is an option but of course who is going to design the houses? Who is going to design the houses? Who is going to pay for the houses? Who is going to invest in the houses? I imagine that Mr Cosgrove’s idea would be to plan and build as many houses as he can along arterial routes which is a good idea. But who is going to raise the funds and invest in this project? Who is going to own the projects? Not the private sector. He would not dare list it on the stock exchange.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I did warn the member about a minute ago to actually start speaking to the bill rather than Opposition policies so I think it would be good if he could now.ALASTAIR SCOTT: Coming back to the bill it will assist first-home buyers along with our other policies. This is one of many things that will contribute to those who can least afford homes because young families want to get ahead and to get into their first homes. This will affect 90000 people on lower and middle incomes. This will allow people to have access to that $521—that $10 a week. It is all part of a contribution to something that will aid first-home buyers. It is pleasing to see that the Opposition parties are supporting it because it is a small contribution to a wider policy that will alleviate the housing price crisis which is particularly felt in Auckland. We know also that this project focuses on the demand side. This supports the demand side those who are most affected by the increased house prices and they are the first-home buyers.It is interesting that there are examples of projects in the private sector that are reacting to the policy already. I know there are projects where developers have set the prices of their new houses to suit this policy. It might be that a house is advertised at $449000 in Christchurch and that is because that is the limit the cap that this policy would apply. These developments are being advertised to attract first-home buyers because they have greater access to deposits which enables them to access mortgages which as we have heard are at historical lows. This all helps the first-home buyers—the families—to get into their first homes.Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. Can we please get an indication through you as the Chair from the Minister in the chair Nicky Wagner whether she will be answering the questions that have been genuinely put. The Committee of the whole House is the opportunity to ask questions to the Minister. They are genuine questions. They have been put several times.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I think the member is experienced and he does know that if a Minister intends to answer the questions it is pretty obvious because the Minister will take a call. I think one should assume that if a Minister does not take a call it is not their current intention to answer questions.PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū):I want to make some comments about the title clause of this bill. Although it is currently titled the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill it would I think be far more aptly named the “KiwiSaver (Look As If You’re Doing Something About the Housing Crisis) Bill”. It is very clear from the debate we have had over the last couple of hours that no initiative is too small or too incremental for this Government when it comes to putting up responses to the housing crisis.I was amazed to listen to the contribution by the member Jami-Lee Ross. If I recall correctly he referenced Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher in his maiden speech—Stuart Nash: And Ronald Reagan.PHIL TWYFORD: —and Ronald Reagan. It is rather sad that someone who has cast himself as a great economic liberal as an economic rationalist should come to the Committee speaking in favour of this bill. It lacks any kind of ambition in dealing with the housing crisis. Its main content is basically allowing the public—who are the victims of this Government’s failure to do anything meaningful about the housing crisis—to crack open their own retirement savings. Jami-Lee Ross its main contribution to the housing crisis is to throw subsidies to throw taxpayers’ money at a supply-constrained market.Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Mrs Thatcher wouldn’t like it.PHIL TWYFORD: Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman would not think that this was a very good bill Jami-Lee Ross. I just feel sad for you that your political career—but not for you Mr Chairman not for you. I feel sad for the member Jami-Lee Ross that his political self-respect has sunk so low that he stands up in this Chamber to speak enthusiastically in favour of a bill that basically consists of throwing public money at a housing crisis where demand already exceeds supply.All of the Government’s advisers—the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment Treasury and the Reserve Bank—have basically told the Government that this bill will do more harm than good. In fact the National Business Review reported it this way: “National’s flagship housing policy has been damned as counter productive by the Treasury.”I think that the title of this bill simply does not do justice to it. There are real similarities between this bill and the other big housing initiative that this Government announced which was to temporarily suspend anti-dumping duties and import tariffs from nails and varnish. Thank you Mr Chairperson; I will narrow the focus a little bit. So I want to propose that the title for this bill actually should be the “Mildly Benign Bill” because as one member of the Committee after another from this side has got up and basically said—Hon Phil Goff: Bury your head in the sand about the real problem.PHIL TWYFORD: Bury your head in the sand about the real problems of the housing crisis. One member after another has said on this side that we are actually going to vote for it because it is better than nothing but only just—but only just. It is testing our patience for the National Government to bring this bill to the House when its own advisers have said that at best it might be slightly benign but at worst it threatens to undermine housing affordability the very issue that Nick Smith the Minister for Building and Housing says he is trying to deal with.So there are some suggestions for amendments to the title. It could be the “Mildly Benign Bill”. It could be the “KiwiSaver (Look As If You’re Doing Something About the Housing Crisis) Bill”. Actually probably the best option of all would be to take a quote direct from the Prime Minister and call this bill the “There Is No Housing Crisis Bill” because it is that kind of denial and that kind of head in the sand mentality that this bill epitomises.JAN LOGIE (Green):I rise to take another short call in this bill just to specifically respond to the comments of the National Party member Jami-Lee Ross specifically where I think there was some comment about how vastly generous—Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Vastly—that’s the one.JAN LOGIE: The vastly—and I did really just want to specifically draw that member’s attention to the definition of vastly because I do think that maybe he does not understand what vastly means. A synonym for vastly is enormous and what this bill will do is enable people to access money that is already in their KiwiSaver account of up to around $521 a year which considering KiwiSaver has only been around since 2007 comes to a total of just over $5000 if you have been in it the whole way. So $5000 towards the 20 percent deposit for the average house price in Auckland at the moment with the deposit needing $120000—is $5000 vastly vastly helping people? I really just—[Interruption] Well 20 percent of over $650000.Hon Member: You don’t have to have 20 percent do you?JAN LOGIE: Ah you do not have to have the loan-to-value ratio for this! We would draw Government members’ attention to the 20 percent and people needing to get into the housing market and that being a major challenge and the Government bringing this measure in in response to people raising their concern about being able to get that deposit together. I think it is fair to reference the 20 percent and to say that this is a vast step forward really misrepresents what the word “vast” means. I would refer the member back to the dictionary.I would also like to in another sense of misrepresentation again reference “remedial matters” in the title and just say that I genuinely want to engage on clauses 8 to 11 in this bill around the impact for veterans of these changes. Because what I have been hearing in this debate—and not having sat through the select committee—from one of the members is that this could result in a one-third decrease in income for veterans. That is not something that I would want to be supporting and I would genuinely like to have that clarified because I think nobody in New Zealand would consider that a remedial matter which is how it is referenced in the title of this bill.So I really would ask the Minister in the chair Nicky Wagner to stand and speak and clarify the in-the-hand impact of the changes of clauses 8 to 11 and clarify whether there will be any veterans in the country who have been receiving a certain amount of money who will have that cut back after we pass this bill. I think it is our duty in this Committee if we are going to be part of a process to actually genuinely understand the impacts of it and the Government seems to have got away so far with passing these things off as remedial matters but it is now on the radar and we do want to know.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Clayton—the honourable Clayton Cosgrove.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour):That is the nicest thing Mr Mallard has said to me for a long time. I just want to deal with clause 6 and take up some of the very interesting contribution of the new member Mr Alastair Scott because he said a couple of very interesting things. Firstly he was the only member of the Government who got up and confirmed our numbers. He said that this will give—I wrote it down—“$10 a week”. So well done. He is the first honest one over there to actually front up on the Government’s policy be honest about it and say that it is 10 bucks a week—a tick in the box.Secondly and we are going for the gold star here he used the words “housing crisis”. He said that this will help to solve the “housing crisis”. I want to commend him again for his honesty and his forthrightness because he is the only member—the Minister will not use the words Mr Brownlee will not use the words Nick Smith will not use the words Nicky Wagner in the chair will not use the words no one will use the words “housing crisis” but we have had a breath of fresh air come in. We have had a National member a new member straight from the vineyard come into the Chamber straight up and down—I think credit is due and honour is due. He is a straight-up member. His constituents should be proud today because he has told the truth. He has said that this policy will give you 10 bucks a week—Mr Bennett would not admit that—and that “this will go some way to helping solve the housing crisis”.What a beautiful moment in this Chamber. This is one of those moments I think we should cherish in a bipartisan way to celebrate the fact that Mr Alastair Scott a new member—normally new members and I have done it when I was a new member trip over on various things in the House but this member in relation to speaking to clause 6 has put the acid right back on the Government. [Interruption] Well how it is relevant Mr Bennett is like this. Under clause 6—we will try again—as Mr Scott pointed out the $10 a week your Government gives will allow people to take $521-odd a year out of their KiwiSaver account to go towards a deposit on a house say in Auckland where the weekly increase is $1700.So I want to commend Mr Alastair Scott. We will be printing off the Hansard and sending it out to various people. I will stand up and I want to be the first on the record to thank him for his honesty—10 bucks a week. He also said though that—there is a slight misunderstanding here—loan-to-value ratios have helped and will help first-home buyers I need to explain to him. This is what he said in his contribution; I wrote it down. He said that loan-to-value ratios will help first-home buyers. I know that Mr Bennett does not like it. The sad thing is Mr Scott loan-to-value ratios mean you have got to come up with more dough for a decent deposit.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order!Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: But getting back to clause 6—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Yes. It is a very good rendition of Julius Caesar but I think what we might get back to now is the detail. Thank you.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: I have to say Julius Caesar had more hair than I have and he had laurel leaves and I do not possess those and neither am I an emperor.But on clause 6 Mr Scott has actually been honest with people. What he said in his contribution is that clause 6 provides the meanest of mean-spirited contributions for a first-home buyer: $10 a week. We were criticised for the “big cheese Budget”—remember that? I do not know. How much does a brick cost? A brick may cost what two or three bucks? So you might get three bricks a week for building your first home.Carmel Sepuloni: Jeez it’s gone up.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: I do not know. I am not sure how much a brick is worth and I say that word very carefully. I do not know how much it is worth but it is the meanest of mean—David Bennett: About the same as your brain.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: Oh well there you go. Poor old David Bennett. You have got to feel sorry for the bloke. Try hard as he does he cannot quite get it but this is actually important. This is actually important for David Bennett’s constituents in Hamilton on Struggle Street trying to get a first home. I am sure Mr Bennett will go out and say: “Alistair Scott has confirmed that we are a mean-spirited Government but you should be grateful to us anyway because we are going to give you $10 a week of your money to go towards house prices that in Auckland are increasing by $1700 a week.”So I just conclude by again thanking Mr Scott for his candour and for his honesty and I would just invite the Minister in the chair Nicky Wagner to either verify what Mr Scott has said or perhaps disagree with him if he is wrong. But I think that given he has agreed with the figures that we have put up I suggest he is right. I look forward to his further learned straightforward and honest contributions as we go through this debate.STUART NASH (Labour—Napier):This has been brought up before but not in the way that I think is important. We have talked about veterans pensions and what has happened to them and what is going to happen but what I would like to do is actually highlight the pieces of legislation that enforce this. I think it is a little bit disingenuous to be honest but if I may say just one thing it did make me smile Jami-Lee Ross’ conversation about the Government’s policy. He did not even know the piece of legislation that was giving force to that policy. It is new section 239 to be inserted in the KiwiSaver Act Mr Ross.What we have got here in clause 11 of the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill is an amendment to section RD 5 of the Income Tax Act. This is the definition of salary and wages. What clause 11 does in this bill is it amends section RD 5 in the Income Tax Act. What it actually does is it inserts—and I am going to read the words that it inserts—the definition of wages or salaries: “a retirement lump sum paid under Part 5 subpart 7 of the Veterans’ Support Act”. That was not in here. All it said about veterans was “a veteran’s pension”. It did not mention anything about a retirement lump sum. So before this piece of legislation came through—remember that the legislation governing this was passed only last year. If you go out in the hall to find the legislation to do some cross-referencing it is not even there. I suspect that what happened is that the RSA did a whole lot of work around this with its members and said: “If you have received a retirement lump sum then you are not subject to tax.” What this bill is doing less than 12 months after that piece of legislation was passed is saying to our veterans: “Sorry you’re wrong. You are going to have to pay tax on it.”I would like to go to clause 10. This talks about incapacity. I suppose this is where what happened is that the Government likes to draw the analogy of a veteran’s retirement lump sum compared with someone on ACC who has had an accident which I think is quite a long bow to draw in my view but this is what it has tried to do. Again in the Income Tax Act in section MA 7(3) it talks about incapacity. It is not a long section—it is three and a bit lines—but the Government has added a whole lot more into it: “The incapacity referred