Ross Jami-LeeJAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany): Thank you very much Mr Assistant Speaker and can I congratulate you and the other presiding officers on your election in this Parliament. I look forward to seeing you in the Chair for the next three years.Can I also congratulate the new members that undertook their maiden speeches throughout the course of this Address in Reply debate. There was a large number of new members. It's always great to see new members giving their maiden speeches here and telling us what they're about what they stand for and what they're going to be looking to achieve and I particularly want to congratulate the 10 new National MPs that all gave their maiden speeches as well. As a caucus we were very proud to see them stand on their feet for the first time and introduce themselves to the House and I'm sure they're going to achieve great things in their time here as members of Parliament.It's very good to be speaking in this debate and I'm certainly going to be supporting the amendment moved by the Leader of the Opposition. The reason why the Leader of the Opposition moved the amendment that he did was because there has been a huge amount of achievement that we were able to undertake in nine years as a National-led Government and we left this country in a far better place than we inherited it nine years prior. We also left the economy in a great shape. We left many of the civil and public services that we have in New Zealand like the education system and the health system in a much better state than we found them and there was a huge amount of achievement in the social sector for young people particularly and for families in this country.I share the Leader of the Opposition's view that this new Government we have opposite needs to be held to account for everything they do and ensure that they are delivering more for New Zealanders. They talked a big game. They went out there during the election campaign and said they were going to do a huge amount of things and now is the time to hold them to account on that. Not just members of Parliament on this side but members of the public in the community will be looking to ensure that the talk that they talked during the election campaign actually results in achievements for New Zealand and when they fail in receiving achievements through this new Government the public will be quick to say so and so will we.I have been reading and watching the progress of this new Government so far in the four or five weeks that they've been in office. We were told that there was going to be some big honeymoon period. Well I think they're going to be wondering where that honeymoon period is because so far they haven't done particularly well. I noticed that Kelvin Davis didn't spend any time on his feet during question time this week. We'll see whether he's going to have a go on Wednesday or Thursday. They'll probably make a good choice if they don't give him that opportunity. I see Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters are here to answer questions this time—probably a wise move on their part too. But we saw very quickly during the first two weeks of Parliament that their number one in the team got them through the election but there wasn't a huge amount sitting there afterwards.I think what we're seeing as well is that this Government is not able to deliver on the rhetoric that they had during the election campaign. The big talk that they had and all the promises that they had in the election campaign are not coming to fruition. In fact I think very soon in the new year we're going to be talking about this Government as the Government of broken promises—the Government that talks big but doesn't achieve anything.The first thing I want to talk about—I was looking through the coalition agreement between the Green Party and the Labour Party and I stumbled across this very interesting set of information. The two parties agree to Strengthen New Zealand's democracy by increasing public participation openness and transparency around official information." Well how does the Green Party stay in the Government with the Labour Party and those other Ministers from New Zealand First when the very simple set of accountabilities that they should have to this House the Government is ignoring?Ministers are refusing to be accountable to this House. We see during question time that people like Winston Peters not able to answer a straight question but we also know that the written question system is a situation where they're not prepared to even say what they've been doing. They will not say to the public what they've—Jan Logie: The hypocrisy—the hypocrisy!JAMI-LEE ROSS: Calm down Jan Logie. You know you might get a chance to be a Minister one day—you never know. She's not right now. But accountability to this Parliament is so very important.I also want to understand a bit more about the Green Party's view on democracy and accountability and transparency. You see we learnt through an email to a journalist that the Green Party is prepared to trade away electoral law in this country to get a public holiday. This is the party that stood up day after day in this Parliament and talked about the sanctity of electoral law. They talked about the fact that such basic institutions of New Zealand should be respected so wholeheartedly and here they are saying amongst their colleagues—they didn't expect it to get out to the media—that they're prepared to trade away electoral law.What else are those parties prepared to trade away? We don't know that because Winston Peters who said he'd make this secret deal public is now refusing to do so. The Prime Minister stood in the Beehive theatrette and danced on the head of a pin talking about the fact that it was just notes and it didn't mean all that much. Those 38 pages or 33 pages—depending on which font it's in and depending on which ministerial staff member changed the font in the system—tell us exactly what the Government's going to be up to but we don't know because they don't believe they're accountable to the public.They don't believe in transparency. They've abandoned already in their first few weeks of being in office public accountability and transparency and they want to trade away electoral law just to stay in office because Winston Peters knows that his party won't be happy with many of the things they've agreed to and he's concerned—Fletcher Tabuteau: Whatever.JAMI-LEE ROSS: —his MPs will jump. Is he concerned that Mark Patterson is going to jump? Is he concerned that the other MPs—Fletcher Tabuteau; is he going to jump? Fletcher Tabuteau is quite a talent. No wonder he needs a law to ensure talented people like that remain in his party when they know what's in that secret agreement. No one else does.The other broken promises are racking up pretty fast as well. They promised a billion trees. Now we're hearing it's going to be only about half a billion.We heard year after year how the Labour Party was going to send down someone into Pike River—into the mine. Well now they've adopted the National Party position of saying they'll do that but if it's safe. That is the correct decision to make. We stand by our view and we welcome the Labour Party's coming to the party on that particular situation.What about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)? Oh we were going to hear about how the Labour Party was going to go in tough and they were going to release everything and they were going to completely change the deal and ensure that all the nasty stuff that the National Party put into TPP wasn't going to exist. What's the situation now? They changed a few words in the title. Now apparently it's a whole new deal. Well Labour has failed on those promises so far.I want to talk a little bit about Manus Island as well because it appears that that is the number one foreign policy goal of the new Labour Government—ensuring that that nasty Australian Government does something about the refugees on Manus Island. At the same time that the Prime Minister was overseas talking about ensuring that 150 refugees could come to New Zealand we were debating in this Parliament whether fathers could have access to the same paid parental leave system as those that mother children. I want to know why the Labour Party was so opposed to fathers having access to paid parental leave at the same time as the mother of the children and why the Labour Party was happy to say they're unhappy about that whilst the Prime Minister was talking about how she wanted to bring 150 refugees to New Zealand. Why does the Prime Minister of New Zealand care more about 150 men on Manus Island than about the fathers in this country that want to take paid parental leave with the mother of their children? That's the reality of it.While we were talking about paid parental leave and having an equal opportunity for fathers to have that paid parental leave alongside the mother of their children for various reasons that'll be important to their family the Prime Minister was out there talking about bringing in refugees from Manus Island. Good on her—it was a National Party view as well—but I have to say that seeing the two sitting there side by side in the newspaper wasn't something I felt particularly comfortable with.We've seen other promises like KiwiBuild being abandoned somewhat in that they're not going to be building the houses they said they would but they're going to buy most of them—another failed promise. The police officers that Stuart Nash said were going to be imported from overseas—they were going to have this big programme to get 1800 police officers coming into this country—already he's backtracking on that as well. And the immigration changes—we heard week after week during the election campaign from New Zealand First about how they were going to stop all those immigrants coming into the country because those nasty immigrants were buying up all the land as foreigners. They're back-tracking on that as well.So I want to know why the Labour Party and the Green Party and the New Zealand First Party believe they can hold this together for three years. I want to know what's in that secret deal because the public deserves to know. I want to know why those backbenchers up there aren't asking to see publicly that deal so they know what they've signed up for and I want to know why this Government believes it can horse-trade away something so important like electoral law. So far this is the Government of broken promises. This is a Government that is not going to achieve everything it said it would at the election campaign and we're right here to hold them to account. Thank you."