Volume 706 Week 19 - Wednesday 17 June 2015Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeVolume 706 Week 19 - Wednesday 17 June 2015[Sitting date: 17 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4469. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Wednesday 17 June 2015Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.Prayers.Ministerial StatementsSouthern District Health Board—Replacement of BoardHon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): I wish to make a ministerial statement under Standing Order 356 relating to the replacement of the board of Southern District Health Board with a commissioner and a team of deputy commissioners. On 28 May I wrote to the chair of the Southern District Health Board indicating that over the past months I had become increasingly concerned with the deterioration inSouthern District Health Board’s financial performance. I stated that I was considering replacing the board and appointing a commissioner under section 31 of the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act 2000. I have carefully considered the board’s response and I have today informed the chair that I will be replacing the board with a commissioner and a team of deputy commissioners.My decision is based on the need for a new approach to the district health board’s longstanding financial issues and the need to help move Southern District Health Board to a more sustainable position over time. Deficits have been a feature of Southern District Health Board’s performance for some years but that situation has worsened considerably over the course of the past financial year. The district health board is forecasting a final deficit of $27 million for the current financial year. That figure has effectively doubled in the last 6 months. The district health board has also forecast that its deficit position will further increase in 2015-16 to between $30 million and $42 million. This accounts for over half of the combined deficit of all 20 district health boards. This is a situation that can no longer continue.Over time a number of steps have been taken to drive improvement including the appointment of a Crown monitor and intensive monitoring by the Ministry of Health. The board and senior management have worked to address financial issues and nearly all options available to Ministers have been tried over the years. The Crown monitor has advised that the changes required to lift the district health board’s performance are significant. Since it became public that I have written to Southern District Health Board I note that the Labour Party’s health spokesperson has indicated her support for the installation of a commissioner. I welcome that support and note that political opponents are attempting to shift the discussion to the adequacy of the population-based funding formula and a debate on the merits or otherwise of the amalgamation of the Southland and Otago district health boards in 2010.In regard to the population-based funding formula all district health boards are funded according to the same formula and have been since the early 2000s. In a tight fiscal environment all district health boards are expected to exercise sound stewardship but no other district health board has failed to control its finances like Southern District Health Board has. In regard to the amalgamation of the Southland and Otago district health boards although it was a challenging exercise the Government’s expectation is that any issues impacting on financial performance should now be on a clear path to resolution.The Government is committed to the redevelopment of Dunedin Hospital and the provision of high-quality health services to all the people of the southern region. Southern District Health Board recently published its strategic plan outlining how it will deliver those services. Based on the board’s history of failing to deliver on annual planned expectations I have lost confidence that the current governance arrangements are fit for addressing the challenges that the district health board faces. Kathy Grant has been appointed as commissioner and takes up the role from 9 a.m. tomorrow 18 June. Mrs Grant is a local lawyer and community leader with significant business and governance experience and a proven track record in turning round struggling organisations.After discussions with Mrs Grant she has indicated that she intends to appoint Graham Crombie and Richard Thomson as deputies. A third deputy with a strong clinical background is expected to be announced later this month.Mr Crombie is a Dunedin local. He has a strong background in accountancy with a proven record in high-level assessments of the sustainability of health organisations. He also has lengthy governance experience. Mr Richard Thomson will also be an important part of the commission’s turn-round team. He is a local businessman and has a longstanding commitment to improving southern health services. He will be able to provide key insights into Southern District Health Board. Mr Thomson was chair of Otago District Health Board from 2001 to 2009 and has continued as a Southern District Health Board member since 2009. He is currently serving his second term on Dunedin City Council. The commissioner team will bring together a mix of strong financial governance and clinical skills.The turn-round for Southern District Health Board is not expected to happen quickly. It is going to be hard work. I would like to thank the outgoing board for its work to date. My decision is not intended to devalue its efforts and achievements. However I believe this decision is the right one to ensure long-term sustainability and the delivery of quality health services to the people of Otago and Southland.Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): Given years of deficits and months of adverse publicity perhaps the most surprising thing about the Minister’s announcement today that he is considering replacing the board is that it has taken him so long to reach a decision. I think the politics have dictated the timing. Until now the Government has maintained a facade of arms-length operation despite appointing five out of 12 board members including the chair and despite having a Crown monitor on the board for nearly 6 years. That Government watchdog has been reporting to the Minister the whole time and has a direct line to the Minister. Any remaining impression of ministerial distance from decision making is sacrificed with the appointment of this commissioner—perhaps it was becoming a little implausible anyway.I cautiously welcome the appointment of Kathy Grant and Graham Crombie and Richard Thomson respectively. They are well respected locally and I hope that they can succeed where the Minister has failed until now. The odds of course will be stacked against them. Fixing the district health board will not be easy. The cultural challenges are well canvassed. Some departments have worked well together since the merger; others have not. But of course one of the big elephants in the room is funding. The Minister can wish that away but the inquiry that he has launched into the funding model is so narrow that it is clearly there only to dismiss media interest and nothing more.The funding issues will not go away. The Southern District Health Board trains a health workforce for the rest of the country and that appears to be inadequately compensated for. It takes longer to treat patients when teaching students at the same time. It has the largest geographic area of any district health board and yet it does not have the largest funding component. It also has older buildings and that forces older less-efficient styles of operation that involve more staff time. The Minister must address concerns about the funding model. It was introduced by Labour about 10 years ago. It is time that it was fully and properly reviewed.The glacial progress towards a hospital rebuild should bother us all. The Minister needs to commit to a full tertiary hospital with level 6 status. So far he has ducked for cover on that one. Already the hospital has lost accreditation for the training of intensive care unit specialists. A Beca Group report late last year said that Dunedin Hospital’s outdated ward and operating theatre layouts were in need of replacement. That means that a refit will not do it. It is prohibitively expensive to do that. There is asbestos in the buildings. The layout is no longer suitable for modern operating and refitting the old building would not be a wise use of capital.Urgency is needed. The Minister has let time frames slip. The previous Minister said a business case would be at Cabinet this year; the Minister has said the end of this year. The district health board has said the background will not be doneeven by the end of this year. There will be no comfort in the South until the Minister commits—and has a sod turned before his term of Government is out—to rebuilding that full tertiary hospital at level 6 standard.People in the South like people across New Zealand deserve affordable access to decent health-care. It is something that every Kiwi should be able to count on. This Government has continued to fund health care below the rate of inflation. Our health care services are suffering. This Minister no longer has anywhere to hide. With the appointment of this commissioner the fate of the Southern District Health Board is tied tightly to his success in his portfolio.JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): The Green Party is glad that this issue is finally being looked at. The Green Party has raised this issue including allegations of fraud a number of times over the course of the last year in questions to the Minister of Health of the time. Unfortunately the Minister refused to engage proactively which is a shame and which is why we are in this situation today. The Government has dropped the ball in the past on the Southern District Health Board especially when it wrote to the Ministry of Health’s audit and compliance unit in December 2010 seeking an investigation and recommendation. It took over 3 years for the Minister to respond.It would seem that the problems for this board began when the Otago and Southland district health boards merged 5 years ago. We hope that this is an opportunity to look at the funding model for the region. It is an incredibly large area to serve and we need to ensure that the people in the area are getting adequate and optimal health-care. We do have concerns that replacing the whole board with one person is less democratic than the oversight of an elected board but we do think it is time for this issue finally to be looked at. This is an opportunity to look at the wider issue and the most important thing here is that the quality of service for people in the area is not affected.BARBARA STEWART (NZ First): New Zealand First believes that the health Minister’s appointment of a commissioner to run the Southern District Health Board basically demonstrates a belated ability to manage New Zealand’s health services. The Southern District Health Board has been under Government monitoring since 2010 and yet it has still been allowed to reach a $27 million deficit this year. That is set to increase to $42 million in 2016. If Southern District Health Board’s financial state is due to board mismanagement why has Minister Coleman allowed the board to remain in control until now? The reality is that Southern District Health Board has a range of very specific needs—a large geographic region an ageing population and high rates of bowel cancer—that the population-based funding formula employed by the Minister just does not cater for. Rather than admit that he has failed to appropriately fund southern health services Minister Coleman has chosen to blame the board.Southern health services have already been cut to the bone by the board. Appointing a commissioner to find more savings will ensure health services across the district are stretched beyond breaking point. We would urge patient care to be the focus of every decision made. When money is the focus it is too easy for patients and the people who care for them to be sidelined. We see no way that a $27 million deficit that is predicted to increase can be brought under control without affecting the delivery of safe and high-quality public health services and the health of thousands.It is time to clean the slate on this particular issue. We hope that the commissioner can succeed and that health services do not deteriorate in the short term.Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): I just want to reassure the people of Otago and Southland that this is about delivering sustainable services over the long term and the public deserve nothing less. As I have said the financial situation in the Southern District Health Board just could not continue and that is why today’s announcement has been made. It has been carefully considered and it is the right course of action.On the point of decisiveness well it does not really come any more decisive than installing a commissioner. And to our political opponents I am very grateful that across the House people are supporting this decision but I would note that if I had removed the board in the first couple of weeks you would have had something considerable to say about that.There has been a lot of money go into the Southern District Health Board—$135 million extra over the last 7 years and a huge increase in the number of doctors and nurses. As to the argument that a deficit indicates underfunding Labour left a combined district health board deficit of $150 million; we have got that down to $50 million. So by that argument you would say that it was actually Labour that was underfunding. But the point is that a deficit actually indicates that the money available is not being allocated correctly.In regard to the population-based funding formula that has been the system that has always been used. What I would say is the Government has a very high level of confidence in this team. They are local people they have got the right set of complementary skills and I know that the Government and the House will wish them well. It is a tough task and they need all the support they can get to get the job done but there is no question that a new approach to the Southern District Health Board’s issues is required and that is what I have announced today.Questions to MinistersHousing Auckland—Housing Developments on Crown Land and Consultation with Iwi1.ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by his statement “what I can say about the Minister for Housing is that he is outstanding”; if so what has been outstanding about his roll-out of the Government’s new Auckland housing policy?Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): Yes; the outstanding housing policies include signing housing accords with seven councils including Auckland in order to speed up housing development; freeing up more land for residential development through more than 80 special housing areas; providing a $200 million loan to the Tāmaki Redevelopment Company in Auckland to develop around 7500 new houses; introducing the new HomeStart package to help around 90000 first-home buyers into houses over the next 5 years; developing land at Hobsonville Point and in other areas such as Weymouth funded through the Social Housing Fund; investing $446 million to insulate around 240000 homes through the Warm Up New Zealand: Heat Smart programme plus around another 46000 through the Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes extension; and to ensure that we maintain this momentum the Budget confirmed that we will consider freeing up more Crown-owned land in Auckland for housing. New house building has doubled in Auckland over the past 3 years and investment in residential construction reached an all-time high of $2.6 billion in the year to March 2015. So the Minister is doing a good job and the previous Labour Government did absolutely nothing—Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The Prime Minister will resume his seat.Andrew Little: Can he advise when the first house will be completed on the newly released Crown land in Auckland?