Draft transcript - Tuesday 28 April 2015First draft - subject to correction.Draft transcript - Tuesday 28 April 2015Services for businessSpeech - DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East)DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): I would like to just congratulate everybody for the way that they are going to engage in these debates. I think that they will actually give an opportunity for a bit of wide-ranging debate rather than the traditional way that we have approached these issues. When we look at this debate here there are seven issues there or a number of issues anyway that are quite broad and cover a range of issues. I would want to just first of all cap off that previous debate as the chair of the Finance and Expenditure Committee. When we look at economic development and some of those issues that are listed here in the services for business debate it is very important that you have that economic environment in place. That is what this Government has been doing through working towards Budget surplus through getting unemployment down through keeping interest rates low through keeping inflation low and through seeing strong economic growth. All those things are important for business because the environment that we as Government deliver for business is the most important thing that we can do. It is much more important than any one-off decision that we may have around what we prefer as the business of the day that we should be supporting or the nature of any changes to the way that those businesses direct their affairs. There is one issue in there that is quite an interesting one in our list which is immigration. It is not necessarily something that the Finance and Expenditure Committee deals with. I dealt with it previously on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and I notice the chair here Mr Jonathan Young—a very good chair he is as well. I just wanted to possibly have a little bit of a talk about immigration. I think that in this House we have a very restrictive approach to immigration in New Zealand and we should be looking at a broader way that we as a country could develop and take more migrants in to enable this country to develop. The changing face of New Zealand that would be the result of that would be something that I think would add value and diversity to our country going forward. We are providing an economic environment that people will want to be part of. That human pool of talent that is out there and that talent of young people around the world who are looking for an opportunity and a future will see New Zealand as a place to come. They see us as somewhere that is free and open that has a strong economic environment that allows them the ability to prosper and that allows their families to grow up with the opportunities that they might not have had in their home country. And yet we deny so many people that opportunity and as a country we deny ourselves the ability to have the strength that they would bring to this economy and this country going forward. Over time that will change. In 50 years’ time we will not have these kinds of debates. As you have seen a globalised world evolve you will see a globalised capital world of talent evolve. There will be no limits between countries around human capital; it will be something that will travel freely between countries as they all strive to get the best people to come to their country. For New Zealand it is also important that we actually take part in that process. Imagine the city of Auckland at 4 million to 5 million people being competitive with Sydney and Melbourne. Imagine the cities of Hamilton and Tauranga at 500000 or 600000 people. Imagine if we built a city in between Hamilton and Auckland. Imagine those kinds of changes that would arise if we had a greater immigration policy. That is the future of building economic growth in this country through having a more modern and progressive approach to our Government to our planning and to our development of our people. Those people will come with energy passion and desire. They will come with the ability to work hard. They will come with a desire for education. They will come with a desire to make their children have the best opportunities. That is the future of New Zealand. That is an opportunity where we can leapfrog our neighbours as well. Many countries will fail to take advantage of that opportunity. They will have situations where they are very restrictive in their approach to their country’s population growth.[Continuation line: That will limit their ability to grow as an economic base.]DAVID BENNETTThat will limit their ability to grow as an economic base. It would be sad if any party in this House were to take that approach because that would be to deny New Zealand our future and would be contrary to any good economic judgment. That party will not be here in 50 years’ time. That is why we will not have to worry about that.[Continuation line: David Clark]Services for businessSpeech - Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North)Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): This is the Government of gerrymandering “johnmandering” and “joycemandering”. It is a Government that is failing to achieve its own export goals as it meddles in the economy looks after its mates and fails to produce a vision for New Zealand’s future that can take the country forward. We have seen Rod Oram’s column on the weekend drawing attention to the Government’s failure to achieve its own target of having 40 percent of our GDP being exports. The Government started at 30 percent and it is going backwards rapidly. It wanted to achieve 40 percent by 2025. Now having admitted failure on its path to that target it is talking about revising the target downward. That is how desperate this Government gets. When it fails to achieve targets it starts wanting to revise them downwards. It is a Government that is out of touch and out of ideas. The dairy price drop has hit it hard and it will hit the dairy industry hard but this Government has got to stop blaming the dairy farmers every time the economy gets tough. That is what they do over there in the Government benches. The members blame the dairy farmers every time the going gets tough for them. Well it is not the dairy farmers’ fault. The dairy farmers take on the risk every day and they do it because they have got skin in the game and because they believe in their businesses.[Continuation line: But this Government has failed to diversify the economy so we lurch]Dr DAVID CLARKBut this Government has failed to diversify the economy so we lurch from one commodity price boom to the next. The dairy price has dropped an astonishing 51 percent since February last year and that leaves our economy vulnerable because this Government has failed to diversify. It is shifting our product mix from value to volume. By its own admission it has changed the statistics that it uses to measure our export success away from the value of the products we are selling to the sheer volume. Probably it was doing that in an attempt to make itself look good but it has got egg on its face now. Of course the challenge for this Government is that it is not going to achieve that target and now that it tries to dress it up and the public knows that it is trying to dress it up it has got to try to introduce another spin doctoring effort. Of course it has the ministry for it. The Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment is struggling to battle Team Joyce in the office of the Minister who so often meddles with its business and its best advice. The ministry has 50 spin doctors sitting there across the road; $5 million worth of salaries sitting with the spin doctors across the road. And they probably need it to be honest because this Government has meddled so much in its affairs it is very difficult for the ministry to achieve the targets the Government has set—that 40 percent of GDP. Asked whether it was achievable the chief executive said it was an aspirational and ambitious target that is useful to aim for. But he could not say that the ministry has full confidence it can be achieved as so many factors are beyond the Government’s control. This is a Government that has cheapened the word “aspiration”. In this Government’s eyes it now means unachievable and that is a Government that is out of ideas. It is thick on spin and low on solutions. In fact Steven Joyce used to be considered the Minister for Everything and now we see that he has the reverse Midas touch. He used to be the man with the pitch. He used to be the pitch-hitter he used to be the man with the pitch. Now everything he touches turns to shemozzle. That is a man who has got no ideas and sees our economy going down the gurgler.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! Come back.Dr DAVID CLARK: I come back to many of the examples of this behaviour in respect of the Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment and in respect of economic development Skycity being the most infamous of them all. It is where the Minister met behind closed doors with one of the bidders for the convention centre—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order!Dr DAVID CLARK: This was covered in the financial review as you will understand questions were certainly raised about the probity of that and the words of the Auditor-General around the deal being neither transparent nor even-handed. It was certainly something that came up in the financial review and that is an indictment on the National Government that particular dirty deal the Skycity deal for the convention centre which is supposed to produce by an independent report 18 net jobs for the economy. That was when it was still an international convention centre. Of course it has been scaled back. It may no longer produce 18 net jobs for the economy. The Government needs to front up and tell us how that has changed with time. Of course it is the Government that brought us Oravida. It is the Government of disgraced MPs teapot tapes and the Government Communications Security Bureau. It is a Government that is failing to meet the promise it set itself of higher standards.[Continuation line: Kaye]Services for businessSpeech - Hon NIKKI KAYE (Minister for ACC)Hon NIKKI KAYE (Minister for ACC): I am very pleased to take a call in this new debate around services for business because what we know on this side of the Chamber is that in order to have decent services for businesses and for many Government departments to be delivering initiatives that create wealth in New Zealand we need a good business environment. That means Resource Management Act reform that means labour reform and that means projects like the international convention centre—all of which members on the Opposition side of the Chamber opposed. So for them to stand up and lecture us on services for business when they have opposed Resource Management Act reform argued for massive increases in the minimum wage opposed the international convention centre opposed major infrastructure projects and advocated for increasing a whole lot of taxes is actually not fair. We know on this side of the Chamber that we have got a range of initiatives which have been set out in a number of these reports by these ministries that we are doing. They include as I have already mentioned $326 million around National Science Challenges. They include major infrastructure investment. But the one that I want to deal with was just dealt with by the previous speaker David Clark and that is exports. So again we are getting a lecture from the Opposition around trade and exports. Well let us actually look at the facts. If we look at the facts in terms of increasing exports our exports increased by 16.73 percent in 2008. Also we have engaged in several major initiatives. We have got the Chinese Taipei agreement which came into force on 1 December 2013. That has seen New Zealand exports grow by 17.9 percent. Then we had a lecture around diversification of exports. Well actually—and I know that Mr Joyce has been saying this in the House a number of times—although primary products have been a major factor in this increase we have seen growth in other sectors. For instance in the information technology sector we saw a 9.4 percent growth in the 10 years to reach $723 million. That is a significant growth in that area and part of that is actually a range of initiatives that we have been involved in. We have been involved in investing a whole lot of money not only around the skills and training in some of these sectors. That has been not only in our tertiary sector the investment we have seen there; we have also seen other initiatives in New Zealand around things like the Wynyard Quarter Innovation Precinct and all of that is about supporting that information and communications technology sector to ensure that we have that diversification. But we also need free trade deals and no one has a better record than this Government. Whether it is Taipei or whether it is Korea those are things that have been initiated by our Government but we have also seen coming into force the Chinese free-trade agreement. And just to give you some figures on that under our Government in terms of merchandise exports to China they have almost quadrupled from $2.5 billion in 2008 to $9.9 billion in 2014. Again I was with the Prime Minister in China. He has been incredibly active in that relationship and part of trade is actually about building those relationships. So you have on that side the members of the party that says no to everything. They say no to Resource Management Act reform they say no to international convention centre they say yes to more taxes they say yes to more regulation and we are the party of getting things done like the international convention centre like pushing investment and innovation and science funding like more free trade deals. We are the party that is sending the country in the right direction. They are in the party that advocates the opposite.[Continuation line: Graham]Services for businessSpeech - Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green)Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green): The Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee’s annual review of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s performance and operations for the year ending March 2014 is before us today. The role of the ministry as stated in the Committee’s report is “to promote and protect New Zealand’s interests overseas. The ministry provides advice on international relations. It works to advance and protect New Zealand’s security and trade interests. It administers New Zealand’s overseas aid programme.” So says the report but this leaves much unexplored. It does not make clear the extent to which New Zealand in the 21st century regards the promotion and protection of our interests as dependent on global competition or global cooperation—“punching above our weight” to quote various Cabinet Ministers triumphantly returning home. It implies that the Government regards the international community as a potentially threatening environment. The report addressed five major areas: the security situation in Iraq our work on the Security Council Syrian refugees trade negotiations and diplomatic immunity. These are all important issues but the annual review is selective and therefore significant for what is omitted. If this is the legislature’s annual review of the executive’s conduct of our international relations we have a long way to go before we have a comprehensive world view. Where for example is the acknowledgement that the world is now in a global ecological crisis? Where is the recognition that the global population will have increased sevenfold in 2 centuries after 100 centuries of stable numbers? Where is the recognition of the pressure this is placing on the planetary resources the scientific work on the planetary boundaries beyond which we cannot proceed if we are to pass on a sustainable world to the next generation having breached four of the nine such boundaries already? Where is the recognition of the latest finding by scientists that there is now a 10 percent chance of the global temperature increase exceeding 6 degrees Celsius which would simply make the planet uninhabitable for human and most forms of advanced life—a 10 percent chance? If these issues seem too huge and too abstract for the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee of the New Zealand Parliament to address then the question has to be asked: who will address them? Who in New Zealand will address the future of the planet and the fate of New Zealand as a result?[Continuation line: who is responsible for New Zealand’s role in the collective task]Dr KENNEDY GRAHAMWho is responsible for New Zealand’s role in the collective task of global policy making? If it is not our foreign affairs parliamentary committee who is it? I have just returned from Europe as part of the Speaker’s tour: France Ireland Northern Ireland Poland and Germany. It was a useful visit and the delegation learned a great deal. One of the main lessons was the sophistication with which European parliaments address foreign policy. They deal with global and regional issues with serious intent: climate change Security Council reform Ukraine the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant  Iran refugee migration. They are all dealt with in each parliament’s committees in greater depth than we do it here. And how is the global climate change dealt with here in New Zealand? In the Local Government and Environment Committee . A related issue is the debating style of the parliaments over there. The very physical nature of their debating chambers facilitates consensus through their hemispherical nature and the central podium in the front from which MPs address all colleagues including their own. This compares favourably with our own adversarial structure with two main front benches directly facing each other in trench-warfare style which gives rise to some fairly puerile behaviour from time to time and dysfunctional decision making. So democracy would I suggest be enhanced by the simple expedient of a bit of carpentry here in the House. Just as we jettisoned the British electoral system in favour of the German model so we should change the British carpentry for the European model. So I suggest three improvements for our democracy: change the physical nature of our debating chamber into a hemispherical shape; hold an open debate on foreign affairs once every quarter; and ensure that the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee is responsible for specified global issues including the global commons such as climate change planetary boundaries weapons of mass destruction and others. Thank you.