White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour—Mt Albert): Thank you. I am going to ask a question of the Government which is what are they afraid of? Because this organisation that is going to be disestablished today was an independent body that looked at our most important problem in this country other than climate change which was the productivity which underpins people's incomes in this country.I want to go back to an earlier person in charge of the Productivity Commission. There was a report done by a woman called Gail Pacheco and I worked with her. She was an academic she worked in workplace relations and she looked specifically at pay gaps. I want to remind the people who are listening here that while we have heard from the National Party that this will be replaced by something which is an evolution apparently it doesn't do the same job at all because Gail Pacheco looked at the wellbeing of people and she looked at what was going on in terms of breaking the cycle of persistent disadvantage. I ask members of the public to think—and in fact the Government—is a ministry set up to look at cutting red tape really going to support that end? Is it going to be able to look at the same issues? The answer is no. It's comparing apples with pears. It's simply not the same thing.So I agree with the Hon James Shaw when he says that that's a side issue. Let's talk about that at some other time. Let's talk about the merits of this because we have a productivity problem in this country. We have a whole lot of businesses which have under four fulltime-equivalent staff. We have small businesses that need the support of good knowledge and expertise. It needs to move away from political rhetoric. It needs to move away from an ideological commitment to actual evidence. What we have in a small country is we have valuable people and those are the people that are disestablished by this law. That's why the contracts are being broken because those people's employment contracts represent those people's commitment in this area. And what they're being told today is You're gone. You're not coming to Treasury." You're not adding to the pool of knowledge that we desperately need in this country if we are going to actually build a productive economy in a very challenging environment with climate change etc.If we want to build that kind of economy; if we want to support our small businesses our little companies that make up most of what we need to build in order to grow; if we want to build better frontier firms which are those big firms that bring in the research and development etc. we are not going to do it all by something that we'll talk about the merits of later—something to do with regulation and cutting it. That's not the whole picture is it?What we had here was actually what we call a quango. We have something that's got independence. Maybe it wasn't perfect. I for one during these debates have learnt that perhaps what we needed to do was actually further depoliticise. We probably needed to move to a model where the person appointed was not appointed by the Minister and we probably needed to move to a model where those reports came to Parliament and we looked at them and we had to respond to them so we all focused on the wisdom of what is the great knowledge out there in our community—the great goodwill out there in our community from people who have headed these organisations and worked for them. That would have been a good thing. That would have been a good decent tweak.I remind the public: this Productivity Commission came up under ACT. It was ACT who thought about it. It was ACT who thought about that first iteration. Now we have ACT saying "I'm not interested in listening. I don't want to know what the experts have to say. I don't want to know about productivity if it doesn't fit my incredibly narrow frame. I want to stay in control of the whole picture up there." So the public are being denied the whole picture. They're being denied the help of good hard-working expert New Zealanders who would have contributed further value in this area we desperately need.So don't bark on to me about how you are helping hard-working New Zealanders when you are cutting them off at the knees and you are cutting off all the voices out there that you disagree with. That is my problem here because we are not going to solve the problems in this country by simply allowing the Minister who is bringing in a ministry of regulation David Seymour to rule the roost.And it is very important that the National Party and New Zealand First think for themselves and think about that critically because we have always had that tendency for a tail to wag a dog and the Government is mainly not made up of the ACT Party. It is time very early on to recognise what is arrogant what is shutting the ears and eyes to anything other than thinking that one person knows best. That is what is going on—an ideologically driven one-person-knows-best solution from the Minister David Seymour. And everybody who's in the Government ranks and each of these parties participating is ignoring their better instincts because I know that New Zealand First had some really good ideas around productivity. They were responsible for a lot of the support of the Government getting in behind and helping seed good products and businesses in rural areas where they had had really devastatingly low economic environments and really low incomes. And that all is part of a productivity story.And all of that is being blocked out—all those stories are being blocked out by a narrow ideological commitment to just cutting out people. That might make things more profitable sometimes but it's not going to make New Zealanders better off. It's not going to help our wellbeing. It's not going to help the wellbeing of the people that Gail Pacheco was looking at in the fair chance report. It's not going to break the cycle of persistent disadvantage which is actually the reality for the majority of New Zealanders. What it is going to do is cut a whole lot of safety and regulation which in fact annoys big players—really big players. Yes they might benefit but are hard-working New Zealanders going to benefit from getting rid of one of those truly independent organisations we have—all those voices that we lose when we lose an independent group which were doing good work? It wasn't un-well-meaning. It wasn't wasting its time. It didn't cost that much money. It was something that was adding value in this country where we desperately needed it.We have one of the lowest productivities in the world in terms of who we are. We desperately need to get this piece right in a country that's changing rapidly. And this Government today turns its back on the chance to involve all of those people in it and I am ashamed of that happening today. So I ask you to consider that and I do not commend this bill to the House."