to in subsection (2)(b) and (d) is an incapacity due to personal injury by accident for which—(a) an accident compensation earnings-related payment has been is being or will be paid: (b) a payment that has been is being or will be paid under the Veterans’ Support Act 2014”.I am not suggesting that for our brave men and women who are heading across to represent us in the Middle East this is going to change their decision about whether they will go or not but what this is actually saying is that if they are injured in the course of their employment—i.e. in the army—then in the past they would have received a lump sum and it would have been exempt from tax and now it is taxed. These are often subject to inquiries. I do not know how much a soldier would get if he or she is injured but whatever it is it is now minus 30 percent. I am assuming that our soldiers are on the top tax rate. So clause 10 has inserted this provision into section MA 7(3) as well.If we go to clause 9 now it is about pensions. It talks about section CW 28 “Pensions” of the Income Tax Act. The heading for section CW 28 in the Income Tax Act is “Income from living allowances foreign superannuation compensation and government grants” and it talks about exempt income in the Act. It lists a whole lot of things that are exempt income and income is where you pay tax. What it did say is: “The following are exempt income: (a) a pension or allowance under the War Pensions Act 1954 … other than … a veteran’s pension”. So there was always a recognition that if you received a veterans pension then it was not exempt from tax. It is like your superannuation payment; you pay tax on that. You can argue about the rights and wrongs of that till we are blue in the face but that is not part of this bill. What the Government has done is that clause 9 has added into the section that it is excluding a veterans’ pension which was always there and “a retirement lump sum paid under Part 5 subpart 7 of that Act”. [Bell rung] Mr Chair—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Stuart Nash.STUART NASH: Good choice. So again what it is actually doing here is closing down any loophole where a war veteran who has been injured or is receiving a lump sum or for whatever reason—and I am not too sure what the reasons are because obviously the statute book has not even been printed yet—if a veteran received a lump sum then they now must pay tax on that.And then we go to clause 8. This references section CF 1 of the Income Tax Act and this is about benefits pensions compensation and Government grants. Again it talks about what defines income. We all have an idea of what defines income but remember this is not wages and salaries; this is pensions compensation and grants. It is things like listed in the Income Tax Act an accident compensation payment an education grant an income-tested benefit a living alone payment a New Zealand superannuation payment a parental leave payment under Part 7A of the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act 1987 and the veterans pension. Those are all the things that are counted as income under benefits pensions compensation Government grants and income tax. However what is now included under income under this bill is a retirement lump sum—nothing to do with injury or incapacity—“paid under Part 5 subpart 7 of the Veterans’ Support Act 2014”. So in effect what this bill does is if a veteran is to receive a lump sum for whatever reason whether they are retiring whether they are injured or whether as a result of an accident or anything like that they must now pay tax on it.Again we can argue about the merits of this but the thing that gets to me a little bit the thing that rankles with me actually is that the Veterans’ Support Act 2014 which is quite critical was passed less than a year ago. I would have thought that this is quite an important part of an Act whether a veteran is to pay tax. I would not mind Mr Bayly talking about this because he is a colonel in our Defence Force. I would not mind knowing what his views are because I have no doubt that some of the soldiers under that member’s command are going to come and say to him: “Goodness me! What is going on?”.But the interesting thing is that this provision is retrospective. This is retrospective. This goes back to December 2014. So there may well be soldiers veterans out there who have been given money—well not given money; they have earned it—they have been injured by accident or they have retired and they have banked that. They have paid off their Auckland mortgage they have given their grandkids money or whatever and the Government is now going to go back to them and say: “Sorry chaps we are now going to take 33 percent of that off you.” I do not think it is fair.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.STUART NASH: I am not going to take a long call on this because I have already spoken quite widely on it. But one thing I would like to know one thing that concerns me greatly—excuse me for being a little bit out of breath. I was just at the Speaker’s forum most interesting actually and I had to sprint in here when I heard the bells. But anyway—Hon Ruth Dyson: What was the Speaker’s forum on?STUART NASH: About pandemics actually. We have talked a lot Mr Chair and you would have been part of this conversation about the nature of the changes to veterans pensions and lump sums. One thing that we have not talked about and it was a point I was actually making before the bell is that actually this change is retrospective. It goes back to December 2014. We do not know whether there is actually a case like this but we absolutely need to know whether in fact there are war veterans who have been given a lump sum but due to the changes in clauses 8 9 10 and 11—clause 11 which amends section RD 5 of the Income Tax Act is to do with the change in the definition of salaries and wages and what it includes is a lump sum given to a war veteran. Clause 10 is to do with a lump sum given out due to incapacity—i.e. an accident to a veteran. Clause 9 is to do with the definition of a pension or a grant. And clause 8 is to do with the definition of again a benefit a pension compensation and a Government grant as opposed to income.Basically what this has done is it has amended the Income Tax Act which means that a lump sum given to a war veteran is now due for taxation whereas in the past in the Act that went through in 2014 which was only last year obviously that was not subject to taxation. One thing that we do not know and I think we really do need to know is how many veterans are going to be affected by this. The reason I say that is this is retrospective legislation because the clauses that are subject to change actually come into force according to clause 2 of this bill on 7 December 2014. I am making an assumption here and I could be wrong that the Veterans’ Support Act actually gained Royal assent on that date. So this is bringing it into line with that. If there are veterans out there who have received a lump sum and have used that money to pay off a mortgage give money to grandkids or have spent that money is the Government really going to go after these guys and get a third of that money back in tax? I find that very difficult to believe.The other thing which is slightly more insidious is what if a war veteran did receive such a lump sum and they can as the member Mr Bayly knows be quite large especially if you have received a lump sum from a war pension or something has gone wrong. But what if a war veteran has received a lump sum and heaven forbid he or she has died between 7 December and when this bill gains Royal assent—let us say it is a month away I’m not too sure when it is—is the Government really going to go after his widow for this? I just think that this is a little unfair.There are a lot of legislative tests around why you introduce retrospective legislation. We can argue about the fairness of whether a lump sum provided to a veteran should be taxed or not. That is an argument we have sort of been having here but the real-world argument is: if a veteran has been given a lump sum and they will be taxed on it due to this is that fair? I just do not think that is fair because we have set an expectation in the Veterans’ Support Act that it would not be taxed.I have no doubt that veterans advocates around the country have gone to RSAs have addressed veterans groups and actually probably—I was not here obviously—consulted widely on the veterans’ piece of legislation and also I have no doubt submitted to the select committee. Again I am unsure what select committee this piece of legislation went to. There was a whole lot of consultation—it is the Veterans’ Support Act 2014 I should get that right. But to miss this I cannot help but feel that there must have been a reason why the Government decided not to include these lump sums in the tax regime.The reason I say that is it is so blindingly obvious because on this side we argue that capital gains should be taxed for example. So the argument about whether income should be taxed is a philosophical argument that both sides of the House have from time to time. But in this case in a bill that was passed last year it was decided that a lump sum that was given to a veteran for whatever purpose be that injury be that accident be that misadventure or be that retirement was not going to be subject to income tax. It was not classed as a benefit. It was not classed as income. But now it is being classed as income and it is being done retrospectively. I just do not think that passes the fairness test for me. I would hate to think what will happen if we go after a veteran especially a veteran’s widow or widower and seek money back from these people once they have spent it or they have died or if we go into their bank account.Soldiers do not do this for the money. They do it for a whole lot of reasons: for adventure they love the country or the public service good. These often are not wealthy people. I would like Mr Bayly to stand up and address this. I am not playing politics around this because he is a colonel or a lieutenant colonel in the reservists so he has a strong association with the military forces and I would like to know how he thinks this will play out. Thank you.ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua):I just want to dwell a little bit on the issue of the veterans which Mr Nash has been talking about for some time. The real essence of this bill is about introducing changes to the Income Tax Act and the KiwiSaver Act to deal with some discrepancies around how the taxation of the income replacement payments to New Zealand veterans is made. Essentially it is about tidying up some of the components of that and the proposed amendments will make it quite clear that the veteran income replacement payments are treated in the same way as ACC payments are made or interpreted for the purposes of tax social policy and KiwiSaver. So they are quite minor in terms of their actual drafting but they are just important little components to try to tidy up those aspects.What I would really like to turn my mind to is the whole issue about the rest of this bill which is of course about helping the 90000 lower and middle income New Zealanders acquire their first homes. Of course it is a package of measures. There is the $35000 that is available for people who contribute to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund for a period of 5 years. That together with the KiwiSaver grant of $20000 means there is potentially a $55000 deposit available that people can join with their own savings to meet the minimum requirement for acquiring their new homes.One of the things I have heard quite a lot from the Opposition is about the lack of supply. I spoke about this briefly last night and if I could just have a moment on this. There are 100 special housing zones across the country. There are 80 in Auckland. I have two of them in my electorate in Hunua. The big one which I think is actually the biggest in the country is the Wesley property development which will contribute between 4000 and 4500 homes and another one just down the road about 2 kilometres will deliver another 700 homes. The Opposition has continually claimed that houses are not being built and factually that is totally incorrect. I was very disappointed to hear some of the earlier speakers tonight talk about this. I would just invite them to fly to Auckland hire a car and drive out to my electorate. If they stopped at the first place Mission Heights which is the area coming down to Flat Bush there are 1300 homes there. Every day a house is being completed there. If you carried on over the hill—probably another 15-minute drive—you would get to Maraetai and Beachlands. The population there at the moment is 8800 and it will increase to 17500 by 2021. There are just vast areas where the diggers the loaders and the bulldozers have been in clearing sites. Those sections are available for sale and there is an avalanche of new sections coming on for sale. It is the same in Clevedon another good part of my electorate—there are 700 homes. If you go to Pukekohe East there are a potential 10000 sections.So this claim from the Opposition that new houses are not being built and new sections are not becoming available is just not right. In fact the problem for my electorate is that we are going to have the equivalent of a new Hamilton in our electorate over the next 30-odd years and I have a council that does not actually have a lot of money to be able to support that infrastructure.Labour members particularly seem to be myopically focused on the Government building new homes. I just want to talk about this for a second. Just in terms of the total new builds in New Zealand the Government actually accounts for only 1 percent of all the new home builds—1 percent. The top 20 house builders in New Zealand actually account for 25 percent. The vast majority of new houses in New Zealand are built by one two or three-person building firms. That is why we need to create the environment to ensure that they can build houses and when the Opposition continually talks about creating new houses—they are the people who are going to deliver it: those one two or three-person businesses.In terms of homeownership at the Finance and Expenditure Committee we were briefed by the Reserve Bank Governor on this issue. The long-term 10-year average for first-home buyers is approximately 19 percent of all homes purchased in New Zealand. Even after the loan-to-value ratio changes that is still at 17 percent—i.e. within the statistical margin of error.CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I am happy to take a brief call on this bill slightly sooner than I had anticipated but I am very happy to speak on the matter. Before I get into the specific provisions of the bill I want to pick up on a comment that the member who just resumed his seat Andrew Bayly made. He argued that the Government accounts for around 1 percent—around 1 percent—of new home builds in New Zealand. The point I would make to him is that housing in New Zealand has been at its most affordable when the Government has been an active partner in the house construction business. In fact in my electorate there are literally thousands of houses that were built as State houses that are now privately owned. Those people were able to buy those houses because the Government was a partner in that process and was actively engaged in making sure there was sufficient supply to meet the demand. So there is real merit in a more active stance from the Government.This bill in particular allows KiwiSaver members to withdraw the tax credit component of their KiwiSaver savings in order to purchase a first home. Previously they were only ever able to withdraw their own contributions and their employer contributions. This bill now allows them to withdraw the Government tax credit contributions as well so that they can get on to the property ladder in the form of a deposit contributed to from their KiwiSaver savings.In principle I can see the merit in that—in fact it was a Labour Government that introduced the KiwiSaver scheme—but I do have some anxiety. One of the reasons we introduced KiwiSaver in the first place is that New Zealand has a woefully bad track record when it comes to saving for our retirement. We have reached the point where people saving for their retirement can dip into that money prematurely just to get a foot on the property ladder. In fact not just necessarily to dip into it but potentially to clean it all out. This provision means that you effectively could end up cleaning out your KiwiSaver account your only retirement savings just in order to get on to the property ladder. Actually we want to have a situation in New Zealand where Kiwis can do both—where Kiwis can save for their retirement but also build up an asset in the form of their family home. So although I agree in principle with what this particular change is designed to achieve which is to give people who are really struggling to get on to the property ladder