Volume 704 Week 11 - Wednesday 18 March 2015Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeVolume 704 Week 11 - Wednesday 18 March 2015[Sitting date: 18 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2341. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Wednesday 18 March 2015Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.Prayers.VisitorsEuropean Parliament—Delegation for Relations with Australia and New ZealandMr SPEAKER: Honourable members I am sure that members would wish to welcome a parliamentary delegation representing the delegation for relations with Australia and New Zealand from the European Parliament led by Mr Michael Theurer MEP of the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe who are present in the gallery.Questions to MinistersWage Rates—Growth1.JAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany) to the Minister of Finance: What reports has he received on progress the Government has made in supporting higher wages for New Zealand families?Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): I have seen several reports confirming that the growing economy is continuing to support more jobs and higher incomes. Statistics New Zealand figures show that in 2014 80000 new jobs were created across the country. Average wages rose 2.5 percent last year so average wages have increased by more than 20 percent since late 2008 to $56000 compared with the rate of inflation over the same period of around 11 percent. Also the labour market participation rate is at a record 69.7 percent.Jami-Lee Ross: What is the expected trend for wages and unemployment over the next few years?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Any expected trend in an economy is subject to the risks that economic forecasts will not turn out exactly as predicted but the current forecast shows that unemployment is expected to fall from its current level to 4.7 percent over the next 2 years. By mid-2019 153000 more people are expected to be in work and over roughly that time through to the latter half of 2018 the average wage is expected to increase from $56000 currently to $62200. Of course one of the risks to that forecast is lower inflation than has been expected because if inflation is lower then generally you would expect that the dollar value of expected wage increases is a bit lower than the forecast.Jami-Lee Ross: What are some of the factors driving recent job and wage growth in the New Zealand labour market?Hon BILL ENGLISH: The main factor is business and consumer confidence. Current signs are encouraging. Business investment increased from $30.5 billion in 2010 to $38 billion in this last year. The ANZ Business Outlook survey shows business confidence is currently buoyant with a net 34 percent of firms optimistic about the general economy. On average forecasts show the economy growing by just under 3 percent a year over the next 5 years following annual growth of between 2 and 3 percent over the past 3 years. So that is a picture of moderate and sustained growth leading to moderate and sustained increases in incomes.Jami-Lee Ross: What steps has the Government taken to help take-home wages for New Zealand families increase faster than the cost of living?Hon BILL ENGLISH: The most important steps the Government takes are those steps that support the confidence of businesses to invest and put more capital into their business and to therefore in the long run be able to pay higher wages. The Government does not influence that directly. However we can contribute by for instance showing fiscal restraint and persisting with economic reform. This enables interest rates to stay lower for longer but enables businesses to improve their competitiveness and therefore their ability to pay higher wages.Housing Affordable—Construction Material Tariffs and Reports2.ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by his statement that reducing tariffs on construction materials will save “about $3500 for a new home”; if so when will new home buyers see these savings?Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): I stand by my full statement last year that removing tariffs and duties is expected to save around $3500 on the construction of a standard New Zealand home. Officials estimate the removal of anti-dumping duties is expected to provide the majority of the savings—around about $2600. The remaining $900 of savings is expected from the removal of tariffs. In respect of the second part of the question I am advised that the benefits could take some time to completely pass through to new homeowners as building businesses develop new supply arrangements offshore.Andrew Little: Has he read the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment report Housing Affordability: Outlook and Opportunities which states: “any cost reductions from the removal of tariffs and duties … is likely to be captured by developers rather than passed on to consumers.”; if so why does the centrepiece of his 2014 Budget give thousands to property developers and nothing to families?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Firstly it was not the centrepiece of the Government’s Budget. No I have not read that report but we live in a competitive world in housing and any removal of duties and tariffs does actually help reduce the cost and therefore is likely to be passed on to consumers. The second thing I would say is that I checked with Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment officials before I came to the House this afternoon and they advised me that they continue to stand by the view that the savings are in the order of magnitude of the $3500 that they indicated to the Government at the time the announcement was made.Phil Twyford: It’s not what they said in writing.Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Yes it was my boy. [Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! It is not acceptable for this chatter to go on between both the front benches.Andrew Little: In view of the fact that he has not read the report—[Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! I will ask the member to start again.Andrew Little: Thank you Mr Speaker. In view of the fact that he has not read the report has he perhaps been advised of another passage in the report which states that the price impact of the Government’s special housing projects is “negligible” and why does he insist on using piffling half-measures against a full-blown housing crisis?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: There is not a housing crisis. There is certainly a demand for houses and that in part reflects the fact that the Government is doing such a good job that New Zealanders are no longer leaving for Australia in droves like they did when Helen Clark was the Prime Minister.Andrew Little: Given that under his watch Auckland house prices went up by $91000 last year alone rising more than—Hon Dr Nick Smith: They doubled under Labour.Andrew Little: —35 times faster than the median family income Dr Smith is he at all surprised that homeownership is at its lowest level in generations?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: The Minister for Building and Housing is quite right in his interjection. House prices doubled under Labour interest rates were driven to 10.9 percent the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet spent 5 years providing advice to Helen Clark on what to do about the housing issues in Auckland and as per normal Labour did absolutely nothing about it. This Government has set about solving those issues. Interest rates are lower a hundred special housing areas have been established and house construction is taking place at levels that are now back where they were in 2008. We are getting on top of the problem.Andrew Little: Is he aware of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment report’s conclusion that a large public sector house building programme is the “Most likely means to overcome the majority of Auckland’s dwelling shortfall inside 10 years.”; if so when is he going to get real on housing and sign up to Labour’s KiwiBuild?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I would be very surprised if that was the conclusion drawn by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. But if the member really thinks that the Government getting out there building houses is the solution to the housing problem then why does he not suggest that the Government should be out there building schools hospitals roads and everything else? Because it does not. The private sector does it and it does it very successfully.Andrew Little: Now that his own officials are recommending he adopt KiwiBuild will he drop his ideological blinkers and get on with actually building affordable homes or is he putting politics before families yet again?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: No we will not be adopting Labour’s failed policies. I predict over the course of the next 6 to 12 months—Mr Parker knows what is coming; he is quiet as a little church mouse these days—most of the policies that Labour did announce will be gone by lunchtime morning tea time and anything else.Andrew Little: In light of the answer to that question I seek leave to table the report of the Ministry of Business Innovation—Mr SPEAKER: Order! No that report is available to all members to source.Roading Auckland—Pūhoi to Wellsford Route3.DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First) to the Minister for Economic Development: Does he stand by his statement to RadioLive’s Duncan Garner yesterday in respect of starting the Pūhoi to Wellsford Motorway that “2016 sounds like a pretty good date to me”?Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Economic Development): I thank the member for his question and I absolutely do. The New Zealand Transport Agency expects construction of the Pūhoi to Wellsford motorway to start in late 2016 and to take around 5 years which is fantastic for the people of Northland. Pūhoi to Wellsford will open up Northland to economic development and tourism by providing a critical link between Northland and the rest of the country. Yesterday I happened to be in the north of Northland and they were telling me it could not come soon enough which is why it is important they support a good local who understands the needs of the north and who does not just fly in and fly out on his helicopter.Denis O’Rourke: Can the Minister please tell the House when the board of inquiry was held on the 19 kilometre Warkworth to Wellsford section of the Pūhoi to Wellsford motorway which is vital to the economic future of Northland?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: That part has not yet happened as the member may have noticed. Pūhoi to Warkworth has and it is expected to start construction next year which is very exciting. And I remind the House that before this Government came along the commitment of the other side was to stop a four-lane motorway in a paddock outside Pūhoi and never extend it further.Denis O’Rourke: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The question asked whether the Minister would tell the House when the board of inquiry was held. That was not addressed at all.Mr SPEAKER: It certainly was addressed. He said it has not occurred for that particular section and then referred to the section that it had been. The question has been addressed.Phil Twyford: Can he confirm the New Zealand Transport Agency’s advice that at this stage in respect of the route between Warkworth and Wellsford there is no indicative route available and no start date for construction; if not is he announcing that a route has been set and a start date has been confirmed?Mr SPEAKER: The Hon Steven Joyce—either of those two supplementary questions.Hon STEVEN JOYCE: This will come as no surprise to the member also known as the “member against the ‘Holiday Highway’ ” as he calls it—Mr SPEAKER: Order! Just answer the question.Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Well it happens to be true. The answer to the question is that no that particular part of the route has yet to be set but the people of Northland know that this Government is committed to Pūhoi to Wellsford and the Labour Party hates Northland which is why they threw Willow-Jean Prime under the bus. [Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! I am wanting to call the next supplementary question and we need a bit of assistance to do so.Denis O’Rourke: Following on from Mr Twyford’s supplementary question can the Minister please tell the House how construction of the Warkworth to Wellsford motorway could start in 2016 when there are no detailed plans for this vital and difficult section of road and no resource consents or designations for it either?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The member is creating a straw person and then trying to shoot it down. The Government has committed that the Pūhoi to Warkworth section will start in 2016. That is what we have said and the member is trying to talk about Warkworth to Wellsford. Believe me that will happen under this Government provided the people of Northland and the people of New Zealand continue to support us.Denis O’Rourke: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: If the point of order is that the question has not been addressed the member is wrong so he does not need to raise that as a point of order. Has he an alternative point of order?Denis O’Rourke: I seek leave to table the February 2015 Tai Tokerau Northland growth study in which these road priorities are listed and which states that resource consents for only the Pūhoi to Warkworth section have been done.Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that particular document. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.Document by leave laid on the Table of the House.Denis O’Rourke: When the Minister told Duncan Garner and the people of Northland concerning building the motorway all the way to Wellsford from 2016: “That’s my plan that’s the Government’s plan.” can he explain how the Government will able to build the key Warkworth to Wellsford section for just the $42.3 million listed in the draft Auckland regional land transport plan through to 2024-25 when that section of road will cost at least a billion dollars?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Let me explain this to the member. There are two sections of the road. One runs from Pūhoi to Warkworth and the second one runs from Warkworth to Wellsford. And when we say we are starting construction next year it is on the first half of the road as has been said now for some time including in our pre-election policy. For Mr O’Rourke to come up today and say: “Well we’re not even sure about Warkworth to Wellsford.” I am pleased he is proposing to join us in support of this road because his leader is wandering around Northland saying it is not even important in Auckland and somehow Wellsford is not part of Northland.Denis O’Rourke: Given it was bridges over troubled waters last week and realistically only half of a motorway this week which actually misses Northland completely can Northlanders expect any more half-baked promises next week to build routes further north and especially through areas of particularly low resilience such as at Brynderwyn and Te Hana?Mr SPEAKER: Order! It is meant to be a concise supplementary question. If there is ministerial responsibility I call the Hon Steven Joyce.Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Presumably I get a little latitude with the answer. This Government is unambiguously supportive of having a decent motorway link between Auckland and Northland and that will bring great economic development for the region. I do not know what the member is trying to achieve but in case he does not know it his leader is wandering around Northland saying that he is in favour of doing things for Northland. Meanwhile Mr O’Rourke is down here arguing against bridges arguing against highways—Mr SPEAKER: Order!Ron Mark: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I know you have ruled once before about people referring to members not in the House and I did let that go initially but the moment he referred to the present tense then that member is out of order.Mr SPEAKER: No. Order! There is no Standing Order that says you cannot refer to absence from the House. It has been a long-term convention in this House and I accept the point the member is making that it is unhelpful and will lead to disorder if members do refer to the absence of any member.Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. It was incorrect for Minister Joyce to refer to the Rt Hon Winston Peters as wandering around Northland. He is in fact flying around in a helicopter.Mr SPEAKER: Order! That is not a point of order either. [Interruption] Order! I think Mr Brownlee is going to get a lesson for the disorder that he now causes by raising such a point of order.Ron Mark: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. That is my point and I am going to ask you to reflect because other members who have—Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The member will sit down. That is not a point of order either. Is there a further supplementary question?Denis O’Rourke: When will this Government honestly admit to the people of Northland that the only way it can be made to keep any of its many election promises is by voting in Winston Peters and not some naive National Party no-hoper?Mr SPEAKER: Order! There is absolutely no ministerial responsibility for that question.Child Poverty—School Food Programmes4.METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by his statement that the principals of decile 1 to 4 schools he has visited have told him “the number of children in those schools who actually require lunch is the odd one or two”?Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): Yes because that is what principals have told me.Metiria Turei: How can it be correct that only the odd one or two kids in low-decile schools require lunch when KidsCan says that on average 23 percent of the children in the schools it works with are in need of lunch every day?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Well I believe it to be true and one of the issues I raised with the Minister of Education today was to ask her whether she in her travels as the Minister of Education in the last 3½ years had had the issue of lunch in schools raised with her. She told me that it has either never been raised or been raised extremely infrequently.Metiria Turei: Is the Prime Minister telling the House that the low-decile schools that he has visited do not have the same needs as other low-decile schools that KidsCan works with?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: What I am telling the member is that firstly the Government has been working with a number of private sector organisations to provide breakfast in schools and about 800—791 I think—schools out of 2500 approximately have taken that up. Secondly I think there will be some children who go to school without lunch but I think that number is actually relatively small. In some cases it will be one or two; in some cases it will be a few more but I do not think it is as widespread as the member is purporting it to be.Metiria Turei: I seek leave to table a document from KidsCan showing that it is now feeding 15000 students a week across 448 schools an average of 33 children in each—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The document is now being described. The date of the document would be useful.Metiria Turei: The date of the document is 3 March 2015.Mr SPEAKER: March 2015—is there any objection to that information being tabled? There is none. It can be tabled.Document by leave laid on the Table of the House.Metiria Turei: I seek leave to table a document prepared by my office on the schools that John Key visited from 2013 to 2014 showing that of the decile 1 schools and decile—Mr SPEAKER: Order! No I—[Interruption] Order! The member will resume her seat. This is an effective way of making a political statement. It does not have the purpose of informing the House. It will not be tabled.Metiria Turei: Which of the decile 1 and 2 schools that John Key visited—Māngere Central Waimate Main Flaxmere Huntly Huntly College Manaia View Pt England—told him that only one or two of their kids needed feeding every day when each of those schools has a lunch programme provided by either KidsCan or some other charity in their community?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Well by definition I suppose if they already have lunch provided then actually they would not raise the fact that they need lunch so that is rather self-defeating. Secondly it may be lost on the member but I have been the Prime Minister since the end of 2008. The question the member asked was for the 1 year from 2013. But in the interests of trying to get to the bottom of this debate at 1.41 this afternoon I took the liberty of ringing the Minister of Education. I said: “Please ring for me three schools that are decile 1 or 2 and ask them how many kids have not come to school today with lunch.” That was done completely randomly and with no information. Here are the facts. Phillip Heeney of Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Te Waiu o Ngati Porou Ruatōria a decile 1 school—people are free to ring the school—Metiria Turei: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! Every member has a right to raise a point of order. It will be heard in silence—[Interruption] Order! The member will resume her seat. I repeat because I was interrupted that every member has a right to raise a point of order. This one will be heard in silence but I sincerely hope that it is a valid point of order.Metiria Turei: That was not an answer to the question that I asked. I asked—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume her seat. It is very much an answer to the question the member asked. She can shake her head but it is I who has got to adjudicate on this. It was a very full answer; it was quite a lengthy question. The House will later on today devote a considerable amount of time to this issue and I feel it is in the interests of the House that the Prime Minister be allowed to complete his answer.Rt Hon JOHN KEY: As I said at 1.41 p.m. with absolutely no knowledge—these are the facts. At Te Waiu o Ngati Porou school Ruatoria decile 1 how many children came to school today without lunch—answer zero. Barbara Ala’Alatoa Sylvia Park School decile 2—one to two kids maybe. Iain Taylor Manurewa Intermediate—decile 1 school roll of 711—maybe 12. Yes there is an issue where some children come to school without lunch. That number of children is relatively low.Metiria Turei: So why then did the Prime Minister refuse my invitation to visit Windley School this morning where we fed with peanut butter and jam sandwiches some 50 kids at lunchtime; where Windley School says it feeds some 50 every day Kelvin Road School some 50 every day; Cosgrove Primary up to 40 kids every day; Hay Park around 12 kids lunch every day; and Kelston Girls’ which was recently on Campbell Live showing just how serious the problem is—why will he not come with me to visit those schools that do have a problem so that he can see it for himself?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: As I said to the member last week when she was trying to tell this House that 90 percent of children went to school without lunch and had to then come back and apologise for being wrong I am happy to go to a school of my choosing. Secondly I note that the member when she tweeted the picture did so with an apron for the KickStart Breakfast programme that the Government is running. This is a Government that has provided 3.4 million breakfasts. This is a Government that is working with the private sector to help deliver that from Fonterra through to Sanitarium. They are the same breakfast programmes where principals tell me—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The answer now is long enough.Metiria Turei: I seek leave to table a document from the Parliamentary Library showing that the GST on $1.29 is 19c not 2c.Mr SPEAKER: Again the purpose of tabling documents is to inform the proceedings of the House. Members know current GST rates. I am not about to put that leave.Metiria Turei: Why does the Prime Minister continue to mock and downplay the seriousness of the problem maintaining yet again that only the odd one or two kids need lunch at school when schools know he is wrong KidsCan knows he is wrong and more important the kids who come to school hungry know he is wrong?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: The Government has been very focused on this issue for a long period of time. It is actually proud of its record. It has extended Fruit in Schools for a huge number of children. It provides breakfasts in schools alongside the private sector. This is an issue that as I said to the member and I repeat again I raise with pretty much every school I go to and the same response is what I always get—about 15 percent of kids want to take up the breakfast programme a very small number need lunch and when they come to school without lunch the school provides them with lunch. It does so out of its breakfast programme for the odd lunch it provides. At the end of the day I think the member actually does a disservice to the fantastic parents and caregivers out there the overwhelming bulk of whom actually do provide their kids with breakfast and lunch. They do a damn good job and the member should stop telling them that they do not.Metiria Turei: Given that the Prime Minister missed the opportunity this morning to talk with parents charity workers and the kids over a lunch programme will he commit to visiting Windley School—and if not Windley School then any school that KidsCan suggests he goes to visit—and making the peanut butter and jam sandwiches for the kids—Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The question is too long. The Prime Minister can answer the essence of the question.Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I have been to numerous schools where KidsCan has been in operation. I have been to those schools with Julie on numerous occasions. This is actually the Government that gave KidsCan $500000 more for raincoats and $900000 more to deal with headlice. We are providing extensive support. But I will say this. I went to one of the schools where every child was given a raincoat and yes we fully supported that. The argument around that is that children do not have raincoats. So I actually asked about 20 of the kids: “Do you own a raincoat?”. Every single child told me: “Yes.” So it is great they have got another one and we support KidsCan and we are giving them money and we think they are a great charity and they are doing good work but just because you give kids a raincoat does not mean they did not own one beforehand.Jobs—Northland5.Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei) to the Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment: What reports has he received on job growth in New Zealand?Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment): I have received a number of positive reports highlighting strong job growth across New Zealand. Today’s Jobs Online report is just the latest. It was released by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and shows that skilled job vacancies advertised online were up nearly 6 percent in the past year to February. This follows the recent household labour force survey which highlighted that 80000 new jobs have been added to New Zealand’s workforce in the previous year with 180000 more people in work now than when we came into Government in 2008. This highlights that the Government is focused on the issues that matter to Kiwi families. Our economic policies are encouraging business investment right across New Zealand and it is this investment that leads to more jobs and higher wages for New Zealanders.Dr Shane Reti: How is job growth in the Northland region compared with the rest of the economy?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The most recent household labour force survey statistics showed that 7500 new jobs were added in the Northland region in the last year which is an impressive 11.1 percent growth rate. To put this growth in perspective the entire country grew 80000 jobs last year so the Northland region generated nearly 10 percent of those. Even more impressive is that of those 7500 new jobs 6600 of them—or nearly 90 percent—were full time with the balance part-time roles. Nobody is saying the job in Northland is done but we are making very good progress.Grant Robertson: In the light of that answer can he confirm that his much-trumpeted figure of 7500 new jobs in the Northland electorate turns out to include not only ones where people were employed for 1 hour a week but also thousands of jobs that are not even in the Northland electorate or are his ghost jobs just joining his ghost roads in Northland?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The member needs to do his work. The figures as has been clear since they were first released relate to the Northland region. We have been very clear that they are for the Northland region. It is about the Northland economy which is now strongly growing under this Government. As for those jobs that he refers to of 1 hour a week or more I should clarify—he obviously did not listen to the previous answer—that 6600 of those jobs are reported by Statistics New Zealand to be full-time jobs. The member should be careful which commentator he reads.Dr Shane Reti: What reports has he received on the types of roles the 7500 new jobs in the Northland region are?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The household labour force survey data shows the increase of 7500 new jobs in the Northland region in the last year are from a broad range of occupations including a 3500 increase in managerial roles a 1800 increase in technicians and trade workers a 1600 increase in sales workers a 1000 increase in clerical and administrative workers a 300 increase in machinery operators and drivers a 200 increase in labourers offset by decreases in professionals and community and personal service workers. Overall it is encouraging to see positive signs of a turn-round under this Government in the Northland region.Wage Rates—Growth6.GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) to the Minister of Finance: Can workers still expect that the average wage will rise to $62000 in the next three years as he stated during the period of the election campaign in 2014; if so what annual percentage increase will be required to make that a reality?Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): Treasury forecasts show the average wage rising to $62200 by September 2018. That information is available to the public it was available to that member and he could have included it in his election speeches but he chose not to. Whether workers can expect that to happen is subject to all the same uncertainties as any economic forecast. These forecasts have annual growth in the average wage of 2.9 percent a year in nominal terms and 0.8 percent in real terms. Treasury’s latest forecasts actually show slightly stronger real wage growth over the next few years so households could have slightly greater spending power or less depending on the relationship between inflation rates and their actual wage settlements.Grant Robertson: Give his promise before the last election that his party’s policies would make those forecasts a reality is he now guaranteeing to New Zealand workers that there will be a 3 percent average pay rise over the next 3 years?Hon BILL ENGLISH: No and I doubt that anyone would believe such a guarantee from a Government. I do not think anyone who voted in the last election overwhelmingly for National ahead of Labour thought that they were voting for a guaranteed set of pay increases. That of course for any individual family or worker will depend on the business that they are in the productivity the negotiation process the success of that business the export prices the exchange rate—any number of uncertainties. We made the point that on average wages are rising. Labour campaigned that incomes were not rising if not falling and it lost the election.Grant Robertson: Given his statement on Sunday on TV that he made his promise that the average wage would rise to $62000 as “part of a political debate” does that mean that promise means absolutely nothing now that the election is over?Hon BILL ENGLISH: If the member believes that wage increases in New Zealand can be guaranteed by a politician’s promise he knows less about economics than I thought he did. Actually Mr Robertson wages cannot be guaranteed by anything politicians say. What we did point out was that all forecasts showed consistent moderate increases in incomes in New Zealand. That is turning out to be the case. We believe it will continue and we believe the Government can take measures to support it. Incomes are rising in New Zealand. That member tried to persuade workers that incomes were falling and it is one of the reasons he lost the election so badly.Grant Robertson: In light of that answer could the finance Minister tell us what percentage figure of wage increases constitutes a moderate wage increase?Hon BILL ENGLISH: I can tell him that we have described these forecasts which imply a 2.9 percent a year increase in nominal terms. I would say that is moderate. Some people might think it is very large. Some people might think it is by no means large enough. But I think it is fair to describe the economic forecasts about wage growth in New Zealand as consistent moderate increases.Parents Teenage—Benefits and Government Measures to Support7.BARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country) to the Minister for Social Development: What reports has she received on the number of teen mothers receiving a benefit?Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development): The number of young mothers aged 16 to 19 requiring a benefit has almost halved since 2009. This means better lives for these families and fewer long-term beneficiaries. There were 48 percent fewer teen mums on main benefits at the end of 2014 compared with 2009. Teen parents spend an average of 19 years on a benefit and have some of the highest lifetime costs of any group on welfare let alone the social costs. These statistics show that they are taking full advantage of the support and the opportunities provided by this Government which is great news for these young families and for taxpayers.Barbara Kuriger: What else is the Government doing to support teen parents?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Our major investment in youth services is enabling these young people to take part in education and training to give them the tools that they need to get into employment. It is helping young people on benefit manage their money better and we do want to extend that to 18 and 19-year-olds. Childcare assistance is also helping teen parents to access education and attend parenting courses. We have put $6.2 million into supported housing for teen parents and this means support by trained staff for teen parents and their children 24 hours a day 7 days a week. We all want to see these young mums and dads become successful independent people with children who are thriving.Darroch Ball: With one of the pathways out of benefit dependency being education how is she planning to address the fact that according to the Association of Teen Parent Educators New Zealand 87 percent of teenage mothers and virtually all teenage fathers are missing out on education especially in Northland where teen pregnancies are on the increase?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I am not sure where those statistics come from because they are not what we are seeing. In fact we are seeing that this Government has put an enormous amount of money into supporting teen parents through teen parent units the numbers of which have doubled throughout the country and the huge work that is going into putting support around them and getting them into education. So I would contest those figures.Roading Northland—Bridges Upgrade and By-electionPHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): Was the National Party’s Northland by-election candidate—Mr SPEAKER: Order! That is not the question that I have on my sheet.8.PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū) to the Minister of Transport: Does he agree that the Government’s Northland bridges policy was “absolutely” the idea of National by-election candidate Mark Osborne as he claims?Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Economic Development) on behalf of theMinister of Transport: Strictly speaking it is the National Party’s bridges policy but I am sure the Government will enjoy putting it in place. We have a great candidate in Mark Osborne with great ideas to ensure that the future of Northland is a prosperous one.David Shearer: Hasn’t answered the question.Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Give me a chance. The Pūhoi to Wellsford road of national significance will open up Northland for economic development and tourism. That is why Mr Osborne has advocated strongly to Ministers that the next logical step is upgrading single-lane bridges on the Twin Coast Discovery Highway to ensure Northland is ready for the influx of new visitors and business that the Pūhoi to Wellsford highway will bring. Mr Osborne’s commitment also reflects priorities identified by the Northland Regional Council in the region’s draft regional land transport plan.Phil Twyford: Was he disappointed that Mark Osborne who he claims is a strong voice for Northland and wait for it actually lives in Northland could not even name the taxpayer-funded bridges when asked about them by the media given that they were supposedly his idea that he announced the policy and that he could even see one of them from his house?Mr SPEAKER: Order! There is absolutely no ministerial responsibility for statements made by Mr Osborne.Grant Robertson: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. In the answer the extremely long answer that the Minister gave he made a number of political points that had absolutely no relationship to his ministerial responsibility. He also in terms of the original question did not in fact give an accurate answer to the original question anyway. Mr Twyford is allowed to ask supplementary questions that come from the Minister’s answers and that is what he did.Mr SPEAKER: Order! No on this occasion I cannot agree. I accept one or two points that the member is making. I think the answer did not strictly address the question that was raised. That is true. I think the answer did contain an element of politics. That is also true. But that does not give licence then for the member to ask a question that is simply out of order in that there is no ministerial responsibility.Chris Hipkins: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: Order! Can I just clarify that we are not relitigating this matter.Chris Hipkins: I am asking for some further clarification.Mr SPEAKER: Well on this occasion I will accept it but only marginally.Chris Hipkins: Thank you Mr Speaker. When this matter was raised previously it was in relation to the Prime Minister and whether he was answering questions as the leader of the National Party or as the Prime Minister. You previously indicated that where the Prime Minister gave answers that related to decisions that he had taken as leader of the National Party but he gave those answers as Prime Minister he could be questioned on those. So I am just wondering whether you could clarify. Mr Joyce as a Minister was answering with party political material. It therefore would seem completely at odds with your earlier ruling to suggest that he cannot now be questioned on that.Hon Gerry Brownlee: I think that raises an interesting thing for you to consider. The primary question that was accepted today and the primary question that was accepted the previous day as mentioned by Chris Hipkins and indeed the question accepted today with regard to the question to the Prime Minister all really go to the same sort of point. I think we should have either one thing or the other. Either questions in the House should relate to ministerial decisions or decisions or comments made by Ministers as Ministers in their portfolios or we just have carte blanche and we have an hour of campaigning every day.Mr SPEAKER: While I am in this position I hope we do not end up with an hour of campaigning every day. In this particular situation—I accept the point the member is making—it is a thin line that I need to judge and in fact the Prime Minister if he is answering the question needs to judge in what capacity he is answering the question. If the Prime Minister decides to suggest he is answering in his capacity as the leader of a political party that is his prerogative to do so. The reason I am comfortable with a question along these lines being on the Order Paper is that the Government on Tuesday last week took the opportunity to very much make this a Government initiative when it raised a Government question asking the Minister of Transport about the bridges. But in this particular supplementary question the member asked: “Is he disappointed with the comments of Mr Osborne?”