Volume 619 Week 64 - Thursday 12 August 2004 
Volume 619 Week 64 - Thursday 12 August 2004 
[Volume:619;Page:14875] 
Thursday 12 August 2004 
Mr Speaker 
 took the Chair at 2 p.m. 
Prayers 
. 
Visitors 
Queensland Australia—Hon Gordon Nuttall MP and Delegation  from Legislative Assembly 
Mr SPEAKER 
: I have much pleasure in informing members that the Hon Gordon Nuttall MP Minister for Health Queensland Australia is within the precincts of this Chamber. I am sure that members would wish that he be welcomed and accorded a seat on the left of the Chair. We also welcome members of his delegation from the Legislative Assembly of Queensland who are present in the gallery. 
Ministerial Statements 
Army—Vehicle Accident 
Hon MARK BURTON (Minister of Defence) 
: 
 Yesterday afternoon two Burnham-based soldiers were killed in a vehicle accident on Banks Peninsula. A third soldier was seriously injured and is at present in a stable condition in Christchurch Hospital. The soldiers were on a driving training course when the accident happened. These two tragic deaths happened during an exercise to prepare our personnel for the often dangerous situations they face overseas. I can tell members that a court of inquiry is already under way and as is normal in such circumstances there will also be a police inquiry. Obviously therefore it is inappropriate for me to comment any further on any details relating to the accident. At this time our thoughts are with the families of the two soldiers who died and with the injured soldier as well as with their colleagues. I know that all members would join me in expressing their deepest sympathy to the families and loved ones of those involved in this tragic accident. 
Business Statement 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Leader of the House) 
: 
 Next week the House will go into a 1-week adjournment. When the House resumes on Tuesday 24 August priority will be given to the third reading of the Appropriation (2004/05 Estimates) Bill which combined with an Imprest Supply Bill is a 3-hour debate; the remaining stages of the Electricity and Gas Industries Bill; and the second reading of the Maori Fisheries Bill. The first Wednesday back is a members’ day. Members might also note that on Tuesday 31 August the first item of business will be the first reading of the Ngati Awa Claims Settlement Bill. 
GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 I wonder whether the Leader of the House could give us some indication as to whether the Government would be prepared to extend the time that the special select committee looking at the foreshore and seabed legislation has to report back to the House and assure the House that there is no intention to have that bill reported on its due date in order that it can be rushed through the House under urgency prior to the Privy Council hearing the case in London. 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Leader of the House) 
: 
 No it is not the intention to extend the time for hearings on that bill. While there seems to be a large number of submissions there also seems to be a large amount of repetition. 
Parliamentary Service Commission 
Membership 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Leader of the House) 
: 
 I move  
That pursuant to sections 15(1)(d) and 17(2)(a) of the Parliamentary Service Act 2000 Rodney Hide be appointed as a member of the Parliamentary Service Commission in place of the Hon Richard Prebble and Simon Power be appointed in place of John Carter and pursuant to section 15(1)(d) and (2)(a) of that Act Tariana Turia be appointed as a member of the commission 
. 
Motion agreed to. 
Questions to Ministers 
Powerco—Sale 
1. Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) 
 to the  
Minister of Finance 
: Has the Government got any concerns about the manner and details relating to the sale of Powerco; if so what are they? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Minister of Finance) 
: 
 As an application will be required for sale approval under the Overseas Investment Act I do not wish to comment on this matter at this stage. 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: Does the Minister feel threatened by the comment of one Mr Upson who said that any Government move to block this sale would be seen as being anti - foreign investment; how does the Minister explain that this decision was made without any consultation as required of those institutions by the Local Government Act; and is this sort of abuse of process one that this Government endorses? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: The chairman of the board made certain comments that I have since been assured were made in response to a false understanding of what I actually said in the House. So I do not propose to respond in kind to the comments that were made by the chairperson. On the other matters I say that the matter will be coming to me for consideration under the Overseas Investment Act so I have no intention of commenting any further on it. 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The Minister may be in charge of the Overseas Investment Commission and he may have future responsibilities but I am asking as a member of this House for answers and I do not think that the Minister can hide behind some future decision process and thereby negate the processes of this House. I want to know whether consultation is required under the Local Government Act with the local community and whether any of those matters have been brought to his attention. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: That is not a point of order because in actual fact the Minister can answer as he pleases. 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: Is the Minister aware of the provisions of the Local Government Act 2002: section 77 “Requirements in relation to decisions” and section 78 “Community views in relation to decisions” which has a prescription clause as to what community outcomes mean in respect of consultation; and does he think in any way that what has happened in respect of Powerco complies with the requirements of the Local Government Act? 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: I am sure I shall receive advice on the way the process has been undertaken when the papers arrive and when they do I will consider them carefully as I am bound to do. However as I say because I am going to be doing that I am not going to comment further on the matter at this point. 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The Minister has just outlined his case for not answering the House. He has not said he will give any old answer at all; he is just saying: “I am not going to comment.” Well frankly this House has a question time and Ministers cannot duck behind that. I know what the sub judice rule is and I know what the requirements are in respect of his duties as a Minister. But nevertheless he is duty bound if this House has any status in this country to reply and say what his answer is in respect of a much wider question—the question regarding the provisions of the Local Government Act and those in particular that relate to community advice and consultation. 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: I am not responsible for the Local Government Act or for those particular matters. I am responsible for consideration of an application under the Overseas Investment Act. I will take into account those matters that are deemed appropriate at the time but I am not going to comment on that process until I receive the material. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: I refer the member to Speaker’s ruling 144/6. 
Question No. 2 to Minister 
Mr SPEAKER 
: I have been advised by the Minister that because there are two quite lengthy parts to this question he will be giving a slightly longer answer than usual and I have said that is fine by me. 
Community Employment Group—Beneficiaries 
2.  
KATHERINE RICH (National) 
 to the  
Minister for Social Development and Employment 
: Does he stand by his response yesterday that Community Employment Group - funded advice to beneficiaries on “safeguarding their income without jeopardising their benefits” can be “helpful” and is he satisfied that programmes funded by the Community Employment Group are an acceptable use of taxpayer funding? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister for Social Development and Employment) 
: 
 Mr Speaker as you have said there are two distinct parts to the member’s question so the answer will be a little longer than usual. 
On the second part many projects funded by the Community Employment Group have worked quite well for disadvantaged groups throughout the country. However the Government has concerns about the way that a number of grants have been used which is why there have been investigations into a number of them. I have initiated a review of the Social Entrepreneur Fund which has resulted in its termination and I have initiated a review of the Community Employment Group itself. 
The first part of this question has taken what I said yesterday out of context. What I said was: “It is very important to know that many people who go into part-time work and who are seeking to return to the workforce also do have eligibility for parts of the benefit system and advice of that kind can be helpful.” The member has as usual distorted the facts. 
Katherine Rich 
: Further to the Minister’s response is it not the aim of the Community Employment Group to help people to be independent not to help them hide their income so that they can remain on a benefit? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: Yes it certainly is the aim of the Community Employment Group to ensure that people can go to work. But can I just come back to the case the member raised specifically yesterday as an illustration. I have had the case the member referred to yesterday checked out. As usual the member was wrong. Income received from the craft operation has been reported to Work and Income for the last 3 years and taken into account in calculating benefit entitlement. The member made other allegations yesterday and previously and I have investigated those as well. I have to say that in almost every single case she has chosen to distort those facts in a way that suits her. I invite her to make the allegations about the Maori Women’s Welfare League outside Parliament. 
Georgina Beyer 
: What outcomes have been achieved from the Mahi a Whanau project that the Community Employment Group has funded the Maori Women’s Welfare League to carry out? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: There have been a number of positive outcomes. Eight regional Mahi a Whanau networks have been established focusing on Maori who run small businesses around basically Maori arts and crafts. A basic business course has been established in each of the eight Maori Women’s Welfare League regions. Exhibitions were held in galleries in Auckland giving 44 artists exhibition exposure and new works have been commissioned. The league has also been giving hands-on business advice and brokering to many organisations assisting with small business. I think that criticising the Maori Women’s Welfare League in the way that Katherine Rich has done has been harmful. She should do it outside the House so that the league can answer her directly. 
Katherine Rich 
: What is there to misinterpret or distort when his own officials write the following: “The group has recently I don’t know quite when experienced a systems failure signing blank cheques which resulted in fraud.”; is he telling the House that his own investigations have found that his own officials got it wrong; if so what is he going to do about it? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: As the member has discovered a number of times in this House Community Employment Group officials have got it wrong. That is why they are being reviewed. 
Dr Muriel Newman 
: Are the Minister’s officials right or wrong to be concerned about pre-signed cheques for Community Employment Group funding and the potential for fraud? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: They sure are and I would endorse their being very concerned about those kinds of behaviours. But can I refer the member to the transcript where the Maori Women’s Welfare League explains exactly what happens to its cheques. I will not read it out; it is a long interview. The league concludes as everybody else who reads this interview will that Ms Rich should try making her accusations outside the House so that it can sue her. 
Rodney Hide 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The Minister’s answer was “They sure are”. I do not know whether they sure are wrong or sure are right. I wonder whether he could explain which the answer was. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: No he does not have to. I thought he gave an adequate addressing of the question. 
Rodney Hide 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The member had better have a point of order. Three times yesterday and once today his points have not been points of order. What is the point of order? 
Rodney Hide 
: The point of order is this. When the Minister having been asked whether they were right or wrong gets up and says “They sure are” you might be able to discern whether they were right or wrong in the Minister’s view but I cannot and neither can anyone else in this House. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Well that was not what he was asked. 
Rodney Hide 
: He was asked that. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: I will have a look at the transcript and if I am wrong I will certainly apologise to the member but that is not what I thought. I thought his answer “They sure are” was to his being asked whether he was concerned about people with blank cheques and he said “They sure are”. 
Rodney Hide 
: Let us not run off to the  
Hansard 
 because we have asked a question and we would like it answered. The question is whether the Minister thinks they were right or wrong to be concerned. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: That is another question. The member can ask it. 
Hon Member 
: It is the same question. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The same question. If the Minister likes to expand on the answer he can. 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: What I said was that the group would be very right to be concerned about people pre-signing cheques in a way that was wrong. But the accusations raised by Katherine Rich are ones I would love her to make outside the House so that the league can have a go at her. 
Katherine Rich 
: Does the Minister support Community Employment Group grants to organisations like Cook Islands and Samoan golf or the $28000 grant to the Common Knowledge Trust to promote the Pink Kit Method for Birthing Better which according to the organisation’s website answers questions like “Am I big enough to get my baby out?” and can help a woman discover her own “unique shape” and —intriguingly—“create more space” for her baby? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: This Government does not support any grant that is done in an inappropriate way or is used inappropriately. But I want to say to the member opposite that she distorts continually grants that have been made. I want to use one other example. She came into the House the other day and said that $2000 had been used to develop a website. It had not; it had been used for email. It had been properly used she was wrong and I wish she would make these accusations outside the House. 
Question No. 1 to Minister 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I have read the Speaker’s ruling you referred me to from the Hon Peter Tapsell— 
Mr SPEAKER 
: It was actually my ruling. Speaker’s ruling 130/6 was one of my rulings. The member has the wrong edition of  
Speakers’ Rulings. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I have it here. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Speaker’s ruling 144/6 I think I said. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I thought you were relying on the rule: “The Speaker cannot force a Minister to give an answer to a question and has no responsibility for the quality of the answer that is given nor its content.” 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Speaker’s ruling 144/6 is my ruling of 2002—“Form of reply”. That is the answer I gave and that is the ruling I have here. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I am not too concerned about that other than to say to you— 
Hon Members 
: Ha ha! 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I will tell the House why. The very same criteria apply here as applied at the time of the sale to an Arab of a Coromandel sheep farm and as applied on 6 June 1989 when the first one-third of the BNZ was sold and no Minister then defended himself on the basis that he could not answer because it was subject to some later scrutiny. Those provisions have always been there and if this House has got to the stage now where a Minister can duck behind some future tribunal then this House is being denied its proper access to information. There are countless examples of high-country farms high-profile sales all of which have come to this House in question time and Ministers in the past have answered. But today we have got something different and we had the same yesterday: “It’s going to the Overseas Investment Commission and therefore I can’t comment.” Frankly either the Overseas Investment Commission is superior to Parliament or Parliament has the right to be asking questions on this matter today. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: That is for the Minister to consider not the Speaker. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. Are you telling me that it is up to the Minister to decide the processes of this House and the level of accountability of Ministers? Because that is what you said—that it is up to the Minister to decide. Frankly it is not. It is up in the end for us to decide. Where you are concerned it is up to us to decide and it is up for you to require of the Minister that he gives something like an adequate answer. There would be no other Western democracy where he would get away with that. 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Minister of Finance) 
: 
 Putting aside that last point which is completely nonsensical because Ministers do not answer questions in Parliament in the United States for a beginning the point is not that the sale is going to the Overseas Investment Commission particularly; it is that it is coming to me. I have to make the decision and in that case I am not going to comment on the factors I am going to be taking into account in the making of that decision. Furthermore the member should read the Speakers’ ruling again: “An answer to a question ought to be given if it can be given consistently with the public interest;”. In the end it is for the Minister to determine whether it is in the public interest to give the answer; it is not up to the Speaker to determine that fact. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: MPs can ask questions; Ministers decide how they answer. [ 
Interruption 
] Order! That is the last warning today. If the member interrupts me again while I am on my feet the member leaves. MPs can ask questions; Ministers decide how they answer. MPs can then criticise the answer. 
GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. You will be aware the various parties in Opposition have expressed to you over a long period now dissatisfaction at the way in which questions are being answered in the House. The fact is we have to go to some effort to prove the veracity of the question in the first place then when we come down here we have it regularly batted away by Ministers who routinely decide they are not going to give an answer. I notice Speakers’ ruling 144/5 includes rulings from previous Speakers Harrison and Gray that indicate that Ministers are not obliged to answer questions. I wonder Mr Speaker given that this trend now appears to be taking hold whether you might consider asking the Standing Orders Committee to consider whether that might become a formal arrangement—that a Minister who does not want to answer a question indicates so at 10 o’clock in the morning when oral questions are lodged so that the Opposition is given time to ask a question to which the Minister may be able to oblige with an answer. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (ACT) 
: 
 Mr Brownlee talked of “Opposition parties” so I thought I should rise on this matter. The Standing Orders are quite clear. Speaker’s ruling 144(2) states: “An answer to a question ought to be given if it can be given consistently with the public interest; an answer can be absolutely refused if in the opinion of the Minister interrogated the public interest would be imperilled by giving the information sought.” The Minister actually told the House—not today but yesterday—that he will have to consider this matter and given that it is not proper for him to give an opinion now before the parties have had an opportunity to make a case to him. I would have said—taking Mr Brownlee’s point—that Mr Peters knew yesterday that the Minister would give that answer. It is completely ridiculous to suggest that you Mr Speaker should order the Minister to give an answer when it is clearly in the public interest that he consider the matter properly. I say to Mr Peters that for all he knows the Minister of Finance might give an answer eventually that he likes. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: I do not need any further assistance on this. I thank the Hon Richard Prebble because I could not have put it better myself. The Minister did not refuse to answer; his answer was that he did not intend to comment. That is his judgment. As far as I am concerned Ministers have been batting away questions ever since I came here in 1967—and that is 38½ years. I am just past the midpoint in my career here! But I say to the member that he can ask the Standing Orders Committee to have a look at it and if it has a look at it and comes to an agreement the Standing Orders can be changed. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 I seek leave to table the relevant sections of the Local Government Act 2002 in respect of planning decision making and accountability and relating to the requirements in respect of consultation with the community. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Leave is sought to table that document. Is there any objection? There is. 
Community and Primary Health Care—Advice to Ministers 
3.  
STEVE CHADWICK (Labour—Rotorua) 
 to the  
Minister of Health 
: What recent innovations in community and primary health care has the Minister been advised of and what impact will these have on the health of New Zealanders? 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Health) 
: 
 Some excellent recent developments in community health have arisen out of the new primary health environment which has an emphasis on keeping people well and out of hospital. I will give a few examples. The Auckland District Health Board and ProCare have commenced a project that has reduced the waiting time for heartburn treatment improved patient access and made an estimated saving of $1.5 million. In Gore a community wellness and education programme has been established that has had great success—in particular the review of medications now being undertaken by local pharmacists—and the Hutt Valley Cardiac Continuum of Care programme has provided a greatly improved service with immediate access to diagnostic tools. I have many other examples that I am happy to table. 
Steve Chadwick 
: Are those innovations being recognised publicly and how has the health sector responded to them? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: Yes they have. The first Health Innovation Awards were held in 2003. This year’s awards were held in partnership with Telecom and attracted over 100 entries of exceptional standard reflecting the world-class depth of talent and ability in the New Zealand health sector. 
Judith Collins 
: Does the Minister have any concerns about the reports of unethical behaviour by doctors working in the primary health care area who have succumbed to pressure from patients to help them wrongly transfer from the unemployment benefit to the sickness benefit; and has she done anything at all to investigate those accusations? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: I have concerns about any unethical behaviour amongst any health professionals. However the responsibility to investigate unethical behaviour is not in the hands of the Minister of Health. This House made it clear that it wanted self-regulation of the medical profession when it passed the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act. I am aware through my colleague that the Medical Council has looked at this issue. That is the right organisation to look at it. 
Barbara Stewart 
: Do these recent innovations ensure that children under 6 have access to free health-care  regardless of their locality? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: In a recent survey we noted that most parts of New Zealand provided free health-care to under-sixes—not all parts of New Zealand and they never have from the time the programme was introduced in 1997. But I am pleased to tell the member that the costs for under-sixes is still low. 
