O'Connor SimonSIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I oppose the motion. I had written notes here actually that I was both delighted and dismayed about this bill. But now I actually am actually—if one can be actually" and "actually" at the same time—outraged. This bill is an affront to the parliamentary democracy of this House. It's an affront for two reasons: (1) it's an amendment an amendment to a bill—and I will expand on this further—that this side of the House warned the Government about and now what we find is the Associate Minister for Social Development stands in the House and says that this amendment this bill is going to be rushed through the House so that even less than one month from now it must be reported back and I'm going to take the next few minutes to outline why this side of the House is absolutely outraged.This bill is fixing a problem—or actually two problems—which this side of the House in an earlier sitting of the Parliament noted pointed out cajoled; we spent hours hours in this House pointing out that they the Government had it wrong around the 28 days. We pointed out there were issues around retirement villages and aged care. The Government and the Minister in particular ignored it—ignored it—and that sits on a further affront to this Parliament: that what started out as a social welfare rewrite bill agreed to in principle by all parties in the House was trumped at the last minute literally the last minutes with a 500-plus - page Supplementary Order Paper fronted to this Parliament with an array of changes including this winter energy payment which took what was a bill agreed in principle to now something highly political forced through—forced through—with no select committee oversight whatsoever. In other words the Act we were amending had no—and particularly for people at home it had no—oversight whatsoever by this Parliament and select committee.And this side of the House stood up time and time again and reminded the Minister whose ears clearly were closed that there were going to be problems—going to be problems. And lo and behold—lo and behold—possibly a little earlier than we thought here we are wasting the Parliament's time by putting through an amendment bill which could have been solved by going to select committee to allow the New Zealand public to come in to allow those in retirement villages to say "Hey there's a problem here." to have the people of New Zealand come in and say "Hey we might be overseas for more than 28 days. Can you actually look at the legislation?"But no there was an arrogance on behalf of this Government that first and foremost thought they should politicise a rewrite bill that didn't need to be. They were arrogant enough to dump 500-plus pages of amendments with no time—no time—for this Parliament to scrutinise and to deny the right of New Zealanders to speak. And then here we are today on a Thursday afternoon of all times to then drop an amendment bill with two changes. And I wonder how many more mistakes this Government has made so that we're going to end up with another amendment on top of another amendment because this is only two. We spent hours in this House pointing out a number of problems. So we will oppose this firmly and as I said at the start part of me was delighted; part of me dismayed—delighted because it's a case of "We told you so."—or "We told them so." being the Government. The National Party probably with the experience of Government and actually experience foresaw that there were going to be problems. So I am sort of delighted that we have a sort of gotcha moment here but I'm dismayed because we don't need to waste the Parliament's time and in fact what we don't need to do is retrospective legislation.And that's the other side of this bill: it's retrospective in a number of areas. And oh my for nine years in Government were we lectured to—lectured to—by the other side. In fact Chris Hipkins the Leader of the House said "simply imposing this"—being legislation that is retrospective—"by way of a legislative override … It is manifestly unjust. It is simply not right. Retrospective legislation is not right." Lectured to for years and now the Government is adding retrospective legislation so early on. But that's not the worst part—that's not the worst part. The Minister had the audacity to stand in the House 10 minutes ago and ask that this Parliament pass a shoddy piece of amending to a shoddy Supplementary Order Paper in under one month to effectively again deny the rights of New Zealanders to speak. That's what's happening here. It's an absolute affront to the parliamentary process of this House and it's unfortunately becoming a little bit of a thing if it's not questions in the House which are sidestepped or denied to legislation which appears at the last moment to legislation actually that has to be pulled back.In fact it was only two weeks ago on another social welfare bill—there's a bit of a theme developing in this ministry—that we had to have a bill return back to committee because there were errors. And lo and behold yet again this side of the House had said—had warned helpfully—the Minister: "Check it out." But we were told "No no. We know it all; we this Labour - whatever other party Government are going to just ram it through." There's a theme developing here right across the legislative process and certainly within the Ministry of Social Development that shoddy legislation has been brought to this House. It's been rammed through with no scrutiny and we would not have to waste the time of this House today to go through this amendment bill if the work had been done properly in the first place.So we oppose this bill. We oppose it strongly in principle and Mr Speaker as a signal we'll be back towards the conclusion of this debate to argue strongly for the right of New Zealanders to have their rightful normal period of time to speak about this bill not to have it rammed through in order to hide the incompetence of this Government."