[Continuation line: David Shearer]Services for businessSpeech - DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert)DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): Keeping on with the topic of foreign affairs: the Government has lost its way in this particular area. I look at the comments that were made by John Key just a few weeks ago about a deployment to Iraq. He mentioned human rights and I was surprised because I had never heard him mention human rights before. So I went to the Parliamentary Library  and I asked: “How often has John Key mentioned human rights in the course of his time in Parliament?” The answer is once—once other than questions—just the once when he moved against Zimbabwe back in 2007. It was a big call a very big call but not really keeping up with what he was claiming and accusing about going into Iraq. And yet here we are with him about to go into Saudi Arabia where human rights are called “discrepancies”—discrepancies. I am in favour of a free trade agreement with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States  but it is our duty and our obligation with the treaties and the various agreements that we have signed up to under international law to make sure that we mention and take that to the table as well. The people of New Zealand are certainly not convinced that we are going into Iraq because of human rights; 50 percent of them believe we are going there simply because our mates have asked us to and John Key cannot say no—like a lot of other things that he does not oblige to say no to either. Mr McCully  who was asked yesterday about Indonesia and the executions—do we support executions? No of course we do not here in New Zealand. But here is what he had to say about executions. He said it is a very concerning situation and we will have something formal to say about it. When will he say that? When the two people accused are dead? When they have been executed? Probably. Of Nepal he said with regard to our group going off to help—our urban search and rescuers going off to help—that New Zealand stands ready. That is great except that everybody else left and went there and we were still standing ready. Unfortunately for the good people and the experience that they hold from dealing with Christchurch they did not get to go to Nepal. I believe that as a result of that we were not able to share our expertise and why? It is because we have sat there and dithered. In Vanuatu  Cyclone Pam hit on 13 March. On 23 March 10 days later we sent our ship. Australia had already sent a ship. Australia had got its flights in to Vanuatu before us. We know that every year cyclones and earthquakes are some things that are likely to occur somewhere throughout the world and yet we do not have the ability to operate as quickly as other countries in the world. It is not about a race. It is about getting our act together so that we are able to be down there on the ground doing the job that we know we are good at. And as a result the people who are in harm’s way will be able to benefit. We need to pre-position. We need to act. We need to stop dithering. We need to take a firm stance on the issues that this Government is not taking a firm stance on. Human rights is one of those issues. John Key needs to mention human rights more than just when he is about to send troops off to Iraq on an unpopular deployment because he is trying to please his mates. And when it comes to the Trans-Pacific Partnership  we have the prince of arrogance himself Mr Tim Groser swanning around saying: “I do not need to talk to the country. I do not need to discuss this with anybody else because I know everything there is to know about trade and I can make that decision on everybody’s behalf.” Wrong Mr Groser; you do have an obligation. You do have an obligation to talk to the rest of the country. You do have an obligation to sit down with civil society and actually explain what it is that we are getting ourselves into. New Zealand used to stand for something and now it stands for arrogance and dithering.[Continuation line: Todd McClay]Services for businessSpeech - Hon TODD McCLAY (Minister of Revenue)Hon TODD McCLAY (Minister of Revenue): It gives me pleasure to take a call in this part of the debate to talk about foreign affairs and trade two issues that are very important to New Zealand and indeed this House. I will just thank the last speaker for his support of Murray McCully and his sterling work almost single-handedly—although Mr McCully is very modest he would share the credit with others—to get so many countries of the world to recognise the importance of New Zealand what a fair-minded country we are how we do go out and at an appropriate time in the best way possible speak up for others who are less fortunate than ourselves. For Mr McCully to get all of those votes so that we could become a member of the Security Council of the United Nations for the next 2-year period—that is where many of these discussions will take place and need to take place as well. We got so many more votes than so many other countries in that first ballot because of what New Zealand is thought of. It is because the country as a whole is not like some parties in this Parliament. It is not about lecturing other people about just the rights and the wrongs or telling them that they are always wrong and that we as a country are always right. That may be the case in this Parliament sometimes I guess when you feel must oppose absolutely everything. But I would say to Mr Kennedy Graham —and I do have a lot of respect for him on many of these issues—that I do not think changing the woodwork in this place is actually going to deliver the level of utopia that he hopes for the world and New Zealand’s place in it unfortunately. This is a place for robust debate; it does not matter which direction you are focused on. I advise him to be as critical of his colleagues as he is of the Government because that does not happen very often yet he suggests that in parliaments in Europe that is the case. The Government will do a very good job on behalf of New Zealand representing all of New Zealand on the Security Council. I do note that Mr Shearer travelled with Mr McCully to the United Nations in New York  where the final vote took place. The votes were hardly counted before he put out a press release saying how wonderful it was to be there and claiming a bit of the credit. But we do not mind sharing it and as I said Mr McCully too would share the credit where it is deserved. That press release told us who the Labour Party thought deserved it. When it comes to trade we are a trading nation. We will not raise incomes we will not have more for the Government to be able to provide to New Zealanders by way of services—the things New Zealanders demand and deserve—by merely trading with ourselves. Indeed if we look at many of the products that we produce in New Zealand we produce too many of them to be able to consume ourselves. Just take dairy for a moment. I know that the Green Party is not a big fan of the dairy industry but if we had to consume all of the dairy produced in New Zealand we would be bigger people.[Continuation line: We will only increase and promote a better standard of living]Hon TODD McCLAYWe will increase and promote a better standard of living and quality of life in New Zealand only by trading with others. We are extremely fortunate to sit on the rim of what at least I think will in my lifetime be one of the largest growths of disposable income in the world—that is the wider continent of Asia—a billion people in China and a billion people in India whose incomes every day are rising. We face some choices as with everything but we are a trading nation and we need high-quality agreements to make sure we have good access to these markets so that our producers in New Zealand and more than that the people who work for these companies in New Zealand can benefit from preferential access in many cases to a very large group of people who want to consume as their incomes increase the things we are so very good at producing. The only way we get that is with high-quality trade agreements and there have been a number of them. In fact I would recognise the work of the previous Labour Government when it came to starting moving through and concluding a negotiation with China. In fact it was Mr Goff as the trade Minister who did most of that work at that time. I actually feel for Mr Goff at this moment because he knows the importance of trade to New Zealand. He supports good high-quality trade agreements. He knows that you cannot talk about all of the issues around a negotiation at every point in time but he also knows that there is a process for this Parliament to follow when an agreement is negotiated and concluded. The reason I feel for him so much actually having a lot of respect for him and his lifetime of work around trade is that he now finds that he is in a party that is turning its back on those New Zealand companies and turning its back on the importance of trade negotiation. The Government has been—Sue Moroney: Rubbish.Hon TODD McCLAY: The member says “Rubbish.” but actually go and look at what your leader says and stand up behind him.[continuation line: Lees-Galloway]Services for businessSpeech - IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North)IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): Today is Workers’ Memorial Day. It is the day when working people and business leaders and others come together across the country to mourn and commemorate those who have been lost at work those people who went to work and never came back home again as well as those who have been injured at work and also to re-energise and re-invigorate the fight to ensure that the living get to work in safer workplaces. Last year 47 people were killed at work. So far this year 10 people have been killed whilst at work. Although I acknowledge that this Government has taken health and safety more seriously in the wake of the Pike River disaster and there is health and safety reform legislation going through the House right now we have to maintain a laser-like focus on accountability for health and safety and encouraging workers to participate in health and safety and to have their voices heard in the workplace. It is also incumbent on all of us not just to rely on legislation but to carry out safe working practices and to encourage better health and safety practices so that we will see fewer people killed and injured in our workplaces. We have a workforce in New Zealand of around 2375000 people. The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment is responsible now for the labour inspectorate which is responsible for ensuring that that workforce gets access to the minimum standards and requirements that it is entitled to under legislation. The International Labour Organization has a guideline for how many labour inspectors we should have. As a developed industrialised nation the International Labour Organization recommends that we have one labour inspector for every 10000 workers. With our current workforce that would amount to 237 labour inspectors. At the time of the period that this review considers we had just 35 labour inspectors. I acknowledge that it has now increased to 41. That is less than one-fifth less than 20 percent the number of labour inspectors that the International Labour Organization recommends that we have. Even the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions has not recommended that we seek to hit that mark of one to 10000. It recommended 2 years ago that we double the number at the time of 35 to 70 and that we double again so that by now the number of labour inspectors we would have would be around 140. That would be one labour inspector for every 1600 workers. This Government has not made any effort at all to get anywhere near that number. So what we see every day in our workplaces across New Zealand are minimum standards rules around the minimum wage the expectation that workers have a written employment agreement rules around the fact that you are not supposed to dock a worker’s pay if theft occurs such as people driving away from petrol stations—those sorts of things happen every day because we do not have a ministry or a labour inspectorate that is sufficiently resourced to enforce the legislation that is in place. So although I am happy that the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment is working on issues to do with zero-hour contracts and that the Minister has indicated that he plans to change the law to somehow deal with the issue of people having their pay docked when theft occurs—although it is illegal now; I do not know why the law needs to be changed—and all those law changes are welcome as are greater penalties for employers who breach those minimum standards my question to the Government is how it actually plans to enforce those law changes when it cannot even enforce the laws that are in place today because it refuses to resource our labour inspectorate and the ministry responsible for it to a sufficient enough extent that workers can get the minimum rights they are entitled to. I was talking to a worker just the other day who has no written employment agreement and gets paid for probably 4 out of the 5 days a week they work. Yet they are scared to take that to the labour inspectorate because they are fearful that they will lose their job and they cannot—[continuation line: Chris Bishop]Services for businessSpeech - CHRIS BISHOP (National)CHRIS BISHOP (National): I want to focus my remarks on two particular aspects of the debate so far and that is firstly on science and innovation and secondly on internationalisation. It relates to the foreign affairs component of the debate we are having today and the Government’s financial statements. The story of the New Zealand economy and of successive New Zealand Governments really over the last 30 years is of the internationalisation of the New Zealand economy an increasing recognition firstly to be fair to Labour by the fourth Labour Government and then by Governments from that point that New Zealand cannot sit down at the bottom of the world and insulate itself from global economic trends and from a market economy and cannot put up barriers behind which the New Zealand economy should stand. The future of the New Zealand economy is one that is globally competitive that is based on price competition where we try and produce goods and services that the rest of the world wants and where we try and be open and accessible to the rest of the world not only in terms of people moving to New Zealand but also in terms of capital that they bring with them. This Government has been very focused on continuing along that path that successive New Zealand Governments have gone on because the future for New Zealand is one where we are increasingly internationalised. That is why this Government is so focused on things like free-trade agreements. We have signed a closer economic partnership with Taiwan. It is why we are so focused including in the Budget statements that we are talking about and no doubt in the Budget coming up on concluding the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal. It is a real shame in some ways that really the only party that has a wholehearted and fully fledged commitment to free trade in this Parliament these days is the National Party and the National-led Government. A Trans-Pacific Partnership deal where we can sell more of our goods and services to some of those countries on the Pacific Rim with us like the United States and like some of the countries in Asia would absolutely be in our national interest and I believe that we need to continue down that path. We need to continue to open up markets overseas like where the Prime Minister is at the moment with the Gulf Cooperation Council. Another important thing that the Budget in 2013-14 gave effect to was an increased drive by this Government for international education so bringing more international students to New Zealand but also New Zealand universities doing more offshore to earn revenue for New Zealand. For me it is not so much about the revenue that international education brings in to our universities although no doubt this is important and we do have a drive as a Government to get that revenue up to double it by 2025; actually it is more important than that. It is about the people to people links that New Zealand students create when they go offshore. It is about sending New Zealand students into China into Viet Nam into those ASEAN countries to learn more about those countries and it is about bringing those students from Saudi Arabia and from Viet Nam and from—Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.CHRIS BISHOP: I am delighted to take this 1 minute and 53 seconds. When I was speaking before the dinner break I was talking about the importance to New Zealand of international education and making the point that it is not just about the revenue that New Zealand universities and the New Zealand economy gets from international students coming to New Zealand but it is about the building of those people-to-people links that New Zealand gets. Ultimately I think in the longer term that will be the best effect of this Government’s very focused drive to increase international education. It is a good thing that we have Indian students coming to New Zealand it is a good thing that we have Chinese students coming and it is a good thing that we have students from Chile which Minister Joyce just announced the other day coming to study in New Zealand secondary schools and universities because ultimately New Zealand’s future is of one that is internationally connected and a globally connected economy. I also flagged at the start that I wanted to talk about science and innovation. That is something that I as a resident of the Hutt Valley and a list MP based in that area feel very strongly about because the Hutt Valley is really making a name for itself as a place and a destination built on science innovation maths engineering and manufacturing. In fact in just a couple of months we have the very first inaugural Hutt Valley science technology engineering maths and manufacturing festival. I am really looking forward to that and the first inaugural technology valley awards. This Government has placed a real emphasis on science and innovation. We have Callaghan Innovation based right in the Hutt Valley. We have also placed an emphasis on things like information and communications graduate schools. We heard talk earlier from a Green Party member about how the Government is not investing in things like information and communications and fast-growing sectors of the New Zealand economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Government’s $28.6 million investment in Budget 2013 and Budget 2014 in information and communications graduate schools is a testament to that commitment that we have to growing the high-tech sector of the New Zealand economy. I could go on. I could talk about things like our proposal to allow start-up firms to cash out their tax losses.[Continuation line: Sue Moroney]Services for businessSpeech - SUE MORONEY (Labour)SUE MORONEY (Labour): An excellent choice it is too because I want to speak about ACC in this debate on the annual reviews. I want to start off by saying something that I never thought I would say in this Chamber and that is that I agree with John Key because John Key has claimed that the surplus is now an artificial target. Well boy oh boy is it ever artificial. It is so artificial that they are using smoke and mirrors to try and obtain a surplus and they are still probably going to miss it. The smoke and mirrors that they are mainly using is the overcharging of ACC levies to every worker and every company in New Zealand and the Government knows it. The Government by its own admission—by its own admission—ignored the recommendation made by ACC itself to drop the ACC levies. It ignored that recommendation because it wanted to in Judith Collins’ words “get to surplus”. So let us just investigate what that means because that is what the select committee did when the ACC board came before it for its annual review. We asked the ACC board what the impact was of the Government’s overcharging of levies and this is what it had to say. I am actually quoting from the financial condition report 2014 of ACC. It said: “The higher than recommended Work and Earners’ Account levies mean that these Accounts will all other things being equal accumulate further funds in excess of the Board’s funding target.” What that means is that the Government is putting its sticky fingers into the pockets of workers and companies to the tune of $350 million a year—Dr David Clark: How much?SUE MORONEY: It is $350 million. They do not need to cover accidents and injuries because they are using this technique to try and make it look as though the Crown’s books are in surplus. So I agree with John Key; it is completely artificial because of course as we all know the money that is sitting there—the riches that are embarrassing the ACC board that are sitting in these funds untouched—cannot be used on anything else. They cannot be used on anything else in the Crown accounts. They are simply fat sitting in the ACC’s accounts against its wishes by the way. The ACC board recommended substantial cuts to ACC levies but that Government ignored it because it has failed—it has failed—to get to surplus by growing the economy. That would be the traditional way to get the Government’s books into surplus. That is what every New Zealander would want in terms of getting to surplus. New Zealanders want to get to surplus because they want to see a growing economy that delivers that. They do not want to see businesses and workers ripped off to the extent of the $350 million that they are being overcharged in ACC levies in order to try and get to surplus. Yet it looks as though even though they are using this false method to get there the Government is still going to fail to get to surplus so badly has its fiscal credibility plummeted. A lot of credibility has plummeted over the course of the last few weeks. John Key’s credibility I think lies in tatters but so does the National Government’s financial credibility. There is no doubt about that. In those burgeoning accounts in the work account—that is the account that all businesses pay into—there is 140 percent of what is needed to pay for accidents and injuries sitting in that account. In the earners’ account the one that workers pay into 130 percent of what is needed is in there. After the gradual-process injuries are taken into account there is still more than is needed sitting in those accounts. Who is out of pocket? Well it is the companies and the workers. Here is the bizarre thing about it: if those companies and those workers had their money back in their pockets rather than being overcharged in ACC levies that would drive economic growth because they would be out spending that money. Companies have said they have told me that they would be using that money for research and development for giving their workers a wage increase and for employing more workers. An independent report said that they would be using it for up to 700 more workers in the economy. That is the bizarre thing about what the Government is doing. Then there are the motor vehicle levies.