Sue Kedgley 
: Is the Minister concerned that the latest New Zealand Medical Association figures show that between 1998 and 2002 there has been a 13.4 percent drop in the number of general practitioners who identify general practice as their main work; and does she agree that if this trend continues the situation will deteriorate into a major crisis putting patient safety at risk? 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: Yes I would be concerned if that were the trend but maybe the member has not read the latest  
New Zealand Doctor 
 that came out today which shows a sharp increase in general practitioner trainees. In fact the number of students applying for a place in general practice training has increased sharply. That is very good news. The reason they are interested in training in general practice is the investment this Government has put into primary health care  and the emphasis we have put on this part of the health system. 
Tertiary Education—Community Education Funding 
4.  
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
 to the  
Associate Minister of Education (Tertiary Education) 
: When will he begin investigations at Tairawhiti Polytechnic the Manukau Institute of Technology the Eastern Institute of Technology and other big recipients of community education funding in order to ensure that enrolments resulted in student engagement and learning as he indicated he would yesterday? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Associate Minister of Education (Tertiary Education)) 
: 
 The Tertiary Education Commission has already been investigating all community education funding recipients where concerns have been raised in relation to enrolments and learner engagement. In addition in June the commission decided to undertake a further review of community education focusing on selected polytechnics including the ones the member mentioned. Joanna Beresford of Martin Jenkins and Associates has been commissioned to undertake the review and the commission has written to all tertiary education institutions explaining the scope and the timing of the review. The outcome of this work will be used to assess the community education component and the profiles that the institutions submit to the commission. The review will also clarify best practice for setting priorities in this area and will highlight issues for further development in the management of community education. 
Hon Bill English 
: Will the Minister apply the same rules to those other polytechnics that he has said he will apply to Christchurch Polytechnic—namely that if they cannot show that the thousands of students they enrolled did at least some of the course he will require them to refund the money the taxpayer paid for those courses? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: As the member knows the Tertiary Education Commission has set powers under the Act. At the present time it is exercising those by talking with institutions about whether enrolments are valid and whether learner engagement has taken place. I have been on record as saying that in my view where people have misused or inappropriately used the Government funding that money should be paid back. 
Dr Ashraf Choudhary 
: What action has the Minister taken to tighten the tertiary funding rules? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: When I became the Minister responsible for the tertiary education area tuition subsidies had just been uncapped by the previous Government. It has become increasingly apparent that the funding rules I inherited were not adequate. As a result over the past 4 years I have regulated tuition fees imposed a moratorium and then a cap on private providers put restrictions on the inclusion of rewards and equipment such as computers as a part of courses put a restriction on overseas travel capped aviation limited the maximum annual enrolment growth rate to 15 percent and capped community education. It does take quite a long time to clean up National Government messes. 
Hon Bill English 
: If the Minister has taken all those measures then why has there been an $800 million increase in equivalent full-time student funding and why has by far the majority of that gone on community funding and foundation-level courses that have been described by his own officials as “EFTS harvesting for financial gain”—and is that not an $800 million mess? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: I think the reason that numbers have grown so rapidly in the 5.1 area is that people have seen the Government closing doors one by one around funding. The institutions know they are being profiled this year and they know that once those profiles are in place a funding agreement will be signed which will limit what they can do. That is why I regret that some of the institutions appear to have taken that last gasp of opportunity to use National’s funding model. 
Floods—Government Assistance 
5.  
JILL PETTIS (Labour—Whanganui) 
 to the  
Minister of Agriculture 
: What further support has the Government provided to farmers affected by recent floods? 
Hon JIM SUTTON (Minister of Agriculture) 
: 
 The Government moved swiftly to assist those who have been affected by the recent floods earthquakes and landslides in the Bay of Plenty. Ministers announced last week an agricultural recovery package and other measures to repair schools fix roads and give direct help to low-income earners and people who had to be evacuated. The Government is matching dollar for dollar any funds raised to support affected people and almost $200000 has been given to local councils to pay for immediate needs. 
Jill Pettis 
: Can people have confidence that their needs will be met as they recover and rebuild after this disaster? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: Absolutely! The Government and all its agencies are focusing on providing services to address people’s needs. We are committed to a prompt and practical response to enable people to resume their lives. Although we are careful to use taxpayers’ dollars prudently in the circumstances we do put people before dollars. 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: In light of the quite substantial concerns of Federated Farmers and those involved in the flood recovery is the Government prepared to lower the threshold for rural recovery assistance to smaller farmers from $10000 to $5000? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: The Government has in fact undertaken to do that— 
Simon Power 
: To lower the threshold? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: Yes. We have reduced the threshold in the Bay of Plenty to $5000 or 10 percent of qualifying expenditure—whichever is higher. 
Ian Ewen-Street 
: What practical steps has the Minister taken to implement the recommendation of Landcare Research following the Manawatu-Wanganui storm event in February and the lessons learnt from Cyclone Bola that marginal hill-country grazing land should be re-afforested; and if he is not taking any practical steps when will he do so? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: In fact the Government has taken a decision in respect of forested areas that were damaged in that storm and it is engaged in a longer-term process to determine appropriate policies to encourage prudent afforestation on vulnerable hill country. But in the context of the immediate response to these recent disasters that has been put aside for more careful consideration in the longer term. 
Judy Turner 
: Can the Minister explain why river sand deposited on pasture cannot be returned to the river; and what solutions have been suggested to stop farmers having to wait until next autumn to till that sand back into their pastures and reclaim their currently unusable acreage? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: I hesitate to proffer advice on the technical questions of pasture restoration. As for returning sand to the riverbed that is certainly a matter for the regional council. 
Tariana Turia 
: Given that there are other members of rural communities also affected by the floods why have they not been assisted to the same level that farmers have and why are the conditions of their houses roads and facilities still in such disrepair as to prevent those people from being able to return to their homes even now? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: My portfolio responsibility is directed to the agriculture recovery programme and I can assure the member in case she is worried that we are being too generous that we are not attempting to compensate people for their loss of income. We are attempting to give them a helping hand to get their businesses back and operating again in the interests of the whole community. 
Simon Power 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I wonder whether the Minister would clarify his answer to an earlier question when I thought I heard him say that the level of spending relates— 
Mr SPEAKER 
: That is not a point of order it is a supplementary question and the member is entitled to have one. [ 
Interruption 
] I am not having those sorts of interjections. He who is without sin can cast the first stone. 
Simon Power 
: Can the Minister confirm that his statement that Bay of Plenty farmers will need to cross only a $5000 threshold to access the Government package will also apply to those properties affected by the February floods in Manawatu Rangitikei and Whanganui? 
Hon JIM SUTTON 
: I am prepared to take the member through this issue later if he likes but to put it shortly the threshold in the Bay of Plenty provides more for people with a small amount of damage and slightly less for people with a large amount of damage compared with the lower North Island. In respect of the lower North Island flooding the member did make representation to me seeking to lower the threshold but while that would replicate in the lower North Island the process we put in place in the Bay of Plenty and would mean giving more to people with a small amount of damage it would also involve giving less to people with a large amount of damage than they have been given reason to expect. So it is not really possible to go back and change that. But we have learnt from that and I think we have an improved system in place for the Bay of Plenty. 
Paedophile—Fund-raising for Child Cancer Foundation 
6.  
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
 to the  
Minister of Corrections 
: Why did Corrections allow one of New Zealand’s worst child sex abusers Roy David Bailey to lead a fund-raiser for the Child Cancer Foundation without informing the foundation of his crimes and what other charities have been assisted by inmates without the charities’ knowledge? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN (Minister of Corrections) 
: 
 The department has supported inmates’ involvement in fund-raising events and charity work as part of their rehabilitation and restitution. However there are no rules around how these events are approved and organised and the information that is made available. While I support inmates being involved in charity work I do not think it is appropriate that a convicted paedophile is organising a fund-raising event for the Child Cancer Foundation. I have asked the department to develop a policy on inmate involvement in charity work. 
Deborah Coddington 
: Does the Minister think it appropriate that the Department of Corrections continues to state that there was no need for the Child Cancer Foundation to be advised that Roy David Bailey is one of New Zealand’s worst child sex abusers; if so why? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: As I said there has not apparently been need for a policy up until now but obviously this has highlighted a gap in the policy area. I certainly agree that if a charity wanted information it should be advised about the nature of the offences of the group of offenders involved. 
Rodney Hide 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The question was quite specific. It asked the Minister whether he thought it was appropriate that the Department of Corrections still holds the view that it did not need to advise the Child Cancer Foundation. The Minister’s response was to say that there is a policy hole and that if the foundation asked then it should be told but the specific question was whether the Minister thinks it appropriate that the department should keep the charity in the dark. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The Minister answered that in the last sentence. I heard him quite clearly. 
Deborah Coddington 
: Can the Minister tell us what specific policy those dangerous criminals have acted under and have been encouraged by the Department of Corrections to solicit money from the public for charity; and can he tell us whether inmates get that work considered when they apply for parole? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: In answer to the second part it may be taken into account. In answer to the first part I point out that inmates have been involved in a whole range of charity issues for example helping in flood relief in Wanganui and other areas which I think many people support. They come forward often with ideas. But I think it is important that we get the policy around the arrangement—between the fund-raising event the people involved and the organisation itself—clearer and tighter and that is what I have asked the department to come back with a policy on within the next month. 
Ron Mark 
: How many more times will the Minister allow himself to be embarrassed in the House by the shoddy management practices of the Department of Corrections or is this clearly the new era of accountability that the Prime Minister alluded to when she came to power? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: Hopefully not many more. 
Deborah Coddington 
: Will the Minister now apologise on behalf of the Government to the Child Cancer Foundation to members of Parliament and to the public who have been manipulated by Roy David Bailey with the approval of the Department of Corrections; if not why not? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: I do not think an apology is appropriate. I consider the matter not to be appropriate and I will do something about making sure these kinds of things do not happen again. 
Rodney Hide 
: Was the Minister aware before it was put to him by the media that prison inmates were fund-raising in that way? If he was not aware would he expect to be informed of such activity going on in prisons? 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: I like I suppose all members of Parliament received a letter on this matter. From memory I think that letter came prior to it being in the media this morning. No I would not expect every individual thing that goes on in a prison to be brought to my attention. 
Deborah Coddington 
: I seek leave to table a letter from Roy Bailey seeking sponsorship. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Resource Management Act—Resource Planning 
7.  
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
 to the  
Minister for the Environment 
: Does she agree that “the RMA is a very sound basis for resource planning. Relative to the comparable law in other OECD countries it is low cost and easy to negotiate.” and that “The Act has been used as a scapegoat taking the blame for the failure of consent applications which would have been marginal under any system that weighed the various interests fairly and respected natural justice.”? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS (Minister for the Environment) 
: 
 Yes. 
Jeanette Fitzsimons 
: Why then does the officials’ paper that was released today under the Official Information Act refer to proposals to change Part II “Purpose and Principles” for a more balanced expression of the national interest to change section 6(c) of the purpose and principles which protects biodiversity  and to add a schedule giving guidance on matters of national importance? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: I remind the questioner that that policy has not been confirmed. I do draw the member’s attention to the guiding principles governing the Resource Management Act review and they include achieving good environmental outcomes certainty of process and not outcome certainty of cost local decision-making public participation and central government leadership. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: How can she claim with any credibility that this latest Resource Management Act reform package will deal with the serious problems of delays costs and uncertainty when just last year in 2003 the Minister passed an amendment to the Resource Management Act that she said would address those very issues and now we are back again 12 months later trying to tackle the same questions? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: We are always trying to improve the Resource Management Act and I think we always will be. 
David Parker 
: Is the Minister aware of other statements by the Minister of Finance to the Wellington Rotary club about the Resource Management Act? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: Yes Dr Cullen said the ideas and principles that underpin the Resource Management Act are not in question. Rather our aim is to get greater certainty and efficiency in the way the Act operates and to make it better able to address larger resource issues that are of national or at least trans-regional importance. 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: Can the Minister name one new resource-based industry established in New Zealand since the enactment of the Resource Management Act some 13 years ago; if so what is that industry? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: Extensions to a variety of aquaculture. 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. My question was: “Can the Minister name one new resource-based industry …”. I did not ask about the extension of existing industries. I asked whether there had been one new industry. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The Minister addressed the question. I am not judging the answer; that is for the House to judge. 
Larry Baldock 
: Does the Minister agree that more can be accomplished in improving the implementation of the Resource Management Act by focusing on changes to the process parts of the Act than by making any major changes to the Part II foundations of the Act? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: With the proviso that policy is still being developed I can say that we are identifying a range of solutions to make the Act work better for all New Zealanders. We are assured that we can do that without compromising the environment. 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: Can the Minister confirm that 4 minutes ago the Government announced that a new 385 megawatt combined-cycle gas turbine plant is to be built at Huntly under the existing Resource Management Act and that it has been successfully consented to? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: Gratefully yes. 
Jeanette Fitzsimons 
: Who is right: the officials’ paper that was just released which states the purpose and principles will be changed in several ways or her Associate Minister who said on Radio New Zealand this morning that changes to the purpose and principles are neither necessary nor likely? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: I would like to remind my honourable colleague over there that the policy is still being developed and debated. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: How is it that this  
RMA Review: Detail of Final Package  
paper was released to the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society including handwritten notes from the Minister’s private secretary of what was and was not to be supported by the Government when normally all such papers are withheld until there is a final Government decision; was that a mistake and if so by whom or is that now standard Government practice? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: It was a response to an Official Information Act request. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The Minister’s response that it was just an Official Information Act request does not answer the question of whether Cabinet normally does not release papers until final decisions are made. This paper was an exception so why was it released to the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society when no other party had received it? I did not get any sort of answer to that. To just refer blandly to an Act does not answer the fundamental question. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: If the Minister wants to add a little to that she can do so. 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: Ministerial offices can have different practices. 
Jeanette Fitzsimons 
: Can the Minister confirm that the number of infrastructure projects declined under the Resource Management Act could be counted on one hand while dozens of big projects like power stations mines motorways prisons and poorly designed dumps have got consent; and does that not suggest that the Act needs strengthening and not weakening? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: The Act will be strengthened and will continue to protect the environment. I do not keep a score sheet but I do know that the environment has been protected in New Zealand. The other day we saw two examples of a bridge being put across an area to save some river quality in Auckland. 
Larry Baldock 
: Has the Minister had any reports of how much time it currently takes to process resource consents through the Environment Court and if those reports confirm that long delays at the court are a thing of the past does she agree that direct referral will not be as useful a recommendation as was once thought? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: I really appreciate that question because it is worth noting that when I became the Minister for the Environment there was a backlog of more than 3000 cases in the Environment Court. It is now down to 1200. At that time there was also a languishing request for more judges from the Resource Management Law Association and a proposal from National—at the same time that it had a backlog of 3000 cases not enough judges and a poorly resourced court—to load up that poorly resourced court even further. 
Jeanette Fitzsimons 
: Now that the backlog in the Environment Court has been massively reduced will the Minister keep her earlier promise to consider again allowing notification decisions to be reviewed by the Environment Court as a check on councils that have been found by the High Court to be illegally shutting people out of the decision so that those people do not face the massive cost of a High Court review which cannot provide redress anyway? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: Although the policy is still being developed at the moment I prefer not to keep on loading the Environment Court; 1200 cases are still too much of a backlog. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: I seek leave of the House to table the Ministry for the Environment  
RMA Review: Detail of Final Package 
 paper that was released exclusively to the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Jeanette Fitzsimons 
: Does the Minister see a fundamental difference between the desecration of Jewish grave sites at Makara and the continuing destruction around the country of wahi tapu and urupa and what is her view of the proposal in the paper to further weaken the rights of iwi to participate in the consent process where they are likely to be the only voice in favour of protecting their sacred sites? 
Hon MARIAN HOBBS 
: I agree that we all honour our dead whether at memorials in Greece—as we just heard the other day at the beginning of the Olympic Games—whether they be in wahi tapu or whether they be in our own community cemeteries. I ask for us to be consistent and informed on this issue and I say there is no proposal in this paper to lessen the involvement of iwi or hapu. 
Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology—COOL Programme 
8.  
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
 to the  
Associate Minister of Education (Tertiary Education) 
: Does he regard the potential conflict of interest outlined in the Tertiary Education Commission  
Review of the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology COOL programme 
 as acceptable in a publicly funded institution; if so why? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Associate Minister of Education (Tertiary Education)) 
: 
 I would suggest that the member wait for the report of the office of the Auditor-General on this matter. Once I have read the report I will be happy to comment and I imagine he will be too. 
Hon Bill English 
: Does the Minister agree with Christchurch Polytechnic’s point of view that because Ms Buck was a contractor and not a member of the council nor a member of the staff she was not subject to conflict-of-interest rules and does that mean that contractors in polytechs around New Zealand can do what they like when it comes to their personal interests? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: No people cannot do what they like but I would urge the member to wait for the report of the Auditor-General on this matter. I certainly do not intend to second-guess him while he is doing that work. 
H V Ross Robertson 
: Is the Minister satisfied with the performance of the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology’s council on this particular issue? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: As I said I will reserve my judgment until I see the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General’s report. But I do note with approval that the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology responded quickly to public concerns in May by engaging its external auditors Audit New Zealand to undertake a review of any conflict of interest. That action led to a statement on 3 June that: “I am pleased to see that the council of the polytechnic have also recognised the need for an independent audit.” That quote came from Bill English. 
Hon Bill English 
: Is the Minister telling the House that as a steward of almost $9 billion of public money he has none of the ethical equipment that will tell him there is a conflict of interest when Ms Buck is a director and owner of the software company and when his own officials have told him that she played an active role in the promotion and marketing of the course and the administrative function supporting that marketing that she personally went to libraries and shopping malls to recruit students all the time knowing that for every student she recruited her personal company pocketed $400 and that she recruited 18000 students? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: No what I am telling the House is that the Auditor-General has a report coming. Bill English asked for that report. I suggest that we do not second-guess it and that we wait to read it. 
