Turei Metiria: Members of Parliament (Remuneration and Services) Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTurei Metiria: Members of Parliament (Remuneration and Services) Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 14 November 2013. Volume:694;Page:14724. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I want to thank Chris Hipkins and say that I agree with a great deal of what he has just said in the House on the Members of Parliament (Remuneration and Services) Bill. I think he is absolutely right that the process by which we are increasing the transparency and the independence in the setting of MPs’ allowances and expenses and salaries is a very good thing. It is continually evolving and we have had a great deal more change over the last 5 years than we probably had in the previous 30 years. So clearly Parliament is doing its best to respond to public issues respond to media scrutiny and respond to a modern environment. We are in the 21st century now. We operate in a different environment than we did last century.I agree absolutely about the concern of representation. This is a House of Representatives. Wealth is not a criterion for entry here and should never be. It has been in the past I think but it should never be ever again. Anyone from any walk of life should be able to come to this House based on their community support and on the nation’s support to represent their people and their interests here.I would disagree with Chris just on one issue really which is around the public view of MPs and MPs’ expenses. I have more optimism actually about the public view. Iain Lees-Galloway raises his eyebrows and understandably so. But I would just note for the House that we have been debating this legislation around MPs expenses and allowances which is of intense interest to a few and there has been very little public discourse or discussion about the debate that we are having and are about to conclude. We are doing so in a week where theNew Zealand Heraldhas run three stories on MPs’ expenses and other media have been doing rolling stories as well. There has been a little bit of heat around that but nothing like what we saw in 2009 and 2010. We also have the issue that people tell me about—that the Remuneration Authority is soon to announce what MPs’ pay will be for the next 12 months—and yet there has not been this great public fury. There has been a public discussion. There have been different viewsexpressed and expressed publicly—expressed on Twitter on social media and in the news and people are asked for their views. There is I agree some cynicism from the public about how all of our expenses and allowances and salaries are set and our involvement in all of that. But again it is nothing like the public backlash that we might have expected in earlier years and nothing like the public backlash that I think MPs are concerned about.I think that the public in the main understand that we need to be paid for our job and that we need financial resources to do our job and to do our job properly. What they expect from us in exchange is transparency on how we use those public resources that we do our jobs properly that we are a good workforce and do what is expected of us and that we do not take personal benefit from the use of that public money beyond our pay. It is a perfectly reasonable expectation and there has been a perfectly reasonable in my view debate about this. I am very surprised at how little heat there has been this week comparatively speaking. So I have a more optimistic view about the public and their view about how we are managing this issue and I do think that it signals very strongly that there will be further change.As the House knows the Green Party did not agree with the travel expenses for MPs remaining with the Speaker. We preferred the original bill that came to the House which said that the travel expenses would go to the Remuneration Authority along with the accommodation allowances and other issues. We talked about that at the Government Administration Committee. We came to an agreement that we had got as far as we could get with that committee. We have put those issues back to this House. The House decided not to support that view—such is the democratic process. But again there is no great heat in this discussion. It is simply about how we are managing to evolve in taking the steps as far as we can go.We are very pleased with the changes that the legislation has made—make no mistake. We are very pleased with the recognition of MPs being entitled to support when they have an impairment that prevents them from being able to use the same supports that MPs without impairment get. We think absolutely that a financial contribution to managing the barriers that those impairments place on MPs’ engagement should be the responsibility of the entire organisation and not just of an MP. We are very pleased that accommodation allowances are moving to the Remuneration Authority. That was raised this week. We are very pleased that the Green Party’s original proposal for the release of our expenses which we started in 2009 has now been put in legislation. Up until now it had been a policy. It had not been a legislative requirement and now it is. It is fantastic. That is the process of change. That is what progress is—the process of change. So that is all great work.There is still a question—and Chris Hipkins raised this—around how to deal with the issue of personal benefit from the travel allowance. Chris Hipkins is quite right. If we were to say that we would keep the travel allowance in-house under the Speaker but that we would restrict it to being used for parliamentary purposes only we would have to have a conversation a discussion about what constitutes parliamentary purposes and we would need to have that with the public because there is public interest in determining how that works. There may be the construction of rules—or guidelines; rules actually not guidelines—that we would develop to show that we could do our jobs do them effectively represent our communities and return to our homes which was the example that was given. All of those things would be within a set of rules that we largely agree to by consensus—by all members of the House and by the public. That is possible. We can have that conversation and I expect that we will. This is not the end point. There will be more change and those conversations will get easier over time just as this one has been much easier than the last time we talked about these issues.Increasing transparency is great. It is good to see that in the bill. MPs will always be under scrutiny.I would just note one thing of interest to the public—if it is of interest—which is of course that MPs are not employed. We are here by the operation of the law. We are removed from our role only by the operation of the law. So that is why our salaries for example and the other tools that we need for our jobs are incorporated into the law. We have no legal structure for our employment so we are in a very unique situation compared with any other group of employees anywhere else in the country and that is why so much of this is public. I do not know about other members but it seems to me that often we read about our salary increases in the newspaper. There are little small things like that that make our lives more interesting and it does bring some real public transparency into the work that we do.The Green Party will support this legislation. We see it as a great step. We are very pleased about the nature of the conversation that has been had over this legislation particularly given some of the political heat this week but we do remind members that there will be calls for more change. So the question then becomes: how do we want to respond to those calls and how do we express to the public that we do trust them to acknowledge the right that we have to do our job properly the right to the tools that we need to do our job and the right to fair remuneration for it?My final comment is that it will always be difficult for us particularly in terms of MPs’ pay for as long as there is severe inequity in this country for as long as the minimum wage is a political decision made by the Prime Minister and not made independently of the political environment and for as long as there continues to be an increase—a significant increase—in higher salaries which MPs also receive and very very small incremental increases if any in the lowest wages. That inequity will continue to bring more scrutiny on MPs. We are making decisions about other people’s pay and other people’s employment conditions—every year we go through cycles of making changes to their pay and changes to their employment conditions—and yet we squeal a little when those decisions are being made about our own pay and employment conditions. That is not fair and we will need to change that also. Thank you.