Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in opposition to this bill. It would have been very simple to do something that was clear simple and ironically enough endorsed by the Green Party. The story of MPs' pay has been the search for finding somebody to blame and for a long time it was the Remuneration Authority. They set it with some discretion and then that became unpopular. So then the thought was perhaps if the pay of MPs was tied to a mathematical formula it would be easy to say Well this is what the formula says." The only small difficulty was that the formula presented MP pay rises much larger than anticipated. So we are now throwing out the idea of having a mathematical formula in order to go back to discretion of civil servants in deciding MPs' pay. Having failed at blaming a mathematical formula we're going to go back to trying to blame people.The problem is that there was a solution—strangely enough elucidated by Gareth Hughes of the Green Party of all people—that actually would have been much better. The solution is simply that MPs' pay rather than being tied to the pay of public servants as it has been for the past several years should be tied to the median wage of the New Zealand worker because to whom MPs' pay is tied not only changes the incentives of MPs but tells us something about the purpose of this place the purpose of members of Parliament and what our values and aspirations are.The problem with the old formula is that if any of those signals are to be taken seriously then we aspire to be a country with higher paid civil servants—right? That's what under the old formula MPs had to do if they wanted to get paid more and what they should be doing is making New Zealand wealthier and more productive because one of the real public policy and performance scandals of New Zealand in the last couple of decades has been anaemic growth in productivity. Perhaps a related scandal is that over the years that the previous arrangement was in place MPs' pay went up so rapidly because public servants' pay went up so rapidly and public sector productivity has been rubbish over that time.One could comment having listened to some of the speeches that preceded mine about the productivity of the MPs who have been receiving these pay rises too—the quality of outputs for the effort put in perhaps not being as high as it might be.Nevertheless we are missing an opportunity here. By seeking to blame a Remuneration Authority for any unpopular decisions about MPs' pay we have missed the opportunity to retain the strategy of using a mathematical formula and we've missed the opportunity to pick the correct mathematical formula that would have aligned members of Parliaments' incentives with something much more important than raising the pay of the public sector. We could have actually chosen to align MPs' incentives with the productivity and median wages of New Zealand. Simple: New Zealand gets richer MPs get paid more; New Zealand gets poorer MPs get paid less. How difficult is it to understand that? Well actually it's clear to understand and that's another one of the advantages of taking this strategy.You see the real issue underneath all of this which no one else will say is that it's about MPs finding someone to blame for unpopular decisions about their pay. If it was linked to the median wage of the average or the median New Zealand worker then it would be simple enough and justifiable enough that nobody would complain. So not only would that alternative advanced by Gareth Hughes have been better in terms of performance and incentives it actually would have been more durable and effective in solving the real problem these politicians here are grappling with which is how to blame someone for unpopular decisions about our own pay.Nevertheless that opportunity has been missed. We're going round in circles and I'm quite happy to be opposing this bill. Thank you Madam Speaker."