Hon Bill English 
: Can the Minister tell the House whether he has any ethical understanding about public service values and the protection of public money that gives him any concern about the thoroughly well-documented conflict of interest of Ms Vicki Buck as a director of development at Christchurch Polytechnic at the same time that she had a personal private interest in a company that pocketed over $6 million of public money? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: I have such a strong ethical framework that I have spent the last 5 years closing all the loopholes left by that party when it was previously in Government and I have such a strong ethical framework that I am deeply concerned about anybody who has a conflict of interest. I have such a strong commitment to ethics that I will wait for the Auditor-General to report and I will talk then. 
Ron Mark 
: I seek leave for Mr English to give me an indication as to how many pairs of underpants that money might have bought. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: No that is silly. 
Police—Resourcing 
9.  
RON MARK (NZ First) 
 to the  
Minister of Police 
: Is he satisfied that police are sufficiently resourced in order to respond to all facets of crime? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS (Minister of Police) 
: 
 Generally yes. The budget exceeds $1 billion crime is tracking down resolution rates are improving steadily and the road toll is falling. This contrasts with when National was in Government. Under the Martin review National tried to slash 540 police jobs and save $35 million a year. 
Ron Mark 
: What confidence should a Wellington woman have that that is the case when having reported the theft of her wallet on 1 July she provided between 13 and 20 July specific evidence that might have led to an arrest repeatedly called the police to ascertain progress and on 21 July out of frustration at the lack of any response wrote to the police reiterating the details she had previously supplied and urging that they be investigated and still has not yet had a reply to that letter? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: If the member had been wise he would have put that down in his primary question and he would have received an answer. This way he does not. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: I think the Minister’s last sentence could have been phrased a little differently. The first part of the answer about putting the details down as a primary question was perfectly in order but I invite the Minister to complete the answer after that part. 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: It would be sensible if people actually tried to tell the Minister what they wanted information on. They would then get their questions answered. 
Ron Mark 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The essential part of the question was: what confidence should the woman have that the resources are there? I am not asking him to explain the case. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The Minister addressed the question and he did it in his way. 
Moana Mackey 
: Has he seen any claims around police funding? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: Yes the president of the Police Association Greg O’Connor  claimed on the  
Holmes 
 show this week that 25 percent of the funding is traffic. But he said that if we ask most district commanders it is about 70 percent of the effort and the rest of the policing is virtually having to be done out of petty cash. Mr O’Connor damages his own credibility and that of his membership with such blatant rubbish. We spend $1.06 billion on policing annually and of that $826 million goes on crime reduction. That is hardly petty cash. 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: Surely the concentration of resources and additional staff on traffic enforcement has been to the detriment of general front-line policing and is that not the explanation for why in his own police district the police are responding only to life-threatening situations and in about half the required safe period? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: All police have responsibilities to investigate crime and to stop it where they see it and that is happening. I can tell members that in my own district crime is dropping dramatically as it is over New Zealand. 
Rod Donald 
: Does the Minister accept that significant amounts of police time are being wasted for no good reason especially in the light of the study published this year by Reinarman Cohen and Kaal in the  
American Journal of Public Health 
 which shows that the decriminalisation of cannabis does not increase its use and that making cannabis illegal does not reduce its use; if not why not? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: I must say that I am amazed that people sort out the type of crime they think should be all right. In the case of the Greens it is cannabis and in the case of other parties it is road traffic fraud and all those sorts of things. I have to say that police concentrate on everything and the resource is well used. 
Marc Alexander 
: Is the real reason the Minister is under-resourcing the real needs of police that attaining higher apprehension and resolution rates is pointless when there is a 35000 case backlog in the courts when some offenders will never face justice and when prisons and the probation service are overflowing; if not why not? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: This Government is really attacking crime very very hard. The money is going there. I have to thank the Minister of Finance for being so generous. The police have never had it so good. I must thank my colleague the Minister of Corrections for building more prisons and of course unlike the Nats I am welcoming one in my own electorate. 
Gordon Copeland 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I doubt whether the Minister really addressed the question. The question basically asked whether the resourcing of police is frustrated by the significant backlog in the courts. I do not think that question was addressed in the answer. 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: I am not the Minister for Courts. 
Ron Mark 
: Can the Minister tell the House that if a citizen had an unlisted number of a woman friend in her wallet and her wallet was stolen and then an unknown man called her friend on that number leaving behind on her caller identification his phone number from which he called would it not be relatively easy for the police to follow that lead or is it truly the case that the police are overworked do not have enough manpower have case workloads that are too high and do not have the funding to be able to purchase the information they need? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: I have told that member many times that the police are better funded now than they have ever been. They do have the resources. If the member wants whodunnits and “what ifs” he should read Sherlock Holmes. 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: Seeing the Minister has put into contention the issue of slashing police numbers why was it that he wrote in a recent  
Sunday News 
 article under his name that police numbers were slashed when Winston Peters was Treasurer; and will he resign if it is not true? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: What was true was that when the work was started on the Martin review he was Treasurer. When it was implemented he had already broken up with the Nats. He had had enough of them and I think: “Good on him!” 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I am trying to ask this Minister a very simple question. He cannot duck out by citing some review that did not take place in respect of its finality when I was there or any other decision. He knows full well that the greatest police numbers we ever had in training were in 1997-98. I am asking him now seeing he wrote that in his column whether he will resign if it is not true—yes or no? 
Mr SPEAKER 
: He does not have to answer yes or no. He has to address the question. 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: The Martin review was started when that member was Treasurer and Mr Mark was the whip. Of course it went on and it took this Government to pull it out and start reinstating jobs. 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: I seek leave to table the evidence and press releases of that time demonstrating that the highest police intake of all times was when I was Treasurer. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Leave is sought to table that information. Is there any objection? There is not. 
Documents not tabled. 
Rod Donald 
: I seek leave to table the report from the  
American Journal of Public Health 
 that states that making cannabis illegal does not reduce its use. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Schools—Zoning 
10.  
HELEN DUNCAN (Labour) 
 to the  
Minister of Education 
: What reports if any has he received on possible changes to school zoning policies? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Minister of Education) 
: 
 I have seen one suggestion that school zoning should be abolished completely while I have seen another report suggesting there should be some limitations on parental choice in areas of high population growth and that the removal of zoning would not solve any problems at all. These suggestions came from the leader of the National Party Don Brash and his education spokesperson Bill English. Why can they not get their act together? 
Helen Duncan 
: Has the removal of school zoning been considered previously? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: Yes school zoning was abolished in the early 1990s. Then the previous Government was forced to bring it back in 1998— 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: Not true. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: I think something has affected that member’s memory. 
Opposition Members 
: Oh come on! 
Mr SPEAKER 
: That was a perfectly legitimate interjection and the member made the interjection. He said it was not true and the Minister said his memory is not accurate. There is nothing wrong with that. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: Yes school zoning was abolished under the previous Government and then it was forced to bring it back in 1998 to combat overcrowding. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: Not accurate. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: It was abolished in the early 1990s and we are listening for Richard Worth’s opinion on this issue. Is he backing Bill English so that people who live next-door to Auckland Grammar can get in or is he backing Don Brash in which case they would not be allowed to go there? 
Police—Traffic Infringement Notices 
11.  
Hon TONY RYALL (National—Bay Of Plenty) 
 to the  
Minister of Police 
: Which police districts operate quotas or performance measures where officers are expected to issue a certain number of tickets every hour or day they are on traffic duty and does he agree with this system? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS (Minister of Police) 
: 
 All police officers are expected to meet performance standards relevant to the duties they undertake. It is a system that works well as the Hon Tony Ryall acknowledged on 16 June at the Law and Order Committee when he told the Commissioner of Police: “I want to compliment you on your statement of intent which I think is a real move in trying to give the Parliament a feel for exactly the approaches you are taking.” 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: Is it not the case that this Government’s speed camera policy now sees pressure on the police to collect revenue to pay for the Government’s Budget promises rather than having road safety as the sole priority? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: Our aim is to get the road toll down. Many years ago people did not go along with the introduction of drink-driving campaigns. They did not like seat-belt campaigns. Now they are not liking speeding campaigns but I have to say that my information is that the number of tickets given out this financial year is starting to show that people are getting the message—the number is starting to drop. 
Dave Hereora 
: What information has he received regarding the performance requirements of police officers on duty? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: On the  
Holmes 
 show earlier this week the Police Association president Greg O’Connor claimed that police were ignoring a lot of their duties. Regrettably Mr O’Connor damages his own credibility with untrue statements such as: “We are ignoring the P.”; “Police are now being forced to ignore a lot of general duties—burglary domestic-type policy.” The facts are the police do all manner of work. They support communities and victims they deal with youth offenders provide youth education manage youth projects process arms licences administer the Arms Act deal with reports of lost and found property make apprehensions on patrol do bail and parole checks— 
Mr SPEAKER 
: That is sufficient. 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. This answer goes over a couple more pages. I seek leave to table it. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Leave is sought to table it. Is there any objection? There is. 
Peter Brown 
: Does the Minister accept that a ticket quota system lowers the standing of the police in the public’s eyes and does he accept that such a practice gives strength to the argument that police and traffic duties should be segregated and administered by totally separate organisations? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: No. 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: In light of the Minister’s repeated denials over the years about revenue gathering how does he explain Budget documents that indicate that the Minister of Finance effectively suggested in December that if the police issue more tickets then the money can be spent on Budget promises; and a paper from the Secretary for Justice which states that the increase in revenue from speed cameras could be earmarked for Budget promises? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: I think those people will be disappointed because speed is coming down on our roads but will be absolutely delighted that we now have safer roads and a dropping road toll. 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: I seek leave to table three documents. The first is a newspaper report confirming quota ticketing. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Leave is sought to table that document. Is there any objection? There is. 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: The second is a document marked “Budget sensitive 16 January” reporting on correspondence from the Minister of Finance about money being available for Budget promises. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: The third is a document from the Ministry of Justice’s chief executive confirming that additional funding could be earmarked from the increase in police fines. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The Minister was asked how he reconciled his denial with what are apparently two Cabinet or official documents that show that the denial is not correct. That was what he was asked as a Minister. He made no attempt whatsoever to answer. He talked about speed coming down fines coming down and offending coming down but he made no attempt to answer the question. How does he reconcile a denial over a long period of time that there is a quota system going on with documents that suggest there is? He should be required to answer that now. 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. Even assuming that the summary of that document is correct—and I have yet to read it—there has in fact been only the claim that was made by Mr Ryall in his question. The point is not that there is a quota but that the money was to be used for other purposes. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: That is perfectly correct. 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. When somebody raises a valid point of order it should be taken seriously. The fact that Dr Cullen came rushing to the rescue and got it wrong is neither here nor there. The Minister was asked a question in respect of his long denial that a quota system is in operation: how come there are documents in existence that suggest there is? When can we have an answer to that question? 
Mr SPEAKER 
: I will examine the transcript and if I find that the Minister has not responded properly I will get back to him. 
Peter Brown 
: Is the Minister aware that there are a significant number of motorists—in particular law-abiding motorists who never get a ticket and who never go wrong—who see this ticket quota system as something like Big Brother; and is it not about time that the Minister sat down with some law-abiding motorists and determined a fairer way to manage traffic on New Zealand roads? 
Hon GEORGE HAWKINS 
: Surveys show that those people generally support the work the police are doing. I have to say that innocent people have nothing to fear. I do not want to be selective about the types of crime for which penalties may be enforced as the member wishes to be. 
Accident Compensation—Farming Premiums 
12.  
PAUL ADAMS (United Future) 
 to the  
Minister for ACC 
: Does the Minister believe that the proposed increases to ACC premiums for farmers are fair? 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Minister for ACC) 
: 
 The Accident Compensation Corporation’s (ACC) proposed increase in self-employed farmers levies is based on the increasing cost of injuries to that group combined with a decline in the pool of liable earnings for livestock farming since 2002 from $2 billion to less than $1.5 billion now. At the same time ACC is proposing a 3 percent drop in the employer levy for farmers which will affect close to half the industry calculated on liable earnings. Public submissions on the levy proposals close on 16 September after which date the ACC board will give me its final recommendations. The Department of Labour will provide me with separate actuarial advice. I will consider all that information before making a final recommendation to Cabinet on the levies. 
Paul Adams 
: How can a 74 percent hike in farmers’ accident compensation levies over 3 years be considered fair when ACC is expected to make a surplus of over $850 million from increased levy revenue and from playing the sharemarket and when it continues to hold a monopoly on workplace safety insurance? 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: I have seen the 74 percent quote from Federated Farmers and it is incorrect. The total accident compensation levy for self-employed farmers has increased by 28 percent. It has been caused by the legal requirement for ACC to collect levies each year on a fully funded basis—that is to ensure that the total cost of all claims incurred and reported in that year are fully funded. That is unlike the previous National administration which lowered the levies and put the cost on to future generations. Labour fully funds the scheme. The increase is also contributed to as I said in answer to the primary question by a combination of a decline in the pool of liable earnings and the increasing cost of injuries. 
Hon Mark Gosche 
: How do New Zealand’s accident compensation levies compare with similar costs overseas? 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: They compare extraordinarily well. In Australia where a private market operates accident compensation levy rates for farmers—and actually for most occupations—are at least twice those of New Zealand according to the Australian Government’s annual report comparing the two markets. 
Hon David Carter 
: Does the Minister accept ACC’s justification for this proposed increase with its suggestion that farmers are failing to take safety seriously when more than 10000 farmers have attended FarmSafe courses in the past 18 months? 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: Not only do I believe that farmers make a significant and valued contribution to our economy but I also agree with the suggestion made by that member that farmers have been working well with ACC to get their rate of injuries down. Despite that work their injury rate is still nearly double the average for all industries combined. 
Gerrard Eckhoff 
: Why should a farmer with a perfect safety record pay this increase of 9 percent; and what more can those farmers who have a perfect safety record do? 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: As the member knows we have been developing since 2000 a series of programmes that ensure that as the injury rate goes down it is reflected directly in the levies that are incurred by that industry. 
Paul Adams 
: Is the Minister aware of a mass survey of farmers’ compliance costs that found that accident compensation levies are the biggest single compliance cost that farmers face and that farmers believe they could obtain private insurance cover for about half the cost of their accident compensation premium if the monopoly was removed? 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: Although I am not aware of that particular survey quoted by the member I am reasonably familiar with the private versus public insurance argument. Australia provides a very good example of how the private market works. As well as resulting in considerably higher levies than New Zealand’s the Australian market collapsed catastrophically— HIH being a prime example—and had to be bailed out by Government intervention to the tune of millions of dollars. It is now heavily regulated by state Governments. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: That is sufficient. The Minister’s answer was too long. 
Paul Adams 
: Why does ACC not have a levy discount programme for small businesses like farms when medium and large employers can access levy discount incentives through the Workplace Safety Management Practices programme in light of the fact that small businesses make up over 90 percent of all businesses in New Zealand? 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: I agree that this is a programme that needs to be extended and I am delighted to inform the House that work is under way. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: I seek the leave of the House to table a report in the  
Nelson Mail 
 that Richmond’s Riding for the Disabled Association is to be forced to close by a 12-fold increase in its accident compensation levies. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Leave is sought to table that article. Is there any objection? There is. 
Speaker’s Rulings 
Question No. 2—Minister's Answer 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Earlier I agreed to look at the transcript of question No. 2. The Minister was asked whether his officials were right or wrong to be concerned about pre-signed cheques. He replied: “They sure are” and then said: “I would endorse their being very concerned about those kinds of behaviours.” I agree with Mr Hide that the words “They sure are” taken alone could be ambiguous but the subsequent part of the Minister’s reply made it perfectly clear that he agreed with his officials’ concerns and the answer did address the question. 
Transport Legislation Bill 
First Reading 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Minister of Transport) 
: 
 I move  
That the Transport Legislation Bill be now read a first time. 
 It is my intention to move at the appropriate time that the Transport Legislation Bill be referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee for consideration that the committee report by 29 October 2004 and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting except during oral questions and during any evening on a day in which there has been a sitting of the House and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House and outside the Wellington area on a day the House is sitting despite Standing Orders 191  193(a)  and 194(1)(b) and (c). 
This bill is the culmination of the Government’s work to structure the transport sector so that it can deliver the affordable integrated safe responsive and sustainable transport system New Zealand deserves by 2010. It builds upon the New Zealand Transport Strategy and is the enabling legislation for changes made through the recent Government transport sector review. The strategy is important in that it moves beyond the narrow focus of the past to a broader vision to provide a truly integrated approach to transport planning and provision in support of wider social economic and environmental goals. The strategy sets out the Government’s five objectives for transport as assisting economic development assisting safety and personal security improving access and mobility protecting and promoting public health and ensuring environmental sustainability. 
This bill also builds on the Land Transport Management Act which restructured the transport funding arrangements and is the type of legislation passed to ensure more roads and public transport infrastructure is built. More recently this was followed by the Local Government (Auckland) Amendment Act which enabled the establishment of the Auckland Regional Transport Authority and Auckland Regional Holdings. These changes helped to realise the Investing for Growth package announced by the Government in December 2003 to address the transport problems of Auckland and of the rest of the country. This Government will get New Zealand moving again. 
Through the Government transport sector review we looked at the structure of the sector and how well this was suited to meeting the expanded brief laid out in the transport strategy. We found it was good at delivering against the old brief but it could produce better outcomes for the economy business communities and the travelling public if restructured to focus on the delivery of the objectives of the strategy. This bill will enable that restructuring to take place. Key to this is addressing a number of structural and resourcing issues that were an impediment to providing leadership across the sector rather than on a type by type basis. 
 The review identified opportunities to improve the level of collaboration across agencies in terms of policy development planning funding and the delivery of solutions to New Zealand’s transport needs in line with the objectives of the strategy. The review also identified that the Land Transport Safety Authority the Maritime Safety Authority and the Civil Aviation Authority were constrained by too narrow a brief. In the light of these findings from the review the bill enables the formation of a new agency Land Transport New Zealand comprising the operational responsibilities of the Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund New Zealand following the transferral of policy functions from those two bodies to the Ministry of Transport. The Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund will be disestablished. 