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I do not have those details but what I know is that by October of this year the land will be identified in parts and from there on the first house will be built by 2016. I find it really odd that the Labour Party does not think that we can build a single house on Crown-owned land and yet the policy it took into the last election was to build theoretically 100000 of them.Andrew Little: I seek leave to table a letter published in the National Business Review online with a comment attached to it from Nick Smith pointing out—Mr SPEAKER: Order! No the member will resume his seat.Andrew Little: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The material published online is behind a paywall not widely available and therefore is entirely appropriate for tabling in the House.Mr SPEAKER: On the basis of the latter part of the argument advanced by the Leader of the Opposition I will put the leave and the House will decide. Leave is sought to table that particular letter. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.Document by leave laid on the Table of the House.Andrew Little: What is outstanding about the fact that his Government has built just 170 homes in Auckland special housing areas since they were announced in 2013 especially given his claims in Parliament yesterday that the Government built 8500 houses last year?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: One always has to be cautious with the Labour Party’s numbers but what I will say about the special housing areas is that there are over 90 of them in Auckland and as everybody knows from the designation of a special housing area you have to go through a process and that process includes infrastructure and everything else. The point was actually made by the Minister yesterday that Labour identified Hobsonville in 2003 and did not build a single house there.Andrew Little: Can he confirm that Minister Nick Smith told Tainui yesterday that they do have first refusal rights over some Crown land in Auckland; if so how does he reconcile this with Nick Smith’s impassioned denials that iwi have any rights at all over the land?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: No I was not party to those conversations.Andrew Little: Given that answer does he now confirm that this is the situation: first the policy was leaked; second some of the land was occupied by power substations and cemeteries; third it turned out that 500 hectares was just a guesstimate; fourth some of the land was not even Crown-owned and other parts of the land were just conceptual; fifth Nick Smith said that he could sell land without giving iwi first dibs; sixth it turned out that the Government has already given iwi first dibs on some of the land; seventh Nick Smith admitted that he cannot sell the land without giving iwi first dibs and the whole thing is going to wind up in court; and finally he has admitted that no houses will be built for at least 18 months?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: No and there are more points on the member’s list than people who voted for him in the election of his leadership.Andrew Little: When will the Prime Minister finally realise that the other outstanding failure here is his own failure to put in a Minister for Building and Housing who is actually up to the job?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I think that at the start of my answer to the primary question I ran through the things that Nick Smith has done in his time as Minister for Building and Housing. What a great privilege it is as Prime Minister to be able to read out an extensive list that is actually making a difference to the people of Auckland—because if Helen Clark were answering this question this blank piece of paper is exactly what the list would look like. They did absolutely nada and that is why house prices doubled under Labour. As I said yesterday—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The question has been answered.Andrew Little: Can he confirm that Nick Smith has been sent today to a remote part of the Bay of Plenty forest in order to avoid further embarrassment to the Government; and that if Nick Smith creates a fiasco in the forest and there is no one to hear it it is still the media’s fault?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: No I can confirm that he has gone to the regions because National cares a lot about the regions.Question No. 2 to MinisterRt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First):I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. It is by way of seeking your advice for the future because we put in a question asking—[Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! This is a point of order; I wish to hear it in silence.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: I am seeking your counsel and advice in this matter because we put in a question asking whether the Prime Minister stood by his statements and then after 11 a.m. which is quite unique in our experience the question was switched to the Minister of Energy and Resources. My question is how you would phrase the question to avoid the outcome that we have just experienced whereby in seeking the Prime Minister standing by his own statements we have now got the Minister of Energy and Resources saying whether he stands by the Prime Minister’s statements which is not remotely what we were asking.Mr SPEAKER: It is not my job to phrase the questions. My job is to judge whether they meet the Standing Orders. On this occasion if the member looks at Speakers’ rulings 168 a number of rulings there will confirm to him that the Government has the right to determine where the question goes. So it transfers the question. Subsequent to a transfer there is often a change of wording required to make it sensible. This question has now been accepted and it will be asked today if the member wants to otherwise I am quite happy to move to the next question.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First):I am aware of the ruling. What I am asking you is if one is seeking to get a Minister to stand by that Minister’s statements or the Prime Minister to stand by his how would one phrase the question other than in the way I phrased it which was: “Does he stand by all his statements regarding the electricity market; if so why?”. If I was to avoid the outcome how would you suggest I draft it? To be within the Standing Orders—Mr SPEAKER: Order! As I said earlier it is not my job to design the questions but the member himself frequently comes in and asks the Prime Minister whether he stands by all his statements. That would have got the member past step 1 on that occasion. He could have done that. This question has been accepted. It will be asked if the member wants to ask it. If he does not I am very comfortable with moving immediately to question No. 3.—Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): There is no suggestion that I do not want to ask the question Mr Speaker—Mr SPEAKER: Order! Well then ask it.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: I was seeking your advice.Mr SPEAKER: Then ask it otherwise the member would not be—Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Oh so seeking counsel is not a good idea?Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. I will give the member one final warning. If he wants to ask the question he rises to his feet and asks it; if he does not he will not be in the House to ask it in the first place.—CHRIS HIPKINS (Senior Whip—Labour): I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: I have dealt with this matter. If it a fresh point of order I am happy to hear it.CHRIS HIPKINS: It is indeed a fresh point of order. In ruling on this issue of transfer previously Speakers have indicated that one of the tests that they would apply in applying the Speakers’ rulings is: could somebody be expected to know what was in the head of somebody else when they made a statement? One of the issues here is if we ask a very broad question of the Prime Minister such as “Does he stand by all of his statements?” you would be quite at liberty to rule that when asked a very specific supplementary question the Prime Minister could not be expected to know about it because he would not have been given notice. So one of the things that the Opposition will try on occasion to do is give an indication of the broad nature of the topics to be debated. If that then means that the Prime Minister can automatically transfer the question to somebody else it does create a situation where we cannot question the Prime Minister on anything specific.Hon Gerry Brownlee: Speaking to the point of order—Mr SPEAKER: If the member wants to take the time I will welcome—Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Leader of the House): It is one of those days Mr Speaker—it is one of those days. The Speaker’s ruling that you quoted—168/2—does go on to make it clear that notwithstanding the claims made by Mr Hipkins matters that go to “Does someone stand by” certain statements do not meet the test as to whether or not the person initially being asked the question could possibly be the only person to give the answer. When the question was seen this morning it was reasonable to expect that it was going to be of a relatively technical nature because we know that is the general thrust of inquiry from the Rt Hon Winston Peters. We therefore felt it most appropriate that the technical information could be provided by a Minister who had that responsibility.RON MARK (NZ First): I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: Is this a fresh point of order which I asked Chris Hipkins to raise or a continuation of the other—RON MARK: Well it pertains to comments made by the Leader of the House and the whole discussion to this point raises another question and I respectively ask you whether you could take some time to consider and come back and give us your views on the wider issue. It would appear to New Zealand First that if we simply asked the question “Does he stand by his statements” putting it to a Minister or the Prime Minister the question would remain with that person. When we try to give some assistance by referring to what the subject of the Prime Minister’s comment was and then the Government exercised its right under the Standing Order to shift it that could well become a tactic to avoid having the Prime Minister answer any question that he does not understand the details of.Mr SPEAKER: Order! I have heard quite enough on this matter. As I said earlier it is well accepted through Speakers’ rulings for a long period of time that the Government has the right to decide who has the responsibility and is best entitled to answer that question. On that basis the Government transferred the question. There will subsequently be an adjustment to words. What is in the Prime Minister’s head is not the essence of this question. The question at the time is about holding the Government to account for its policies. On this occasion the Government has decided to transfer it. That is the end of the matter. A question can be asked and indeed will be asked by the Rt Hon Winston Peters.Electricity Market—Consumer and Industry Prices2.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) to the Minister of Energy and Resources: Does he stand by all the Prime Minister’s statements regarding the electricity market; if so why?Hon SIMON BRIDGES (Minister of Energy and Resources): Yes; because the Prime Minister has very good expertise on these matters.Rt Hon Winston Peters: Will the Minister state with precision and clarity that he is familiar with every statement that the Prime Minister has made recently about electricity pricing—yes or no?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I am not always privileged to be in the same room with the Prime Minister so I have not heard all the comments.Rt Hon Winston Peters: So is he saying he is prepared to stand up for the Prime Minister as to what the Prime Minister said even though he is not familiar with what he said on the question of electricity pricing in each and every case—yes or no?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: Unlike New Zealand First National is a values-based party and I and the Prime Minister share the same values.Rt Hon Winston Peters: In what way will increasing the annual per customer charge for Westpower from $1.79 to $6.76 Top Energy from $1.55 to $4.21 and Northpower from $300 to $560 benefit the economic direction of the regions?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: The member is jumping to conclusions. It is far too early in the process to assume that changes to transmission pricing methodology will significantly alter electricity prices in some regions. As I say for example one of the options is to be prospective in effect only and in that case there would be very minimal impact on the cost of electricity across the regions. I think just to go one step further this is about the Electricity Authority living up to its mandate of ensuring efficient investment decisions and that is why it has issued this options paper.Rt Hon Winston Peters: Given that customers of Auckland’s Vector will see their annual customer charge increase on average from $327 to $519 how on earth will that help our poorest our elderly or hard-working parents trying to make ends meet?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: The member is quite wrong because he says that will happen. As I have said this is an options paper where it is not at all clear that that will be the result. I have been very clear with the Electricity Authority that it needs to consult well and listen and we know as I said in one of my earlier answers that there are many options that would not have anything like the effects that the member is talking of.Rt Hon Winston Peters: Does he believe that building corporate welfare particularly for large industrial foreign-owned energy consumers like Rio Tinto and BlueScope Steel which are getting 56 percent reductions or more among others is a hallmark of this Government and why does he think that the people from Westport to Kaitāia should be subsidising this?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I repeat that the member is jumping to conclusions. This is not in any way shape or form about benefiting any particular businesses. What it is about is fairly and efficiently ensuring that power investment in infrastructure is spread appropriately and as I say efficiently across the regions. That said let us be very clear: it is an options paper. It will be taken carefully and judiciously and the member is very much welcome to make a submission.Economic Outlook—Reports3.SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill) to the Minister of Finance: What reports has he received showing that lower interest rates and a pick-up in construction activity are helping to support growth in the economy?Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): Last week the Reserve Bank released its Monetary Policy Statement for June 2015 and it cut the official cash rate to 3.25 percent—just above a 50-year low for interest rates. The bank said that the economy is growing at around 3 percent a year supported by low interest rates continued growth in construction activity high net migration and a decline in fuel prices. It noted risks including weaker prospects for dairy prices and higher petrol prices. It indicated that these could slow income and demand growth. Annual inflation remains near zero. The Reserve Bank’s outlook is for solid real growth in the economy.Sarah Dowie: What is the Reserve Bank’s outlook for growth employment and household savings?Hon BILL ENGLISH: The forecasts for these are reasonably strong. It forecasts that economic output will increase by an average of 3 percent for each of the next 3 years. Total employment growth is expected to be 1.5 percent over the next 3 years—above recent averages—with unemployment expected to fall to 5 percent. Household savings are expected to remain positive and well above long-term averages at 2 percent to 3 percent of disposable income.Sarah Dowie: What other reports has he received on the outlook for the New Zealand economy?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Earlier this week the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research released its consensus forecast—that is it compiles all the economic forecasts that are done. It says that although the outlook has been pared back slightly following the fall in dairy prices forecasters expect average annual growth of nearly 3 percent in the 3 years to 2018 and it notes particularly that the labour market is a positive aspect of the outlook. Export growth is expected to pick up over 2016 in spite of slowing activity in trading partners. These forecasts are consistent with the moderate sustainable growth that underpins the Budget.Sarah Dowie: What alternative reports has he seen on interest rates?Hon BILL ENGLISH: I have received two particular reports lately. The first report said that households were worse off because of high interest rates. The second report received last week following the Reserve Bank’s cut in the official cash rate said that lower interest rates apparently show that the economy is on a downward slide. If sustained growth of 3 percent and 150000 more jobs by 2019 is the economy on a slide then that is not too bad. Both of these reports came from an organisation that apparently thinks that both higher interest rates and lower interest rates are bad for the New Zealand economy. It could be only one organisation—the New Zealand Labour Party.Business Innovation and Employment Ministry—Refurbishment Costs4.Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North) to the Minister for Economic Development: Does the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment’s expenditure of $140747.66 on a public information screen show it is achieving one of its principal goals of realising efficiency gains over time?Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Economic Development): I am disappointed with the cost ofboth the public information screen and the outside sign and as I have said publicly I have spoken to the chief executive of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and made clear my disappointment. He has accepted that those two items in their relocation should have cost less and in future large building projects will have additional oversight. It is important that these two items are seen in the context of savings of $40 million over 20 years by being located in a single head office that come from a 31 percent reduction in office space. It is also important to note that the overall cost of that development came in at $2 million under budget.Dr David Clark: Does spending $74000 on a reception desk show good judgment?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The member could run through a number of things that he and I could both have an opinion on but actually overall the project has saved very significant sums of money for taxpayers—$40 million over 20 years—and it also came in under budget.Dr David Clark: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. That was a very direct and straightforward question and it was not answered or addressed.Mr SPEAKER: In my opinion in listening carefully to the answer from what I could hear it was addressed. It would help if the member could ask his own colleagues to be a little quieter and then he might well have heard the answer more clearly as well. Does the member have a further supplementary question?Dr David Clark: I did hear the answer Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: Then he will agree that it was addressed.Dr David Clark: Can he confirm that his name appears on the ministerial plaque described in the release documents as requiring an additional $1696 spending variation in the contract; if so is he the Minister responsible to this House for the expenditure referred to in my questions today?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: It could be helpful to the member to point out that he is failing to make the distinction between policy-related issues which it is right and proper that the Minister gets involved in and operational issues which are the responsibility of the chief executive. We have seen examples in this House of members failing to observe the differences that are appropriate in what could be known as the “Trevor Mallard - Erin Leigh effect”. If Ministers start trying to run the departments for the chief executives that generally does not work out well.Dr David Clark: It will be an epitaph not a plaque. Does spending taxpayer money on the installation of hair straighteners show good judgment—Hon Steven Joyce: Well not for you.Dr David Clark: —well not for you or me—if so is the forward rental contract flexible enough to allow the Government installation of hair curlers as and when Wellington’s fashions change?Mr SPEAKER: In so far as there is ministerial responsibility in this particular case.Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I would suggest to the member that in his case and mine hair straighteners are no use paid for by anybody frankly.Youth Unemployment—Youth Service and Other Initiatives5.JONO NAYLOR (National) to the Minister for Social Development: What reports has she received on the Government’s Youth Service?Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development): The Youth Service is helping at-risk young people aged 16 and 17 build their skills and prepare them for employment. At the end of March 86.5 percent of young people enrolled in the Youth Service were engaged in education training or workplace learning. That is a 10.4 percent increase and is more than 1000 clients more than at the same time last year. Youth Service providers have told us that the percentage achieving National Certificate in Educational Achievement level 2 or equivalent has more than doubled compared with last year from less than 10 percent to nearly 25 percent which means that nearly 1500 more young people are achieving that qualification. This is just one of the ways that we are helping support young people into work.Jono Naylor: What else is the Government doing to support young people off welfare and into work?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: The Government is running a number of programmes to help support young people into work. We are putting $15.4 million over the next 4 years into our Limited Service Volunteer scheme as part of Budget 2015. This programme provides educational motivational and job options to unemployed young people. This will result in 800 placements a year. We are funding an extension of our 3K to Christchurch scheme which has already seen 1300 people granted a one-off payment to relocate and take up a job offer in other parts of the country. Of these 465 grants were made to clients aged 16 to 14. So this Government is focused on providing a range of options to improve the employment prospects of young people in New Zealand.Housing New Zealand—Condition of Properties and Health of Tenants6.METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) to the Minister responsible for HNZC: Does he stand by his statement that “I can commit to all public services involved with these families taking the steps that they ought to take to prevent as tragic an outcome as a death”?Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister responsible for HNZC): Yes.Metiria Turei: Will the Minister instruct Housing New Zealand to provide every State house built before 2000 with thermal-quality curtains and carpeted floors as a step to prevent as tragic an outcome as a death?Hon BILL ENGLISH: As I understand it—and I will have to check the detailed information—since Housing New Zealand has insulated all State houses that can be insulated unlike under previous Governments it does now supply heating to those houses that cannot be insulated. There will be a question of course as to whether that goes as far as a particular grade of thermal drapes or carpet. We would expect it to be of a reasonable standard.Metiria Turei: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. It was a very clear question asking the Minister as to whether he—Mr SPEAKER: Order! I am going to on this occasion allow the repeat of the question. I suspect it has been addressed. It was not a very clear question in my mind but it was a supplementary question that was accepted. I invite the member to ask it again for the benefit of myself and of the Minister.Metiria Turei: Will the Minister instruct Housing New Zealand to provide every State house built before 2000 with thermal-quality curtains and carpeted floors as a step to prevent as tragic an outcome as a death?Hon BILL ENGLISH: There is no need to instruct Housing New Zealand. It has a standard to which it maintains its houses. Fortunately it is the highest standard it has ever been. The member needs to keep in mind the original comments for which she asked the primary question and that is that where there are families for whom there are real health risks there are almost certainly a range of other issues involved—other health issues long-term welfare dependence lack of access to work or education. The approach this Government takes through social investment is to try to deal with the range of issues from the point of view of the family not just one such as the heating in the house although of course that is important.Metiria Turei: Will the Minister instruct Housing New Zealand to provide every State house built before 2000 that has unlined block walls with lining as a step to prevent as tragic an outcome as a death?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Housing New Zealand in the light of this case will certainly be considering what its maintenance standards are. The requirement of them will be to reach a reasonable standard. That is a bit different from you know guarantees about exactly what happens with each family in each house.Jami-Lee Ross: What steps is the Government taking to support vulnerable families by delivering more warm dry homes where they are most needed?Hon BILL ENGLISH: There are a number in train. We have been spending more than $300 million every year maintaining these homesto of course standards relevant today rather than when they were built which was far too many of them back in the 1950s and 1960s. We will continue with an insulation programme that has insulated 280000 old cold damp homes through the Warm Up New Zealand programme. We have spent around $30 million to provide heating in about 2000 homes where that is important and thermal curtains have been installed in around 17000 homes since February 2013. That is in addition to investing over the next 3 years through the Housing New Zealand asset management strategy $2.9 billion to build and upgrade State housing still overcoming a legacy of 50 years of policy that was not that sensible in between National Governments by incompetent Labour Governments that took State housing for granted.Metiria Turei: Will the Minister instruct Housing New Zealandto as a matter of urgency move every family whose doctors say they are at serious risk of a life-threatening respiratory illness from their cold damp State house to a warm dry and safe State house?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Where I think there may be some common ground here is that I think—and this has not been instructed—that where there are indications of significant health issues such as the admission of a child to hospital that should be picked up by a range of social services and acted on as it is now for rheumatic fever. Such a straightforward notification process and appropriate sharing of information which too many people are still unwilling to do could lead to a benefit for families who are experiencing health problems. But in respect of moving every one of these families to another warm dry house that would be a lot easier if our city planning was not distorted by Green-type policies that prevent the building of affordable reasonable-standard houses on the scale that we need. Housing New Zealand has the same issues as everyone else in Auckland—there is a shortage of houses because of 20 years of Green-type policies that stop them being built.Metiria Turei: Is it not a fact that Emma-Lita Bourne’s family was identified as being at risk because of the illness of those children and was not moved from their cold damp house until after she was dead?Hon BILL ENGLISH: I would have to look back into the details of the case but if the member is raising the issue that across State agencies there is not enough information shared about the risks to some of these families then she would be correct. Too often the professionals involved and sometimes the agencies involved think it is inappropriate to share information that would allow better servicing of those families. Right now we are looking at addressing a large number of information-sharing agreements to try to resolve that problem because we believe that information that is held which could help avoid this kind of tragic outcome is probably not the best way to deal with it.Metiria Turei: Has the Minister received any advice on the cost of carpets and curtains and wall linings for those State houses without them versus the benefit of saving tenants’ lives; if so what is his cost-per-life ratio?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Well not specifically in that form although I would have to say that that view of the expenditure is completely consistent with our social investment framework—that is where it is clear there are benefits that exceed the cost then we are willing to spend more money. Often it is as simple as knowing which families are at risk which agencies knew that and what information has been provided to people who can make decisions to make that kind of expenditure.Metiria Turei: Is the Minister therefore confirming that he is making an assessment as to the risk of death of infants like Emma-Lita Bourne or of young fathers like Soesa Tovo against the cost of providing carpet and curtains and wall linings for the cold damp State homes that they are living in—is that what he just told us?Hon BILL ENGLISH: No certainly not in those terms if only because the cases the member is referring to have their own complexities and circumstances that are not amenable to simple economic calculations of that nature. I am simply making the point a general point that long-term dependency and poor levels of housing do flow through to longer-term costs. We all understand that and I would have thought that the member instead of opposing the Social Housing Reform Programme might now see these couple of high-profile deaths as a catalyst to supporting reform in the State housing programme so that we can achieve some of the things she wants to achieve.Transport Auckland—Transport Strategy and Minister’s Involvement7.Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) to the Minister of Transport: Why has he rejected Auckland City’s transport strategy and its proposals to fund that strategy?Hon SIMON BRIDGES (Minister of Transport): It is tremendous to see “His Worship” out of the starting blocks—Mr SPEAKER: Order! Just answer the question.Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I wish him well. We do not believe that Auckland Council’s current transport strategy is good enough for Aucklanders. It will deliver only very modest improvements in areas that matter most to Aucklanders—namely tackling congestion and greater public transport use. That is why the Minister of Finance and I have written to the mayor to initiate an engagement process to do better for Aucklanders and to improve alignment between central government and the council. I confirm that we will be OK working with “His Worship” Phil Goff if that comes to pass.Hon Phil Goff: Why did he wait until after Auckland Transport Auckland Council and his own agency the New Zealand Transport Agency had worked together over a long period to reach consensus on a transport strategy only then to reject it instead of working collaboratively with those groups on the problem right from the outset?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: I was very clear right from the get-go that that was the time line we were working to and when we would seek to formally engage. I think it is an exaggeration to say that there is consensus between those parties.Hon Phil Goff: Why is he holding up the implementation of this strategy to tackle Auckland’s urgent transport problems by asking for yet another report which will take at least another year when Aucklanders have been widely consulted on this strategy and when a Colmar Brunton survey of 5000 Aucklanders has shown that they strongly support this strategy?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: Well I reject nearly all of that. Let us be very clear: in the face of decelerating investment in transport by Auckland this Government continues to put the lion’s share of funding into Auckland transport. We are getting on with the job while also engaging. We can actually do two things at once Mr Goff. Whether it is the Victoria Park Tunnel whether it is the Waterview Connection whether it is the electrification of rail in Auckland or whether it is the announcement today of a preferred route for the east-west connection we are making the biggest difference to transport in Aucklandin a very long time. We want to engage with the council to do an even better job.Hon Phil Goff: Why has he ruled out road pricing when the OECD last week Auckland Council the New Zealand Transport Agency the national infrastructure unit within Treasury and tomorrow the Productivity Commission have all recommended it; or are they all wrong and less informed about resolving Auckland’s transport problems than he is?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: Tolling is not our preferred strategy—that is very clear. What is also clear is that funding should follow good strategy. We are trying hard to get alignment on these things in Auckland. I would note that many of the stakeholders that “His Worship” refers to actually think the plan is fundamentally flawed and are praising the Government for getting involved to try to get it back on track.Hon Phil Goff: Will he bring forward funding for the City Rail Link given that projections show that Auckland is now on track well before 2020 to meet the Government-imposed requirements of 20 million rail passenger trips a year and thousands of new jobs in the central business district or will he accept responsibility for Britomart having to turn away passengers after 2018 because it will have reached full capacity in the evening peak period?Hon SIMON BRIDGES: If the member wants to be mayor he will have to have a better transport policy than that. But be very clear that when he talks about bringing it forward this is the Government that is providing the lion’s share of transport funding in Auckland—some $1 billion a year. In terms of the City Rail Link we have been very clear that we support a business case in 2017. There are set criteria that will see it come forward although they look unlikely to be met. In 2020 construction will start.Budget 2015—Biosecurity8.IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei) to the Minister for Primary Industries: What announcements has he made in Budget 2015 that will future-proof New Zealand’s biosecurity system?Hon NATHAN GUY (Minister for Primary Industries): As part of Budget 2015 I announced that biosecurity funding will be boosted by $24.9 million over 4 years in addition to $2 million of capital funding. This funding will be used for a range of new biosecurity initiatives including more biosecurity detector dogs more X-ray machines improving New Zealand’s import health standards and greater auditing of other countries. In the Budget we also announced a new levy on overseas travellers to help protect our border which means that travellers will pay for customs and biosecurity services rather than the taxpayer. This is good news.Ian McKelvie: How can the New Zealand public contribute to the futureproofing of our biosecurity system?Hon NATHAN GUY: Biosecurity is important to all New Zealanders regardless of whether they are a food producer a tourism operator or even just someone who enjoys our unique biodiversity. The public can have their say on how they see the biosecurity system functioning now and also on how the system may operate to protect our interests into the future in the next 10 years. Participation in the Biosecurity 2025 strategy has already started and the public can register their interest by emailing biosecurity.Swamp Kauri—Monitoring of Exports9.EUGENIE SAGE (Green) to the Minister for Primary Industries: Does he stand by his statement in regard to the export of swamp kauri that “we manage it very very closely”?Hon NATHAN GUY (Minister for Primary Industries): Yes. The Ministry for Primary Industries takes its legal responsibilities very seriously and works closely with the Customs Service on the export of indigenous products. There is a 100 percent inspection rate of notified exported kauri products by the ministry or by AsureQuality to make sure that these products are permitted under the Forests Act. In the last 18 months 80 consignments have been physically inspected and six were not approved. Yesterday I requested further advice from the ministry on improvements that can be made in managing the milling and exporting of swamp kauri.Eugenie Sage: If he and his ministry take their legal responsibilities very seriously why was important information missing from 81 percent of the “intention to export” notices submitted to the Ministry for Primary Industries in 2013?Hon NATHAN GUY: I am unaware of those allegations. What I am aware of is that the Ministry for Primary Industries takes a real focus on this issue. It complies with the Forests Act.Eugenie Sage: I seek leave to table a 2014 spreadsheet from the Northland Environmental Protection Society of “intention to export” notices submitted to the Ministry for Primary Industries in 2013—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The document has been described. I will put the leave to the House and the House will decide. Leave is sought to table that particular document. Is there any objection? There is objection.Eugenie Sage: If his ministry is managing this issue very very closely why is this log for sale online on a global wholesale trade platform when the Forests Act prohibits the export of kauri logs?Hon NATHAN GUY: The Ministry for Primary Industries is investigating that particular issue and the early information that I have had about that photo is in fact that that log is likely to be sitting here in New Zealand.Eugenie Sage: I seek leave to table a screenshot taken today from the Alibaba website—Mr SPEAKER: Order! That information is available if members want to go and look it up.Eugenie Sage: What action will the Minister take to tighten loopholes that have seen the illegal export of ancient swamp kauri logs and the plunder of Northland wetlands and that have made a mockery of the Forests Act’s protection of a scarce and valuable resource?Hon NATHAN GUY: I refute a lot of those allegations made by that member. There is already a 100 percent inspection rate of notified export swamp kauri products. Indeed if the member had listened to my primary answer she would have heard me say that I have requested further information from my officials to do with the milling and exporting of swamp kauri.Māori Television—Minister’s Involvement in Programming Decisions10.CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) to the Minister for Māori Development: When he met with the Chief Executive of Māori Television in May did he or his office discuss the planned Native Affairs debate on Whānau Ora?Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL (Minister for Māori Development): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Kia ora tātou. In answer to the question: no. I met with the chief executive officer of Māori Television once in May 2015. The meeting itself had been confirmed in my diary since February 2015 when I believe I had my first meeting with him. I did not discuss and do not discuss planned news items or editorial decisions as those are matters for the staff of Māori Television to consider.Clare Curran: Did his press secretary question the format and offer alternative suggestions for a proposed Native Affairs debate regarding Whānau Ora which was to have occurred on Māori Television on 1 June 2015?Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: I am advised that my media secretary had communications with the associate producer of Māori Television to clarify the purpose of the panel and having been told by Māori Television that it was to discuss Whānau Ora and its details she questioned whether a panel of MPs including MPs from New Zealand First—who have clearly never understood in any detail what it is all about—would achieve the stated purpose.Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. It is well known that a Minister cannot seek to answer and lay out the policy of another political party particularly when it is so demonstrably false.Mr SPEAKER: I just want to rule on the point made by the Rt Hon Winston Peters because he is righton this occasion. [Interruption] Order! When answering a question it just does not help the order of the House to take the opportunity to criticise in any way another political party.Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: The questioner asked about discussions that might have occurred with my press secretary—Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The Minister will now resume his seat. I have no problem with that part of the answer. The part that caused a little disruption in the House was the reference to whether or not another political party understood the purposes of Whānau Ora. That was not helpful and is not actually in accordance with the Standing Orders.Hon David Cunliffe: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: Is this is a fresh point of order?Hon David Cunliffe: Yes it is a completely separate point of order.Mr SPEAKER: I will hear it.Hon David Cunliffe: There was a degree of to and fro across the cross benches which made it difficult for members here to hear the Minister’s initial reply. I wonder whether it would be possible for the Minister to repeat his reply to the previous supplementary question.Mr SPEAKER: If the member is saying that he did not hear that—I heard most of the answer without any difficulty—I have got to accept the member’s word. Would the Minister please re-give his answer without the part that caused some difficulty in the last answer.Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: I will do my best. In answer to the question: I am advised that my media secretary had communications with the associate producer of Māori Television in order to clarify what the purpose of the panel was and having been told by Māori Television that it was to discuss in detail what Whānau Ora was about she questioned whether a panel of MPs including New Zealand First—for those are the statements—would achieve the stated purpose. The note continues in the same discussion thread with Māori Television. My media secretary confirmed also that I was happy to be interviewed on the Whānau Ora story and that is because I do not shirk my responsibilities and I would have no difficulty in answering questions about the value of Whānau Ora because it has benefited so many families’ lives throughout the country.Clare Curran: I seek leave to table emails dated 14 May 2015 and 19 May 2015 between the Minister’s press secretary and a Māori Television associate producer which offer alternative suggestions for the format and which question the need for New Zealand First to appear in the proposed Native Affairs debate regarding Whānau Ora that was to occur—Mr SPEAKER: Order! I think the document has now been described more than adequately. Leave is sought to table this particular email. Is there any objection? There is.Clare Curran: When he told the Māori Affairs Committee this morning that neither he nor his office expressed a view about what should be screened or who should be approached to comment on Māori Television why did he not admit then that his own press secretary had indeed engaged in an email discussion with a Native Affairs producer about what should be screened and who should be approached to comment?Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: It is pretty simple: I did not believe that the communications between my press secretary and indeed Māori Television did what the member has just said.Clare Curran: Is it correct that on the afternoon of 20 May 2015 just after he met with the chief executive officer of Māori Television Paora Maxwell the planned debate regarding Whānau Ora was cancelled?Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: That is very insightful. Yes it was cancelled. We were notified on that date having also told Māori Television on the 14th that I was prepared to appear on that programme.Clare Curran: I seek leave to table an email dated 20 May 2015 at 3.13 p.m. from the producer of Native Affairs stating that the proposed debate on Whānau Ora had been—Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The member will resume her seat. The email has been described adequately. I am putting the leave. Leave is sought to table it. Is there any objection? There is.Clare Curran: I seek leave to table an email from Paora Maxwell dated 22 May 2015 showing that he met with the Minister for Māori Development on Wednesday 20 May.Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that particular email. Is there any objection? There is objection. [Interruption] Order! If the member wants to ask a supplementary question get on with it.Clare Curran: Can he assure this House unequivocally that he has complied with section 10 of the Māori Television Service (Te Aratuku Whakaata Irirangi Māori) Act which states that a “Minister or any person acting by or on behalf of or at the direction of any Minister … must not direct the Service … in respect of … the preparation or presentation of current affairs programmes”?Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: Absolutely.Clare Curran: Did he post a tweet on 8 June in response to Graham Cameron that he had never been invited to talk to the Native Affairs programme about the Whānau Ora programme?Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: I am not sure but I think I did post a tweet and confirm that I had not been invited. The communication that the member has talked about was through my press secretary. It had not arrived to me and I stand by what I said.Clare Curran: I seek leave to table a copy of the 8 June tweet by the Minister in response to Graham Cameron.Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that particular information. Is there any objection? There is objection. [Interruption] Order! A member on this side is trying to ask a supplementary question.Clare Curran: Is he concerned about the claims of continued editorial interference with the Native Affairsprogramme including stories on Whānau Ora and Te Kōhanga Reo National Trust; and if he is concerned and is not a party to this editorial interference as he claims why has he not investigated these allegations or raised them with the chief executive officer and chair of Māori Television?Mr SPEAKER: The Hon Te Ururoa Flavell—any of those three supplementary questions.Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL: Those issues are matters for both the board and the chief executive; they are not the prerogative of the Minister.Police Counties Manukau—Compliance Policy for Transport Offences11.RON MARK (NZ First) to the Minister of Police: Does he believe that the Police are allowed to carry out their duties in a professional manner and are able to deal with all New Zealanders equally?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister of Police): Yes.Ron Mark: Why then have police commanders in Counties Manukau issued instructions to front-line police officers telling them that all Māori drivers detected driving without licences or in breach of licence conditions should not be ticketed but should be referred to community-based driver licence training?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: For several years police have had a compliance policy that enables all New Zealanders to have discretion applied in respect of transport offences and for the last 5 years there has been a pre-charge warning process. But I do not condone any policy that has the effect or the appearance of treating one group of people differently from another. Following media reports last night I expressed that concern regarding the policy to the police commissioner. I received an assurance from him that this was not the intent of the policy and that the policy will be amended to make that clear.Ron Mark: Good answer. Would the Minister—[Interruption] Well it was a good answer. [Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! I am looking at members on my right-hand side.Ron Mark: Would the Minister not agree with the New Zealand First view then that the carrot-and-stick approach to policing is a smart approach but that it should apply to all New Zealanders regardless of their race?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: I would agree with both of those things and I am sure the member and his party would join me in agreeing that it is simply not acceptable to be doing nothing in the face of very very high statistics in respect of Māori offending and reoffending. It is very important that the police’s strategy of prevention-first is applied to those people most at risk of offending. In this case it could be Māori or any other group in New Zealand. What is important is that those policies are based on need not ethnicity.Ron Mark: But bearing all that in mind Minister is it not the truth that this race-based policing policy is another inappropriate and separatist initiative this time foisted upon the police through the National Government’s Whānau Ora programme?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: No it is not and I do not even think that member believes that. It was clearly a question written for him by the leader in front of him.Ron Mark: I seek the leave of the House to table the document from Whānau Ora called Crime and Crash Prevention Strategy—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat immediately. It is not information that is difficult for a member to get.Kelvin Davis: Is it correct that the police budget has been cut by $15 million in this year’s Budget; if so how can New Zealanders have confidence that police will be there when they need them the most?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: In answer to the first question no.Kelvin Davis: How can victims of high-volume crime such as burglaries and car crime be assured their complaints will be resolved given resolution rates of these crimes are only about 10 percent?Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: That is a very good question and one that the Law and Order Committee asked me at the estimates review this morning. I am very satisfied that the police are concerned about the relatively low resolution rates for what could be described as minor crime—although if one is a victim of that it is certainly not considered to be minor. I will be working with the police to ensure that those rates improve.Senior Citizens—Elder Abuse and Support for Carers12.SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel) to the Minister for Senior Citizens: What steps is the Government taking to combat elder abuse?Hon MAGGIE BARRY (Minister for Senior Citizens): This is World Elder Abuse Awareness Week. One in 10 seniors has suffered some form of abuse or neglect and that is simply unacceptable. [Interruption] It may not be to the braying Opposition but most right-minded people would be concerned about that. Last year Age Concern received more than 2000 referrals for older people who suffered some form of physical financial or psychological abuse. Annually this Government distributes $1.7 million across 27 elder abuse and neglect prevention services around New Zealand to provide free and confidential support. On Friday I am releasing a video explaining why enduring power of attorney is so important for vulnerable seniors. A new umbrella initiative called Connects which we are rolling out across several communities will bring together agencies that will connect older New Zealanders to each other and will help prevent social isolation and elder abuse.Scott Simpson: What support is available for those who care for our elderly?Hon MAGGIE BARRY: There are more than 430000 carers in New Zealand which means that around one in 10 of us helps to care for a family member or a friend with everyday life. That is very hard for carers to balance in their lives so this afternoon when we celebrate 10 years of the Carers Alliance we are launching a new set of resources including five new online programmes to make it easier for those who care for our seniors to look after their own needs and access information to help seniors. One such programme is to provide webinars a web-based service that will enable seniors to engage with professionals about specific issues for seniors.Questions to MembersHealth and Safety Reform Bill—Select Committee Process1.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North) to the Chairperson of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee: Does he intend to call for further submissions on the Health and Safety Reform Bill before it is reported back to the House?JONATHAN YOUNG (Chairperson of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee): As the member knows Standing Order 195(1) allows for a chairperson to request any person to attend and give evidence before the committee. He also knows that this action is most often taken in circumstances where there is a shortened report-back date on the bill and the committee is not due to meet for some time so the chair will call publicly for submissions under this Standing Order. Any such action taken by the chair is also on behalf of the committee so it is in effect subject to the committee’s approval. However in most other cases the decision to call for submissions is a decision that the committee would make.Iain Lees-Galloway: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: Yes—listen I can understand the point of order. I am going to invite the member to ask the question again because I do not believe that it has been answered.Iain Lees-Galloway: My question which was on notice is to the chairman of the—Mr SPEAKER: The member will just ask the question.Iain Lees-Galloway: —Transport and Industrial Relations Committee: does he intend to call for further submissions on the Health and Safety Reform Bill before it is reported back to the House?JONATHAN YOUNG: To call for a submission is a decision that the committee would make.Iain Lees-Galloway: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: We have had a second go at it; we are moving forward. Could the member could ask his supplementary question.Iain Lees-Galloway: All right then. What is the purpose of the 2-month extension for reporting back the Health and Safety Reform Bill which he sought leave of the committee to request from the Business Committee?JONATHAN YOUNG: As that member will understand from discussions in the committee it is an opportunity for the caucus committee to review and to commit—[Interruption] But as that member knows any decisions about the bill until the bill is reported to the House are for the committee to decide.Urgent Debates DeclinedSouthern District Health Board—Replacement of BoardMr SPEAKER: I have received a letter from Dr David Clark seeking to debate under Standing Order 389 the dismissal of all members of the Southern District Health Board and the appointment of a commissioner. This is a particular case of recent occurrence involving ministerial responsibility. The dismissal of the board and the appointment of a commissioner were announced this morning. This is an important issue upon which debates have been held in the past. However the Minister of Health has made a ministerial statement on the matter in the House today and importantly Dr Clark has had the opportunity to comment on it. On this basis I am not convinced that I should set aside further business of the House today. The application is therefore declined.General DebateANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business. It all started so well. The freshly elected Government came in. Bill English went to John Key and said: “We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to do something for the poor the indigent and the hard up for whom we’ve done nothing for so long.” So he turned up here and said: “What about relief of poverty? Yep we’ll do that. What about the poor people at the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment who need a big screen and a new reception desk?”. That was ticked off as well. “What about trade deals for the Middle East? We’ve got one little farm in the middle of the desert with no sheep on it. Yeah we’ll tick that off as well.” And then they came to housing—then they came to housing—because they have run the housing stock down and they have got people living in poor-quality housing. Bill English said: “Please we’ve got to do something about housing.” Prime Minister John Key because he does not like to think little said: “Yep we’ll go big on housing. We won’t have one Minister; we’ll have three Ministers and half a dozen associates if we have to have them. And we will make housing the centrepiece of our Government for the foreseeable future.” Then they appointed Nick Smith to run the programme and that is where it all started to unravel.That is where it started to unravel because Nick Smith was left in charge of the most pressing housing issues: out-of-control Auckland house prices poor-quality rentals—a whole range of things. He was given the job of fixing it all up. And so he started. He had ignored the problem for several months to begin with. Pressed repeatedly by members of the Opposition about what he was doing about out-of-control house prices he said: “What crisis of Auckland house prices? There isn’t one. What is the matter with them?”. “Somebody can afford the houses.” he said. “Somebody can afford expensive houses. Oh they’re all affordable.” he said. Then he was pressed into actually having to do something. Desperation turned to panic and he has not stopped panicking since so that is where he is stucknow. He signed up councils for special housing areas—it was a couple of years ago that the Government did that. Thousands of houses were promised. The Prime Minister said yesterday that 8500 houses had been built and then he found the truth: it was 170 houses. Two years on and there are 170 houses for a city that needs 20000 houses a year just to catch up. So those members got that wrong as well.Then those members said: “Oh we will sort out the out-of-control house prices. We’ll introduce a brightline test for the people who are buying more than one house. We’ll make it for 2 years.” And so what did the property speculators all say? “Don’t worry we’ll sell them after 2 years.” so that is not going to work. Then they said: “OK we accept that non-resident foreign buyers are a problem so we’ll give them a couple of hurdles to leap and that will get them out of the market.” But the two hurdles were non-resident foreign buyers having a bank account in New Zealand and an IRD number. They can get them onlinejust about. That is no hurdle at all. Then those members got to the serious end of the business—the serious end of the business. They accepted finally that they had to build more houses more quickly—housing supply. And they were not just any houses; they had to be affordable—let us give them that. They understood that they had to build affordable housing. So Nick Smith stumbled on the idea of a State-led house-building programme and he has not stopped stumbling since. He has not stopped stumbling since.Unfortunately a whole number of missteps and mishaps occurred to this “Minister of Outstanding Achievements”. It did not help that the plan was leaked. But leaks happen; we all know that. Then those members announced that there were 500 hectares. Remember? “Five hundred hectares—we’ve got land to burn. We’re going to build houses like you haven’t seen before.” Then they discovered that some of that land had power substations on it and that some had cemeteries. One area of land was earmarked for a motorway on-ramp. They cannot build on that one so that was ditched. Then Nick Smith said: “Right I’ve got the journalists. They’re interested. I’ve got ’em on my side. We’ll take ’em on the bus. We’ll ram a filled roll down their throats and say we’ve fed them and we’ll show them the land.” So he showed them 30 hectares—30 hectares of land. Then it turned out that it was not his land to trade away. The local iwi had rights over the land so that plan then turned to custard as well. Then he denied that the iwi had any rights at all. He told the Prime Minister “No Prime Minister they have no rights at all.” at the same time that he was going around sayingto the iwi “We’ll give you right of first refusal.”What sort of Minister is this? What sort of Minister is this? So they had to concede: “Listen it was all just a guesstimate. It is all just a concept plan. We are not really sure what we are doing. We do not know which way it is going to go.” But he does have one redeeming quality Nick Smith. He is a man of great foresight. Seeing his fate as a Minister he recently went bush with Maurice Williamson and started playing like a possum and like road kill. Here he is in this photo in his natural habitat. Road kill: that is our Minister of Building and Housing.Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Health): The first line in that speech was “It all started so well” and in the end that is the line that is going to sum up Andrew Little’s leadership because that was a pathetic speech. If you are a Labour supporter out there watching on TV you will be deeply disappointed. That man is the leader of the Labour Party and in no way was that a Labour Party leader’s speech and those guys over there know it.You know there is a lot going on today. There is some big stuff but what is Labour focusing on? The minutiae—the stuff that nobody cares about. OK housing is very important. No question about that. Do not forget that Andrew Little is opposed to a capital gains tax. So what does that mean for Labour’s caucus? Do you think David Parker and David Cunliffe are going to fall in behind him? Frankly on policy those guys opposite are now absolutely fractured.I am very disappointed that on a day that is incredibly important to the people of Otago and Southland when we have put in a commissioner to turn round a dire financial situation the Labour leader does not have the quickness of mind the quickness on his feet or the intellectual flexibility to deliver a speech that would make some real difference to people in that region. Well I can tell you: on health that is a battleground that Labour is no longer prepared to fight because it has lost on health.We have got a situation in the Southern District Health Board of worsening deficits over many years. The financial forecasting has gone out the window. I could not rely on those figures any longer. After a very considered period I took the step to announce today that we are installing a commissioner supported by two deputy commissioners into the Southern District Health Board. Why that is important is that the people of Otago and Southland deserve high-quality health services and actually until we can have confidence in the finances we can have no confidence that those services will be delivered in the long term. We are totally committed to rebuilding Dunedin Hospital but it is very important that we have the governance arrangements that can implement the strategic plan that is laid out. We need to know actually what the configuration of services will be before we can build the hospital. But that hospital absolutely will be built under National.In terms of Otago and Southland—the southern region—we have put in an extra $135 million over 7 years and many many more doctors and nurses. The definition of a deficit is not underfunding; it is all about sensibly using the money that you are given. So what I say to those members there is that actually $800 million - plus for Otago-Southland—for the Southern District Health Board—is a lot of money. We are now relying on the commissioner whom I have a great deal of faith in to reconfigure those services to deliver positively for the people of Otago and Southland.I am really disappointed when you look at what Labour is focusing on. Clare Curran the MP for Dunedin South—do you know what she has had on her Twitter feed since it became knowledge that we were going to announce a commissioner? Well there have been seven attacks on the Australian Government three tweets in favour of Edward Snowden and only one tweet retweeted from Annette King about the Southern District Health Board—and the Southern District Health Board is a big issue.I am glad that we have support across the House for installing a commissioner. I know it is very tempting for everyone to play politics with that. I know that that is going to prove irresistible for some but people like the MP for Dunedin North need to get behind the commissioner or get out of the way. Actually Opposition MPs can be a very constructive part of the solution down there and it is going to be very important that we support Kathy Grant Richard Thomson and Graham Crombie as the commissioning team.We are not being political about this. Richard Thomson a well-known Labour Party member and previously chair of the district health board down there—I do not care. He is the right guy to put in there for the job. We have got the best people there to turn round the health services and the finances for the people of the Southern District Health Board. This is a very considered decision we have made today but it had to be made. I think the future will be good given that the commissioner has a big task in front of her. Thank you.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): So soon this has become a smug arrogant Government prepared to covertly lean on the media because it cannot stand the heat. It is very clear that the Māori Party decided to ring up Māori Television because members did not want to front with a New Zealand First person on the panel. The reason is of course that we know what they are up to and we said from the word “go” that they were not going to be a success. Although they might have sucked the National members into it they are going to fall with them as well.There is also a story up in the North and what the story says is that there is gold in those wetlands of Northland. How did the Hon Judith Collins describe the place where swamp kauri comes from? “I don’t like wetlands—they’re swamps.” she exclaimed on TV3 last year. “I don’t like wetlands—they’re swamps.” No doubt there are a few on the backbenches of National wondering what this has got to do with Judith Collins. If you were talking about Oravida Kauri they would more likely answer: “We like wetlands—they’re goldmines.” The unlawful mining of swamp kauri is a practice that is robbing Northland and robbing New Zealand but robbing is a trait that this Government has perfected into an art form while the same officials who run “honesty box” biosecurity allow precious ancient timber to be exported whilst almost zero added value occurs for Northland and for New Zealand. Plus there is the environmental despoliation in so many cases.This is incompetence built upon a rort that must stop and New Zealand First calls upon the Government to stop turning a blind eye and start enforcing the law that we already have and that is capable of doing the job if the Minister but did his job. This is like the Wild West and it is no wonder. In 2012 the Northern Advocate which is the paper at Whangarei wrote that if swamp kauri averaged $71.66 a superfoot in old money ancient swamp kauri the size of Tane Mahuta would be worth $7 million—just the one.Ron Mark: How much?Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Seven million dollars. In 2012 the manager of Oravida—it keeps on coming back does it not? It will never go away. I mean you can be in the women’s magazine. You can be putting yourself out there in a rather trashy American way. It is the kind of distinguished thing that New Zealand First would never sink to: going in the magazines and holding your private life out there because she is on a mission to get back. But I am telling those colleagues over there that there is more. Anyway the manager of Oravida Kauri’s Ruakākā yard confirmed that by the end of 2012 it would have 2800 tonnes of swamp kauri harvested. In today’s dollars that is $71 million.This is serious money breeding serious illegality because in law swamp kauri must be turned into a finished item before it is exported.Alfred Ngaro: All the drama.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Now there is no use in Alfred Ngaro—who should understand these things who should understand the cultural significance of what I am talking about let alone the environmental matters—thinking it is a drama. It is a drama all right. It will be a real drama by the time we are finished. This is serious money breeding serious illegality because in law swamp kauri must be turned into a finished item before it is exported. The Forests Act 1949 defines “finished” as being a manufactured wood product in its final state that is ready to be installed or used for its intended purpose. We are talking furniture picture frames and yes even carvings. It is important to understand and the people of Northland know this that dressed or rough-sawn timber is not—I repeat not—a finished or manufactured product. So how can the Minister for Primary Industries the Minister of Conservation and the Minister for Māori Development class a raw log with shallow chiselled Māori carvings or titivated surface decorations as a finished product? The Minister for Primary Industries got up in the House today and he is out there talking to the media right now. The fact that a kaumātua blessed some of these logs is totally irrelevant. There is always a kaumātua for sale if the price is right. Members opposite would not know what a kaumātua was if they fell over one. The one log cleared by both the Ministry for Primary Industries and AsureQuality as being a finished carving got the export tick to go to Fuzhou Yima Trading Company in China. In short to conclude there is an almighty rort going on with private products right under the Government’s nose but because it has Chinese friends and a former Minister’s husband who are involved it will not raise a finger. Well we are going to raise the roof.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister of Immigration): One of the more challenging aspects of delivering better public services for New Zealand is that from time to time Governments need to make really tough decisions and today has been one of those days. I want to applaud Dr Coleman our Minister of Health for the difficult decision that he has made to appoint commissioners to the Southern District Health Board an organisation that I know very well having worked there albeit it quite some time ago. I want to start my intervention by applauding those many thousands of hard-working staff of the Southern District Health Board the regional hospitals and the contractors to the delivery of health services in the south because they do a fantastic job for our people but there is a problem. There is a problem of financial viability that as the Minister said is very longstanding. During the period from my last year at Dunedin Hospital in 1996 until my first year as a member of Parliament the combined deficits of the Otago District Health Board were around $144 million. That sounds quite challenging in and of itself but the budgeted deficits during that period were only half that. What has frustrated successive Ministers on both sides of the House is that successive returns to viability plans have been tabled and not adhered to. So what is really important now is that there be a circuit breaker and I think that is what the appointment of commissioners will do.I was very pleased albeit not surprised to note the Minister of Health’s commitment to the rebuilding of the clinical services block and the hospital in the foreseeable future. What is very important however is that those decisions on the configuration and the timing of the rebuild are matters for clinicians and health building designers not politicians. I counsel Dr Clark whose advocacy I admire—I have no problem with that—against the political rhetoric around the rebuilding of that hospital which as I know from experience is a very very complex process.I want to defend and applaud this Government’s response to the support for the Southern District Health Board. In the best of times when the so-called surpluses were many and plentiful Labour did nothing about Dunedin Hospital. It built a Chinese garden but it cannot rebuild a hospital. The previous Minister of Health and current spokesman on health in Labour has heavily criticised the fact that the windows in the operating theatre are leaking. Well I have got news for Mrs King. They have been doing that for years and she ignored it when Labour had an excellent opportunity. Then when finances were tight and this Government had straitened times the commitment to all of our district health boards and in particular the southern one was maintained. The results are emphatic: a 30 percent increase in elective surgery throughput and reductions in waiting times for cancer treatment and emergency department.The worst part of Dunedin Hospital was the neonatal intensive care unit which my youngest daughter spent some time in after she was born. I cannot believe the patience and good grace with which those workers spent years in terribly cramped and overcrowded conditions. It was this Government that rebuilt the neonatal intensive care unit the children’s ward and the acute mental health ward at Wakari Hospital. That is commitment. That is making sure that health services are maintained in straitened times and despite the financial challenges that the district health board faces.I want to wish the very best for the commissioners all three of whom I know very well. Kathy Grant Graham Crombie and Richard Thomson have a mountain of work to do and it is encouraging to me to know that the community is behind them and will wish them all the best as they go on that path to viability. Yes there are discussions about population-based funding formulas and regional rural adjustors and things like that but the simple fact is and we in the south should know this better than anybody—those canny Scottish settlers have given that ethos of cutting our cloth to meet the need. We fix those problems not by ignoring the financial constraints that are set for the community. We live within those constraints and we make sure that we extract every ounce of value from every dollar allocated to the Southern District Health Board. That is the responsible thing to do that is what the commissioners will do and that is what I wish them all the very best in achieving.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour): Andrew Little is right. This Government did start off with a bit of a hiss and a roar and then as happens with many third-term Governments arrogant out of touch and out of touch with the community are the themes that start creeping in. Is it not interesting that on the day that Nick Smith is out on walkabout—out in never-never land or somewhere out of the House gone—the Government sacks the Southern District Health Board? On the same day as the cheese slides right off Nick Smith’s cracker—right off it: the same day. He is gone troppo: gone bush. I will tell you this: if ever a Minister exhibited the themes of arrogance and being out of touch it is that member Nick Smith.What a litany what a political catastrophe that man’s career has been. God alone knows why the Prime Minister is so benevolent—in fact a number of Prime Ministers—as to put him back into Cabinet. Nick Smith is the man who in 1999 had his first defamation case and lost. He is the man who in 2003—and as I say again that was a time when the cheese did slip off the cracker; his headlights were on dim as he wandered through life—lasted as deputy leader of the National Party for a long 21 days. Then we hit 2005 the second defamation case—he lost again. Then in 2010 we find out $270000-odd of taxpayers’ money was spent on his legal defence. He then acquiesced to and settled those two defamation cases. He had to make a payout and an apology.Then we go forward of course to 2012: sacked from Cabinet for gross impropriety in respect of ACC and then he goes back into Cabinet as housing Minister. Then we have a whole series month after month week after week of the claim that there is no housing crisis. Then in the Budget there was a rush of blood to the head. The lights went from dim to high beam really quickly—maybe the fuse was blown—“We’ll come up with a surplus land housing policy.” Yet again that was a complete debacle—I will not waste the time by relitigating the excellent chronology that my leader went through to evidence that fact—with the result of course that the iwi are now taking the Government to court. What a litany!Then of course the ultimate irony on a very serious note was his response to the death of an infant Emma-Lita Bourne. I will read the quote because he denied it you will recall in the House yesterday. He said on TV3’s The Paul Henry Show that “people dying from pneumonia in winter was ‘not new’.” He also said: “People have got unwell during winter died from pneumonia and other illnesses for a very very long time.” That is what he said and that is what he denied in the House yesterday—he denied it in the House yesterday. That is an example not only of a Minister who is completely out of touch—possibly with reality definitely with the community—but of a Minister who is so arrogant so lacking in compassion that he would not even draw breath breathe through his nose nod to the family nod to the loved ones and express some sort of remorse some sort of compassion some sort of sympathy. The best the Government can do today after it has sacked the board—coincidentally when yet again Nick Smith’s feet are firmly in the fire—is to talk about that and not actually address the issue. I just ask in the high standards that the Prime Minister has for his Ministers—Hon David Parker: Theoretically.