the opportunity to do so I have some anxiety that it is not going to lead to a sustainable rate of savings when it comes to their retirement.I think a lot of New Zealanders my age would not even think that far ahead. They are not thinking that far ahead because there are just too many other financial hurdles to get across at the moment. Buying a first home is one. Paying off their student loan is another—Stuart Nash: Getting married.CHRIS HIPKINS: Getting married is getting more and more expensive. That is not a particular burden that I have yet had to meet but there is always hope! I do believe that it is important that all New Zealanders start to think early on about their retirement savings.The final point I want to make in this very brief contribution on this legislation is just a general point around the nature of retrospective legislation and any provisions that have any kind of retrospectivity. There are really good reasons why we in this House do not do that and I am always very disappointed when any legislation has such provisions.So with that Mr Chair I thank you for the opportunity to contribute briefly to this debate. I had that one point I wanted to make because I think it is important.Hon Christopher Finlayson: And you’ve done it very well.CHRIS HIPKINS: I have done it very well. Oh look! Mr Finlayson is getting very very impatient over there. It is really important that we save for our retirement. Although I can understand the desire of people to get a foot on the property ladder they do need to be thinking longer term as well.STUART NASH (Labour—Napier):There are just a couple of things I want to say. I want to talk about the title clause and the commencement clause. We have done the serious stuff. But do you know what? I think we should call this bill the “Commando Bill”. The reason I say we should call this the “Commando Bill” is that this is slipping something under the cover of night to screw soldiers. That is why I think it should be called the “Commando Bill”.The most disappointing thing is that Mr Andrew Bayly—or I should say Colonel Bayly; he was actually a colonel in the army—has stood up and said not to worry that this measure is only small and inconsequential. Well I pity that bloke if he has to turn up on the parade ground or worse at the RSA in a couple of weeks and explain to the veterans that this is only minor. This is not minor.I think we could also call this the “All Show No Style Bill” and the reason I say that is that everyone wants to do something to improve the housing market. Everyone wants to do something to allow young people to buy their homes yet this is what this Government has come up with. After 7 years this is the best it can do. The officials told us that this bill may help 200 or 300 people. That is fantastic for 200 or 300 people but it is not the 90000 young people whom the Government keeps crowing on about. In fact the officials took such a lackadaisical approach to this that they said they had not even modelled it and I do not blame them. I think they did what we did—they had a look at it they read it and they thought: “Oh my God! This is one of those election promises we are just going to have to do because the Government wants to do it.”Labour is voting for the bill and the reason we are voting for it is that the officials actually said—and these are their words not mine: “Well it does no harm to anyone.” So we are now passing legislation because it does no harm. Well I would suspect that that is not a great reason to pass legislation.Jenny Salesa: We have better things to do—yes we have.STUART NASH: You are right. We have much better things to do than pass pieces of legislation because they do no harm. I would have thought that the Government would have a legislative agenda like it had under the busy Minister Simon Power when we had substantial pieces of legislation on the Order Paper.Carmel Sepuloni: It’s gone downhill since he left.STUART NASH: It has gone downhill. We had substantial pieces of legislation that actually made a real difference to good hard-working Kiwis—not just good hard-working Kiwis but good hard-working young Kiwis who still hold that dream of homeownership and still believe it is possible.If they live in the regions they have got to have a 20 percent deposit. This provision is not going to give them a 20 percent deposit. The Hon Nick Smith stood up here and said: “Well if you do this and this if you’re going away from home and you’ve got this amount of money you may end up with $50000. And if you do that and you get a 10 percent deposit under this sort of scenario”—there might be five people in the country who qualify for this—“you can get a $450000 loan.”But to service a $450000 loan—to come under that sort of covenant—you need to have a household income of about $175000. There are not that many young people apart from maybe our senior whip who actually have a household income of $175000. As Mr Hipkins said they are worrying about how they are going to put food on the table how they are going to pay the bill to fix the car and what they are going to do with their children let alone whether they can service a debt of $450000.So this is really tinkering around the edges. In fact that is not a bad name as well—the “Tinkering Around the Edges While Rome Burns Bill”. That is not a great metaphor because we do not want to see anyone burning but I will tell you what—a lot of a people are suffering. The thing that really distresses me is that I wonder whether my four children are ever going to be able to afford a home. I wonder what it is going to be like in 30 years. There is one way that they will be able to and that is if there is a Labour Government in 2017 and it starts dealing with the issues that are important to New Zealanders.The one thing that this whole debate has really sort of honed for me—it has solidified and cemented my views around this—is that that party believes that the market has the absolute solutions. This party believes that the Government has a role to play in actually helping good hard-working Kiwis. I would argue if you look at the Auckland housing market that the market has failed good hard-working Kiwis who only want to own a home have a beer at the end of the day get on with life and not have these massive money problems. Of course the thing is that if they are not paying off their mortgage they are paying off someone else’s mortgage through rent and they just cannot get on that property ladder. Mind you having said that there are going to be a whole lot of developers by the sound of things with a whole lot of houses that they have just bought off the Government. Thank you very much.RON MARK (NZ First):I have to say that I was sitting in my office trying to get some other work done reading for a select committee tomorrow and could not help but hear the previous speeches from the National side speaking specifically around the impact on veterans. As you know I am a returned serviceman myself. I do not know whether there is one in the Government ranks over there. There might be one. [Interruption] Well Mr Bennett. There is Mr Bennett the man who is due to become an ex - member of Parliament we know after the next election. He is the man who spends more time in San Francisco than he does in New Zealand but we will not go into that will we Mr Bennett? So he wants to chip in.When we start to talk about defence force personnel Mr Bennett has always got a mouth on him the size of that door over there. He has always got things to say. The truth is that Mr Bennett is the type of person who talks about sending people overseas but would never himself volunteer to do that work because he—well he lacks the fortitude required. But I would say that—David Bennett: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I do not need any help. I can anticipate what the point of order is. Mr Mark has been here long enough to know that making those sorts of comments is unparliamentary in respect of questioning somebody’s fortitude. Withdraw and apologise.RON MARK: Thank you and I—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Order! The member will withdraw and apologise.RON MARK: Oh I am sorry Mr Bennett—I withdraw wholeheartedly.David Bennett: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. When you withdraw and apologise you are supposed to do that—just say “I withdraw and apologise.” not make any other comment like that.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Because the member has taken issue I ask the member to withdraw and apologise without further statement.RON MARK: I withdraw and apologise.Darroch Ball: Without further statement.RON MARK: Without further statement. As you know Mr Chair having been in this Chamber—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Order! The member is now trifling with a good-natured Chairman. He can continue with his call and try to do so with some grace.RON MARK: Thank you Mr Chairman—Jono Naylor: Let’s talk about the bill Ron.RON MARK: There you go. I do know that the rule of this House is that every time someone has some interjection to make there is a right of reply on that interjection. The House has always understood that if you dish it out you should expect to wear it straight back Jono.So I am going to say—and clearly the Opposition is pricking the conscience of this Government having deployed men and women to Iraq. Clearly on the one hand while we get some guts join the right side and send servicemen overseas on the other hand behind the backs of the very men—that the member who is based in Palmerston North has just agreed to deploy over there; behind the backs of every person in Linton—we have this clause veterans’ support.I want the Minister in the chair Paul Goldsmith to stand and explain clearly to the Committee and to answer the questions from the Opposition: does this adversely affect veterans? Will this mean that they will lose money? Will this mean that retrospectively those veterans who had a lump sum will now be required to pay it back?It is important that the Minister does not take this lightly and that he stands because Hansard as you know Mr Chair is the record by which determinations may be better understood. Tonight it is very important that we clarify this point right now on the record of the House that the Committee receives a clear unequivocal statement from the Government that this clause will not—not—disadvantage those service personnel who will return from Iraq and become veterans and in time seek the sort of assistance that this legislation allows them to seek. Will shifting this legislation—will this clause 2 disadvantage veterans? Will it retrospectively mean that some people or their widows as was raised by a member earlier on have to repay money that they have received? Please just clarify this.New Zealand First’s position is that we support the intent of this bill and we support the bill going forward but now we have a serious issue here as far as I am concerned. I find it very difficult myself as a returned serviceman and I am really sincerely sure that there are members in the National Party ranks who would not want to think that their vote is going to disadvantage those personnel whom they have sent to Iraq as well. I actually would like to think that Mr Bennett would like to hear the answer from the Minister. Right now it needs to be clarified so I am going to sit down now and I will take another call if I do not hear an answer because I really think that this issue needs to be clarified in the Hansard tonight.Clause 1 agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 60 in the name of the Hon Todd McClay to clause 2 be agreed to.Amendment agreed to.Clause 2 as amended agreed to.Clause 3 agreed to.Clause 4 agreed to.Clause 5 agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 60 in the name of the Hon Todd McClay to insert new clause 5BA be agreed to.New clause 5BA agreed to.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 60 in the name of the Hon Todd McClay to clause 5B be agreed to.Amendments agreed to.Clause 5B as amended agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 60 in the name of the Hon Todd McClay to clause 6 be agreed to.Amendment agreed to.Clause 6 as amended agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 60 in the name of the Hon Todd McClay to insert new clause 6B be agreed to.New clause 6B agreed to.Clause 7 agreed to.Clause 8 agreed to.Clause 9 agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 60 in the name of the Hon Todd McClay to clause 10 be agreed to.Amendment agreed to.Clause 10 as amended agreed to.Clause 11 agreed to.Bill to be reported with amendment presently.Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3)In CommitteePAUL FOSTER-BELL (National):I seek leave for the debate in the Committee stage of the Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3) to be taken as one question with each part to be voted on separately.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There appears to be none.Parts 1 and 2 new schedule and clauses 1 to 3JACINDA ARDERN (Labour):It is my pleasure to speak on the Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3). Labour is supporting this bill which I would describe as essentially a kind of omnibus bill—and had it actually not had quite so many retrospective changes made to it which are necessary because there have obviously been drafting issues it may potentially have qualified as a statutes amendment bill. But there are a number of changes that we are making in this bill some of which I do think actually point to some wider issues within the Social Security Act and which I think deserve robust debate.I want to start by speaking to the Short-Form Departmental Disclosure Statement prepared obviously by the Ministry of Social Development to clarify whether or not any of the changes in this bill have any impact retrospectively on the freedoms rights or obligations of a department or an individual. Of course Parliament has an interest if we are doing anything in this place that retrospectively takes away an individual’s rights freedoms or entitlements. What this departmental report demonstrates is that obviously this bill is correcting a number of errors because most frequently you see retrospective legislation when we are amending policy intent to fit with what the Government wanted to do but did not quite draft correctly.When we look at that departmental report we can see for instance that clause 5A clarifies that new section 79 applies only to a person who with regard to a period of overseas employment had tax deducted or withheld under New Zealand’s PAYE rules. Clause 5A is coming into effect retrospectively. Clause 6A amends schedule 6 of the Social Security Act and clarifies that “the $20 personal earnings exemption only applies to beneficiaries granted Supported Living Payment”—a very recent amendment obviously to the Social Security Act—“due to total blindness or permanent and severe restriction in capacity for work …”. And that again is also coming in retrospectively—obviously clear drafting errors. We come then to clause 6B. It amends schedule 18 of the Social Security Act to “reinstate the income threshold for non-beneficiary sole parents receiving Accommodation Supplement …”. That comes into effect retrospectively. The report goes on. There are a few other errors. But you take my point that these are obviously the things that the Government intended to do in the original drafting but did not.One of the other things that the disclosure statement states is that the provisions do not result in the retrospective creation of a criminal offence. Obviously there is the chance here that someone who may not have been entitled to something within the Social Security Act may have been because this legislation was not drafted correctly—and the Government has been very explicit obviously to point out here that the provisions do not result in a criminal offence. Why would you need to point that out? Well probably because there has been a tendency in the way this Government has treated the Social Security Act since it came into Government to be quick to criminalise—very quick to criminalise. In fact some might argue that it is quicker to criminalise under this Act than it would be under tax fraud or any other form of what could be considered theft under tax law. We have only ever argued that the Government treat those two groups equitably and it is a point I just wanted to make.The piece that I wanted to speak to specifically though in my first contribution relates to Part 1 of the bill. Overall the bill is basically trying to ensure that people—as it itself proclaims—in similar circumstances are treated equitably. I would argue though that the amendment we are making in Part 1 does not necessarily fit with that purpose. Clause 4 in Part 1 relates to the accommodation supplement. Section 61EA(4) is amended by inserting the following new paragraph. New paragraph (ab) states: “would be eligible to receive a basic grant or an independent circumstances grant under the Student Allowances Regulations 1998 if he