. Under no circumstances can I find any way that allows that to have a ministerial responsibility. If the member wants to use a portion of the Minister’s answers and get it into order as a supplementary question good luck to him but he certainly did not achieve that in this supplementary question.Denis O’Rourke: What are the names of the 10 State highway bridges to be two-laned in Northland?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The Minister is more than happy to share those with the House. There is of course the Kaeō River Bridge which his colleague the Minister for Economic Development was passing over yesterday; there is the Waihou River Rangiahua Bridge; there is the Taipā Bridge; there is the Tirohanga Stream Bridge; there is the Taheke Bridge No. 569; there is the Waimamaku River Lowes Bridge; there is the Waimamaku River Hallahans Bridge; there is the “Darby and Joan” Kauri Bridge; there is the Andersons Bridge; and there is the Matakohe River Bridge also known as the Hardies Bridge. Incidentally I heard that somebody was asked to name them yesterday. I understand they got seven out of the 10 right on the first shot although I did not need the TV and then Annette King—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The continuation of this answer will not help the order of the House.Phil Twyford: Has he as transport Minister advised Mark Osborne the man who announced his policy on the bridges of the names of each of the 10 bridges given that he could not name them when asked by the media last night?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: It is important to know that actually it was the Minister standing as the spokesperson on transport for National and the candidate who announced the 10 bridges together. He has been advised of them. As I said yesterday he got seven out of 10 on the first go. As I also said the deputy leader of the Labour Party was very supportive of him and said: “Many longstanding MPs in this House could not name all the bridges in their electorates.”Phil Twyford: Was not the real source of the bridges policy Steven Joyce and Crosby/Textor’s Jo de Joux and why does he not just come clean with the people on this?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The Minister has spoken to his colleague the Minister for Economic Development who is also very enthusiastic about roading for economic development in Northland. He is very encouraging of the project that this Mr Osborne candidate for Northland has brought up. The only thing we can be sure of about Mr Twyford’s line of questioning is that there is one party in this House that is in favour of developing the roading network in Northland. It ain’t the Labour Party and it certainly is not the New Zealand First Party.Phil Twyford: Does he see anything wrong with a candidate proposing $70 million of taxpayer spending the Minister seeking only general advice from officials—in his words—approving them without seeing any cost-benefit analysis and then the candidate announcing that spending in order to win him votes?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: That sounds like a lot more analysis than the Labour Party went through in 2005 over the interest on student loans.Phil Twyford: Which of these best describes his bridges policy: “Brazen shameless cynical and more than a little desperate” John Armstrong in the New Zealand Herald; “it sends a destructive message … that this is how things now roll under John Key.” Matthew Hooton; that it amounts to corruption Andrew Geddis; that it shows that the Government is “Highly biddable and to be blunt a bit weak.” Rob Hosking in the National Business Review; or the New Zealand Herald editorial which said the bribe was “insulting on so many levels”?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: In response to that litany of armchair quarterbacks including one of whom has subsequently apologised for his column I would make the following comment—[Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! It was a long question. It deserves an answer and I am looking forward to it.Hon STEVEN JOYCE: So two points. The Minister’s colleague the Minister for Economic Development was in Northland yesterday and the Northland people were very very enthusiastic about these projects. They wanted to know whether they could be built more quickly than 6 years and wanted to know which ones would be done first. But also this is a continuation of a programme that this Government has been running right around this country. If you want to talk about the Kōpū Bridge in the Coromandel or the Kurow Bridges in North Otago or the Kawarau Bridge in Queenstown or the Waiwhakaiho Bridge in New Plymouth or the Normanby Bridge in Hāwera or the—Mr SPEAKER: The Minister will resume his seat. I have heard enough.Disability Care—Out-of-home Care Review9.STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura) to the Minister for Disability Issues: What is the Government doing to improve the lives of families with disabled children placed in out-of-home care?Hon NICKY WAGNER (Minister for Disability Issues): Today I am announcing the start of public consultation on the review of voluntary out-of-home placements under sections 141 and 142 of the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act 1989. All parents want the best for their children and in a small number of cases of severely disabled children who can no longer be cared for at home they are cared for in voluntary out-of-home placement. The decision to place a disabled child in out-of-home care would be a difficult decision for any family and the review will ensure that the process supports families and puts the needs of the child first.Stuart Smith: How can disabled children and their families have their say on the future of out-of-home care?Hon NICKY WAGNER: There will be a number of opportunities for disabled children their families caregivers service providers and New Zealanders to have their say. Throughout the consultation period which runs to 29 May people can make submissions in writing or online and we even have available an easy-read format or they can join a Facebook closed discussion group or attend a stakeholder meeting which will be held throughout the country. We want to draw on the experience of disabled children and their families and find out how the system can help them better.Internal Affairs Department—Security of Personal Information10.CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) to the Minister of Internal Affairs: Is he confident that the Department of Internal Affairs manages New Zealanders’ personal information documents and records effectively and safely?Hon PETER DUNNE (Minister of Internal Affairs): Yes I am.Clare Curran: Does he have confidence that the Department of Internal Affairs has effective oversight of risks in IT functions and security across Government agencies and that appropriate levels of assurance are in place?Hon PETER DUNNE: Yes I do for a number of reasons. One is that in late 2012 the Government Chief Information Officer who is also the Secretary for Internal Affairs carried out a review of publicly accessible information systems and as a result of that review some changes were made including the appointment of a Government Chief Privacy Officer.Clare Curran: Has he seen any recent reports from the Department of Internal Affairs that identified high-level risks leaving Government networks vulnerable to attack including security controls not functioning a lack of ability to investigate malicious activity and insecure information transmitted over the Department of Internal Affairs and “Desktop as a Service” cloud-provider networks; if so when?Hon PETER DUNNE: I constantly receive advice from the Secretary for Internal Affairs in his capacity as the Government Chief Information Officer. Given the sensitivity of a lot of that advice it would be inappropriate to go into detail in this House.Clare Curran: Which specific IT security functions within his department are currently compromised as a result of a lack of funding?Hon PETER DUNNE: I think the best way I can answer that question is to refer the member to my previous answer.Clare Curran: Can he guarantee that under his watch no Government IT system has gone live without accreditation from the New Zealand Institute of Safety Management and sign-off from the chief executive officer?Hon PETER DUNNE: I assume the member is referring to the chief executive officer of the Department of Internal Affairs in her question and the answer to that would be yes.Clare Curran: Will he support my Electronic Data Safety Bill which has its first reading today to select committee in order to restore public confidence that people’s information that is held by the Government is secure private and well-managed given that he expressed support for this bill when it was first drawn from the ballot and before he was the Minister?Hon PETER DUNNE: The short answer is no because the bill was drawn from the ballot before work that I referred to in one of my earlier answers in late 2012 which addressed the very issues the bill seeks to address and which therefore makes the bill utterly redundant.Dairy Farming—Environmental Concerns11.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by his statements regarding dairy conversions that the debate should be driven by the “capacity for maintaining and improving the environment”?Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): I stand by my full statement which was: “What should drive that debate is … the capacity for maintaining and improving the environment …”. So I cannot tell you whether there are too many conversions taking place or not enough.Catherine Delahunty: Does he agree with Waikato Federated Farmers that Landcorp and others should consider halting the conversion of upper Waikato land into dairy farms because the addition of thousands more cows will undermine its work for water quality downstream?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I am just not in a position to comment on that. I have not seen those particular comments. What I do know is that the Government sets a national water standard and that standard has been well received by people. It is a good yardstick for what should actually happen.Catherine Delahunty: Does he agree that Landcorp’s conversion of land in the upper Waikato and the addition of another 29500 cows over the next 5 years on that land will neither “maintain nor improve the water quality” which is already too dirty to swim in?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: No I do not think I could agree with that statement. I think what is worthy of introducing into this is Dairy New Zealand’s Dr Rick Pridmore who publicly stated last year: “The best thing about the Government’s new standards is that they are the result of more than 60 scientists working together … We all have a stake in this—and if we do it right we can still manage to sustainably grow dairy farming.”Catherine Delahunty: Does this not show that the Government has failed to protect water quality with its standards when it is left to Federated Famers to call for a moratorium on dairy conversions?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: No.Catherine Delahunty: I seek leave to table a table showing the 85 percent increase in the number of dairy cows nationally between 1990 and 2013. It is a table prepared for the Green Party by the Parliamentary Library.Mr SPEAKER: On the basis that it may not be freely available and may be useful for the House I will put the leave. Is there any objection to the tabling of that table? Leave has been denied.Small Businesses—Confidence and Accident Compensation Levies12.JONO NAYLOR (National) to the Minister for Small Business: What reports has he received about support for measures the Government has taken to assist small business?Hon CRAIG FOSS (Minister for Small Business): According to the latest Mind Your Own Business (MYOB) business monitor survey of over 1000 small and medium businesses 65 percent trust this Government’s management of the economy up from 63 percent just prior to the election. The Government’s handling of the economy and our sensible policies have been identified as some of the reasons that New Zealand’s small and medium businesses continue their approval of this Government. This Government will continue our support for small and medium enterprises. We are committed to delivering on our policies through the Business Growth Agenda the Better for Business programmes and of course all those that help support small and medium enterprises to grow more and employ more Kiwis.Jono Naylor: What measures is the Government undertaking to help support small and medium businesses?Hon CRAIG FOSS: This Government is delivering on a number of measures to support growth of small and medium businesses. These include making it easier to employ staff by implementing the 90-day trial the starting-out wage simplifying the way small businesses interact with the Government via the New Zealand Business Number rolling out ultra-fast broadband reducing personal and company tax rates and reducing compliance costs under the Better Public Services targets. These policies and others show again that this Government is better for business.Jono Naylor: What factors would stifle the growth of small and medium business?Hon CRAIG FOSS: According to the MYOB report small and medium businesses want to focus on growth innovation and employment. The last thing small businesses need is to have to spend more time effort resource and money on things such as new and complex taxes unionised workplaces and large minimum wage increases. Those factors are in fact still proposed by the Labour Party.Jacinda Ardern: Has he received any reports from small business representatives or small businesses themselves supporting the Government’s decision not to further reduce ACC levies by $350 million in line with ACC’s recommendation last year?Hon CRAIG FOSS: Just last night actually I was at a function for about 130-odd small businesses in Hawke’s Bay. And a few of them—we did discuss actually the $1.5 billion of ACC reductions that have already been announced banked and locked in by this Government. Those same organisations also talked about the need for certainty transparency clarity and a sustainable accident compensation system within New Zealand which would not happen if in fact the member were to get her political hands on setting the levies of ACC.Jacinda Ardern: Can the Minister explain how ACC was incorrect in proposing to the Government that it would be sustainable to reduce ACC levies by $350 million for small and medium sized enterprises?Hon CRAIG FOSS: If that member had been listening via various question times over the last week she would have seen and probably heard that the decisions that are around the levy settings are actually a decision of Cabinet—such as the $1.5 billion decision in ACC reductions that have already occurred.Jacinda Ardern: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I specifically asked the Minister to explain—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume her seat. The question was asked it was a legitimate question and on this occasion the answer addressed the question.Jacinda Ardern: Is he saying that ACC was wrong to assert that levies could sustainably be reduced for small and medium sized enterprises?Hon CRAIG FOSS: Well part of that question you should address to the ACC Minister but in fact small and medium sized enterprises in New Zealand are enjoying the benefits of the $1.5 billion per annum—now locked in—reductions of ACC while balancing the need to have a strong sustainable ACC system that brings certainty to small and medium enterprises in New Zealand.Jacinda Ardern: Will he ask the Small Business Development Group at its next meeting whether it supports ACC’s proposal that levies for small and medium sized businesses be lowered immediately by $350 million?Hon CRAIG FOSS: In my ongoing discussions with members of that group and in fact with many many others in the small business community they all value the $1.5 billion reduction of ACC levies they are already enjoying and banking. Of course businesses always like lower costs but at the same time they like transparency certainty and sustainable agencies of Government such as we have with ACC now.Jacinda Ardern: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The Small Business Development Group is meeting in the Minister’s electorate very soon. I simply asked whether he would put one question to it.Mr SPEAKER: I agree and I am going to invite the member to ask that question again.Jacinda Ardern: Will he ask the Small Business Development Group at its next meeting whether it supports ACC’s proposal that levies for small and medium sized businesses be lowered immediately by $350 million?Hon CRAIG FOSS: I would very much prefer not to pull or drag that group into some political sphere. It provides good policy advice and discussion in fact in and around other issues such as locking in the $1.5 billion reduction of ACC levies that have already been locked in. But I welcome that member’s interest in the Small Business Development Group and she could read many of its reports. In fact it would be quite good if she came in and supported its position for example on the 90-day trial.General DebateHon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business. There is a lot to look forward to in New Zealand right now. We have got the Northland by-election we have got National continuing to deliver for families and of course we have got the Cricket World Cup quarter-finals.I am looking forward to welcoming my new colleague Mark Osborne into Parliament when he turns up here on Tuesday 31 March after a great win in Northland. But what a lively place it must be in Northland right now for the Labour candidate because the Labour candidate has no backing from the Labour Party hierarchy. Andrew Little does not even want her to win and that must be a terrible place to be. And have you seen any Labour Party MPs up there? No. Where has David Cunliffe been? He has been stuck up the kauri tree in west Auckland. But in the end he decided he might be more use on the ground although his leader had a slightly different opinion. Where has Phil Goff been? He has been off campaigning to be the mayor. They are not backing her at all. Meanwhile Winston is wandering around promising to take action—flying around in a helicopter promising to take action on the closure of fictional health centres which were never even opened. So it is all pretty strange up there. It is getting pretty wild.But what I can say is that National is delivering for families in Northland. There is no question about that. If you look at the area I am responsible for—health—there has been a huge increase in what has been going on up there. Last year 8500 Northlanders got elective surgery there. We have been really tackling the tough problems of rheumatic fever—a 25 percent decrease in the rate there over the past year. The initiatives around healthy homes the health promotional activity the free sore throat clinics the drop-in clinics the throat swabbing—we are really focused on these tough problems in Northland. I can also say—you heard my colleague Steven Joyce today talking about this—that there were 7500 new jobs in Northland last year 600 of which are full time. Northland’s economy grew by 5.1 percent last year—that is the highest rate in New Zealand. So it is all go-ahead in Northland. Of course we have also got the Pūhoi to Wellsford road coming up; we have got the broadband initiatives which are going to extend fibre-optic cable to places like Kaikohe Kaitāia Kerikeri. There is a lot to look forward to in that part of the country: Treaty settlements are going ahead up there the Twin Coast Cycle Trail—that is going to inject $20 million into that economy over the next 5 years; 250 new jobs for Northlanders. There is a lot to vote for positively in that part of the country.Of course there is the outlook economically in New Zealand—3.2 percent growth. That is massive. Wages grew 15 percent over the past 5 years and there were 80000 new jobs in New Zealand over the past year. Inflation is at 0.8 percent while weekly average wages grew 2.5 percent over the past year. Unemployment is only 5.7 percent—much lower than in Australia. And of course we know that Kiwis are flocking back here. Meanwhile the balance of payments deficit—that has shrunk to 2.6 percent of GDP and is getting smaller all the time. We are going to hit surplus this year—that is under control. We are heading to 20 percent of GDP by 2020. It is looking good but we are continuing to focus on families so that 300000 houses are insulated nationwide under this Government. There has been an increase in paid parental leave. We are providing breakfast in schools. In education Hekia Parata is providing leadership basically by bolstering the teaching profession. Early childhood education investment has been doubled. Homestart programmes are getting young Kiwi families into new homes. We have reduced ACC levies. So in short Kiwi families are much much better off. And of course there is the progress in welfare. [Interruption] What does that mean Mr Speaker?Mr SPEAKER: That means you have 1 minute to go.Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Oh rightio. I thought it was the finger—never mind. We have had 48 percent fewer teen mums on benefits since 2009.Mr Speaker I know you will agree the Black Caps have started winning since the change in portfolio. It has been quite remarkable. The Cricket World Cup has been great for New Zealand. John Key and Brendon McCullum back themselves. They are on the front foot. Andrew Little is like someone going out to face the West Indies without a box on—hesitant fearful wandering around the crease. New Zealanders back winners. They back John Key. They are backing National and go the Black Caps on Saturday for a great world cup quarter-final.METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green):The Prime Minister’s parting shot at the end of my questions to him today was that the kids whom he talked to when KidsCan was giving out raincoats all told him that they all had a raincoat and that in just the last hour has shocked a large number of people—the Prime Minister’s statement. Not because the children might have two raincoats—one more than they might need—but shock at the Prime Minister’s complete ignorance of the stress and responsibility that children who live in poverty and hardship cope with every day. We are talking about one in six kids in hardship and one in four kids in poverty from the latest statistics.Kids who live in severe poverty know that the public perception of poverty is that poverty is a crime of which they are guilty—that it is a disgrace that it is a shame that the family will bear and that it should be hidden from view. Why would a child tell a complete stranger the truth about their impoverished life? Any interaction that the child may have seen between their parents and Work and Income teaches them that they are to blame for their circumstance and that they deserve to be treated with disrespect. Any interaction these children see between their parents and a charity or a food bank or at a supermarket counting out the coins teaches those kids that poverty is embarrassing that it requires you to swallow your pride and that if you suffer it for long enough to lose your pride altogether. Any interaction their child may have seen between the family and virtually any agency or any authority let alone authority figure teaches that child that you do not tell the truth. You do not tell the truth because the truth will get you and your family into trouble. The truth will cause you harm shame embarrassment and ridicule. That is what admitting to hardship and poverty gets you.So no child is going to tell a stranger let alone the Prime Minister—whom they see on TV every day; the ultimate authority figure—what their life is really like. How could they possibly expose themselves or their families to even more shame and ridicule? And the kids are right—they bear this responsibility every day. And they are right because at every turn—especially from this Prime Minister—the Prime Minister has refused to engage with the evidence of hardship and poverty. Even his comment this afternoon shows that he is ignorant. His comment about funding KidsCan shows that actually he is not funding KidsCan because he agrees that there is a need. That is what the Prime Minister exposed in his answers today. He is funding KidsCan because he sees that there is a political advantage in doing so. It is prime ministerial largesse. That is why the breakfast clubs are being funded not because he agrees that there is a need.If he agreed that there was a need he would make sure that he fixed it. He would make sure that no kid in this country went to school hungry and that there was breakfast in every school for every kid who needed it; that there was lunch in every school for every kid who needed it. But he does not agree that the problem is serious so he is just putting in a band-aid response and using public money to justify what he is doing. He does not agree. It is a politically expedient act for him. That is why the Prime Minister and National are refusing to support my bill. He is refusing even to accept the evidence that comes to him from independent agencies showing the extent of the problem. And he then tries to claim by talking to kids who are poor and who are not telling him the whole story about their lives that he is right. He has no idea of what these kids’ lives are like and they are absolutely right to keep it from him. How could they possibly trust this man to treat their lives with the respect that they deserve when he treats poor kids not as a constituency and as the ultimate responsibility—the reason why he is sitting here in that chair—but he treats those kids as if they are political opportunities so that he can excuse himself and justify his miserable actions. Thank you.Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development): Well there ends the lesson. I am sick and tired of being lectured to in this House by that member Metiria Turei who makes things up who has no facts to back up what she says and who accuses our Prime Minister of being mean. In fact the country went to the polls last year and gave National huge support—an enormous mandate—to keep on with the reforms and to expand the reforms that it was in the process of making to all New Zealand families. The reality of that is that New Zealanders understand that this is a Prime Minister who cares about New Zealand families. This is a Government that has done a great deal for New Zealand families not the least bit making sure that there is a strong growing economy that is providing more jobs for people and we are seeing more people in work now than we have ever seen before.But let us talk about this issue of food in schools and let us look at the accusations that this Government led by John Key is mean. The reality is that now currently this Government is funding fruit in schools. We expanded the programme that the Labour Government put in where half of it was being spent on administration. We have expanded it so that there is fruit going into every single school—and vegetables I have to say—throughout the country. Fonterra is providing milk to schools and fridges to put the milk in so that there is fruit and milk in schools. This Government is working with a programme called KickStart Breakfast which is working with Sanitarium and Fonterra. Just last month we delivered the 3400000th breakfast. Every school in the country is able to take part in that and the Prime Minister is absolutely right—just under 800 schools are taking part in providing that breakfast. That is being funded by this Government along with other companies.KidsCan is also providing food support to schools. And it is really interesting that in the talk that KidsCan had with me it said that it is providing lunches to about 300-odd schools but that it does so in a discreet manner. It does not want those children to be stigmatised. It just makes sure that the schools can deliver the programme. So up comes a politician who is making a political point with photos and media and there we are—we have those children stigmatised which is totally against the respect that KidsCan was showing those children. KidsCan has also been funding raincoats and the Government has funded that initiative with half a million dollars. And it is also funding nits. We put $900000 into treating nits because that was recognised as a problem.I just want to share with the House when we are considering as part of this Government’s programme reform of the Resource Management Act. This Government put $900000 into relieving children of nits. Part of that funding went to providing specifically designed handbasins to wash the children’s hair in at school. It was a fantastic idea and schools were delighted. Let me tell you that in the 17 Hawke’s Bay schools it took 6 months to get a resource consent through to install those handbasins—6 months. In Hawke’s Bay 17 schools waited while that resource management consent went through their local councils. That is ridiculous.Stuart Nash: What councils?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Hastings and Napier. The members that represent those areas should be banging on those councils’ doors—6 months to get resource consentsto put handbasins in so that KidsCan could roll out the nit programme. Since it has done that of course we have seen a huge response to that and it has made a huge difference to the lives of those children. They have discovered all sorts of skin diseases as a result of it there are nurses working with them and it is a very good programme.So the point is that this Government is providing enormous help to those families and for that member to stand up in this House and accuse our Prime Minister of being mean and of supporting kids for only a political purpose is I think outrageous because he has shown enormous leadership on this and has made sure that the Government is stepping in to help hundreds and thousands of New Zealand children throughout schools.None of that takes away from the responsibility of parents. We know that because the economy is growing the average wage is growing. The Minister of Finance said that in the House today. The average wage is growing faster than inflation so families should be taking care of children—that is their first responsibility—but where they cannot this Government is stepping in to help.JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): Before I begin my contribution I just want to point out that the Prime Minister today in this House stood up and claimed that he had personally asked children about their access to things like raincoats and lunches and that he then had the Minister of Education call schools individually to ascertain the availability of lunches for students in the schools. Then we have the Minister who just resumed her seat Anne Tolley pointing out that the most important thing we have to do for children living in poverty is to make sure that we do not stigmatise them. If that is the case what is the Prime Minister doing standing up and individually questioning children on whether or not they can get school lunches or have a raincoat to wear to school?If we were serious about not stigmatising children the Prime Minister would not base his and his Government’s policies on anecdote and on his personal surveying of children and their families. Yes talk to principals; yes ask principals what is going on but we already have every report we need. Multiple reports have been conducted into this issue. If that Government is serious about addressing issues then surely the reports that say that 17 percent of children are living in material deprivation—a figure that that Government uses itself—would be the basis on which we design our policies. Listen to the evidence. That is all that we are asking.You know that things start getting a little bit rough in a Government’s third term and we have got multiple examples of that not least the fact Craig Foss is managing to get a patsy question in almost every question time. If that does not demonstrate that things are little bit off then I do not know what does. But it is not just the Opposition that experiences the torrid nature of a third-term Government; it is the public that does as well and no more so than the people of Northland. The Northland by-election demonstrates how badly this Government is willing to put politics before people. It is an extreme example of a Government that is not listening to the real needs of the people on the ground but is simply trying to dangle electoral bribes. They are not even particularly good electoral bribes at that. We have had $70 million worth of bridge double-laning proposed as part of this by-election—some of the lowest-priority building projects. And that Government would know that if it had talked to the people on the ground. If it had talked to the people on the ground it would know that road sealing filling in potholes and even funding for the polytech are higher priorities for the people of Northland than double-laningbridges that the candidate cannot even name except for the one that he can see from his back door. If that does not demonstrate that it is politics before people even politics before the people that National is campaigning amongst then I do not know what is.Hon Maggie Barry: Like Labour’s campaign in the north—non-existent.JACINDA ARDERN: If the Government wanted to do something meaningful Ms Barry it would provide jobs. If you wanted to do something meaningful you would provide jobs for the people of Northland. The Government would make sure that wages were being lifted for the people of Northland. It would make sure that the schools in Northland had everything they needed to provide adequately for the children of Northland. Seventy million dollars could go quite a long way in making a difference for those people.If we want another example of politics before people I would use the numbers that were displayed in the New Zealand Herald today around access to justice. Judith Collins in 2012 decided that she was going to crack down on legal aid.Hon Maggie Barry: Support Labour’s candidate.JACINDA ARDERN: Listen up Ms Barry you might actually learn something meaningful. In 2012 Judith Collins decided that she would send out 47000 letters on outstanding debt—47000 letters. A quarter claimed that they had an inability to repay that debt—11000 people went back to the Ministry of Justice and said they could not pay. The Ministry of Justice substantiated those claims in how many of those 11000 cases? In 10000 of them. If that is not a red flag that that Government needs to look at legal aid thresholds then I do not know what is. If you will not listen to us listen to Frances Joychild listen to Justice Winkelmann. They have all raised red flags over what is happening to access to justice in this country. This Government needs to make sure that it puts people before politics or is it that the justice system needs a by-election to get a little attention?Hon NIKKI KAYE (Minister of Civil Defence): It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. The first thing I want to do is address a couple of issues that were raised by the previous speaker Ms Ardern. To get a lecture from the Labour Party about what the people are saying in Northland is ridiculous. There have been no Labour MPs there for a very long time because they are not campaigning there. They have left Willow-Jean Prime under a bus and we know that. I was doorknocking there at the weekend and I can tell you what they have been saying. Many people do believe that National has done more than any other Government but the reality is that the people of Northland do need more and the reality is that they do understand that there are more free doctors visits for under-13-year-olds and more money to fix their schools. There are a number of schools that have been fixed up in Northland. We have made more of an investment than ever before in terms of those schools. There is more money in early childhood centres. There is more money to insulate houses.So a huge amount has been done but the reality is that it is actually at times like this when we see the situation with Cyclone Pam that we see the best of New Zealand. I have seen the best of New Zealand over this period. It is the case that it was communities like Northland that won the civil defence award this year. They won that award because despite massive challenges in terms of weather we saw communities rally together and help others. We have seen that in spades across New Zealand over this period.If I have learnt three things as the Minister of Civil Defence it is this. The first is that our hearts go out to the people of Vanuatu for everything they are dealing with. Some of the unsung heroes in New Zealand in terms of civil defence are our engineers. What we do know in this country is that sometimes the difference between having massive loss of life and people being saved is the buildings. We have seen that in Vanuatu. One of the most powerful moments I have had as a member of Parliament was sitting with the Minister from Haiti and talking about an event similar to Christchurch’s earthquakes. We lost several hundred people; they lost more than 250000. That is the difference so I want to pay tribute to the engineers of this country.The second thing is I want to say is what an amazing job so many regions across New Zealand did to prepare for this event. We had evacuations in parts of Gisborne. We had so many community groups on the ground doing amazing things. In the Chatham Islands they still have a local state of emergency. I want to acknowledge the mayor and the civil defence staff for what they are doing over there. They are still getting a bit of a battering but we will be there to help them.So my message is that this is a Government that cares. We have demonstrated in many communities—whether it is through under-13-year-olds going to the doctor for free or whether it is through our investment in early childhood education or fixing more schools than ever before—that we do care. But often we see the best of communities right across New Zealand at a time like a civil defence emergency when the only reason that we get through these events is that communities rally not just the people in Wellington who are doing things from a civil defence perspective.We have seen the best of New Zealand and that is why I am very proud to be the Minister of Civil Defence and to be seeing so many people on the ground helping others at a time like this. Part of that is due to some of the changes we have put in place like shifting the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management into the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet so that agencies across New Zealand rally at a time like this.So I want to acknowledge the people of Northland for winning that civil defence award this year. I want to acknowledge the many families I have met through my doorknocking and the fact that they have acknowledged what this Government has done. But I also acknowledge that there is more to do there in terms of investing in education and infrastructure and  with a National MP we are the only Government that can provide that.I also want to acknowledge all of the people across New Zealand who have helped others through this period including the people of the Chathams who are going through quite a bit at this point in time.STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): I must admit I found it quite amusing when the last speaker Ms Kaye talked about Northland and how Labour was disconnected and then she realised that over three-quarters of the people sitting on this side of the House have actually been up there and spoken to the people of Northland. One of the most enlightening things for me is that I made a few visits and then I went to a local pub. I started talking to the people about who they are going to vote for and they said to me: “We used to vote National but we are sick to death of being taken for granted by this Government.” They said they were