Robertson GrantHon GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm just taking the opportunity of a call in the second reading—DEPUTY SPEAKER: That is a split call. This is a split call?Hon Member: Yes.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes it is.Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Ah! It is. Fair enough. I'm taking the opportunity—I don't know who I'm splitting it with but that's good. I might split it with myself. We'll see how we go. But I did just want to take an opportunity in the second reading to raise the point that at this stage we would normally be discussing what had been put up at select committee from the many members of the public who would have come forward and put in submissions about what they felt about the disestablishment of the Productivity Commission. I imagine we would have been overwhelmed at the Finance and Expenditure Committee by members of the ACT Party saying What are you doing destroying this thing that Rodney Hide brought to Parliament?" They'd be coming and saying "What's going on here? We heard our leader David Seymour talk about all the great reports that the Productivity Commission had produced and for some reason there's a piece of legislation here disestablishing it." I think members of the public would have enjoyed that opportunity to come forward to this House and put their views on the table but they are not being given the opportunity to do that. I have heard many times while I have been in this House David Seymour rail about the use of urgency and I do want to quote from him towards the end of 2020 when a bill was being passed in urgency. And he says the reason for urgency that was given by the Leader of the House on this legislation is "Well we campaigned on it and we want to do it really quickly." So forget checks and balances and forget the right of the public to have a say; it's another case of "We won. You lost. Eat that!"So adding to the layers of irony and hypocrisy that have been present in the House tonight is the Minister in charge of this bill—who used to rail about the use of urgency who used to tell us it was undemocratic not to give the public a say—here tonight with a silly and sad piece of legislation that he hasn't even sought to justify. If we take the Hon James Shaw's guidance here this is a bill about disestablishing the Productivity Commission. All we've heard from around the House tonight is that the Productivity Commission is a good body that's done some good things. Mr Shaw has offered up some ideas about how it could be changed. Those are indeed the kinds of things that could have been considered at a select committee when we had this bill. Is it time to change the way the commissioners are appointed? Is it time to change the way in which the Government has to respond to a Productivity Commission report? What other ways could we engage? When this was first done there was a lot of talk about engaging with Australia and the Australian Productivity Commission doing joint inquiries. Why haven't we done that? What could we do to facilitate more work in that area? All of those options—ironically the kind of thing that you might see in a regulatory impact statement if there had been a regulatory impact statement for this bill—are not here at all.The only other point I really want to make in the second reading speech is the false equivalence of the Productivity Commission's work and the work of a ministry of regulation. The idea that somehow or other one is an automatic replacement for the other is utterly ridiculous. There may well be a case for a ministry of regulation; I look forward to hearing it made by Mr Seymour at some point. But the case for the Productivity Commission is actually about big-picture thinking. It's about grabbing the big ideas and talking about how we can then translate those into things that improve productivity.Actually on a serious point—and this was a point made in the first reading; I think it may have been by Mark Patterson—every Government in New Zealand has faced the productivity challenges that New Zealand has and we've all worked to try to improve them and we all continue to do that. To have an institution that actually supports that conversation provides the big-picture issues gives people an opportunity to input on that and gives its thoughts and recommendations to the Government is a different job than a ministry of regulation. It's a different job than the Ministry for Primary Industries. And the fact that the ACT Party are prepared to trade that away for the vanity project that is the ministry of regulation that David Seymour has put forward is indeed very sad."