The bill enables an increase in the scope of the Maritime Safety Authority and of the Civil Aviation Authority to take into account the objectives of the New Zealand Transport Strategy in their work. There is no change to the primary safety responsibilities of those authorities. The bill enables the integration of the current Safety Administration Programme—which contains $275 million including GST in funding for the 2003-04 year—into the National Land Transport Programme. This safety funding covers a diverse set of outputs ranging from safety information and promotion to road policing. 
The establishment of Land Transport New Zealand will enable a strong multi-objective focus to be taken closer and more effective linkages to local government enhanced regional presence and resourcing and a better integrated approach to land transport planning and delivery. As a result local government and local communities alike can expect better understanding of their transport needs and improved responsiveness to them. 
The changes in this bill mainly affect the Ministry of Transport the Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund. There are no major changes to the current structure activities or staff of Transit New Zealand the Maritime Safety Authority the Civil Aviation Authority the Transport Accident Investigation Commission or the Aviation Security Service. Most employees in the agencies affected by these changes will continue in their current roles with some movement between agencies as functions are transferred. No material change is expected in the overall numbers of staff employed within the sector however the Ministry of Transport will grow by about 50 employees as policy roles are transferred over from the Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund. 
The balance of Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund roles will be brought together in Land Transport New Zealand. The funding for the National Land Transport Programme will not be affected by the changes. Although there are some functional changes and a general expansion of the sector’s brief to cover the objectives of the New Zealand Transport Strategy there will be no reduction in the emphasis placed on safety. The bill includes specific measures designed to improve search and rescue arrangements. The responsible Minister will have the primary responsibility for coordination of search and rescue functions among agencies. 
The bill also covers the various related technical amendments to other Acts that are affected by this legislation. The Government intends that New Zealanders should be well served by an integrated affordable safe and sustainable transport system as set out through the New Zealand Transport Strategy. There is a need for Government transport agencies as a whole to jointly own and contribute to the achievement of the strategy. This bill provides the institutional arrangements for the Government’s transport sector agencies that will underpin that strategy. This bill will overcome past fragmentation and enable the sector to take a broader and more collaborative approach to transport planning and management. I urge members to support the bill. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I say at the outset to the Minister and to the House that the National Party will support this legislation—certainly in going to the select committee and probably right through the House—because it is a step in the right direction in terms of making what I think are some sensible modifications that are required. My history in the transport portfolio goes right back to the early 1990s when as a Minister in Cabinet I oversaw what I thought was some quite sensible restructuring of what was a monolith in those days: one huge Ministry of Transport which had everything in it. It was a little bit like the old Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Nobody knew what it was what it did or how the staff did what they did but it had thousands of people in it. We went about breaking that ministry up into its various component parts. I think we got most of that right although this bill today takes one extra step which I support. 
We tried to break the operational elements of transport into their particular components by setting up a Civil Aviation Authority whose job was to go out and manage safety practices within the civil aviation world and a Maritime Safety Authority whose job was to deal with the transport sector in maritime terms. There was another body—the name of which I still have trouble in using because of the counselling I had to receive over what it did to me along the way—called the Land Transport Safety Authority. I think one of the reasons that authority was such a difficult organisation to deal with was that it had some control over policy as well as the operational side of land transport. The pleasure I feel today in seeing this bill can be expressed by saying that responsibility for transport policy has to come back into the Ministry of Transport where the Minister has some say over things can express some guidance about what Government policies are and can see policies develop. Policy should not be developed at an arm’s length from the Minister or we will have the situation of a Crown entity going ahead and doing its own thing and then leaving time bombs for the Minister to wake up to in the morning and find they have just exploded on him or her. 
I will give an example of that. I was woken early one morning when I was the Minister by a journalist from National Radio’s  
Morning Report 
 who asked whether I wanted to comment on the latest discussion document the Land Transport Safety Authority had released which was about safety helmets for motorcar drivers. I really thought that someone was pulling my leg. 
Darren Hughes 
: But it wasn’t? 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No. That was the problem. My first instinct because I was bleary-eyed after a very late night was that it must be the first of April. But it was not; it was something like October. So it was not that. I thought the incident could not be happening to me. First of all I thought that it was not a  
Morning Repor 
t journalist who was asking me to comment but one of my colleagues who was playing a trick on me. But it was not; the call concerned a genuine discussion document. Somebody in the Land Transport Safety Authority had had a light bulb go off in his or her head and had thought that because helmets had worked on motorbikes and were stopping head injuries the authority should put out a paper without telling the Minister—the authority was supposed to have a no-surprises regime whereby the Minister knew things were coming but I was not told of this—with a proposal that the authority would require safety helmets for motorcar drivers. 
Now I want members to think about the implications of that. They can take the example of a Remuera housewife who pops down to the town centre and has a lovely $300 hairdo done. It is just beautiful—coiffed to magnificence. She is off to a ball that night. She would get out to her BMW a 7 series be about to head off home and she would have to put on the old safety helmet. So I told the person on  
Morning Report 
—and sadly the reporter used the line over the air so it got me into a bit of trouble—that the person from the Land Transport Safety Authority who had put out such a hopeless piece of nothingness would find it difficult to sit down for the rest of the week. But that sort of stuff went on. 
The other thing I am still getting counselling for was the window-tinting regulations an issue that went on and on. The Land Transport Safety Authority was setting policy about how much tint one could put on windows and—members will love this—it even said that in vans with rows of seats running back behind the driver it would make a concession. It said it would let people tint the windows that were further back than the driver but that they had to put an opaque partition behind the driver so the driver could not turn around and look out of those windows. That is what the authority said. We went through a nightmare with that outfit. The regulations went to the Regulations Review Committee. I hoped that the committee would kill them but it did not and we went around and around. So I have to say that today is one of those days when the empire strikes back and I feel good about this bill. I congratulate the Minister on this bit of the bill at least because policy—the real determination about the things we want to be done—is to be brought back into the ministry. 
I would still want to keep some form of blowtorch on the performance of the Land Transport Safety Authority. I think that it has improved dramatically; let me give it a bit of a shot in the arm as well. I think the new director David Wright has improved the operation of the authority and made it better but there is still more room for improvement. This bill is a good step in that direction. I think there should be the same situation with regard to every one of the operational agencies: the Land Transport Safety Authority the Civil Aviation Authority and the Maritime Safety Authority. They should deal with operational matters only and not start to get into the madness and lunacy of policy setting. They are not equipped to set policy and it used to always come back on the Minister’s plate as if it was the Minister’s fault and the Minister was to blame even when he or she had not been told the agency was thinking of doing something. 
When this reform was first announced I was a bit fearful that it would go much further than it has and I am pleased it has not done that. There was a whole lot of talk about setting up one huge roading operation that did the provision of both roading and the funding for roading again and I am pleased the Minister did not go in that way. As a former Minister I separated the purchasing and the provision of roading and I still think there is some sense to that. I still think that it was wrong that Transit which had all the money was also the arbiter of how much went towards State highways—which it ran—and how much went into local roading subsidies alternatives to roads subsidies for buses and ferries and the public passenger transport subsidy. It seemed ridiculous that Transit was both the judge and jury in terms of the process it was involved in. It was receiving all the money in its coffers and then deciding whether to fund a project it proposed itself or to fund a project proposed by other people. That was the reason for splitting the Transit operation which we did in 1996 I think. We did that to make sure that we had both a purchaser of services—be they State highways or local roads—and a provider of State highways. That was being done within Transit but in fact Transfund had a lot of flexibility about how it went about its purchasing. 
I do not have a problem with Transfund being merged into the operational side of the Land Transport Safety Authority. It is really a merger in name only and I am sure there will still be a department or a division within the authority that is responsible for the purchasing of roading outcomes and alternatives to roading. So maybe that really is just an efficiency gain in terms of some overheads—not needing to have two directors and two boards. I will watch with interest to see that Transfund does not get subsumed into that operation and lose some of the efficiency gains that it could generate if the purchasing is done properly. But overall in the first half of this bill with regard to the reforms I think that the Government has moved in the right direction. I am happy to say that is so and that this bill is not the cataclysmic massive restructuring that some of the industry were fearful of. I have found that most people within the industry sector think that in principle at least this is the right way to go. We will watch the situation obviously as the bill goes through the select committee. We will listen to the submissions and there may be some tidying-up of detail around the fringes that needs to be done. 
The other area of the bill concerns the coordination of search and rescue which I think is desperately needed. One of the problems in the old civil aviation legislation was that the Civil Aviation Authority was given the mandate to run the whole search and rescue operation. Clearly it has a proper role to play in terms of a lot of the accidents we have; any aircraft accidents would obviously have to have some guidance and control from that authority. But there have been some examples—for instance a situation where there was quite significant loss of life off Oamaru in a boating tragedy—where it was clear if one was thinking about it that the Maritime Safety Authority might have been a better agency to have an overall brief to watch over how that search and rescue operation was conducted and who was in charge of it. Again I think it is probably right that responsibility for search and rescue operations is being brought back to the Minister to make some determinations. This legislation will pull out the mandate that the Civil Aviation Authority has had and put it back with the Minister—or at least that it is what I understand the legislation will look like. It will give the Minister the right to determine the agencies responsible for search and rescue what they should do and where the various boundaries lie in terms of what the various agencies do. Again it is quite a sensible move. 
However I will just recap in the last minute that I have by saying once again that the most important thing whenever Government agencies are functioning is to have—[ 
Interruption 
] Goodness me what was that? My watch says—OK never mind. I have 2 more minutes so that means I have 12 minutes for this speech. 
Darren Hughes 
: Start again. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No no—I have more important stories to tell if members would like to hear them. 
Opposition Member 
: Go ahead. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: “Go ahead.” says the whip. Yes I have even more stories to tell if members want me to. They will really stop members from sleeping at night. 
The other thing that I would want is some more accountability in the Land Transport Safety Authority with regard to specific outcomes. Today in the House I think I heard the Minister of Police wax lyrical about the road toll coming down. Well I say to the Minister that the road toll is not coming down. I ask him to go and look at the graph. The road toll came down progressively during the 1990s and into the beginning of the 2000s but it has since turned and is now heading back up. I think some very serious questions need to be asked of the police with regard to their enforcement of the road code because I think there is some really ludicrous stuff going on including situations where speed cameras are pinging people for driving at 1 kilometre an hour over the tolerance level. Those people are law-abiding citizens—for example a vicar on his or her way to church—and that makes the public angry. It makes the public very angry because those drivers were not endangering people but were travelling along at the normal speeds that others were travelling at but the speed cameras were just clicking away. I also put some onus back on to the Land Transport Safety Authority for some of that. Its focus has often been on the bizarre and the extreme and it has lost sight of what the major gains are in terms of road safety what best practice is and which international practices are to be followed. I think that as we are a small country that really does not have a great deal of say crash testing and stress testing ability and so on we should be very sensible and look to learn from the experience of alternative jurisdictions. 
So overall I think this bill is halfway towards being reasonable legislation. The National Party certainly will support its referral to a select committee and we will take great interest in what members of the public have to say in their submissions. 
Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) 
: 
 The debate is in danger of becoming congested by Ministers and former Ministers of Transport so I will take a very brief call. I will not get into the sharing of my inner feelings in such a manner as Mr Williamson even though I could tell some stories myself because the health of our whips might not be enhanced by that process. 
As the chair of the select committee I look forward to this bill coming before it and to perusing it to make sure we get good legislation. I am pleased that we will have a structure that will put into place Government agencies that are able to keep pace with the rapid progress this Government is making in transport—in improving infrastructure and public transport throughout the country. It is a good bill and I commend it to the House. 
PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 New Zealand First will support the bill going to the select committee. We are quite relaxed about the Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund joining forces and becoming Land Transport New Zealand. We hope that the new agency will be structured in such a way that it will not only be able to fulfil its functions as stipulated in the bill but it will also be able from time to time to give the Minister practical hands-on advice on what needs to be done in terms of land transport to advance the economic well-being of the country. 
I thought the Minister said in his opening speech that one of the responsibilities of the new authority would be to give economic advice but I cannot readily find that responsibility in the bill. I hope it is in there somewhere; if not I hope the select committee will be bold enough to consider inserting some sort of provision or recommendation that Land Transport New Zealand is able to give sound and practical economic advice to the Minister so that we can develop this country and its infrastructure. 
I feel frankly that over a period of years land transport and roading in particular has not kept pace with vehicle traffic and numbers. Something needs to be done with some degree of urgency. I know that the Labour Government is well in league with the Green Party which basically wants to tear up roads but I am hoping that the organisation resulting from the amalgamation of the Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund will be able to give the Minister some sound hands-on practical advice. 
One of my areas of concern is section 69 “Functions of Authority” inserted by clause 33. Paragraph (h) states that one of those functions is “to investigate and review land transport accidents and incidents in its capacity as the responsible safety authority subject to any limitations set out in the Transport Accident Investigation Commission Act 1990:”. I have some real concerns about how we investigate accidents in this country—concerns not so much about land transport accidents but more about maritime accidents. I thought a Transport Legislation Bill—the title of this bill—would be an appropriate bill for addressing those sorts of concerns. 
I am specifically talking about the investigations of accidents by the Civil Aviation Authority and the Maritime Safety Authority of New Zealand. The accident that comes to mind is one involving ships called the  
Sydney Express  
and the  
Maria Luisa 
. On one cool calm dark night in Wellington Harbour I think in December 1996 the  
Sydney Express 
 which was a container ship literally rammed into the  
Maria Luisa  
overturned her and five men died. 
When one looks at the way that that accident was investigated and reported upon one has to speak one’s concern. Allegedly the police did look at it but they told me they listened to the Maritime Safety Authority and relied heavily on the authority. The Maritime Safety Authority and the Transport Accident Investigation Commission supposedly conducted independent investigations but I have now found out that evidence that was given confidentially to the Transport Accident Investigation Commission got into the hands of the Maritime Safety Authority. Evidence from the master and third officer of the  
Sydney Express 
 got into the hands of the Maritime Safety Authority very early on in the piece—months before the authority made its final determination—and the authority will not now release that evidence to the families of the crew of the  
Maria Luisa 
. 
I am working through the Ombudsman right now and hopefully we will get access to that evidence. There was no formal inquiry. There was nothing but a few experts gathered in a few rooms who made a determination. The deputy coroner who took charge of the case ruled that there was no need to have an inquest because there had been so many inquiries into the issue. It now turns out that there were no truly independent inquiries. There was a degree of cooperation—to put it mildly—by which a conclusion was reached. 
I say that that is not good enough and that this bill is the ideal legislation in which to look at how we examine accidents in this country. I feel particularly sad about the  
Maria Luisa 
 incident because 5 men died and there is no conclusion at all for their families. They are still grieving. 
To some degree the crew were blamed for the accident but there was no cross-examination of witnesses. There was nothing. There was simply a decision arrived at by so-called experts. I have met many experts who disagree with those findings and as a master mariner myself I have to say that I was concerned when I read the transcripts of the evidence that the Maritime Safety Authority had compiled. 
This bill gives an ideal opportunity to examine in some detail how the organisations of the Maritime Safety Authority the Civil Aviation Authority and the new authority should investigate accidents and report on them. I believe that the process should be a good deal more transparent than it currently is. 
This is a small bill in the scheme of things and I suggest that it will go through largely unnoticed. I doubt whether there will be terribly many submitters. But the bill could have a profound effect on transport and its operations in this country so we have to get it right. 
The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee has to address this issue in a meaningful way. I respect Mr Gosche. By and large he does a very very good job in chairing that committee but the committee has been known to make some blues. 
Darren Hughes 
: What? 
PETER BROWN 
: Oh yes. 
Darren Hughes 
: No! 
PETER BROWN 
: Oh yes—the holidays legislation caused me some anguish; I was there. There are aspects about the Holidays Act that New Zealand First firmly supports but we did warn the committee and we did warn the House that the legislation might be going a bit too far and will need to be rectified. I do not think we will have the same sort of opportunity with this legislation—we have to get it right. 
New Zealand First will support the bill going to the select committee. I hope we will play a positive and strong role in endeavouring to get the whole thing addressed correctly. So I will close on that point by simply saying that New Zealand First will support this bill going to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and we will see how it goes from there. 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Peace has broken out in the House and I find myself most unusually agreeing with what the two previous Ministers to speak have said which suggests to me that I should say rather little. There is of course quite a bit of detail to be sorted out at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and the Greens look forward to taking part in that proceeding but generally we see this bill as pretty non-controversial. 
The big things in transport have happened. With the new strategy and the new Land Transport Management Act we have set a new direction for transport. We have set new objectives goals and priorities. The main issue now is to make sure that that is carried through into implementation on the ground. I have to say there is always an element of “business as usual” after we change legislation in this way and there is a need to manage that. Therefore it is now important that we strengthen the capacity of the Ministry of Transport  which frankly does not have the resources it needs to do the job that is currently required of it; so we support that. 
Rationalising the way safety is delivered across modes and search and rescue is sensible. I alerted the Minister during the Review of the Centre to the fact that we did not support merging Transfund and Transit. We put a lot of effort in the last legislation into getting their respective roles right and we felt that should not be changed. I am glad that the Minister did not go in that direction either. I do not have strong feelings about the merger of Transfund and the Land Transport Safety Authority. It may work well it may turn out to have some problems but we do not have a strong view either way. We will just have to wait and see on that. 
Having said those few words I can say that we look forward to the debate at the select committee. 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 The ACT party supports this bill being referred to the select committee but before I move on to why we do so I would like to say that we are becoming increasingly incensed at this Government’s referral motions which are an abuse of the process and an abuse of power. I am referring to Ministers’ requests to dispense with Standing Orders 191 to 194 so that select committees are allowed to meet on Fridays and in an evening when the House is sitting. Another thing that this Minister has requested is to ram this bill through with a report-back date of 26 October. The other parties have already signalled that they support this bill’s referral to a select committee and that makes that abuse of power even more insidious because there is absolutely no need for the Minister to request that referral date. 