or she were to apply for the grant;”. In and of itself that does not sound like it is saying much particularly. What that amendment does basically is say that a young person—presumably a young person—or any person who has applied for the accommodation supplement through the student accommodation support system is not then eligible to go through Work and Income to apply for an accommodation supplement. The reason that is important is that those two things are set at quite different rates.What the bill is trying to amend is the fact that it therefore implies that if you are a student and you have not applied for accommodation support as a student then you could go to Work and Income and make an application for the accommodation supplement just because you have not made any other application. I think what the Government’s intention here is is that basically if you are eligible for accommodation support as a student regardless of whether you have applied or not you are not eligible to then go to Work and Income at all. That is obviously meaningful from the Government’s perspective—because of course why would you seek to access accommodation support under Work and Income? Because actually it is attached much more closely to the actual cost of accommodation. It looks at where you might be based it takes into account that costs are higher for instance in Auckland and it does not have the same caps as accommodation support as a student.One might then ask the question: would a better way to deal with this not be simply to bring the two accommodation support entitlements into alignment? It is a very fair question and something that obviously rang true with the Government for one particular set of beneficiaries—and that is those who are on sole-parent support. We had the ridiculous situation after the welfare reforms where those who are on sole-parent support—they might have had a child who was aged say 5—and who might have been studying might have been told by Work and Income: “Well you’ve now got to seek part-time work.” And the parent might have been in nurse training for instance—and this is a genuine case I had. Work and Income then because its focus was on ensuring that person was seeking work in a part-time capacity told that sole parent when a dishwashing job came up even though it clashed with that individual’s study to quit their study and be a dishwasher.Anyone in this House I am sure would say that that is a ridiculous set of circumstances. Why would you have someone remove themselves from study which means that in the longer term they will withdraw from their need to access Government support in order to go and take a part-time job as a dishwasher where they will need their income supplemented? It is a very good question. Well the reason she was on sole-parent support was that the accommodation supplement was more generous. If as a student she had transferred her payment as a sole parent would stay the same but her accommodation support would change because students do not get the same accommodation support. That meant that she was basically in a rut where she ended up being faced with the position of quitting her nursing in order to fulfil the obligations for Work and Income.Thankfully the Government saw that this was a crazy situation and brought more equity into the systems for accommodation support so that you could get a sole parent transferring over to the student scheme—which also means thankfully that you bring down your benefit statistics which is obviously one of the goals that the Government had. It has done that for one group but it has not done it for anyone else. That is what raises questions and I have serious questions about this amendment. If we are saying that actually for sole parents it made sense to create equity between accommodation support and accommodation supplement why can it not be the same for say a job seeker? What is the difference between a job seeker who is given a 16-week training course by Work and Income and a job seeker who actually goes into full-time training and transfers over to student support but is not eligible for that same level of accommodation support? I think it is a really relevant question and it is one that I think the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations is right to raise. Why is it that we are using two different schemes to assess the kind of support that someone is eligible for?I would really seek a view—and thankfully and actually helpfully it is the Minister for Social Development the Hon Anne Tolley who is in the chair. Minister I really would welcome hearing from you about the policy rationale for that differentiation because in the departmental report on this the ministry actually really remains pretty silent on why we can have these differentiated schemes and I would be interested to hear from her on that.POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East):Thank you Mr Chair—a good choice.Hon Members: Ha ha!POTO WILLIAMS: Yes great—thank you. I rise to take a call on the Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3)—an innocuous name for a bill that does as my colleague Jacinda Ardern suggests tidy up a few bits and pieces that are probably related to drafting errors that were made when the original legislation was drawn up.I want to make a couple of comments in this call. My first comment I guess relates to how long it has taken for this piece of work to come before the House and to reach this stage. I understand that it has taken about 4 years. If this bill were a 4-year-old child under the reforms of the welfare system this child would probably have been in day care for the past 3 years. So it is interesting that it has taken this long to get this piece of work before the House. And I wonder why now. Why is this piece of legislation before the Committee now? I would suggest that it is because the Government is kind of running out of ideas on what to do next. I would suggest that this Government actually lacks any vision inspiration or aspiration for our people so it is casting around through its work programmes for bits of work to do. So this 4-year-old child has come to the House to finally have those drafting errors corrected.I just want to make a comment about some of the specific cases or scenarios that this bill will affect. One of the issues that was raised by submitters and by people working on this legislation was about ensuring that our students get the kind of support that was designed for them and their circumstances. What I mean by that is around the student allowance and as my colleague has already pointed out the scenario that has been suggested is that students will forgo their student allowance and will opt for the accommodation supplement because it may give them a little extra. We all know about students. I am sure that those of you with young people in your homes know that students are very canny at finding ways to maximise their advantage. I would suggest that that is a little cynical and that this bill is a little cynical in this regard.It also speaks to student allowances and to how we support our young people at university technical institutes and the like and to whether we are actually doing enough in that regard to support them. I would suggest that you are right Ms Sepuloni. I do not believe that we are. So perhaps another option rather than trying to align these two pieces of legislation may be to actually look at how we support our students better.In this particular call and I hope to take more later this evening I also want to talk about the ACC programmes that are leading us to look at equal treatment—at aligning some equity between those people who receive ACC payments through the normal ACC programme and those whose ACC payments come through an employer-accredited programme. The employer-accredited programmes came out of a piece of work that happened in I think the mid-1990s from memory when private ACC programmes could be developed by employers and it has taken an awfully long time for the realisation that when employees access their ACC payments they may actually receive more under the ACC-accredited programmes delivered by their employer. There are some major employers still employing those programmes. [Bell rung] There are employers who employ up to—[Interruption] Sorry Mr Chair.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I call Poto Williams.POTO WILLIAMS: Thank you. Yes I did call but—Hon Member: Quietly.POTO WILLIAMS: Yes it was quietly. I will try to be louder next time. There are some large employers who still continue with those ACC-accredited programmes and it could work out to be quite significant for them that we have finally realised that there is a level of inequity in those payments to employees.I also want to comment—if you will just bear with me Mr Chairman; I will just have a look at my notes—specifically with regard to clauses 5 and 6. I am just taking some reference from the regulatory impact statement—I refer back to that inequitable treatment. ACC-accredited programmes were really designed to encourage employers to take responsibility for their employees but if we look at the broader issue around ACC there have obviously been some comments in this Chamber in recent weeks on the ACC levies that are currently being charged to employers on the impact of the overtaxing of employers by ACC and on the use of those funds to bolster what it has actually become quite apparent is a bit of a sham really in the Government’s surplus. It has actually all been around the overcharging of employers for their ACC levies and I think it is about time that the Government recognised this and spoke to employers about why it is continuing to do this. Employers are now actually starting to realise that the Government should not be doing this and should be reducing levies to employees.Back to the regulatory impact statement: this legislation will actually look to make some changes retrospectively and if we do not change this legislation retrospectively there will be some windfall gains of additional benefit payments to those people whose employers have agreed to manage their own ACC compensation. But it has taken 4 years as I have said to get to this point. Four years is a significant cost to those employers. Will we look at how we may compensate those employers for this? I do not think that this is something we are looking at but it certainly is a case to be held up for them.In summing up in this particular call there are two major scenarios that are playing out in this amendment bill. It would be good to hear from the Minister—firstly as to why it has taken so long to get this bill to the House to ensure that these drafting errors are taken care of. While the Minister is in the chair I would welcome hearing the answers to the questions that my colleague Ms Ardern put to her too. Thank you.DARROCH BALL (NZ First):It is a pleasure to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak in the Committee stage of the Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3). May I say first that we will not be supporting this bill not because of what is in the entire bill but because of one specific clause. We understand that the intent of the bill in so far as what the Minister Anne Tolley has explained is that it is the tightening up of loopholes. But what we are concerned with is the ramifications of tightening up those loopholes—what effects they have on certain members of the public. At this stage what we see from the Government is that those ramifications have not been taken into account.The specific clause that I am talking about is in Part 1 clauses 4(1) and 4(2) which have to do with accommodation supplement issues and student allowances. In the explanatory note of the bill it tries to explain what the purpose of clause 4 is: “The Bill also amends the Social Security Act 1964 to clarify the provisions that exclude students who are eligible for assistance under the Student Allowances Regulations 1998 from receiving the accommodation supplement. The amendment makes it clear that students are not eligible for the accommodation supplement if they could receive assistance under the Student Allowances Regulations 1998 but choose not to apply for it or if they could receive this assistance but for their own income or the income of their parents spouse or partner.”So at the moment what is happening and the loophole that the Government is trying to fix is that students get a certain amount when they get the student allowance but if they choose not to get the student allowance they will receive more if they went for the accommodation supplement. So what the Government is trying to do is close that loophole so that even if the student was not taking the student allowance but was eligible they could not take the accommodation supplement. To be able to put that into some sort of context I would like to refer to the departmental report and look at the specific submissions.The first thing I would like to say is that there were only two written submissions for this bill and that begs the question. Looking at the submission period when those submissions were allowed it was only approximately 2 weeks. That seems like a very fast turn-round for submissions to be heard. The two submissions were from the Dunedin Community Law Centre and the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations. Both of those submissions funnily enough were on that clause itself and they were against the changes. Their reasoning behind that was because of the ramifications down the track for the students and the concerns that they had for that and that is the exact same position that New Zealand First is taking with this clause.With the submissions and reading from the departmental report both the centre and the union expressed concern about the adequacy of accommodation assistance provided to students through the student support system. That is the issue that they are facing and the closing of this loophole has consequences. The centre actually suggests that “thought should be given as to why students seek to access Accommodation Supplement and whether or not the accommodation component of the Student Allowance meets the basic needs of students.” What is interesting is the Ministry of Social Development comment over the page. It states that “The level or adequacy of assistance provided within the student support system is outside the scope of the bill.” What it looks like from New Zealand First’s perspective is that that is being used as an excuse to ignore that issue.So what we have here in the Chamber are the lawmakers and this legislation but outside where we hear these submissions in the select committee stage are the people who are affected by this legislation and by the law that we change in here. What is concerning for New Zealand First is that—Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development):I thank the members for the comments that they have made particularly around the accommodation supplement and the changes that we are making on that. I want to take just a short call and perhaps explain as requested the policy behind it. I think it is very important that we understand there is actually a major difference between the support that we give to students in tertiary education and the support that we give through the accommodation supplement to largely low and middle income people mainly families.New Zealand actually has a very generous support system for students. We did not always have that but now I would think about 74 percent of the fees are funded by the taxpayer and that is right and proper. We know as a nation that it is critical to our development that we have highly educated skilled people living in New Zealand and it is of benefit to the whole community. There is also an individual benefit from tertiary education. There is plenty of research that backs that up and shows the advantages that someone who has been through tertiary education can earn over their lifetime.What you are doing by providing support to students is creating a shared form of assistance. It is shared between the taxpayers in the country the individual students and their families. So the policy intent is quite clear that that is a different level of assistance from that given to those whom the Government supports through the accommodation supplement who are getting no other form of Government support and who may not be getting any other type of Government support and recognising that they have needs. Of course we had a debate in this Chamber earlier about housing. People in the country do actually need help from the community to help them with those housing needs.That is the policy behind why we have two different types of support and what we are doing in the Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3) is saying that actually we have got some very smart students out there who have worked this out and they are coming off the student allowance in order to be eligible for the accommodation allowance. They quite rightly under the policy guidelines should be receiving their support