SpeechHon IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): Thank you very much Madam Chair. Well a range of points and questions made by members opposite which I'm happy to address as best as possible. First of all Mr Smith migrants are human beings; they are not labour units. What an appalling way to describe people. I think this tells the committee and any New Zealander listening to this debate about the mind-set of the National Party when it comes to any working people actually migrants or otherwise. Labour units"—those are the words he used to describe our migrant workforce. Just let's all reflect on that for a moment and think about the mind-set of the National Party—Chris Bishop: You're a disgrace.Hon IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: —and how once again—I'm not a disgrace Mr Bishop. I'm reminding the committee of the words that your colleague Mr Smith used. So let's all just reflect on that and remind ourselves why the National Party is not fit to govern because they describe human beings who want to come and work and live in New Zealand as labour units.The member then went on to say that the Immigration New Zealand restructure did—effectively what I think he was saying is it did not go as well as it could and I have to agree with him. I think it was a mixed bag—would be the best way to describe it. It was long planned as the member suggested. It was planned well in advance of the last election. It was planned based on some pretty flawed assumptions I have to say about what was going to happen in the immigration space. I've been working very hard to clean up the mess that I inherited from the previous Government in regards to that particular restructure.The member said that we needed a Minister who was faster to act on things like visa processing. Visa processing had been getting slower since 2014—2014 is when visa processing started to slow down. So the Minister who should have acted is actually sitting opposite us here Mr Michael Woodhouse.Hon Michael Woodhouse: The Minister's giving his best Pinocchio impression.Hon IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: No not at all Mr Woodhouse. The facts show that what I have just said is absolutely correct. Hon Michael Woodhouse: The Minister will be back and retreating.Hon IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: No I won't because I have the data to demonstrate it. Now then once Mr Smith had sat down we started getting some serious questions from Mr Seymour and I appreciate the questions that he asked. So the first one was around the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme. Look I think we just have a strong difference of opinion about the value of the capping of the system. I think it is important that we do have a cap on the system that there is enough incentive for those horticulture viticulture employers to employ New Zealanders first and one of those incentives is the cap that we place on the RSE scheme. But we have been working on improving the scheme. For instance last year we announced the cap increase much earlier than ordinarily happens. That I know was particularly appreciated by the strawberry growers. We also indicated what this year's increase would look like if certain things were met by the industry and that's a decision that we have to make relatively soon. Again I want to make it early in the year so that those employers have a bit more certainty. But it's true we are in a much different environment right now and actually a lot more of that picking and pruning and harvesting is being done by New Zealanders right now people who have recently been made unemployed and I suspect for the next couple of seasons we will see a lot more New Zealanders doing that work and we will have to take that into account when we're thinking about the way the RSE scheme works. But the member makes another good point which is that to offset that we're not going to see the same number of people coming from overseas. My response is that we're working closely with the industry to find solutions to both sides of that equation to make sure that the fruit continues to be picked that the vegetables continue to be harvested and that we continue to see the progress that we want to see in that industry despite some of the things that we've been facing.Mr Seymour then moved on to workplace relations matters. I just simply disagree with the way he describes the nature of fair pay agreements of industry-wide bargaining as some sort of closed-shop situation. That's not what they are at all. Or that the minimum wage stops people being able to get employment. There is absolutely no evidence that that is the case. In fact the OECD these days is actually advising that the best industrial relations settings that a nation can have are a mixture of individual agreements enterprise level collective agreements and sector level collective agreements and that that achieves the right balance of flexibility productivity and security and creates the opportunity for us to address the inequality issue that many developed—especially Western—nations face in wages across their economies. The OECD has changed its thinking on this it has to be said and I'd encourage the member to consider changing his thinking as well because as the facts and the evidence change our responses have to change over time as well. Just on the question of future minimum wages we've always said yes it's always been our ambition to get the minimum wage to $20 an hour by next year but that every year we would take into account economic conditions. It does remain our ambition it is a priority for this Government but obviously we will be looking at economic conditions and we will be looking at wage movement over the next months and year as we consider what future minimum wage increases might look like. But this is a Government that is committed to increasing the minimum wage. We may have a high minimum wage relative to our median wage. That's only because our median wage is so low. We are a low-wage low-skill economy and that is one of the major structural changes that this Government has been seeking to address. The member rightly asked: what are we doing about upskilling and reskilling? I don't think we inherited a situation from the previous Government where we are able to upskill and reskill as quickly as we need to. That is why the Minister of Education Chris Hipkins has embarked on significant reform of our vocational education system. It's why we are trying to join up our immigration system our training systems our education system and our welfare system so that we can do a much better job of this than has been occurring in the past. I can assure the member that a lot of those discussions which have been sort of framed in the context of the future of work are very much the "here and now" of work and the Government is considering what further changes need to be made in order to ensure that people get the ability to retrain and upskill and pick up the new jobs that will grow in the recovering economy. Mr Woodhouse asked about the liability of the employer under the Health and Safety at Work Act. As the former Minister he will well know that the obligation on the employer is to take all reasonable and practicable steps to ensure the health and safety of their employees and should it ever come to a matter of WorkSafe investigating whether or not someone has taken those reasonable and practicable steps that the guidelines the advice the evidence that is available will be taken into account when doing that. But WorkSafe has been working proactively with individual businesses and with sectors to make sure that they have as much information and are supported as well as they can be to be able to provide safe and healthy workplaces for their businesses. I have received advice on the question of whether people could get cover for contracting COVID-19 in the workplace. The question of treatment injury is an interesting one and the answer simply is: potentially yes depending on the circumstances. There's the three-step test that the member will be well aware of—again as a former Minister—and depending on the circumstances yes potentially someone who contracts COVID-19 as a result of their work may potentially be covered by ACC and they would have to go through the usual process in making an application for that.The question of variation of conditions for visas: as members are probably aware we've done this in essential services. We are certainly turning our minds to what needs to happen again to support the recovery to ensure that we have the workforce that we need to support that recovery. But I will just in the last few seconds that I have available to me respond to the final point that the member made: what does immigration policy look like going forward? Well I think it's good that we have made the changes to the temporary visa policy that we have. I'd like to see those implemented. I've said to Immigration New Zealand that I'd like to see those implemented as quickly as possible. If there's any opportunity to accelerate those I'd like to see that happen because I think they set us up well to be able to have an immigration system which responds to the new labour market reality which is that we do have far more New Zealanders who are unemployed. Migrants will be part of the recovery. There will be skills that we do not have here in New Zealand but we do need our training systems to ensure that New Zealanders are able to get work where it becomes available."