The Government does this increasingly. It is not only an abuse that affects smaller parties; it is also an abuse of the submitters who have the right to come to select committees and be heard by those select committees and an abuse of the right of the members of those select committees—especially the Opposition members—to put questions to those submitters. We are increasingly seeing that this Government wants to ram legislation through. It has early report-back dates with sittings at any time of the day the night and the week and in some cases the time for questions is reduced to 30 seconds. A submitter puts a submission before a select committee and members have 30 seconds to ask questions. 
Hon Mark Gosche 
: Not on my committee. 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON 
: The member opposite is shaking his head. I suggest he sits in on the select committee that is dealing with the foreshore and seabed legislation at the moment because that is exactly what is happening. It is an abuse of democracy. When I came into Parliament I was told that we in this Parliament have a privilege that I do not think any other Westminster system has whereby submitters can appear before a select committee give their submissions and be questioned so that the public can have their input into legislation. If this Government keeps abusing that privilege then it is about time that all Opposition parties started fighting back. The ACT party will be moving an amendment today to the referral motion to take out all the words after the word “consideration”. I think all parties in this House that believe in democracy should vote in favour of that amendment and stop this abuse of process. It is outrageous and it is increasingly happening. It is increasingly what this Government is doing with bills that it is introducing to the House. 
Small parties do not have enough members to be everywhere at once. We have to make decisions. Some of us are on two or three select committees. The Government would argue that list MPs have the time to do so. That is not the case. A list MP’s constituency stretches from North Cape to Bluff. Sometimes the workload can be triple that of a constituency MP. List MPs cannot be here on Fridays in a week when the House is sitting; they have to be elsewhere. They lose their representation of the people whom they are speaking up for at the select committee. It is about time the Opposition started to fight back and we are starting it. 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: It’s an affront to democracy. 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON 
: It is an affront to democracy. As I said this is good legislation because we have seen in the whole area of transport all these big fiefdoms being able to develop their own policies and fighting with each other. We have the Maritime Safety Authority the Civil Aviation Authority the Land Transport Safety Authority Transfund Transit and the Ministry of Transport. Do members know why this has happened? Do members know why we have got to this situation with transport in this country? It is because for so long we have had weak Ministers of Transport. Under the 1984 Labour Government the Ministry of Transport was reduced to 20 personnel and out of that has grown these enormous— 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: Who was the Minister? 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON 
: Yes who was the Minister? 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: It was Richard Prebble. 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON 
: It was the Hon Richard Prebble—the last strong Minister of Transport. 
Darren Hughes 
: She’s embarrassed! 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON 
: It was a rhetorical question but the baby over there would not know what that meant. We need a strong Minister of Transport. This Government has had so many changes of Ministers of Transport and we still do not see a strong Minister of Transport. 
We have a recommendation from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee that this Government hold an inquiry into the sale process of Paraparaumu Airport. What is this Government doing with that recommendation? It is just shelving it. It has decided that it might do something by 1 October. Questions need to be asked about whether there is a conflict of interest with that inquiry in terms of personnel from the Ministry of Transport who were involved with the sale process having gone to work in the Minister’s office and having too much influence on the Minister in terms of whether an inquiry will be held. There are people out there who have fought a long and hard battle to have an inquiry into that sale process. They deserve answers. 
As I said we are supporting this bill being referred to the select committee but we are furious at this Government’s increasing abuse of power when it tries to ram legislation through the House. When I last looked New Zealand was not a dictatorship; we still had democracy and the right of the Opposition parties to be heard and to have some input. But that is increasingly being taken away by this Government. It is an appalling affront and any Opposition party that does not support our amendment is standing on the top of a slippery slope of abuse of power. 
PHIL HEATLEY (National—Whangarei) 
: 
 All I can do for the National Party over here is endorse ACT’s proposal that all parties in this House—apart from the undemocratic Labour Party which is riding roughshod over process—support the motion that we dispense with the Labour Party Government’s proposal that we ride roughshod over Standing Orders 191 192 and 193.  
That may not have been so bad had the Labour Party Government not been continually doing it over this parliamentary term. Members will recall that the new seabed and foreshore select committee—which I think is called the Fisheries and Other Sea-related Legislation Committee—has dispensed with Standing Order 191 which is about meetings not happening on Fridays except by leave of the committee. It states: “Except by leave of the committee a select committee may not meet on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House.” but no the Fisheries and Other Sea-related Legislation Committee has ridden roughshod over that Standing Order. Standing Order 192 “Place of meeting” states: “A select committee may meet at any place within New Zealand. It must be authorised by the House before it can meet outside New Zealand.” It has also been dispensed with by the Fisheries and Other Sea-related Legislation Committee. Standing Order 193 “Meetings outside Wellington area” states: “A committee may meet outside the Wellington area—(a) during a sitting of the House only with the agreement of the Business Committee”—Labour is riding roughshod over that—“and (b) otherwise only if the committee has itself agreed to the place for its meeting.” 
That is happening far too often and we will join ACT in opposing the proposal that this bill be considered on Fridays and in places outside Wellington without that first having gone to the Business Committee and all the other issues in the Standing Orders that are being overruled. They are not put there as a joke as the House well knows. The Standing Orders are the Speaker’s second bible. I know that the Standing Orders are important to Mr Speaker. He has watched them being ridden roughshod over. They were not put there in vain. 
In saying that I would like to point out that the National Party supports this bill being referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. We understand that it is to report back on 29 October. We have members on that committee who are enthusiastic to see this bill tweaked where it needs to be but on the whole we support it. 
I would like to take up some of the Hon Maurice Williamson’s comments about the decision for this legislation actually to split off the policy functions of the Land Transport Safety Authority and bring them back into the Ministry of Transport. In his view and certainly in the view of much of Parliament the policy and operational functions being in the Land Transport Safety Authority has gone on for far too long. There have been too many surprises. Legislation and regulation in the transport sector have tended to run away from Ministers in this Labour Government more than most. I acknowledge that part of that is incompetence but it is also to do with the fact that the Land Transport Safety Authority has had a policy function as well as an operational function. Having the majority of the policy brought back into the ministry is certainly a good thing. 
 It was interesting to hear about the issue of safety helmets. When Maurice Williamson was Minister of Transport he was woken up one morning and asked to comment on the Land Transport Safety Authority’s bright idea of having safety helmets for those in automobiles trucks and little minis all around the country. How absurd that idea was! How could it ever have got into a policy document? It was absolutely absurd. I think of the mother of six from Pakuranga whom Maurice Williamson often talks about. What if she had to have seven little helmets stored in her car to be used every time she wanted to drive down to the local dairy to pick up some milk? What if she had to have seven little car seats and seven little helmets? I mean how far does it go? One might need to have gloves next and knee-pads and on it goes. That is the problem with having the Land Transport Safety Authority too focused on those sorts of policy decisions and not being accountable I guess politically to the electorate which is generally common sense. Sometimes regulations tend to run away with people. 
Talking about the transparency of car windows and not being able to see through them I remember that argument. I have a woman in the Whangarei electorate who is still battling Land Transport Safety Authority proposals about how much of her side windows she should be allowed to cover with transparencies. Having spent 500 bucks putting stickers on the side windows of her car she was told she had to tear them off. That was understandable except that she had received three warrants of fitness while those stickers were on the car; all of a sudden apparently the warrant of fitness people had got it wrong and she at her expense had to take them off. 
Simon Power 
: That can’t be right. 
PHIL HEATLEY 
: No. The authority then suggested that she put transparent stickers on the windows—ones with colours that people can see through. She spent a couple of grand on that and again the car went through warrant of fitness checks and was fine. She then got pulled up on that and had to tear those off as well. That is the difficulty when something like the Land Transport Safety Authority is involved in operational functions as well as policy functions; we get these absurd impractical regulations bureaucracy runs away with it and every New Zealander is the poorer for it. 
Of course we know of the authority’s focus on the road toll issue. We heard the Minister of Police say in the House today that road tolls are dropping. We know that is not true. They levelled out and they have just started increasing again. He has police out there collecting revenue for his Minister of Finance Michael Cullen to spend on all sorts of pet projects. He has his police collecting revenue under a quota system and it is not having an impact on speeding drivers dangerous events or the number of deaths of New Zealanders on the roads. We need to ensure that the Land Transport Safety Authority does not give permission in effect for the police to be collecting revenue instead of focusing on police work which is what the police should be doing. 
In fact I am actually doing a survey at the moment of people in Northland. I have received just over 3000 survey forms back from the public on whether they feel the police are spending too much of their time and resources on road work—that is collecting revenue on the roads—or whether they are getting enough resources for police work which is catching criminals who are stealing catching violent offenders and catching all those others who are causing mayhem in our society. I will be very interested to go through that survey and find out whether people in Northland are concerned that there is too much focus on revenue collecting and not enough on policing. I will certainly be sending those results to the Minister of Police. He might get a short sharp shock from those results. He might decide that a quota system for ticketing is not helpful to New Zealanders and not helpful with regard to their relationship with the police. 
Maurice Williamson also touched on the issue of search and rescue operations—those undertaken or overseen by the Civil Aviation Authority in the past—and the change in the bill to give the Minister discretion as to who does oversee search and rescue operations. Clearly it could be the role of the Maritime Safety Authority and that would be better in many many situations. This change was brought about by the sinking of a recreation vehicle near Oamaru some time ago where several lives were lost. A review of what happened there questioned whether the search and rescue had been carried out in the best way it could have been. The authority’s involvement in the overseeing of it actually came up wanting and that led to the changes in this bill. 
So we support this bill being referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee but we will also support ACT’s proposed amendment to the motion. 
LARRY BALDOCK (United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to support this legislation being introduced into the House. It is with a great deal of satisfaction really that we see another piece of legislation that is focusing upon transport issues. When I first entered this Parliament I had a burden for the issue of families. Second to that was the issue with regard to our transport network in this country and the number of New Zealanders who were being injured or killed on our roads as a result of poor roading infrastructure as well as other things. 
When I first stood for Parliament in 1999 I spoke a lot in my speeches about some very practical things that could be done to improve things in New Zealand. I had recently read a little publication called  
The Dog and Lemon Guide  
which I still hold to be full of some very practical things. One of the things the book recommended was the introduction of crash testing results for automobiles. It has been pleasing to see that introduced in the last few days so that New Zealand motorists can choose safer cars when they purchase them and I think ultimately that will have an effect upon the safety statistics that we all long for in this country. So there has been much happening with regard to transport in terms of the legislative programme of this House. United Future is pleased again to rise and speak in support of the Transport Legislation Bill. 
A long time has passed since the Government transport sector was restructured in such a way that a single agency has the authority and resources to take the lead in developing and implementing transport policy and that administrative overlap and wastage is minimised. I think we all agree that there will be significant improvements arising from the restructuring that this bill promotes. Ultimately it will give our taxpayers a much better efficiency in the use of their taxpayer funds. 
United Future has worked closely with this Government on transport issues. It has been my pleasure to work with the Hon Paul Swain and now with the new Minister of Transport the Hon Pete Hodgson. In fact United Future is very pleased that the Government has adopted so much of United Future’s transport policy. We will continue to work cooperatively with the Government throughout the rest of this term. We are determined to see addressed the chronic underfunding of New Zealand’s transport infrastructure. We are determined to see reforms that will enable much-needed new roading projects all over the country to be expedited. 
We have already made significant legislative reforms that will enable alternative sources of funding such as public-private partnerships to be identified and utilised. We have also ensured that extra funding for all regions not just Auckland will be made available from petrol excise tax increases soon to come and that a more favourable proportion of this tax will be spent on roads rather than ending up in the Crown account. 
However there is little point in securing extra funding if it is just going to be frittered away by an uncoordinated bureaucracy or tied up while waiting for projects to get the go-ahead. That is why United Future is so pleased to see this legislation. By strengthening the role of the Ministry of Transport this single agency will be able to take the lead in developing and implementing transport strategy. Rather than having one agency pulling in one direction and one pulling in another by spending road funding money in an inefficient and uncoordinated manner as they go we will see road money being spent strategically and efficiently thereby maximising the gains from increased funding. 
It has made no sense to us in United Future why we had to have a statutory independent body such as Transfund to make so many significant decisions about road funding simply because there may have been some suspicion about the Minister fixing the roads in his own back yard when in consideration that was such a small percentage of the amount of funding that was to be carried out throughout the country and only led to an increased layer of bureaucracy. 
This does not occur in the Ministry of Health and it does not occur in any other agencies and I believe that it is time we were able to trust the Minister and the Ministry of Transport to see that road funding is used where it is needed throughout the country. 
United Future is also pleased that the longstanding issue over which agency should have primary responsibility for undertaking search and rescue coordination has been resolved. By enabling the Minister of Transport to direct the new Maritime Transport Authority to carry out management administration of national search and rescue in future rather than the Civil Aviation Authority we will hopefully see better search and rescue coverage and response times and avoid a repeat of the incident near Oamaru which resulted in a tragic loss of life. 
The other department that is to be restructured under this bill is the Land Transport Safety Authority. It began with United’s policy and then was United Future’s policy for some time to have the Land Transport Safety Authority abolished. I have to say that I have personally been impressed with the work of the new director of the Land Transport Safety Authority in the time he has been in charge of the authority. I believe that the authority has made significant progress in what it does and I commend him particularly for adopting a threefold strategy rather than the old twofold strategy that ignored the need to see our roads built more safely and the engineering design taken into consideration in the strategy to reduce accidents. But ultimately it is clear that the policy development of the Land Transport Safety Authority should be transferred to the Ministry of Transport rather then held in a separate agency. As Phil Heatley said speaking prior to me there needed to be a separating of the policy and the operational functions of the Land Transport Safety Authority. 
We know though that despite the best efforts of the authority we will arrive at a plateau in this country where we cannot bring down the road toll any further without investing heavily in improving the quality of our roads so that lunatics who continue to travel at great speed or under the influence of alcohol or drugs are impeded from being able to kill innocent motorists. We must have more divided highways throughout our highway network and other engineering initiatives that will produce a safer condition to limit the error factor that will always be with us for as long as human beings are behind the wheel of automobiles. 
There will be other things addressed by the select committee I am sure as it hears submissions on this bill. There has been a lot of debate today about the speed with which this bill has to go through the House but United Future is supporting that speed. We believe that it is necessary. We believe that this restructuring has been discussed and has been provided for for some time. The sooner it can be implemented the better off motorists and the business network through the country will be as we can implement all the other initiatives that this Government has been introducing with the support of United Future. I conclude my comments by indicating that United Future will be supporting the first reading of this bill. 
JOHN KEY (National—Helensville) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to engage in debate on the Transport Legislation Bill on behalf of the National Party. National will be supporting the bill. But we will be taking a very very close look at it when it goes to the select committee for a couple of reasons. Firstly we know that legislation introduced to the House by the Labour Party often lacks rigour and definition. It is often very sloppy indeed. I notice that on many of the select committees I sit on a huge amount of change is made to legislation introduced by this Government. I am forced to draw the conclusion that there is a lack of work by the Government on these bills before they are rushed into the House. Certainly we will be looking at this bill very closely. I commend the first speaker for the National Party the Hon Maurice Williamson. He came down here— 
Phil Heatley 
: A former Minister of Transport 
JOHN KEY 
: He is a former Minister of Transport. The Hon Mark Gosche also a former Minister of Transport noted that the House was flush with former Ministers of Transport—in fact the Minister himself— 
Phil Heatley 
: The graveyard shift. 
JOHN KEY 
: Yes it can be a graveyard shift. It was interesting to watch the current Minister of Transport and a former Minister of Transport Mark Gosche listening intently while the Hon Maurice Williams was speaking on the bill so eloquently. In their heart of hearts they knew that although their absolute performance may have been adequate—a “could do better” on a report card—they were looking to learn about relative performance. I could see in their eyes they were thoroughly enjoying his address and that it added to the debate. 
I turn to the first and quite important point about the intent in the bill to override Standing Order 191 which would allow the select committee to sit on a Friday and anywhere in New Zealand. The National Party will have much pleasure in supporting the amendment put up by Deborah Coddington of the ACT party to remove that provision. When I saw that I wondered why the Government is all of a sudden asking for this provision so that the committee can sit on a Friday and anywhere in New Zealand. It is a trend of this administration to try to do this a lot. It happened with the Foreshore and Seabed Bill and a number of others. 
The obvious conclusion I have come to is simple. This is not taking place because the Ministers care about whether the select committee sits on a Friday or in Auckland Wellington Christchurch Dunedin Taupaki or anywhere else. Ministers as members of the public will know do not sit on a select committee as such. They attend if it affects their particular ministry. So it does not affect Ministers. They will not be pushing for this. The reason is that the Government now has a very narrow majority indeed. It has a one-vote majority. It lost one of its former colleagues the honourable Tariana Turia. She saw the light and left the Labour Party. She will obviously be back in 2005 with a great many more colleagues and Labour will have far fewer as it sits on the Opposition benches. Interestingly it is now in a position where it cannot afford to vote down— 
Dave Hereora 
: He’s dreaming. 
JOHN KEY 
: Dreams are free but that is not a dream I have; it is a real-life experience. I have seen it in front of me. I have read the book. I know that it has taken place. Nanaia Mahuta is in the House today. She is a good member but is another who will be under pressure when she goes to the ballot box. 
Phil Heatley 
: She will jump ship. 
JOHN KEY 
: Yes but I am digressing in wondering why the Government is so eager to override this provision and why it has been so eager the whole way through in current legislation and I was at the point where I was discussing the very slim majority this Government has. It could fall at any time. I have great faith in United Future which understands that this Government is in its dying throes. It is really a very sick puppy indeed if I can put it in those terms. I notice this afternoon that the junior Government whip Mr Darren Hughes has gone out and had a haircut. That should not be of any note but often one does that—[ 
Interruption 
] I know I have parliamentary privilege so I do not want to abuse this and I would not say this outside the House but I suspect the haircut is very much on the basis that he is looking for a job interview. I return to Standing Order 191. 
