White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour—Mt Albert): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise in this House and this is my first speech as the MP for Mt Albert. Now the first thing I wanted to do was to was say congratulations to you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to have you in this position. I also wanted to congratulate Melissa Lee who has become a Minister in this Government and she was quite right when she said earlier in her speech that I reached out to both her and to Ricardo Menéndez March who were candidates in Mt Albert—a hotly contested seat—to say that it is absolutely important that we work together as far as that is possible. She has met me in the spirit of that and I hope to work very well with her. It was a very tight race and I'd like to thank the voters of Mt Albert for seeing me back into this House. I intend to do everything I can to earn their respect.Yesterday when we were sworn in it was one where I took the step of speaking my affirmation in Māori. I had done that before and it was when I was a very new MP and I was very nervous. I was equally nervous yesterday. I don't take to languages well. I find them pretty scary actually and I'm worried that I'll be judged for my terrible pronunciation. But I thought it was really important to do so on this occasion because I am concerned that there is an attack and I think it is really important that we push ourselves. We do that as parliamentarians all the time. I recently had my uncle and aunt visit from Australia and I took them around this Parliament and they were so impressed with it. We are actually privileged in this House to work together and to work quite often in very much a consciousness of the tikanga and in an integrated way in that around the House. I think we actually come on our journeys in this place towards a much greater respect and engagement with Māori culture so I will be very very sad if that is undermined in the currency of this Government. I wanted to talk about my greater concern about that because of what I heard from Winston Peters today. He said—and I was listening to him carefully—that what Māori want is First World wages and I wanted to say to him that that's exactly what the people of Mt Albert want too. That is a common need of people—we do want First World wages. Hon Mark Patterson: That was the point. HELEN WHITE: The point absolutely is that Winston Peters has got into bed with ACT and got into bed with National and they have made an agreement—Hon Member: To fix the economy.HELEN WHITE: —which I am concerned—and I will now talk about in my speech why I don't think it's going to achieve that sir. We have an issue in this country with productivity. One of the things I saw on the list that will be over is ITPs—the industry transformation plans. Those are our long-term plans for our industries. What on earth was wrong with them? What on earth was wrong with keeping plans which actually make sure that there are skills pathways for people and make sure that all the flow-over effects from those skills pathways affect other people? You can look at something like the digital transformation plan. Digital industries—it's a really good plan and it feeds out a high-paid workforce. But the decision of this coalition is that we will not have them. Do you know what else we're going to get rid of? The Productivity Commission. It's going. It's going on order to pay for a new Minister for Regulation. It is laughable that the Minister for Regulation is in fact setting up a Ministry for Regulation which is sort of more regulation isn't it? But we're going to get rid of the Productivity Commission for that which actually is the body that recommended long-term planning for productivity—for things like ITPs. I am really sad to see that. I'm going to be the spokesperson in the Labour Party for manufacturing and small business. These things are critical to the development of these incredibly important things and that is what pays the wages of people in this country. So it is very sad to see those moves go—those forward-thinking future-thinking moves go—for something that is so backward-looking because there is an ideological background to the decision to do things like this which is that we just have to get out of there and cut all the red tape and everything will come right. Well it didn't. It didn't come right in the 1990s and it's not going to come right now. What we need to do is make sure that we're supporting our businesses and supporting our workforces and making sure that we build high-wage work in this country. That is what we were doing because we had a vision and what it's being replaced with is a 1990s ideology which is long since out of date long since disproved.I want to talk about wages a bit more because I was an employment lawyer for 25 years and I saw the pain low wages caused people. There has been a halt and a suggestion—softened I think by the New Zealand First Party—that perhaps the minimum wage might have to go up a little bit. Well that's not just good enough. The Labour Government made sure that wages stayed ahead of inflation and they made sure the minimum wage went up. I am proud of that and I will be very sorry if it gets slipped backwards and so will the working people including the Māori people that Winston Peters talks about—so will they. They will be very sorry to see their wages slip backwards while the majority of tax cuts go to the wealthy in this country because again ideologically the fundamental underpinning is a belief—an outdated belief—in trickle-down economics. Long since has that myth gone and long since has most of the world lost interest in that ridiculous philosophy because it's never worked and it never will. I want to talk to you about contracting. That would have been a very big piece of work that needed doing. We needed to get a handle on the back door to paying bad wages which was basically subsistence contracting or dependent contracting. Instead a deal has been done that we're not going to look behind the words—it was called the status quo in the agreements. But we aren't going to look behind the words of what people call themselves. So I am fearful that what the coalition Government has decided to do is ignore utterly what the real relationship is between people and whether there is exploitation whether they are actually really in business on their account or whether they are actually just dependent and subservient and exploited. If you do that and if you go through with that that's going to hurt working people in this country so please don't. Think twice. Think twice because—again I quote the Hon Winston Peters—I understand that Māori want First World wages too." because so do I and so do the people of Mt Albert. Now I want to talk about an issue that is related and that is housing because another thing that people need is they need a decent house. They need a decent place to live. There has been so much work done on that and it is about to be undermined and that is my fear. My fear is that we have a situation where we are going to see rents rise in this country but also insecurity of rent—insecurity. You cannot deny that if the proposal is to bring in a 90-day no-fault termination because that means that it doesn't matter if you can now bring your dog to the rental—which I'd love—you could get kicked out in 90 days for doing nothing and for doing no harm. We need to make moves towards treating rentals as homes not investments. If we did that and if we stuck to the plan and moved on that what we would end up with is homes for our children—secure homes for our children—and yes I welcome the idea that we would bring pets into them. That is a really nice move but you have to have base security first. You have to have a rental that you can call your home and that you can bring up your kids in so that they can go to Mount Albert Grammar School and know that they're not going to get kicked out tomorrow. It's a really important part of security for people. Poor first-time home buyers. What's going to happen to them in the next little while because they're now going to be competing—they're going to be competing—with a whole lot of rental investors because that's where the money is going to go. You know where it's not going to go—and I'm going to return back to my speech here. It's not going to go into the productive economy is it where we would really like that money. That money if it was in the productive economy would boost wages and productivity in this country—something that we sorely need to do. Thank you."