Robertson Grant: Remuneration Authority (Members of Parliament Remuneration) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Remuneration Authority (Members of Parliament Remuneration) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2297. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): I rise to speak on the second reading of this bill. This would normally be the point at which we would be reflecting upon the interesting and diverse submissions that had come to the select committee that would have been set up. I imagine a bill of this type would have attracted a lot of interest actually. There would have been a lot of hearings. There would have been the traditional argument between Opposition members and Government members about whether 5 minutes or 10 minutes is actually enough for a submitter to make their point. We would have jousted over that and got our way through. I predict that the select committee probably would have travelled on this bill and gone to Auckland and Christchurch and taken on board the views of people from right across the country.Hon Michael Woodhouse: It’s such a burning issue.GRANT ROBERTSON: Well the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety interjects and says: “It’s such a burning issue.” Actually it is. It actually is something that worries and concerns New Zealanders and that is because I believe of the reasons I mentioned in my first reading speech. The concerns are not so much about what we as politicians are being paid but actually about what ordinary working New Zealanders are being paid and the fact that they have not had a pay increase. In the last year 40-odd percent of them have not had a pay increase. That is what drives the anger the concern—the fact that there is a greater disparity being created yet again by this. So I do want to make the point in all seriousness that clearly it is less than desirable to have now moved immediately to the second reading of this bill.I think everyone in the House would recognise that a piece of legislation like this would benefit from having a select committee process. Any time you see an algebraic equation show up in a piece of legislation it should go to a select committee and I think it is really important that when we are—Hon Michael Woodhouse: The member should’ve paid more attention at King’s High School in fourth form. He’d have got it right.GRANT ROBERTSON: Well no actually—things went wrong for me in maths when they started including letters with the numbers Mr Woodhouse. But no the fact is that when we get a piece of legislation like this with a formula-based approach it would be better if it was before a select committee. What we know—and the reason the Labour Party is supporting this piece of legislation as I said in my first reading contribution—is that we share the goal that the kind of pay increase that was put forward for us by the Remuneration Authority is not right. It is not acceptable. We want to see MP pay much more closely aligned with what average workers are getting in terms of pay increases and this bill takes us a step in that direction. It is not to my mind the end of this discussion but it is a step away from the kinds of pay increases that were proposed in recent weeks.I want to take a moment to talk about some of the issues that the Minister raised in his speech at the start of the second reading. The first of those is around the whole question of what has happened to chief executive pay. This is relevant because that is the relativity that is going on here—or with executive pay more broadly shall we say. That is the relativity that the Remuneration Authority looks at under section 18 of its Act.There is no doubt that we have seen massive pay increases for chief executives in the public sector and the private sector and the Minister is actually just plain wrong to assert that that is not what has happened in New Zealand. Actually my own view is that no Public Service chief executive should be paid more than the Prime Minister. I do not understand that. I think that that sends the wrong signals. I simply do not believe when we are getting up to the $400000 $500000 or $600000 area that we are in a situation where there is some kind of concern about recruitment of quality people for those roles. I think that is wrong. You know we have got the State Services Commissioner who got a 9 percent pay increase after a shocker of a year frankly. What kind of situation are we in when those kinds of pay increases are going on?As I said earlier when we get to the point in New Zealand workplaces where we have got a chief executive being paid 26 times the average worker’s pay we have got ourselves out of whack. I note that if you look at the ANZ with a $4.1 million salary for the ANZ chief executive the ANZ’s chief executive is paid 120 times what the lowest-paid worker within the ANZis paid. That is out of control. That is disproportionate.What we need in New Zealand is a sustained programme of lifting the wages of ordinary New Zealanders and that comes through a variety of means. It does come through productivity increases—there is no doubt about that—but the disjuncture that I mentioned in the first reading between productivity growth and wage increases in New Zealand in the last 25 years needs further exploration and that is around some questions about the bargaining power of workers and the real value of the minimum wage. Those are the real considerations around wages in New Zealand that are being ignored by this Government and now we have this piece of legislation to paper over the cracks that we have got here.The Minister did not in his contribution address to my satisfaction—and I hope we come back to it in the Committee stage of this debate—the question of the particular mechanism being chosen here the quarterly employment survey for public service workers as the best benchmark we can have. There are two concerns I have about that. The first of those is the fact that public sector pay is in the control of politicians in all sorts of ways. We had Bill English saying on the television on Sunday that 4 percent is out for teachers nurses and the police. We can certainly debate the merits of whether that is fair or not but that indicates the level of control a politician has about that. We all know that. We all know that when the Ministry of Education sits down with the teacher unions later this year what they negotiate will come back to the table of the Ministers.So the very thing that we are about to benchmark ourselves to is in the control of Ministers and that takes us back years in terms of whether or not we should be setting our own pay. As my colleague Chris Hipkins said earlier you know we can put it up or we can put it down. This provides me with my biggest issue with this bill and I want to hear from the Minister in the Committee stage why the quarterly employment survey for public sector workers is being used. Why not look across the whole economy? That takes that out of the equation because there are public servants all over New Zealand who are now thinking: “Well this is just going to mean an absolute certainty that we are down to 1 percent or lower in pay increases because the politicians will be too scared to put the pay up because it will lift their pay as well.”On the other side of the fence there are committees of Parliamentdebating these issues all the time. So the Officers of Parliament Committee is right now debating pay and salary around the Ombudsman and around other Officers of Parliament as well. As politicians we are constantly involved in what it is that makes up public sector pay and I think the Government needs to explain very carefully to us why it is limiting this to the public sector. If we looked across the economy more broadly then I would have more comfort. As I say I think it is a step in the right direction because it delinks us from the runaway executive salaries but it does not in my view provide a broad enough look across the economy at wage increases and I think we need to take another look at that. I think it is really important also that we go back to asking the Minister to describe in some more detail the difference between the quarterly employment survey as a measure and other measures of public sector pay as well and I am sure he will do that as those concerns have been raised online.So in the second reading of the bill once again we on the Labour Party side find ourselves in the position of supporting a piece of legislation that takes a step forward to ensure that we do not get silly disproportionate unrealistic pay increases like that proposed by the Remuneration Authority and that we are drawn closer to the experience of working New Zealanders in terms of the kinds of pay increases they have got. But it is highly suboptimal to be here today having not had this go to a select committee having had year after year of the Prime Minister telling us we must do something about this and then we have to rush this through because as my colleague Annette King said the shambles that would be created about that pay going into our accounts and then coming out again would be ridiculous. So we have to get this done but the fact is that the Government has dropped the ball around this issue consistently now and it now brings to us something where there are still many many questions outstanding which we will take up in the Committee stage.