Darren Hughes 
: Bring it on! 
JOHN KEY 
: We will be bringing it on. 
Hon Member 
: Don Brash will be running against him. 
JOHN KEY 
: Don Brash will be running against him in Otaki! Dr Don Brash would wipe it clean in Otaki. What a wonderful Prime Minister of New Zealand he is going to make. I return to Standing Order 191. Why is it that the Government is so keen about that? It is nothing to do with Ministers. We know they do not sit on select committees. We know that the Government has a one-seat majority. The reason is very obvious and I am sure very obvious to those who are eagerly engaged in this debate today. The reason is that members of Parliament back-bench members the cannon-fodder of the Labour Party cannot afford to be out of the House for fear of the Government losing a vote. Ministers well they would have normally come down to the Chamber and filled up their seats and been happily engaged and happy to take some of the workload off the back-benchers so they could be out there trying to win their seats. But no they cannot now because the Government is under so much pressure. They are out there going up and down the country trying to talk to people about the things they are doing. It is just not happening. That is my conclusion as to why the Government has gone to so much length on Standing Order 191 and I simply wanted to raise that point. 
I want to move on to the guts of the bill which looks to integrate the policy work from the Land Transport Authority and Transfund into the Ministry of Transport. At first blush that looks like an eminently sensible idea and we commend the Minister for doing that. But I am interested to note that in the explanatory note of the bill there is no mention of the financial implications of merging the policy work that was under the Land Transport Authority and was in Transfund into the Ministry of Transport. When the select committee looks at this I will be asking our members on the select committee to find out about any cost savings taking place. Because one thing we know about this Government is that it is a big spender. It loves spending taxpayers’ money. A $13.9 billion spend-up is what Dr Michael Cullen dished out in the last Budget. 
Interestingly enough most people in New Zealand know that that is a crazy amount of money to be spending on such a build-up and for someone who claims to be a fiscal conservative—a rather bold assumption I would have thought on Dr Cullen’s part—that is interesting. I am surprised we have not seen any mention of cost savings and the Opposition will be looking to do that. 
I do want to make mention of the purpose of the bill and if I may read from it for a moment it states: “The purpose of the review was to consider whether the Government transport sector has the capability and is best arranged to implement the NZTS.” If one looks at the strategy we see some very very interesting terms. One of them is “ensuring environmental sustainability”. I was interested to hear the speech made by the United Future member who claimed credit and said that so much of Labour’s current policy in transport is coming from United Future. 
 That of course is a complete and utter hoax. We know that the Labour Party’s transport strategy was not written by the Hon Pete Hodgson who is now the Minister of Transport. It was not actually written by the previous Minister of Transport Mark Gosche either. It was written by an unknown woman—Heather Simpson—who does not sit in the Parliament. She does the negotiations with the Green Party. Interestingly enough when the Land Transport Management Bill was being debated here on a quiet night it was Heather Simpson with the Prime Minister who determined what would be in New Zealand’s transport strategy. That is why it is such a Green strategy and unworkable. That strategy will be soundly rejected by the people of New Zealand when they go to the polls in 12 months’ time. 
National will be supporting the legislation. We will take a good look at it in the select committee. I urge members to make sure that the cost savings are found and I urge the Government to remove Standing Order 191 so that it can be tossed from office as soon as possible. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I seek leave to table a report from the  
Dominion 
 dated 29 September 1998 headed “Minister rules out law on helmets”. 
Document by leave laid on the Table of the House. 
Bill read a first time. 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Minister of Transport) 
: 
 I move 
 That the Transport Legislation Bill be referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee 
referred to Transport and Industrial Relations Committee 
 for consideration that the committee report the bill by 29 October 2004 and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting except during questions for oral answer and during an evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House and outside the Wellington area on a day the House is sitting despite Standing Orders 191 193(a) and 194(1)(b) and (c). 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 I move  
That all the words after the word “consideration” be omitted. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the amendment be agreed to. 
Ayes 47 
New Zealand National 27; New Zealand First 13; ACT New Zealand 7. 
Noes 68 
New Zealand Labour 51; Green Party 7; United Future 8; Progressive 2. 
Amendment not agreed to. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the motion be agreed to. 
Ayes 68 
New Zealand Labour 51; Green Party 7; United Future 8; Progressive 2. 
Noes 47 
New Zealand National 27; New Zealand First 13; ACT New Zealand 7. 
Motion agreed to. 
Building Bill 
Third Reading 
Hon TAITO PHILLIP FIELD (Minister of State) 
 on behalf of the  
Associate Minister of Commerce (Hon John Tamihere) 
: I move  
That the Building Bill be now read a third time 
. This bill is the culmination of a thorough review and I pay tribute to the literally hundreds of stakeholders who have offered advice during its development. 
The bill marks an important milestone in the development of an appropriate regulatory framework for the building industry that both the industry and consumers have been seeking. Like a well-designed building the changes reflected in the bill are a complementary and integrated package. They are designed to work together to minimise risk of future regulatory failure. The Opposition claims that the bill is over-regulation. That ignores the impact that too little control has had on ordinary New Zealanders. I believe that the bill represents a position of balance. We want New Zealanders devising innovative solutions to building problems but we also want buildings that do not fail. 
The performance-based approach has been retained but adapted to provide greater information on the outcomes sought their measurement and best practice on how to achieve them. There are changes to improve monitoring and enforcement of the building control system and to ensure the competence of those who provide the services—the designers the builders and other critical sub-trades. The performance standards and the licensing regime are designed to ensure that people who use buildings can do so safely and without endangering their health; that buildings have attributes that improve the well-being of people who use them; that people can escape from buildings if the buildings are on fire; and that buildings are constructed and designed in ways that promote sustainable development. 
This bill strengthens the building regulatory regime by providing the framework to ensure that inputs into buildings are high quality. The building code will be comprehensively reviewed within 3 years to make sure that it is clear enough about the standards we expect buildings to meet. The bill provides for the development of compliance documents that set out how the building code standards may be met and for best-practice guidance documents to provide information to territorial authorities in recognition that they are co-regulators in respect of this legislation. It requires registration and audits of building consent authorities and as part of this process they will need to be accredited that they can do the job and do it well. 
The bill provides for the licensing of building practitioners for the first time and sets the framework for the licensing system but the detail of how it will work in practice will be set out in regulation after consultation with the industry. On Monday the Associate Minister of Commerce the Hon John Tamihere released a discussion document on this subject. 
The bill also provides greater consumer protection. It gives express recognition to the importance of standards of design and construction in achieving its objectives increases the emphasis on durability and standards of maintenance and provides for mandatory standard warrantees. Sustainable development will be promoted by the development of building standards in relation to energy efficiency energy conservation water efficiency and water conservation. 
In conclusion this bill shows that the Government is concerned about ordinary New Zealanders and I look forward to it being passed into law. I commend this bill to the House. 
LINDSAY TISCH (National—Piako) 
: 
 National has acknowledged through the first and second readings and the Committee stage of this bill that there are deficiencies in the Building Act 1991. We have acknowledged the leaky home problem and the subsequent weathertightness report. But we cannot support a bill that introduces a very prescriptive regulatory regime. It is overkill and an overburdening of the industry with bureaucracy and administration. Although we believed there were faults in the 1991 Act it was also our view that that legislation could have been amended to compensate for its deficiencies. 
This legislation will add significant costs to all construction work and compliance costs for residential buildings will increase the most. It will potentially affect economic growth due to the significant increase in building compliance costs for both applicants and territorial local authorities with regard to accreditation. We will see widespread bypassing of the new requirements for do-it-yourself projects. The economic impact of this legislation will see significant increases in labour costs. The labour component of the cost of a typical dwelling is approximately 35 to 40 percent. That labour component will bear the brunt of the increased costs as it responds more readily to supply and demand factors than the other components do. There is already a short supply of skilled tradespeople in the building industry—especially in bricklaying where they are able to name their price. The provision that building works need to be supervised rather than inspected will prove to be a major cost factor in any building project. To supervise the construction of a small home that would take about 4 months to build has been estimated to take about 85 hours. It will cost approximately $10000 just to meet the new requirements of this legislation. 
Will this legislation enhance customer safety and protection? National’s view is that it will not. This legislation will lead to delays it will fuel inflation and it will most probably lead to illegal construction work as people look to bypass it. The very considerable shortage of skilled personnel will impact on the number of licensed building practitioners available from 1 July 2009 when that part of the bill becomes law. Any person assuming liability for the overall supervision of building works as a principal licensed building practitioner will need to have wide knowledge and a high level of competency as well as substantial professional indemnity insurance—that is if he or she is able to obtain that insurance. Industry registration will have an immediate impact on the availability of skilled tradespeople because many of them will simply not wish to formally upskill themselves in order to meet the requirements to become licensed and will leave the industry. The training industry does not have the resources to meet the expected demand from those who will wish to upskill themselves to meet the new regulatory requirements that the bill provides for. That will be very noticeable in rural and remote areas and will have an adverse economic and social effect on owner-builders and on farming communities. 
The traditional Kiwi attitude towards building one’s own home farm building or backyard shed is compromised by the very prescriptive nature of this bill. In fact clause 173 requires that all work be supervised—not just inspected as the law states at the moment. That will add huge costs for those operators who are involved in building prefabricated buildings barns bridges glasshouses  and hothouses. All those structures require a building consent and their construction will need to be carried out or supervised by a licensed building practitioner. With the increased compliance costs the viability of some of the businesses operating in that area could become suspect and that will be a major concern. 
We also have a concern about the future of private certifiers who along with territorial local authorities will become building consent authorities. The issues pertaining to insurance have been widely canvassed and debated. In Australia—and I used examples of this in the Committee stage yesterday—private certifiers are used extensively. They are covered by proportionate liability compared with the system in New Zealand where the liability is joint and several. There is a distinct feeling within the industry that the Government does not want to have private certifiers. Although private certifiers are accommodated in the bill—the amendment to clause 381 tabled yesterday on Supplementary Order Paper 241 in the name of the Hon John Tamihere provides for a period of some limited comfort; in fact clause 381(1) enables them to work until 31 May 2006—they will not be able to continue in their work unless they have applied to become a building consent authority before then. In National’s view that is an escape clause for the Government and it will be difficult for a private certifier to operate after that date. 
The role of building consent authorities is important in the bill. It will be impossible for territorial local authorities to pick up all the work that is currently done by private certifiers and their own staff because they will not have the qualified personnel needed to do that. Some observers have commented that private certifiers could become the employees of territorial local authorities. That is quite right; they could. But it is certainly my view that many will move off shore where their experience and expertise will be valued. 
We had another major concern regarding the bill. I put forward an amendment to add land subsidence and geothermal hazards to the definition of the term “natural hazard”. Supplementary Order Paper 241 did include subsidence but the proposition that geothermal hazards should be included was defeated. The impact of that is that territorial local authorities will not be able to refuse to issue consents on the ground that the land could be subject to geothermal hazards—or hot spots in the ground. They will then not have the protection of non-liability as found in clause 344 of the bill. Councils have been able to use section 36 of the current Act to manage risk but under this bill the risk management provision is excluded when it comes to the matter of geothermal hazards. In the Taupo area where geothermal hazards are a major factor the liability that that council will face in the future could be quite extensive. It is my view that Parliament is exposing local government to future civil litigation—a minefield—and that that will have significant effects for both councils and their ratepayers. 
We also argued that if fences to hold people out of swimming pools were included in the definition of a building stopbanks should also be included. The devastation that we have seen in the lower North Island and recently in the Eastern Bay of Plenty would suggest that stopbanks are important in the protection of people property local communities and infrastructure. But our reasoning was not accepted by the Government. 
National has stated throughout this debate that there are problems with the existing law and the Act and that those problems needed to be fixed. But to throw the Act out in its entirety and to substitute 385 pages of bureaucratic red tape will do nothing to ensure the safety and confidence of the people whom this legislation is designed to help. National does not support this bill. 
BRENT CATCHPOLE (NZ First) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take a call in the third reading of this bill. New Zealand First supports this bill and we support it because it is the result of an extensive inquiry. That inquiry was held into the weathertightness of homes—the leaky homes debacle that we saw a few years ago. We also support the extensive research into and rewrite of a number of parts of the old Act. Although New Zealand First believed that the old Act was adequate we felt it did need a few adjustments the most important of which concerned the licensing of building practitioners. However with the catalyst for this bill being the inquiry into the weathertightness of homes it was a case of this bill having to go through a whole process that followed on from that inquiry. That process was carried out extensively particularly by the Government Administration Committee. Its chairperson Dianne Yates and the rest of the members of the committee did a very very good job in putting the bill together. 
New Zealand First believes that do-it-yourselfers are not affected in any way by this legislation. They do have to make sure that if they are working with the outer skin of a building or with any structural walls they have somebody there to sign off that they have carried out the work correctly. That person has to be a licensed building practitioner. A do-it-yourselfer—or DIY’er—is allowed to do everything else so the great Kiwi tradition of people being able to build their own homes has not been affected at all. It is essential to remember that because the structures that are put in place through this legislation ensure that do-it-yourselfers are not affected. People have to abide by certain rules but they can still build their own homes. 
People state that extra costs are a part of this bill. Yes there are some extra costs—some extra compliance costs—but we think of them as an insurance policy. That policy insures that the building or house is put together correctly with all the detail and all the facilities necessary for it to be an asset. Let us face it: people’s homes are the biggest assets they will ever own. Therefore they want to be sure that those assets will not become devalued which is what we have seen with leaking homes. Those buildings have been devalued. In fact there are a lot of homes out there that people are having difficulty in selling. No insurance company will touch them because there are huge problems with the way that the buildings were constructed and with the effectiveness of the repairs to them. So New Zealand First looks at the additional costs as an insurance policy—insurance that people have houses that will be ongoing assets for them. 
The fact that code of compliance statements for buildings were outstanding with territorial local authorities was an area we were very concerned about. We discovered during the select committee inquiry that there were tens of thousands of code of compliance statements outstanding and there had been no attempt to match them up with the building consents issued by building consent authorities. That in itself was a major problem because many of the houses concerned were completed many years ago. I have evidence that some buildings were completed from 5 to 10 years ago but they do not have a code of compliance statement. That was a remiss action on the territorial authorities’ part because they failed to follow up on that and cross-check the records. This bill corrects that and makes sure that they are responsible for checking to ensure that the correct paperwork has been completed. 
The provision concerning licensed building practitioners is the biggest addition in this bill. It is the major part of the bill and if anybody says that the old Act is being thrown out and that the 358-page bill now being brought in is a complete rewrite of the legislation he or she is incorrect. It is not a complete rewrite because large parts of the old Act have been just transferred straight into this bill with the addition of the provisions concerning licensed building practitioners. New Zealand First agrees that the licensing of building practitioners is an important step towards trying to unify the whole process. In the past the process has had a lot of inconsistencies as the economy has gone up and down. When the economy was on a high a number of new entrants into the building industry came in without the full training and skills that were needed and that was particularly true after the abolition of the old apprenticeship scheme. A lot of those people came in and they began to undercut others when the economy started to dive again. That then forced the full tradespeople out of the industry because they could no longer compete with them and it left a huge gap in the industry. Licensing people at the levels of their competence which will be done with peer review will allow for more consistency within the whole building industry. The industry welcomes that because it means it will have a better benchmark for deciding how the construction and building industries should develop. 
We in New Zealand First are very mindful of the need for the chief executive and particularly the licensing body to be very careful with regard to the licensing regime so as not to make it too difficult for some very skilled people who are reaching the end of their working lives. We do not want to see people with high skills walking away from the industry early because they have a valuable part to play in training the young people who are coming into the industry. If we allow those people to fall by the wayside early then we will lose their experience which will not be passed on. 
The Government crows about its Modern Apprenticeships scheme. Now that is a misnomer because although the Government promised that it would put the old apprenticeship scheme back in place Modern Apprenticeships are not the old apprenticeship scheme. The Government has just taken the scheme that was in place under the New Zealand Qualifications Authority rebadged it and called it the Modern Apprenticeships scheme. It does not provide the mechanisms and support for small businesses and highly skilled tradespeople to take on an apprentice. There is not the incentive or the mechanism for them to take on apprentices and to properly train the young people who are coming through. Therefore we are not getting the new entrants coming into the scheme. As a result the industry is very short of skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen—and there are a lot of very skilled tradeswomen within the building industry as well so they should not be forgotten. But it is important that the chief executive keeps in mind the entry levels and requirements in order to make sure that the skilled workforce is not forced out of the industry. 
As the bill has progressed through the House we have already seen an improvement within the industry. We have seen territorial authorities pick up on parts of the bill already. Many parts of the building code have already been rewritten as a result of the inquiry into leaky homes and the advancement of this bill. Therefore the industry is starting to regain the confidence of the public and I am pleased that it has taken into its mind the need to regain that confidence. We will see a much better economy resulting from that. 
Finally just to wrap up one matter that New Zealand First would have liked to see included in this bill was a provision to prevent phoenix companies from popping up just to develop a particular project and then disappearing again taking the assets with them. 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is extremely pleased to be supporting this bill. We are particularly pleased that so many of our amendments have been incorporated into it such as adding sustainable development and health to the purpose clause and adding issues of heritage energy conservation and efficiency the use of renewable energy water conservation efficiency the efficient use of material waste reduction and of course health into the principles of this bill. 
I notice that the National Party representative has suggested that this bill is overkill but the truth is that it is responding to an extremely serious problem which was investigated in the leaky buildings inquiry into poor building practices in New Zealand. It is not a small problem but a huge one as can be seen by the fact that the Weathertight Homes Resolution Service’s information line has received an extraordinary 7623 calls since it was launched in September last year and the service has received 2273 applications since December last year. All of those thousands of applications came from people whose lives have in many cases almost been destroyed by the fact that they have bought homes that in some cases are worth virtually nothing. We heard from submitters who had literally lost all their life-savings and others who were living in homes that are damp and wet and who have serious health concerns. 
