Lubeck MarjaMARJA LUBECK (Labour): Thank you Mr Chair. Look that's going to be a very hard act to follow. It's obvious from the Minister of Education's speech before that this Budget makes the investments where they are needed and we are building the foundations for the future. But I am happy to take this call and speak for just a few minutes in this Estimates debate. I'd like to focus on the Vote Labour Market.Now this won't be any surprise to the member for the Coromandel the Hon Scott Simpson because we've had a few of these encounters before but I completely disagree with what he had to say in his assessment of our meeting with the honourable Minister Iain Lees-Galloway. The member for the Coromandel mentioned the word fudging" when he talked about the answer that our Education and Workforce Committee received about the redesign of the air ambulance services. In fact the Minister very eloquently explained to us the process of this ageing helicopter fleet needing to be replaced because it's predominantly single-engine and therefore cannot fly over any urban areas and that comes with obvious problems. The Minister also explained that it was inappropriate for him as a Minister to interfere with basically what is a commercial tendering process. He explained that it was up to the individual trusts to engage with the process so perhaps the member Scott Simpson wasn't entirely listening when the Minister explained that.The other member that wasn't listening when there were issues explained was Nicola Willis. I'll say it again—it's been said many times—that it's important to distinguish as the Minister said on page 13 of the verbatim record of this meeting between a Labour manifesto and a Government of three parties.Nicola Willis: Oh that's a great excuse!MARJA LUBECK: I don't know what's funny about that but maybe at some stage that will get through to the Opposition. [Interruption] No perhaps not.Now I would like to also talk about the numbers because I have to say that the report given by the chair of our committee was a little bit light on the figures that were supposed to be given to the House. So the appropriations sought for Vote Labour Market in 2018/2019 are just over $2 billion. That is in fact a 6.8 percent increase on the 2017/2018 estimated actual spending. Across the portfolios Budget 2018 has appropriated $194 million in operating funding for 2018/2019 through the 2021/2022 financial years $28 million in operating funding largely for cost pressures in the 2017/2018 financial year and $20 million in capital funding. Now we had two Ministers presenting to our quite new committee and these Ministers—Minister Hipkins and Minister Lees-Galloway—really impressed our committee. They were obviously very well briefed on their portfolios and they didn't have to defer many questions to the officials so I would like to commend both Ministers—Hipkins and Lees-Galloway—for their respective performances. We heard about the challenges they identified and what they are proposing to do to ensure that we overcome these challenges and personally I find it a lot more reassuring than the messages we heard from the Opposition when they were in Government basically telling us that everything was hunky-dory; we should just keep going like we were going and nothing needed to change.Now the economic forecast shows that we have a modern productive sustainable economy under this Government's plan. Growth is forecast to average at 3 percent in the next few years. We are forecast to deliver more jobs and address the cost of living for Kiwi families. We are ensuring that workers are paid fairly. Under the current labour market conditions wages should be increasing but that's not happening and in fact we see a declining share of economic growth going to working people. So what we've done is we're putting the minimum wage up and we're also making the workplace fairer by restoring core employment rights and strengthening collective bargaining through the bill that's currently going through our committee the Employment Relations Amendment Bill.We are also lifting the capability and capacity of the labour inspectorate over the next three years and the Minister explained that the plan is to double the size of the labour inspectorate by the end of this term. This will help with ensuring that vulnerable workers are receiving their minimum rights. It will also ensure that the majority of employers—who are in fact acting legally—can compete in a fair market. We have seen that this is not the case at the moment. Very clearly as an example is the current Wellington bus situation where employers have to tender for contracts and therefore we see this race to the bottom. So therefore I support this bill."