going to vote for Winston Peters. I said: “Really? You’re really going to vote for Winston? Why are you going to do that?” and they said: “National has taken us for granted for so long and we’re sick to death of it. We’re absolutely sick to death of it.” The thing is that we all know that by-elections are often referendums on a Government’s performance. Well I think that this will be a very strong referendum on this Government’s performance and I think this Government is going to get a very big shock.The other thing I found quite amusing is that the Hon Anne Tolley stood up and said she is sick and tired of being in this House. Well I have some very good news for the honourable Minister. I was up in Whakatāne and Ōhope recently and we had three fantastic people who want to be the Labour candidate for the East Coast electorate. So Ms Tolley do not worry about it. You will not be there in 2017.Once again that electorate will be returning to Labour and I can tell you why. The reason is that wherever I go around provincial New Zealand people say to me: “We’ve been forgotten by this National Government.” They say that if you own a house in Auckland or if you are involved in the rebuild in Christchurch you are probably doing OK. Even the guy who was the chair of Local Government New Zealand the Mayor of Hastings who used to be a supporter of this National Government came out and said that this Government does not have a strategy for the provinces. This Government has no plan for the regions. I think that this is what we will be seeing in Northland. There will be a very loud and clear message.But the interesting thing is that I am back in my second term. I took a bit of break—Hon Member: A sabbatical.STUART NASH: I took a sabbatical. I took time out to talk to the people to reconnect with the people of the Napier electorate. But when I was in my first term the Government was quite an engaged Government. There was the Hon Simon Power who I reckon put through about 40 percent of the legislation on the Order Paper. He was a very engaged and very hard-working Minister. There was John Key who went out and promised the world and there was a National Government that was really driving what it thought was an agenda. As we have since learnt it was not a particularly favourable agenda for the rest of New Zealand. But when I came back to Parliament after 3 years goodness me the change was immeasurable. It is like a lot of things. I think that if you have been sitting here for the last 6 years it is sort of incremental and you will not have seen it. But coming back after 3 years goodness me the change is immeasurable.There are a couple of things. Mr Joyce’s performance must be a worry to the Prime Minister in terms of the way Mr Joyce has tried to arrogantly handle the Skycity debacle Northland and corporate welfare. The man is so out of touch with the way the vast majority of New Zealanders think it must be of concern to the Prime Minister. There is no doubt about that. Then I was astounded Mr Speaker—and you would appreciate this—to hear the Deputy Prime Minister the Minister of Finance stand up and basically say that you cannot trust anything a politician says during election time. I thought that was despicable. I know that members on this side of the House go out there and work really hard. We have key messages. David Parker spent an inordinate amount of time costing a fantastic fiscal policy that was going to put the Labour Government and New Zealand back on track. And then Mr English has the nerve to stand up and say: “Don’t trust a politician during election time.”Well there is one thing I would like to say to the people of New Zealand: trust the Labour Party. Trust everything we say everything we will do and when we say that we will stand for the people in regional New Zealand when we say that we will champion those who have been forgotten by this Government believe us because it is what we do. We are a party that stands by what we say. We are not a party of empty slogans or bribery of throwing lollies out in a by-election. The Northland by-election is a referendum on the performance of this Government and I think there will be a very very clear message sent from provisional New Zealand to that Government that it is out of touch. Thank you very much.TODD BARCLAY (National—Clutha-Southland): Whether or not the by-election in Northland is a referendum on the Government’s performance it will certainly not be an endorsement of Labour’s because its members cannot even support their own candidate let alone ask the people of Northland to support their candidate.I want to talk about how this Government is supporting families and how we are doing that through an integrated client-focused investment approach with regard to families and vulnerable New Zealanders. This is a way of thinking that has been led by this Government. It has been implemented over the last 6 years and there is a lot more work to do. It is something about which the former Labour Government had nothing to say. When we came in we set new targets. We are working towards those targets and we have seen results.The net present cost of total benefits for the population of this country is $76 billion. There are two key groups I want to focus on today. The first is teen sole parents. We know that there are 2600 teen sole parents and as Minister Tolley outlined today that figure has dropped by 50 percent since 2009 under this Government. We know that it will be a 20-year average that those people will spend on a benefit at a cost of $250000 each if they do not have a qualification. There are a number of steps that are being taken by this Government to address that. One we are putting a responsible adult with each and every one of these people to provide them with budgetary support to get them back into education and to get them a qualification which will enable them to get back into the workforce. We know that a teen solo parent who is under the age of 20 with no qualification will spend an average of 20 years on a benefit. If they can get a post-school qualification that average reduces from 20 years on a benefit down to 7 years. That is a considerable contribution towards these people’s lives and to the taxpayer.There is another group of children I want to talk about and these are children in care. These are hugely disproportionate cost drivers for the Government. We know that there are 2000 males currently in care. Based on 30 years’ worth of records from Treasury the Ministry of Education the Ministry of Social Development the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Corrections all working together we know that these kids are destined for a life of involvement in the justice sector and correctional facilities if they do not get back on track. These are kids who are currently misbehaving in school and going through foster home after foster home. There is one 10-year-old foster kid in my electorate who has been through 93 foster homes and that is just unacceptable. I could not imagine putting myself in the position of that kid mentally when he is getting chucked from family to family day on day week on week and then having to go to school and try to get a qualification.This Government has taken considerable steps to try to get these kids back on track so they can have the life they deserve and the life their coming families will deserve. And what are we doing about that? We are implementing an individualised policy approach led by Minister Tolley formerly Minister Bennett and Minister English. Just going back to these 2000 kids we know that during their lifetime—if they do not get back on track now—combined they will have a collective cost to the taxpayer of $750 million in corrections system costs alone. So what do we do about that to try to get them back on track to try to improve their life chances? We are individualising the policy around them getting the Government departments to think of them as individuals and as people instead of thinking about how departments best operate and work. That is what we are doing.Unlike Labour our Government cares about individuals and we care about families. I can tell you how many young people receive sole parent benefits in my electorate. In Gore there are 185 in Clutha District there are 168 and in Queenstown there are 98. In Ōwaka of the 228 people nine of them are unemployed three of them are on a sickness benefit six are on the domestic purposes benefit and nine are on the invalid’s benefit. We know individual people and where they are. We know their names and Government departments are now working with them to get them back into a better position.Tracey Martin: How many in Northland?TODD BARCLAY: Talking about Northland we know who our candidate is and we fully get behind him and back him—Mark Osborne. Coming back though the most compelling statistic I found was regarding the number of people who are currently in correctional facilities. We have reduced youth crime and we have reduced recidivism under this Government and under the integrated approach we are taking.In conclusion I want to fully support the steps this Government is taking under the leadership of some very strong Ministers who put families first who put individuals at the centre. We are improving public services we are raising achievement standards we are reducing crime and recidivism and we are improving the lives of families and individual New Zealanders. Thank you.RON MARK (NZ First): Well the one thing I can say for that young man Todd Barclay is that he has got plenty of time on his side. He is a young man in the House he has got a lot to learn along the way and there will be a day when he will realise that he has not exactly been told everything by his associates that is actually truthful—is it?There have been some speeches here this afternoon and I want to refer to a couple of them. “The country gave this Government a mandate to carry on with its reforms.” Really? Really—seriously? Well I think the country gave New Zealand First a mandate by almost doubling the number of MPs that it has in this House to curb this Government’s excesses to keep a choker collar around its neck and to keep it honest. That is the fact of the matter. There is almost double the number of New Zealand First MPs in the House to keep this Government honest.On 28 March rural provincial Northland is going to send a message on behalf of rural provincial New Zealand telling this Government that it is out of line that it is out of order. That message is coming and we are looking forward to the delivery of that message.One of the messages that Northland wants to pass back to this Government is that the people there reject this Government’s amalgamation agendas. Oh listen up—so too does the Hawke’s Bay and so too does the Wairarapa. If people are not listening now they damned well will be after 28 March let us be sure about that. Let us have a look at what the people are saying out there in rural provincial New Zealand. On the proposal to amalgamate Northland right there were 1800 submissions of which over two-thirds were opposed. In Hawke’s Bay 732 submissions—heartland rural provincial New Zealand; listen up listen up team—said that 80 percent of them were opposed. Coming to the greater Wairarapa or the greater Wellington region—a Freudian slip; it should be the Wairarapa region should it not—there were 9400 submissions. Those 9400 submissions were overwhelmingly opposed to your Local Government Commission lackeys’ proposal.And what are they all so angry about? Listen up National—what are they all so angry about? They are angry with you the National Government. Do you know why? They are angry because you changed the Local Government Act and you removed the automatic right to a referendum. The National Government that is pushing these reforms—Tim Macindoe: They re-elected the Government twice after that.RON MARK: It has got a mandate for these reforms but card-carrying members of the National Party are overwhelmingly angry with you because you have taken away the automatic right to a referendum. Do not talk to me about fighting for democracy. This Government is anti-democracy. What else are those people angry about? They are angry that when the Government forces a referendum by petition—Hon Maggie Barry: They’re happy you’re gone.RON MARK: —listen up Maggie listen up—when you force a—Mr SPEAKER: Order!RON MARK: —they force a referendum by petition the referendum is right across the whole Wellington region—Hon Anne Tolley: Point of order.RON MARK: Maggie Barry. I am sorry about that—Maggie Barry.Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order!Hon Anne Tolley: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. He did correct it but the member well knows as it is pointed out in the House you must address a member by their full name.Mr SPEAKER: I agree. It is a robust debate and I would be grateful while the member also gathers his breath if he would stop drawing me into this particular debate.RON MARK: Thank you Mr Speaker. It is the Hon Maggie Barry and I want her to listen up because those people are overwhelmingly angry that when the referendum is conducted it will be 400000 people telling 40000 in the Wairarapa what is best for them. Talk to me now about sending troops to fight for democracy. That is anti-democracy and that is a hallmark of one of this Government’s reforms.And who is out there right now doing submissions submitting towards the Local Government Commission? Well the Local Government Commission is hearing submissions in the Wairarapa and guess what sort of behaviour we are witnessing? We are witnessing staff members from the Local Government Commission going over and chatting colluding and giving advice to proponents of the super-city and dismissing and being arrogant towards card-carrying members of the National Party who oppose it.Bring it on we say in New Zealand First. Bring on 28 March because there is a shock coming. There is a shock coming and the result will be a very very emphatic message to National from rural provincial New Zealand. It is tired of being taken for granted. You have had 70 years to build 10 bridges—70 years—and you are promising you are going to do them all next year. Well hallelujah! Nobody is listening. Nobody believes you. Power to the force for the north. Roll on 28 March. Thank you very much.Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Just looking at the opposite side I wonder who is the Opposition here—the Greens New Zealand First or the Labour Party. But when I closely analyse this I see more ex-leaders sitting on the backbenches in the Labour Party. So that must be the Opposition party then. But unfortunately its current leader is also no better than their previously failed leaders and that is because he is not backing his own candidate in Northland. When this Opposition Labour Party was in Government for 9 years it created loads of inefficiencies. I say this because I still remember how I felt in 2008 with this huge global financial crisis coming our way. Then I am sure every New Zealander feared how they and their families and children would get through this global financial crisis. What our new Prime Minister the Rt Hon John Key then inherited from that Labour Government was this economy that was already in recession with Treasury predictions of doom and gloom and endless debt and this huge responsibility of navigating us through this global financial crisis.I do not want to remember those nanny State days when those members wanted to tell our families what kind of shower fittings and lightbulbs we should be using. They stood for more Government more dependency more rules and more spending. But the Rt Hon John Key and his Ministers in 2008 focused the machinery of government to deliver more for less. They did not increase taxes. They gave tax cuts across the board helping low and middle income New Zealand families. They did what they promised to do and that is what I call leadership. That leadership is working. The National Government understands issues around our children and issues around our families. National understands the worries of our senior citizens. It is not just about them being safe and secure physically; it is about them being safe and secure financially and socially too. New Zealand families do understand the importance of our economy if families are to flourish. National continues to stand with the families and that is why we keep investing in the public sector and we keep having challenging targets.Just for an example from 1 April next month paid parental leave is going to increase from 14 weeks to 16 weeks. That is the National Government increasing it from 14 weeks to 16 weeks. From next year on 1 April 2016 it will be increased by another 2 weeks to 18 weeks. This assistance will be extended to other families too. The parental tax credit is going to be increased from $150 to $220 a week and the length of that is also going to be increased from 8 weeks to 10 weeks. This is being done by the National Government. This is going to start from 1 April. After that if we look at 1 July free GP visits are going to be extended to children under the age of 13. Currently children under the age of 6 can access free GP visits and prescriptions but the National Government is investing to extend free GP visits to children under the age of 13. This is an important precautionary health measure. It is expected that 400000 primary school - aged children will benefit from this investment which is being done by the National Government. This kind of assistance is really going to help our families and children because then families do not have to end up in the hospital queue at odd times. Because of that sometimes children miss their schooling and their suffering is longer as well.All of this is complemented by keeping our houses warmer drier and healthier. Around 300000 homes are insulated under the National Government thanks to the Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes and the Warm Up New Zealand: Heat Smart programmes. Again with our focus on children and families the National Government has partnered with Fonterra and Sanitarium to give free breakfasts in schools. This is in all primary and secondary schools regardless of their decile. This is to look after children’s well-being so that they do not suffer in their education if they are not fed at home. Education is really important. National believes in delivering for all children. National believes that we should provide opportunities to all our children to succeed. That is why we are investing $359 million in communities of schools. This is to keep our best teachers in classrooms to extend that leadership across different schools. Since National came into office the Government’s investment in early childhood education has doubled. Our target is that 98 percent of young children are able to access some kind of early childhood education programme before they start school.The National-led Government under the leadership of the Rt Hon John Key will continue to support our families and children. We will remain focused on the economy we will remain focused on jobs and we will keep taking people off welfare because employment is important. Employment is not just about money; it is much more than that. We will continue to do that. Thank you.Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): Last week I was asked to resign—not by the National Party; no indeed it was by a community leader on the West Coast. That person said: “If it takes your resigning for us to be discovered and to get the reduction in one-way bridges a decent hospital and proper funding of our education then it’s worth it.” I thought seriously about it because I am committed to my electorate and to rural New Zealand.The previous Labour speaker Mr Nash said that this Government has no strategy for provincial New Zealand. He is wrong. [Interruption] No he is wrong. It has no strategy for New Zealand—not a clue. And what must be the ultimate insult was a press release today by the Government’s own department Statistics New Zealand which is traditionally seen as a very fair and objective organisation. It is nothing more than spin. Do you know what the press release says? “Current account deficit reflects growing economy.” It then goes on to say: “The larger deficit”—because indeed it was a larger deficit—“in the latest quarter is due to overseas companies earning more from their investments in New Zealand.” Then it goes on to say: “Companies tend to earn higher profits when the economy is growing. If nothing else changes an increase in profits earned by foreign-owned companies in New Zealand will increase our current account deficit.”That says that John Key and his merry men have got what they want. They campaigned on selling down our assets and on facilitating the sale of anything that moves and anything that does not—land houses companies; you name it. They have got that and what that has left us in is a structural malaise—that is Statistics New Zealand in spite of its spin is admitting that the better our economy gets the worse our deficit becomes. We need change and they have indicated here that without change we will continue to go down the gurgler. Well change is on its way at the next election—starting with the by-election—and I am very pleased. Nikki Kaye said that we have got the best in New Zealand. Well I would have to say that is a pretty poor target. We can do better and the Labour Party in Government will ensure that we work for a better New Zealand for everyone.In the primary sector the Ministry for Primary Industries—the new superministry—has an export double goal: to double the number of exports from this countryby 2025. It is failing because we are some way down the track from when it said that and we have not made much progress. It has been said that a goal is not a strategy but the Government has not learnt that. Although I applaud the efforts to increase our exports it is coming at the expense of a long-term vision for our country. I say to you that National in spite of its traditional support from the rural sector is now destroying the very people who put it in power. There is a clear lack of leadership not only at departmental level in the Ministry for Primary Industries where the Government formed the superministry but also from the Ministers themselves. I challenge John Key and Minister Guy to provide the leadership that the rural and primary sectors are seeking at this moment.Yesterday an independent group—the Meat Industry Excellence group—put together after pleading for funding a very good report identifying about half a billion dollars in savings each year that can be achieved in the meat sector which will give more security to meatworkers more security to rural communities and a brighter future for farmers and it will ensure that we have growing stock numbers. It depends upon the Government taking leadership and taking the steps as laid down in that report.Dr David Clark: Will they do it?Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Will they do it? Well I have offered personally to Minister Guy support from myself and from the Labour Partyto implement those recommendations if he so chooses. I am not going to hold my breath on that. The Government has already committed $350 million of taxpayers’ money—$350 million of farmers’ money—to a Primary Growth Partnership scheme about which the Office of the Auditor-General says: “Having reviewed six programmes there is no identifiable economic benefit so far.” It is an absolute rort and a slush fund for a bunch of Tories who go around the country singing the praises of the Government knowing full well that their sectors are slipping backwards.The dairy industry is facing some big challenges as is the meat industry—and all of them—because this Government refuses to show the leadership necessary to develop a strategy for New Zealand a New Zealand that we want to be proud of.IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Getting to speak last or near to last in the general debate just re-emphasises the tragic nature of some in this House. I want to remind the last speaker Damien O’Connor that he of course tried leaving the House for a while and no one wanted him back so they did not put any new bridges on the West Coast. That did not work for him. I also want to remind the co-leader of the Green Party that Kelvin Grove of course is very close to my electorate. I could throw a stone at it. There is in fact no school in Kelvin Grove and she was quoting the “Kelvin Grove School” numbers to the Prime Minister just this afternoon. There is no such school in New Zealand unfortunately. I think that is a bit tragic too. I think that when we get up to speak in this House we need to be pretty clear of our facts.Before I get on to the real topic of my speech I want to touch on a topic that the previous speaker spoke about and that is the Meat Industry Excellence report which was presented last night. It was presented to quite a group of people from around New Zealand. It was of course instigated by John McCarthy who comes a fair way out of the middle of my electorate from Ōhākune. He was very pleased to bring that report to the country last night. It did point out some very good points. It made some very good points as the previous speaker said and I am sure that if those points made in the course of that report and all the work that was done on that report in fact have the value that the previous speaker said then they will be brought to fruition in due course probably by the industry or maybe by a Government.I want to get back to talk about how improvements to the economy are making life significantly better for our families in New Zealand. I want to start firstly with interest rates. We are seeing interest rates—and I guess it is a great surprise to some—in a position now that is making a significant difference to young families throughout New Zealand. It is making a difference to business. It is certainly making a difference to the farming community in my electorate. We have also seen fuel prices drop significantly in the last few months making a difference of probably around about $30 a week to the average family. I know in my case that if I fill up in Levin I can get my petrol at 20c a litre cheaper than I can in Wellington. If I fill up in Palmerston North I can get it cheaper than I can in Sanson for example—and significantly cheaper as well. So being lucky enough to have to drive down here every week I fill up in Levin as I go past going both ways. It makes a difference.I want to also talk about ACC which has taken $130 off the family car expenses. That is a significant saving again for New Zealand families.Finally in this section I want to very briefly mention the New Zealand dollar which of course has come off at about 10c against the US$1 making a significant difference to most of our exporters. Although there might be some threat to us around what is going on in the cross rate with Australia we certainly are in a good position from that perspective. So all in all the economy is making a significant difference to what is going on in New Zealand and with New Zealand families and in rural New Zealand.Very briefly on the dairy prices which have come off at 8 percent overnight in New Zealand or the milk price has—I think that when you compare this and look at the recent 1080 scare it just shows the irresponsible nature of the type of activity that had been engaged in there. I also want to quickly touch on a demonstration day held by Operational Solutions for Primary Industries out in the Hutt some 2 weeks ago which a number of us were fortunate enough to attend. It looked at the benefits of 1080 which have made a massive difference to the preservation of our forests our nature and to the eradication of possums and of course TB which has been virtually cleaned up in New Zealand by the 1080 programme. Without the use of this tool we would be in desperate straits from a TB perspective and certainly our native fauna and wildlife—our native birds particularly—would also be in deep distress. I think we all want to see a time when 1080 is replaced by something more efficient but until that time happens I do not think we have much choice but to continue with it.I want to touch quickly on the Northland Fieldays which I attended a couple of weeks ago. They were pretty successful. I might make the point also for the benefit of the New Zealand First member who just spoke recently that that party is so interested in the Northland electorate it did not even stand a candidate there for four elections. So that shows the interest it has got. I might also make a point about that member. He himself comes from Carterton—the Carterton District Council of which he was the mayor—which is about the size of Kerikeri or not much bigger and of course the number of votes he got in the last election was smaller than the number of votes he got in Carterton.Finally I want to very briefly mention the Central Districts Fieldays held at Manfeild this last week which was extremely successful and had a crowd of 40000 through there. Again there were families farmers and other people of New Zealand enjoying themselves. Thank you.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Before I start my general debate speech I would just like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the people of Vanuatu. I have not had that chance yet. I acknowledge my friends in Parliamentover there who are doing their absolute best for their people under dreadful circumstances. I acknowledge them for facing the front line of climate change the front line of no resources and the destruction that has come from a mismanaged planet.I would also just like to correct the previous speaker Ian McKelvie on his unfortunate tirade on Metiria’s question. In fact the name of the school is—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Can I just ask the member—I know it is a habit that people have developed with the familiarity with the name of the co-leader of the Green Party but I think that even if one addresses someone in a particular way outside the House the formality should stay in the House.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: Thank you very much Mr Assistant Speaker. I do hope I have not offended Metiria Turei. Somehow I feel I may not have but I do take your point. We should maintain the rules of the House.I would just like to refer to the National Party member who said that Metiria Turei was wrong about “Kelvin Grove School”. I think he misheard the name of the school. I have rechecked the question. It is Kelvin Road School and it is a school that both Metiria and I are familiar with. I have visited it. It is in Papatoetoe not in his electorate.Tim Macindoe: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Hon Annette King: How can this be a point of order?Tim Macindoe: For the deputy leader of the Labour Party I say that the member has just offended in exactly the same way that she was asked not to by the Assistant Speaker a moment ago. I completely agree with the Assistant Speaker and would ask—CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: What? I called her “Turei.”Tim Macindoe: No on that occasion again the member’s first name only was used.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: I am sorry Mr Assistant Speaker—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! Catherine Delahunty are you replying to the point of order?CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: Yes. I am not actually replying to the point of order as such. I cannot remember whether I said “Metiria” or “Metiria Turei”. I am afraid that I am attempting to stick to the rules of the House and perhaps to talk about important subjects if that member would allow me to continue.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): OK and I apologise if I missed it because I did too.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: So if we could get on with the business of the day water is the subject of the general debate for me because no matter how many bridges you build in Northland it is what goes underneath the bridge that really matters. I recently visited the Tai Tokerau in the middle north and I stood on the bridges with a wonderful man called Millan Ruka who runs the environmental river patrol. I stood on those bridges and I saw slimy dirty algae-ridden grey water because of the excessive amount of effluent that was coming into those rivers from badly managed farms in the area of the Hikurangi Swamp. It is that kind of problem that we saw today in question time when the Prime Minister was unable to answer my questions about the very reasonable call that Federated Farmers put out that we end dairy conversions in the upper Waikato. When Federated Farmers tell the country that we have gone too far with dairying and that Landcorp should stop converting their farms we know there is a big problem.Chris Lewis from Federated Farmers Waikato made it very clear this week that a moratorium was a really good idea not because he is anti-dairying—he is no more anti-dairying than the Green Party is—but because he can see that downstream the efforts that farmers are making across the Waikato to clean up water quality are being undermined by a Government-owned State-owned enterprise Landcorp which is proposing to put another 29500 dairy cows in the upper catchment. The catchment cannot take it. That is in the next 5 years. It is proposing to do this not over 30 years or even 40 years but in the next 5 years because the Government unlike Federated Farmers has gone crazy with milk-fed greed. And while that takes place every waterway downstream is at risk. The point that Chris Lewis was making is a very valid point because he was saying that the farming community has put a lot of effort into riparian planting into fencing and into trying to manage nutrients in the Waikato. I would say there is a lot more work to go having been up along the Waihou River and other such rivers that are still in a parlous state. But it is very disturbing to see the Government-owned enterprise Landcorp ignoring the calls of farmers and attacking Federated Farmers for daring to suggest that enough was enough.So we are saying to Federated Farmers that we are going to stand beside you in this call for a halt. We think it is a very reasonable call because the people who have made the effort who are trying to meet a decent standard of water quality are being undermined by their own Government. The Government set a quality standard for fresh water—its National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management—that is incredibly low. It is completely low and it is pretty much useless because it is all about wading and boating not swimming. If you cannot swim in a river like I could swim in a river when I was young we have lost—I beg your pardon Mr Assistant Speaker; not you. If we cannot swim in rivers any more we have lost something really precious.We should listen to Federated Farmers. They are telling the Government:“Stop doing this. There are much more positive ways of managing water quality.” We can protect the land but there is no point in the Government’s policy of retiring adjacent waterways to land if upstream it is putting thousands more cows—thousands and thousands—into those catchments and destroying the work of farmers downstream. The Government should listen to the Green Party and listen to Federated Farmers. It is in everyone’s interest to protect water. There will not be any wonderful economy and there will not be any fantastic community great lifestyle and all the rest that it spouts on about year after year coming from its policies if it does not protect water. Water is life and we must protect it. Kia ora tātou.TIM MACINDOE (Senior Whip—National): I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I wonder whether you could just explain whether there has been a change of procedure relating to the general debate in that in the past there has never been a 1-minute warning bell rung but today I have noticed on several occasions that there has been. Is that a permanent change or were you just being particularly benevolent towards the speakers in the Chamber today?The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): It was a deliberate thing which I have done during the general debate when I have been in the Chair in the past. I think that generally members have felt that it is useful having a warning. Some people have greeted it as the member did with some relief.TIM MACINDOE (Senior Whip—National): I was not complaining; I just wanted to be clear so that I can advise our members.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): You will probably have inconsistent treatment depending on who is in the Chair.