as a student rather than through the accommodation allowance. The question that that member from New Zealand First raised about the adequacy then of the support that we give to students is completely beyond the scope of this bill. It is a completely different debate and that is a right and proper debate to have at that time. I have been a Minister for Tertiary Education and students never think they get enough support. And that is right. That is their ability to argue that but as I say the taxpayer does support them very generously because it is recognised that—Carmel Sepuloni: And then they go on to be taxpayers.Hon ANNE TOLLEY: That is right. They go on to be taxpayers. There is a community benefit and that is why we do it. But there is a very distinct policy difference between the support for the two different groups.CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):Can I thank the Minister for Social Development for that clarification. She made it very clear in her comments that there is a difference in Government support between what we give to students and what we give to predominantly low and middle income people through the form of the accommodation supplement. I want to make it clear that that is the issue because the changes that are being made here potentially discourage people from studying. I disagree with the Minister’s statement that in fact student support is more generous than what someone would be getting if they were in some other form of State assistance. In fact they would probably be getting more if they were on jobseeker support than if they were on a student allowance. I have not got the figures exactly to hand but I am absolutely confident in saying that jobseeker support is probably worth more dollars in the hand per week than a student allowance is.So we actually financially penalise people who are doing the very things that the Minister talked about that have a value to New Zealand long term because they do result in their being more employable earning higher incomes and therefore paying more tax. And by making this particular change—potentially reducing the level of accommodation support to a student or a prospective student—what we are saying to them is that they would be better off to stay on a benefit. That is not what we should be doing. We should actually be encouraging people to get into tertiary education and tertiary study.But it is abundantly clear that this is one of a package of measures and they are all interconnected that are designed to do what Steven Joyce referred to as “dampening demand” for tertiary education—in other words making it more difficult for students to get into tertiary study and to support themselves financially whilst they do so. So this particular change is removing yes what was a bit of a loophole but a loophole that if it provided some support to a group of students who otherwise would not be able to engage in tertiary study then potentially it was one we should actually be looking at going the other way with. I know that talks about additional funding but I do not think we can do what the Government and even the select committee have argued and completely separate out the policy issue that is in question here. The policy issue that is in question in this very amendment is in fact whether or not the level of funding that we are giving to tertiary students is sufficient.At the moment there are clear arguments that it is not because if students are resorting to this loophole in order to support their studies and to cover the cost of their accommodation whilst they are undertaking tertiary study there is a reason for that. It is because they may not be able to do their tertiary study without it and so the policy issues are absolutely intricately linked. Just drawing this distinction that says we are going to close this loophole and pretend that there is no issue there and that we can just wander away from it is not actually right. If people are exploiting the loophole the first question we should be asking from a policy perspective is whether we should be closing the loophole to bring everybody down or whether we should be looking at increasing the level of financial support so there are no financial incentives to exploit the loophole in the first place. That is a legitimate policy question that the Government has simply washed its hands of.Actually it should have had that debate first. If Government members were coming to the House and saying: “We think students get enough. We do not think they should be exploiting this loophole because they get too much if they go through this loophole.” I would have some respect for them taking that position. I would disagree with it but I would have some respect for the position. But if somebody is saying: “Oh we’re closing the loophole and we think that there’s a legitimate question to be asked about whether students are getting insufficient accommodation support but we will deal with that some other time.” and then tomorrow never comes that is actually not right and not fair.I think the fair thing to do is have that policy discussion from the outset because when you look at the situation that tertiary students are facing the price of their accommodation—like the accommodation of just about every other New Zealander—has gone up whilst the rates of students’ financial support in the form of student allowances have remained relatively static. Their fees continue to go up whilst their rates of allowance and other financial support have remained relatively static. They have been hit by increases in GST. Students who are on very low incomes of course suffer from increases in GST. They have no way to offset the increase in GST and of course they probably did not benefit from any of the tax cuts that were introduced at the same period of time.All of these things are increasing the cost of tertiary education and making it less and less accessible and less and less affordable to greater numbers of New Zealand students or prospective New Zealand students. If we want to get serious about the knowledge economy and upskilling the workforce we should be looking for ways to increase support.JAN LOGIE (Green):I rise to take my first call on the Committee stage of the Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3). The Greens are opposing this legislation because it seeks to make things just that much harder for people who are trying to get ahead through study people on ACC who are also on a benefit and people who are caring for family members who would otherwise be in care. To put it as simply as I can this legislation specifically clauses 4 and 5 and Supplementary Order Paper 56 runs counter to the well-being of our society as a whole. To be honest they come across as just mean-spirited. In this contribution I would like to specifically address the changes for students and we will hopefully get the opportunity later to address other concerns with Mr Chair’s permission.This legislation closes a loophole for students who are currently eligible for a student allowance but who choose not to apply for it because the accommodation supplement will offer them a higher income. This legislation will remove that option and prevent them from applying for the accommodation supplement so it will prevent them accessing a higher income. The Green Party wants a well-educated and a well-paid society and we believe that it is up to us collectively to support students especially students without much in the way of financial resources. This is pretty essential when it comes to that concept of social mobility. If we are serious about addressing our crisis of inequality we need to be doing a lot more not less to support people on lower incomes to get through tertiary education to get higher qualifications and to be able to get ahead in life.The adequacy of student support we are told is separate to the accommodation allowance because that has a different purpose. We have heard that just now from the Minister for Social Development. To me that seems a pretty arbitrary distinction and strange packaging of policy parameters. The accommodation allowance is available to some low-income workers and it is available to those who are out of paid employment and on a benefit. Why exclude people in the same or even greater financial stress just because they are trying to get ahead through tertiary education? I have heard the policy rationale is that that is a different issue. I do not see why that is a different issue if our concern is our population and the well-being of people as a whole.We have had advice from the New Zealand University Students’ Association which has told us a bit about the situation for students in New Zealand at the moment. It estimates that as many as one in six students would be better off turning down the student allowance and applying for the accommodation supplement instead. This is because their allowance has been abated due to parental income and the support available for the accommodation supplement is so much better than support targeted to students—again students who are trying to get ahead or who are trying to gain more knowledge to be able to contribute to our society.If you live in Auckland and are on a low income and pay the average student rent of $220 a week then you would be entitled to $118 a week in the accommodation supplement. The New Zealand University Students’ Association survey of students’ income and expenditure in 2014 showed that almost one-quarter of Auckland students currently getting an allowance receive less than that due to the abatement regime. It needs to be pointed out again: these are not privileged people. If you are privileged and you come from a family with a lot of financial resources you do not get anywhere near a student allowance. So we are talking about the group of people who are coming along who are wanting to get ahead and whose parents do not have the resources to be able to support them through. And here in this piece of legislation we are saying: “Well there was an option where you could support yourself a little bit better to get ahead and we’re going to take that away. We’re going to remove that option and restrict you to an even meaner existence make it harder to be able to feed yourself to get to your course and to be able to pay your rent.” To me that is not good policy.The New Zealand Union of Students’ Association also raised I thought a really interesting point by saying that the need to close this legislation loophole came to the Government’s attention over 4 years ago which means that there has been the potential for those people to access a higher level of entitlement for 4 years. It also questioned how many of those students had been informed of that option because the number of students in 2010—when this legislation was first introduced—who were taking advantage of the so-called loophole was only two. If there are not that many students who have managed to find out about this loophole and who have been able to be told about the option then actually if we have a system of entitlements there is something wrong with our system—again if the department was aware of it and it was not informing them.I would just like to point out too that students who are receiving the allowance are by definition unable to support themselves and their parents are not in a position to support them. Even ignoring the levels of parental income that are currently part of the regime of means testing which takes place until students are 24 years of age—which to me is ludicrous when you think of youth development processes—they can get a maximum of $40 a week of accommodation assistance called the accommodation benefit. Think of that in Auckland where the average student rent is $220. That is a maximum of $40 for the people whom we really want to help get ahead the people whose families really want their kids to be better off than they were. I have said recently in this House that we need to be acknowledging this. We are being told that this is the first generation post-colonisation where our young people are likely to be worse off than their parents. Here we are discussing that very group who is trying to fight against the odds to get ahead to be able to push ahead from their parents and we are taking away from them options to be able to support them through that process. I have said it seems mean-spirited. It runs counter to our concept of collective good.The Greens will certainly not be supporting this bill. We hope that the Government will see and listen to the arguments on this side of the Chamber around our collective good and around supporting the mobility of young people and change its mind on this point.RON MARK (NZ First):I must say what a pleasure it is to see the Minister in the chair the Hon Anne Tolley actually answering some questions. It is helpful. I am going to take this call in order to seek some clarity for New Zealand First around Supplementary Order Paper 56. I am looking also at Supplementary Order Paper 64 which my colleague Darroch Ball is getting me a copy of. My question to the Minister is for the purpose of clarity so that we can better understand precisely what these Supplementary Order Papers seek to do and to raise our question around Supplementary Order Paper 56. That proposes that “for the purpose of satisfying the residential qualification for any benefit after the return to New Zealand the residence status of persons (and their spouses and children) who were liable for and paid income tax on earnings while employed overseas” are to be treated as resident and present in New Zealand. These specific Supplementary Order Papers refer specifically to veterans. Once again I am not particularly clear Minister as to whether this seeks to aid and assist. I know that the explanatory note that has been provided says that this does not seek to change the law; it seeks to make it clearer. But I would really appreciate some explanation from you on those lines because it is not that clear to me.I am looking at the Supplementary Order Papers and the clauses that they refer to. There are a couple of things that stand out to me. Firstly Supplementary Order Paper 56 refers to people being “treated under section 79(3)(a)”. I can find no section 79(3)(a). I can find section 79(1)(a) and paragraphs (b) and (c) and a section 79(2) but I do not see a section 79(3)(a) at all in the legislation. So is that a typo or is that me not reading it correctly? Is there a piece of paper that I am missing? Supplementary Order Paper 56 clearly says in big bold black lettering: “was treated under section 79(3)(a) of the Social Security Act 1964 …”. I have a copy of page 69 of that and there is no section 79(3)(a) that I can find but some guidance may be helpful.The next thing is that the Supplementary Order Paper also refers to—I am just jumping from one piece of paper because we have got two pieces of legislation here that I am trying to look across at. I guess one of the first questions I have is about when we talk of persons who have paid tax. I am assuming that that is about paying tax in New Zealand because we have many former service personnel—and in fact we could talk about missionary workers; we could talk about a range of people whom this legislation does cover off—who have served outside of New Zealand employed by other agencies such as the United Nations and whoever who have paid tax. I just need some clarity. Are we saying that to fit within these criteria they would have paid tax in New Zealand? I want to understand what that means.Really Minister our concern is whether this disadvantages any of our veterans who are serving offshore. How will this impact on those when they come back? I tried to get answers on the previous piece of legislation the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill which went through this Committee. Unfortunately the Minister in the chair then the Hon Paul Goldsmith did not feel the need to explain himself. That is not going to be helpful in the long run. I really would appreciate answers and my sense is that this Minister in the chair is a different Minister. I really would like some help around those clauses Minister Tolley. Thank you.Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development):I am happy to answer that question for the benefit of the member Ron Mark on the Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3). He will know that to qualify for New Zealand superannuation there is a residency qualification. It is very unfair if you might not be living here but you are paying tax here in New Zealand on your earnings but that is not counted towards your residency. So if you are a serviceman serving overseas and you are being paid a wage or a salary in New Zealand and paying tax on that then nothing changes—that counts for you. That is what that does. I hope that satisfies the member.JACINDA ARDERN (Labour):The Minister for Social Development spoke to an issue that I am quite interested in as well and that I want to delve into a little bit further—that is speaking to the amendments to the Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3) that are made in Supplementary Order Paper 56. This I note interestingly is actually longer than the bill itself that we are debating so it seems that the Supplementary Order Paper is obviously of reasonable importance. It also seems like it reads like a bit of an afterthought—an opportunity to make some amendments where errors were again made.Just to clarify though—and I not sure whether or not the Minister really spoke to this point—I think the point that Ron Mark raised obviously was that if you read section 79(1) of the original Social Security Act 1964 it already does point out that “Where any person has been employed outside New Zealand and while so employed was liable for the payment of income tax on earnings from that employment then for the purposes of satisfying the residential qualification …” is deemed to have been in New Zealand for benefits purposes. The way I read that though is that a person was employed outside New Zealand and while so employed was liable for payment of income tax on earnings from that employment. So it is quite specific. It is almost saying it applies if you are employed outside New Zealand but those earnings from that employment that takes you outside New Zealand are liable for income tax in New Zealand. One could assume a number of roles where that might be the case. For instance if you were in a New Zealand Trade and Enterprise role perhaps or something like that—for those purposes you are considered to be paying tax in New Zealand obviously and therefore would still qualify upon return for New Zealand benefits. That seems pretty straightforward.The change that we have in this Supplementary Order Paper replaces section 79 in the Act and is titled “Persons who have had income tax deducted or withheld on earnings from employment overseas to be treated as resident and present in New Zealand”. It says: “This section applies to any person who was employed outside New Zealand if with respect to the person’s period of employment the person’s employer (or other relevant person) makes—(a) PAYE income payments … from which the person employer or other relevant person must withhold an amount of tax under the PAYE rules as defined in that Act;”. It seems to me that these two provisions are doing very similar things. I would be interested as to why it is there is specificity around PAYE—is that simply to bring it into alignment with the Income Tax Act 2007? Is that the main purpose? Or is there a functional change to the type of income that is deemed to be relevant by having this change? Because it seems to me that the original legislation seems to me like a broader catch-all than the subsequent amendment that we are making which is very specific towards PAYE. So I would be interested in the Minister’s comment as to why that change was deemed necessary.I am also interested that in these Supplementary Order Papers we are making an amendment that alters the qualification of someone for a relevant benefit in New Zealand. We can assume that the most likely benefit that will be covered by these provisions will be New Zealand superannuation. That is probably the thing that is going to be covered because of the qualification test around residency in New Zealand: you basically have to have been an income earner in New Zealand for a specified period of time and then 5 years before the date of your retirement. So basically you have to have been resident in New Zealand earning an income and paying tax or living here 5 years before the point at which you retire. If not then you have to stay here for an extra 5 years before you are eligible. That is basically the rule in a nutshell. However your eligibility is also affected by other forms of pension entitlement that you might have. So for instance say under section 79 you were one of these individuals who went overseas paid income tax in New Zealand but whilst you were overseas you may have also been eligible to pay into an overseas pension scheme. If that were the case even if you qualify for a New Zealand superannuation when you return because you qualify even under the amended section 79 in new clause 5A under the current rules in New Zealand—Mr Chair I have 3 seconds to go and I will be seeking another call. [Bell rung] Mr Chair?The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Jacinda Ardern.JACINDA ARDERN: Even if you do come back at that point you have qualified for all intents and purposes and you have been paying income tax if you come back with an overseas pension then section 70 of the Social Security Act will apply to you.Section 70 is a very controversial section of the Social Security Act. Most members of this House who conduct any form of constituency work will be familiar with this section of the Act. It allows the Ministry of Social Development if you have an overseas pension that is considered to be equitable or similar to New Zealand superannuation to deduct dollar for dollar from that overseas scheme—dollar for dollar. We have been doing this direct deduction policy since 1938. That is the time period in which it has been happening. At that time probably there were not so many people who were eligible for overseas pensions—Stuart Nash: Great Minister of Finance then.JACINDA ARDERN: But since that great Minister of Finance—that is right at the time—12 percent now of our superannuitants are eligible for an overseas pension and I would wager that that will continue to grow. Some would say: “OK it’s fair. No one should really—if they have spent obviously enough time overseas to be eligible for an overseas pension—double dip come home be eligible for New Zealand superannuation collect the overseas superannuation and get that double whammy. If they are going to collect that and it is similar to the New Zealand scheme let us just deduct until they end up getting the same amount that everyone else in a pension scheme would.” The issue with this policy is about making a judgment over what overseas pension schemes are similar to ours and what are not. And that is where there seems to be real injustice in the way that the direct deduction policy works.I have seen countless cases of pension schemes that have been contributory where someone has put in their own money into a scheme come back to New Zealand assumed that they are going to be able to draw down that scheme which they have contributed to only to then have that deducted from their New Zealand superannuation entitlement. You can argue the rights and wrongs of a scheme like that. What you cannot argue in my mind is that under that policy if they deduct right down to zero such is the generosity of that alternative scheme the ministry will then start deducting from your partner’s entitlement—someone who may not have even lived overseas may have known you for only the last 10 years. They will have their pension deducted as well as yours because you have reached full entitlement. That cost from memory saves the New Zealand Government roughly $5 million a year that specific provision but it is totally unfair. In my mind it is a human rights violation because it predominantly affects women who have their entitlement deducted. Their entitlement is their entitlement. It should never be affected by anyone else’s.So the point that I raise for the Minister is this: if we are looking at eligibility criteria if we are looking at who is eligible for a New Zealand pension and has been overseas why not look at the big stuff? Why not look at whether or not in this changing globalised environment where more and more New Zealanders are working offshore where more and more are contributing to an overseas pension scheme—I have one—our scheme is equitable anymore? New Zealand First has a policy on this and Labour before the last election tried to get the select committee to review this issue because it was so difficult to navigate for so many people. That was turned down by the select committee—unfortunately voted down by National. But we have given our commitment that we will review the direct deduction policy with a view to removing the unfairness of this scheme—the fact that it is antiquated and no longer caters to the modern environment and the fact that so many schemes actually are not similar to New Zealand schemes and yet are being treated as such. So Minister I would have hoped that alongside Supplementary Order Paper 56 there would be a prime opportunity alongside reviewing section 79 to review section 70 to at the very least acknowledge the point that has been raised by the Human Rights Commission over the deduction of a partner’s pension or at least commit to reviewing the rest of the inequity that exists in our scheme currently.MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri):It is an honour to rise and take a brief call on the Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3). I would very much like to take the time to focus on the nub of the debate around the student allowance versus the accommodation supplement. But first I would like to take a step back and say that I am proud to live in a country that has a Social Security Act and it is right that we are putting the right provisions around beneficiaries and students—obviously they need very different support and we can expand on that further.Clause 4 relates to the accommodation supplement. It amends the principal Act by clarifying that students are ineligible for the supplement if they may receive grants under the Student Allowances Regulations 1998. My fellow Canterbury MP across the Chamber Poto Williams described this bill as a 4-year-old child after taking 4 years to come into the House. But considering that a child develops 95 percent of their brain in the first 4 years of development you could say that this bill is at a very good developmental stage.What I would like to focus on are the issues concerning students. Being a student is very much another interesting developmental stage. As we know students take risks and push boundaries and I think that is probably what this is all about. It is about students gaming the system. Obviously there are some students out there who are quite bright and quite intelligent and they have realised that if they decline the allowance then they can qualify for the accommodation supplement. This is why this bill in clause 4 looks to close down this loophole this gaming. You could just imagine students at the local university meeting over at the Back Bencher and sharing the secret of what they had learnt about claiming a larger allowance. I think if I look at my notes that for a sole parent in Auckland with two children the maximum amount that can be paid as an accommodation supplement is $225 a week compared with $60 for an accommodation benefit on a student allowance. I think that says a lot in itself.I would also like to raise the plight of the poor old case manager who is administering this process. We all know in business that if we do not have consistent business rules and one rule for everyone it pretty much turns into a fiasco. It is very appropriate and right that we put together clear legislation that will be implemented and clear business rules for case managers to apply in this case. Thank you very much.STUART NASH (Labour—Napier):I do like it when National members stand up and they praise things like the Social Security Act 1938. Either they do not know their history or they are truly appreciative of what the first Labour Government did. What a great Government that was; there is no doubt about that. This bill for me has been quite confusing. I am just a simple man from the provinces. What I do here is I take a look at the bill and I read through it. Now we are at the Committee stage and the bill is being taken as a whole. I look at points that we can talk about—because we are supporting this but every bill has its discussion points—and then I get to as Ms Ardern alluded to Supplementary Order Paper 56 and the Supplementary Order Paper is longer than the bill itself. And then there is another Supplementary Order Paper—Kris Faafoi: Amending the Supplementary Order Paper.STUART NASH: —yes—for that Supplementary Order Paper and I scratch my head and go: “Where do I start on this?”.Again I go back to something that—Kris Faafoi: The very beginning.STUART NASH: —yes the very beginning—Ron Mark talked about. Supplementary Order Paper 64 talks about the Veterans’ Support Act 2014 which has been in place for less than 6 months if I am right. In fact the last bill we talked about the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill amended the Veterans’ Support Act as well. Those poor veterans. Things change hugely for these guys. [Interruption] It is. And this Supplementary Order Paper talks about how there is a difference here. The wording is changed. The Government is omitting or getting rid of the term “deemed to have been resident in New Zealand” and replacing it with “treated under section 79(3)(a) of the Social Security Act 1964 as being resident and present in New Zealand”.As Mr Mark alluded to and as Jacinda Ardern and I tried to figure out we wanted to see what section 79(3)(a) actually looked like. We looked online which is what you do because that is supposed to be the most up-to-date version and this is the 21st century and we could not find it. Yet again I do not know how MPs are supposed to do their job when we go to the source of these documents and we cannot even find the piece of legislation that is being referenced. Again I am not too sure whether this is a typing error or in fact the legislation itself just has not been updated from last time it was amended. We deserve better than this; there is no doubt about that. It seems a little bit sloppy to me because this bill has been to the Social Services Committee and the select committee went through it. There were experts who looked at it. MPs cannot be experts in everything. Yet we end up with this level of Supplementary Order Paper. Again the cynic in me says that what this is is a Minister sneaking stuff under the radar that they did not want discussed in the select committee. But I am not cynical. I think this is just—Poto Williams: You’re bigger than that.STUART NASH: I am bigger than that. I suspect that this was just an error. The Minister for Social Development realised that there was a whole lot more stuff after the bill had been through the select committee process and all that sort of carry-on so she needed to put in a substantial Supplementary Order Paper.There are a couple of things I would like to talk about here. New clause 6A amends an item. The explanatory note of Supplementary Order Paper 56 says: “item 1 of Schedule 6 of the principal Act to prevent the income disregards provisions in that clause from applying unintentionally to supported living payments …”. These are for people who are looking after patients who require care full time. I do not know how you can apply unintentionally or how it can be applied unintentionally and what if it is applied unintentionally? As with these things people who look after ill people do not earn a lot of money. In fact they are usually on the minimum wage and they do it out of the goodness of their heart and man they are exploited. But the thing is what happens if they actually do end up with more money than they are supposed to? Do they have to pay it back? It is just a sort of insidious situation that is the last thing we want some of the most disadvantaged but well-meaning people in our society ending up doing.The other thing that I note as well—and this is most interesting—is that “New clause 6B amends clause 2(b) of Part 1 of Schedule 18 of the principal Act to restore the pre-15 July 2013 calculation of the rate of non-beneficiary accommodation supplement for sole parents.” The reason I say that this is interesting is that this existed less than 2 years ago. For some reason it was withdrawn and now it is back. I wonder whether it is because the Minister is a little bit more benevolent than the previous one and she has talked to officials and she has talked to members of the public and she has found out that actually something that this Government had done to beneficiaries was unfair and so it is restoring it. I am not too sure why. You can understand if you restore something from 2007 or 2008 but to restore something that was taken away less than 2 years ago again that seems like either rushed legislation in 2013 or rushed legislation now. It is just very hard to actually figure it out.JAN LOGIE (Green):In this contribution I would like to speak to the changes in relation to ACC compensation payments which are in clause 5 of the bill and also specifically to Supplementary Order Paper 56 and some of our concerns around that. In relation to ACC at present weekly ACC compensation payments are deducted from benefit payments on a dollar for dollar basis. However a loophole was discovered through a case that went in front of the Social Security Appeal Authority that revealed that in law weekly compensation paid directly by employers accredited with ACC should be treated as income and therefore deducted from benefits at a