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: —theoretically—what does this guy have to do to get sacked and what does the country have to do to be put out of its misery of putting up with him? He has exhibited qualities of a person who should be nowhere near a Cabinet door—nowhere near a dunny door outside Cabinet let alone Cabinet itself.Chris Bishop: Closer than you mate.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: If a person Mr Bishop—and I suspect that member would not be as stupid or dispassionate as Dr Smith as he grins—cannot give a little bit of compassion and acknowledge as he is the responsible Minister that perhaps his department could have done better that perhaps his department was indeed as the coroner said partially if not greatly responsible as a contributing factor to that little girl’s death then there is something very very wrong. The Prime Minister and this Government should see Dr Smith for what he is: an example of where this Government is going right off the rails is completely arrogant and is out of touch with the community.Hon Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA (Minister for Pacific Peoples): It is an honour and a privilege to speak in this general debate this afternoon. It follows from a morning that I spent out in Porirua with thousands of other supporters of rugby and supporters of Jerry Collins and the Madill family to celebrate a rugby legend—to celebrate a young boy from Porirua who made good. We were there to celebrate certainly a gift from Porirua to our nation and that was Jerry Collins.We all know that Jerry Collins was brutal tough and uncompromising on the rugby field but we also know that off the rugby field he was humble he had a sense of fun he was loyal and he was a family man. He represented this country with great ability and achievement in 48 tests over his career.Tim Macindoe: And a proud Samoan.Hon Peseta SAM LOTU-IIGA: Yes he was a proud Samoan too Mr Macindoe. The Pacific community revered him upheld him and uplifted this man who did a lot particularly for young Pacific males to look up and dream and aspire to just like Jerry had done over those 34 years of his life.La’auli Michael Jones another legend talked about him as being unique and as being spontaneous. His sister Brenda spoke of Jerry who had big heart as we all know. He had a lot of support and our prayers and our thoughts continue to go out to Ayla the child of Alana and Jerry—both of whom sadly passed away 12 days ago—as she recovers in a hospital in France.We remember Jerry. We remember Alana. May I say to Jerry ia manuia lau malaga. Our thoughts prayers and sympathies go to his family and to her family.Today as Jerry Collins demonstrated with his ability and his leadership on the rugby paddock the Hon Jonathan Coleman demonstrated his leadership in the health portfolio by making the difficult decision to replace the board of the Southern District Health Board and appoint a commissioner Kathy Grant. She will take up that role in order to bring this institution back in line and bring it back from the financial distress it is currently under and to provide the quality health services that the people of Southland and the people of the southern districts demand.I was in Invercargill last week and though I was dealing with matters around the Department of Corrections disability care and ethnic communities the subject of the local district health board did come up. People were showing some concern about that and they have shown concern for a great period of time. Today’s decision I think brings some of those concerns and those apprehensions to an end and puts in place a process and a team. Alongside Kathy Grant will be Graham Crombie and Richard Thomson as deputies and a third deputy with a strong clinical background is expected to be announced later this month. That team will lead the Southern District Health Board back into the black back into surplus and back to delivering the quality services that we expect—not just those people in the south but all New Zealanders. So today is about taking over the improvement of that district health board.Health is very important to New Zealanders. Health is one of those fundamental portfolios alongside education law and order and jobs that New Zealanders demand and expect from their Government. They expect services and they expect leadership and that is why as an Associate Minister of Health I welcome the decision that the Hon Jonathan Coleman has made. It is an important decision to take a step forward with this district health board having taken several steps backwards over the years. So although it is disappointing that the district health board failed in its duties we are confident that the commissioners who are going to take over the operations and the governance of this district health board will do the job we expect them to do.DENISE ROCHE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I just want to start my speech in the general debate by acknowledging the passing of economist and former secretary of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Peter Conway. It was his funeral this morning and I have just come back from it. Peter was a kind loving and gentle man. He devoted his life to social justice. I think that he would have actually appreciated and approved of the bill that I launched today. It is designed to amend the Immigration Act to increase the refugee quota to 1000 refugees plus or minus 5 percent. This bill has been lodged and although I recognise that the refugee quota can be raised currently by regulation that requires the will of the Government and at this stage that will is missing. A member’s bill is the only means I have to attempt to compel the Government into taking action on refugee quotas.A former Prime Minister of this country with razor sharp wit David Lange once said that New Zealand was a country of insurmountable opportunity—basically a place where many of us have the opportunity to thrive. Interestingly David Lange was the Prime Minister the last time the refugee quota was raised and that was in 1987—28 years ago. Since then we have offered that opportunity to thrive to only 750 refugees per year despite the fact that in 28 years our population has increased by roughly 40 percent. Basically over that period we have nearly halved the number of refugees we take on a per capita basis. We take only 750 refugees from a total of over 50 million refugees worldwide and that is the largest number since the end of the Second World War. Yes it is a big problem. But yes we can do our fair share to support these people who have been displaced who have endured war who have endured civil disruption and who have actually faced death many times over. These are the people who are desperately seeking a safe haven a place to live—not just a refugee camp which is a place to survive but a place to live and a place simply to thrive.There are people who would give the world to settle here in New Zealand and many of them actually do give everything they have. By taking so few refugees we are failing in our obligations as humanitarian global citizens. We are 88th in the world in terms of refugees per capita. Even Australia takes roughly five times more per capita then we do. I do not think that we should think this is generous of Australia given its appalling treatment of asylum seekers in camps in Nauru and its appalling inhumane and illegal treatment of people arriving by boat seeking asylum and basically paying off the people smugglers. Before we think that Australia is generous by taking five times our refugee quota we should look to the Scandinavian countries which take 20 times more than we do and that is on a per capita basis.Increasing the quota will cost—of course it will. Based on the information that I have received from the Minister’s office it would be about $19.2 million over 3 years but this is a tiny fraction of the Government’s budget. When we think about how much we are spending on a referendum on a flag I think we have actually got our priorities wrong. More and more New Zealanders want us to raise the quota. Organisations like Amnesty International the Red Cross and the Refugee Council want us to double it. Actually even Newstalk ZB with its poll showed that the majority of New Zealanders who answered the poll want to see the quota raised. This Government is out of touch with ordinary New Zealanders who want to take a compassionate approach to ensuring that refugees can come to New Zealand. We can increase the quota. It is a life and death situation for most of them and we have it in our hands to make life better for them.JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki): If we needed an illustration of how important good public services are for the lives of New Zealanders then I think the events around the Southern District Health Board’s non-performance over the past few years absolutely illustrates and confirms this Government’s push and very strong focus on providing good public services. Today’s letter by the Minister of Health the Hon Jonathan Coleman to the Southern District Health Board replacing it with commissioners is the circuit-breaker that we have been looking for and that we have needed down south in the Southern District Health Board area.I commend the Minister for his approach to this worrying situation which has been developing over the previous months and years. It has been particularly worrying not only for the people of Dunedin and Invercargill but for the people of Central Otago and also North Otago. The reason for that is that the two rural hospitals Dunstan Hospital and Ōāmaru Hospital have contracts for services with the district health board. If you talk about the people of those areas Ōāmaru is an area in North Otago with a fairly static population an ageing population but we also have a number of new people coming into our communities as a result of employment opportunities. Central Otago on the other hand is an area of growth. It also has its fair share of older folk there with their particular needs but it is experiencing strong growth.I met many years ago now a young woman who lived at Lake Hāwea. She was pregnant and was concerned about her pregnancy because she was one of those to whom it was signalled that she would probably have to go to Dunedin for the birth of her child. The implications of that were very stark. If one were to look at the Stuff website one would see that there is a bad weather and snow warning for all of Central Otago and much of the south. What that would mean is that if you were having a planned birth at Dunedin Hospital from Hāwea you would almost have to set up the day before. We are very remote down south. We are very remote from the base hospitals of Dunedin and Invercargill which is why it is so very important to maintain the capability and the funding to both Dunstan and Ōāmaru hospitals. We are remote.Dr David Clark: Her hospital’s underfunding. That’s why they are facing cuts.JACQUI DEAN: It is really disappointing when the Opposition members choose to treat such a serious issue as an opportunity for political gain. Quite apart from the fact that they are just wrong the issues are very important to all of Dunedin and I do hope that that member chooses to take them a little more seriously in the future.The rural health services review that was undertaken by the district health board over the past couple of years promised to be an opportunity to provide better services for those hospitals of Dunstan and Ōāmaru but also Balclutha of course and Ranfurly. The board promised to take a more modern view and more modern look at how we provide health services for that woman living in Lake Hāwea or for the person who is experiencing a cardiac event in Wānaka or Ōāmaru and needs specialist health services. It is entirely feasible these days for health services to be provided out at the rural hospitals. If I can just reference the mobile health services—the surgical bus that travels around New Zealand delivering day surgeries to patients at those hospitals providing a huge benefit in terms of convenience and cost and with greater health outcomes because those patients do not have to travel. That is the future. That is the future of rural health services.I wish the commissioners—Kathy Grant Graham Crombie and Richard Thomson—the very best in their endeavours because I would like to see this as an opportunity to have another look not just at reducing the deficit and not just at a better delivery of health services to all people within the district health board area but as an opportunity to look at how we deliver health services better in the future.JENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Talofa lava Mr Assistant Speaker. First of all I would like to honour and acknowledge Jerry Collins who had his funeral in Porirua earlier on this morning. I and a number of Labour MPs were there to celebrate his life. Manuia Iou Malaga Jerry.This Government has failed to deliver on the brighter future that it promised us. Seven years ago it promised us that it would deliver a Budget surplus; we have still not seen that. It has lost its way and it is stumbling from one disaster to another. It is now dealing with incompetence—for instance how it is dealing with the Tāmaki Collective and Ngāti Whātua over Crown land in Auckland and how it is dealing with Relationships Aotearoa. And one of my very own constituents 2-year-old Emma-Lita Bourne—may she rest in peace—died last year due in part to the incompetence of this Government. There are many examples of where this Government has lost its way and of where it fails to prioritise what is actually important—that is New Zealand children and their families.This Government has spent $11 million on sheep for a businessman in Saudi Arabia. It has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment signs on a Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment rock and we heard today on a Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment desk. The Government has wasted $26 million on the flag referendum which a lot of people tell us they do not really want. This Government has not even passed health and safety legislation following the deaths of 29 New Zealanders at Pike River. Then there is the housing crisis which brings me to where I would like to focus today which is on the tragic death of 2-year-old Emma-Lita Bourne.In his report the coroner found that Emma-Lita Bourne’s death in Ōtara was partly a result of the cold damp mouldy State house that she lived in. This is a damning indictment on this Government. The State house did not even have any carpets. It was not insulated. And the State departments that the family dealt with were told many many times of the ill health that this toddler was suffering from as well as that of one of her siblings who was suffering from rheumatic fever. Mr English stated that Housing New Zealand insulates all of its properties where practicable. I think that the Government needs to explain to the Bourne family the reasons why it was not practicable to insulate the State house that the Bourne family lived in and why it was not practicable to move the family. They asked many times to be moved from this State house to another house that would have been fit for them to live in. Why was it not practicable to move them until after the tragic death of this child?I went door-knocking during the adjournmentlast week including along the particular street in Ōtara where Emma-Lita Bourne lived. I tell you it breaks my heart to see some of these State houses and the conditions that some of these families are living instill. Some of their houses are not insulated. It is actually colder inside the houses than outside the houses. I spoke with some of the neighbours who lived next to Emma-Lita Bourne who actually recalled seeing this toddler and how she used to play on the streets and at the public park right next door to her house. Only a few days after Emma-Lita Bourne’s death we were also informed of another father of six who lived in Papakura and his death was also according to the coroner’s report because of the incompetence of this Government and the condition of the State house that he lived in.I would like actually to point to the quote from the Hon Nick Smith when he was interviewed on TV3 on Paul Henry’s programme. Nick Smith is quoted after the death of Emma-Lita Bourne as saying: “People dying from pneumonia in winter is not new. People have got unwell during winter died from pneumonia and other illnesses for a very very long time”. This is a very very insensitive quote right after a death. The tragic death of Ōtara’s Emma-Lita Bourne as well as that of the father of six Mr Tovo is indeed the fault of this Government and the Government has a moral obligation to do everythingthat it can to stop its houses from contributing to the deaths of its tenants. Thank you.