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.Social Security (Clothing Allowances for Orphans and Unsupported Children) Amendment BillSecond ReadingDebate resumed from 25 February.SUE MORONEY (Labour): It is a pleasure to rise and speak to the second reading of the Social Security (Clothing Allowances for Orphans and Unsupported Children) Amendment Bill. At the outset can I congratulate the MP Tracey Martin who has brought this issue before our Parliament. She is genuine in her concern towards children who are unsupported and are being taken care of by family members and she is genuine in her concern about their equality with other children who are in similar situations. I want to commend Tracey Martin because she has done everything she can to make sure there is some progress on this issue.I also want to say that I feel as part of the Social Services Committee which considered this bill that I know how hard Tracey Martin has worked on presenting this issue. It was with a bit of a heavy heart that I was part of the committee when it agreed to an amendment that sees these changes not coming in until 2018. I think it is important that people listening to this debate understand the background to that because that is not of the member’s choosing and it was not the choosing of the majority of the select committee. It was because the Government does not see this as being a priority.The Government simply would not agree to support this bill unless this proposed change which brings equality to children very much in need was pushed out not just beyond the next election—which at the time the select committee was debating this would have been the election we have just had in 2014—but beyond the 2017 election. I am going to place a bet right now because I am a betting person that by the time this legislation comes into being there will in fact be a Labour-led Government in place. There will be a Labour-led Government in place and by 1 July 2018 we will be in control of bringing budgetary measures into this House that will not only help these children but help all the children who are suffering in New Zealand particularly children who are living in poverty which that Government absolutely fails to even recognise let alone address.This bill comes behind priorities for the National Government like suddenly finding the funding for 10 bridges in Northland—the bridges that the Northland Regional Council does not even want and does not say it needs. But that is a priority for this National Government at the moment and these unsupported children these children who are being brought up often by their grandparents and by other family members do not deserve to have equality when it comes to the financial support they will have as they are growing up. That Government opposite would rather build bridges in Northland. It would rather have put its energy into trying to sort out the Skycity debacle. It would rather actually be focused on—Hon Annette King: Rio Tinto.SUE MORONEY: That is right—giving money to Rio Tinto. That is a priority. That is a priority for this Government. It will address those issues immediately but these children and their families who are working hard to support them have to wait until 1 July 2018. I think that is an absolute indictment on the National Government and its lack of priority for the things that really matter.I just want to remind people—because this is an interrupted debate—whom we are talking about here. We are talking about children who through a range of often really tragic circumstances are not able to live with their natural parents. That may be because their natural parents have died. It may be because—certainly it was in one of the submissions the select committee heard—the father of the children had murdered their mother so the father was incarcerated and the mother was no longer with them. These are terribly terribly tragic situations in which the grandparents had absolutely been there for their grandchildren. They had stepped in at a time of huge grief to themselves and started raising children who were at primary school and teenagers even though they were grandparents who suddenly found themselves in that position.So these are often tragic situations. These are often children whose grandparents have determined or have worked with the rest of the family to say that they are the best people to be caring for those children and yet the State support they get for doing so is less than what people who have no relationship with the children they take them on—foster carers—get. An example of that is that a foster carer can apply for a quarterly clothing allowance. They can apply for an allowance for Christmas and birthday presents. They can have their health and education costs met depending on the child’s care plan. The carer may also be able to provide financial assistance towards recreational items. All of these matters should be extended to unsupported children as well as we call them.I remind the House that these children who are being taken care of by family members often have additional needs. Not only do they need another family member to take care of them but they are often suffering a high degree of trauma and that has financial costs associated with it as well.We had several heartbreaking submissions on this bill before the select committee one of which I just described before but all of them—all of them—had one theme and that was the relatives now the primary carers of these children coming to tell our select committee how much grief it caused them to see that they could not provide. They felt they could not provide as much for these children in their times of need. So submitters were coming to us and talking about how they felt that they needed to go to the op shop and buy second-hand clothes for their children because they could not provide anything more. These are often grandparents who are on New Zealand superannuation. They have got fixed incomes and they could not provide anything more than that and the one thing they wanted was for their grandchildren to be able to hold their heads up high amongst their peers and be able to be treated just like anyone else and they often felt like that was not the case. We heard many gut-wrenching submissions.I also want to also congratulate Tracey Martin on the way in which she presented her briefing to the select committee. As a former adult educator I was very impressed. We did not have bits of paper to wade through like we frequently do in briefings on this matter. We had caricatures of two children and on each of those children—one was an unsupported child and the other was being taken care of by a foster family—was written what financial support they were entitled to from the State and what they were not entitled to. It was a very very graphic way of bringing that information before the select committee.I conclude this contribution by saying that Labour endorses and supports this bill. We wish that it had a start date right now because these children need the support right now.JONO NAYLOR (National): I apologise if somewhere along the line my voice fades during this speech.Hon Annette King: It could be a blessing.JONO NAYLOR: It could well be a blessing. In fact I am sure the honourable member opposite would just love it if I would wallow down and sort of sink into the seat but I will keep going as best I can anyway.Hon Annette King: Do your best.JONO NAYLOR: I will do my best and hopefully that will be good enough for her. It is a novel day as I find myself in agreement with New Zealand First or at least one of its members on this bill that is going forward. I think in my 6 months in Parliament—[Interruption] I am just being told to be careful by my colleagues. Under normal circumstances it may well be a career-threatening move to agree with Tracey Martin but I think that today when we look at the content of this amendment bill it is clear that the right course of action for us to take is to support this bill.This morning while we were in the middle of the review of the Social Workers Registration Board at the Social Services Committee I received an out-of-the-blue text message from my daughter who asked me which years it was that I worked for Child Youth and Family. I thought it was a somewhat unusual text to get from one’s 21-year-old daughter so I replied back to her and said it was in 1997 and 1998 which is a good few years ago now. She did enlighten me that the reason she was asking me that was that she was applying for a job with it on a part-time basis and thought she might have to disclose that at some point. Anyway I digress slightly—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Yes.JONO NAYLOR: But it did cause me to reflect—in fact some might say even more than slightly. But there is method to my madness because it caused me to reflect on my time as a Child Youth and Family social worker. It was a brief stint. I think at the time the average length of service of social workers was about 10 months and I managed 7 months. But during that time the issues that we are discussing today certainly came to light.I remember on many occasions one of the things that we were asked to do at times was to speak to caregivers who were caring for children who were at that stage under the care of the State to see whether or not they would be prepared to take on additional guardianship and then they would move to receiving the unsupported child’s benefit rather than care payments. There were good social work reasons for doing this. Some people had had a child in their care for a very long period of time and a significant bond had formed and it was clear that the child would in fact really be better served by remaining with this family over a long period of time. Their need for social work input was minimal and in fact we used to find that with a lot of those children we would do our sort of mandatory visit just to make sure that we could tick the right box in the key performance indicators column because actually there was no need for ongoing social work intervention because the placement was stable the bond was good.But as a social worker turning up to those families and putting to them whether they would consider taking on additional guardianship for the Ministry of Social Development or—I cannot remember quite what it was we were called back in 1997 or 1998. I think we were the Child Youth Families and Young Persons Service or something. No Children Young People—anyway CYPFS in those days.Hon Annette King: CYFS.JONO NAYLOR: We had a little P in the middle of the CYFS.Hon Annette King: Did you?JONO NAYLOR: Well you know when you have got to go you have got to go. But anyway—[Interruption] Clearly again behind me I am hearing: “Is there a doctor in the house?”.Anyway whatever it was that we were called we would have to go and talk to these families. But it was actually a pretty hard call to go and say: “Look it is fantastic the work you have done with this young person. You have taken them from a place of brokenness to a place of wholeness to a place of belonging but by the way we would like you to get paid a whole lot less than you are now.” It was I guess an unpleasant thing to have to go and do. It was as I say good social work practice actually to say: “The time has come for us to pull out. The time has come for you to make it on your own.” But to actually then say: “We want you to do this and receive less money.” did not make a lot of sense. So I guess this amendment that we are putting through now which will allow people in those situations to receive the same sorts of payments to support these childrenis I think incredibly good.The previous speaker Sue Moroney alluded to some of the importance of that because I think it is really important for young people and children when they are in care—there is enough stigma at times associated with that as it is. So we want to make sure that at the very least there is adequate funding coming through to ensure that they are not having to go and buy clothes from the second-hand store and that we can make sure that there is the opportunity for them to be able to participate perhaps as children whohave their own familiesdo in society. So I think it is really important that we have payments like this to ensure that their dignity is maintained.I referred to those people who you know have perhaps been foster carers who move into a more permanent arrangement with additional guardianship and receive the unsupported child’s benefit but of course not everybody who is a kin carer has had that benefit or had the process of having been a foster carer first. Sometimes they simply for all manner of reasons wind up having young people in their care which they had not planned on doing. Almost inevitably it has not occurred because some sort of pre-planned idea that that is how it would be. It is not because when they set out in life they thought: “Oh at approximately this point in my life it will be great to take on some children to care for.” No it will often occur as a result of some form of tragedy whether it be through the sudden death or loss of parents or through abuse and neglect and children no longer being able to be with their parents and they find themselves being cared for by extended family members—often grandparents in fact—who perhaps are at a stage of life where they were not necessarily planning on doing this and it becomes a very stressful environment. It is stressful enough being a parent at times as it is.Hon Annette King: So Jono why do they have to wait?JONO NAYLOR: I am coming to that. If you just hang on we have got 10 minutes to walk our way through this and we will get to it. [Interruption]Oh 3 minutes? All right well I was talking in terms of the whole length of the speech not what was left. But thank you Mr Assistant Speaker I now know I have got 3 minutes left and I will make sure I get to that point that the Hon Annette King made. I think I have got the full name right so that is good.Anyway what I was saying was that there is stress involved and so it is appropriate that there are financial payments made to ensure that that stress is decreased so that people through whatever circumstances when they find themselves caring for these young people are having that burden lessened somewhat. At the very least I think what we can expect is that they would find themselves receiving the same level of compensation as if they had been foster caregivers in terms of being able to provide for the material needs of those children.I know that the honourable member over the other side of the Chamber Annette King has asked: “Why do we have to wait so long?” and there is a rationale for that wait. I understand that in the report that came back from the select committee it was outlined pretty clearly that actually there are some transitional arrangements in place that have been set up already and the Government has helped through the annual school and year start-up payment for carers. I believe that in the first instance that may well be enough. We do recognise the issue over time of parity for people to be able to receive appropriate levels of compensation in order to ensure that young people are being cared for appropriately and to ensure that young people who are in the care of not necessarily their legal parents but who are in the care of others who have stepped up to the plate in difficult situations are able to be provided for.As I said at the beginning of my speech I find myself agreeing with Tracey Martin on this occasion. It may well not be the last time it may well happen again in the future but we will have to wait and see if in fact that can happen. It has been I think overall from my understanding although this went through the select committee process before my time a very constructive process. I understand that a good conversation was had between the member who brought this bill forward and the Government and I look forward to seeing this bill continue its passage through the House and for this situation to be resolved. Thank you.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Catherine Delahunty—a 5-minute call.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Kia ora tātou I would just like to acknowledge Tracey Martin for her excellent effort here. He iti he pounamu. It may be a small apparent thing but for the children and the families that Tracey has created this change for especially her original vision before it was gutted by the Government it is an excellent effort.I think this bill is a very good example of what is actually achievable in this hostile and adversarial space called Parliament. Tracey has negotiated extremely successfully and although she had to make compromises that are pretty unacceptable she decided there was enough in it—and we agree with her—to continue with this bill. It is a sword of Damocles when you get to this stage and I think Sue Moroney knows this well as well after the paid parental leave debacle. We come in good faith with our members’ bills we really hope to make change and make things better for people and then we come up against a wall of adversarial pettiness sometimes when common sense is on our side but we have to compromise in order to achieve anything. So Tracey has done that and good on her. The Green Party is very proud to support this bill.What kind of society accepts discrimination against its children let alone its unsupported children? We are the support of those children. We have an obligation—this State us here in this room now—to support those children. If they do not have parents to provide for them it is our duty our obligation and our responsibility to provide for them. So we do thank Tracey Martin very much for continuing in persisting with this despite all the difficulties.I would say: “Feed the kids and clothe the kids.” It is about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for any of you who have any idea about what that means. Feed the kids and clothe the kids. It is pretty basic. I guess we are now going to have to have a member’s bill about giving them homes as well because the basic needs have not been met. But thanks to two fantastic women Metiria Turei and Tracey Martin we have got down to the basics of talking about food and clothing. And thank you Hone Harawira for the original concept. Some of us are not here to talk fancy lawyer language or spout on about economic growth if we cannot feed and clothe our children. These are our children. Make no mistake about it; these are our children.So what is the message to these children? From Tracey Martin the message is that their lives are important and their needs are important. The Government’s amendments however which delay the changes to 2018 and do not quite create parity are what I would call mean-spirited minimalist mealy-mouthed and miserly—a nice bit of alliteration I thought—as well as being completely unnecessary. What is the message we should be giving to these apparently unsupported children who are being treated differently from children who are in the care of strangers? What is the message? Because the Green Party believes that the message to these children needs to be that whether they have two parents or not we will provide for them; that they are important to us; that they deserve the best; that they will not be discriminated against by having less access to things like clothing; and that they and their lives will be celebrated and cherished by us the State and by their community. That is the message we should be giving these kids—not that they are in any sense lesser or entitled to less because of circumstances that were not under their control because those children are us. If we do not accept that we do not have the right to be here making decisions on their behalf.I did not have the privilege of being on the Social Services Committee but Jan Logie passed me some letters that she received—a number of beautiful letters from children. They all say the same thing. I will just quickly share a few of those. “Please don’t make Gran and Grandad wait until 2018. They have looked after us for 17½ years.” Here is another of a little girl saying: “Please don’t make us wait until 2018.” She is sitting on a sofa that is obviously her bed. It has got a sheet on it. She does not come from a wealthy family. She does not have a lot of support. She cannot wait. There is another child on a sofa which is also his bed. “Please don’t make me wait.” He has got a broken arm and a broken leg so obviously he has health issues as well. “Please don’t make me wait.” There is another young girl and her eyes are the eyes that will haunt us if we look into those eyes and do not provide for those children.There are a number of letters here. Some of them have got stickers and some of them have got photos of kids. All of them have been written by children asking: “Please do not make me wait.” Those children have a right to make that challenge to us. There is no reason to make them wait. It is time to do this. We should have done it better but thank you Tracey Martin. We will support this bill.PEENI HENARE (Labour—Tāmaki Makaurau): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā tātou katoa. Kia ora. In the 1980s our country got it right. We went on with a very hard long piece of work known as Pūao-te-ata-tū. From Pūao-te-ata-tū came Matua Whāngai. Matua Whāngai is for parent caregivers and it allows for tamariki or Māori children in particular in Pūao-te-ata-tū’s case to be cared for by their own families for whatever reason whether it is a family breakdown the stigma of teen pregnancy or other issues that were discussed when the Pūao-te-ata-tū consultation went around.It was a step in the right direction but it just did not quite go far enough in supporting our families and supporting our kaumātua and our kuia our grandparents in looking after and caring properly for their tamariki their mokopuna or children who come into their care. The House might be interested to know that at one point in time I was a case manager with Work and Income. We constantly heard sad cases of kuia and kaumātua who were unable to care properly for their grandchildren. It was not that they did not love them and it was not that they did not give them a beautiful home or a warm home where they felt loved and grew up in a great environment; it was just those extra little costs that come with caring for and looking after tamariki.We all know what those costs are—in particular clothes. We know that when you are sending your kids to school you want them to have the bare essentials of a nice outfit and nice clothes in particular if they are not going to a school that has a uniform. I know that most do have uniforms now and they are quite practical. Once upon a time it was a nasty grey buttoned-up shirt but now there are nice polo shirts. But with that comes a cost. We know that our kaumātua and kuia were unable to meet those costs so they put off other things and finally accumulated just enough money to knock their bills on the head.We support this bill. We support it for the very reason that a foster carer and those whom—just like with Matua Whāngai—are family members who look after young ones get some sort of parity get equal assistance under the eyes of the law. We support this particular bill. We support it for all of the reasons that have already been mentioned. I do not want to labour too many—but we talked about stigma. It was funny; I was having a chat with my son—and he had a lot to do with my parents his grandparents—and he always spoke about how bummed out he was that he was the child who tooka date loaf to his shared lunch. And nobody no 8-year-old or 9-year-old eats date loaf but all the MallowPuffs and all the Rashuns and all the Twistieswere taken. There was a stigma attached to it. Now my boy is quite a bit older and he is still known as the “date loaf kid”. So we support this particular bill so that those tamariki are not affected by those types of stigma which can live with them for a long time.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): My favourite food.PEENI HENARE: In that vein—food is food eh? That is what I try to say to him. We cannot have our children being disadvantaged. There is a lot of rhetoric around poverty in our country at the moment and what that means for our tamariki. We know that the bill that is being proposed here will go some way to alleviating some of that poverty and supporting our families to look after our tamariki and allow them to enjoy the carefree days that I am sure most of us in this House enjoyed. So we support it. Kia ora tātou.Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this bill. I am rising to support this bill in its second reading. I acknowledge the work that the member in charge of this bill Tracey Martin has done on it. I acknowledge the select committee the previous Social Services Committee and its work that it did in the past term. I also recognise that Tracey Martin has put forward a very genuine concern in the form of this bill. This bill is about the clothing allowance entitlement and parity for orphans or unsupported children with foster children. This bill seeks to make that entitlement clarification through legislation.The purpose of this bill is to increase financial support for kin carers. I believe that this is really vital because if this financial support is not available it can lead to the inhibition of the growth of our children. This is for any kin carers—unrelated caregivers family members or grandparents looking after their grandchildren. I also acknowledge the select committee’s recommended amendments. I was not part of that select committee in the past but nevertheless I like everyone else here in the Chamber understand the issue of clothing. If the clothing issue is because of material deprivation it can lead to an impact on the psychological state of children leading to a lot of other problems. This can happen because children will be hesitant to socialise and socialisation is very important for children because that helps them acquire a lot of skills that are required throughout life. The lack of sufficient clothing can create some mental and emotional issues as well so that can create some prejudice against children. Sadly this may not be under their control if it is due to the financial situation of their kin carers.The National Government has been actively supporting children through the Children’s Action Plan. The issue of providing all children with the opportunities for them to succeed is something we all agree on. Just like my colleagues I want to see all children succeed at all levels and clothing issues can hold them back. Having been actively involved in the community I understand the hardships of our community. I also want to acknowledge the work that kin carers do in looking after these children in unfortunate circumstances. Their job is an extremely difficult one and requires a large amount of empathy in order to come to some realisation of the hardships that one can face and that these children go through. It is really essential that this support is provided to these kin carers so that this support can be passed on to these children in need who have no control over their situation.Sometimes these responsibilities come unexpectedly. I remember during doorknocking while campaigning in the general election that I met a family. These were very elderly grandparents looking after their two grandchildren because of a tragedy in their son’s family. They had no choice but to look after these children with a very limited income. These children do need support. They need to be looked after. The Government recognises the incredible work that family members do to look after these children—those who have lost their parent or parents or who cannot be looked after by their family or their parents. More than 12000 New Zealand children are being cared for by wider family members because of the death of a parent or a family breakdown.Currently kin carers are entitled to assistance to help with the cost of raising orphaned or unsupported children. In 2009 National ensured kin carers got the same weekly amount as foster carers. The National Government is known for delivering value for money and is already working in that direction and looking at exploring options to see how the $10 million capped fund that was announced can be utilised to help children in this situation. To address that the National Government has already set up a ministerial reference group which is currently working through options for how help can be provided to kin carers or how in this kind of situation extra funding can be applied. This extra $10 million that was announced is to help with kin carers’ additional costs. This ministerial reference group also has a representative for grandparents who are looking after grandchildren so that experience is also there in this ministerial reference group. That group will be providing advice on how best to allocate this funding to help kin carers in similar circumstances. This National Government is always striving to deliver for our communities and our focus is the well-being of our families. That is a very vital package of our mission. This is why the Minister for Social Development has asked this ministerial reference group to explore all options to get positive outcomes.There are other recent initiatives taken by the Government as well. One is to make parenting very practical and possible for grandparents. It is very important that grandparents are given the assistance that they need to raise these children because sometimes there is a big gap between when grandparents have looked after their children versus when they have to look after these children in their family. This kind of assistance will be required and some special parenting skills are also required and to provide that assistance Work and Income has now assigned a manager at its national office to work with grandparents raising grandchildren. This is like a one-stop place for grandparents to seek the information that they need and this is really important.The times are changing really fast—we know that technology is changing really fast as well—and how we are raising our children changes really fast as well. And so it is really important that grandparents are able to catch up with the changing technology are able to catch up with new ways of raising children and are able to understand the expectations of children. This monetary support which is for clothing is really important. It is also really important that grandparents learn parenting skills under the current legislation. It is really important that this kind of training is available to grandparents because parenting is a very complex issue no matter how many children one has raised. Every child is different they come with their different traits and so it is a very tricky issue. Therefore this parenting support is very important.For this the Government is investing $600000 a year in a Toolbox parenting groups programme that is especially designed for kin carers. This is a great tool as it provides a refresher course on parenting for grandparents and this training is facilitated by trained volunteers. All this is being done to support the incredible work that kin carers are doing to raise children who are in the unfortunate circumstances of not having a parent to live with them and look after them. I recognise that our children are our future and that is why the National Government is so focused on our children. As I said before there are more than 12000 children in this situation and currently kin carers are entitled to assistance to help with the cost of raising orphaned or unsupported children.Along with this entire issue I feel it is important to provide every child in New Zealand with an equal opportunity of prosperity and happiness. It is essential we focus on our children because they are our future and they will carry our long-term ideas and hopes for our country. So in summary we are already working in the direction to provide additional assistance in areas that this bill seeks to address. As this bill is in line with our objectives I support this bill in the second reading. Thank you.POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Kia orana Mr Assistant Speaker. With the indulgence of the House I would like to talk a little bit about my previous life having worked on a child protection review panel for a Child Youth and Family site and say what that was about.The review panels came about because of some unfortunate incidents that happened in the community that resulted in the death of some children. The child protection review panels were charged with reviewing the work of social workers particularly in the Child Youth and Family environment to ensure that they were given the best resources the best support and the best networks into the community sector to ensure that they could do their work effectively so that we could minimise the harm to children in our community.Why I raise it is that—I am referring to my colleague Peeni Henare—he talked about Pūao-te-ata-tū which was a programme that really first started the discussion in the social service arena around whānau caring for their tamariki when the parents were unable to do so. I believe that is right is it not Mr Henare?Peeni Henare: That’s right.POTO WILLIAMS:That is the genesis of a lot of the work that we are now engaged in in Whānau Ora. It had its genesis in the idea that the family should be able and should be encouraged to care for their own when circumstances make it difficult for parents to take that role through whatever mechanism.It was a really important step forward because it made us recognise that there were a whole lot of components to caring for children that were more than just providing a safe home or a warm bed or food. It was about attending to that child’s emotional needs and their cultural needs and ensuring that they had connections to their family their history and their past.So I must commend the work that started with Pūao-te-ata-tū and has continued to evolve into different programmes because really for most of the children who come to the notice of Child Youth and Family—when they get to the process where they may be uplifted or there are some real difficulties—it means the family gets involved at a very significant time. The family may be encouraged to find options to support that particular child. It may be that an aunt may provide some kind of respite or provide oversight for the family.Why that is important to mention is that this bill which Tracey Martin is bringing to the House and which she has got wide support for actually speaks to the heart of caring for children. We place a lot of responsibility on our families as we should to support parents to parent well and grandparents or aunts and uncles to take control when parents are unable to. This bill actually speaks about the equity of that. Yes it is right and true that families should take care of their own but not at the expense of being seen as unequal or having some inequity with other carers such as paid foster carers. This is really about the principle of having an equitable response and equitable treatment for all children with that being the basic principle for this. So I really commend you Tracey Martin. It is a small but a potentially very significant step in ensuring that we treat all children equitably.Let us look at what has come from Pūao-te-ata-tū to what we currently view as a very important way of dealing with families: Whānau Ora. The basis of Whānau Ora is about families caring for their own but it is also about families finding solutions that are fit for them and having the resources to do that. Sometimes that includes having the funding resources to support whānau to care for their own because sometimes our families are not the best place. We have had some issues in our families and we need to do a little bit of work on our families to ensure that they can be providing the appropriate care and support for our tamariki. We know this which is why Whānau Ora is such an important opportunity for families to deal with those longstanding issues.We must look not at the imposition but at what actually happens to grandparents and aunts and uncles or even older siblings when they are asked to care for children—what that actually does to the dynamic of a particular family. I want to refer to a dear colleague of mine who took on the children of her sister. Tragically her sister was killed at the hands of her partner in a family violence homicide and my colleague was then asked to take care of these two children in addition to caring for her own children one of whom was a special needs child. Very tragic circumstances but she was given very limited resources and did not really know where to go for support. She cast around various agencies looking for support.In circumstances like that should not the State be at the front of that queue not at the back of that queue? It should be right there saying to people like my colleague: “We will help you every step of the way. We won’t wait until 2018 to put this bill through. We’re going to put it through as soon as it has received its Royal assent.” So I want to challenge the Government members. They are obviously very supportive of what Tracey Martin’s bill is attempting to do. I thought Jono Naylor made an extraordinary speech. I was really happy to hear what he had to say—he obviously speaks from some experience—but then we look to when this bill is actually going to be in place: 2018. What is the significance of 2018? What is more significant is why it is not going to be in place as soon as it is possible. So—Tracey Martin: In 2018 the $4 million is gone.POTO WILLIAMS: That is right—thank you Tracey Martin.This bill has got a couple of clauses in it that are important but really it is the sentiment that sits behind this bill that is most important and it is around ensuring that our kids are treated equally. The basis is that it should be regardless of their circumstances. The tragic nature of the circumstances in which some of these children come into our notice should not actually disadvantage them at all. We should not have any more children who have to go to school and compete with Peeni Henare’s son for his date loaf. I think that is a delightful story and I would like to encourage all parents who make date loaf to put it in their children’s school lunches. That actually speaks to something—families that are thinking about the nutrition of their children. That is another issue that we could talk about but this is not the place for that.But I do want to say that this is a great bill. It will do a great thing. I encourage the Government to look at bringing the date forward in order to bring this bill into play and thank you very much for your indulgence Mr Assistant Speaker.STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): As this is the first opportunity I have had to speak in the House since Cyclone Pam I would like to take just a brief moment to acknowledge the hardship that has gone on particularly for the people of Tanna island. In my electorate there is a close affiliation with Tanna island. A lot of the recognised seasonal workers have come from Tanna island and it has been quite devastated there. I note that there is quite an effort going on in Marlborough to put together a 40-foot container with building materials generators and other things to help those people get back on their feet. They make a valuable contribution to our economy and their work in turn makes a lot of valuable contribution back to their own GDP. I would like to take just a moment to acknowledge that so thank you.It is a great pleasure to speak to the Social Security (Clothing Allowances for Orphans and Unsupported Children) Amendment Bill. Tracey like everybody else I would like to pay tribute to you for putting this together. It is a fantastic bill and it is a really important issue to bring forward to people. Unfortunately I was not on the Social Services Committee that looked at it because I was not elected to Parliament at that time but I am now on that committee and I really am enjoying the work that we do there. So I look at this with different eyes from those I would have had prior to the election so thank you and well done.I would also like to say that as part of my election campaign I spent quite a bit of time going around places like the Salvation Army Bread of Life and Barnados looking at the sorts of issues that this bill attempts to cover. It is really quite a big issue out there because with this bill we really are talking about the unsupported child’s benefit which is available only when the family breaks down—and who knows what sorts of circumstances have gone on behind that; perhaps the parent or parents have gone to jail or something like that—or the orphans benefit where the parents have died or cannot be found. That is a pretty traumatic thing for a child to go through and then to have them supported by their kin as kin carers. There is a heck of a lot going on for them to put up with and to adjust to and to then go through financial difficulties as well would be pretty traumatic. This bill attempts to alleviate that so well done on that.I note that there is no income or asset test for this particular benefit and I think it is an important pointthat the families who are going through this do not have to go through the added difficulties of having to apply for that. This particular bill is trying to fill another hole—I realise that—but I will come to that a little bit later. I also note that the child automatically qualifies for a community services card and depending on how the benefit is applied for there may well be an in-work tax credit for some of the beneficiaries which I think is also a very good thing to do.When we are talking about kin carers we are really talking quite often about grandparents. I thought we could just for a moment turn our minds to that. It was a common practice for grandparents to have quite a role in bringing children up in the past perhaps two generations ago. That really has changed a lot today. The big difference we note today is that when a grandparent is looking after and bringing up a child they will be much older than they would have been two generations ago. People start their families now in their late 20s and 30s and sometimes late 30s whereas going back two generations ago it would be in their 20s. So there is a much bigger age difference between the grandparents and the grandchildren and that is pretty difficult to deal with sometimes. Having three children of my own I know how difficult it can be without being a grandparent trying to look after them.When we are talking about clothing allowances for young children in particular being as I said a parent I know how hard kids can be particularly boys on their clothes. It is an expensive business trying to buy school uniforms for them and to keep those up to date let alone all the other clothes they wear—sports uniforms and all that sort of thing. In regard to the implementation of the bill being pushed out to 2018 when you are talking about gathering tax from taxpayers and redistributing it to people in need or to provide the goods and services that Governments provide on our behalf you really have to walk a delicate line. If you go too far and tax people too heavily they will put too much effort into trying to minimise their income tax liabilities. That has been shown many times around the world to have a perverse effect on the economy and to drag the economy down and hold everybody back and we cannot do that.Being in Government being leaders and being members of Parliament we have to make tough decisions about how we balance out the needs of people and our ability to pay. The demand for Government funds is limitless but our ability to pay is very much limited and we have to take those things into account when we pass laws. The Government is quite rightly taking a sort of whole-of-Government approach in looking at its welfare policies and how they might be implemented and I think that is a really smart thing to do. So that is why there is a delay. We really need to do it properly because simply bolting more things on in an ad hoc manner is really not good government and that is what is driving the implementation of this bill.I noted Poto Williams talking about Whānau Ora before and the other sorts of policies that go around it. Those are fantastic policies and they are all going to hit specific needs in different ways. The likes of Children’s Teams is another policy that is working very well in that way and I am proud to say in Marlborough which is the fourth place in New Zealand for Children’s Teams to be introduced. I believe that it is going to work very well and that it will help in this sort of area particularly because those children will often be the ones who will need those services. When I was going around those various community groups it struck me that there is quite an overlap in services and that often those people will grab a bit of service from here and another bit from another area and it is not necessarily in the best interests of that particular child. So I think that having an overall approach is needed.I am certainly supporting this bill and I think it will go through. The delay is needed because of balancing up all the policies and making sure that they all work together. But I do commend you Tracey for all the hard work that has gone into it and it is a great pleasure to actually commend this bill to the House. Thank you.Bill read a second time.Education (Breakfast and Lunch Programmes in Schools) Amendment BillFirst ReadingDebate resumed from 28 May 2014.