[Continuation line: James Shaw]Services for businessSpeech - JAMES SHAW (Green)JAMES SHAW (Green): Tēnā koe. The 2013/14 annual review for the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment outlines activities that the ministry has undertaken supporting the Government’s economic development strategy of increasing deep-sea oil exploration fracking for gas and coal extraction. This particular plank of the Government’s economic strategy has a number of consequences. First of all it increases our dependence on oil imports which is currently costing the country about $5.3 billion a year contributing to our balance of payments deficit. Secondly it decreases our resilience to global shocks such as fluctuations in the price of oil and the risk of stranded assets. Thirdly and most importantly it adds to New Zealand’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions globally which are of course in turn increasing climate change. Climate change is a significant drag on the New Zealand economy. New Zealand’s worst storm in 60 years in 2013 left 30000 Wellington homes without power some for up to a week and set the city back $4 million in direct clean-up costs. Around the country it resulted in over $31 million of insurance claims. But that pales in comparison to the hit that we took as a result of our worst drought in 70 years. Scientists from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd (NIWA) and Victoria University of Wellington found in a peer-reviewed study that the severity of the drought was due to climate change.[Continuation line: This drought cost the New Zealand economy over $1.5 billion.]JAMES SHAWThis drought cost the New Zealand economy over $1.5 billion. Jobs are being lost in the tourism sector as glacier melt melts not just the glaciers but also eradicates the businesses that are guiding tourists up to them. An industry that is close to my heart personally the snow sports industry is under threat as snow cover retreats up the mountains and the seasons are getting shorter and this will worsen over the coming two decades. I note that the Minister of Tourism is completely silent about these job losses in his sector and the challenge facing this important part of New Zealand’s tourism sector. We are already paying the price of climate change. Farmers are already paying the price of climate change. Our tourism operators are already paying the price of climate change. Top Kiwi scientists are telling us that we will be experiencing these worst ever – type of events every single year—longer deeper droughts extreme rain and floods incredibly powerful winds. The thing is that while we are investing in sunset industries that expose New Zealand to ever-increasing risk we are missing the economic opportunity of a lifetime—an economic opportunity that is taking the rest of the world by storm so to speak. The global renewable energy market is estimated to be worth about $20 billion by 2020. Why is exporting our already extreme competence in this area not a core part of the Government’s economic development strategy? The global industry for converting waste into value is estimated to be worth about $200 billion and New Zealand is nowhere to be seen in that. Upgrading every New Zealand home to be thermally efficient would save us around $800 million a year in unnecessary energy costs and would increase our resilience to extreme weather events. Investing in distributed energy via a world-class smart grid would save us about $3.6 billion by 2030 and would turn people who currently consume and spend into people who produce and earn. This is just a sample of the opportunities that we could be taking up and participating in. If we did we would be more resilient more self-sufficient and have a better balance of payments. But most important when it comes to climate change we would be part of the solution and not part of the problem.[Continuation line: Paul Goldsmith]Services for businessSpeech - Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs)Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Over the dinner break I have been catching upon the National Business Review and I came across an interesting article here in relation to the latest IMF World Economic Outlook which estimates that advanced economies are expected to average 1.5 percent annual GDP growth over the next 5 years from 2015 to 2020—1.5 percent. New Zealand a developed country is expecting to grow on average 3 percent over the next 3 years so at double the rate that the IMF is expecting the rest of the OECD countries to be growing. That to me exemplifies why I am so proud to be part of this Government—its economic record is second to none and doing very well. The question is why growth is so weak in so many countries around the world. The answer is that investment is sluggish and that is because businesses around particularly Europe and many other parts of the world at the moment lack the confidence to invest. That is a puzzle because when you look around you see almost negative interest rates in some parts of the world. Money is cheap and yet businesses are still not investing significantly to grow their economy. The puzzle is why that is and it is because there is a lack of confidence. To me the best thing that a Government can do anywhere around the world is provide stable predictable Government and that leads to confidence and that is why you get businesses growing and investing and it is investing that leads to jobs. When we look back over the last year where 80000 jobs have been created in New Zealand we are in the middle of a jobs boom in this country and every family around—Dr David Clark: Why is unemployment higher than it was during the recession?Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well 80000 jobs were developed in the last year and 217000 jobs were created in this economy in the last 5 years and it is those jobs that are enabling young men and women in this country to be able to get up in the morning and go to work and come back with some money in contrast with so many other young people around the world at the moment who are facing high levels of unemployment. That is something that I am proud of. I wanted to focus on the services to business area which we are supposed to be focusing on in this period and the areas that I am responsible for particularly in the financial markets where we are working hard particularly with the significant changes in the Financial Markets Conduct Act in the last year which we are bedding in this year. The most important thing that businesses need is access to capital to grow. We are hoping to build confidence in capital markets in New Zealand by improving the quality of disclosure in investments and creating a regime that can build confidence in investment to strengthen the governance of financial products—and we have done that in many detailed ways—and thirdly to enable more innovative and flexible methods of capital raising. We have seen some real progress being made in the crowd funding area over the last few months which is opening up a new avenue for smaller fast-growing countries to access capital to grow. We are expecting the next market to develop in the stock exchange which will provide a new opportunity for middle-sized businesses and so on and the programme develops so that those businesses have more access to capital to grow their business. We want financial markets to be supported by clear predictable rules that enable investors to make confident judgments about the risks and returns that they have. Related to that is the review of financial advisers that we have got underway at the moment. We have had the terms of reference out for the last few months and I expect to be bringing some suggestions over the next few months in the area of financial advisers which is again a very important area when New Zealanders have been in the habit of investing most of their money in residential property. That is a good thing for many households but we want to enable New Zealanders to feel more confident to invest in financial products and so the financial advisers’ regime is an important element in that. I do just want to touch again briefly on competition law because if we are trying to raise living standards in this country we can grow the economy but we can also make each dollar that people have go further by having a competitive domestic market in all sorts of industries across the economy. That requires good competition law which roots out cartel behaviour and which deals effectively with misuse of market power and that is why we are at the moment bringing through our cartels legislation and we are also going to be reviewing section 36 of the Commerce Act.[Continuation line: David Clark]Services for businessSpeech - Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North)Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): Well we have heard another speech from a tired arrogant out-of-touch Government. The Government members have the rhetoric but they do not have the ideas any more. We hear about capital markets reform and we are seeing that it is not happening the way it should be. This Government is a Government that reads the National Business Review in the dinner break rather than talking to ordinary New Zealanders who know that this country is struggling to get ahead and that the ordinary people who are working hard are being left behind. When we do see some signs of economic growth—some tentative shoots—it is the people in the middle who are missing out. It is a tired out-of-touch and arrogant Government that is failing to achieve its own targets. I talked in my earlier contribution about the failure to achieve growth in exports as a proportion of GDP. That was discussed extensively in the financial review that I was a part of. This Government set itself the goal of shifting from 30 percent of exports to 40 percent of exports as a proportion of GDP and that number is something that it is now in fact trying to retreat from because it cannot achieve its own targets. It has also talked about achieving surplus for a couple of elections now. It is about to have its seventh Budget and to fail to reach surplus yet again. It is failing to achieve its own targets yet again. New Zealanders are losing trust in the promises of a Government that always promises jam tomorrow and that has failed to deliver. I want to talk about regional development which was another thing that came up in the “MBIE” financial review—Sue Moroney: “Mobie”.Dr DAVID CLARK: “Mobie”—my colleague corrects me; the great white whale. We know that regional development should be a focus for this country and yet people in the regions are feeling neglected and they are being neglected. We see a tale of a two-speed economy emerging as the Government neglects growth in the regions and we cannot afford it. Everyone in Auckland agrees as well that we cannot afford the regions to be left behind. The OECD says that the way to build economic growth in developed nations is to lift the skills of the lowest-skilled workers in the regions. It is the most cost-effective way of achieving economic growth.[Continuation line: We have seen a Government without a plan]Dr DAVID CLARKWe have seen a Government without a plan happy to let a two-speed economy emerge as it takes its hands off the wheel of the economy. I want to talk a little bit about the way in which those statistics play out. In Northland recently we had an election and the Minister for Economic Development said that there was a unique set of circumstances there that caused the thumping defeat of the National Party in Northland having previously held a huge surplus of votes. The people in the regions are saying that they are not happy with what is happening. They have voted out the National Party in Northland. But it is not a unique set of circumstances—and this is the point I want to make—because in Northland people are struggling and it is tough there. Unemployment is around 8 percent. But in the Manawatū and Whanganui regions it used to be around 3 percent and it is now 9 percent—higher than in Northland. That is hardly a unique set of circumstances. In the Waikato they used to have a 10 percent premium in real median weekly wages over Northland. They used to get paid more in the Waikato than they do in Northland in real weekly wage terms. They do not any more—they do not any more. Northland has caught up. It is getting worse in the Waikato because the commodity price bubble is hurting. We also see that in the Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne it is actually worse again. They used to have a higher real median weekly wage in Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne than in Northland and now they have a lower real median weekly wage than they do in Northland. Again it is hardly a unique set of circumstances. Talk about the West Coast and Tasman—unemployment and weekly wages are hurting there too. The people in the middle are struggling in New Zealand and this Government has no answers. It is out of touch it is leaving them behind. It is happy to get on with its meddling its tutu-ing around—adjusting the settings here and there but sailing on while Rome burns. We have seen this with of course the “Gerry-mandering” the “John-mandering” and the “Joyce-mandering” that I have talked of earlier. The Skycity deal—what we see going on there. It is what the Auditor-General has described as neither transparent nor even-handed. It is a deal done behind closed doors that the Treasury was suspicious of and that looks set to introduce very little if any economic growth for New Zealand—and that is its big flagship economic growth project. This is a Government that is out of ideas. It talks about unique sets of circumstances. It has every excuse in the book but actually it is out of touch and New Zealanders are losing faith in this Government. It is about photo opportunities. We have heard the pre-announcement for the Budget of $20 million a year in extra research and development spending. That is a drop in the bucket in research and development terms. It will buy the Minister a few more photo opportunities with his hand-picked favourite companies but it will not boost research and development in this country which is well below the OECD average.[Continuation line: Denise Roche]Services for businessSpeech - DENISE ROCHE (Green)DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a call in this debate on services for business and I am going to direct my remarks to WorkSafe New Zealand. Today is Workers’ Memorial Day so it is a good time to reflect and assess whether our industrial relations framework and the mechanisms that the Government has to support healthy and safe workplaces are fit for purpose. Over the last 5 years 287 workers went to work and did not come home. Last year in New Zealand 47 people died at work and that was down from 2013 when 57 were killed. It is a terrible reminder of what can happen when people go to work and they do not come back. In the last year we have already had 10 workplace fatalities. These figures are provided by WorkSafe New Zealand. It says that the actual death toll could be higher because workers who are killed on the road in aviation accidents or on the sea are investigated by the police the Civil Aviation Authority and Maritime New Zealand respectively. Each death is a personal tragedy. Today I went to Canterbury to the commemoration of Workers’ Memorial Day there which was a very heartfelt and sad occasion. It was today that we remembered the death of Lyttelton Port worker Brad Fletcher and the deaths of the two Work and Income workers Peggy Noble and Susan Cleveland. These are the people behind the statistics. The grief that their families and friends feel is raw and it is real. As well as the social costs there is the economic cost. WorkSafe New Zealand suggests that the cost of the death rate is a conservative $3.5 billion each year. Over the last 5 years there were nearly 28000 serious harm incidents reported—that is people who have been hurt seriously at work—and it estimates that that is about just under 6000 people per year. On top of that it says that there are between 600 and 900 people who die every year from diseases that were caused by long-term exposure to harmful influences. Our health and safety record is nothing to be proud of. A New Zealand worker is twice as likely to be killed on the job as an Australian worker and four times as likely to be killed on the job as a worker from the UK. This is not because the work is different. The work is the same. It is just that the culture is different and the laws are different and I have to say the industrial relations framework is also different.Continuation line: I acknowledge that there is legislation in front of the House.DENISE ROCHEI acknowledge that there is legislation in front of the House at the moment that reforms the health and safety laws and I am hopeful that that law will introduce more emphasis on employers on corporate bodies and on owners to take responsibility for safety on the job. However I remain convinced that little will change unless workers themselves are empowered to be safe at work and to be able to speak up about potential risks and hazards. Workers who work in a place with higher workplace democracy have better health and safety records there because they are not afraid to speak up about the hazards or the risks that are present on the job. But sadly this Government undermines health and safety practice that is good by creating an industrial relations environment that pits worker against worker and creates a workplace climate of fear and it has done that through the introduction of youth rates through the 90-day fire-at-will legislation and through the changes to the Employment Relations Act that make it harder for workers to join a union or to negotiate collectively. A poor health and safety culture thrives when workers are insecure about their jobs and when precarious work and zero-hour contracts mean that they are not going to kick up a fuss about what is going on in the job in case they do not get rostered back on again. We know and we have seen it time and time again that workplaces with high union membership and good workplace democracy are safer workplaces and we just have to compare Huntly mine with Pike River mine and what happened there. I do want to acknowledge the sterling job that WorkSafe New Zealand is doing.[Continuation line: Mark Mitchell]Services for businessSpeech - MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney)MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): I would just like to open by saying that I would challenge the Labour Party and the members opposite—the next caller—to get up and instead of what we continue to hear tonight which is negativity and attack to actually articulate what the plan is.Hon Ruth Dyson: What are you hearing? Tired old Government—out of touch and arrogant?MARK MITCHELL: The Hon Ruth Dyson just played right in to the point that I wanted to make which is the fact that when we come to this Chamber we should come here with aspiration. We should be talking with aspiration and we should have aspiration for our country and for our nation. This is the type of language that I hear throughout the night from the Labour Party from the Opposition benches: “tired” “left behind” “arrogant” and “failure”. I hear it time and time again. That is not the language of aspiration. That is not the type of language actually that this country needs. I want to come back to something that my colleague the Hon Paul Goldsmith said and the point that he made earlier tonight and that is the fact that he said that when we went into the global financial crisis and we went into it in a world recession what we really needed was strong leadership. We needed leadership that knew what had to be done to get us through that and to protect and help those who were most vulnerable. I am very proud of this Government and what it has achieved. But to achieve stability it actually helps if you have one leader and I am very proud of the fact that we have had one of the best world leaders that any country could have asked for through a global financial crisis and through a world recession—that is the Rt Hon John Key.