different and more favourable rate. So this bill is seeking to remove that anomaly and bring the compensation abatements back to a dollar for dollar basis—on a retrospective basis. It is seeking to retrospectively validate Work and Income’s misapplication of the law.This will result in someone who has been on a benefit while working part-time suddenly having their benefit reduced to zero after an injury that entitles them to access ACC. I would just like this Committee to dwell on that for a moment and—I am sure there are a number of stories and letters that you get into your office or people coming into your office to talk to you about the struggles they are having with ACC or the struggles they are having to be able to survive on a benefit or negotiate between those two systems—and reflect again that this legislation will result in somebody who has been on a benefit while working part-time suddenly having their benefit reduced to zero if they find they are entitled to ACC compensation after an injury. I would suggest to this Committee that this is again mean-spirited and cruel and is increasing the level of hardship for some of the most vulnerable people in this country.I doubt that any of us would want to be in their situation. In some ways that is possibly a test in terms of legislation. If we were in the place of the people whom this legislation is applying to would we want to be in their situation? Would we feel that we were able to manage in their situation? I would suggest to this Committee that we would not and that we possibly most probably could not manage in those situations. So the Greens are certainly opposing these amendments.To speak specifically to Supplementary Order Paper 56 we also find it quite problematic because what it will do is provide a less generous residential qualification for New Zealand superannuation and welfare benefits than is provided under the current interpretation of the legislation and it will do so retrospectively dating back to 23 June 1987. This is in response to another Social Security Appeal Authority decision which interpreted the current section 79 of the Social Security Act in a more generous manner than had been and is Ministry of Social Development practice. The proposed new section 79 inserted by clause 5A reflects past and current Ministry of Social Development practice and will apply retrospectively except in the case of people who had filed proceedings before 6 July 2013. The only person in this category is likely to be the successful applicant in the Social Security Appeal Authority case that this amendment is in response to. So that is quite a bizarre situation really and another example it would seem to me of this House spending time fixing up some degree of incompetence and also penalising the people in the most vulnerable situations in this country. Supplementary Order Paper 56 also amends schedule 6.MEKA WHAITIRI (Labour—Ikaroa-Rāwhiti):Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Tēnā tātou katoa. I am happy to take a short call on the Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3). I was not a member of the select committee but probably more important as a mother of two teenage sons about to enter university next year I feel it is appropriate that I get up and make a contribution.I would like to talk specifically around—I have papers for Africa here—section 61EA of the principal Act which ensures that students who would be eligible for assistance from the student allowance scheme including its extra accommodation component but who choose not to apply for that assistance will be excluded from receiving the accommodation supplement.I am a firm believer that investing in our young people in this country is definitely the role of the State. There is plenty of research around showing that our student population across the country is struggling. This is an opportunity to address that and I am rather disappointed from listening to all the contributions tonight that the benchmark has been set at the student allowance rate rather than at the accommodation supplement. I would be keen to hear from the Minister herself as to why the benchmark has been set low rather than high.I understand that there have been two contributions to the select committee from the Dunedin Community Law Centre and from the New Zealand University Students’ Association which I am sure many of us in this Chamber have been members of. They do a fine job and they clearly have got recent research that shows there is hardship faced by many of our students around the country. Again I would be really interested to hear the Minister’s response as to why an organisation with the history of the New Zealand University Students’ Association was not consulted on amending this Act. Clearly the association probably had a major contribution to offer and it would have meant that we would probably have a more robust bill brought before the House to be discussed.From reading this bill like many of the previous speakers I am still of the view of wanting to hear the rationale behind incentivising our students to stay in tertiary education as opposed to opting out because they can get more from the accommodation supplement. I support that the bill is trying to address some of the loopholes but given the 4 years since it has been brought to the Government’s attention I would also be keen to hear how many students have been caught up in the loophole. I guess given that this is retrospective legislation there are also the unintended consequences of passing retrospective legislation. I would be keen to hear from the Minister herself on what would happen to those students. I am interested to know how many students are caught up and what will actually happen to those who have received the accommodation supplement as opposed to the student allowance.Yes I support the contributions of this bill but I caution the Minister and the Government around ensuring we are investing in our students perhaps more than what I see with this bill before the Committee given the pressures that students are under not in terms of completing study but with having a very low student allowance the cost of fees rising out of proportion to other supplements that may assist them and also in terms of GST which has risen.RON MARK (NZ First):I stand to take another call on behalf of New Zealand First just to clarify the issues having finally got my head around Minister the stray the phantom new sections 79(3)(a) and 79(3)(b). I am pleased that I persevered because it was just vexing me somewhat. I guess in summary what I now understand about this bill—and my colleague Darroch Ball has ably articulated this in his opening comments but I need to go through these steps because it helps me understand what has happened here. This bill came to the House in 2011. It was referred to the Social Services Committee on 6 April 2011. As Darroch Ball has said there were a couple of submissions heard and the submissions closed on 28 April. A few submissions were heard and it was reported back to the House. It is now very clear to me that it sat and languished in the House from that point.On 17 March 2015 we had presented to us Supplementary Order Paper 56. On 24 March—what is that? Two days ago? Two days ago we were presented with Supplementary Order Paper 64. Supplementary Order Paper 64 seeks to amend Supplementary Order Paper 56. It is within Supplementary Order Paper 56 that the phantom new sections that my people could not find 79(3)(a) and 79(3)(b) reside. It is those provisions that Supplementary Order Paper 64 seeks to amend. It is like the amendment to the amended amendment and so the story goes on. What I have got to say is that it is quite astonishing because collectively between them Supplementary Order Papers 56 and 64 are bigger than the original bill. How bizarre is that? So—Hon Ruth Dyson: Say that again. Say that again.RON MARK: I am holding two pieces of paper here. If I look at Supplementary Order Paper 56 and Supplementary Order Paper 64 and I hold up the original bill they are bigger than the original bill. Yet Parliament and the Government saw fit to send the original bill to the Social Services Committee to be examined. One would have thought that with such considerable amendments and then amendments to the amendments the Government might well say: “Well let us refer this bill back to the select committee 4 years later—4 years later—just to ensure that we had everything correct.”What we now know from the debate tonight—and my colleague Darroch Ball has raised New Zealand First’s concerns about student loans and the impacts on them and we have heard countless speakers from the Labour team once again raising their concerns—everybody agrees and this is the nonsense of it all. Please Government please Minister after Sunday let us reflect on how this House should be run. It is time to consult and talk to all the members of the House. If one does that then we can iron out these things and where we agree on stuff we can move it through the House and save the taxpayer a hell of a lot of money. That is something that I hear a lot of Government members banging on about: wanting to save taxpayers’ money reduce compliance reduce costs and reduce red tape. What we have right now is we are moving through the Committee two amendments to the bill which appear to be larger than the original bill without having put them to a select committee. Here this evening getting close to half past 9 at night we are having to answer questions that we could have answered in the select committee and progressed this bill a lot more smoothly.I am comfortable with the Minister’s explanation and I thank the Minister very much for that. I would have liked to see a better response from the previous Minister on the other issues pertaining to veterans’ affairs and adjustments to that KiwiSaver legislation that went through. I do not think that is the end of the matter because there are those of us who are always going to be conscious and wary about any legislation that is first retrospective—first retrospective—and secondly that impacts on veterans particularly at a time when we are creating new veterans by dispatching more people off to war zones around the world.One thing we know for sure as members of Parliament—and I say so across the whole of the Chamber—there is nothing more frustrating than trying to deal with officials and bureaucrats be they at ACC or Work and Income when trying to do the best by our veterans who may have suffered post-traumatic stress disorder or accidents that have then thrown them straight back into the ACC system or who may have lost a foot had an injury that one cannot recover from or had a wound. There is nothing more frustrating than having to fight the bureaucracy and the red tape as an MP. I say that on behalf of all MPs because I know all MPs throughout the Chamber struggle with those issues in their electorate offices time and time again. But we struggle because we do not always get it right here. We struggle because often we pass retrospective legislation without thinking for 1 minute that there might be half a dozen 10 or 12 people caught up adversely.Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National):Thank you Mr Chair for the opportunity to take a call on the Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3) in its Committee stage. Previous contributions discussed wider issues around the adequacy of the accommodation assistance available to students through different student support systems. There was a view expressed that the student accommodation rate does not meet students’ needs and there was a suggestion that the select committee should look at why students are accessing the accommodation supplement. But this bill is not about the assistance level provided to students. This bill is not about deciding whether student assistance is generous or not. This bill is to close loopholes in the existing Act.This bill is short but very important. It is a very simple one. It has just two parts. Clause 4 in Part 1 of the bill amends the principal Act and clarifies the eligibility criteria. It clarifies that students who choose not to apply for a student allowance under the Student Allowances Regulations 1998 are excluded from receiving the accommodation supplement. Clause 4 also clarifies that the income test will include a spouse’s or partner’s income as well as parental income.As the Minister in charge of the bill the Hon Anne Tolley explained assistance for students is designed to be through a shared approach towards their tertiary education—the Government and the student—because the Government and the student benefit from that tertiary education. Again I say that this bill is not about the level of assistance provided. It is about closing the loopholes that exist in the existing legislation and students should receive the assistance that is designed for them. But the current wording in the Social Security Act is not clear enough and it leaves open the loophole that allows people to claim the accommodation supplement if they give up the student allowance. The accommodation supplement is intended to assist low and middle income families who have accommodation costs and do not receive a student allowance or loan.Part 1 also intends to ensure that the direct deduction of weekly compensation payment applies whether these payments come from ACC or an accredited employer. Clauses 5 7 and 8 provide for consistent treatment for weekly compensation payments whether made by or on behalf of ACC or on behalf of an accredited employer. I also want to clarify what I heard before about the burden of this on employers. The fact is that this legislation will not impose any additional costs on businesses. So I support the bill as it is. Thank you.POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East):I am going to take just a short call. I just want to talk a little bit about the submissions and the submission process. As we have heard this bill came before the House 4 years ago and the submission process at that time was a very short period. Two weeks were given for submitters to provide submissions to the Social Services Committee. I want to question that in terms of good process. Is it good process to allow only a couple of weeks for people to develop submissions to provide to the select committee? In this case I would argue that there was insufficient time provided for people to make submissions—because there were only two submissions that were made. Both of those submissions relate to the impacts that this bill would have on students and both of those submissions were deemed to be outside the scope of the bill because of that. However this bill does impact students and 4 years on—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Mr O’Connor you are allowed to sit down but it is a bit rude to have your back to the speaker like that.POTO WILLIAMS: Four years on those impacts I believe are much more significant than they were and I just want to spend some time talking about what that means for students. The previous speaker said that it is not necessarily the job of the Government to support students in this way. Well actually it is. It is absolutely the Government’s role to support students through their student life because our future lies in the educational status and well-being of our young people. That is where our future lies. Well-educated young people and children really raise all sorts of levels for their children going forward. It is absolutely the role of the Government to support our students.We know that in the period between when this bill came before the House and now there have been some significant changes in the lives of students. For example we have had significant cuts to allowances for postgraduate students and training—significant cuts—and who do those cuts impact the most? Actually postgraduate study is often study that is undertaken by women who are either returning to the workforce or retraining after a period at home caring for children. It is very significant for the ongoing well-being of our society that women are able to access good quality training and get the support to do that.I know there has been a bit of banter across the House this evening about the lives of students. We do tend to categorise students as being a bit carefree but let us face it. Many of our students have to—are forced to—find employment often in not only very low-paid work but work that other people do not want to undertake because of the level of assistance that they are able to access through Government schemes. My argument to the previous speaker is that actually we could look at supporting our students much more significantly. We could look at that. It is a role for the Government. It actually has good future impacts for our society and our students would respond much more favourably. We would get much better results if they were supported well and did not have to do the kinds of hours and the types of work they have to do just to continue on at their studies. So I think that is my contribution for this