 This is not overkill. It addresses a very serious problem in New Zealand and for the first time it offers real consumer protection. However the Green Party still has real concerns about the energy efficiency standards in the building code and we sincerely hope that the bill will result in higher better standards of insulation and energy efficiency. Current insulation requirements under the building code are frankly minimal. They are simply minimum standards that need to be met and hardly contribute to building warm dry healthier homes. In Europe double glazing is the norm in most new houses as is thick insulation. But double glazing is not even part of our code. Surely it is simple common sense that new houses with large amounts of glass particularly in the colder areas of New Zealand should be double-glazed. Surely it is just common sense that we would have higher standards of insulation in New Zealand particularly in the colder parts because properly insulated homes mean warmer houses lower heating bills and less sickness. They require much less heating and much less energy and produce great energy savings not just to the householder but also to the whole nation so that instead of having to build dams to solve our energy shortages all we need are simple things like properly insulated homes. We need incentives to encourage people to properly insulate their homes. 
Less heating would also mean less smoke from wood fires and consequently less pollution which would mean meeting our Kyoto obligations faster. At present we have smog reminiscent of Victorian London lying over some of our major cities on cold winter mornings—notably Christchurch. Various regulations are being talked about but there is no mention of proper strengthened insulation and double glazing to help solve the problem. Properly insulated energy-efficient homes mean savings in terms of costs to the health system and fewer employee sick-days for businesses. 
If it were all added up and a proper cost benefit done it is pure common sense to require new home owners to build warm energy-efficient and well-insulated homes especially when one realises that spending a little up front will result in huge savings every single year that a house exists. If a house lasts for 50 or 100 years as it is supposed to—if it is not one of those leaky homes that may last only a few years—there will be huge energy savings. And of course it is so much more expensive to try to add insulation to an already built home than it is to build it in the first place. 
It is quite astonishing that in New Zealand half our houses are not properly insulated. A quarter of our homes have full insulation and a further quarter are partly insulated. That is despite the fact that research shows that people who live in well-insulated homes have much better health and children who live in uninsulated homes are twice as likely to experience asthma and take days off school because of colds and the flu. That is why we are deeply disappointed that a simple common-sense amendment that we put forward was rejected by the Committee—a requirement that if an existing home is undergoing a significant renovation the energy efficiency standards of the building code should apply to the alterations of that house. When one reflects that half our homes are not properly insulated one can see what a waste of energy what poor health and what problems that is creating. Surely it would be simple common sense to require that the energy efficiency standards apply to alterations. But no the Committee rejected that amendment. What stupidity! That will come back to haunt us. We will continue to waste energy and then instead of considering simple things we will go around trying to destroy our environment by building dams. What idiocy! 
Another common-sense proposal we had was that territorial authorities should be given the power to be able to ensure purely for reasons of resource conservation that they could add requirements in their geographic areas for new homes having to meet certain additional standards. But the bill does not permit them to do that. It is simple common sense as I said. In Christchurch they might be looking at greater insulation or double glazing. In areas where there are water shortages they might want to introduce mandatory water tanks. It is just simple common sense to give the local authorities the ability to require that for resource conservation only. I am pleased to see the Labour member Steve Chadwick agreeing with me and I therefore wonder why her party rejected our amendment which would mean so much in terms of improving energy efficiency. 
Finally I want to say talking about health that we are absolutely delighted that there is finally a requirement that the new building department will have to assess the health effects of new building materials. It is not just astonishing but almost beyond comprehension that none of the thousands of building materials on the market in New Zealand—many of which are known to off-gas things such as formaldehyde a known carcinogen and which use known toxic substances—are assessed for their health effects even though we spend 80 percent of our time indoors. We have just come up with a whole new national environmental standard for air quality but we are completely silent on indoor air quality. We were warned by various submitters that indoor air quality will be a major health concern in New Zealand and we are grateful that we will require at least under that provision that the health effects of building materials will have to be considered even though it is arguably 100 years too late. But the problem is what will happen to all of those existing building materials that are already emitting toxic fumes and in some cases are creating poisonous environments in our homes and in our buildings—another big issue that the Green Party wants to see addressed. 
We strongly support the registration of builders and we believe it is essential that we have builders who are properly registered. It is just bizarre that we have people building our homes who do not need to have any qualifications. We do have some concerns about whether owner-builders are being penalised by the provisions of this bill. They are not the ones who created the leaky building crisis—it was the developers. We also have concerns about the continuance of private building inspectors but overall despite our reservations we think the bill offers much greater consumer protection and we are happy to support it. 
Hon KEN SHIRLEY (ACT) 
: 
 I would like to spend a couple of minutes in rebuttal of the Green Party member who has just resumed her seat. I totally agree with her that housing is unquestionably an important part of health. New Zealanders do live in cold damp houses because of our climatic conditions. We live in a cool temperate climate zone and we are right at the edge of not justifying central heating and our houses are cold. Most visitors to this country agree that our houses are cold relative to other countries but then we would be using an awful lot more energy if we had central heating. What we find in America and Europe is that they tend to overcool their houses in the hot summers and overheat them in the winter—fighting nature at every turn—whereas in New Zealand we tend to put on warm jerseys and sit around the fire. We are hardy characters and that is the Kiwi tradition. 
There have been a lot of myths and the speaker from the Green Party has just highlighted those myths. Firstly in reference to the leaky home syndrome she was calling for more insulation and energy efficiency. We have seen tremendous progress in energy efficiency in installation over the last 20 years in this country but that is one of the biggest problems of our leaky home syndrome and the toxic algae and fungi that are in the wall cavities. It was when we started tightening up on the conditions of the vapour barrier that we had the condensation in the wood structures of our timber frames and the rot. Those fungi and algae which are naturally occurring are much more toxic and damaging to health than we had realised. 
Then we come on to the issue of treated timber. Members will remember that we used to treat our frames but part of the problem has been exacerbated by the lack of treated frames. Who was it who ran a campaign against copper chrome arsenate? It was an outrageous campaign in Wellington playgrounds—spurious science. I will tell the members what they did because the Forest Research Institute has done a lot of work on this and there is quite a bit published. The person who made this claim—and a certain member of this House jumped on the bandwagon—actually took shavings from a playground that kids enjoyed where there was nice tanalised timber. The analysis was that a kid would have to ingest 5 kilograms a day of these wood shavings down at the local playground. How many little kids sit down at the playground in between swings and slides and ingest 5 kilograms of copper chrome arsenate treated wood? It is absolute rubbish. In terms of infusion into the adjacent ground there is no movement at all into the adjacent ground. 
 In fact copper chrome and arsenic are not particularly toxic. They can be toxic in certain doses but they are certainly not as harmful as not treating one’s wood and having the algae and the fungi that cause real disease in our homes. That is why we have to be very careful with issues like this. 
In fact it was not the copper chrome arsenate  which was the tanalised treatment of our wood frames and it was not the boric. We used to boric treat our frames but that was only for insect attack not for algae and fungi. The algae and fungi were held at bay indirectly. To prevent the anti-sap stain we used to put wood through the boric bath to which pentachlorophenol and organochlorine were added for cosmetic reasons. It stopped the blue stain as the market did not like blue-stained wood. But it was that substance that actually prevented the mould and the algae on our timber-framed housing. Now that we have very staunch tight vapour-proof insulation we are finding that air is condensing in the wood cavity with nowhere to go. 
Our homes are also more weathertight. We have sealed our windows tighter. In the old houses that Shane Ardern and I grew up in we used to have to stand on the carpet when the wind blew to hold it down. That was the nature of New Zealand housing. However insulation is now very tight. We have this monolithic cladding some of which is not very good and I think we will see a move away from that. The market is already rejecting it. New house buyers look very askance when they see monolithic cladding and so they should. There are also design problems like internal balconies that become water traps and baths and that water soaks down through the cavities. 
But the answer is not more regulation and control. The ACT party fiercely opposes this bill. It is all about more compliance costs more barriers to new entry and greater costs and difficulty for young homeowners trying to get into their first home. It is not a good bill. We heard from the New Zealand First speaker in this debate a claim that this would not impinge on the home do-it-yourselfer—the Kiwi tradition of doing one’s own work. I have to tell that member that it certainly does as we now have this term “restricted building work”. I refer the member to clause 6 where it is very clear. It states: “restricted building work—(a) means building work that— (i) requires a building consent;” and it goes on to state that it “includes without limitation work on—(i) the building envelope; and (ii) the structural support of a building”. 
But it is actually worse than that. I have just picked up another point when reading this provision. Traditional Kiwis will not be able to paint their houses any more particularly if it is a two-storey house because most scaffolding is attached to the frame of the house. There are screw bolts that go in with a scaffolding frame which many people will be familiar with but the bill refers to “any plank coupling fastening fitting or device used in connection with the construction erection or use of scaffolding”. If people use scaffolding to paint their houses they will have to have one of these registered licensed people on station and charging an inordinate amount. This is an affront to the traditional Kiwi ethos and spirit and I am deeply alarmed that so many parties in this House have been duped and seduced by what I regard as very draconian legislation. 
The big construction companies welcome the bill. They say that it is good but then they would. Who will benefit if entry is to be restricted? Those who are already in the tree hut always want to pull up the ladder so that no one else gets into the tree hut. That is exactly the situation we have with the big construction companies. They are rubbing their hands with glee. Fletcher Challenge has just announced a record profit—and good luck to that company—largely because of the home-building activity. This bill means that healthy competition will be further restricted and monopolies will be enshrined and that comes at a cost to the economy and to the individual. 
There are all sorts of other provisions in this bill—fences actually become a building and a swimming pool fence becomes a building. We will have bureaucrats and more bureaucrats. Let us think about it. We have always had local bodies with responsibility for inspecting buildings; some of them have done good jobs and some of them not so good. Surely that is enough control and regulation. When we start to have certifiers over inspectors over administrators—and then who checks the inspector and who certifies the certifier—it sounds good on paper and it might make people feel all warm and fuzzy inside and think they have done a good job in sorting it out but in practice invariably all it means is more control more restriction and a less satisfactory outcome where the rubber meets the road. This is bad legislation we will not support it and we are very disappointed that other parties have chosen to support it. 
MURRAY SMITH (United Future) 
: 
 I rise to shed some light rather than heat on the Building Bill. During the Committee stage we heard a lot of people speaking who obviously had not read the bill or if they had had not understood it and the ACT party has continued that today. 
Let me outline what this bill actually does and what the structure of the building industry will look like once this bill has passed. The first item is that there is a chief executive who will be responsible for the Department of Building and Housing that has just been created and over whom the Government will have much clearer oversight than it does over the Building Industry Authority. The current regime of the Building Industry Authority has lacked oversight; it has been too detached from Government oversight and that has been the thing that has caused us considerable problems. Part of the value of this bill is that it sets out clear principles that the chief executive is to follow and that provide a holistic approach to the building regime in New Zealand. It provides quite a wide range of measures that are to be taken into account when the building code and the way in which our building system is to operate are being formulated. Those measures have been expanded particularly by the Government Administration Committee to contain things like heritage recognition and the need for energy efficiency as well as to require innovation and cost factors to be taken into account. So there is far greater clarity outlined in the bill in terms of the role of the chief executive and a better picture for everyone to look at in terms of the sort of building industry we are seeking to establish in New Zealand over the next 5 to 10 years and beyond. 
The chief executive also has to undertake consultation and there are very clear provisions in the bill requiring him or her to consult the building industry. They include the provision of an advisory group made up of people from various aspects of the industry who will provide ongoing advice to the chief executive in the role that he or she fulfils. That is in contrast to the Building Industry Authority which was a little bit of a law unto itself. It was quite a small body that clearly did not consult or to the extent that it did consult did not adequately consult or take sufficient notice of what it was being told. That was no more transparent than in the leaky homes scenario where we found that the chief executive had been sitting on documents for 2 years that would have alterted him earlier to the problems that the leaky homes inquiry subsequently found out about. The problems we have had in that whole area could have been discovered a lot earlier. 
Another thing that the bill sets up having provided that framework in terms of chief executive oversight is provision for materials and labour and the methodology in terms of building to be clearly examined and controlled. The certification of products and methods is a new idea that is contained in the bill. Hopefully it will provide a better solution than the one we currently have whereby the only remedy is approved solutions. The way that that has worked is that very few people have applied for approved solutions and that regime really has not been successful. Hopefully the certification of products and methods although a voluntary scheme will be far more successful. Part of the important role of the chief executive in conjunction with the Government is to ensure that people—manufacturers in particular—are attracted towards getting certification of their products. They will receive approvals from territorial authorities more quickly if the products and the methods they are pushing forward or selling have already been examined and shown to be compliant with the building code. 
One of the things that United Future was particularly keen to see in relation to the certification of products and methods was that the authorities look not just purely at the method or the product but at the way it interfaced with other products and other parts of the building. That was the principal weakness that was found in the homes that were not weathertight; it was not so much the cladding system but where the cladding system interfaced with other areas. United Future succeeded in having clause 103(2) put into the bill. It provides: “A product certificate must state whether there are any matters that should be taken into account in the use or application of the building method or product and if so what those matters are.” That is intended to provide a broader basis of looking at the way that those methods are used and when it is appropriate to use them—something that was lacking up till now. 
The powers of the chief executive are substantially increased over those that the Building Industry Authority has particularly in the ability of the chief executive to move urgently where it is ascertained that there is an obvious default or problem. With the homes that were not weathertight the powers were simply not there for the Building Industry Authority. The chief executive can issue warnings and bans; he or she can use those in extreme situations where they are needed. 
The next thing that the bill provides that is a substantial improvement and is part of this whole new regime is the licensed building practitioner system. It provides for minimum standards of training and competence where at the moment we have none. We have a laissez-faire system where any person can build houses as we have described in this House as we have debated this bill. But the bill does provide minimum standards. 
There is an important factor that has already been alluded to by New Zealand First and that is the concern that there is pressure in terms of our having sufficient tradespeople to fulfil that role. It is something I also alluded to in the Committee stage. It will be very important for the Government to ensure that we are able in fact to deliver the tradespeople that we need in society to do the work and meet the demand. That is why of course the licensed building practitioner regime is being delayed for 5 years—to give time for people to be upskilled and to meet the requirements. It is up to the Government now actually to put in place the mechanisms to enable us to reach that situation but I think as I said during the Committee stage we will need to have some measure of grandparenting whereby senior practitioners who have proved their competence in terms of their experience are not left out of the loop and are not lost to the industry. 
That is in contrast to Mr Prebble’s speech yesterday where he was talking about how he valued the fact that he had had a builder come to him and say: “Well if you tell me you’ve got a permit I can build you a house more cheaply than if you’ve actually got a permit.” He thought that was a really good idea—that people should be able to undermine the system to provide services and get round the regulations. Well I do not think it is a good idea. I think it is how the market works and obviously it is the way that ACT would like to see it work but it is not good for New Zealanders. Mr Prebble may be able to assess the difference between a high-standard builder and one that is not competent for the job; most New Zealanders cannot. 
The licensed building practitioner regime will also cover both design and building and give a number of classifications of people within those categories to meet different standards of building and different levels of complexity. I think that is really welcome as well. 
We have talked at length about owner-builders and the restrictions on them. Contrary to what ACT has said the restricted building work is confined to what is really essential. A lot of areas are not covered: decks; internal rearrangement of rooms that have non-bearing walls; and interior design matters. There are also the exemptions contained in schedule 1 which ACT seems to have overlooked; a number of areas of building work are exempt including verandas patios and things of that nature and other building work that a local authority believes is not likely to breach the provisions of the building code. So there are provisions that try to limit what a licensed building practitioner has to sign off because we were very conscious in the Government Administration Committee of the need to provide for that. 
The last things are the regulatory bodies the public audit and accountability. Increased powers are given to territorial authorities whether they are working directly or through council-controlled organisations. There is a need for plans to be consistent with the building code but also with the Resource Management Act. And there will be inspections and code compliance certificates. That is a particular improvement in the bill because we found during our examination that tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of code of compliance certificates are outstanding. This bill provides that all building work will be assessed 2 years after a building consent has been issued and either a code of compliance certificate will be issued or a notice to fix will be issued and enforcement proceedings undertaken. 
Those are major improvements. National’s promises to do nothing or to make changes without legislation or to make some changes to the current procedure in a patch-up type of method would be totally unsatisfactory. This bill provides a holistic approach. It covers the whole territory and provides us with a new framework that will stand us in good stead for the future. 
SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki-King Country) 
: 
 I rise in the third reading to oppose the bill which is what National members have done the whole way through so it will come as no surprise to the House. There are a range of reasons for that and there is a range of debate yet to be had on this bill. 
Let us start with how the whole process began. The 1991 Building Bill which was passed with the intention of reducing compliance costs was found to be a bit deficient. There is no dispute on this side of the House about that; the National Party accepts it. Certainly the building survey that was carried out in 1994 warned that there were some problems looming and something should be done. By 1998 the Building Industry Authority had investigated that and had decided that because of a range of reasons there were some problems starting to develop. I think it said at that stage that there was a development of systemic failure for the reasons that the Hon Ken Shirley spoke of earlier which included the change in the way that we built buildings and the desire to have them more airtight watertight and insulated and able to be heated from inside outside and everywhere else. Simultaneously we were going through a campaign primarily run by the environmentalists against the use of tanalised timber for a whole lot of misguided reasons that have been well stated throughout this debate. So we moved to a situation of monolithic cladding highly insulated construction and untanalised  
Pinus radiata 
 being used for the framing. All of that along with bad design in trying to achieve modern architectural desires led to the leaky house syndrome. 
