King Annette: Remuneration Authority (Members of Parliament Remuneration) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: Remuneration Authority (Members of Parliament Remuneration) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 17 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2312. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour): We are down to the business end of this bill and it is time for some answers from Minister Woodhouse because in effect he has become the select committee the public the officials the arbiter the judge and the jury on this bill. He started his contribution in the Committee stage by telling us it was a very well-worded bill. We would first of all say: “Minister if that is well-worded it reflects your muddled thinking.” It is a very woolly worded bill. He also said it is grammatically correct. I am sure we have got some people on this side who can go through and see whether we have got the apostrophes in the right places. Maybe Hekia Parata our Minister of Education might like to go through it but maybe she does not need to because the Minister was crowing about how it is grammatically correct as if that was very important. He then said there are some less mathematically erudite people amongst us. I say to the Minister that if he is so mathematically erudite can he please explain the missing “p”. That is what I want you to explain to us Minister. Tell us about the missing “p” in your formula. The first formula you put up had two “p”s in it and now you have one “p”. So for those who do not know what the formula is the formula that we now have is: Sr + Sur = (Sp + Sup × (a ÷ b) – P.Hon Michael Woodhouse: “Pr”.Hon ANNETTE KING:But in the old one there was another “p”. I do not know where your “r” is at the last bit.Hon Michael Woodhouse: It’s in here. On page 3 at line 20.Hon ANNETTE KING: On page 3? I am on page 1 and I am reading out your amendments Minister—your amendments. So I want you to tell the Committee and the listeners—who will be very interested in how mathematically erudite you are—what the missing “p” meant. Why were there two “p”s in the old formula last week and only one “p” this week? I think this is important because the Minister told us how erudite he is that he knows algebra and that he could tell us what it meant. So Minister in a minute get on your feet and tell us about the missing “p” because I thought that was a pretty arrogant sort of a speech—telling people in here that you understood it and they did not. Maybe there are people here who do not. That is not a criticism of them and everybody has a right to question you Minister on what your legislation means.You also said Minister that David Farrar the trusted blogger of the National Party is now at this very moment polling up in Northland to see whether they are going to win or not. When National’s very reliable blogger its pollster put up a blog according to the Minister he got it totally totally wrong. He said he used Statistics New Zealand’s quarterly employment survey. He also said to his surprise it did not save any money. He was talking about the brains trust in the National Cabinet which put this together. He said MPs would have got even larger pay increases using the Prime Minister’s preferred methodology. Under the new law Minister if this law had been in place for the last 6 years or 5 years there would have been an average increase of 3.1. Is that right Minister?Hon Michael Woodhouse: I explained the—Hon ANNETTE KING: Is that right Minister?Hon Michael Woodhouse: The member wasn’t listening.Hon ANNETTE KING: No it does not matter. You are there to answer the questions; my job is to ask them. He cannot answer it. Under the current law the average would be 1.7. That is what David Farrar said. He has not withdrawn it—he has not withdrawn it. I would like the Minister to give David Farrar a little tinkle on the phone and tell him to write a new blog because thousands of New Zealanders read that and laughed. They laughed at a Government that brought in a bill last week and had to put it on the shelf for a week because it had not got something right. But we are not allowed to know what we did not get right in that bill because the Minister has not explained what went wrong last week. So Minister when you get a chance can you stand up and tell us why we were not debating the bill last week? Apart from the missing “p” there has been very little it seems to me that has changed. The member has got some answers he needs to give.I want to also address some of the issues he then diverted into. I thought “Well this must be a wide-ranging debate.” because he then could go back 7 years to talk about the previous Labour Government. He said that we were a Government that spent spent spent. Well can I say to the Minister that you have been a Government that has cut cut cut. You have had tax cuts—not for the ordinary people who are on low wages and who do not get big pay increases but tax cuts for those who already had the most. But worse than that you reduced the Public Service with lots of smoke and mirrors. The way you do it with smoke and mirrors is to say you are reducing the total number. “We are taking the back room to the front office.”Then we go to our financial reviews we go through the financial reviews and we find out that—oh yes—the Government might have reduced some numbers from the back office. They have now been relabelled and they have got new names and we have now got a whole lot of consultants who have taken over from the Public Service. So when you see the actual figures the number of public servants who are now employed by the National Government is slightly higher than it was under a Labour Government. The Minister just made a lot of noise about it.I have to say Minister that you know when a Government is not in control and it is what I call the “couch measure”—the expenditure on couches. You see under a National Government thousands was spent on couches for the bottoms of the Health Funding Authority people and for its former Minister Jenny Shipley. And what do we have now? We have the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment spending thousands of dollars on couches. That is how the Government is hiding its expenditure—by putting it into fancy fittings. So Minister do not give us a lecture on what happened in the past because we can give you one right back and I think ours is probably a better one.Can I just conclude by saying that the Remuneration Authority was given a job to do. Today it has become the whipping boy—the whipping boys and girls—for the Minister because it did the job as it was required to under the law. It made a determination. We do not like the determination. We do not want its determination but it made a determination. Then the Minister said that by the Remuneration Authority’s best analysis it gave pay increases to chief executive officers. And what are we complaining about? Well it did the same for members of Parliament and we are complaining.Why not fetter the Remuneration Authority’s ability to give big pay increases to chief executive officers? That would be fair. This bill is to make it fair for members of Parliament when it comes to their remuneration. It should be fair. We should not be getting greater pay increases than other New Zealanders but neither should chief executive officers. That part is not being addressed by this Government. It is running away and running scared from it. So I say we will support this bill but I believe and I predict that the Minister will be back in a year’s time—Hon Ruth Dyson: Doing a Simon Bridges.Hon ANNETTE KING: —yes doing a Mr Bridges—correcting yet another mistake in rushed legislation that has not had the scrutiny it ought to have. It could have achieved what the Government wanted if it had not spent 5 years talking about it. The Government could have brought in legislation that went to a select committee but it has to pass this bill so it can stop members getting the pay increases that were given by the Remuneration Authority. So perhaps better planning and being a bit more mathematically erudite in terms of working out your timetable in Parliament might work.