Goff Phil: Statutes Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goff Phil: Statutes Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 11 December 2012. Volume:686;Page:7445. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) 
: 
 By definition a Statutes Amendment Bill deals with issues that are uncontroversial non-contentious and generally minor and technical and those facts justify the use of an omnibus bill. The bills generally go through without major debate but I have read through this Statutes Amendment Bill and it seems to me that although the measures it contains are by and large innocuous they also are interestingly a catalogue of Government botch-ups since the last election. I want to give the House some examples of that by going through the bill part by part. 
Phil Twyford 
: We haven’t got all day. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: It might need an extension of time as Mr Twyford has explained. 
Part 1 deals with the Accident Compensation Act and the section that it deals with section 331 gives the Minister for ACC power to direct the Accident Compensation Corporation to give effect to Government policy. But I have to say that this has caused enormous problems over the last couple of years. We had the absolute debacle of Nick Smith creating an artificial crisis in claiming that the corporation was insolvent and going down the gurgler. That was as a respected commentator Brian Fallow described at the time a whole lot of shrill scaremongering and gratuitous scapegoating. So are we really confident that we want to give the Minister this power to direct policy to the corporation? Nick Smith’s policy was about privatisation. It was about cutting back protection for people. I remember most particularly the concern I had that they were cutting back the counselling for women who had been sexually abused. That was an absolute disgrace. They combined that with cutting back counselling for families of suicide victims. So what sort of a Government is it that directs that sort of policy to the corporation when it has such negative and damaging effects on individuals? 
Then of course there was the move to lift the levies on motorbikes. As you are aware Mr Assistant Speaker I am a motorbike rider. I got my bill the other day. The accident compensation component for registration was about $531. What annoys me having never made a claim in 45 years of motorbike riding is that I am paying for the accidents caused by cars that do not see motorbikes and by a Government that keeps roads in a state where actually a lot of accidents are caused by the state of the roads. I am wondering whether something that should have been in this bill was addressing those sorts of problems with accident compensation. 
But of course we had a further debacle with ACC and that was that the Minister for ACC resigned. The Minister resigned because he had written inappropriately on behalf of somebody who had been making a claim to the corporation and not recognised and not disclosed a conflict of interest in that way. That was not very good. I think that on this side of the House we applauded the fact that the Minister for ACC had resigned but then we got a new Minister who started off with the whole of her executive of the ACC resigning over breaches of privacy—massive breaches of privacy—but the Minister taking no responsibility. That was not good enough either. Mrs Collins does not seem to understand the doctrine of ministerial accountability. We are still waiting to find out actually who did leak those documents relating to Bronwyn Pullar because we have never had a satisfactory explanation from the Government. 
I want to come to Part 4 of the bill which is about the Armed Forces Discipline Act. What worries me about this is that given the reports we received recently at the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee at the rate of attrition in the armed forces there will not be an armed force to discipline. I am wondering why we have got this part of the bill before the House. I say that with a real concern about what is happening—a real concern for the Government side to listen to. Is the National Party aware that there has been a drop in the regular force personnel in the last year of more than 1000 personnel? A thousand of our regular soldiers sailors and air personnel have disappeared from the armed forces taking them down to about 8500. 
Hon Annette King 
: Why? 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: Why is a very good question as my colleague has asked. Some of it seems to have been deliberate—people are being sacked—and some of it seems to be inadvertent. People are so demoralised that they are leaving in droves. What did we find in the select committee? We found that the attrition rate was 21 percent in the last year—21 percent. If you looked at the navy it was 23 percent. What the Defence Force itself acknowledged was that this is absolutely unsustainable. At this rate we will not have a defence force in a few years so I am not quite sure why we are amending the Armed Forces Discipline Act. 
A particular concern for me is what is happening to women in the navy and the air force because the attrition by women was such that in the last 4 years the numbers have dropped by more than a third. Here we are in modern New Zealand saying that there should be equity between the genders and that we want to see women participating and what is the record of the National Government? It has been a drop of a third in the number of women in the navy and in the air force. That is pretty serious. Why are we losing these people? We are losing them because the morale which the Defence Force regularly monitors is the worst ever on record. Only just over a third of the people in the Defence Force actually want to be there. Two-thirds are either ambivalent about being there or are negative about being there. There is only one ministry that does worse than that and that is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade where the Government has ripped the guts out of it and most of the employees do not want to be there. So much for that part of the bill. 
Then we come to Part 10 of the Statutes Amendment Bill and that is amending the Electoral Act. This relates largely to the lodging of list nominees and the payment of deposits but I wonder whether the National Government in fact has much more significant changes in mind that it is not revealing here. I know the National Party has been looking very closely at what the Republicans at the state level did in the United States. What the Republicans did before the last election was try to devise every mechanism they could to stop people enrolling and stop people being able to vote. That is the negation of democracy. But I hear a whisper that the National Party is intending to close off the date at which people can enrol before an election at the issuing of the writ so a month before the election. That would disenfranchise tens of thousands of people. I want to ask the Minister who introduced this bill the Associate Minister of Justice in putting in a fairly innocuous provision in this bill is that disguising what the Government is intending to do further down the track in relation to the Electoral Act? We would be utterly opposed to that. 
Then we come to the next part which is Part 11 on the Extradition Act. Well that is the daddy of them all because that relates to certain crimes with transnational aspects that are deemed to be included in extradition treaties. That brings to mind one of the most colossal stuff-ups that this Government has made this year and that is in the Kim Dotcom case. I want to know from the Associate Minister—the police got it wrong the Crown Law Office got it wrong and the Government Communications Security Bureau under John Key’s leadership got it wrong so what is going on in this area and is this provision in the Extradition Act actually able to address that? Does it address the problem that we found from John Key and John Banks of amnesia—political amnesia? They could not remember what had happened. They could not tell us who was accountable. Mr Key said he did not even know what it was about. The truth was that National was overeager to please United States authorities and in so dramatically stuffing it up it has actually undermined the American position. So it has really hosed off the Americans. At the same time it has made the New Zealand public liable to enormous costs in the court action that might be taken by Kim Dotcom against it. John Key said he knew nothing—the Sergeant Schultz defence—but that does not wash. 
I want to come to the next part Part 13 on the Gambling Act. We know that there is another case of amnesia in relation to the Gambling Act because Mr Banks went down to Skycity he picked up a cheque for $15000 in a plain brown envelope but then he declared it as anonymous. I want to know from the Associate Minister whether there is anything in this change that addresses that form of amnesia and dishonesty where you pick up the cheque personally and then you declare it as anonymous. I want to know whether there is anything in this part of the bill that also deals with the situation where Skycity can go to John Key and say: “You give us the licence to print money”—actually it is called more licences for pokie machines—“and we will build a convention centre for you.” I want to know how appropriate that is and whether that is consistent with the changes that are being made here to the Gambling Act. 
I want to finally end up on something rather more positive. Well I hoped it was more positive. It is Part 18. It deals with parental leave and employment protection. But I do not see anything here that deals with the parental leave proposals in Sue Moroney’s Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill. I cannot see any commitment by the Government to allow mums at a very special time— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch) 
: Sorry to interrupt the honourable member his time has expired.