Turei Metiria: New Zealand International Convention Centre Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTurei Metiria: New Zealand International Convention Centre Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 06 November 2013. Volume:694;Page:14424. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): I am very pleased to take the first of a number of calls on this legislation the New Zealand International Convention Centre Bill. I have a number of amendments to this bill in Part 2 but here in Part 1 I am particularly concerned about the purpose clause and the apparent overarching purpose of this legislation which is to provide economic benefits to New Zealanders. We have had a very close look at the economic benefits from the papers that have been provided to us and I can tell you now that I do not know whether Mr Key and Mr Joyce deliberately misinformed the House over the number of jobs that would be created but they certainly did misinform the House. There is no paper that is available to anyone but them—perhaps they are still keeping that one secret—that describes the number of jobs as they have said. They have claimed 800 jobs as a result of the final convention centre and they have claimed 1000 jobs that will be created as part of its construction. This is supposedly part of the great economic benefit to New Zealanders from this deal. Well let us just have a look at the information that has been provided.They first relied on the Horwath report. There is nothing in the Horwath report that describes those numbers of jobs. They then relied on the KordaMentha report that was produced earlier this year. That report does say that it looked at the economic benefits. It does not describe 800 jobs in the convention centre or 1000 jobs in the construction phase—Hon Trevor Mallard: They relied entirely on Skycity for information.METIRIA TUREI: That is right Mr Mallard. The report says: “The financial analysis of both the NZICC and the regulatory concessions are based on an Excel Model dated 18 April 2013 … prepared by SkyCity.” So the KordaMentha report was based entirely on information from the one organisation that is about to get hundreds of millions of dollars of benefit from this deal. Still that report does not talk about 800 jobs in the convention centre or 1000 jobs in its construction.Then we look to the Government’s own information that it provides to the public to help inform the public around the economic benefits of this deal and we go to the regulatory impact statement which provides that information. We see here actually the description of the 800 jobs and the 1000 jobs. It says here in paragraph 9 of the regulatory impact statement that “(… around 800 people) would be employed by the convention centre with up to 1000 workers employed in the construction phase.” and then there is a little note footnote 8 on the regulatory impact statement. So let us look at footnote 8 to see where the evidence is that shows that there will be 800 jobs and 1000 jobs. That little footnote refers to two things. It refers first to table 1 in a New Zealand Institute of Economic Research report and it also refers to information that has been supplied to the Government by Skycity. It says “(… received from a leading NZ-based contractor)” but it does not provide the paper it does not provide the name of that contractor and it does not provide the evidence.Let us have a look first at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research paper that the regulatory impact statement refers to as justification for this misleading—and I stillthink deliberately misleading—statement around job creation. What does the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research paper say? Oh it does not say 800 jobs in the convention centre. It does not say 1000 jobs in the construction of the convention centre. Actually it says that there will be 380 full-time jobs in construction and 340 full-time equivalents once the convention centre is operating. So somehow Skycity has created out of who knows what—thin air—an additional 160 people who will apparently be working at the convention centre and an extra 600 people have been invented by Skycity and agreed to by the Government as evidence to back up this claim of 1000 jobs in construction. This is a deliberate attempt to mislead New Zealanders on the economic impacts of this deal. John Key and Steven Joyce have spent months and months and months telling New Zealanders that there are thousands of jobs in this convention centre and yet the only piece of genuinely independent advice that this Government has and the only genuine advice that it has released to the public says that they are not telling the truth. There simply are not the jobs that they claim.So what are we giving up here? What are we giving up in exchange for this misinformation about job creation? I can give you some numbers of some other people who will be affected by the legislation—people who will not have any choices about how they are involved people who will actually be harmed by this legislation. They are the 6500 children who the Government’s own papers say are likely to be harmed by the problem gambling that is caused by this deal—6500 children. Those children do actually exist. They are not the made-up people—the made-up workers—whom Skycity and the Government have been talking about. They are children whose lives will be affected and in some cases very damaged for most of their lives as a result of this deal.Where do they sit? Where is the analysis of the economic impact on them the social impact on them from this deal? Actually there is not any. The Government looked to KordaMentha for some of this information. KordaMentha said that it was not engaged to assess the social harm of this deal. The Minister for Economic Development himself has said that he sought no advice on the economic harm that could be caused by this deal. I do not know whether he is telling the truth frankly because there have been so many mistruths told around this deal. Maybe he did seek the advice and is not prepared to release it. Maybe he did not seek the advice because he does not want to know. All he has been prepared to talk about are the mistruths around the job creation and not the reality for the 6500 children who his own advisers have said will be affected by this legislation. Where is their voice here? Is it only the Opposition that cares about the 6500 New Zealand children who could be affected by this bill? There is no way that it is justifiable to claim any kind of economic benefit from this deal when the numbers of jobs are being deliberately made up and spread around the country and when the real numbers of the people actually affected are being ignored by the people who are making the decisions.There is a whole range of economic advice that comes from this legislation and out of the papers that have been released and all of it flies in the face of the statements made by the Government. Even if we just want to look at comparisons we have comparisons for example with convention centres overseas. The 3500 capacity convention centre in Sydney employs only 200 full-time equivalents not the 800 that Steven Joyce and John Key are claiming. Melbourne’s 5000 capacity convention centre employs just 133 people full-time. It has 270 casual workers and 130 full-timers and yet Steven Joyce somehow thinks that a smaller centre here in New Zealand is going to employ 800 people. He is actually interested in the deal being done not in the reality for New Zealanders and for Aucklanders. He is not prepared to tell the country the whole story around the genuine economic impacts and the genuine economic harm. Why does he mistrust New Zealanders so much? Why does he believe that New Zealanders are too stupid to identify these failings these mistruths in what he has said? Why will he not tell the truth? If it issuch a good deal why keep information secret? Why not tell New Zealanders the truth about the jobs? Maybe New Zealanders will think that it is still worth it if there are 340 jobs not 800. Maybe they will. What is the harm in treating New Zealanders like they are intelligent people who can make a genuine assessment about the effects good and bad of this convention centre? Why put all this spin and mistruth over it? It is because there is an inherent mistrust by this Government of New Zealanders and New Zealanders’ ability to assess the information and to make an intelligent decision about what they think is necessary.We do not want a Government that does that. We do not want a Government that treats New Zealanders in such a shabby way. We do not want a Government that is going to put 6500 children at risk for at best 18 new jobs in the New Zealand economy. That is what the research actually says. That is what the table that the Government has referred to actually says. There will be 18 new jobs in the New Zealand economy—