Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Minister for Climate Change): Thank you Mr Speaker. Here we are again: a group of members of Parliament attempting to avoid the embarrassment of riches that occasionally accidentally shower down upon us once every few years—trying to correct for mistakes made by the last Parliament on this matter. I imagine Mr Speaker as you've just pointed out remembering the changes in the early 1990s that you've been through versions of this debate many many times over. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could actually work out a way to get it sorted and not have to deal with it every Parliament?I had the dubious pleasure of being in the Parliament in 2015 when we debated the last set of changes that were pushed through under urgency which pegged MP remuneration increases to the Public Service rate. I have to say I said at the time that this is what would happen—that we would end up with even faster rates of increases if we pegged them to the Public Service rate than we would if we'd pegged them to the median rate because that's the way things happen. And that is actually what happened. So here we are attempting to unwind something that we pushed through under urgency in 2015 when you then had a group of members of Parliament attempting to unpick a piece of algebra late in the night none of which made much sense. The inevitable thing happened and here we are attempting to fix that by restoring the law to the way it was prior to 2015.I want to commend the Minister Iain Lees-Galloway for the work that he has done across the House to get us to this point. He will know that the Green Party has quite strong views about MP pay and I will state them again for the sake of the House because we are supporting the bill because it is an improvement. It does reverse the error that was made in 2015 but it doesn't do what we would like it to do. The Green Party believes and has believed for a very long time that what we should do is peg MP remuneration to the nominal change in the median weekly income of all New Zealanders according to the household labour force survey (HLFS)—not the percentage but the actual nominal amount. What that would then do is it would give members of Parliament a really crystal clear idea of what is going on out there in the rest of the country in terms of the movement in people's actual real lives. If you want the House of Representatives to be representative I think that one of the places that you could start would be for MPs to have an awareness in very real terms of what changes are going on in the median weekly wage.One of the things that should change about this bill in our view would be to remove the clause that says that MPs' pay cannot go down it can only go up. If you peg MPs' pay to the nominal change in the median weekly wage according to all income sources according to the HLFS then MPs' pay could go down because actually the median weekly wage has in times past gone down. If we are going through tough times as a country and the median wage goes down I believe and the Green Party believes that actually MPs' pay should also go down to reflect that. It gives us a sense of reality about what's going on in the world.So those are changes that we would like to see to this bill. We will be supporting it through the House but we would be very keen in the subsequent stages to engage in a debate with our colleagues across the House about what we think is a measure which would both in very real terms tie us to the average Kiwi the average New Zealand family but also I think help to close the gap because you have to understand that members of Parliament are in the top 2 percent of salary earners in the entire country. As long as we keep getting percentage increases that gap only increases—it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger all of the time between us and the average. So if we were to say Well we're going to tie our remuneration to the nominal changes."—not the percentage increase but the actual cash amount and the changes in the median wage—then what would happen is that over time our salaries would flatten out and the gap between us and the median would start to close. Again I think that that would give us a better sense of reality.To give you an illustration: at the moment a backbench MP earns just under $165000. If our proposal had been in place since 2011 a backbench MP's pay would be $11000 lower than it is today: just a nudge over $150000. Therefore obviously the gap would be closer to the median than it is today. So I think that that is a proposal that we have debated a number of times and that we have put to the House and we will put it to the House again through the various stages of this bill. I think given that Parliament consistently does seem to get it wrong on this issue but given that nobody else is around to change the law on this other than Parliament actually we would like that proposal to warrant serious consideration.So those are the changes that we'll be looking for. As a number of other speakers have mentioned there is a change in this bill that we think is a very good idea which is the idea of shifting from annual changes to simply one per parliamentary term. We think that that makes a lot of sense. It means that if it does come up for debate it only comes up for debate once every three years rather than every year and you don't get into the kind of silly situation that we've had of freezing and then debating and then changing the system and then finding out that that didn't work and then freezing them again and going through the whole goat rodeo and wasting an enormous amount of time on behalf of the relevant Minister who has been saddled with the task of attempting to unpick this at least for this parliamentary term until we go at it again next parliamentary term.So again I just wanted to say we are supporting the bill. We do think that the system that was in place prior to the changes in 2015 is better than those changes that were introduced in 2015. However that system itself was flawed and we would like to see further changes to the bill and to the way that MPs get paid and we think that that would only be fair. Thank you Mr Speaker.Bill read a first time. Bill referred to the Education and Workforce Committee."