[Continuation line: If we look across at Labour]MARK MITCHELLIf we look across at Labour if we look across at the Opposition benches look at the leadership that they have provided over the last 6 years. Let us look at the churn rate. We have had the Hon Phil Goff—gone. We then had David Shearer come in. David Shearer whom I worked with on the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee is a quality man who has got a very good track record and a proud record. What happened to him? What did you do to him? Gone.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! Come back on to the debate.MARK MITCHELL: Cunliffe and Little that is right a constant churn—but you are right Mr Chairperson. I will come back to the bill. I want to speak about the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. I want to acknowledge all the staff and all our people employed around the world working in New Zealand’s interests—especially I want to comment and thank and acknowledge the ministry staff who have been dealing with the recent tragedy and earthquake in Nepal. I spoke with a father who has a 19-year old son over there at the moment and he said that they have been nothing but fantastic. The communication has been very good. They have located him they have reassured him that he is OK and that he is safe. That seems to be a constant theme in terms of what they are doing and how they are performing. I want to acknowledge them. I want to acknowledge Minister McCully again and the team at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the likes of David Shearer who work very hard for a huge achievement for us in terms of credibility and presence on the world stage and being successful with achieving a seat on the United Nations Security Council. I want to acknowledge the people who work in the trade sector along with our Minister and the free-trade agreements that have been very very successfully negotiated over the term of this Government. We are a small country. We are a small trading nation down the bottom of the world. The future of our country relies heavily on how well we continue to trade with the rest of the world. That is why these free-trade agreements are so critically important to us. I do want to acknowledge Phil Goff and the Labour Party for the work that they did on the free-trade agreement with China and the way that we picked that up when we came into Government. It has been very successful and it continues to be very successful for the GDP growth of our country. I want to just quickly refer back to something that the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance highlighted. I think it is something really worth noting. That is the fact that even though the milk powder price has dropped off—and unfortunately that is something that we cannot control—our GDP is still very strong and continues to grow. What that would show is that actually there is a lot more diversity inside our economy than what we actually realise so I just wanted to acknowledge that point also. I just wanted to very quickly touch on the deployment to Iraq. I know that that is close to all our hearts as our servicemen and women from the Defence Force arrive in Iraq.[Continuation line: Annette King]Services for businessSpeech - Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour)Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour): The member who has just resumed his seat Mark Mitchell was disappointed because we have not spoken in the language of aspiration. This side of the Committee has been pointing out that we believe that the Government has become arrogant and out of touch; that it has lost its way and been breaking promises. We do not resile from that Mr Mitchell. That is our job—to point out the failures of this Government. It gets plenty of sycophantic endorsements from its own members of Parliament who can find absolutely nothing wrong in what it does. I just have to remind Mr Mitchell about when he said about what we have had in leadership over here. Well let me just say: Jim Bolger Jenny Shipley Bill English Don Brash John Key. I can say that there were five leaders of the National Party before you got this Prime Minister. So when you quote history you need to just look a little bit further back because you will find it might come to bite you in the bottom. I would say to the member thank you for recognising some of the work that a Labour Government did including free-trade deals but I would have also appreciated if the Government opposite could one day acknowledge the work that the Labour Party did through Michael Cullen in terms of the management of this economy the very man you have made chair of New Zealand Post—because he was so terrible as Minister of Finance you wanted him for New Zealand Post. Of course we know the reason why he was made the chair of New Zealand Post is that he was such a good manager of the economy. I want to point out to the members opposite where I think there is a real problem in this annual review and that is in the area of health. I am very concerned about what is happening in health. I have sat through the annual reviews—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! That is the next debate. Health does not come under this one.Hon ANNETTE KING: This is the general debate on—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): No no—health comes next in theme No. 2.Hon ANNETTE KING: I thought we could do any theme under the one heading.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): No I have already indicated what the Committee—health does not come under this one. It is on the next one.Hon ANNETTE KING: In that case Mr Chairperson—[Interruption] I beg your pardon? Sorry Mr Chairman I never heard your ruling. The understanding we had was that under the themes that we are doing—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): No no—[Interruption] Order! When we started this debate at 20 past 5 I indicated clearly the seven themes. There are going to be seven themes. We are on theme No. 1. When we started after dinner at 7.30 I actually read out once again what those themes were. Just to make note of this we are talking about the relevant services for business: accident compensation commerce and consumer affairs customs economic development foreign affairs and trade immigration labour science and innovation and tourism. Those are the themes that we are on. Health comes into the next debate.Hon ANNETTE KING: Unfortunately not everybody sits listening to every word that is said in the Chamber at 5.30 and at 7.20—some of us actually were at other functions. So I apologise to the Committee for not speaking on the right area but I would like to speak about labour and that is under this area I am told. We know that when we left Government we had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world. We did that through sheer hard work and good management of the economy. We acknowledge the Government went through a global financial crisis but we are now talking about our seventh year on. This Government cannot continue to blame the global financial crisis for everything that is wrong in New Zealand. Whenever it goes wrong it says there was a global financial crisis. Remember the Prime Minister told us 5 years the global financial crisis was over—that it was finished. But John Key has not delivered on his promise for jobs in this country. He has not delivered. What worries us is that when you look at those unemployment figures and you look in the regions of New Zealand you have to be concerned about those who are not getting jobs particularly our young people. You need only to see some of the figures the numbers of young people who are missing out because this Government will not focus on the fact that the concentration should be on getting our young people into work. The Government talks about what it has done but I have to say it has been abysmal particularly for Māori and Pasifika youth in this country. We ought to worry about that. That is a generation that is going to miss out unless there is a greater focus put on it. We also know that under the labour portfolio this Government has been very miserly when it comes to the minimum wage. When we promoted a minimum wage that was close to the living wage this Government had plenty of excuses why people should not be paid enough to live on. I would say to those members to go and spend a day with home-care workers in this country who are paid the minimum wage looking after our old folk doing work that is difficult.[Continuation line: Services for citizens]Services for citizensSpeech - The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch)The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): The question is that the reports of committees relevant to services for citizens—education health housing senior citizens and social development—be noted. We need a—[Interruption] We cannot move if we do not have a Minister in the chair.Services for citizensSpeech - The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch)ALFRED NGARO (National): I rise to take a call on the services for citizens. The focus of the appropriation debate for this year has been to try to sort of ensure that we increase the ability to have debate that focuses on the issues that are very important.[Continuation line: I just want to make mention]ALFRED NGAROI just want to make mention of the comments made by the Hon Annette King who talked about Māori and Pasifika in particular—a generation that she has commented on and that she feels we are locking out. I want to hold the previous Government to account for those very words because when you talk about that—let us talk about Māori for instance. When it comes to Treaty claims if they do not like this because it came after a whole lot of issues around the foreshore and seabed they are all silent. They are very quiet because they will know that when they talked about issues for Māori they did not deliver. Issues that were delivered on health education and welfare—you do not want to go there because you know that is a fact. The truth is this. The rest of New Zealand will hear this microphone not those voices over there so I will just keep talking because that is the truth of what is happening here. The second thing I want to put out—let us talk about issues for Māori. Let us talk about Treaty claims. How many Treaty claims came from the Labour Government that would benefit health education and welfare? The focus for the debate—Hon Annette King: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. Are Treaty claims a part of this debate?The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I am just dealing with this. I am asking the Clerk specifically whether it comes into here because Māori Affairs is covered later on. I have asked specifically whether Treaty claims come under this. I am just seeking some advice. Let me just answer. Before I answer the question about Treaty claims the Business Committee has changed the format for this debate. It has come up with a format as to how we are going to have seven themes. The seven themes are identified and that is what we are actually speaking about today for 7 hours. That is what we are doing. In answer to the point of order about whether Treaty claims are part of this they are not unless you can relate Māori aspirations or Māori involvement back under the headings that I mentioned before—education health housing and social development. If you do that that is fine. You cannot specifically talk about the Treaty claims settlement process.ALFRED NGARO: As I was alluding to in my speech I talked about the impact of those claims—not particularly to the claims themselves but to the impact that they have on Māori education health and welfare. Again I see under this Government what we have done. That is right. There have been over 42 Treaty claims that benefit health education and welfare. That is what this Government has done. So I hold to account the words that have been spoken over there. Let us talk about Pasifika because I love this. Those members want to stand up and speak about this about Pasifika. Let us talk about the whole aspect of education and the achievements. What have been the achievement rates for education in particular? I will tell you what. They are the education rates that a Labour Government would be ashamed of. Under a National Government we have increased early childhood education participation. We have increased the retention rates and the completion rates at university. That is what we have done. [Interruption] Again I remind Opposition members that the only microphone that is being heard by the public is this one not their one. This is what we are doing as a Government. These are the things absolutely. This is what we are achieving. The reality is that it is the facts that speak the loudest. These are the things that we have done that are important to welfare for our communities and they are truly making a difference. Vulnerable children services are absolutely critical. Under Budget 2014 $16.4 million went around child protection services and the Social Workers in Schools programme is now available to 142000 children. Child abuse statistics—and this has got to be critically important. You have used statistics of children who are in our community who are vulnerable. We know that in June 2014 the numbers fell by 12 percent. Let us give that a number—2306. Why? Because those are the statistics. That is what is proving different. I want to announce to the public who may be listening to this that this appropriation debate is about what this Government has done previously in the Budget to make a difference. These are the facts that we are talking about. Let us talk about welfare reform because this really hits at the heart. The old adage that keeps coming out of the previous Labour Government is the same old thing—paying out tax and spend. Under this Government 1600 people are moving off welfare and into work each week—1600 off welfare and into work each week. That has got to make a difference. Why? Because the fact is that we are creating more opportunities. Let us talk about the facts again. March 2015 recorded the lowest benefit numbers of any quarter in 6 years. [Interruption] That is right. You can yell and you can shout. But here are the facts just to remind you: a 3.7 percent—or let us give it a number: 11060—decrease from March 2014. That is making a difference. Welfare reforms have reduced the expected future time on main benefits by an average of 1.2 years for sole parents and 2.8 years for youth beneficiaries. I just want to be able to clearly say that what this Government is actually about is showing that it cares through its welfare reforms. It is giving opportunities to get out of dependency and into the work opportunities that are out there. Over the past 3 years the number of young people on the youth payment at age 17 and expected to still be on a benefit at age 19 has dropped by 19 percent. These are the things that are really important out there—19 percent. So you can talk and you can bandy it all around. But here is the thing that really hurts the most. For all the condemnation for all that 2 weeks ago what did the polls say? They said that 49.1 percent of New Zealanders still have confidence in this Government. That has got to really hurt the Opposition. For all that it has tried and all of the effort and all the fighting and all the banter 49.1 percent still say that they have confidence in this Government to deliver whether it be in welfare education or health. We believe that that is making a difference. Thank you.[Continuation line: TWYFORD]Services for citizensSpeech - PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū)PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): The National Party used to talk a lot about being ambitious for New Zealand. But you do not really hear that very much these days. It used to be so ambitious for New Zealand and nothing illustrates better a tired run-down Government that is out of ideas than Bill English’s comments only a few days ago when he said that there was nothing left undone by the Government in relation to the Auckland housing crisis—there was nothing left undone; there was nothing more to do. But I guess Bill English was kind of right if you ignore cracking down on speculators. He probably forgot banning offshore speculators from buying New Zealand houses. He forgot about building new houses that people could actually live in. He did not mention reforming the planning rules to build more houses and more affordable houses. He must have forgotten to mention the fact that loan-to-value ratios should be changed so they do not needlessly punish the regions and first-home buyers. But that is only six policies. Other than that I guess Bill English was right and there is nothing more to be done about the Auckland housing crisis. You see this Government on housing is looking increasingly isolated and beleaguered. You saw it in question time today on Bill English’s face. He was tired worn down beaten and embarrassed that this party that once claimed to be so ambitious for New Zealand is so patently completely out of ideas and flailing around. You know in the last couple of weeks the Reserve Bank Deputy Governor called on the Government to take action to address imbalances in the housing market. The Reserve Bank called on the Government to crack down on speculators. Who would have believed it—that this Government would be so isolated and so embarrassed on housing policy that the Reserve Bank Governor is advocating a crackdown on speculators. According to Quotable Value 40 percent of all property transactions involve speculators. To rub salt into the wounds of tens of thousands of young Kiwi first-home buyers who are shut out of the market by this National Government that has presided over the worst rates of homeownership in 60 years what did we hear last week? We heard a New Zealand company running ads on the radio in Singapore and Malaysia saying: “Come and invest in New Zealand property because New Zealanders will give you half their weekly earnings.”