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Members when we were debating the first reading of the Education (Breakfast and Lunch Programmes in Schools) Amendment Bill Tim Macindoe was speaking and has 30 seconds remaining if he so wishes.TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West): What a generous allocation. When I was speaking on this matter in the last Parliament I made the point that no one in this House wants to see children going to school hungry but the problem with this bill is that it is a blunt instrument which is estimated to cost about $100 million and it will not fix the problem.What we are doing as a Government is looking after the most vulnerable in our community and I am very proud of the measures that we have been taking. I am also very grateful to those private sector companies such as Fonterra and Sanitarium that have been working with our Government—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. His time has expired. I call Metiria Turei—5 minutes in reply.METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Let me first thank Hone Harawira and the Māori Party for drafting this bill and for bringing it to the House after having the good luck to have it drawn out of the ballot. Hone Harawira has been a fierce and passionate advocate for our kids and this bill was one example of that work and I want to thank him for allowing me to take it over after the last election. I note that he nominated the Māori Affairs Committee to receive this bill should it pass its first reading—we remain ever hopeful.Secondly I want to acknowledge the extensive coalition of NGOs that are supporting this bill. There is a coalition of 30-odd organisations including Unicef Plunket and a whole range that have been working very hard to increase public awareness of the extent of hunger in our schools and also working with National to do their best to encourage National to support the bill’s referral to the select committee. The groups have understood the need to have a parliamentary conversation about feeding kids in schools because they work with the consequences of hunger in children every day. Can I also thank all the members of this House who have spoken in support of the bill during the first reading and all of those parties that will be supporting it tonight. It is very much appreciated.I do remain deeply disappointed in National for not supporting the bill’s referral to the select committee. It would cause the National Party no harm to support this bill at its first reading. In fact it would do National only good to support the community who wants to have this conversation. It is not just the Greens or other parties in the Opposition; the community wants to have a conversation about the extent of hunger in our kids in schools and what we should do about it. We have asked National repeatedly to commit only to the first reading so that parliamentarians can hear from schools from communities from families and from teachers about the scale of the problem and what the options are for solutions.I have said over and over that we are not wedded to any particular solution and that we are open to changes to the bill and even to withdrawal of the bill should there be either a conversation or a Budget bid to feed kids in schools. We put a letter to Bill English just a few weeks ago suggesting that we would withdraw the bill if we could get some certainty about that and we have heard nothing back.There are no downsides for National in supporting this bill at its first reading. It would show the community that it is listening to the evidence the community has and it would show that it is capable of putting aside ideology in favour of kids who are hungry. There is a real problem. A few years ago KidsCan said that 9 percent of the kids at schools it worked with were hungry at breakfast and at lunchtime and last year it said it was 15 percent. The problem has now grown to 23 percent. It is getting worse. So the measures we have in place are not helping.When the first reading of this bill began in the House last year Hone Harawira said: “I know the bill is not perfect. I hear the kōrero about feeding the kids being a parent’s responsibility but the truth is that a lot of people have been so poor for so long that they struggle to make the right choices and often end up making the wrong ones and all the while our kids go hungry.” He said further: “I have heard a lot about increasing employment opportunities upgrading housing improving access to health care and developing better educational pathways. All of that is necessary and good but it takes a long time to happen and all the while our kids go hungry.”That is the fundamental point—kids are going hungry; thousands and thousands of them. This House this afternoon has the power to change that. By voting for the bill we declare that children are the most important priority; our most important constituency. By voting for this bill we declare that we will put aside our political enmities and focus on the needs of kids. By voting for this bill we declare that the whole point of our being in this debating chamber is to make life for our children better. Not a single one of us in our own communities would stand in front of a hungry child and refuse to give them food—not a single one of us would do that. Why would we do that when there are 20 children or 40 children or when there are 59 of us standing in front of those kids? Not one of us individually would say no to a hungry child. Why would we say no collectively? It makes no sense.So many times I have heard National argue that hungry children are being failed by someone else—parents or teachers. Tonight hungry children are being failed by 59 National MPs.A party vote was called for on the question That the Education (Breakfast and Lunch Programmes in Schools) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.Ayes 59New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 11; Māori Party 2.Noes 61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Motion not agreed to.Electronic Data Safety BillFirst ReadingCLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I move That the Electronic Data Safety Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Commerce Committee to consider the bill. New Zealanders need to have the utmost confidence that their personal information held by the Government is secure and private. There have been numerous and very high-profile incidents in recent years that have shaken that confidence. The establishment of an Electronic Data Safety Commission which is what this bill does will help restore confidence.This should not be a partisan issue. Every member of this House understands the need for privacy and security of information in conducting their role as an MP. We must ensure that the information the State holds regarding members of the public is treated with the same care and respect we expect the information we deal with as MPs to be treated. We must ensure that the electronic systems used are robust resourced modern and regularly audited. But there is a growing body of evidence that this is not the case. If the Government’s intention today is to vote against this bill because it claims that the numerous issues with data security over recent years are minor isolated incidents and that they have been addressed by a few internal appointments then I ask that the Government put that claim to the test by establishing the Electronic Data Safety Commission to reassure the public.There is a widespread perception that personal data is not safe with the Government. If that perception is misplaced then this commission will show that. The Privacy Commissioner’s 2014 annual survey of the public showed that 63 percent of them rate their level of concern about the privacy of their information as high and that this number has remained very high over recent years. The Privacy Commissioner’s office gets notified of an increasing number of data breaches every year the vast majority in the public sector. In the 2013-14 year the total figure was 113 up from 16 in 2008-09. Of those 86 were in the public sector—across the Government and in the hospitals and other health agencies. These are important breaches and they are significant.Almost a year ago the previous Minister of Justice Judith Collins announced significant changes to the Privacy Act that would give the Privacy Commissioner more powers to compel public and private sector organisations to report privacy breaches. In May 2014 Judith Collins said it was vital that New Zealanders have confidence in our privacy laws and that people know that their information is in safe hands. She said she was going to introduce legislation for the mandatory reporting of data breaches with new offences increased fines enhanced powers for the Privacy Commissioner and various other things. That was nearly a year ago and that legislation is not even on the Order Paper. Where is it? Well a little birdie tells me that it might have got lost. That is a significant worry and I ask the current Minister of Justice where that legislation is.There are fundamental concerns—fundamental concerns—about IT governance and accountability as well as the wider Government attitude to privacy that have got to be addressed. The National Government must answer for a long line of recent privacy breaches that include breaches at ACC the Ministry of Social Development the Earthquake Commission Housing New Zealand the Medical Council of New Zealand Immigration New Zealand and most recently the Ministry of Justice. Two other very recent privacy breaches include the Southern District Health Board labelled incompetent after accidentally sending the private health details of 60 patients to a member of the public. In January this year a privacy breach blunder resulted in the personal details of more than 600 females some as young as 13 who had had abortions in the central North Island being given to Fairfax Media. These are recent occurrences. These have not been dealt with.This is systemic. Today I revealed in question time that there are deeply concerning high-level risks identified within the Department of Internal Affairs which Peter Dunne is the Minister of that are leaving Government networks vulnerable to attack including security controls that are not functioning a lack of ability to investigate malicious activity and insecure information being transmitted over the Department of Internal Affairs’ cloud provider networks and other cloud provider networks. But the Minister has denied that under his watch any Government system has gone live without accreditation from the New Zealand Institute of Safety Management and sign-off from the Chief Executive of the Department of Internal Affairs.Well you would think the Government would have learnt from Novopay. You would think it would have learnt from the bungles. It is my understanding that there have been IT systems going live without accreditation and without sign-off. They include the “Desktop as a Service” cloud-provider networks. Many vendor systems are either insecure accessed by foreign nationals locally accessed by contractual agreements with third parties overseas often with poor sanitation of data or all three of those together. These are extremely important significant issues happening right now in one of our most important Government agencies. John Key has been consistently blasé in the face of recurring privacy breaches. There is a distinction between one-off mistakes and a systemic widespread privacy problem that is not being resolved.The commission of inquiry in my bill is needed because more and more personal information is being collected electronically by the Government and we need to ensure that guidance and proper rules are set in place to protect the privacy of New Zealanders in an increasingly sophisticated environment. I know that many members on the Government side claim to take data security and the privacy of the public very seriously. Well now we get to see whether they live up to their rhetoric by supporting this bill.National should vote for this bill because this bill will assist the Government in achieving one of its Better Public Services targets. Target 10 is that “An average of 70 per cent of New Zealanders’ most common transactions with government will be completed in a digital environment by 2017.” The number is currently at 46 percent. To lift this to 70 percent by 2017 New Zealanders will need to have greater confidence in the security of their transactions. A commission that assesses the problems with data security and recommends solutions can only help the current Government in achieving this target. It would be somewhat perverse for the Government to vote against this bill for purely partisan reasons when it actually helps it achieve one of its stated election promises.Peter Dunne should support this bill. The Minister of Internal Affairs claimed today in question time that he believes that New Zealanders’ personal information is being managed securely in his department. Well he needs to vote for the bill to prove that this is the case. He originally pledged to support this bill as you heard in question time but that was before he got caught out leaking confidential documents to the media and then attempted to mislead the public about that. After he was stood down as the revenue Minister a few months later he was—without any hint of irony—appointed as Minister of Internal Affairs responsible for data security. Well if Mr Dunne wants to have any credibility he should be up here today voting for this bill to show that there is probity and that there are proper processes happening within his own ministry.David Seymour the ACT member for Epsom in his maiden speech spoke of liberty and of improving public policy so that “free individuals may flourish”. Well surely if Mr Seymour is going to be true to his libertarian beliefs he must vote for this bill to ensure that the State is handling the information of private individuals which is the private property of those individuals in the most appropriate and careful manner. Voting this bill through to select committee is the first step so that we can receive public submissions on the security of data and discuss how the effectiveness of the commission could be improved. We owe it to the public to ensure that their personal information is treated with the respect it deserves.MELISSA LEE (National): I would like to begin my contribution on the first reading of the Electronic Data Safety Bill in the name of the Labour Opposition member Clare Curran by congratulating her on actually having her bill drawn. However I have to start by saying that I do not support this bill.This bill proposes to establish a special commission of inquiry. Clare Curran often talks in this House about technology and how fast technology is actually moving but this bill refers to privacy breaches in 2012. I guess that is the nature of members’ bills. When she actually wrote the bill it was related to the privacy breach in the Ministry of Social Development back in 2012. This is also about privacy breaches within Government agencies the capacity of Government agencies to manage and hold personal information and also how significant privacy breaches can be avoided in future and any other related matter.National is definitely committed to Better Public Services and to increasing the use of Government services online. Ensuring that the public actually have confidence in the information and communications system forms a crucial part of the work that we do. When the breaches happened in 2012 let me say that there were individual departments that had their own reviews which cost the Government departments money and they are working to fix those things by even appointing a Government Chief Privacy Officer a function that was established in 2014.If we were to have a commission of inquiry as this bill proposes there would be three members and it would be chaired by a lawyer. The commission would be required to report to the Prime Minister within 12 months. It would also investigate various privacy breaches that have occurred in the past within various Government agencies. The commission would also examine the agencies’ capacity to respond to breaches in the future.To me this bill is all about having a talkfest once again. I mean Metiria Turei in an earlier bill talked about the Government not putting money into children who are not having breakfast and lunches. I was not actually here to listen to her speak so I am not sure exactly what she was talking about but I just heard a little bit about children going hungry in schools which is a very very important issue. But Clare Curran is willing to spend $4.4 million—or even $11.5 million which a commission of inquiry would in fact cost—to do this. A talkfest to do what? I am totally at a loss as to what she thinks she can actually achieve.It is as if the Government is not already doing something. The Government is in fact doing something about privacy breaches. A commission of inquiry should also be considered only when the situation is so unusual that no other approach will fix the problem. There are other reviews under way as I said earlier. For example the Ministry of Social Development contracted Deloitte to undertake a review of the privacy breach that it had had. ACC contracted KPMG and Information Integrity Solutions to report into the privacy breach that it had had.Privacy breaches—we all want to protect our privacy. I mean as the mother of a teenage son I want to protect his privacy. I do not even have my son’s photograph on my campaign material. I try to protect my privacy by not including him in the material that I send out to the electorate when I am campaigning.The Government Chief Information Officer also has the ability to assist agencies in addressing issues as happened with the Earthquake Commission and that was back in 2013 when that breach actually happened. The Government Chief Information Officer was asked by the head of the State Services Commission to look into information and communications technology security and privacy. The Privacy Commissioner already has the ability to investigate privacy breaches and report to the Prime Minister any matter affecting the privacy of the individual including the need to or the desirability of taking legislative or administrative or other actions to give better protection to the privacy of the individual. So would the commission of inquiry that Clare Curran wants to establish do more than what we are already doing? A commission of inquiry would cost even more money. For me this bill is not something that I would support.Going back to 2012 the review of the publicly accessible information system by the Government Chief Information Officer was commissioned by the State Services Commissioner and it has resulted in a range of measures to strengthen the security of New Zealanders’ personal information including the establishment of the Government Chief Privacy Officer’s functions.Recently there was the story of Sony. It is a huge conglomerate and it will have spent so much money on trying to protect its data and trying to protect its copyright of material like the movies that it is developing and the shows that it is working on. If somebody wants to filter that organisation and it is attacked—in terms of cyber-attacking which Clare talked about—they will do it. Sony was attacked. All that work it has done working in privacy was released to the public.If somebody is intentionally trying to break into something they will do it. That does not mean that I do not support the work that the Privacy Commissioner is doing—I really support that. What I am actually saying is that if somebody intentionally wants to attack then they will do so and they can possibly breach that security wall that we might put up.The Privacy Maturity Assessment Framework has also been developed to help agencies assess their existing capability and implement appropriate improvements as well. There is an expectation and the Privacy Maturity Assessment Framework was developed and tested in collaboration with privacy practitioners from across Government. There are best-practice models around. Having a commission of inquiry is certainly not one of them and I am not prepared to support the member spending millions of dollars on a talkfest. I do not support this bill.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): There is an old joke doing the rounds in the Pacific that at least now New Zealand is listening to them because the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) is wholesale harvesting their data. The same joke has been going around in New Zealand that the first time the National Government has listened to New Zealanders is when it got the GCSB to do it. That is of course an extreme example of what we are talking about here: the necessary privacy that must be attached to citizens’ information be that at the routine level of avoiding breaches and stuff-ups the systemic level of developing systems that are resilient and robust to those accidents and even more important the systemic level of avoiding the deliberate attempts by third parties to access the private information of New Zealanders.Before I go into those three layers for which this special commission of inquiry is essential let me just quickly note the fallacy in the previous speaker’s contribution. Her line of argument was that because one of the examples quoted by my colleague Clare Curran dated from 2012 the bill was no longer needed because everything had all been fixed. Well my colleague has done a data pull on stories of Government privacy breaches since January 2015 and there are plenty of them. There is a Northland Regional Council breach. There is an abortion data-leak error from Lakes District Health Board to Fairfax Media. There is the Broadcasting Standards Authority claim around the Valley Animal Research Centre. There is a Plunket privacy breach in Taranaki—that is an NGO sector rather than the Government sector. There is the Southern District Health Board and so on and so forth. So there are plenty of examples.If you want the statistics the Privacy Commissioner has helpfully compiled them. They tell us several interesting things. Since 2012 when the member’s quoted example was concluded the number of Government privacy breaches has actually gone up. In the last year Labour was in office it was 13. In the most recent year under investigation which is 2014 there were 86. It has gone up from 13 to 86. What is worse is that the private sector equivalent—the whole private sector which is two-thirds of the economy—had only 27. So the one-third of the economy that is the Government run by the National Party had 86 major privacy breaches and there were only 27 in the rest of the economy.What kinds of causes were there according to the Privacy Commissioner? There was unsafe website design loss or theft of physical data files loss or theft of portable storage devices improper employee browsing that was not prevented electronic information sent to the wrong recipient or physical information sent to the wrong recipient. These are all causes.Let us come back to that staircase of issues. At the bottom level is an individual agency that has a stuff-up whether it is a computer design error or whether it is an employee error and they can be extremely serious. The member opposite quoted some cases where third-party consultants had been called in to investigate them. It is good in so far as it goes if the report is thorough and if the agency acts on the recommendations—we all know they usually gather dust on the doorstep—and they are implemented. But what an individual report cannot do is it cannot look at the system and it cannot look at the links between different agencies and the protocols that run and necessarily should run across the whole of Government.That is when we get into the second tier—that is systemic data security design. Not long ago the Government did a project on authenticating individuals. The Government wants to take individual transactions with Government online up from 46 percent to 70 percent. We live in the age of big data. These privacy issues are going to become more and more and more important.And then we get to the third tier which is deliberate use of private data. That happens every day admittedly. Internet service providers website hosting companies and everybody else seem to have systems where they harvest data about their users and then onsell it to third parties or use it to target their own activities. We need to make sure that the Government’s protocols around all three layers are tight. That is why we need this commission of inquiry. That is why we need this bill.Hon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura): Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this bill. I have a level of support really for some of the areas that Ms Curran has spoken about. I was actually quite pleased to hear Mr Cunliffe speak about the concerns about people’s private information in the commercial sphere and everywhere else because having been the victim of someone who decided to hack into someone else’s private information and then make money off it by providing it to that well-known receiver of stolen information Nicky Hager—who masquerades as a journalist but is basically a hack who takes money off people who are stupid enough to buy his books—let me just say that I agree with quite a lot of what has been said so far.I expect members on that side of the House who are suddenly all worried about people’s personal information to tell us about what they were doing visiting that other well-known hacker Kim Dotcom and what they were doing masquerading around with that Nicky Hager and using his book and stolen information to try to beat down the Government. All of a sudden I hear a lot of noise coming from the Opposition members who clearly do not like the truth. They like to stand up in the House and pontificate about private information but by golly they do not like it when we tell them the truth about their filthy little friend Nicky Hager and their big mate Kim Dotcom—someone who I hope one day will quickly be extradited. He can have his day in court which he apparently wants to have. Would that not be great?Let us have a real serious talk about Government information—Hon David Cunliffe: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The Standing Orders provide that it is improper for a member to draw other members into disrepute. I seek your advice. Is it proper for a member to draw themselves into disrepute?The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): No look that is not a point of order. The member is quite within her rights to express the way that she feels.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Well for goodness’ sake! Why is that man no longer the leader of the Labour Party? Why is he not? Oh that is right he took it to the worst defeat it has ever had since 1906. But hey whatever—he tried he was there he did not conquer. There you go—whatever.Now let us get back to it. Why is it that we have these privacy breaches in the Government sphere? Basically because we have much more data. Secondly there always were privacy breaches. People used to have hard-copy files. People would trawl through them. They would have a look at things. Nowadays fortunately if they do that in an electronic file they can get found out.Now with a click of a button with a click of the mouse we can send information all the way around the place. It is easy to make mistakes. Is that OK? No it is not. We already have the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. We already have the Privacy Commissioner. We already have reports on it.Clare Curran: Where’s the new privacy laws?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Ms Curran has quite rightly said in reference an excellent comment I made last year around introducing a bill around this—it was an excellent comment I would have to say if I may say so myself—and I am sure it is progressing. But it takes a lot of work to get that sort of bill into the House because it is extremely complicated.I think that is one of the things where we now do not accept that it is OK—oh except apparently in the political sense; if you are going through other people’s information and you are on the left it suits you—to actually go through people’s private information and use it. But many of us have worked this out. We use online banking. Many of our communications are online.Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi: Passports are online.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: There are passports online. We have to have confidence in our system and that is why I think it was a really good thing to have the Government Chief Information Officer so that we could actually get all the systems working together.There is this balance between giving people the right to be able to access things online and to work online with the Government and Government agencies and at the same time putting in place measures to protect their privacy. The two are actually quite competing. We have got techie people who are there to try to make it all happen and to make it happen fast and then we have got people like lawyers and others who are saying: “Hang on you’ve got to be careful.” So that is the balance. That is why we need somebody who looks after it. That is why I am very confident that we have measures in place to improve the system. I am sure that when there is a new bill on the Privacy Act we will all be happy to support it.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): It is good to speak in favour of this bill. I would like to acknowledge Clare Curran for her efforts on behalf of us all actually because it is actually really important that we all have a level of protection that currently does not exist. There is this sorry list of privacy breaches in the State sector that need to be rectified. We are in a brave new world but it is not very brave or satisfactory for many people whose privacy details have been exposed through a number of debacles and breaches. In fact when the last speaker Judith Collins was speaking about nasty little hackers I thought she was talking about Cameron Slater who does actually fulfil that criterion of being quite an unpleasant person in the way he talks about other people. I am going to defend the right of people to talk about important issues. I do think that Nicky Hager is a citizen who brings issues into the light which is quite different from exposing privacy. We actually need to know what is going on in our country. We need journalists who can do that. We also need protection and that is why this bill is important. The vulnerable who are in a relationship with the State with the private details of their own very personal—sometimes—circumstances need protection.The Electronic Data Safety Bill establishes a special commission of inquiry and it was inspired by the Ministry of Social Development kiosk privacy breach. I think we were all pretty horrified at the ease with which Keith Ng was able to access this through a very simple system basically through an open file. I have some sympathy for people working in Government departments who make mistakes with technology. I am sure that if I worked there I would be one of those people. But what we need is rigorous oversight and excellent modern systems and we need to have a commission such as is suggested here to really set up a decent framework so that this cannot keep happening to ordinary people. I am speaking here not as an expert on this technology who is definitely Gareth Hughes and not myself; I am speaking here as the human rights spokesperson because actually the human rights of citizens who are engaging with departments such as the Ministry of Social Development Work and Income and ACC really need to know that when they sit in a room and tell someone a story about themselves and give their very personal and sometimes extremely traumatising details to that person—whether it is at Work and Income or ACC—those details will actually stay private. Those very personal traumatic stories that people find it hard enough to tell in order to get some support that the State should actually support them with—if they then become part of the public domain it is very very scary.What was scary about what happened with the Ministry of Social Development was that it had an utterly inadequate process in place. It was not protecting the confidential details. The full names of children for example in the high and complex needs programme were exposed and I do not see how that is beneficial to those children let alone the rest of us. There was a list exposed of everyone who owed the ministry money which is pretty extraordinary because it is so easy to make assumptions about this kind of stuff without knowing the background and there were addresses for their family homes in care protection facilities for the Child Youth and Family Services homes. That is the kind of information that in the wrong hands is really damaging. Also although there was an independent investigation by Deloitte and it found some pretty serious things that was not really sufficient. It was damning about governance and it showed that security was not being consistently considered.The investigation also showed that some more investigation was needed and that privacy breaches were pervasive across Government departments. Which Government departments you might ask? Well I have mentioned the Ministry of Social Development and ACC. In respect of ACC in particular 6500 client details were able to be accessed and those are people who have been victims of not just accidents at work in the conventional sense but sexual violence—people who have experienced extremely traumatic experiences. Novopay was also another one. Teachers’ details were available to previous employers and to other schools. There is a proper process for that; it is called the Teachers Council. But this was actually through insufficient internet care insufficient protection. And then of course there was Work and Income. To add to that there was the Earthquake Commission. There were breaches exposing thousands of client details. In the Ministry for the Environment it was 150 clients’ private email addresses. I could go on and on but the Assistant Speaker is indicating that I should not. We support this bill because this stuff is rife it is rampant it is not OK and we need to do something about it. So we support Clare Curran’s efforts.KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National): Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the first reading of the Electronic Data Safety Bill in the name of Clare Curran. First of all I would like to clarify that the National Party will not be supporting this bill. The second thing that I would like to emphasise is what the Hon David Cunliffe mentioned as an example: that during the Labour period there were 13 breaches; during National’s period there have been 86 breaches.Hon David Cunliffe: Just in the last year.KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI: Yes yes. So here I would like to give an example. When I became a member of Parliament in 2008 we used to do everything on paper in the select committees. We did not have anything electronic; everything was done on paper. Today everything is online which means there is an increase in the data and in electronic transactions in Parliament itself. I am not trying to justify that even a single breach is acceptable but I am telling you that there is an increase in the data that is happening right now. Technology is changing and so much is happening.Coming back to what this Government wants to do and what it has done in the past 6 years we have time and again stated our commitment towards providing better public services. Furthermore we have taken dramatic steps towards providing an online platform for the delivery of many Government services such as electronic passport applications. Here I would especially like to mention the Hon Chris Tremain who was the architect of getting passports online and introducing RealMe. It is very important that we follow the technology. Of course when we want to provide ease of services to New Zealanders we want to also ensure that the private and personal information of those using these services is protected and that the general public has got confidence while using these services.The Government has already accepted that there have been many lapses but there have been remedies that have been put in place. We have also moved swiftly towards ensuring that any further lapses do not take place. The need to set up a royal commission of inquiry which will cost taxpayers between $4.5 million and $11 million appears to be very futile. I think New Zealanders will appreciate that if this kind of money was invested in providing front-line services at our schools and hospitals or building infrastructure it would be a better utilisation of money than setting up an inquiry. There are other reviews that are being used or can be used in case of lapses if required.I think history will tell us that the royal commission has been used only when a situation has been so unusual that no other approach will work. The Ministry of Social Development contracted Deloitte one of the big four auditing firms in the world to study the privacy breaches in its information security system management. ACC contracted KPMG another one of the big four auditing firms in the world to look into its information systems. I think both these reviews would have served the purpose far better than a review of agencies’ IT systems. Furthermore it is highly likely that the royal commission may end up asking for the IT system to be reviewed and for necessary measures taken to ensure that such mistakes are not repeated. Basically what the member wants to achieve in multiple areas can be achieved by taking this straightforward approach. With these words I once again confirm that the National Party will not be supporting this bill.TRACEY MARTIN (Deputy Leader—NZ First): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. New Zealand First had a very strong discussion in caucus about this particular bill. Originally it was the cost of the inquiry that concerned us and whether we felt it was necessary because we already knew that there were some reviews going on. So there were some reviews in the systems and the National Party members continued to repeat that that was adequate. What is unfortunate is that after those reviews more breaches happened so New Zealand First has decided that it will be supporting this bill. We would like to see it go to a select committee.There has been a very interesting series of contributions by National Party members to date. The contribution from Melissa Lee and the contribution from the member Kanwaljit Singh Bakshiwho has just resumed his seat both made it sound like we have moved into a digital world so therefore it is too bad you are just going to have to accept being hacked. That is really interesting because Melissa Lee said—and she repeated it again and again if you look at her contribution—that if somebody wants to attack you they are going to attack you they are going to steal your information. This bill is not actually necessarily all about people being attacked.Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi: This is for the royal commission.TRACEY MARTIN: Mr Bakshi just said the same thing. Apparently he has forgotten because he is repeating himself now. This bill is not necessarily about being hacked. This bill did not come out of somebody hacking information; this bill came out of Government departments dropping it—dropping it—and accidentally sending it to other people. This bill is not about each individual Government department.The members on the other side like to use the phrase and they have used it in this House today—here we go; I had better get it right—“a whole-of-Government approach”. They like to use the phrase “a whole-of-Government approach” and that is exactly what Ms Curran is suggesting in this bill. That is exactly what the purpose is. If you have a look at the last sentence of the explanatory note of the bill it says: “The Commission will also examine the agencies’ capacity to respond to breaches in the future and how best to prevent further future unauthorised access to private information.” but it is across Government departments. It is about the point of weakness. That is what we see that actually needs to be addressed here. That is what is different from Deloitte and KPMG. It is not about a single department; it is about this point of transference between departments.Since these reviews were done this Government has actually put through several pieces of legislation in the last 3 years—2012 2013 and 2014. One of them has actually been a mass collection of data of every school-leaver in this country—every school-leaver in this country. I am referring to the Social Security Amendment Bill. Every 16 17 and 18-year-old New Zealander now has under their National Student Number all their academic data sent to the Ministry of Social Development. The Ministry of Social Development then outsources this data about these young people’s academic outcomes to contracted people in certain areas around New Zealand and a risk analysis is done on every single one of those young people. How likely are they to become a beneficiary? What are their parental circumstances? Are they the child of a parent who is on a benefit? This data is all done. It has all been brought into play through the Social Security Amendment Bill and that data is now held like it has never been held before by this Government.All that Ms Curran and this bill are suggesting is that it is actually worth $4.5 million to the New Zealand public to do a commission of inquiry to have a look at the weak points of transference around this data and others because we have seen data leak out from this Government and its departments. Surely if ever there was a saying “A stitch in time saves nine” is one of them. If we keep having to employ KPMG and if we keep having to employ Deloitte to go and look at breaches when they happen for each individual department how much will that add up to? Instead of investing $4.5 million let us get the systems right across Parliament because the cloud is a reality. We know that it is here. Let us look at it in its reality and make sure the New Zealand public believes that it is safe. We urge the Government to just vote the bill through to the select committee.SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): National does not support this bill the Electronic Data Safety Bill and neither do I. To pick up on one of the points that Tracey Martin raised she said that doing this $4.5 million inquiry would save money. Well I have seen enough inquiries over the years in different contexts. The inquiry itself I am afraid Ms Martin will eventually say: “Actually what we need to do is bring in a whole range of other experts to continue engaging with the Government.” so I do not think this is a cost saver. I think it is really good to bring you into it really—Tracey Martin: Why do you hate talking to people Mr O’Connor?SIMON O’CONNOR: What do you mean? I love it. I have spent most of my life talking to people and it is a fantastic thing.You know the people of Tāmaki are not clamouring for this bill. It would be remiss of me as a constituent MP—Tracey Martin: How do you know?SIMON O’CONNOR: Because actually I spend an inordinate amount of time with the good people of Tāmaki which is perhaps one of the reasons it has one of the highest majorities in the country. When I look across the House you do have to wonder—Jami-Lee Ross: What’s Tracey Martin’s majority?SIMON O’CONNOR: Exactly—you have to look at the number of National MPs here. The good thing is that none of that has to be leaked or broken.I do want to acknowledge Clare Curran—[Interruption]The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order!SIMON O’CONNOR: We clearly have got a data safety issue carrying on here between two members. I do want to acknowledge Clare Curran in responding to this. A member’s bill is an important thing in identifying what is an important issue. I think we on this side do see the importance of privacy which we see as wanting to protect New Zealand’s data and I think we as a Government and through the various departments take data safety very very seriously. I know that in my time working in various Government departments I was very cognisant that this is people’s lives expressed in information and this Government as I say is taking it very seriously. It was noted by an earlier speaker that there has been an increase in reported breaches. In fact that shows the increased vigilance of the Government. We are working jolly hard.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.SIMON O’CONNOR: It would be remiss of me I know—Tracey Martin: Oh no.SIMON O’CONNOR: And Tracey Martin in particular is looking forward to this continued contribution of convivial elegance I am sure.As we were finishing before the dinner break I was stressing that the National Party is very keen on privacy. I think there is actually a very good story to tell here first and foremost over vigilance. I think that is indicated by the Government noting where there are breaches. I think one of the things about privacy is that we do not live in a utopian world. There are always going to be for better or worse privacy breaches in the public or private sector. It is not something we want. It is not something that is desired. If you were the particular person who has been affected you would not be terribly pleased but the nature of communications is that you have always got to leave a door open in order to allow that information to flow. We have heard from other colleagues such as the Hon Judith Collins earlier and I know that the other side know of their own situations where they have sent emails to the wrong people. But if you are going to have communication then a door as I say has to be open and there is always the chance for problems so it is about mitigating that.I think ultimately at the heart of why this side of the House is not keen to progress this particular bill is that an inquiry a discussion a committee or a looking into things is actually not going to cut the mustard. A big chunk of that is because the Government already is working in this space. We have a cyber-security plan for Government information and assets. We know that Government agencies are always already working together. We have appointed a Government Chief Information Officer. I think that is something we have learnt from other countries and have very happily appointed. This person is strongly identifying the issues and making the changes that are needed. I know that one colleague across the House talked about this whole-of-Government approach and how strange this is. Well actually the National Government knows there is strength in pulling together and by having all the departments talking in relation to the Government Chief Information Officer—Tracey Martin: That’s not what I said. I said the exact opposite.SIMON O’CONNOR: I hear someone across the House has presumed that I might have been referring to her. We are working in this space. No breach is acceptable but we also understand that breaches will happen. They are opportunities for this Government the Government Chief Information Officer and the agencies to make their systems more robust. I am very confident as I have thought about this bill and the speech tonight that we are putting the right systems in place and we continue to put the right systems in place. We are a Government that reacts accordingly and to the needs of what we hear. And if I may finish on that—oh no I have been given the signal. On that I shall finish and I am very grateful that my speech was not electronically leaked beforehand.JAN LOGIE (Green): I am pleased to rise and take a call on the first reading of the Electronic Data Safety Bill which has been presented to the House by Labour MP Clare Curran. The Greens are supporting this bill which is a response to continued very serious privacy breaches within the Ministry of Social Development and other Government departments. We have seen breaches over the last few years in ACC Novopay Work and Income the Earthquake Commission the Ministry for the Environment the Ministry of Education and Immigration New Zealand—the breaches go on. We have had breaches from within Government departments and breaches from the very leadership—the Ministers of those departments the Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Justice two critical ministerial positions when it comes to considering privacy.Really this bill we believe speaks to the issue of trust and the ability of New Zealanders to trust that this Government will solve those problems of privacy when the leadership it has shown has run so counter to the principles of privacy. It is clear this is a deeply serious issue that needs a serious solution. It is concerning to hear Ministers of the Government say that there is no need for this bill because everything has been sorted. They speak as if this is such a thing of the distant past when the last major breach—in fact of 600 ACC clients’ data—occurred just this year in January. This is not an issue of the distant past. The Green Party takes privacy seriously. One of our members Gareth Hughes has a member’s bill on internet rights and freedoms which will ensure the right to privacy online a right that currently is not legally protected within New Zealand law.I would like to speak this evening briefly a little more on this special need for a commission of inquiry into the Ministry of Social Development privacy breaches and most important the need for an independent inquiry with official status to look at systemic issues within the Ministry of Social Development because at the end of last year the Office of the Auditor-General released a report on complaints within the Ministry of Social Development. Within this report it found that there was significant room for improvement in the processing and recording of complaints and it expressed concern about the lack of ministry-wide analysis of complaints to identify systemic problems which goes to the very heart of this bill because if we cannot trust the ministry to identify complaints in relation to privacy and put systemic responses in place then we need an independent inquiry. This is clearly telling us that we cannot have that trust because those systems are not in place.We have been hearing this concern from advocates and lawyers for quite a while on a much wider level. Again it speaks to our ability to trust. Recently Frances Joychild QC also raised the issue of the lack of power and legal support for beneficiaries experiencing problems in the system. She has written a very very powerful article on this and the need for us to actually start turning round what has become a drastic imbalance of power. Again it speaks to our ability to trust and the need and importance for this bill. We have seen examples of legal rulings happening in courts against the Ministry of Social Development where it has not even after a ruling against it put systems in place to ensure a policy change. We cannot have any trust in this ministry at the moment when it refuses to put the systems in place to turn it round even with court rulings against it. We need privacy reporting to be public. We need an inquiry. Just recently we have heard of cases—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Electronic data is what we are debating.JAN LOGIE: It is absolutely about electronic data in relation to the Ministry of Social Development and privacy which is what this bill is about. We have had somebody contact us where they have been to the Privacy Commissioner they had had a ruling in their favour but that was a confidential ruling and they have evidence that no systems change or policy change has been put in place as a result of that ruling. We have no systemic ability to respond to breaches at the moment. Because of that lack of ability to trust in the system we need this independent inquiry. The Greens fully support this bill because it answers the public’s lack of trust.MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): I am rising to speak on the Electronic Data Safety Bill. Can I first say that I think electronic data protection is important it is vital and it is paramount in the 21st century. Although I am not on the Commerce Committee I am on the Social Services Committee so patient data and records and their stories and the protection of that data is paramount as well. It is an area that I am extremely interested in. I was very interested to read about the key driver to this bill in the general policy statement the hacking of 7000 documents from the Ministry of Social Development computer network through Work and Income self-service kiosks. This included medical records personal data and pay rates.I think electronic data protection is important because we are using information technology a lot more these days. Some of us are buying our groceries online some of us are reading books online and I have heard of some people finding love online. I am very much proud of our Government which is committing to essential infrastructure and information technology around our ultra-fast broadband and our Rural Broadband Initiative. This essential infrastructure is valued by all constituents in my electorate of Waimakariri a rural electorate. You very much need essential infrastructure for a strong economy and for the well-being of our people.Data management and protection are vital. I think back to the stories I read post-earthquake when there were a lot of health care systems and IT systems that had crashed so patients were presenting to health care services they had not been to before and health care professionals were making treatment decisions that were not based on the data they would normally have if their health IT system had been up and running. So it is great to hear about the innovation now of sharing vital primary secondary and allied health information but that will come at a risk when you share information across boundaries across sectors and across organisations.I do not believe that a commission of inquiry with an expense of about $4 million to $10 million is the way forward. I also think a commission of inquiry should be for an unusual situation; it should not be used for business as usual. We do have precedent and we do have benchmarking from other reviews into privacy breaches and information management security. These are the Ministry of Social Development contracting Deloitte and ACC contracting KPMG.What we do know is that across the government IT work is under way to address electronic data protection issues. We have a cyber-security plan for Government information and assets and agencies are already systematically working towards addressing some of these issues. I know from my own career working in health—specifically mental health—and setting out new health care services that you do need to think along the whole system and along the whole continuum around data protection not only in terms of simple things like passwords for tablets phones and PCs but right up to risk management strategies and looking at issues around risk assessments in plans. We know from our own experience in this precinct of using our swipe cards and levels of accessibility are paramount to that data as well. We know in health and social services that as there are bigger multi-agencies working now we need to understand how much our patients are consenting to their data being shared and ensuring their data is protected as it goes across sectors and organisations.To conclude we have a Government Chief Information Officer who is working to address data security and has been asked by the head of State services to look into data security. We have a Privacy Commissioner. This is why I do not support this bill. Thank you.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I call Clare Curran—5 minutes in reply.CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Can I lament the lackadaisical ill-informed shallow response from the Government members on this bill. I could have used stronger words but can I lament and say and predict that they will rue the day they made them given the very strong likelihood of further significant data breaches and mismanagement of IT projects going forward and how important this is. Really this bill was quite simple. It created a mechanism that would have been an arm’s-length approach to a really important and significant issue. It really would not have cost very much to provide more confidence surety and trust across New Zealand across our public sector and across Parliament around IT issues which I would have thought was an important matter in 2015 in the current environment. I mean the New Zealand Parliament cannot even get its own IT right and has no resilience in its system. This is largely as a result of a systemic underfunded approach. If you look at that as a microcosm of what is happening across the public sector generally you would think that we would be treating this with a bit more seriousness.I want in my closing remarks not to focus on the puerile responses from across the House but actually to just point to some real life examples and some ones that are happening right now and are of real seriousness and significance. I am pleased to see that the Attorney-General is sitting in the House. He might be actually listening to some of these.Last year there was a project undertaken around the number of computers across Government agencies—whether they are departments or agencies including health boards—that still had a software programme on them that had run out of date and was no longer being supported. The programme was called Windows XP. I undertook that project because it had been pointed out to me by a number of significant people in the tech industry how important it was for the public sector to not have holes in its IT programmes and be unsupported. I did that and eventually I discovered after a lot of effort that there were more than 40000 computers still on Windows XP and that the cost was well in excess of $1 million for extended support from Microsoft and some of them were not actually being supported. The risk that poses to New Zealand and our public sector—and this is just one example—is quite significant. There are exponential risks beyond that currently operating right now in our public sector including a number of public-facing computer systems that people go and use every day that have great big gaping holes in them—great big gaping holes. This will come to light. I have warned the Government. I have asked questions of the Minister of Internal Affairs today about it—deny deny deny. He said there was no issue.A special commission of inquiry into this would have created a responsible arm’s length approach. It has the support of most of Parliament; it should have the support of the whole of Parliament. It is not a big deal—$4 million versus $45 million to fix Novopay and $130 million of extra spending on the Inland Revenue Department system. This is shameful it is wrong and it is irresponsible. It is just frankly irresponsible for the Government not to take this approach when we cannot even get our own IT right in our offices in our own Parliament. There is no resilience. There is no back-up system. Why can we not do it across the Government and take a proper approach to this? Not supporting this bill is just quite frankly irresponsible.A party vote was called for on the question That the Electronic Data Safety Bill be now read a first time.Ayes 59New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 11; Māori Party 2.Noes 61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Motion not agreed to.Education (Food in Schools) Amendment BillFirst ReadingDAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): I move That the Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Science Committee to consider this bill.This bill came about some time ago—a couple of years ago actually—when I was visiting a number of schools. The schools that I visited had children there who had come to school without food and certainly were not doing as well as they could have done. As a result of that we drafted this bill put it in the ballot and it was drawn out—unexpectedly of course because nobody expects their bill to necessarily be drawn out. I took this bill and re-approached the schools to find out what was happening. I visited a number of schools hospitals health practitioners and many others. As a result of those visits I believe that I did not get it right and as a result of that I believe that this bill needs to be substantially changed. But what I do believe is that it needs to go to the select committee because the lessons we can learn from this bill are ones that have a profound impact on New Zealand.I want to mention two of the schools that I visited that made me rethink what I believed was the right thing to do which was to introduce food in schools. Yendarra School is a decile 1a school in Ōtara. In a sense it comes from the poorest area anywhere in New Zealand. They rely on Fruit in Schools and are about to receive milk from Fonterra and yet their kids—all of them; all of them—bring a lunch to school. All of them bring a lunch to the school and as a result of that what we are seeing is kids who are healthy bright-eyed and willing to learn. I asked this school: “What is it? What have you done that enables you to ensure that your kids are well fed while the kids down the road are not?”. What the school told me was basically they work with the community. They work with families. They enable those kids to have the food and the sandwiches and whatever they needed to bring to school—to be augmented with some of the fruit and milk as well—and then they have the kids at lunchtime sitting down and the teachers moving around to make sure that their families are actually providing sandwiches. Sometimes they were just Marmite sandwiches but nevertheless they were something the kids were bringing. If they did not the school would help them out on an emergency basis and then go back to the parents and ask what it was that was happening. That was Yendarra—I will come back to that in a minute.The second school that I visited was Ōwairaka District School a decile 2 school in my electorate. This is a school that relies on a programme called Garden to Table which some of you may have heard about. It is an organisation that helps schools grow vegetables and fruit trees in their schools and then helps them not only to garden and learn how to garden but also to make sure that those same vegetables and that same fruit goes into a kitchen. And every week they make something from the food that comes out of their own gardens. What I saw in those schools told me that there is a better way of being able to look at the whole issue of providing food in schools a different way that will provide long-term and sustainable change.I want to say one other thing about both of these schools. Both of these schools banned fizzy drinks from the schools. All of them without exception—and this goes for many other schools that I visited—all of them believed that fizzy drinks are detrimental to their kids’ health along with everything else that the tuck shops often serve up. They believed that nine teaspoons of sugar in a can of Coke were not going to do their kids any good in terms of their health or their concentration. And when they took those drinks out those kids’ concentration improved. The interesting thing about Yendarra in Ōtara is that the public health nurse when she visited it found there were fewer skin infections. The dental health nurse found that there were fewer cavities in the kids’ teeth. The kids were less heavy than comparable kids down the road; in a sense they were less overweight. In effect what was happening was not just about feeding the kids in schools but about teaching them about good nutrition and making them and their families healthier. This is what this bill is really about.I recognise that in some cases of course we are going to have to ensure that children do get fed; otherwise they will get left behind. But I do not want to take parents’ responsibility—which is to ensure that their kids grow up—away from them because that is not what we are trying to do in terms of ensuring and guaranteeing a long-term and sustainable solution to our problems. It is simply fixing the problem today. There is an old Chinese proverb which I am sure everybody has heard about: “Give a person a fish and you will feed them for a day. Teach a person how to fish and they will be able to be self-sufficient for their entire lifetime.” You will be feeding them for their entire lifetime. That is really what I am talking about with this bill.What I would like to see is what I observed before I came into Parliament in many of the aid operations that I was involved in. I remember in particular in Somalia feeding 30000 children under 5 who had to be starving in order to get into our programme. They had to be less than 80 percent weight-for-height than what they should be. Those kids came in and when they came up to 100 percent they were checked out. They were discharged from the programme. The idea is that feeding children in that environment is an emergency situation not a prolonged situation that will guarantee that there will be dependence.So with this bill—what do I want to do with it? It is not like a politician to accept that they have not necessarily got it right but I do not think I got it right with that first bill. What I do want to do is see that this bill goes through to the select committee because I believe that the stories of those schools that I spoke about—Yendarra Ōwairaka and many many more—have something to give to New Zealand as a whole by coming before us and sharing their experiences. I do not want to impose and I do not want to see imposed on schools a diktat from on high saying: “You must do this you must teach nutrition.” or whatever. What I want to see is that these schools and other schools that would like to follow in the same direction have the opportunity to access the resources and the money that will enable them to run programmes like the ones at Yendarra and Ōwairaka and that they apply to perhaps the Ministry of Education to ask how you run a Garden to Table programme—how you connect with the local community so that the local community is about sharing and ensuring that their dietary habits change along with those of the children whom they are sending to the school. Those are the sorts of things that I want to see come up.There are so many benefits that can arise from replicating what we have seen in those two schools and many others around the country and applying them much more widely across the board. Instead we are doing the same things over and over expecting things to change. We have the third-highest obesity rate in the world behind the USA and Mexico. If we do not change the way that we do things it will cost us billions—billions—in taxpayer dollars. We cannot afford to have a society where obese and overweight children grow into unhealthy adults and cost our health system so much in our taxes. I want to see us move away from feeding as an emergency interaction and I want to know that schools can access if they want to a more sustainable self-reliant and healthy programme and that they can have the resources to do it.Food in schools should be the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff but not the remedy to the overall problem. I do not want to see kids being dependent families being dependent on a feeding programme. What I want to see rather than an institutionalised programme of feeding is an institutionalised way of looking beyond that and teaching the long-term lifelong skills that will enable kids not only to be able to be better fed but to have better nutrition and better health for the rest of their lives. Thank you.Dr JIAN YANG (National): I rise to speak briefly on the Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill in its first reading. First of all I acknowledge the honourable member David Shearer who put forward this particular bill. Actually I believe David Shearer is a fine man. I did a search online on Wikipedia—although when I was an academic I did not allow my students to use Wikipedia as a source of reference. I was looking at Wikipedia and David Shearer along with his wife was named the New Zealander of the Year by the New Zealand Herald in 1992 and the following year he was appointed as a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the British New Year honours list. He also did humanitarian work in different parts of the world including Liberia Rwanda Albania Belgrade Israel Lebanon and Iraq. So he has quite extraordinary experience and I believe that he could have been a very good Leader of the Opposition but unfortunately he did not have the support of his caucus. Now we—Carmel Sepuloni: Are you going to talk about the bill? When are you going to talk about the bill?Dr JIAN YANG: Well the reason why I say this is that I appreciate the member’s intention of helping children from poor families.Looking at the main provisions of the bill basically—look at this—it inserts a new part in the Education Act 1989 that provides for the Secretary of Education to designate organisations as “food in school providers” and to set out the basis on which schools are eligible for receiving assistance from food in school providers. Also a designated food in school provider must provide food to students in schools if the school board has requested assistance and the school has been defined as eligible for notice and also if it is a State primary school. The fund is appropriated by Parliament and the food in school providers must be paid a general grant. So these are some of the main provisions.Also the member has stated in the bill’s explanatory note that “There is substantive evidence from New Zealand and around the world that hunger has a significant impact on children’s cognitive development learning and classroom behaviour. … If kids turn up to school not having eaten breakfast without shoes or sick because their house is cold and damp it is obvious they will not get the best start. Addressing this problem is one of the most important actions we can take to lift New Zealand’s educational achievement.”I have to say that it is very hard to disagree. These are good observations but the point is that the Government has been doing all sorts of things to help our kids. We say it is important to help kids from poor families. It is important. I had a look at the KickStart Breakfast programme online and it states that “Schools say Kickstart Breakfast clubs are not only helping children nutritionally but is also making a positive impact on learning behaviour. In-school research shows: literacy and numeracy levels are improving; children are happier have more energy and are able to concentrate longer; children are no longer eating junk food at morning tea; the club provides a great environment for children to socialise together; the older children are taking on responsibility and looking after the younger ones.” So I would say that it is indeed important for us to make sure that our kids have food in school.I also meant to mention my educational background and also my family background. I come from a family of teachers. My parents were teachers—they are now retired—and my parents-in-law are also retired teachers. My younger brother is still working in China as a deputy principal and my sister-in-law is also working in the education sector in China. So very interestingly of course now I have moved to New Zealand and as chair of the Education and Science Committee I would say that education is fundamental to our kids and to our future. I would also mention that I experienced poverty myself. All my family were sent to the countryside in the 1960s as part of a Chinese programme called “Intellectuals Need to be Educated”—or re-educated—“by Peasants”. My parents were sent to the countryside to work as peasants and so I witnessed poverty in China and I also saw numerous poor kids going to school because in those years China was under socialism and everyone was equal but everyone was poor. So for my family it was similar.We would say that it is important and I totally agree with the member David Shearer that it is important but the National Government is already fulfilling the purpose of the bill—that is we have undertaken a number of initiatives to help our kids. I note for example the KickStart Breakfast programme. Fonterra and Sanitarium partnered in February 2009 to provide a free school breakfast of Anchor milk and Weet-Bix to all New Zealand schools. The Government then expanded KickStart Breakfast as part of a programme to better support vulnerable children with an investment of $9.5 million over 5 years. That was in May 2013. So the investment enabled the programme to be extended from 2 days to 5 days a week and it was opened up to all schools from decile 1 to 10. So basically we are saying that not all poor children attend decile 1 and 2 schools. Some poor children also go to higher-decile schools.With the KickStart Breakfast programme extended to schools of every decile it targets more kids in need and more than 95000 nutritious breakfasts are now served each week in the over 730 schools that run their own KickStart Breakfast club. Over 3.4 million breakfasts have been served and we are now reaching more than 28000 children. Also we have our Children’s Action Plan which is a plan that focuses resources on the kids most in need. And we also have KidsCan. The Government is increasing support for KidsCan providing $1.5 million over 3 years in order to provide children with basic necessities like raincoats and shoes. That is why we do not need this legislation to launch a Government-funded programme to support the delivery of food or meals in schools. We are already doing this in partnership with corporate and not-for-profit groups.Budget 2014 also supported our young families. For example we invested almost $500 million more in the well-being of New Zealand’s children and families. Budget 2014 also provided a comprehensive package of practical measures focused on young families and those vulnerable children who most need our care and protection. An example here is that Budget 2014 committed $42 million to increase the parental tax credit from its previous maximum amount of $150 a week to $220 a week and also from 1 April 2015 it increases the period for which the tax credit is paid from 8 weeks to 10 weeks following the birth of a child. Also free doctors visits and prescriptions for children aged under 6 will be extended to children aged under 13 from July 2015—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am sorry to interrupt the member but his time has expired.CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): It is a great pleasure to rise in support of the bill that David Shearer has put forward. I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the member who has just spoken before me Jian Yang who has demonstrated very clearly one of the perils of not listening to the contribution of the member speaking before him and simply relying on the notes provided by the party research unit rather than actually engaging properly in the debate. Had he listened to what David Shearer had contributed in his first reading speech he would have heard him acknowledge that the solution proposed in this bill might not be the right one but by putting the bill before a select committee there would be an opportunity to canvass the issues properly to get submissions from the public to look at what is happening now and what is working and to look at how things might be improved. I think that is an absolutely commendable approach to take.This bill of course had its genesis some years ago and I recall the speech that David Shearer made talking about children in schools going to school hungry and not being ready to learn. That is how this bill came about. Since then there has been a lot of debate about the best way to tackle that problem and I think that the contribution David Shearer made in the very beginning where he talked about the importance of some of the healthy eating and healthy action programmes that are already happening in schools was very very pertinent to the debate and very important. I know for example in my own electorate that there are some fantastic programmes happening in local primary schools early childhood centres and secondary schools as well.Just to give one example Fraser Crescent School in my electorate has a large council reserve at its back door the Clyma Park which was not particularly well used. They have now established a community garden within Clyma Park and the people working in that garden work very closely with the primary school. The kids are involved in the community garden. They have got an orchard planted they do their own compost they harvest rainwater and they grow vegetables. It is a fantastic learning experience for the kids and it involves members of the wider community as well. Those are the sorts of programmes that I think we should be looking at as examples of what can be achieved.I grew up in a family where we had one of the old quarter-acre sections in the Hutt Valley which are fast disappearing now as they are subdivided. My parents had a vegetable garden. I learned at a young age what growing vegetables is all about and how to do it. Many many kids today do not get that opportunity. Many come from families with two working parents and I was fortunate when I was a young kid to have one of my parents not working full-time—well working at home—but if you look at the nature of how we live now like I said those sections are disappearing. The room for vegetable gardens is disappearing as sections are subdivided and people are living in much higher density housing. Schools can do something about that. Schools often have the land and councils in partnership with local authorities have access to the land and can do some pretty amazing things. I think that this is an opportunity for us to really look at some of those issues and how we could better facilitate that happening all around the country.What I am not willing to do is come along to Parliament and say that I am going to turn a blind eye to the fact that kids are coming to school hungry because they are coming to school hungry and we should do something about that. Do I believe that Government intervention is the sole answer? No of course I do not. It is a very complex problem and it is going to require a number of things to address it but doing nothing is not an option. This bill that has been put forward by David Shearer provides us with an opportunity to do something. It provides us with an opportunity to talk about the various alternatives and the various options that are available to us.Meka Whaitiri: It does not have a predetermined outcome.CHRIS HIPKINS: It does not have a predetermined outcome as Meka Whaitiri has pointed out. This is an opportunity for us to look at a whole variety of options and potential outcomes. It is incredibly disappointing that the Government members are voting against the bill because it is an opportunity to develop a robust policy and a good policy that will gain cross-party support and community support which people can buy into to address what is a very real problem in our schools—kids coming to school with either the wrong food or with no food. Actually some of the kids coming to school with the wrong food are just as much of a problem. If you talk to the teachers who have got a classroom full of kids who have just been dosed up on fizzy drinks and sugar they will tell you that that is just as hard to manage as a classroom full of hungry kids. So we have got to get real about this problem. We have an obesity problem in New Zealand; we have got a hungry kids problem in New Zealand. We could do something about that. This bill if progressed to select committee provides an opportunity for us to have that debate and to have a constructive discussion. I have absolutely no hesitation in saying that the Labour Party will be fully supporting it.Hon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura): I have been listening very carefully to the debate tonight and I note that the member who has just resumed his seat Chris Hipkins gave a very passionate speech about it. He acknowledged that the Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill did not solve the issues but that it would lead if it went to select committee to a lot of talking about it. I may be paraphrasing him there but that is exactly what he sort of said.I think everybody in this House would agree that the situation of young children going to school without breakfast and being hungry until lunchtime or even until they go home again is a