Hipkins Chris: Standards and Accreditation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Standards and Accreditation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 04 November 2014. Volume:701;Page:499. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I am happy to take a fairly brief call on this standards legislation. I want to say that the Labour Party will be supporting the bill’s referral to the select committee and we look forward to the debate. We do have some further things that we will be looking for clarification on at such time as we get to have those hearings.The Standards and Accreditation Bill is long overdue. I think there are many elements of it that the New Zealand public should be very supportive of. I think that when we talk about standards though we should be clear what we are talking about. Standards impact on every part of our day-to-day lives whether they are building standards the standards for appliances we purchase or standards related to workplaces.One of the reasons that standards are important from an employee perspective is that there is a significant health and safety factor. One of things that the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions has quite rightly raised with regard to this review is its desire to see union and worker representation in the development process for standards. I actually think this is very very important. If you look at health and safety in the workplace for example take an industry that I have become familiar with in the last few months—the forestry sector. I think we do need to have workers much more involved in the development of standards within the forestry sector because we need to get that wider buy-in to what has been going on there. If we are going to address health and safety in the forestry sector then it will need to involve all the players in the forestry sector. I think that is a good example of why making sure that the standards that get set have good buy-in and are well supported. So that is the first point I would like to make. I am going to be looking as this bill progresses to ensure that there is adequate worker representation throughout the process. You will have to forgive me Mr Deputy Speaker. I have somewhat of a rusty throat today.I do want to also then talk about—Kris Faafoi: Rusty?CHRIS HIPKINS: —rusty very rusty—the importance of the independence from Government. When it comes to setting standards we know that if this was left up to the current Government the standards would be moved every day. One of the critical things about standards is that you set standards so that there is a reliable benchmark so that people know where they stand and yet we do not seem to have that with the Government. For example a classic case in point—Simon O’Connor: A national standard.CHRIS HIPKINS: Well national standards are a great example. National standards would not survive the scrutiny that this bill proposes. National standards are neither national nor standard so they would fail at the first hurdle. But then John Key’s standards for Ministers would also fail at the first hurdle because they change depending on who the Minister is. For example we know that there was a certain level of standard for Judith Collins. She seemed to manage to get away with a lot of stuff then suddenly the standards changed and she was out. It was the same with Maurice Williamson—suddenly he was out. We had examples today where John Key fails to meet his own standards but apparently that is OK because when he did not meet his own standards he was not acting as Prime Minister; he was acting as leader of the National Party so therefore the standard really depends on which hat he is wearing at the time. I think that having independence from Government when it comes to setting standards is very important because we know where we stand so to speak when standards are set by an independent body. We certainly do not know where we stand when they are set by this current National Government.So we will be looking forward to seeing this bill progress through. There are some very positive aspects to it. When I started at the beginning I mentioned that this bill was very long overdue. There was of course a bill drafted in 2008 by the previous Labour Government. It was all ready to go and that of course was stalled by the current National Government for 6 years. It is now finally getting around to progressing this legislation and I think that that will be a welcome thing. There were 6 years of reviews discussions submissions and inaction overall but that seems to be the case with this Government. It is quite often very lost in what it is trying to do. It just has another review—another consultation process another review and nothing ever gets done. We are pleased to see that this bill is now finally progressing. I think that we will be following the debate very closely. Thank you very much.