[Continuation line: They said New Zealanders will give you half their weekly]PHIL TWYFORDThey said New Zealanders will give you half their weekly earnings and there is no stamp duty there is no capital gains tax there are no restrictions on foreign speculators bidding up the price of New Zealand houses. So this Government instead of being ambitious for New Zealand is out there on the world stage prostituting our real estate market for all comers. It is saying: “Come on the property speculators of the world. Come to New Zealand and you can buy and sell New Zealand houses for capital gain and these New Zealanders will give you half their weekly earnings.” That is what has happened under this National Government which used to be so ambitious for New Zealand. What did John Key say when he was asked about the comments of the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank? He said that Auckland price houses which have increased by $300000 under this Government are not overvalued because there has not been a market correction in 45 years. John Key said: “That’s just the market working. That’s how markets work.” You see this is the currency trader trying to get his head around a failed housing market that has destroyed the dreams of a generation of young New Zealanders and Government members do not care about it because they all own multiple properties themselves. John Key who says there is no housing crisis is completely oblivious to the fact that homeownership rates are the lowest in 60 years. In Auckland it now takes 50 years to pay off the average house—50 years under this National Government—and that is something that Jami-Lee Ross is proud of that people are living in garages and cars and caravans and that foreign speculators are making a killing off New Zealand homes. Government members are out of touch they are arrogant and they do not care that the next generation after Generation X and Generation Y under this National Government is “Generation Rent”. The Government’s biggest housing policy has been to blame everybody else. Last week the Prime Minister announced that the Government was going to send letters to property developers complaining that they were not building houses on the so-called special housing areas. So developers are now the problem! The Government has spent the last year blaming the councils because apparently it is all the councils’ fault. It has also said that first-home buyers are the problem. Nick Smith said last week “People need to be realistic. It’s your first home. It’s not going to be in the leafy suburbs of Remuera close to the central city.” So now we have got developers are the problem councils are the problem unrealistic first-home buyers are the problem and of course the Resource Management Act is the problem in spite of the fact that under Labour we built 40 percent more houses when we were in Government than this Government is currently building under the very same Resource Management Act. The National Party has been talking a big game on Resource Management Act reform since it was in Opposition. Back in 2006 Bill English and Nick Smith were blaming the Resource Management Act for unaffordable houses. What have they done in 7 years in Government? Nothing. The Government has done nothing about reforming the planning rules to make housing more affordable. It has done nothing about urban growth boundaries that drive up the price of land. It has done nothing about the rules that stop developers building affordable flats and apartments in the leafy suburbs of Auckland. It has done nothing about it. Government members keep on talking about it. It is a joke. They should put up or shut up. The other great fiasco of National’s housing policy is the State house sell-off. John Key announced in January that he wanted to sell 8000 houses in this 3-year term. Bill English thinks it is a lazy use of capital for the Government to own houses even though there are people all over this country desperately in need. There are people living in garages and caravans and paying exorbitant rents for cold damp and unhealthy homes in the private rental market. But this Government thinks that the solution is to sell off State houses to property developers. For the best part of 6 months after the last election it tried to dress up that policy and deceive New Zealanders by saying it was going to sell these houses to the Salvation Army. Well our most respect social agency did due diligence on that policy and told the public that that policy would not improve the lives of the tenants of social housing that it would not have a bar of it and the fig leaf of respectability was stripped away from that policy. And now the Government has been forced to admit that if it wants to sell those houses they are going to have to be sold off to property developers and private landlords. What an absolute disgrace. Too often people think that the housing crisis is simply an Auckland problem. Well it is not. It is an Auckland problem when houses go up by $300000 in 1 year. That is a problem and it is a problem for the generation of hard-working young families who only want what their parents and their grandparents had in this country and that was the opportunity to buy and own their own home. That is a broken dream under this National Government but it is also a problem in other parts of the country. Because of this Government’s complete and utter failure to do anything meaningful about the Auckland housing crisis the rest of the country the two-thirds of the people in this country who do not live in Auckland are having to pay 20 percent minimum deposits because the Reserve Bank was backed into a corner by this Government’s failure to do anything about the Auckland housing crisis. Loan-to-value ratios have whacked first-home buyers driven them out of the market and this Government has damaged the lives and the economic prospects of regional New Zealand but it does not care about regional New Zealand. That is far from its concern.[continuation line: Mojo Mathers]Services for citizensSpeech - MOJO MATHERS (Green)MOJO MATHERS (Green): I wish to address my comments to the Ministry for Social Development. So apparently supporting vulnerable children is one of this Government’s priority areas. Who could disagree with that? But I find it difficult to reconcile the aim of caring for vulnerable children with the fact that over the last 5 years more than 11000 disabled children have lost access to the child disability allowance—11000 children. I want to ask how slashing access to this vital supplementary benefit helps disabled students. The answer is that it does not. It is penny-pinching on the meanest level. The child disability allowance recognises that there is significant time care and effort involved in raising a child with a disability. It is well established that for many disabled children significant parental time and energy are needed in their earliest years to help to develop amongst other things speech language motor coordination and all these other skills and that there are numerous associated extra costs relating to caring for a disabled child such as the extra costs of transport to doctors specialists therapy child care as well as the extra time. We also know that more disabled children than those in the general population live in poverty and in part this is because parenting a disabled child often means that a parent cannot obtain full-time work. So for these families the child disability allowance is doubly important. Yet despite all of these facts about the need and the benefits of ensuring that these children are adequately supported the Government is so obsessed with pinching pennies that it is scrimping in supporting our most vulnerable children and families. I have just this week heard from a parent whose disabled preschool child has been declined the child disability allowance despite the fact that expert medical opinion clearly states that the child needs access to significant therapy and early intervention before entering school all of which will involve significant time and effort by the family.[Continuation line: It is just one example of many that have]MOJO MATHERSIt is just one example of many that have come through my office. It is wrong that parents and families are going through so much stress just to access a simple benefit for disabled children. It is clear that the bar has been shifted for accessing the child disability allowance and that that bar has now been set too high. Children with very profound disabilities are no longer able to access this benefit. The Government needs to recognise that it has gone too far and that it needs to fully reinstate the child disability allowance back to how it was so that families with disabled children are not put under more pressure than they already are. The other area where I believe the Government is really getting it wrong is with the welfare reforms. The needs of disabled children need to prevail ahead of parent job seeking and work preparation obligations especially in sole-parent households. The obsession with the welfare reform programme is ignoring the inconvenient truth around the care for disabled children. Many early childhood education centres are simply not set up to provide for the needs of disabled children leaving many parents in an impossible situation where they cannot get their child into an early childhood education centre or their child will have substandard care or they risk losing the sole parent benefit. That is an impossible situation that far too many families are finding themselves in.[Continuation line: Hekia Parata]Services for citizensSpeech - Hon HEKIA PARATA (Minister of Education)Hon HEKIA PARATA (Minister of Education): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Otirā tēnā tātou katoa i roto i te Whare i tēnei pō. I am delighted to stand and make a contribution in this annual review debate under the theme of services to citizens and in so doing assure the anxious Opposition that we remain both ambitious and accountable. We have a set of 10 Better Public Services targets that are well known to the public that hold us accountable every 6 months to what this Government is doing across a range of public services and that are all about the quality of citizenship that New Zealanders can enjoy under this Government. Predictably and appropriately I am going to speak in particular about education and the very significant contribution that all of us know education makes to the quality of life that we lead as individuals and therefore our families communities and ultimately our country—this great nation of Aotearoa New Zealand—can lead. The story in education is a very good one. Kids are starting earlier staying longer and leaving better qualified. That is in every ethnicity. I will be very pleased to talk about the particular achievements that are occurring in and by both the Pasifika and Māori communities as well as of course Pākehā Asian—all of those who make New Zealand their home and participate in our education system. That is as much because our Government has invested the most ever into education demonstrating that we put money where our mouths are and in this case in education. In the past year over $10 billion has gone into both early childhood and secondary schooling. When we came into Government—just to remind us of the stark contrast between the Opposition when it left Government and where we are now—$800 million was what the Labour Government was—[Interruption]Sue Moroney: You should be choking on it too.Hon HEKIA PARATA: How ungracious the member of Parliament Sue Moroney is. I am not choking on it. I am not choking on it. What was happening under her Government was that early childhood education was $800 million. Under ours it is forecast to be just under $1.6 billion just nearly doubling that investment as well as the tending to quality. Let me just tell the member if she was of a mind to actually listen that of the 1500 reviews undertaken by the Education Review Office into the quality of early childhood education provision between 2013 and this year only 12 providers were found to be failing—less than 1 percent. So jumping on this ridiculous bandwagon and saying that we have sacrificed quality for participation is not supported by the evidence but I accept that the Opposition is not in a very close relationship with evidence. We have also increased spending on special education. Again when we came into Government in 2007/8 the spending was $414 million. It is now $530 million and that is supporting 80000 to 100000 young New Zealanders who have special education needs. Kids are starting earlier and that is because we are really focused on how young people get the best start in education. We know if they start behind too often they stay behind so we have been focused throughout the system. There is a great story to tell in early education and it is a pity that the Opposition does not have the grace to celebrate that strong start for our youngest learners. Kids are staying longer and leaving better qualified. Here is a statistic for the Opposition. When we came into Government in 2008 Māori students were leaving with the minimum qualification of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) level 2 at a rate of 44 percent. That is what the Opposition hang its hats on as being the quality of commitment it made to education. Less than half of all Māori students were leaving with our minimum qualification. Pasifika students were doing slightly better at 51 percent. How the Opposition can sit there and say what a proud record it has in education is again disputed by the facts. Under this Government we have had on average a 20 percent lift by both those populations. That is great credit to those students; to their families whānau and aiga; to the New Zealand education system; and to the relentlessness of this Government which understands that a quality education just gives young people more choices than they would otherwise have. So we now have Māori achievement at over 63 percent. That is much better but not good enough and we are focused on lifting it even further. That is ambition. Pasifika have responded extremely well to the initiatives that we have embraced together with churches with community groups and with sports clubs. It is now up at 72 percent and climbing under this Government. And so the Opposition does need to take note that this is occurring throughout the system and that means that more young people are able to get into trades through the vocational education pathways that we have made available through working with industries through working with industry training organisations and through working with business and employers to understand what skills they want from kids and then delivering those through the education system.[Continuation line: Again we are seeing significant uptake]Hon HEKIA PARATAAgain we are seeing significant uptake by Māori and Pasifika and all New Zealand kids and that is why we are seeing the lift in the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) too. We are seeing them staying at school longer. In fact 82 percent of our 17-year-olds have stayed at school in 2014. That is great because we know from the evidence that the longer kids stay at school the more likely they are able to leave with a great education. We have got higher confidence in education than we have ever had. UMR Research in its Mood of the Nation report as one indicator said that since it began this series education is at the highest it has ever been. That is because we are a transparent Government and we are reporting to it at primary schools through national standards every 6 months and we have developed a public achievement framework that lets parents know exactly what is happening with their children every year in every school because the more informed parents are the more they can demand of us. The more they demand of us the more we lift our performance because that is the kind of Government we are. In Rotorua on Wednesday I was pleased to announce as I indicated in the Chamber this afternoon that we now have a further 18 communities of schools bringing it to a total of 29 which is 85000 students now involved in these communities which is where we are investing to lift the quality of teaching and of leadership. We passed legislation this year to establish the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand (EDUCANZ) a professional body that will be focused on meeting the needs of the profession and again on joining us in this crusade to raise the quality of teaching and leadership. That will in turn raise the prospects of a great education for each and every one of our young people. We have invested in a teacher-led innovation fund of $10 million which was significantly well subscribed because we do understand that by working together teachers know best what will make a difference. Again we put our money where our mouths are and supported that.[Continuation line: We are building a nimble responsive and modern 21st century education]Hon HEKIA PARATAWe are building a nimble and responsive and modern 21st century education system. Not only are we investing in better property but we are as I have indicated investing in better initiatives that support learning. We are in danger of seeing an even greater outbreak of achievement and is that not great for New Zealand for our country for families and for our participation on the global stage. I want to take the opportunity of acknowledging at this time having done so not only the schools their governors their boards the parents and the kids themselves who are absolutely at the core of our education system and we completely understand that but I also want to acknowledge how well agencies within Government are working together. The Ministry of Education the Education Review Office the New Zealand Qualifications Authority the Tertiary Education Commission—all of them understand that there is a pathway from 0 through to university and postgraduate studies where in every year a difference has to be made in order for our young people to attain the kinds of qualifications they are looking for so that they can contribute to a more meaningful life for themselves and for their families. Those agencies understand that they are here to serve the education sector. They are here to ensure that the Better Public Services targets that our Government has committed to can be delivered. It is all about the quality of citizenship. We have just spent the weekend in commemorative services for Anzac. Anzac is a significant symbolic event commemorating the contribution and sacrifice that citizens have made on behalf of our country. There is no bigger sacrifice than the sacrifice of one’s life and our defence forces have fought in wars and managed peace and conflict all around the world and they have done so from a small nation here in the heart of the Pacific. They have done so because they have understood what the quality of citizenship means at one end of the spectrum. Education is at the other end as well as the housing social development health and other issues that will be covered in tonight’s debate.[Contribution: Ball]Services for citizensSpeech - DARROCH BALL (NZ First)DARROCH BALL (NZ First): I am pleased to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take this 5-minute call on the service to citizens theme. I think that the title “services to citizens” is quite apt and let us not forget that those who are the most vulnerable citizens in our society and who need the most help and the most service in their lives are our vulnerable children. So I would like to talk about the social development area if I may but before I do I think timing is everything and just today the Productivity Commission released a draft report on the social services. There is an article on the TV3 news website and the title is “Government social services lacking”. What the article says is that changes are needed to improve the way Government provides social services to the most in need New Zealanders. The chairman Murray Sherwin says: “Our current system … is not … designed to deal with the complex problems facing many vulnerable New Zealanders. Services are designed and commissioned in administrative silos without the full picture of what an individual might need.” What that is saying is that the Government the way that it deals with social services and the whole process is out of touch. Government members are making their laws and creating policy and legislation in this Chamber and in their caucus but what is not happening is the interaction with the most vulnerable people and how it affects the most vulnerable in our society. That is what the Productivity Commissioner is saying. The commission drafts recommendations and one of the recommendations is to make better use of the data. What we just heard the Minister of Education talking about was Better Public Services targets. Well I would put the question to the Minister: when was the last time those Better Public Services targets were reviewed. When where they independently audited? I can give you the answer. The answer is never. They have never been audited or independently reviewed so how can the public of New Zealand have any faith or confidence in this Government or its social services when the very targets that the Government creates for its ministries and its services to accomplish are never independently audited. What the Minister also said was that that Government is putting the money where its mouth is in regards to accountability. Well I challenge the Minister and I challenge the Government to get all of their Better Public Services standards independently audited and give the public of New Zealand the confidence in their statistics. I would like to focus on the social development area like I said and in particular the Children’s Commissioner and its report as well as the Social Workers Registration Board report. There are a couple of questions that fall out in regards to the commitment this Government has towards our most vulnerable children. The first one is what its priority is. What priority does it give to the vulnerable children and what priority does it give to the Children’s Commissioner to be able to do his job adequately and properly? The second is whether this Government values the role of the Children’s Commissioner. There are a few things that you can do just off the top of your head to answer that question quite aptly. We have had a few members bills that have come through that have not been passed because of that Government. The first was the food in schools bill and that directly affects our vulnerable children. The second is the paid parental leave bill which directly affects our vulnerable children. Instead we have got millions of dollars being spent on a flag referendum. Where are the priorities that this Government is setting for our most vulnerable in our society? New Zealand First of course values our Children’s Commissioner but at the moment the office has got limited resources it has got limited staff and it has got limited funding. This is all coming out of the annual report from the Children’s Commissioner. But the question is what the expectation is to fulfil one of the most important roles in our society. We have got on the one hand this great expectation from the Government to the Children’s Commissioner to fulfil one of the most important roles in our society but it does not give the resources the funding or the staff to be able to do so. All of the available savings that the commissioner can make have been implemented. There is a pattern of deficit and overspending under significant financial restraints and then you start talking about the cutbacks that the Office of the Children’s Commissioner has had to make. What is its current role? What is the current role of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner? It is to provide a social security blanket.