Lees-Galloway Iain: Remuneration Authority (Members of Parliament Remuneration) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Remuneration Authority (Members of Parliament Remuneration) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2319. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): I have learnt something interesting during the course of this debate and over the last few days and that is that according to the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety pay rises in the public sector are a bad thing.Dr Megan Woods: What?IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Pay rises in the public sector are a bad thing according to Minister Woodhouse. This came up when the National Party’s pet blogger David Farrar started blogging around the issues of connecting MPs’ pay to public sector salaries. In particular he identified that there were periods of time in recent history when MPs’ pay rises would have been higher had they been tagged to the pay increases the public sector got. The Minister turned round and said that that was all Labour’s fault—that that was the result of a profligate Labour Government that seemed to believe in this bizarre notion that nurses and doctors and teachers and the Defence Force—Sue Moroney: And the police.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: —and the police force deserve a pay rise and that it is somehow a bad idea that these people should be paid a reasonable wage for the work they do. Of course one of the things that is important to note about a lot of those professions is they are quite heavily unionised which means that these are people who have got—[Interruption]—I do not know whether or not that means that the National Party thinks they are bad people but it does mean they have got the strength of collective bargaining. So if some of those groups did well in their bargaining—Paul Foster-Bell: Union thugs. Hired goons and the union thugs.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: So teachers according to Paul Foster-Bell are union thugs. The police are union thugs. Firefighters are union thugs. Nurses are union thugs. That is the language we get from the National Party—even the quiet little church mouse Paul Foster-Bell calls nurses “union thugs”. There you have it ladies and gentlemen. That is the approach we get from the National Party. The fact that these unionised workforces were able to negotiate for themselves good pay rises and the fact that the National Party thinks that that was a bad thing give us I think some insight into some of the employment relations legislation changes we have seen over the last few years deliberately designed to suppress wages by curtailing the influence and the bargaining power of the unions. So that I think tells us a lot about what the National Party thinks about the public sector getting pay rises.Hon Paula Bennett: Give it a bit more—you haven’t quite exaggerated enough. Take it to another level. Take your exaggeration to another level.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Paula I simply quoted your own member back to you. I cannot exaggerate his words. I cannot exaggerate his words. He told me what he thought. He told me what he thought and I repeated those words back to him. I would hardly call that ramping it up.This bill does seek to do a good thing. The problem is that the mechanism it uses is poor and the process that has been used to bring this legislation before the House is extremely poor. This is an issue that has been around for a long time. As soon as John Key became the Prime Minister one of the first things I remember him talking about was the issue of MPs’ pay rises and them potentially being disproportionate when compared with the pay increases he expected ordinary working people—people who depend on work to make a living—would actually be able to get in New Zealand. So he has had 6 years—getting on 7 years—to do something about this issue.The latest round of pay increases obviously did not do very well in the polling. When David Farrar went out there and did the polling when they ran the focus groups over the weekend clearly there was a significant backlash from the public around the latest pay increase and so they felt they had to do something. So after the Sunday afternoon focus group quickly they ran off to the officials and got a draft bill organised and it was quickly introduced to the House. As we know that draft bill was then sort of left on the table for a while as all the issues with it were sorted out. The National Party went back to the officials and tried to figure it out. It tried to figure out how to do this properly without a proper process where we actually hear from as Chris Hipkins said the Remuneration Authority.I would actually genuinely like to know whether the Minister has consulted with the Remuneration Authority and for that matter who else the Minister has consulted with about this. What outside advice has the Minister actually sought in order to get this legislation as right as possible given that it will not go to a select committee? We are not giving the officials the proper length of time to actually closely examine this legislation and make sure it is fit for purpose. The public have no opportunity to come and give us their view on this legislation. Organisations like the Remuneration Authority have no opportunity to come to a select committee and give us their views to make sure this legislation is fit for purpose. We have had experience in this House under this Government of rushed legislation in the past and we have had the experience of having to come back to the House sort it out and make it right. There are a number of ways in which members in Parliament tonight have questioned the mechanism that is being used.I would like to turn to the Green Party’s Supplementary Order Papers. As Chris Hipkins has outlined because the legislation in its final form arrived late the Supplementary Order Papers then came after that and we really have not had time to consider them. I take James Shaw’s sort of wheel of fortune approach. I appreciate his view that we are taking a bit of a gamble on the Government’s legislation—why not take a gamble on the Greens? The simple fact is that the Government does have the machinery of Government behind it. It has the best opportunity to get this right.Actually we in the Labour Party were looking at some similar Supplementary Order Papers particularly around the labour cost index. I think we were going in the same direction as the Greens were. We decided we did not want to muddle the process any more than it already was and we were going to have to rely on the Government and its superb officials who have been put under a lot of pressure to try to get this legislation right. That is the benefit of being in Government—you have the whole operation behind you to get these things right. We do not have the same level of support in the Opposition. So we will take a gamble on the Government’s legislation. We suspect though as I am sure the Green members suspect that although this might be a step in the right direction we are going to be back looking at this again some time in the near future.The fact is that the reason there is so much discontent out in the general public about what MPs get paid is that essentially people who work for a living have been under a pay freeze for the last 6 years. As costs have gone up—many of those costs driven by decisions made by this Government when it cut taxes for the extremely wealthy put GST up put the petrol tax up and put ACC levies up so it could achieve a phoney surplus. All of those things are driving costs up for working people; meanwhile they are not seeing their wages go up at the same rate. That is where the distress about MPs’ pay actually comes from. So if this Government wanted to do something about the things that are driving people’s concerns about MPs’ pay it would actually have a laser-like focus on ensuring that people who work for a living and who are on median wages actually saw some progress actually felt as though they were getting ahead in life and actually felt as though their wages and salaries were sufficient to make ends meet to pay the bills to put a roof over their heads to feed their children and to try to get ahead in life. If the Government had a focus on those things we probably would not have to be here debating this legislation tonight.I agree that actually tagging our wages to what the general working population gets would be a good incentive for us to have our focus in the right place. I think we will be back having a look at mechanisms like that sometime in the future. This is a step in the right direction as a response to the outrage cried out by the New Zealand public but it is legislation by focus group. It is rushed and it is muddled and my fear is that it is going to be just another mistake on this path and that we are going to be back trying to fix it up again in the future.