very sorry thing to happen in this country—this land of plenty God’s own country. I was very interested to hear Dr Jian Yang and his speech that referenced his own growing up and his parents’ growing up and what they went through. I would also say that in my electorate in Papakura we have breakfast clubs—and that is generally how they are referred to—in some of our schools particularly in some of the lower-decile schools. I have quite a few schools in my electorate that are decile 1 and decile 2. We have some of the poorest people in the country in my electorate. We also by the way have some of the wealthiest. So there is a huge disparity. I would also say that not all children who go to high-decile schools are wealthy children or from wealthy families. There are some children who come to our decile 10 schools our decile 8 schools—in fact I am going to see one on Friday with exactly this situation—who come from homes that are at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum and they often suffer.I do not believe for a moment that because a family does not have a lot of money they cannot put two pieces of bread in the toaster and some margarine or butteror whatever and jam or something on the toast for their child. But we know that sometimes both parents are working sometimes there is only one parent who is generally home anyway with the child—maybe it is a sole-parent family—and that parent may be out working and not able to see the child off to school. We also know that some people simply do not make this a priority for their children. I do not think that they necessarily do not care about their children but actually there are quite a few people in our country who do not understand the benefit of a child having breakfast before they go to school because they did not have it when they were growing up and their parents probably did not have it when they were growing up and they just do not understand it.But what we do see in my electorate are quite a few breakfast clubs for the children who come along and as some of my school principals have said to me some of the kids coming into those breakfast clubs do not actually need to come in. There are many children who do need to and it is great that we have got them but in some schools they encourage lots of kids to come because it actually takes away the stigma for the child. It also actually builds a sense of community for the child to come to school and they have got something to do straight away and it is a really fun activity; it is not sitting down listening to someone else telling them what to do—it is actually a fun thing. The KickStart Breakfast programme that we have got is available to any school that wants it and I think that is better than just trying to target particular schools. I think we had to start off targeting particular schools because of the numbers of schools that we had to deal with in quite a short period of time. I would also say that the KickStart Breakfast programme is a real opportunity for some very successful companies like Sanitarium and Fonterra which have by the way benefited for many years from New Zealand and being part of New Zealand. We support them obviously in all the things that we are seen to do as New Zealanders and these companies have an opportunity—and they do—to help to contribute back to the very people who by the way have helped to make their fortunes. That is what I think is a really great thing.One of the problems of having yet another committee look at something is that in the meantime these children need breakfast. You cannot wait a year and wonder why they have not got a breakfast. It does not work like that. We have already got the KickStart Breakfast programme. It is really feeding children right across the spectrum and it is also a great way for kids to start the day. I would like to see that continue and so the issue that Mr Shearer brought to the table is an issue that is being redressed. It is not actually for every child but it is being redressed and the opportunity is there for every school no matter what their decile to take this up for their children. I think that is a challenge for every school to do so.MOJO MATHERS (Green): It goes without saying that we support this bill’s referral to the select committee. Obviously an issue very close to our heart is ensuring that hungry kids at school get fed. I was quite relieved to see Mr Shearer say that he is reconsidering the mechanism as it is not the best proposed mechanism because that was our concern too. The bill proposed to essentially provide food rather than empower a school directly to come up with a solution that best suits their needs and the needs of the children and the community setting they are in. So we very much share that concern about the actual mechanism. But the intent of the bill which is to ensure that kids at school do not go hungry is one that we absolutely support. We have raised earlier today many reasons why it is so important to ensure that hungry kids are fed.I am going to repeat some of those reasons tonight because it was rather frustrating—when earlier today Metiria Turei’s Education (Breakfast and Lunch Programmes in Schools) Amendment Bill the “Feed the Kids Bill” was debated—to see the extent of the denial of the extent of the problem we have in New Zealand around the sheer numbers of students who are in poverty experiencing real material poverty and the numbers of students who are going hungry to school or are doing without lunch at school. If those members are not in denial then they are blaming the parents for it by continually banging on about parental responsibility. I feel very uncomfortable when we go on about parental responsibility because it has overtones of Victorian England for me. The reality is that in New Zealand poverty has doubled in the last 25 years and the highest levels are amongst children with more than 200000 living in poverty. Yes we know that poverty will not go away without significant changes in employment in the minimum wage in housing and in all the supports for families in need but all of those things take time to implement and children are going hungry right now. We can do something about that.Feeding kids at school is a common low-cost option that will directly make a big difference for these children. I just want to say here that I was very fortunate to have spent my childhood in a small rural school in Wales where we ate two-course hot school lunches on-site. The school had three staff: two teachers and one cook an amazing cook who created incredible meals from scratch often following local traditional recipes such as cawl which was a local recipe that used root vegetables and lamb. It was a recipe I absolutely loved. I always had a second helping. So needless to say no kids went hungry at the school I went to. Since we had a long walk home after school several miles across the countryside it was really good to be able to do that and be well-fed before we got home.Food in schools in my view is an absolute no-brainer. It is affordable. It is something we can do right now and we know it will help the kids especially the kids who need it the most. Nearly every country in the OECD apart from us already runs an extensive programme to feed kids at school and some countries like Finland and Sweden provide fully State - funded meals to every school student as part of a wider framework of child well-being. It is no coincidence that those countries regularly top the international surveys in child health and educational achievement. They do this because all the evidence from teachers from nurses and from doctors is that kids need a good meal every day to develop into healthy well-educated adults.This bill is about evidence-based policy decision-making. This is not about what you see in one school or another school. This takes a broad comprehensive evidence-based policy approach and we absolutely need this bill to go to the select committee and continue that conversation.PAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): I rise to speak in this first reading debate of the Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill. I absolutely sympathise with the intention of the member David Shearer in bringing this bill before the House. As a former teacher he has spoken about the impacts that going to school hungry can have on the pedagogical outcomes we would seek to have delivered in our New Zealand schools. I do not think there is any debate over that as a matter of fact. I did listen very carefully to some of the previous contributions and we had one from a member of the Opposition about what things were like when he was growing up. I thought I would share a similar story since we have heard this already during this debate.I cannot claim to have had any particular hardship at all in my upbringing. I was fortunate enough to grow up on a farm north of Auckland where we always had sufficient food partially because we grew a lot of produce—fruit and vegetables as well as the meat and the milk that came off the land. But throughout my time at school I really did see the full gamut of the New Zealand educational system from a decile 10 small rural primary school Otaika Primary School through to a school that was actually referenced earlier in question time today by Metiria Turei Manaia View School except when I was there it was known as Raumanga Intermediate a decile 1 school and definitely one of the most challenging for the teachers and one of the poorest schools in New Zealand hence the decile 1 rating. Then I went to Whangarei Boys’ High School a decile 5 State school.I think it is absolutely something we would all agree on—that children going to school hungry is an issue that needs to be addressed and that is why this Government has put in a significant effort and funding to the tune of $9.5 million to set up the KickStart programme to provide breakfasts in schools. This programme has provided 3.4 million breakfasts and actually more—100000 or so—every week reaching 26000 children on a weekly basis. But if I think back to my time at Raumanga Intermediate and think of the parents some of whom were in pretty tough economic conditions I remember that they managed to send their children to school with a decent breakfast. It may not have been anything particularly flash. It might have been something along the lines of what is delivered under the KickStart programme—a couple of Weet-Bix served up with milk or perhaps a couple of pieces of toast and some Marmite—but it was a nutritious breakfast so that kids had a full tummy and could get on with the day’s learning. I think this is something this Government would want to see happen but we do not want to take away from the responsibility of parents to make sure that their children are turning up to school nutritionally able to undertake a day’s learning.There are other complexities and challenges that this legislation would introduce. By making it a responsibility of the State rather than allowing schools to access the programme that is a partnership between Sanitarium and Fonterra alongside community involvement in running a breakfast club we face a huge issue with the management of schools including capital issues in schools around setting up kitchens and spaces to prepare food when the vast majority of parents as we know are perfectly able and capable of making sure their children take a packed lunch to school or potentially have access to the school tuck shop.Also the funding appropriated by Parliament for education is for that purpose and I would wonder operationally how this would fit. I do not know—perhaps the member who has backed this bill has another opportunity to tell us more about how this fits in. We are talking about effectively the provision of a social service via schools so I would actually be interested to hear more about that. But because of the complexities that we have identified plus also the lack of necessity given we already have the KickStart Breakfast programme I personally will not be supporting this bill any further. Thank you.TRACEY MARTIN (Deputy Leader—NZ First): First of all can I just make it very very clear: if the Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill fails to go to select committee it will be because of one person and one person alone and that will be Mr David Seymour. So I ask Mr David Seymour to contact the Government whip and tell him that he is changing his vote and that he will support this bill to select committee and I will tell you why. It is because if the National Party members instead of deciding that this is about feeding hungry children with free lunches had listened to Mr Shearer when he spoke at the beginning they would know that this bill is actually about delivering the New Zealand curriculum. It is about delivering the science curriculum Mr Bell. It is about delivering the living world strand of the science curriculum through growing vegetables. It is about delivering the material world science curriculum inside the New Zealand curriculum which is the chemistry curriculum through the cooking and the preparation of food. It is about the interaction of children with the earth and also the science extension of that: do vegetables grow better in hydroponics or do they grow better in the earth? There is a huge opportunity here Mr Bell and Dr Yang—Paul Foster-Bell: Foster-Bell.TRACEY MARTIN: Mr Foster-Bell I do beg your pardon. We are both on the Education and Science Committee. This is an opportunity for the Education and Science Committee to look at ways to deliver the New Zealand curriculum the science strand and at least two if not three of those strands in a way that actually continues to benefit.I will give you credit for the food that is being delivered inside schools now. Well done! Thank you. This is the long-term plan. That was the short-term plan. Mr Seymour are you listening? This is the long-term answer to this issue: teach children how to grow the food. They will take those lessons home just as our parents took those lessons home. Whether they live in a unit in the middle of Auckland where they can grow vegetables inside flowerpots or whether they live on a quarter acre section somewhere in Ruatōria they will take those lessons home. This is the long-term answer and yet because you are blinded by the title of the bill you will not support it.Mr Seymour pick up the phone. This is an opportunity to make a difference and I suggest—I urge—the National Party members to actually think about what Mr Shearer said. This is the New Zealand curriculum. This is the delivery and this is your long-term solution. We do not want to keep on having to bring sandwiches into schools—nobody does—and this is one of the solutions to it. Short-term answer: deliver sandwiches to schools; long-term answer: teach people to be self-sufficient. Mr Shearer said that in his contribution. Did nobody listen? Were you blinded by the notes you were given by your researchers which were wrong?Look at the bill. Just because it says “food in school providers” does not mean that they are bringing the food in in carts. It could be a person who has been contracted by the school or is under a partial-employment contract with the school to set up those gardens. The schools already have some part of it already there. It may very well be that those in-school providers are the people who take those chemistry lessons who make sure that during the weekends all the materials are there for the children to then come and participate in those gardens. It may be that they are the ones who go out to the communities and source the fruit trees so that we can cut down the costs. How do we know what the cost is? How do we know what the cost is—because this is not about sandwiches. This is about gardens and fruit trees and Mr Shearer told you that when he stood up at the start of it.Listen for goodness’ sake to the contributions. Send the bill to select committee. Give us an opportunity to give you some numbers around it. Give us an opportunity to see how we can make a culture shift inside with the New Zealand curriculum as the basis of it and sort out this problem long term.MELISSA LEE (National): It is a pleasure to rise to speak on the this bill; however I am opposing this bill. I commend the member David Shearer. I do actually work with him in the electorate of Mt Albert—he is the elected member and I am the list member and we often are seen together at many different events around the electorate. But for this particular bill I have to say that I do not agree with him that we should actually teach kids how to grow vegetables. Well I guess you could teach kids how to grow vegetables and you could actually teach kids how to cook food and learn how to make gravy. We used to have that in our curriculum. I think that when I was in high school in Malaysia—Simon O’Connor: Just a few years ago.MELISSA LEE: —yes a couple of years ago we did actually have cookery lessons and we also had typing lessons as well on a typewriter. That was a long time ago. We do actually have a New Zealand curriculum and for me I wonder why the parents cannot actually teach the kids about gardening at home. Why does it have to be introduced at school? The member who just sat down Tracey Martin talked about this bill being inaptly named “Food in Schools”. Well it does actually say “Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill”.Earlier my learned colleague Paul Foster-Bell talked about his school life experience and I just wanted to go back to my childhood and talk about how different it was for me to grow up in a country like Korea in the late 1970s. Often people ask: “What was it like for you? How many kids were in your classroom?” and all that sort of stuff. I often say that I grew up in a very normal Korean primary school. I remember only primary school because I was there only for primary school and there were 65 kids in my classroom. In every year level there were about 20 classes and there were thousands of kids in a primary school. They were not decile schools like New Zealand. Not one single student was ever provided lunch by the school. It was the responsibility of the parents or the grandparents who were raising these kids to have them bring their own lunch. It was the responsibility of the parents and the grandparents who were raising these kids to feed them breakfast. It was the responsibility of the parents to look after their children.I remember during cold winter days when after you washed your face you walked to school and your eyebrows actually froze over because it was that cold and we all had our lunchboxes in the urn that was in the middle of the classroom. This was in the 1970s. Korea was decimated in the 1950 Korean War. It was almost like the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake. It was about children learning good education. It is not about learning how to grow your own food and eat it because you are hungry. Well it should be the responsibility of the family. Not all poor children attend decile 1 or decile 2 schools.Earlier speakers have talked about the KickStart Breakfast programme that the Government is already funding. Over 3.4 million breakfasts have been served and now it reaches about 26000 children. That to me is a little sad you know having grown up in a country that was decimated by war and yet in the 1970s only 20 years after the war the parents knew their responsibility. Korea did not have social welfare; New Zealand does. New Zealand has one of the most progressive social welfare systems and yet there are parents who will send their children to school without breakfast without lunches and shame on them. That is not all parents.I have to say that as a parent who is raising a teenage child it would be fantastic if the Government actually took care of my child so that I would be richer. Would it not be fantastic? But thank God that I am not raising a teenage daughter because she would be a lot more expensive. But this is about responsible Government looking after the welfare of all New Zealanders and good for those parents who will look after their children by providing breakfast lunch and dinner and for the welfare of their children. It is the responsibility of the parents not the Government. Thank you very much.METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): New Zealand in 2015 is not Korea in the 1970s and neither is it New Zealand in the 1970s or the 1980s.Carmel Sepuloni: Neither is it Paul Foster-Bell’s intermediate back whenever.METIRIA TUREI: Yes neither is what is happening with Manaia View School now what was happening with Manaia View School when Paul Foster-Bell knew it. We are now in a situation in 2015 where the one major agency that is working with schools to provide lunch and breakfast in those schools is already feeding 15000 kids a day. It already has 450 schools that it works with and already has a waiting list of 7000 children who are looking for that same service. Melissa Lee can stand up and berate parents all she likes and regale us with tales of Korea in the 1970s. Not a single statement she made has any relevance to the life of a child who went to school today without breakfast and without lunch and was not in a school where there was some assistance. That is what we are facing today. Thousands of New Zealand children go to school without breakfast or lunch.We sit here in this Parliament with all the resources of our entire nation available to us to fix that problem. We have already had today a discussion on the Education (Breakfast and Lunch Programmes in Schools) Amendment Bill where the Parliament could have chosen to support hungry kids and provide them with the solution. We have another chance today to fix the mistake that was made this afternoon and to support David Shearer’s Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill to the select committee so that we can have as we have said time and time again the conversation about New Zealand in 2015—families in 2015 and children in 2015 who are going to school without breakfast and lunch. They are the people whom we should be talking about not about Paul Foster-Bell when he was 7 and not about Melissa Lee when she was 10. We should be talking about the kids of today who are 7 and who are 10 and who are going to school hungry and because they are hungry they cannot learn properly and their whole lives are affected by what happens as a result of the decisions we make.I am very pleased to support David Shearer’s bill. It is different from the solution that was put forward this afternoon which put an obligation on schools to provide breakfast and lunch. It is different from the solution that the Green Party prepared which is to have a fund that schools can access to then spend as they choose to provide lunch in school. These are all the ideas that our Parliament should be having a constructive conversation about not on the floor of the debating chamber but actually in the select committee where we are together with members from all parties and talking with our own communities about how we deal with today’s problem—the problem of 2015. That is the rational responsible thing for this Parliament to do. We have another chance to do that today and we should take it up.This bill is going to fail by only one vote—do I understand that correctly—because Peter Dunne is supporting it. That is very good news. One vote is going to make the difference between having a conversation about how to feed today’s hungry kids or not and the National Party is choosing yet again to say no to those hungry kids. The 7000 kids who are waiting on the KidsCan list are being told no by this Government. The many thousands of others who are not yet able to get on the waiting list are about to be told no yet again by John Key and his Government and they should be deeply ashamed of themselves. There is no other reason for members to be here in this Parliament with all the privileges of this office if not to take care of our kids. Here is an opportunity to prove that you are worthy of this job and to support this bill. Thank you.BRETT HUDSON (National): It is an absolute pleasure to speak on this bill. It is an absolute pleasure because the National Party is already doing this through our KickStart Breakfast programme—a $9.5 million investment over 5 years an investment that has seen an additional 3.4 million breakfasts provided in the schools that want them. This is a service that is reaching over 26000 children and is providing the assistance that those children need. I think every one of us acknowledges that our children will be in a better position to learn and in a better position to absorb the teaching of their teachers if they are well fed and starting the day on the right foot. But the reality is that we are already doing it.I would just like to take issue with a comment that one of the previous speakers made about this being a bill to teach children how to grow their own food. That is an absolute nonsense. The bill is very clear about what it is and I will just read from the bill if I may—if my computer would come to life. The bill says it is all about helping to provide the supply of food to schools that need it. There is no provision—no provision at all—in this bill to do with any form of gardening or any form of growing any form of fruit or vegetables. It is not about teaching children to be farmers or orchardists or even to grow a home garden. It is simply about supplying food which as I have pointed out we already do.The other point I would make on that is that even if there were an intent even if we allowed that there were an intent behind this to teach children how to grow fruit and vegetables the simple reality is you do not need this amendment bill for schools to teach that. There is nothing in the amendment bill that takes away a prohibition or reduces a barrier or actually creates a scenario where it is about teaching children how to grow fruit and vegetables. But the simple reality is this: there is no barrier. To date there is no legislative barrier to schools doing that. If as the previous speaker said this is actually about a pathway to teaching children to grow their own food quite frankly there is no impediment to that to date. There is no legislative impediment that this amendment bill would address or that an amendment bill needs to address.I return to the very clear and simple message here. This amendment bill introduced by the member the honourable David Shearer is actually about something that this Government is already doing. It is about providing food to children in those schools that perceive a need for that service and want to take it up. Through our KickStart Breakfast programme in association with Sanitarium and Fonterra this Government is already delivering that to the schools that want it. It is a highly effective service. It has been proven to be delivering to the schools that need it. Quite frankly it is also interesting that not all schools see they have a need for this programme and not all schools take it up although it is available to all of them.I will just end with a very simple message for members opposite and that is that they are trying to introduce legislation that this Government is already delivering on. Their bill is completely redundant. We will continue doing what we do. I oppose this bill. I will not be supporting it.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I call David Shearer—5 minutes in reply.DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): First of all could I just thank the parties that have agreed to support this bill—the Green Party the New Zealand First Party the Māori Party and United Future. Unfortunately the National Party and the ACT Party are not supporting the bill which I find rather extraordinary because this bill as I explained in my introductory comments is about self-reliance it is about sustainability and it is about teaching lifelong skills. It is not necessarily just about growing vegetables. We have problems in New Zealand. The first problem is that kids are coming to school hungry and the second problem is that we have an obesity issue in New Zealand which is the third-worst in the world and which will cost us billions and billions of dollars if we do not do something about it.I started off as I began in my earlier comments when I introduced this bill believing that the solution to this was to provide food for kids in schools. I looked at other schools and at what they were doing and believed that this was not the best way to address something that is not a band-aid on a problem but is about ensuring we have a mechanism and a solution to create an opportunity for schools to be able to teach long-term lifelong skills. I want to make sure that people on the other side understand what in fact they are giving up because I have been criticised with this bill. One is for changing my opinion and my mind on it and that is something that a politician does not generally do. We normally dig ourselves into a huge hole and bury ourselves in it and in this particular case I said: “This is not the right way forward. I disagree and we need to be going in a different direction and that is why I have outlined this direction.” The second thing I have been criticised for is asking why National and ACT are not supporting this. This is about being independent being self-reliant and teaching lifelong skills. I for the life of me cannot understand it. I think it is a real shame.What I do know now is that there are schools out there right now across New Zealand that are doing remarkable things for their kids. I want to come back to a school that I mentioned in my opening which is Yendarra School a decile 1a school in Ōtara. In the schools around it kids are coming to school hungry. They have more cavities. They have more health problems but somehow Yendarra School is remarkable in the sense that it does not have the same scale of problems that the schools around it have. The reason for that is that it has brought the community into the school and with the community is teaching good nutrition. The kids are not being fed by an outside feeding programme; they are being fed by the parents themselves as they should be. I am not saying that in every case parents are able to do that and in emergency cases I absolutely see the necessity for feeding kids. But that should not be the solution to hungry kids in schools. It is not the solution. It is absolutely not the solution. It is simply addressing the symptoms of a problem and not addressing the problem itself.That is the underlying tenet of this bill. It was about getting this idea to a select committee where we could actually hear from those experts and the schools that are able to achieve what other schools across New Zealand cannot despite the fact that as the member beforehand said they have every opportunity. Actually they do not have every opportunity because they are not doing it. If they were doing it we would not have a problem. But they are not and what we on this side of the House want to be able to do is to provide schools across New Zealand with the ability to have their kids come to school well fed and able to have lunches in their schools but also to teach the basic tenets of nutrition which will go home with the kids and make a real difference in the homes that they come from. Instead we have squandered—absolutely squandered—an opportunity to be able to do that in this House. I think that is a real shame. I think it is a real shame for those schools out there that are able to do what they need to do. I want to leave by thanking those parties that have been supporting it but I believe that those parties that did not will have in effect missed an opportunity. Thank you very much.A party vote was called for on the question That the Education (Food in Schools) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.Ayes 60New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 11; Māori Party 2; United Future 1.Noes 60New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1.The vote was equal.Motion not agreed to.Healthy Homes Guarantee BillFirst ReadingPHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I move That the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Social Services Committee to consider the bill. I want to make three points in this contribution. The first is that we have a major problem in New Zealand with cold damp homes and it is causing our children in this country to be hospitalised at Third World rates for infectious and respiratory diseases. The second point I want to make is that current approaches are simply not working and the problem of cold damp unhealthy homes and the public health impact that they have on our people is not being helped by current policies and regulations. The third point is that I want to talk about my bill and what it would do to solve this problem. If I have time I would also like to address some of the objections and criticisms that have been levelled at my bill over the last year or so.I want to start by quoting Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman of Otago University. Professor Howden-Chapman is the winner of this year’s Prime Minister’s Science Prize. She said that houses “get damp and cold and mouldy but it also damages the people living in them particularly babies children and older people. It damages their lungs. If they have heart problems it is harder for their circulatory system to work. And so people who live in cold houses it’s likely to aggravate their heart conditions but for children we get this terrible terrible battery of respiratory infections and close contact infections because people have to crowd together in one room. So it’s pretty shocking in a country that is as wealthy as we are; we can’t make our houses warm enough for people to live in.” That I think is a very good summary by Professor Philippa Howden-Chapman of the problem that we are trying to deal with here.I now want to quote from a story that ran in the Nelson Mail last year. It told a story of a family—Jared Haruru and his partner Grace Rāpata—who live in Victory in Nelson. They have got three children under 4 years. Both parents are working earning the minimum wage. They told the Nelson Mail that keeping their house warm in winter is a huge problem. All three children they said have asthma so keeping them warm is crucial to their health. They said: “It’s a damp house. In the winter we all sleep in the same room because it’s too cold. Or we sleep in the lounge with the heat pump on but the heat pump is not a cheap thing to run. … We have to wipe down the house all the time for mould because it’s quite damp.” That is a story that has been played out in every town city and neighbourhood around New Zealand. There are people particularly kids and the elderly getting sick unnecessarily because of cold damp homes.In fact the problem is so bad that a few years ago the Child Poverty Monitor estimated that in New Zealand we are hospitalising 40000 young children every year for poverty-related diseases. That is 40000 kids every year in hospital for preventable diseases and many of those diseases are related to cold damp homes. I think everybody knows that the quality of New Zealand’s housing stock is very poor. The Building Research Association of New Zealand the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority and other Government agencies have made it very clear. In a 2010 survey the Building Research Association of New Zealand found that 22 percent—only 22 percent—of rental properties were in a good condition but that twice as many were in a poor condition.The students at the Wellington medical school did a study a few years ago. They interviewed the families of 150 acutely ill children who were admitted to Wellington Regional Hospital during 2 weeks in winter in 2012. What they found was that the prevalence of exposure to cold damp and overcrowded houses was striking in all of those families where kids had been admitted to hospital—34 percent a full third of the admissions were for respiratory diseases associated with the cold and damp. That is the problem but the solutions that this Government has in place are not working. There has been a generous subsidy scheme in place to encourage people to insulate their homes. Going back to the last Labour Government and to give credit to the current Government and the Green Party those policies have continued on for a number of years.More than a quarter of a million houses have been insulated with the help of those taxpayer subsidies. But the striking thing is that a tiny proportion of those houses that have been insulated were private. Only 14 percent of all of those insulated houses were private rentals. Only 5 percent of private rental houses in this country have been insulated according to the best statistics we have so it is very clear that private landlords have had no economic incentive to take advantage of those subsidies. What we do know is that half the children in this country who are growing up below the poverty line are living in private rentals. The very poorest people are living in private rentals. Those kids are growing up in cold damp homes they are getting sick unnecessarily and that is locking them into a cycle of disadvantage. To make that worse National drastically cut the subsidy—it cut the subsidy back by two-thirds. Treasury told it that actually the current funding for that subsidy is enough to insulate only one in six of the houses that are in need of it.The other initiative or policy of this Government that falls well short of what is needed in this area is the trial warrants of fitness for State houses that Nick Smith announced a couple of years ago. We do not need warrants of fitness for State houses. If the Minister Paula Bennett wants State houses to be insulated and retrofitted with modern heating she only needs to pick up the phone and tell the chief executive of Housing New Zealand to do that. We need warrants of fitness or minimum standards for private rentals across the whole market.My bill offers a simple practical affordable and pragmatic solution to this problem and I urge members to vote for it tonight. What it will do is direct the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority to set standards for insulation and heating. It will require landlords every time they post a new tenancy agreement to make a declaration that they meet those standards. There is no big heavy compliance mechanism involved—it is simple it will do the trick and it will make sure that every rental property in this country is warm and dry. And that is what we want to achieve.There are three reasons to consider voting for this bill this evening. The first is that it is the right thing to do. We cannot go on in this country hospitalising our children for Third World diseases because our homes are too cold and damp. Secondly it is a practical solution. I want to quote Andrew King from the New Zealand Property Investors Federation who said that my healthy homes bill is sensible and pragmatic. This is the head of the landlords’ federation the Property Investors Federation of New Zealand who said that this bill that we are debating tonight is a sensible and pragmatic solution that it tackles the two biggest problems—the cold and the damp—and that it should not incur large compliance costs. Thirdly it makes good economic sense. What we know is that—and this is based on highly credible New Zealand - based public health research—for every dollar invested in retrofitting our homes with insulation and efficient heating we save $5 in public health expenditure. That is a no-brainer. This bill makes sound economic sense.My final point is that we do not allow cars on the road if they do not have a decent warrant of fitness—if they are not safe and fit for purpose. We do not allow a restaurant to operate unless it has a permit to say that it is hygienic and that it meets all the necessary standards for food preparation and food hygiene. But somehow in New Zealand today in the 21st century it is OK for landlords to rent out homes that are a threat to the health of the people living in them and I do not believe that that is acceptable any more. I say that publicly this argument has already been won. The public is behind this bill. They want to see a warrant of fitness implemented. They want to see minimum standards that make our homes healthy. They do not want to see our kids hospitalised in the numbers that they are because of cold damp homes. It is time for this bill to be passed.MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): I rise to speak to this first reading of the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill a bill that the Government will not be supporting. I acknowledge the sponsor Phil Twyford and congratulate him on his member’s bill being selected from the ballot. As a new MP I do look forward to that opportunity myself. Mr Twyford raises some good points I think. Reducing the number of admissions for the vulnerable be they young or old to the health care system—I agree with that. Reducing the cost and more preventative intervention for the health care system—I agree with that. But I suppose what I do not agree on and I will be raising these three points over the course of my talking tonight is the unintended risk to housing supply for this bill the unintended increased rents that this bill might cause and very much the unclear level of standards that this bill will set.Just looking at this bill—I must admit that I have not had a lot of time to look at it tonight—it is intended to ensure that every rental home social or private in New Zealand meets minimum standards for heating insulation indoor temperatures ventilation draft stopping and drainage. Mr Twyford is right about the health effects of cold damp and leaky homes. As someone who has had a career in health specifically mental health I understand how this can manifest into health conditions such as bronchitis and asthma and also how it manifests into mental health issues for people who are stressed and how it causes depression and anxiety. I suppose that is why this National Government has invested in insulating every State house that can be insulated as well as trialling minimum quality standards on Housing New Zealand houses.The Government though is yet to make a decision on minimum quality standards to other social housing providers and to the private rental market. As I say this bill does pose an unintended consequence or threat to housing supply. The advice is that thousands of houses will never be able to be insulated and will never meet the standards required. I suppose as someone who represents an electorate that was severely hit by the first earthquake and consequently the second earthquake and the lack of housing in Canterbury we need to make sure we use all the housing stock we have. “Waimak” has the third-largest population growth of all the electorates and we need to ensure and sustain the housing stock we have and not do anything to incur any further shortage that unfortunately a disaster like the earthquakes has caused. We have seen a significant population shift in Canterbury and the housing market is responding to that.Could I also share some experiences of mine of the way social providers and also community providers are responding to this very important need to make our houses in New Zealand drier and warmer. Last Friday I went and met with the Community Energy Action group in Canterbury a great fantastic organisation funded by the Government and also voluntary funding. It sends its assessors out to assess houses in order to understand how it can warm them up and make them healthier to live in. It has various means for that. One is the Curtain Bank where it takes donations of curtains puts lining in them and provides these free of charge to any houses that might like them.It also provides advice on insulation whether that be in the floors in the walls or in the ceilings. We do have a problem with modern design and the downlights in the ceiling. We find that the insulation has been cut away around those downlights so the group has very ingeniously developed a plastic dome that sits on top of that so the insulation can go over the top. It also gives advice on how to use a woodburner more effectively and how to use plastic strips across single windows as well. So that very much gives an example and a flavour of organisations already out there supporting the need and demand of making houses drier and warmer.On Monday I also went and met the Comcare Trust which has recently been announced to provide social housing and emergency housing in Canterbury with the VisionWest Community Trust. It is a very much needed housing supply for 8 weeks for singles and families. It was very interesting understanding their sense of definitions of homelessness. They talked about street homelessness people who are very problematic in housing as well as people who are waiting on the Ministry of Social Development wait-lists and waiting for housing to come up. They were very much talking about building new social housing that will be dry warm and insulated.Just to summarise I am not supporting this bill because of those three things. I am very much concerned about this bill—the unintended risk to housing supply whether this means that once the bill comes in tenancies will have to be cancelled and people will have to be put out on the street; and also the unintended consequence of increased rents. Will this force very vulnerable people in the rental market to seek further overcrowded housing as this level of rentals is taken off the market? And I am very much unclear about the level of standards that this bill will be set at. It would be interesting to hear further information about what the levels of standards of this bill will be. This is the reason that I do not support this bill.JAMI-LEE ROSS (Junior Whip—National): I seek leave for the House to adjourn at the conclusion of the first reading debate on the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill until the next sitting day.