[Continuation line: Hipkins]Services for citizensSpeech - CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka)CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): There was a time when the National Government promised New Zealanders that it was ambitious for New Zealand. Not only have Government members not delivered on their ambition for New Zealand they have made every other New Zealander embarrassed for New Zealand in recent times—embarrassed for New Zealand. There was a time when John Key promised to raise the standards of government raise the standards of ministerial behaviour. How can he promise that for other Ministers when he cannot even deliver on that himself? There was of course a time when the National members promised to get the books back in order. In fact they declared victory at the last election when they said the books were back in surplus and yet here we are—the seventh Budget in a row and the seventh deficit in a row another broken promise for this National Government. Not only have they failed to deliver one single surplus in fact they have clocked up the largest Government debt in New Zealand’s history. Let me repeat that. This Government has clocked up the largest Government debt in New Zealand’s history. So what has that to do with social services? It massively constrains what the Government can do in the social service area when it is making such a shambles of its management of the overall economy. Let us look at some of the promises that National members have made in the social services area. They promised free doctors’ visits for the under-13s. Have they delivered that? No they have not. They promised better teacher-child ratios in early childhood education for the under-2s. Have they delivered that? No they have not delivered on that. They promised New Zealanders higher wages at the last election. Have they delivered on that? No they have not. No they have not delivered on that promise. In fact you do not have to look very closely at the National Party manifesto from the 2008 election the 2011 election or the 2014 election to find a broken promise. They have literally littered the country with them like confetti because this is a party that says that whatever it thinks it needs to say to get elected with no intention whatsoever of delivering on those promises after the election. National members have become so arrogant that they simply believe that they are born to rule that they are the natural party of government and they do not have to earn the trust of New Zealanders. Well actually they do need to earn the trust of New Zealanders and they are certainly not doing a very good job of that at the moment.[Continuation line: New Zealanders have had enough of being embarrassed around the world]CHRIS HIPKINSNew Zealanders have had enough of being embarrassed around the world by this Government and they have had enough of having broken promises shoved down their throats and they have had enough of a Government that tells them what they want to hear and then fails to deliver on those things. The Steven Joyce school of politics: ask the voters what they want; give them what they want or maybe not; and tell them you have given them what they want even if you have not actually given them what they want. He misses out the middle bit. He basically asks them what they want and then tries to tell them that they have already got it. Actually New Zealanders deserve better from their Government. New Zealanders are willing to work hard to get ahead and they want a Government that is going to back them and they do not have that in the current National Government. New Zealand parents want a better future for their kids and they are willing to work for that and they are willing to do their part to make sure their kids get the best start in life. And they want a Government that is going to do the same. I listened very carefully to Hekia Parata’s contribution on this debate when she was talking about education and I recalled the fact that Hekia Parata’s one big idea her first big idea and her one big idea the boldest most audacious idea that Hekia Parata had to improve educational outcomes for Kiwi kids was bigger class sizes. That was her first major promise to New Zealand parents and New Zealand kids: more kids in every class in front of every teacher. That was Hekia Parata’s first major promise and she had to back down because there was such an outcry from parents. Her second major commitment to the educational community was that she was not necessarily going to pay teachers because she implemented the Novopay payroll system which meant that some teachers waited for weeks and months to simply get paid what they had earned. Forget about pay rises and raising wages; the teachers around the country for months and months just wanted to be paid—because of Hekia Parata’s absolute incompetence. And what was Hekia Parata’s promise to the people of Christchurch? That the Government would stand with them during the tough times. Hekia Parata and John Key’s National Government stood with the people of Christchurch by closing down a big chunk of their schools at a time when the people of Christchurch had already been clobbered by the Christchurch earthquakes. That is how this Government views education. And of course when it comes to education we know that the most significant thing a Government can do is back the teaching profession. Because all of the words of Hekia Parata in this House mean nothing—mean nothing—if she is not out there backing teachers. Because it is not all Hekia Parata’s own work in lifting student achievement; it all comes down to teachers and parents. And what have we seen from this Government? An absolute war on teachers around the country a Government that tells parents they cannot trust teachers and a Government that tells the public they cannot trust teachers so much so that they take complete control of the body that regulates the teaching profession. It would not do it to lawyers. It would not do it to doctors. It would not do it to any other major profession. In fact the National Party filibustered in Parliament when the Labour Government tried to regulate the real estate profession more heavily saying that the Government should not do that. It is willing to do that for all those other professions but when it comes to teachers—oh no no Hekia Parata knows best. She is going to hand-pick the people who are going to regulate the teaching profession without any democratic input from the profession itself and that says everything about this Government’s attitude when it comes to education. Because on the one hand while it says it wants to raise the standard of teaching of course we know how hollow that is; because when it comes to charter schools they do not even have to have registered teachers at all. So much for raising the standards of teaching in New Zealand as charter schools do not even need to employ registered teachers at all. Of course the Government is willing to pump millions of dollars more into a handful of charter schools than it would put into any public school in New Zealand so desperate is it to make its charter school experiment work when actually any State school in the country could do amazing things with that money if it was given the opportunity to do so. I want to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the many many people who make up our education system: the teachers the support staff the principals the boards of trustees the parents. They are working hard to achieve great things for kids and they are doing it in spite of a Government that does not back them in doing so. Hekia Parata talked about increases in Māori and Pasifika achievement. So here is a simple question for Hekia Parata: if things are getting so much better for Māori and Pasifika young people why is it that they are still the most likely to be represented in unemployment statistics? Why is it that in record levels they are leaving the education system with whatever level of qualification they have and going on to do nothing? No job no further training—they are leaving and doing nothing. Why is that? If the Government’s education platform has been so successful why do we have record levels of people leaving the school system to do absolutely nothing? Because if we are going to judge the success of the Government’s education policy then surely the outcome that matters is what happens to the kids when they leave. Is that not the point of the education system to prepare people for the world that they will enter? And yet we have got record levels of kids leaving and going on to do absolutely nothing because we have got a Government that has failed to create the right environment for jobs and that has absolutely failed to make sure that there is opportunity for those kids when they leave school. We have had 7 years of National Government and there is still no light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to those big important issues like what kids are doing when they leave school. Because this Government is simply beset by scandal—beset by scandal. It has completely lost track of the things that matter. But I tell you what I said that there was no light at the end of the tunnel—there is. Because there is an election in 2017 and the Labour Party will be ready. It will be a very clear contest. It will be a very clear contest between a leader in Andrew Little—whose work can be trusted; who New Zealanders know that if he says he is going to do something about early childhood education like John Key did he will actually deliver on it; that if he promises better and better outcomes in education he will deliver on it—and a leader over there who tells New Zealanders whatever they want with absolutely no intention of delivering on it who embarrasses New Zealand regularly on the world stage and who has got more publicity for New Zealand by embarrassing us than he ever got in his role as Minister of Tourism . New Zealanders will know in 2017 that when it comes to making the choice between a Government on this side that will deliver and a Government on that side that is full of promises with no real delivery—they know exactly what side they will be better off under. Education is so important to New Zealand’s future. Early childhood education increasing participation is a great thing. That is very good. But increases in quality participation are important. So why is the Government lowering the standard at the same time as participation is increasing?[Continuation line: Sam Lotu-Iiga]Services for citizensSpeech - Hon Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA (Minister of Corrections)Hon Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA (Minister of Corrections): Thank you Mr Chairperson and thank you for the opportunity to take this call in these annual review debates. Tonight I am just going to touch on the health portfolio  for which I am the Associate Minister of Health . In the 2013-14 year this Government spent $14.9 billion on health. That is the most of any other time in our history more than when David Cunliffe was the Minister of Health and more than when Annette King was the Minister of Health . But it is not just about spending money. It is not about spending money because that side of the House thinks that it is just about spending more and more of taxpayers’ money on Government services. No this is about results for patients. It is about quality spending. It is about the well-being of New Zealanders in order to live a better quality of life.Clare Curran: What? Where? Where?Hon Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: And I am going to get to that Ms Curran. I will get to it. And it is about some of the promises that we made when we became Government in 2008. What did we say?Hon Simon Bridges: Tell us.Hon Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: What did we say Mr Bridges  do you remember? We said more front-line police. We said more nurses on the front line. We said more doctors. We said more front-line services and that is what we did. So in health in 2014 we know that there were 1000 fewer managers than when we took over the Treasury benches. We know that there were over 1000 more doctors. And we also know that there were 3000 extra nurses when we took over. You see it is also about meeting health targets. It is about outcomes. It is not about activity it is about outcomes. And in terms of immunisation in the 2014 financial year the target for 8-month and year-old children was 90 percent—90 percent for immunisation. And what did we achieve during that financial year—92 percent. We met the targets. On our promises that we made to the people of New Zealand: we achieved those targets. And the Hon Tony Ryall also set a target for an increase in elective surgeries of 4000 patients per annum—4000 patients per annum. And what have we achieved in 2014?Alfred Ngaro: Tell us.Hon Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: I will tell you Mr Ngaro.[Continuation line: It is 7300 in terms of]Hon Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGAIt is 7300 in terms of extra elective surgeries in 2014. What else is it about? It is about bringing our services closer to home—services closer to home. When I was at Counties Manukau District Health Board last week—and I encourage members across the aisle to go and visit the clinics go and visit the health boards—it had a quit bus. The quit bus is about taking services on smoking cessation out to our communities where they live where they congregate and where they work. That is what this Government stands for: services closer to home. It is also about strengthening our health workforce. As the Minister for Pacific Peoples I am proud of the fact that we have implemented a scholarship scheme the Aniva Scholarships—over $1 million—in order to promote Pacific people into the health workforce so that they can meaningfully contribute to health services in this country. I am proud of that and I know that the National Party is proud of that. In terms of Pacific health—Ms King is here and she asked about what we were doing for Pacific and Māori health. In terms of rheumatic fever we know that rheumatic fever has been a problem over the years and it largely affects Māori and Pacific. We have invested $65 million over 6 years to combat rheumatic fever. Guess how much money Ms King put in as the health Minister on this particular issue. Guess how much. A big fat doughnut—a big fat doughnut. She made no spending in this area. Guess what happened. Here are the outcomes. Here are the results. Here are the results. In 2013 there were 194 cases of rheumatic fever. One year later after applying resources there were 153 cases that were reported. So that is a drop of 25 percent. That is what a Government that is committed to health services quality health services can achieve. It is also about the work of cross agencies. Mr Twyford was there talking about housing. Guess what. This Government has insulated 300000 houses and spent $2 billion on accommodation support. That is what makes a difference. So I say to those Labour members “Stand up and stand on your record. Stand on your record.” This Government has done more for Pacifica more for people in the health services than any other Government in history.[continuation line: Kevin Hague]Services for citizensSpeech - KEVIN HAGUE (Green)KEVIN HAGUE (Green): It is a shame that this new style of this debate does not permit me to go across multiple portfolios because I would love to talk about the comments that the Minister in the chair the Minister for Pacific Peoples has just made about health. Instead tonight I am going to talk about housing and pick up the comment made by the Hon Hekia Parata that this debate is about the quality of citizenship New Zealanders can expect under this Government. There is a human right to good housing—a human right. It is a basic human need and yet across the broad spectrum of housing issues this Government is failing again and again. Let us see what some of those issues are. Affordability of housing is certainly one of those particularly in Auckland and Christchurch but not isolated to those communities; rental affordability and also security; and the quality of housing that we have in this country—those are three big issues and I will touch on all three of those. First of all on affordability last week we had the Reserve Bank Deputy Governor Grant Spencer  talking in quite extraordinary language about the need for central government to step up to the plate saying that the Reserve Bank simply did not have the tools to do the job itself and that only central government could do the necessary things to solve the affordability crisis particularly in Auckland. He recommended a comprehensive range of measures with the centrepiece in fact being addressing the unequal tax treatment of income that we earn from our jobs compared with the income derived from capital gains. He was advocating a capital gains tax amongst a suite of other measures. What we saw from the Government in response to this extraordinary demand side picture painted by the Reserve Bank was a silver bullet solution that was about supply and how it is going to change the Resource Management Act to make supply a bit easier. That is what the Government had to respond to the Reserve Bank with. The median house price in Auckland is now $720000—$720000. The median household income for New Zealanders in Auckland under the age of 35 is under $50000. Housing for that generation in Auckland will never be affordable with all of the consequences that that has for retirement savings. It is a fundamental failure of Government policy to ensure housing supply for those New Zealanders. When we come to rentals I pick up on some of the comments that lead out the select committee’s report on Housing New Zealand’s annual review: “Housing New Zealand Corporation aims for New Zealanders in high need to have access to a Housing New Zealand property for as long as that need continues.” Well in fact that is a fundamental shift of policy. The point of State housing in the first place was to ensure that everybody was housed not just those in high need. That was what Housing New Zealand set out to do. Housing New Zealand did not use to say “When that need is finished then we no longer provide service to you.” The reality is that Housing New Zealand and the Government used to understand that settling someone’s housing situation might well provide the platform that enabled them to actually take further steps up the ladder further steps in reducing the chaos in their lives. What happens now is that as soon as that person finds a job tenancy review comes in and says “Out you go.” They are plunged back into the chaos of homelessness. It is an incoherent policy that maybe has short-term gains for Housing New Zealand but long-term costs to this country. I just want to mention too the shameful use which is not picked up in the select committee’s review of 90-day notices by Housing New Zealand. Housing New Zealand decides that it wants to get rid of some tenants. It takes them to the tribunal and loses and then it responds by—Hon Anne Tolley: Mr Chair—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I am sorry; the Ministers’ calls have been used in respect of this. [Interruption] I am sorry. I stand corrected.