evening. Thank you.JAN LOGIE (Green):Thank you Mr Chair for enabling me to take a last call on this bill. I would like to specifically address Supplementary Order Paper 56 and the amendment to schedule 6 of the Social Security Act 1964. The amendment will clarify that the $20 personal earnings exemption that is currently accessible to people caring full-time for people who would otherwise be in care will no longer be accessible to them. How extraordinary is that—in this week Caregivers Week when most of the country is spending a moment to actually thank the people in this country most of whom are women who are giving up so much of their lives to care for our most vulnerable people. Some of those people are in paid work and I have had a discussion with the Minister this afternoon about the very clear exploitation of those women workers and the gender pay gap we have in the country.Another side to this also is the almost entirely unpaid workers of those family members receiving the supported living allowance to care for family members who—through legislation that was rushed through this House under urgency after the last Budget—were denied access to a wage denied access to the Human Rights Commission and denied access to basic rules of justice. We get to see a pattern—and again this Supplementary Order Paper denies that group of people access to a $20 personal earnings exemption. For goodness’ sake! I know the Government has been desperate to try to reach a surplus but to claw back money from people who are looking after—giving up so much to care for—some of the most vulnerable people in our society is just beyond the pale of meanness. I really would like to hear the Minister in the chair stand up and defend that.The Government is saying that people who themselves have total blindness or permanent and severe restrictions in their capacity to work because of sickness injury or disability are allowed a $20 personal earnings exemption. It is so generous—so generous! Are we all not grateful to have this wonderfully generous social security system as we have heard from the National Party members? To deny it to people caring for some of those same people—I cannot understand a policy that would make that distinction. If we are at all interested in the well-being fairness and ability of people to contribute to our society then a $20 earnings exemption—surely that is the absolute minimum. Why would you even look at that and see it as a problem let alone a problem to come to this Committee at the last minute and not enable any members of the public to actually put in submissions on it and to pass it through this Committee? Again we have seen how under Budget urgency members of the New Zealand public were denied the ability to submit on the changes around restrictions to human rights and pay for some family carers and here we are again seeing legislation pushed through the House without the ability for people to submit contribute or comment on—affecting some of the very same people who were locked out of that earlier legislation. It is a shame.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 56 in the name of the Hon Anne Tolley to Part 1 be agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat the amendments be agreed to.Ayes 95New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 32; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 25Green Party 14; New Zealand First 11.Amendments agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat Part 1 as amended be agreed to.Ayes 95New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 32; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 25Green Party 14; New Zealand First 11.Part 1 as amended agreed to.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 56 in the name of the Hon Anne Tolley to Part 2 be agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat the amendments to Part 2 be agreed to.Ayes 106New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 32; New Zealand First 11; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 14Green Party 14.Amendments agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat Part 2 as amended be agreed to.Ayes 95New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 32; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 25Green Party 14; New Zealand First 11.Part 2 as amended agreed to.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 64 in the name of the Hon Anne Tolley to the new schedule be agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat the amendment be agreed to.Ayes 95New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 32; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 25Green Party 14; New Zealand First 11.Amendment agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat the new schedule as amended be agreed to.Ayes 95New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 32; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 25Green Party 14; New Zealand First 11.New schedule as amended agreed to.A party votewas called for on the questionThat clauses 1 to 3 be agreed to.Ayes 95New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 32; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 25Green Party 14; New Zealand First 11.Clauses 1 to 3 agreed to.Bill to be reported with amendment presently.Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2)In CommitteePAUL FOSTER-BELL (National):I seek leave for debate in the Committee stage of the Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2) to be taken as one question with each part to be voted upon separately.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Leave has been sought. Is there any objection to that occurring? There is no objection.Parts 1 and 2 schedules 1 and 2 and clauses 1 to 3IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North):I was half expecting the Minister in the chair Mr Woodhouse to take the call given that there is a rather substantial Supplementary Order Paper in his name which he may have wanted to outline to the Committee so that we could consider it more fully. I am sure the Minister will be back soon to explain this rather weighty Supplementary Order Paper. I am looking forward to it—obviously a bit of a tidy-up is required on this legislation.As the Labour Party has made clear in previous readings of this legislation although we supported its referral to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—because we certainly agree with the Government that there are considerable issues with the abuse of migrant workers in New Zealand and we hoped that this legislation would make some inroads into dealing with that abuse—we have not been able to continue with our support after the select committee consideration. A lot of concerns were raised by submitters and a lot of matters became apparent at the committee and to date sadly those have not been addressed although I must admit having only just come across this rather large Supplementary Order Paper that I wonder whether the Minister may be planning to address some of those issues in those amendments.I do have some questions for the Minister around some of the areas that we have specific concerns about. I think it would be useful to the Committee if the Minister was able to answer some of those concerns. Firstly why is it that the Government chooses with this legislation to give the power to search private dwellings without a warrant to immigration officers rather than labour inspectors? Obviously we are talking about people who are here on work visas and it is an immigration issue but we are also talking about the abuse of people working in New Zealand. And what we are trying to get to the bottom of is abusive and exploitative labour practices rather than abusive and exploitative immigration practices.The other reason we have a concern with giving those powers to immigration officers rather than labour inspectors is that the use of those powers could very easily be misinterpreted by the migrant workers whom the Government wishes to protect. These are vulnerable people who often may not fully understand the English language. They may not fully understand the New Zealand way of doing things. They may not understand our law. They may not understand our processes. And they may be used to a different use of Government agencies than we are used to here in New Zealand.The threat—which is indeed how it could be perceived—of giving immigration officers the power to search private dwellings without a warrant which is quite a significant power to give any Government agency and the threat of that power being able to be used may give utterly the wrong message to these migrant workers. In fact it could serve as a disincentive for them to come forward with their complaints about the abuse they may be suffering at the hands of unscrupulous employers.We understand the need to be able to provide additional powers of search. We are generally uncomfortable with the concept of warrantless search and that has been something we have canvassed in other legislation in recent times in this House. But we certainly have that question—why choose to give this power to the immigration officers rather than to the labour inspectorate? That is a genuine question that we would appreciate a response to from the Minister in the chair Michael Woodhouse.The second question is around one very specific aspect of the legislation and that is concerning the Legislation Advisory Committee’s recommendations around the proposed immigration levy. At the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee the Legislation Advisory Committee recommended that the purpose and the use of the proposed levy contained in this legislation ought to be much more tightly focused. At the moment the potential use of that levy is so broad that it in fact looks a lot more like a tax than a levy.There is an important difference between a tax and a levy. General taxation is something that we empower the Government to carry out through this House and it raises those taxes in order to pay for the general expenses of running the Government. Levies on the other hand are supposed to be for a very specific purpose. The fuel levy for instance goes directly into the National Land Transport Fund and is specifically for the purpose of providing transport infrastructure. The proposed levy in this legislation ought to have a much more defined purpose and a much more defined use than it currently does. That was not the view of the Opposition necessarily; that was the view of the Legislation Advisory Committee. But those proposals were not taken up and a question for the Minister which we would appreciate an answer to is this: why not take up the advice of the committee and narrow the focus of that levy so that it is genuinely a levy and not just another stealth tax to be placed—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Oh no I am now going to apologise to the member because I thought he was straying into the next part of the bill but we did take leave to take it together.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: That is right.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I apologise. No wonder I could not find it.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: I accept the Chairman’s apology. Thank you Mr Chairman. So that is—ha ha!The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I withdraw and apologise yes.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: I am a little taken aback but I will recover. Thank you Mr Chairman. The other areas that we have some concern about are the inclusion of clauses that provide for regulations that override or depart from the primary legislation. That is always a fraught area of concern. The body that is supposed to pass legislation—the body that has the authority to pass laws in this country—is Parliament but there are clauses in this legislation that provide for regulations that override that primary legislation effectively giving the Government the ability to override the will of Parliament at times. Why are those clauses necessary in the legislation? If there is a good reason we would like to hear it from the Minister.This is legislation that is full of very very good intentions. But unfortunately because the advice that was given at the select committee by the submitters was not heeded the bill has ended up being a piece of legislation that in its current form could actually potentially do more harm than good. We on this side of the House have been quite happy sometimes to vote for legislation that we think will do very little or will make only minor changes or may not do any good at all. But as long as it does no harm and if the Government thinks that it might be taking us in the right direction we will support it.Unfortunately we think that this bill in its current form—and again I do recognise that there is a very large Supplementary Order Paper here—has the potential to do quite a bit of harm and to potentially put the people whom it purports to protect in an even more vulnerable position.I have raised some of the areas that we have concerns about and we would appreciate some response from the Minister on those. I have no doubt that other members will be interested in asking the Minister questions as well.JAN LOGIE (Green):I rise to speak in the Committee stage of the Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2). This is a bill that there was a lot of public interest in when it was first introduced because this was the bill that was going to help us as a country to address the very real problem of exploitation of migrant workers. I am sure everyone in this Chamber will remember the stories that were in the media at that time of people being paid a pitiful amount of money well—well—under the minimum wage; of people being sold jobs; of people living in slum conditions and being charged exorbitant rent. They are very real situations of exploitation which we know are ongoing. We have been hearing of a number of stories from Christchurch and Auckland in particular. We have heard many stories from those two areas in particular.So this was the bill that was going to help us solve this problem. We have been following this with a lot of interest because this is a problem that desperately needs solving. I want to thank the Government members for bringing forward this legislation but I just cannot bring myself to thank them because what we have been told from the union which is working most closely with people who are bringing forward claims of exploitation is that this is not going to help. In fact too many provisions in this bill will actually put barriers in front of people coming forward and reporting exploitation.Just to specifically address some of the concerns—I also like my Labour colleague do need to admit that I have not had the chance to read the Supplementary Order Paper and go through that in detail. Maybe that will address some of my concerns but sadly I have been in the Chamber addressing other legislation since it was introduced—[Interruption] And I am hearing from a colleague that it does not address any of our concerns sadly.Our concern is that although this will penalise people who are exploiting migrant workers—and that is a good thing; we absolutely need to be increasing penalties from the kind of slap-over-the-hand penalties that we have at the moment for people exploiting migrant workers—on the other side to be able to find out the information about the exploitation we have to create an enabling environment for workers to come forward to say: “Something is wrong I need help.” What we have heard from pretty much everyone—the union the workers themselves and people of their communities—is that the way to do that would be to build and ensure people have visa protection so that they will not get deported because they have lost their job. This bill fails to do that.So although we talk about setting up community networks to help people to find people to go to we are not protecting their visas or their ability to stay and have a job. Often tragically the exploitation is that they live in the hope that maybe they will find something else and be able to go forward and they continue in that stuck place. And that undermines our local economy and other businesses that are paying people the minimum wage—or hopefully more. So this is something that is a problem for all of us not just the migrant workers—even though they are the ones most woefully affected by this.Another aspect of this bill which is deeply concerning and which has been mentioned by my Labour colleague already is the enhanced search powers for immigration officers which—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I regret to inform the member that the time has come for me to report progress.Debate interrupted.Progress to be reported presently.House resumed.The Chairperson reported the Taxation (KiwiSaver HomeStart and Remedial Matters) Bill with amendment the Social Security Amendment Bill (No 3) with amendment and progress on the Immigration Amendment Bill (No 2).Report adopted.The House adjourned at 9.56 p.m.