Shaw James: Remuneration Authority (Members of Parliament Remuneration) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: Remuneration Authority (Members of Parliament Remuneration) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2337. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Green): I would like to start by thanking the public servants who helped to draft the legislation and who were in here later tonight after hours to help guide it through the House. It must have been hard for them to hear the Minister say that one of the motivations for this bill was to hold down their wages in the future.I think that there are a number of flaws with this bill. The Government’s motivation for tying MPs’ remuneration to that of the public sector specifically is one of them. In saying to public servants and teachers and firefighters and doctors and nurses and so on that we are going to tell members of Parliament that they should be afraid of the public backlash on their own pay in order to hold down your pay is I think absolutely outrageous and it is one of the reasons why we are opposed to this bill.It is poor-quality legislation—we can see that. We have no idea what the actual impact of this will be. There was no regulatory impact statement. We brought numbers to this House analysing what we knew of the bill last week. We brought numbers to the House that showed what the changes would have been under both of our Supplementary Order Papers but the Minister did not do that. We have actually not been shown by the Government what the actual impact of this legislation would be. So we are about to pass a bill and we do not actually know what it is and as a number of people have said most people in this House who are voting for it do not know what the algebraic equation in the bill actually means—what it says. It is a shocking piece of lawmaking.That is in large part because it is being passed under urgency and I would like to say that the National Government has had 6 long years to do something about what is now considered a burning issue. Six long years—long years—in which it has done absolutely nothing until the last 10 days when all of a sudden it was so important it was so important that we had to use urgency as if this was some kind of national emergency. It is not a national emergency; it is an emergency for National. This is not worthy of an abuse of this process. The Minister has provided no case for this bill to come through under urgency. We could have put this through under a normal legislative programme. We could have had select committee stages we could have heard the evidence we could have heard from the public we could have weighed the options and we would have had a much higher-quality bill where people actually understood what the impact was going to be when they voted for it. They would have actually understood that but tonight instead we are going to vote on a bill it is going to pass and we have no idea what it is actually going to do except in some kind of theory.I would like to thank Labour and New Zealand First in particular and I would also like to thank the Māori Party for its gracious words about the Supplementary Order Papers that we put forward in Metiria Turei’s name. We know that because this is such a poor-quality piece of legislation—a number of MPs have said this—we will be back in the House talking about this legislation before too long because we know that it is busted. So we will be fixing it and we will be calling on those who supported us tonight on those Supplementary Order Papers for their support to fix the legislation and to tie MP remuneration to the New Zealand median wage which would tie MPs’ economic interests to those of all New Zealanders. If we were to do that our pay would rise and fall with the pay of the country as a whole.So we have made that case we appreciate that it has been listened to by both sides of the House and we have done everything that we can on this one. We will continue to hold that flame alive. We will not be voting for this bill although some people have said that this is some kind of improvement on the status quo. But we will not be voting for something that is such an appalling abuse of process and such a poor-quality piece of legislation. It is better to retain the status quo and to allow that to happen than it is to put through such a shoddy piece of legislation. We will be looking forward to the next time—and I cannot imagine it will be too long—that we have to address this. Thank you.