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is no objection.POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): A few months ago I had my colleague Phil Twyford attend a meeting of people who are interested in housing issues in Christchurch. There were a few very knowledgable who spoke at that meeting. Two of them I have to say quoted John A Lee. Those on this side of the House know John A Lee’s legacy was really around the construction of State homes in the 1930s. His quote is: “It is well to remember that good housing is essential for a good community.” We all know that. The speakers who have spoken already and who will speak after will know the implications of good warm dry and affordable housing. In those days harking back to John A Lee they knew about housing. Housing New Zealand homes were the gold standard. Everybody wanted to have a State house because they were so well constructed. They were the real basis they were the building blocks for our communities.Decent housing does more than just provide a roof over people’s heads; it actually does many things including it is well-known leading to improving or stabilising good health outcomes for our community. But it does something else as well. Sustainable housing is one of the major ways to build strong communities. Families are able to stay in their houses put down roots form connections into the community the kids go to the same school they have friends the parents also are able to get support from the wider community and it is really important that we do everything we can to ensure that people are not only in decent housing but in sustainable housing.Just to quote from something that I was reading today: “Every child deserves to grow up in a warm dry house.” I do not think anybody on either side of the House would argue with that. It is absolutely important to all of us that our families grow up in warm dry houses. But I want to tell you about a visit that I made during winter of last year to a constituent of mine who lives in a Housing New Zealand home. I guess in a sense it challenges what Matt Doocey said about Housing New Zealand and its maintenance programme. This was a mother of either three children or four children. As I recall they were living in a three-bedroom home. The home was not well insulated. They had a heat pump in the lounge and everyone crowded into the lounge. It was the only room that was able to be heated. There was a problem with mould in one of the children’s bedrooms and of course we know mould is a real symptom of a sick house. A sick house a poorly insulated house leads to sick children.We visited during the day—it was about lunchtime. We walked through the house and as we walked through the house the condensation could be seen coming out of our mouths. This was a Housing New Zealand home provided for a family to grow up in. This particular woman was asking for my assistance to help her to transfer out of this house which was absolutely not appropriate for her children to be living in. They were sick. She had an infant as well as some toddlers in the house and it was totally inappropriate.If the Government cannot meet a standard that is fit for our communities how can it tell us that this bill is not appropriate? Landlords in this country should not be allowed to get away with the housing conditions that many of our families currently endure and pay good money for as well. I do not see the point in this Government supporting landlords to behave in this way. They had plenty of opportunity to bring their homes up to standard when the subsidised insulation programme was put in place and they have not taken advantage of it. Now it is time for us to set the standards. I really support this bill to the select committee. Thank you.Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill in the name of Phil Twyford. We do not support this bill. This bill is to amend two Acts. It amends the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Act 2000 to require the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority to set standards for heating and insulation in residential rental properties. It also amends the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 to require all landlords to then meet those standards that will be set by the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority.We believe that our first duty is to ensure that our own houses—that means our State houses—are in order which means our first step is to make sure that these houses are insulated and that is what we are doing. We are insulating every State house that can be insulated. The Government is taking a practical approach to this issue and for that we are developing a practical minimum quality standard. This standard will be applied to all State houses. This minimum quality standard has been already trialled on 500 Housing New Zealand houses. The National Government is committed to providing drier healthier and warmer homes. That is why we are focusing on getting State houses insulated first.About this member’s bill—there are a few issues in this bill that are not clear. The first and most important one is that it does not say when it would come into effect. It just says that it will be illegal to enter into a tenancy agreement from 7 days after the regulation takes effect for homes that do not meet the imposed standard. This will actually create a big commotion in the residential rental market because people will not get time to make sure that they have got their properties inspected and that the properties are compliant with the standards that will be set. So as a result landlords will be pulling out their properties from the market because they do not want to face those legal actions that are prescribed in this bill. If you look at the number of tenancy agreements that are entered into each day that number is around 1400. That tells us the magnitude of the problem that this bill could create.Secondly insulation does not mean better quality. The National Government is focusing on the overall quality of houses and that is why we are working on minimum quality standards. Minimum quality standards cover more than just insulation.The third issue is about standards. It is not very clear about the standards that will be set for these rental properties because if the standards are set low then those standards will not meet the purpose of this bill because those houses will not be drier and warmer. But if the standards are set high then it will have some indirect consequences. These consequences can be that some houses are such that they will not be able to meet those standards and will be out of the market. That will push the rent up. In the private sector if there are more rules more regulations and more restrictions that is going to push rents up.Another issue with these standards is that this bill puts the whole responsibility of meeting these standards on the landlord. This is not practically possible because in maintaining indoor temperature and ventilation there should be some kind of arrangement with the person who is living in the house as well and because some houses are designed such that there will be restrictions as per the design as to what can be modified.The final issue that I would like to talk about is that as per this bill it appears that landlords with new tenancies would not be given any period of notice to upgrade their property. This lack of notice is not workable or practical. With the way this bill is currently drafted it looks like this bill is going to create more social problems and more health problems and this will be a big risk to housing supply.Due to these reasons that I have listed I do not see any value in this bill. Instead I see numerous complications in the housing market due to this bill. The National Government is committed to helping families live in drier warmer healthier and affordable homes and providing drier warmer healthier and affordable homes is a much wider issue than what is covered in this bill. That is why I do not support this bill. Thank you.METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): It must be hell on earth to be a backbencher in National after listening to today’s contributions. I have heard such rubbish from the backbench of National and that last one really did take the cake. I am going to be generous though and say that it is hard when you are new and it is hard when you get this huge amount of information from Steven Joyce’s—somewhat defunct now because they are all up in Northland—research unit that is giving you all this rubbish to say and you have got no other choice but to say it. So I have some sympathy but it must just be impossible to walk out of this House feeling like you have made any kind of useful contribution if you have to spout that kind of rubbish.We have heard all sorts of alarmist extremist claims about why New Zealanders are not entitled to have a decent standard of housing because that is all that this bill—Phil Twyford’s bill—does. It simply respects the fact that New Zealanders are entitled to a decent standard of housing—and in the rental market of course they are paying good money. People pay good money for the houses that they rent but the standards are so low that frankly toasters have more regulatory controls for safety than New Zealand houses do. This bill is one attempt to try to fix that to provide some guidance and some criteria so that if landlords want to be in the profit-making business by renting out this particular piece of property there are some standards that they should meet because the consequences of no standards are so obvious for everyone to see: severe health consequences for our kids severe health consequences for older New Zealanders and increased energy costs for families and for older New Zealanders.We know from the report that was done on the home insulation scheme that the Green Party and Labour first worked to implement and the Green Party and National then worked to implement that one of the major advantages of the early years of the home insulation scheme was that lives were saved. Primarily it was the lives of older people in this country because they were the ones who were struggling particularly those living on their own to pay power bills and who were suffering severe health consequences as a result of living in cold damp homes and it led to early death. These are the reports from the Government’s own agencies about the benefits of decent standards in New Zealand housing. So I ask New Zealanders: please just do not listen to National members—I really do not even know why they are even here if they are going to make ridiculous arguments like that—and instead look at the evidence.A million New Zealanders rent in this country and 400000 children live in rental accommodation. It is a business. Rental accommodation is a business and a business needs to be decently regulated. I will just also remind the country that National was the party of the leaky homes right? It was the party that deregulated the building industry so that it was perfectly legal and legit for your house to be built and then rot around you and nothing could be done.Hon David Parker: Maurice Williamson.METIRIA TUREI: Maurice Williamson is still in the National Party backbenches. How he has managed to survive that long back there I do not know especially after that debacle. So when New Zealanders are listening to National talking about housing just remember that the leaky homes debacle which New Zealanders are still paying for and still struggling with is a result of deregulation and a reduction in the standards that existed even then.Now we have an opportunity to improve the circumstances of New Zealanders’ housing for families for kids and for older people to make sure that they can actually get the value of the power bills that they are paying and National is yet again saying no to New Zealanders: “Your standard of living your health and your well-being are not our concern.” What is the point of National? It really does beg the question.I do want to acknowledge Jeanette Fitzsimons in the implementation of what was then the Heat Smart programme and the home insulation programme and others who worked with her on that in the years since. We can still continue to build on that. National might want to vote down this bill but Labour and the Greens will continue to push for and promote increased standards for rental housing. We know that it is so important to our kids and our people. Labour the Greens and other parties in the Opposition will stand up for families and New Zealanders. Thank you.STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): I would just like to comment on the previous contribution and remind the member Metiria Turei that the worst day in Government is better than the best day in Opposition. I suspect that the member had something for dinner that did not agree with her.It is a pleasure to make a contribution on the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill in the name of Phil Twyford. I commend the member for having a go and getting it through the ballot which seems to be quite difficult. I understand that many members who have been here for many years have not had a bill drawn from the ballot so I look forward to having one drawn out myself.In 1937 Michael Joseph Savage carried a table into the very first State home in New Zealand. They were cold and damp then and they are cold and damp today. Nothing has changed with that but what has changed is that National has actually gone out there and insulated every State house that it could—every single State house that it could. That costs a lot of money and it is not practical in some cases.I would like to take it back to a person experience. I lived in a cold house for quite some time when I was starting out. It was cold and it was damp. We used to get ice on the windows but not on the outside; we got ice on the inside. It was pretty cold. In fact when my brother stayed with me one time in the winter we ended up with a bottle of beer freezing under the bed so it was pretty cold but we got through it all right. That is what it is like to live in the country in rural Canterbury. That is what happens in the winter—it gets cold. We looked at insulating that house but we could not. To put insulation under the floor was impossible. To put insulation in the walls became just undoable. It was too expensive. So what we would have if this bill was to go through would be a situation where the people at the very bottom who are living in those houses in the worst places in New Zealand would be priced out of the market. It is the law of unintended consequences.This issue really is something that has to have a lot of thought put into it. If you are going to bring in standards it has to be done in a way that is actually practical. It is great to have good ideas and I commend the member for that but a little bit of practicality every now and again would be quite helpful. There are lots of health issues as we have heard with all these sorts of things but the amendments proposed for the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Act 2000 and the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 simply will not do what we want which is to make houses better for New Zealanders.As I have said we have insulted every State house that can be insulated and now we are trying to get rid of those houses but we cannot. The Opposition is really kicking up a stink about it. We are trying to do the right thing for those people who are living in those houses and we are not really getting any support. What is the endgame here?Hon David Parker: Jeanette Fitzsimons.STUART SMITH: I beg your pardon?Hon David Parker: It was Jeanette Fitzsimons. Give credit where it’s due. It was her Budget bid.STUART SMITH: No she did not hold the purse strings there. The one reason why it is so difficult to actually get all these houses up to standard is that these designs have changed so much over the time since they were designed and built that there is no one standard that will easily fix that problem. So I am not going to support this bill. We are not supporting the bill. I do commend the member for having a go but really he just needs to go back and have another think about it. Thank you.DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): First of all I want to congratulate Phil Twyford on having this very good bill selected from the ballot. I wish that I could be as lucky. However it is great to be able to stand up and support a bill of this quality. And I might say at the beginning that I think that the contributions from the members opposite have been utterly pathetic nothing more than a litany of excuses to do nothing completely lacking any logic at all and most of all lacking compassion for people who are these days still in this day and age required to live in unhealthy homes because they are not properly insulated and not properly heated. Some of them have talked nonsense about unintended consequences when if they bothered to read the bill at all they would have found that there is a 5-year phase-in period which gives landlords plenty of time to make preparations and the landlords association itself actually agrees with this bill. So why do those members opposite not actually listen to those people? Because they do know what they are talking about.There is no doubt that home insulation and home heating are the foremost issues for healthy homes in this country—and that means all homes—but this bill deals with only rental homes and they of course are the homes usually in most need of it. New Zealand First agrees that every rental home in New Zealand must meet minimum standards for heating and insulation. That does require legislation and this is that legislation. It is the sort of legislation that the Government itself should be bringing forward if it had any wit but it does not. The bill will require the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority to set the standards—the bill actually says 1 April 2014 but clearly that will be amended. The important thing is that it will make it mandatory for landlords to meet those standards. I can say this: most good landlords actually do want that because they know it will create a level playing field and that is good for the market. One of those members opposite—I cannot remember her name—talked a load of nonsense about people being thrown out of homes about the market not being able to cope and so on. Well a properly regulated market actually works better and this market would too.The bill also amends the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 and it talks about requiring every tenancy agreement to require that the standards to be set would be met. That actually gives the tenants a way of enforcing good standards and so they should be able to. They are the ones best in a position to do it. This should have been done a long long time ago and it is good to see that it could be done now if only the National Government would think a little more clearly about the whole issue.My experience in dealing with tenants homeowners and housing problems in Christchurch has come to a head—I suppose I should say—because of the earthquakes in Christchurch. Like other Christchurch MPs I have dealt with a whole list of people with all sorts of different problems about that. What that means is actually this bill is only the beginning. A lot more really needs to be done. This bill takes a strictly regulatory approach and that is fine but if I were to list some of the other things that need to be done you will see what I mean. For example earthquake resistance is another issue that really should be dealt with in a bill like this and which the Government should be doing something about. There is a lot of information about that now and it can be done without huge expense. Another lesson we have learned is about flood protection. Remember the people in the Flockton basin in Christchurch? That is another big issue that really needs to be dealt with too. Then there are other things as well. Another example would be—and somebody else has already mentioned this—the huge problem of leaky homes. We still do not really understand the magnitude of that.So there is a lot more to be done but this bill is a very solid and important step in the right direction and we should all in this House be supporting it.PAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): Contrary to what we have heard from some of the other speakers so far in this debate we on this side of the House do believe that New Zealanders should live in warm and cosy homes whether they are in a cottage or a villa in town or an apartment or whether they are Green or New Zealand First Party supporters and live in an igloo a yurt a tepee or a mud hut. They deserve to have a warm and healthy home to live in.This member Mr Twyford starts from a reasonably sensible position; I will concede that. Unfortunately the bill soon degenerates into an absolute mess and will achieve in some cases quite the opposite I think of what that member sets out to achieve. This is typical of a smug know-it-all and Stalinist heavy-handed approach insisting that landlords meet standards that are actually beyond their control. It is one thing to require a level of insulation; it is quite another to determine what the interior temperature of a home must be given that a number of things that tenants themselves do from opening the window to switching a heater on will regulate that temperature. So I think that is an example of the confused and muddled drafting that Mr Twyford has unfortunately fallen victim to here in this bill.A point that he raised was that this will not actually come into force immediately for existing tenancies—well that is all very well and good but there are 1400 new tenancies signed every week. So from day one of this bill taking effect as it is currently drafted landlords would be required to meet the new conditions as set by Mr Twyford with no time in order to install insulation.As the bill is currently drafted there is also a huge degree of unintended consequences that we just do not know about. We have heard comments from some of the parties opposite about notes being drafted by our research unit. Well unlike the Opposition as a Government we also have the advantage of having officials hard-working public servants here in Wellington at ministries such as the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment who do give good advice—far better-considered advice than clearly Opposition parties have access to. If significant upgrades are required there is only one logical consequence that will flow from that and that is rent increases often for the most vulnerable in society. So this bill coming with good intentions as it does still manages to achieve quite the opposite I think of Mr Twyford’s original intentions.This Government is focused on providing good quality housing for New Zealanders. An example of this is the Tāmaki Redevelopment Co. in Auckland which is aiming to build 6000 new homes—social housing with integrated community facilities. This is an excellent example of the direction that we are heading in working and partnering with community groups and not taking a statist and Stalinist approach as members opposite seem to want to do. I will not be supporting this bill past this reading.KEVIN HAGUE (Green): Earlier this evening my colleague Catherine Delahunty referred to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which of course is a way of thinking about basic human needs that need to be met in order for a human being to achieve their potential. What we have seen from the Government members this evening is also an approach based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We have seen them defeat the “Feed the Kids Bill” and then David Shearer’s alternative solution to the same problem. The right to food—the need for food—is one of those basic rights.Another of those basic rights is the right—the need—for warmth and shelter and it seems that the Government is intending to vote against this as well. So it appears that rather than approaching those basic needs on the basis of trying to progressively meet them all which actually is kind of the purpose of government the Government is instead intent on destroying all of those needs and ensuring that they are not met. If I were Matt Doocey I would be embarrassed. The man has come from a health background and therefore he must know that health status is driven by environment—by the environment that people in communities find themselves in—and there is no more direct kind of environment than the housing that we live in.The evidence is abundant—Phil Twyford captured a small summary of that in his opening contribution—that housing in New Zealand is one of the major drivers of ill health in this country in two ways. First of all it is through overcrowding. The Government’s failure to ensure an adequate supply of housing is condemning New Zealanders to live in overcrowded conditions that feed respiratory and skin infections and that feed rheumatic fever and even more serious conditions. The second way in which poor-quality housing drives ill health is through that housing being cold or damp or drafty or mouldy. That is the condition that this bill sets out to address. Both of those problems are getting worse—overcrowding because of the shortage of supply and because in particular of the decreasing affordability of housing in this country—but the poor-quality housing is getting worse because it acts as a safety valve for the Government’s failure to provide affordable housing. That is right and Matt Doocey’s opening contribution in fact pretty much said that. It said that the Government is worried that this would force up rental costs.Denis O’Rourke: It won’t.KEVIN HAGUE: As Denis O’Rourke has said you know it is unlikely to result. What that means is that the Government has a balanced solution from its point of view. It enables landlords to provide poor-quality shoddy housing and that enables it to get away with in fact not ensuring that there is affordable housing available to New Zealanders. It is a disgrace. The Green Party as Metiria Turei has commented already this evening has worked for many years on this issue of the quality of housing. In particular Jeanette Fitzsimons was an absolute battler for ensuring that houses were as well insulated and energy-efficient as they could be working first with Labour and then with National to ensure that our insulation schemes were progressed.We have our own bill. It takes a different approach from Mr Twyford’s. That is in the ballot but we will be supporting his bill tonight. Any of the problems that the Government members have addressed in their contributions tonight could and should be addressed by the select committee. That is the proper process for legislation. It seems to me that it is an unusual state of affairs when we have tenants we have landlords—and I notice that the Property Investors Federation speaks to Mr Twyford and me; it is a bit of a worry that it is not speaking to the Government—and we have the health professionals all saying that this is what we need to do. So why will the Government not do it or allow it to be done?BRETT HUDSON (National): It is just quite incredible to hear that from the previous speaker Kevin Hague—a man who aspires to be a party leader but who does not even know the economic growth rate of the last quarter or year criticises the arguments of a speaker on this side of the House. That is rich indeed although it is not surprising because that member has been fixated on rich for all the months of this 51st Parliament. I rise in opposition to this member’s bill. It is ill-defined and poorly targeted. In fact it is not targeted at all. It is a one-size-fits-all approach and as we on this side know one size does not fit all. It is also a solution by decree. It has no specifications. It has no fundamental standard details. It merely says: “We’ll make a couple of changes and the job’s done.” Some would say that is the typical approach of the Labour Party—in fact some might describe it as its policy methodology.What does the bill do? It does seek to set a single standard across all rentals. It takes into no consideration at all the challenges from different builds different types and different previous standards. It merely says that everyone can comply with this one set standard. It does not understand and takes no cognisance at all of some of the challenges as we have heard from a previous speaker on this side of the House. Some of the challenges are simply insurmountable given current insulation. Others are challenging but could be addressed. However they could be addressed only at major cost. What we on this side of the House understand but clearly is not understood on the other side of the House or on the cross benches is that an increase in costs to the landlord is going to be borne by the tenant if not in the short term then certainly in the long run. So what we have is a bill that is going to propose what amounts to an increase in cost to tenants and that the Opposition members think is somehow going to solve an affordability problem and a housing problem. It simply will not.Let us have a look at the standards that are specified in the bill. Well the answer is that there are none really. We simply do not know whether the standards that will come into force will be so high that they will compromise supply of rental stock because landlords cannot afford to do it or whether they will simply compromise the cost that tenants have to pay. Of course the other possibility is that the standards will shoot too low in which case they will not improve the warmth or dryness of the rental stock either. At the moment in the bill that is being introduced we simply do not know. There is the rub and the heart of the problems that this bill will create or exacerbate. It will simply force properties out of supply or it will force significant costs on landlords which in the reality of this market environment which the members opposite have spoken about will simply force greater costs on to tenants.It proposes a measurement that would make the person legally responsible for something they cannot control. It is the internal temperature and ventilation. That is something that is drivel. It is highly dependent on the tenant’s behaviour and yet they would seek to make the landlord responsible. That is incredible absolutely incredible. What the National Party is doing is that we are very clear that housing affordability is driven by supply challenges and we are addressing those through strong pragmatic means to open up land supply to reduce regulatory costs and to reduce materials’ costs and by tackling problems head-on. We are taking on the real problems for vulnerable renters by addressing insulation in State houses—something we have already done. We have grabbed the bull by the horns and have actually solved that particular problem.The next step in that plan is developing a practical minimum quality standard and applying that to our State housing stock—the stock as I have said where the most vulnerable low-income earners are likely to reside. So we have tackled the problem pragmatically using measures that will work and that have been proven to work. The Opposition is simply proposing a decree and a one size fits all that will not. I cannot support that and I will not. Thank you.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I call Phil Twyford—5 minutes in reply.PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): Let me address the three objections that I heard from the members opposite. The first is that somehow my bill would result in the unintended consequence of putting housing supply at risk and causing large numbers of rental properties to suddenly no longer be able to be rented. Well if the members opposite had actually taken the trouble to read the bill they would understand that there is a 5-year phase-in period. Every time a new tenancy agreement is signed a landlord is required to meet the new prescribed standards. On average a tenancy agreement lasts 15 months so over that period of 5 years it is easy to see—I think most normal people would understand—that all of the rental properties would then be brought up to scratch.The second objection I heard from members opposite was that somehow this bill was going to result in rents going up. I ask those members to think about this. The estimated cost of retrofitting a standard three-bedroom New Zealand home with heat pumps and insulation would be about $5000 according to the experts. That is a $5000 cost that would have a 15-year lifetime—all right? Let us consider that the median rent in New Zealand is about $360 a week—that rental property a median New Zealand rental property would generate a gross revenue stream over those 15 years of more than $280000. So that is a $5000 outlay to bring the house up to minimum standards to ensure it is not a health hazard for the people living in it as compared with a gross revenue stream over the same time period of more than $280000. On top of that we all know that what sets rents is supply and demand—all right? That is why over the last decade rents have been relatively static in most New Zealand markets—because there is a decent supply of rental properties. So supply and demand is going to mean—Brett Hudson: Rents are going to go up.PHIL TWYFORD: —that rents will not necessarily go up and the member cannot predict that with any confidence. It is not at all true to suggest that this bill will put rents up.Government members also tried to say that the bill has unclear standards but what the bill says is that the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority will be mandated to set standards taking into account the economic and social reality of the day and it will be required to update those standards regularly to ensure that they have a positive effect. So the arguments put up by the Government members simply do not stack up.So why does National oppose this bill? I think actually that Pattrick Smellie the journalist had a very interesting theory about why National does not support this bill. What he said was that National’s electoral base tends to include large numbers of small non-professional landlords and National believes it would be politically unpalatable for it to be associated with regulating landlords. What the members opposite seem to be completely oblivious to is that the New Zealand Property Investors Federation has said that this bill is a sensible and pragmatic measure. It supports it. So what is National doing by voting against this bill? It is standing on the side of the worst bottom-of-the-barrel ratbag landlords who are content to compete against other landlords by renting out slums—cold damp housing that is not fit for people to live in. National stands with those people.Labour and the Opposition parties on this side of the House stand with professional landlords who want to rent out good quality houses. We stand on the side of the one-third of New Zealanders who rent. One-third of the New Zealand people live in rental properties. They need warm dry homes for their kids to grow up in but National members do not understand that. They are happy to stand on the side of slum landlords and against ordinary New Zealanders who want their kids to grow up in warm dry homes.A party vote was called for on the question That the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill be now read a first time.Ayes 60New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 11; Māori Party 2; United Future 1.Noes 60New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1.The vote was equal.Motion not agreed to.The House adjourned at 9.54 p.m.