It was decided by the new Labour Government that an independent inquiry should be conducted. It was chaired by the then State Services Commissioner Don Hunn. The Hunn inquiry overwhelmingly confirmed what the Building Industry Authority had been saying a year or two prior to that At that point it was decided that a select committee should look into it. The select committee inquiry of course was primarily driven by the National Party outcry at the Government’s lack of response to this issue. It absolutely put pressure on the Government through the media and in various other ways—in campaigns and at meetings up and down the country. I know that my colleague Wayne Mapp was very active in that; so was Tony Ryall. That led to the select committee inquiry which came back recommending some changes. 
The select committee then set out to go through a submission process which is quite normal; that is what happens with select committees. A number of people submitted. The summary of the submissions went along these lines: “Most industry players have little appreciation or understanding of the existing Act which is over 100 pages and has been in place for 12 years. Without significant expenditure and resourcing it is unlikely that the industry will have any greater appreciation of any proposed changes.” So it was saying that there was heavy-handed regulation. We have here a thick bill of 358 pages. I will digress a little by saying that when we have a practical problem like leaky buildings and it is handed to a bunch of urban academics to solve—the kinds of people who could not tell a claw hammer from a Skilsaw or rusticating from Hardiplank—then we end up with 358 pages of bureaucratic socialist nonsense that will not fix the problem. 
Jill Pettis 
: Stop saying that. 
SHANE ARDERN 
: There is no evidence that it will. That is the end result. I notice I have excited one or two members on the other side. I am pleased I digressed because it has woken up one or two members over there. 
What happened then was that the select committee listened to the submissions and overwhelmingly the submitters who came in were people with a practical building background—there were a few lawyers of course; we always tolerate a few lawyers in the process. They came through and said that what Mr Smith from United Future the party that says it stands for common sense is proposing will add a huge layer of cost to the industry will make low-cost housing more unaffordable and will make poor-quality houses more sustainable because nobody will have the money to be able to fix them. They said it will run the do-it-yourselfers out of business will put them completely out of business because they will be required to have a certified licensed building practitioner standing there on a Sunday afternoon with mum dad and the kids there inspecting their work on upgrading the new family room. 
I digress again. The house I grew up in was a traditional Taranaki sharemilker’s cottage. Every time another child was born another room was added on to the house. That was how it worked in those days. This bill will absolutely stop that practice from happening. That house used to leak like a sieve. People would say that was good. It was as cold as hell. In fact the old man used to say and I need to say it again: “You opened the fridge door and the cold air rushed in.” That is the kind of house I grew up in. That house could still be built to that standard under this bill. That is the irony. The things that that house had like eaves a corrugated iron roof sash windows and native untreated timber are what is being proposed in this bill. We could have had a building certifier standing there but the end result would have been the same. The house never fell down. The house was solid. It did not rot except for the weatherboards on the outside which had to be replaced from time to time. The house stood there for 100 years. People on the other side say that that could not be; well it could be. That is the reality. That is exactly what could happen. [ 
Interruption 
] Where are the standards in the bill? The Green member made a very valid point when she said that some of the issues around insulation—which of course is in the building code not in the bill—are not actually mentioned. 
Here is another interesting analogy. The old house I grew up in had water tanks. We had our own water supply from a tank on the roof. The tank occasionally would have in it the odd dead bird a few dead possums plenty of bird droppings from the roof a few leaves—they all added body to the water. But listen to this: the house had a corrugated iron roof painted with lead paint secured with lead-head nails with lead flashing and galvanised pipes to provide the water to the taps. It was perfectly safe and environmentally friendly—rainwater off the roof! It is a wonder we were not poisoned by the water we drank. 
Hon David Carter 
: It made you bald. 
SHANE ARDERN 
: Absolutely! I know there were some side effects as my colleague says but the reality is that that house would pass the test today. That is what happens when a bunch of urban bureaucrats try to design something. 
Let us have a look at some of the other bizarre things that have happened. Yes we have given the chief executive more power and I do not know that that is a bad thing. We will have to suck it and see on that one. We will not know until we test it. But here is the real acid test. How will a chief executive based in Wellington or Auckland have jurisdiction over what happens with house construction in Kinohaku? That is what I want to know. All that he will do is bind up all those people out there through the territorial authorities which now will have to adhere to instruction from the chief executive and with so much red tape that our traditional Kiwi bloke out there with a ute and his dog and his radio will be out of business. When a Kinohaku family wants to build on to their house they will have to get an Auckland-based carpentry firm or construction firm to go down there and build it. What will that do? It will add about $40000 or $50000 of costs to building houses in outlying isolated rural areas where the territorial authorities will not have the horsepower or the expertise to provide the kind of red tape that the member is advocating. That is what will happen. 
Of course all the Auckland firms are rubbing their hands together. The Hon Richard Prebble touched on this point last night in the House. He mentioned the director of such a firm. Those people love this bill because they know that the man with the ute and the dog and the radio is history. The typical Labour-voting Kiwi bloke is out of business and they know that. He will not be able to put up with this regulation. He will not be able to get through it. 
But that is not all. It gets worse. Not only will swimming pools need to be fenced but they will need to be caged. If people have a swimming pool next to a creek that runs down a mountain to the sea—that is how it normally happens—there may be no fences or gates around the creek but the swimming pool will have to have a cage round it. 
We oppose this bill. It is nuts. 
Hon DAVID CARTER (National) 
: 
 We know that a Government is in trouble when it refuses to take calls. I recently had the opportunity to reread the debate around the passage of the Resource Management Act and I was particularly taken with the contribution made by a former colleague of yours Mr Speaker—namely Margaret Moir who represented the West Coast. That was the last time the West Coast had reasonable representation. She predicted in her speeches on that legislation that it would cause huge hassles and huge compliance costs for New Zealand. Nothing could be truer than that. 
Hon Harry Duynhoven 
: She voted for the bill. 
Hon DAVID CARTER 
: Certainly. Margaret Moir was a National member. She recognised that the Resource Management Bill as advanced by Sir Geoffrey Palmer—and as a Labour member he should have been more wide awake—would impose huge costs. Now we have the Building Bill— 
Hon Harry Duynhoven 
: She voted for that bill. 
Hon DAVID CARTER 
: If Harry Duynhoven wants to take a call he is welcome to do so. If not he should shut up and listen. I say to him that in a few years’ time we will find that this legislation is held in as much disrespect as many people hold the Resource Management Act. This bill will impose huge costs and huge complexity on the construction industry. 
At a time when home affordability is at an all-time high one would have thought the Labour Government would show some concern for the desperate prospective new homeowners in this country. At a time when interest rates construction rates and real estate prices are all rising what is the Government’s response to that in terms of helping people to buy their own home? It comes to this House and with the support of New Zealand First the Greens and United Future will pass this legislation which will move home affordability away from those very people. This is happening at a time when 12500 New Zealanders are waiting desperately for a State house. That number will further increase because of this legislation. 
I have listened to a large number of the speeches on this bill but I have to say that the speech made by Sue Kedgely from the Greens was one of the more intriguing and interesting contributions that I have ever heard in a discussion in this Parliament. She stood to say she was going to support the legislation and then spent a full 10 minutes on decrying it and correctly pointing out the many many inadequacies in it. Then she concluded by saying that as she had been told to do she would vote for it. I do not often agree with the Greens but one of the comments that Sue Kedgley made was about the value of double glazing. I think she is absolutely right. Double glazing is of huge importance to this country; we are desperate for energy conservation. She spoke very well about the need for double glazing as a standard in the industry. At a time when this country is desperately short of energy does this Building Bill deliver double glazing? It absolutely does not I say to Sue Kedgely. It does nothing at all to deliver double glazing as a standard in New Zealand houses. 
The other amazing contribution that we had came from the United Future member Murray Smith. During the Committee stage on Tuesday night when I was here in the Chamber I asked the Minister in the chair the Hon John Tamihere whether he would help me by explaining what was meant by the term “restricted building work”. That definition is at the very crux of this bill because if something is a restricted building work it then requires one of the newfangled licensed building practitioners to be involved in its construction. I put a simple question to the Minister and asked him to help us with the definition of a restricted building work. At the end of my 5-minute questioning of Mr Tamihere he obviously did not have Helen Clark’s permission to speak so he sat silently in the chair. But up jumped Mr Murray Smith. Now for the benefit of the people listening to this debate I will explain that Mr Murray Smith is a member of Parliament. He is here with the United Future party so we have not heard much from him and we will not in the future hear much from that man again. But he stood and said I should read the bill. He told me that the definition of “restricted building work” was in the bill. 
So I went back up to my office and went through the papers that had arrived on my desk that day and found that on Tuesday the Hon John Tamihere had released a discussion document  
Licensing of Building Practitioners: Discussing the Options 
. I looked at it and saw that on page 2 it states: “Purpose of this paper” and amongst other matters raised it also states: “In particular it wants your views on what work should be restricted to licensed practitioners and who or what sorts of trades should be licensed.” Although Mr Murray Smith has not been in Parliament for long and will not be here for much longer I ask him what right he has to say that the definition is included in the legislation when we then have the Minister in charge of the legislation putting out a discussion document that asks the industry to help the Government with the definition. That is what is happening I tell that member. My question as to what a restricted building work is was a legitimate question that Mr Murray Smith and Mr Harry Duynhoven cannot answer. No member of the Labour Party can answer that question. Now the Government has put out a discussion document asking the industry to help it to define that term. 
Steve Chadwick 
: The sector asked for a discussion document. 
Hon DAVID CARTER 
: That is the very point I am making. I am pleased that member has finally woken up. It is a quarter to 6 and close to her bedtime. Now she is acknowledging that the legislation is so imperfect that it does not define that issue and that Labour went back out to the industry and asked it for help. What a disastrous piece of legislation it is that we are to pass today. 
The other point that became quite clear—and I thank Mr Ken Shirley for his contribution—is that some people in the construction industry support this legislation. If one talks to them one learns they all have one thing in common: they are pretty large operators. The construction industry is very similar to the tourism industry in that there are a few large operators and lots and lots of small operators. The large operators build perhaps more than 100 houses in a year and they will find that they can comply with this legislation. But typically the construction sector of New Zealand has a huge number of small operators such as builders who work on their own or with one or two mates. They are the ones that will struggle with this legislation. What will happen then? The big operators will be advantaged and they will squeeze out the small operators. It is no wonder some of the big operators support this legislation because it will give them a huge competitive advantage. 
I tell the Government that shortly after the next election this legislation will be one of the first pieces of legislation that is back before a National Government—because it will be a National Government that will tidy up this mess. It is all right for Murray Smith to scoff and laugh because he will not be here in Parliament then to fix it. He can give his valedictory speech today; that is what we have just heard. He will not be back to fix the mess. This legislation will be one of the first pieces of legislation that a National Government—the next Government—will tidy up. All that has been done here is to impose 370 pages of legislation that will add approximately $6000 to $10000 of additional cost to the building of a house but it has done what the Prime Minister wanted this legislation to do. Cynically all that she wanted to do was to take the leaky home syndrome which occurred in 2000 and was particularly embarrassing to the Government off the headlines. She has succeeded in doing that but no owner of a leaky home will get any satisfaction at all out of the bureaucratic nightmare of this legislation. 
MURRAY SMITH (United Future) 
: 
 Mr Speaker. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich) 
: Is this a point of order? 
MURRAY SMITH 
: No I am taking a call. 
Jill Pettis 
: No you are not. 
Hon KEN SHIRLEY (ACT) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Assistant Speaker. The chief Government whip has just told a member who has stood in this House and called that he is not allowed to call. That is an outrage. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich) 
: No it is not an outrage; I was going to tell him the same thing. Would the member please sit down. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That the Building Bill be now read a third time. 
Ayes 81 
New Zealand Labour 51; New Zealand First 13; Green Party 7; United Future 8; Progressive 2. 
Noes 33 
New Zealand National 27; ACT New Zealand 5; Maori Party 1. 
Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill 
Third Reading 
Hon PAUL SWAIN (Minister of Immigration) for the Minister of Education 
: 
 I move  
That the Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill be now read a third time 
. The general purpose of the bill is to further support New Zealand’s export education industry and to ensure that New Zealand continues to be viewed by overseas Governments as a desirable education destination offering excellent education in quality establishments that operate with business integrity for their international students. Export education has become a key industry for New Zealand. In order to maintain this major industry students and their home Governments need to be assured that international students will receive quality education in exchange for their investment. The export education levy introduced by the Education (Tertiary Reform) Amendment Act 2002 was conceived with a view to supporting a range of industry-wide development and risk management activities to ensure the ongoing quality and sustained growth of the industry. The increased demand from international students for a New Zealand education led many providers to expand their operations and led many new ones to open their doors. Some grew too fast too quickly and the closure of some private establishments has focused the export education industry in New Zealand on the risk of negative publicity. 
The Government has taken several measures including those in this bill to maintain the financial security of international students in their quest for enhancement of their further education in New Zealand. It will continue to do so by holding the appropriate sector accountable should failure occur in the future. The Government will also continue to support the sector providers that act responsibly and with integrity. Specifically the legislation will achieve its general purpose by enabling international students to be reimbursed. The fund may also be used to recover any consequential expenses incurred by the Government. Immediate action is required to protect the educational and financial interests of international students when a provider of tuition to international students fails. Although there are arrangements in place between the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the Tertiary Education Commission to place students statutory security is essential to ensure certainty for those students. Furthermore when the failure affects international students the wider dimension of the implication for overseas Governments needs to be addressed quickly in order to avoid damaging our bilateral relationships and our reputation as an education destination. The Government has acted quickly in that regard in the three failures that have occurred in the past year. The bill will clarify the rights within the process. 
A number of submitters to the Education and Science Committee objected to a proposal to increase the percentage component of the levy on private training establishments. The Government took on board the concerns of the education sector. After listening carefully to the feedback the Minister asked the select committee to remove the clause that specified the increased rate. Sector representatives had wanted more time to adjust to any possible increase to the levy in order to ensure their viability during a time of market downturn. They also expressed concern about being accountable for the business decisions of particular providers. The Minister also considered it responsible to introduce Supplementary Order Paper 240 to enable the Government to recover its losses in circumstances where there may be the need for additional Crown funding for the levy account in order to make immediate and direct redress to international students. 
I thank the members of the Education and Science Committee and other members for the contribution they have made to the passage of the bill. In conclusion I commend the Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill to the House for its third reading. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 This will not be the last Education (Export Education Levy) Amendment Bill that this Parliament sees under this Minister. Even though he will be here for only 12 months I am sure he will find reason to get another such bill in because he will have to. No one is more responsible for messing up the way our export education industry is perceived by other countries than the current Minister of Education Mr Trevor Mallard. Every time he goes overseas the student numbers drop. I do not know what he says to the Chinese Government but it does not like it much and it does not help. The effect of him going overseas is that the private training institutions to which this bill applies are not listed on the Chinese Government website that sets out options for Chinese students coming to New Zealand. So he has failed. 
 So if the idea was that Parliament would pass this bill and that that would reassure overseas Governments that New Zealand was a provider of quality education then Parliament has wasted its time. That is not actually what has happened. It has not had that effect. I invite the chirping senior whip from the other side to go and have a look at the Chinese Government website and I tell her that that is what she will find. 
What is worrying those overseas Governments is what also worries us—that is the incompetence of the Minister. When Government representatives meet him that is what is reinforced in their minds. The incompetence of the Minister is this: public agencies already have a range of mechanisms by which they underpin the viability and equality of the organisations that provide export education—and those public agencies have failed. Everyone agrees with that actually. I think even the Minister agrees with that. They have failed. They have not used those powers properly and they have not taken this export industry seriously. It is a billion-dollar earner for New Zealand but the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has been regarded as the place to put people when nothing else can be found for them to do. The authority is meant to be out there ensuring compliance but in fact it has not been doing that. 
So we have this which is the second export education levy amendment bill this Minister has had to bring in because he has not done his own job of putting pressure on his own civil servants. And why is that? Not only does he not take export education seriously but he is ideologically and deeply opposed to the private training institutions that are part—only part—of the export education industry. He is very happy to get up and kick them around at every opportunity impose a levy and give the New Zealand Qualifications Authority even more powers such as he has under this bill. 
This bill includes the fact that this levy will be used to reimburse the costs of the public agency. Well we can guarantee that that is not an incentive for careful use of the funds by that public agency or for careful management of its expenditure. 
This bill exemplifies the problems that the Labour Government has created in education. Time and time again when things go wrong the Government punishes everybody. It does not pick out the people who broke the rules. It does not let people live with the responsibilities of the bad decisions they make—which is often the case in the collapse of those private educational organisations. It does not let people face those responsibilities. What the Government does instead is punish everybody. So this levy is a levy on all the sound long-term high-quality operators in order to pay for some people who messed up. 
It is a direct analogy with what the Government has done with our polytechs. Some of them have blatantly and ruthlessly exploited Steve Maharey’s weaknesses as a Minister of Education. But what has the Government done about that? Instead of dealing to the people who ruthlessly exploited its soft rules it has decided to punish every polytech by cutting the funds of all of them. And that is what this bill does to the private training establishments. 
I say to the Government that that leads to bad behaviour. It encourages bad behaviour and it is a disincentive to good behaviour. It is a disincentive to quality and a disincentive to viability. It is also a disincentive to good operators to keep on being good operators because if one is a good operator in the export education industry one just ends up paying a bigger and bigger levy. The longer that that good operator lasts the more levy it will pay. The better the operator is than everybody else the more levy that operator will pay. That to the Minister no doubt is just common sense because that is how Labour thinks: if an operator does better it will try to bring it down; if the operator does badly it will protect the operator from the consequences of its own decisions. That is the problem at the core of this bill. 
There are a number of technical problems that were discussed at the Committee stage. For instance the bill is retrospective. This Parliament is legislating today to allow for the use of a levy that is quite different from the use for which it was raised. The last education levy bill specified that use; this bill changes that provision. 
Debate interrupted. 
The House adjourned at 6 p.m.