[continuation line: Anne Tolley]Services for citizensSpeech - Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development)Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development): Before I go on to talk about social development I just want to make the point that I think that although we all agree that there are huge issues in the Auckland housing market actually the average house price in Kawerau is $53000. And the—Kevin Hague: How many jobs?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Well there we are you see. I encourage young people to come and move to the Eastern Bay of Plenty or to the East Coast because housing is great the weather is great and life is pretty good. And there are jobs particularly at this time of the year—seasonal harvest jobs and of course the pack houses of the Eastern Bay of Plenty are going full tilt with our very valuable kiwifruit crop. I am very proud to stand here tonight as a Minister in a National Government that has focused on supporting vulnerable New Zealanders through some of the toughest times that this country has ever seen. This Government has made no apologies for the fact that we have not brought in any austerity measures. We have supported vulnerable New Zealanders vulnerable families and in particular vulnerable children throughout those very difficult times. Even in the last year the Budget year we are talking about this Government has made significant moves to make sure that some of the most vulnerable children in our community are supported such as the passing of the Vulnerable Children Act and the Children’s Action Plan which listed out a whole raft of initiatives to be completed by both Government and the NGO sector focused on making sure that children have the right—and we are talking about human rights—to grow in a home safe from abuse a home that is warm and well insulated. This Government has a good record on that. As I say I am very proud to be part of that Government.[continuation line: In addition to that]Hon ANNE TOLLEYIn addition to that we are very focused on breaking that cycle of welfare. We are working extremely hard both with sole parents as a group and with people who are able to and ready to go back into the workforce to make sure that we support them into work in order to break that cycle of dependency. The statistics are really good: about 1600 are going off welfare and into work. That is a tremendous outcome not only for the Government and the taxpayers of New Zealand but for those families who are able then to stand on their own two feet and be independent. We know that work is important. It is important to people’s health both physical and mental. It is important to the social fabric of our communities that we have those people working. It is always sad when the Opposition do not support us in the efforts that this Government has made to get families back into work. I think one of the areas that we are most proud of is our work with youth. Over the last 12 months in this Budget year the youth service has seen four out of five young people who have been enrolled in that youth service—that is those youth who are living away from their families and also the ones who we talk about as not in education and training who the youth service picks up—reengaged in some form of education training or in-work training. I think that is an outstanding result for young New Zealanders. In fact that resulted in this financial year we are discussing here an 8 percent drop in the number of those 15-year-olds and 16-year-olds enrolled in youth services who went on to a youth benefit into a full benefit at age 18. If we can stop them going on to a benefit at age 18 we have a very good chance of helping them live full successful and independent lives raising their families and becoming full and participating members of our communities. The reason that that is so important is because we have good data now good data that tells us that a child born into a family that is reliant on a benefit that cycle of dependency that we talk about has a 25 percent chance of receiving a Child Youth and Family notification and a 24 percent chance of substantiated abuse against the rest of the population who do not rely on a benefit of a 2 percent chance of receiving a notification to Child Youth and Family.[Continuation line: Carmel Sepuloni]Services for citizensSpeech - CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston)CARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): The theme of this part of the debate is “services to citizens” but I think when looking at social development we really need to rename it as “disservice to New Zealand citizens” because that is what this National Government has been doing. I want to start by saying that we agree fundamentally on some things with the National Government. Yes where possible we think it is good to get people off benefits and into work but what we have seen from the National Government is this perceived drop-off in benefit numbers. But so many of our social services out there are saying that this is not a drop off this is a cut off. What is happening is that they are getting denied support at Work and Income and other Government agencies and then they are getting referred by those Government agencies on to our church-based organisations and our NGOs. Those same church-based organisations and NGOs have not had any increase in funding under that National Government for over 6 years. They are under-resourced and the demand on their services because that National Government is not helping the most vulnerable people has skyrocketed through the roof. I just want to say that that Government is responsible for running some of our most charitable people into the ground taking advantage of some of the goodwill that these people have the goodwill of these very good organisations that the Government is responsible for taking advantage of. They are working off the smell of an oily rag. They are talking about the fact that they have people coming to them who are being denied Government support and who are on the verge of suicide. I am not making that up. They are telling us because we have been all around the country that they have people going to them with high mental health needs who are being denied financial support by the Government and the last ports of call for these people are these church-based organisations and NGOs that do not have the funding to support them. What they do have is the goodwill to do the best that they can. I think that this theme of this part of the debate should be called “National’s disservice to New Zealand citizens” as opposed to “service to citizens” because that Government is doing nothing. What I am really concerned about are the long-term repercussions of the decisions that that Government is making. They are saying that it is all about getting people out into work. No one will deny that getting people out into work is very important but what are we risking here? We have got mothers who are being pushed out into work way earlier than what they would like to with kids who actually need their support with mothers who would like to be able to stay at home with them. But that Government says: “Nah you had that baby you get out and work. We do not care who looks after it. We do not care about the quality of early childhood education that they are going to be exposed to. We do not care about the childcare arrangement. We do not care about the danger that that child might be in. You go out you work that minimum-wage job you work your butt off and let us not worry about the safety of you and your family or the long-term well-being of you and your family.” That is the real concern that we have on this side of the Chamber. We are concerned that it is just all a numbers game to the National Government that it thinks by reducing the number of people accessing welfare that it is winning. But that does not necessarily equate to more people going into work. That does not necessarily equate to a healthier society. We are not seeing a healthier society. If you live in Auckland or even any of the other major cities around New Zealand you only need to walk out to your nearest shopping centre to see that the levels of homelessness the levels of people begging on our streets has increased dramatically under that Government. That is a sign. That is a sign and they shut their eyes at those things because they refuse to admit that they are responsible for the increasing social problems that we are facing as a country. As I said this whole debate should be themed “the National Government’s disservice to New Zealand citizens”. Recently what infuriates me even more is that that Government through social development is dealing with the most cash-strapped New Zealanders who exist and yet we saw when we went through the annual review that in particular areas funding had increased significantly. Yet when asked the ministry could not say where that money had gone to and instead said it was a drop in the bucket. That Minister said that that is a minute amount of money. The $6.9 million that I pointed out that I was asking questions about that I was concerned about in terms of increase in funding and spending was almost the equivalent to the $7.2 million that that Government had to shave off and defer in terms of funding programmes.[Continuation line: Barbara Stewart]Services for citizensSpeech - BARBARA STEWART (NZ First)BARBARA STEWART (NZ First): I would like to take a brief call on health. New Zealand First has always said that health is a really critical investment and if we ignore it we ignore it at our peril. We really know that some of the problems that we have got are becoming totally overwhelming and unmanageable. What we are seeing from the Government is an attempt to manage the Budget around the areas that are easy with little regard for some of those areas. We are really concerned at the number of people who are now becoming obese in New Zealand. When we went through the annual reviews not many district health boards had thought about nor was there any money from the Government for programmes to address obesity. Ignoring the problem is not going to assist it; it is just going to make it bigger and bigger. At this point in time we have got 1.2 million New Zealanders who are classified as obese. That is a significant number. The cost to our health system has increased to $686 million per year every year. Really if we are going to spend that amount of money we would believe that it was a health crisis. We know that the Government has decided to adopt an Australian programme to try to tackle the problem of obesity and invest $1 million per year in 10 communities around the country.[Continuation line: It is ironic that this Government chose to look overseas]BARBARA STEWARTIt is ironic that this Government chose to look overseas for programmes to address obesity when we have got some really good programmes here in New Zealand that have addressed the problem. I must talk about Project Energise which is in the Waikato. What did it do? It got children out and about exercising reducing weight and improved health was a result. Why on earth we would choose to go with a programme where the evidence—and I will quote from Professor Boyd Swinburn from the University of Auckland—“ … seems to show that it will be effective in European kids. But … it needs to work for Māori and Pacific kids … ” Well guess what? New Zealand is a multiracial society and obesity is an issue that affects everybody not just Europeans and not just the residents of the 10 lucky areas that have actually been chosen. If nothing is done this will only continue to increase the problem and the demand for services. We need to look at action and prevention right now and take some really practical steps to ensure that New Zealand families can address the problem themselves. Another absolutely disgraceful case of cost cutting demonstrated by the Government is the under-spend of over $20 million on family-funded care schemes last year. The scheme was originally set up so that family members of disabled people could be compensated for the time and the effort that they put into caring for their loved ones. I can assure you that this is not a little job; it is a very difficult job and there is little appreciation of it. Basically that scheme was meant to ease the financial burden that families were facing. They already face a huge financial burden and they are really in need of support. When the scheme was first rolled out we were told here in this Chamber that it would benefit 1600 New Zealand families that $23 million would be spent and that the disabled and care communities had actually been consulted to produce the scheme. When we look at the reality out of the projected 1600 families only 187 families have been allowed or are able to take up the opportunity and just over $2 million has been spent. Here we have a disabled and carers’ community who believe that the scheme is the most flawed. A review is absolutely essential. The money has been put aside; we need to ensure that it gets to the most vulnerable and these people are. My last area—another area that has been totally overlooked—is that of asthma and respiratory disease. We know that there are over half a million Kiwis suffering from asthma and the costs are estimated to be in the vicinity of $800 million a year.[Continuation line: Adrian Rurawhe]Services for citizensSpeech - ADRIAN RURAWHE (Labour—Te Tai Hauāuru)ADRIAN RURAWHE (Labour—Te Tai Hauāuru): Tēnā koe o te Whare o te rā. Tēnā koutou katoa. I get really worried when I hear the Minister for Social Development talking about the house prices in Kawerau even at $53000 and seasonal workers. I get worried because since when can a seasonal worker go to Kawerau and earn enough money to get a deposit on a house even at $53000? It does not happen. There is a reason why the houses are $53000 and it is because no one is buying. That is the reason why. That is an example of arrogance. I am hearing in my mind: “Let them eat cake.” That is what I heard when the Minister said that—let them eat cake. That is like saying that you can attain something that is really unattainable. So it is rather annoying that that kind of arrogance is blatantly displayed in this Committee. I will give you another example. Last year in June we were told that the Māori housing fund announced by the Government would be given to Te Pou Matakana because they were working at the grassroots and they are the kind of organisation that can deliver on the Government’s housing policy. So why was it that in December of last year after the election and after the Māori Party and the Government went to the electorate and told it that this was how the Government was going to deliver its Māori housing policy to Māori it all changed. Why? What happened? What happened in December? Well I will tell you what happened. All those statements around Māori housing were made by the Hon—now Dame—Tariana Turia. If you do not believe me go and read her statements to the whole world in December last year. She was annoyed with her own party. She told them that they had got it wrong. I am standing up here to say that this is an example of how the Government can change its policy say one thing in June of last year and then in December of last year completely change it. Why is that? Well I think No. 1 you no longer have a Minister such as Minister Turia fighting for that policy. But I can tell you also that that policy is to me in danger of not being delivered. How many houses have actually been built since then? What has happened since June of last year until now around Māori housing? What has changed? To me what I can see is that nothing has changed. I look forward to seeing some changes. We need changes. We are talking about the most vulnerable whānau in our community. For the Minister to be standing here saying “Well you could get a job in Kawerau and that might solve your housing problem.”—well sorry but you have lost your way. The Government has lost its way. Not only has the Government lost its way but its support parties have lost their way as well. Last year at the general election I think that the Māori electorates saw the Māori Party had lost its way. That is why Te Tai Tokerau Tāmaki-Makaurau Hauraki-Waikato Te Tai Hauāuru Ikaroa-Rāwhiti and Te Tai Tonga got it right. Waiariki sort of got it right in a way too because if you have a look at the numbers that voted against the incumbent you will see that they understood that as well. I stand here before you in this Committee saying that we need in 2017 a new Government. We need a good Minister of Housing who we would have with Phil Twyford. I think that is really important. I want to talk also about this artificial target with regard to housing and all the other policy areas. If you look it up in the dictionary I will tell you what the synonyms for “artificial” are: manufactured fabricated insincere false exaggerated and overdone. That is the Government.[Continuation line: Simon O’Connor]Services for citizensSpeech - SIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki)SIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): What an excellent word the member opposite finished on—“overdone”. I think that fully expresses what we have heard from the Opposition tonight. I want to primarily talk about health but one thing I want to note from an earlier tirade against Work and Income and as someone who worked in the Ministry of Social Development for many years prior in the community is that I want to say thank you to those people particularly within the Ministry of Social Development who day after day tirelessly go out and serve their people and community. I heard that from the Minister Anne Tolley but I just wanted to add my own voice to that. So thank you for all that you do to serve other Kiwis in this country. I want to turn to health though. I think we have some very good news stories there. Although it is not news coming out of the Government I noticed as I was coming down to the Chamber that there was a breakthrough by the Malaghan Institute which I think is symbolic of the great work that our Kiwi health providers and scientists are doing. They have actually worked out a way to deal with something like hookworm. I know it is not the most exciting topic but it is something that affects a billion of the poorest people. Here in New Zealand based out of Wellington the Malaghan Institute has worked out a way to create an immune response to hookworm. Again it is a small thing in and of itself but this has been led by Kiwi scientists and Kiwi medical people and I think it just provides a good context of how New Zealand leads the way not only in immunological research but also in health.