Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Kia ora Mr Speaker. Can I just say before I talk to the bill how appropriately and strikingly attired Meka Whaitiri is today. I really very much admire the top she is wearing and appropriate for the bill that we are debating.I must confess that before I came to this place I had very little knowledge and nearly no understanding of Matariki and I don't particularly think I was any more out of touch than the average Pākehā New Zealander. I have to acknowledge my former colleagues Georgina te Heuheu Nuk Korako and especially Hekia Parata my good friend and fellow 2008 intake for their promotion of Matariki as an important cultural event not just for Māori but for New Zealand. Particularly in Hekia Parata's case as Minister of Education—one holding that role doesn't directly influence the curriculum in that way but she was very encouraging of schools early childhood education schools and our institutions like museums and Te Papa actually creating a resource that would enable our young to be able to understand the cultural significance of Matariki the celebration that goes with it and then to actually use that knowledge as a learning tool whether it was astronomy or mathematics or our history. On history I was interested in Ms Whaitiri's comment about that being significant in her iwi for only 15 years. So I wonder actually if it's a case of this being a cultural tradition that perhaps had become a little bit lost in our modernisation through the 20th century and it's really nice to see it come back as a strong and growing event for New Zealand.It is true that with any public holiday for whatever reason there will be a benefit: a cultural benefit a social benefit—a financial benefit to the good people of the Coromandel probably—and indeed there is a financial benefit. But the net effect—and I don't want to sound like the Grinch but I am the shadow finance spokesperson—there are no benefits on public holidays without there first being a cost and in and of itself the cost may not seem overly significant at $400 million - odd but I do think this is sort of a case of stacks on the mill. In the last four years or so we've had a number of these $400 million costs actually and some much much higher and all of which I have to say—all of these individually—have merit certainly were felt meritorious by this Government: the increases in paid parental leave; David Clark's good fortune in Monday-ising public holidays which I think had a lesser cost because they don't happen so often but indeed there is a benefit to those who hadn't previously benefited from public holidays when they fell over the weekend; and sick leave has gone up from five to 10 days and while the regulatory impact statements on that said well it wouldn't affect those people who were already on 10 days I know that those employees who were then asked for 15 and so that cost ripples through and that's also the effect of the substantial increases in the minimum wage which now stands at $20 per hour. Again the previous Minister for workplace relations tried to convince the House that that was raising the floor not having any impact through pay scales—wrong again. The relativities of somebody who wasn't on the minimum wage but then ended up there because of these statutory increases was certainly—the reaction was to then go and seek a higher hourly rate.Then we've got some more ubiquitous costs on small business with things like increasing the regulatory environment and again these are individual cases where they may well have merit: the healthy homes standards the increase in the top tax rate. Ultimately small businesses' profits are paid by the individuals that own those companies. I could go on about a number of others. I think I've made the point that this is a case of trees in a forest—that the cumulative effect of all of these added costs on small business against the backdrop of a very very difficult and challenging environment because of COVID makes it I think difficult to support something which has such merit. Matariki could well be and should potentially have already been a recognised holiday in this country but what National says is that if that is the case that should not add to our holiday environment. We rank around the middle I think of the OECD in terms of the number of paid public holidays that we have and with 20 paid annual leave days we rank not in the upper quartile; probably in the upper half of the OECD for paid leave. So it's not as if we're already at the maximum and this is even more generous; it's more about the whole impact of all of these individual costs on business.Now the Government is a reasonable proportion of our economy and growing. It's gone up from about 28 percent to around 34 percent of our economy that is now State or local government and Government doesn't have any money. It doesn't have any money except the money it takes out of the pockets of those small businesses and their employees and so—Maureen Pugh: Oh is that where it comes from?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: Yes it is. It's a revelation to some in the House Ms Pugh but that is where it comes from. There is no golden tree at the end of the lane and so effectively small businesses are paying 1½ times. They're paying for their own costs that have been imposed and for their employees—all good—but they're also having to pay for the State employees because that's where the salaries come from. They come from the pockets of hard-working New Zealanders earning through their small businesses.So we would have supported this had there been some kind of trade-off and there's still an opportunity at select committee to hear from the submitters who are going to be paying for it and whether or not that sways the Government—I doubt it—we'll probably be back here in six months' time debating the merits of it having heard from those submitters. I hope we hear more about why Matariki is so important because as Minister Allan laid out so eloquently in her first reading speech there is a lot we can learn from this celebration of our whakapapa our history and our future. But in essence our position is that we regretfully cannot support it even though we strongly support the principle of the celebration.