[Continuation line: We heard from Minister Lotu-Iiga earlier some very good statistics]SIMON O'CONNORWe heard from the Minister Lotu-Iiga earlier some very good statistics that have come out of the Ministry of Health in general and I think that is pretty fantastic. You know a health budget of $15.6 billion—huge. We now know that 94 percent of 8-month-olds are fully immunised. We are going to reach the target of 95 percent by the end of this year. Just a comparison: when we took over Government in 2007 shamefully only 67 percent of young people were immunised. But if I can just step away from the broad big numbers I just want to reflect some of the good news stories we heard out of the district health boards in particular that came before our select committee. Obviously there are too many district health boards to review every year so we take a sample but the Health Committee has been very hard at work and some of the themes within health that came to me were first and foremost around financial improvement. No one shies away from the fact that times are always tough and every group wants more money from the Government but we saw in the district health boards financial improvement. A quick and good example is the likes of the Nelson - Marlborough District Health Board which has actually moved from a deficit of about $2.9 million 2 years ago to now a surplus of $4.4 million—I think a really good example. We had the Northland District Health Board come before us and I think that its good news story amongst others was just how it is investing in new infrastructure. And although I am proudly the MP for Tāmaki I am originally a Whangarei boy. I know the hospital well. The investment it is making there particularly in maternity wards and services is really impressive. Turning back to Auckland although it is not my district health board—I am going to talk about Waitematā—we are hearing about life expectancy. A number of district health boards touched on this and it came up in the reviews—it is increasing for New Zealanders. In Waitematā as one example life expectancy is now is 85.1 years. So it is 3 years higher than in most of the rest of the country. In fact it is even higher for Māori in Waitematā in terms of their growth as well—they are 4 years above the national average. Again good news. We heard a lot about mental health services. That was a question that was raised quite often. I turn therefore to the Capital and Coast District Health Board. We heard from it and from the Hutt Valley and the Wairarapa District Health Boards all three together. And I note my colleague here Alistair Scott from that electorate. He would know this but the district health boards there have launched a new integrated mental health system. Its message is “New service no boundaries” and it is I think a marvellous example of how three district health boards work together. Other things came through around oral health—and I think it is particularly actually through Barbara Stewart from New Zealand First to give her credit. District health boards one after the other know the importance of fluoride. I occasionally get in my electorate people who ignore the science but the science is clear and the district health boards are clear: fluoride in water makes a difference. It is the same around immunisation: immunise your children. That is a simple key message; there are no excuses or YouTube videos that can impress upon me any difference. And therefore to move on to that look at the Southern District Health Board whose immunisation rates exceed the national target and I think that is a wonderful result for Southern District Health Board.[Continuation line: Reports noted][Continuation line: Infrastructure Mr Chairperson]InfrastructureSpeech - The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows)JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): I am very pleased to stand and talk upon such an important series of subjects to the life and the economy of New Zealand as infrastructure. Infrastructure is like the skeletal system. It is like the nervous system. It is like all of the things that enable our country to function and succeed. I want to just talk about ultra-fast broadband to start off with and talk about just how important that is and certainly how well I think that we have seen progress take place in this area. The OECD said that New Zealand is No. 1—No. 1.Hon Damien O'Connor: Come down our way and have a look. Open your eyes.JONATHAN YOUNG: You need a better MP over in your area. That is the problem over there. Figures for fibre growth connections in the OECD released earlier this year show that New Zealand is No. 1 with a connection growth rate of 272 percent and the average of the 34 developed OECD countries is just 12.4 percent. So the momentum is growing and the fibre is being rolled and we are seeing this affect the way that New Zealanders do education do health and do communications. It is incredibly important. We have provided fibre-ready service to over 2200 schools including almost 1000 rural schools and to 36 hospitals and integrated health services around the country. We have rolled out ultra-fast broadband to more than 570000 locations nationwide. We have ensured that over 231000 households and businesses now have access to faster broadband under the Government’s Rural Broadband Initiative —the RVI. All of these things are important. Look we are in the middle of a technological revolution not just here but around the world. Ultra-fast broadband is absolutely essential for this nation to be able to go forward. You know we have seen revolutions happen around the world—the agrarian one the Industrial Revolution and we have seen the digital revolution over these last number of decades—change the way that people do business. Every single one of these revolutions of business and of function has this effect of actually taking people out of the rural areas into city areas and all of that creates I guess better mechanisation better manufacturing and clearer more detailed more high-quality manufacturing. All of these things also come with the social challenges that all of that provides. So it is important for us alongside rolling out these infrastructures to ensure that we as an economy and as people who go through our educational system can engage with these sorts of technological advancements. We are making sure that 97.7 percent—that is a high figure—of schools can connect to broadband which means that nearly 100 percent of students can connect to broadband.[Continuation line: So they can learn in a modern environment]JONATHAN YOUNGSo they can learn in a modern environment they can access information they can access tuition they can access all sorts of ways in which they can learn about this world in their home schools and towns. We are providing fibre access to rural public hospitals and integrated family health centres by June next year. We also announced last year that we are investing $100 million to expand the rural broadband programme and added to that $50 million to improve mobile coverage in black spot areas along main highways and popular tourist destinations. That is going to work well when it comes to State Highway 3. I know that you Mr Chair and other members who come from the central North Island understand that State Highway 3 has a real necessity for these many black spots in an area of roading that is actually very challenging and has had a number of accidents in it. So all of this is not only just creating better communication but it creates the flow of information and makes travelling our roads safer and enables us to be able to ensure that tourists who come this way can have the adequate communication that they need as well. More towns have been fibred: Whangarei Te Awamutu Cambridge Tokoroa Hāwera in South Taranaki are fully fibred. In the South Island we have Ōamaru Blenheim and Ashburton—thanks to the Government’s ultra-fast broadband network they are fully fibred as well. It is important to understand that this is more than just downloading a movie so people can enjoy that sort of entertainment.[Continuation line: Ruth Dyson]InfrastructureSpeech - Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills)Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I am sorry that I interrupted the member Jonathan Young in his flow. It was quite an interesting speech but the bell had rung so if I wanted to get a call I had to stand up and take it. I am pleased to be contributing in the debate related to the Canterbury earthquake recovery. I just want to note that a number of my colleagues have been talking about the “third-term-itis” of this Government and about how arrogant it has become how out of touch it is and how it is ignoring the big issues for New Zealand. I do not think anybody personifies that more than the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery. It is a bit of a steep competition in Cabinet I know but Minister Brownlee has generated so much spin in Canterbury about the pace of the recovery and the vision for the future that actually people are dizzy. Nobody can see anything happening that is his responsibility—it has all been good private sector investment and risk but he takes the credit for it. Somebody said the other day that John Key comes down to open an envelope and somebody else said yes but he closes the post office on the way out which is exactly how it feels to us. You cannot of course ignore the fact that we had a series of horrific earthquakes and they caused massive amounts of damage but insurance money and taxpayers’ and ratepayers’ investment into the rebuild does not make an economic recovery. But that is what John Key and the National Party promised the people of New Zealand. They promised an economic recovery. They promised a Budget surplus—not just in passing but throughout the entire 2011 election campaign and then again throughout the entire 2014 election campaign—and that this year 2015 would be the year of the Budget surplus. That is called another broken promise. Add it to the big long list actually—a big long list of broken promises. Now the Prime Minister says that is just an artificial target. Well actually during the 2011 campaign and the 2014 campaign when some members opposite stood on platforms promising to deliver this he said it was going to be a Budget surplus not an artificial target. This time last year this surplus was going to be half a billion dollars—this year’s surplus in the Budget next month. Now it is going to be a half-billion-dollar deficit. Where do those members stand? Where are their integrity their personal credibility and their basic honesty with their constituents? How are they going to front up to those people whom they said one thing to and now are delivering another? I guess there will be another round of spin and excuses but people will see through it. They are not as stupid as John Key and the National Party want to make out. National has borrowed $1 million an hour since it became the Government—$1 million an hour. It is spending $10 million a day in interest payments on its borrowing. How is this good financial management? We have more gross debt as a percentage of the economy than any New Zealand Government since the 1930s. “Bill the borrower” is exactly the hashtag that he deserves. Yes we have had a recession yes we have had a global financial crisis and yes we have had a series of earthquakes but we have also had some disgraceful wastes of taxpayers’ money. It is not Government money. It is not the Government’s generosity that allows it to spend on things that it determines. It is taxpayers’ money. It is our money that we contribute for the public good. The Government gave $5 billion worth of tax cuts to the wealthiest 10 percent of New Zealanders—sorry not the wealthiest; the highest income earners who declared that for the purposes of paying tax because that is different from the wealthiest. The top 10 percent of income earners in New Zealand got $5 billion worth of tax cuts in the same Budget that Bill English cut home support for older New Zealanders. What are the priorities of this Government? Through its asset sales programme we have lost nearly $1 billion already in lost dividends and that loss is rising more every day. We have had corporate bailouts and handouts— Rio Tinto with no guarantee that it will stay going and most recently Skycity. Those corporate bailouts and handouts run into billions of dollars. They have borrowed more—[Continuation line: Stuart Nash]InfrastructureSpeech - STUART NASH (Labour—Napier)STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): I must admit it was very rude of me to interrupt the Hon Ruth Dyson because she has a lot to say on this very very important issue that affects all New Zealanders. But as she did not seek a further call I decided I had better stand up and make one. I would not mind talking for 5 minutes about the electricity sector. We had Transpower come and talk to the Finance and Expenditure Committee. They talked about how its revenues grew by over 9 percent to a billion dollars but its profits declined by 18 percent. So it delivered a dividend to the Government of about $151 million. As the Hon Ruth Dyson outlined just as an aside it is quite interesting to note that due to the sale of State assets over half a billion dollars in dividends that would have come into the Government have actually gone out to the private sector. It would have been nice to have that at a time of fiscal restraint. But anyway that is where we are at. The other thing that is worth noting is the North Island grid upgrade project that actually exceeded the maximum allowable cost approved by the Electricity Commission by over $17 million. Again that seems like a bit of a theme. If it is not a database or if it is not a system then it is an upgrade. There is just so much under-budgeting and cost overruns going on here that it is of great concern. But having said that I am sure it is of great concern as well to the Minister of Finance. One of the things I would like to talk about which I know is dear to the Minister’s heart is that the World Energy Council does something called the Energy Trilemma Index and New Zealand came out at 10th. It sounds pretty good—10th in the world out of over 100 countries. But if you dig a little deeper into these figures what we will see is that the energy equity in our country dropped from 18th to 28th. Energy equity relates to the accessibility and the affordability of the energy supplied for the total population and this feeds into what is a growing problem in this country and that is fuel poverty. The definition of fuel poverty is the inability to afford to heat your home in the middle of winter. It is a real issue affecting New Zealand at the moment as poverty rates grow. As Mr Twyford well knows as our housing spokesperson and he has told everyone who will listen—and those will not listen as well; he has still told them—the state of our housing stock at the moment is at a deplorable rate. We need to do something about this and we really need to address this issue of fuel poverty. Mr Twyford and I as the housing and energy spokespeople have been working very closely to come up with solutions to this. But the thing that concerns me Mr Bridges is that you do not seem to care about this. You think it is all OK. We are 10th in the world. But who cares about the general population? You know if we have slipped to 26th in terms of energy equity it does not really matter. Well in fact it really does matter. This cuts to the heart of what we expect of a country. We do not like to think of citizens sitting in cold houses wrapping themselves up in blankets because they cannot afford power. There is a high degree of fuel poverty in this country. The other thing that happened in that World Energy Council’s Energy Trilemma Index is that our environmental sustainability dropped from 36th to 42nd position. This is of equal concern because we go out to the global market with a brand that is clean green and 100 percent pure. But the real concern I have is we are not living this brand. I do not think we have got very long to rectify the situation until that brand is eroded to such an extent we become just another small economy selling commodities to an overcrowded global market. If we lose that clean green 100 percent brand we are in real trouble. An organisation tried to quantify this about 10 years ago. They reckoned it was worth about $30 billion a year to our global economy and it is being eroded. Megan Woods and I along with others on our environmental team are working on solutions that will allow us to live this brand. If we do not live it if we do not walk the walk then we are in real trouble as a country. The erosion of our global brand I think is a major issue and something that this Government is just absolutely ignoring. We cannot continue to do that Mr Bridges. Even you Mr Bridges must admit that environmental sustainability from 36th down to 42nd is a real concern. The electricity generation sector has a pretty good story to tell. We are at around about 80 percent renewables at the moment and we are looking to go towards 90 percent. We both agree on that target. It is a very good target. But what we have also got to do is make sure that good hard-working Kiwis can afford to heat their homes and that we are living the clean green brand. Thank you very much.[Continuation line: WAGNER]AdjournmentSpeech - Hon NICKY WAGNER (Minister of Customs)Hon NICKY WAGNER (Minister of Customs): I am delighted to take this opportunity to have a call on infrastructure because it is efficient and effective infrastructure that underpins both economic development and the quality of life for all New Zealanders. The Canterbury earthquakes have taught us just how miserable life can be if you have got broken roads you do not have a reliable power service the water system is patchy and you do not have a functioning toilet. The National Government has invested heavily into infrastructure into the roads of national significance the roll-out of ultra-fast broadband new social housing fabulous new schools and health facilities and in Christchurch we have got all this and more. In fact our city is getting the biggest infrastructure investment New Zealand has ever seen. I want to talk in terms of horizontal infrastructure as if we knew that term before the earthquake. The Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team is delivering its rebuild on time on budget and to specification. The Christchurch roading and the three water systems the three waters network—that is waste water storm water and potable water—when complete will be far more resilient and much more cost effective than ever before. Right now at 31 March 2015 across Christchurch 66 percent of the roading and the three waters network is complete 91 percent of all the work in the central city is complete and overall 70 percent of the whole Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure repair and rebuild is done. Every Cantabrian will be thrilled when we get that finished although I think we will feel a bit bereft when we lose all those road cones. The public transport infrastructure will get a boost when the new bus interchange is completed next month. Although the bus network has been running pretty successfully the new interchange will be more than just a building because it signals a new start to the way that we deliver public transport in our city. It is intricately connected with the accessible city plan and that is providing a safer more concise central roading system and better public transport. This is infrastructure for all. The needs of pedestrians the needs of cyclists the needs of the fully abled as well as those who are not are all accounted for in this plan. The justice and the emergency services precinct in Christchurch is growing by the day and when it is complete it will have 19 courts accommodation for police and corrections and an emergency services hub. That hub is a new way of delivering emergency services. It will include the fire brigade St John Ambulance and a combined emergency call centre. It will be state of the art. It is infrastructure that will support not only Christchurch but Canterbury and the rest of the South Island during emergency conditions. Christchurch is already benefiting from its hospital rebuild. Both Burwood and Christchurch hospitals are being rebuilt and that is over $600 million worth of work. It is well under way and it is the biggest hospital project in our country’s history. I went to the opening of the new Child Haematology Oncology Centre which is fondly known as “CHOC”. It is an absolutely magnificent facility which will provide a really good homely environment and real support for young people and their families and it truly will make a difference during these difficult times in their lives. While I am talking about that I would like to acknowledge the work of the Canterbury District Health Board and everyone who works in those hospitals. The logistics of running a hospital during a rebuild are enormously challenging and they affect everyone who works on the site. I know life is difficult for them but they are getting through it because they are looking forward to the real benefits of a new modern hospital. Finally in terms of the central city 65000 square metres of new office space has been completed in the central business district and every day new businesses are moving into the centre city. The retail sector is also booming with retail sales 30 percent higher than pre-earthquake and the infrastructure for nightlife—the bars the restaurants and the cafes are back. They are back to about 95 percent of pre-earthquake levels. The National Government understands that resilient and modern infrastructure—