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Just before I call the member I am going to ask the Hon Paula Bennett to speak just a little bit more quietly when other members are speaking especially about serious topics. Thank you.JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): The Salvation Army’s report into the state of the nation in 2008 expressed incredible disappointment that the investment that was being made in social services and care for people was not producing the result that it hoped. There are challenges that New Zealanders face and that Governments face all the time so laying everything at the feet of the Government is an easy blame game to play. I would just suggest that the previous speaker Jenny Salesa go back and read that report from the Salvation Army regarding her Government at that time and consider the words that were said.What we need to understand is that during the most difficult of times that this nation faced financially the health budget in this country continued to be increased year after year. If you go back to 2012 and if you look at what was happening in for example Ireland it cut out $200 million of its health budget at a time when we increased ours by 3.4 percent. Ireland ended up with an $800 million deficit and many health professionals lost their jobs. It was a time when we as we have done year after year after year increased health spending increased accessibility for elective surgery increased the number of doctors and nurses and midwives and we have made it possible for hard-to-staff places like rural Taranaki to have access to health professionals through our bonding scheme. At a time when things were very tough around the world out of all of the 27 countries that the OECD measured we were third-highest for health funding. So the rhetoric we hear today does not have any data or facts behind it. It is political bias and it is misinformation.What we understand is that New Zealanders need to have confidence in whoever governs their country. We have been returned for a third term and that is not a statement of arrogance as other people would say. It is just the fact that New Zealanders have had confidence in this Government and principally it is because of the gains that we have seen achieved over a number of years in the face of great challenge and great difficulty. We have seen more children involved in early childhood education. We have seen more people receive surgery. We have seen more doctors and nurses be trained and be involved in the health profession. We have seen many many achievements and that is why today the Minister of Health has decided to put commissioners into the Southern District Health Board because the gains that we expect for the benefit of New Zealanders and the taxpayer are not being seen in that district health board.Health budgets are under pressure all around the world and in this country. We in Taranaki have had the tremendous advantage of having a new hospital built. From all the accounts that I hear from people who have gone into that hospital for surgery and appointments the facility and design itself have facilitated a far higher ability to offer health care and get more people to that place and receive the benefit of that hospital. All of that is absolutely necessary and if we want to see New Zealanders cared for in such a way that we desire then in order to have those efficiencies and those modern buildings we have got to have strong financial management of this economy. By and large I think that is what New Zealanders have seen in this Government. They are seeing the benefits of prudence. They are seeing the benefits of discipline. They are seeing the benefits when the Prime Minister made a whole list of Better Public Services targets and the work that we have done to achieve them. Thank you.EUGENIE SAGE (Green): You cannot have a healthy population unless you have a healthy environment and the National Government’s hands-behind-its-back approach to the logging and mining of swamp kauri in Northland is all about promoting an unhealthy environment of extracting the maximum commercial advantage from nature without any care about the consequences. It is really State-sponsored negligence by both the Government and the Ministry for Primary Industries in allowing quite blatant breaches of the Forests Act and the illegal export of these ancient kauri logs which can be tens of thousands of years old. The Forests Act 1949 was amended in 1993 after a long campaign by the public to protect indigenous forests. It was amended to ensure quite strict controls on the export of indigenous timber and timber products and there are prohibitions in the Forests Act on the export of indigenous timber unless it is in a manufactured or finished form. Those controls were put in place to recognise that our indigenous forests whether they are standing trees or whether they are buried in wetlands in Northland are finite that they are vulnerable to overexploitation if the timber can be exported and a larger market created and that they should be carefully managed because of their value to Aotearoa New Zealand.Some of these trees would have fallen at the end of the last Ice Age. They have remained buried in wetlands. Some of them are fairly intact because they are not exposed to the air. They have got a value as taonga as Dover Samuels and others have called them and yet under this Government the Ministry for Primary Industries is turning a blind eye to the export of whole ancient kauri logs. That is because ancient swamp kauri has a reputation as being one of the oldest timbers able to be worked in the world and it has got a huge value in places like China where it can sell for anything between $2000 and $10000 a cubic metre. So what we have seen is a gold rush mentality over the last decade because of these very high prices for the timber and that has led to industrial-scale mining of the buried kauri forest in areas around Dargaville Kaitāia and throughout the north.It is only in Northland that we get these buried kauri forests. They are finite yet the Government is just closing its eyes to the plundering of wetlands and the plundering of these forests. Judith Collins says she does not care about wetlands. That is because her husband’s company Oravida is too interested in taking the swamp kauri from these wetlands. But wetlands have been hugely reduced in New Zealand. We are down to less than 10 percent of their former extent. We should be protecting our wetlands under the Resource Management Act; not having local councils also being irresponsible and allowing them to be dug up with huge bulldozers and earth-moving equipment.It has been the work of citizens in Northland and groups like the Northland Environmental Protection Society and the far north branch of Forest and Bird which has exposed the scandal that is going on here. They have sought numerous requests under the Official Information Act and the work that the Northland Environmental Protection Society has done shows that of the 53 notices of intention to export that were filed with the Ministry for Primary Industries in 2013 81 percent of those notices were missing quite substantial information about the milling statements and the source of the timber. In the Forests Act there is an absolute prohibition on native timber being sourced from indigenous forest land or dug up from wetlands and then being exported. So it is really important that the Ministry for Primary Industries knows the source of the swamp kauri and yet when this information is missing from the notice of export statements how can it know that?The Minister was saying earlier in the House that there is close monitoring yet I understand that the Ministry for Primary Industries often requires only a photograph of the area to be logged or a map. It is not actually sending its staff out on-site to determine where the kauri is coming from. And then we have this prohibition on the export of logs and the export of anything over than finished or manufactured products. Yet what are we finding? On websites like Alibaba there are a number of advertisements for logs. What we are seeing is big planks of swamp kauri that are rough-sawn timber that have had a brief bit of stain applied to them. Those are being exported as table tops. The Ministry for Primary Industries needs to actually enforce the Act and prohibit these log exports.TODD BARCLAY (National—Clutha-Southland): Thank you for the ability to make a contribution to this general debate. I just want to make one remark before I start and that is for the Opposition members who wanted to have a snap debate on an issue as important as the Minister of Health’s decision to put a commissioner into the Southern District Health Board. The Opposition has not really made much of a mention of that issue over the last hour or so so I thought I would start off my contribution by just clarifying a few points that were raised. Firstly with regard to the Southern District Health Board I think I would like to congratulate the Minister on taking this decision. I know it is about the third time in the past 3 decades a decision like this has been taken. It is not taken on a light basis. I think that it has been from what I have heard from my constituents welcomed by the community particularly the rural health centres—Dr David Clark: How about the cuts in the member’s electorate? Are they welcomed?TODD BARCLAY: Actually while we are talking about cuts the total funding to the Southern District Health Board is at a level of about $852 million. There has been an increase of $134 million over the last 7 years including $15 million last year. There are 66 more doctors 195 more nurses and 2557 more elective surgeries—a 30 percent increase since 2008. So while we are talking about the data it is looking pretty good from this side.But I would just like to reinforce the point that health is a sensitive topic and it is something on top of the mind for everybody. I think that our community certainly would like to reinforce the support behind the Government and the Minister of Health in particular for taking this step. I would like to offer my personal optimism for Southland and Otago and the confidence that I have on behalf of my electorate for Kathy Grant and her team and I look forward to working with her in the near future. It is a project that she has willingly taken on board that will not be a short-term fix but she is more than qualified from all that I have heard of her expertise and background to lead this through.Seguing into the purpose of my speech: the Better Public Services which are a key feature of this Government’s policies across the Public Service are around actually putting people at the centre of policies and at the centre of the outcomes of public departments. That is actually a key feature of what the Minister of Health has done in this decision that he has announced today unlike the Labour Party which was more focused on making sure that Government departments kept getting more money each year with no real delivery in outcome. An example I will use is education. Over the 9 years when Labour was in Government it almost doubled spending on education with no real gain in achievement. We have increased spending in education by about 45 percent. The achievement rates right from early childhood education participation to national standards participation to high school National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) levels 1 2 and 3 are going up and up each year. It is through the remarkable contributions of Cabinet and particularly Ministers working across the social sector portfolios—Chris Bishop: Hekia Parata.TODD BARCLAY: The Hon Hekia Parata the Hon Anne Tolley the Hon Nikki Kaye—these are real people who are looking across the Public Service and making a strong contribution for real New Zealanders.Just talking about the national standards data for NCEA level 2 in the latest data we have seen we have had an increase from 85.7 percent to 86.8 percent over the last year. Since 2010 we have seen NCEA level 2 participation rise by 7 percent.Dr David Clark: What about the TV screens? Where was Mr Bishop? Come on fess up. Play a continuous loop of him. He dropped the Minister in it.TODD BARCLAY: It is interesting that Mr Clark over there is still talking about Mr Bishop and not talking about the real issue at hand which is actually the Southern District Health Board and his constituents. I think if you would ask your constituents Mr Clark about the Government’s need to put in a commissioner they would be very supportive of it because they did not see those gains under Labour. They saw the former Labour Government muddling around with health and no real gains.This Government has increased elective surgeries and increased the number of doctors and the number of nurses—real tangible gains across the board. So our rural hospitals are in good heart. They are led by capable boards. They are led by capable chief executives passionate medical staff and passionate volunteers as well across the board from our midwifery care right through to GPs and to other aspects of rural hospitals. That is why they are united in support of the steps this Government is taking to try to get some real results for the people of Southland and Otago. Again I would just like to reiterate my congratulations to the Minister on behalf of the people of Clutha-Southland. Thank you.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.Imprest Supply (First for 2015/16) BillFirst ReadingHon PAULA BENNETT (Associate Minister of Finance) on behalf of theMinister of Finance: I move That the Imprest Supply (First for 2015/16) Bill be now read a first time.A party vote was called for on the question That the Imprest Supply (First for 2015/16) Bill be now read a first time.Ayes 63New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 58New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.Bill read a first time.Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) BillImprest Supply (First for 2015/16) BillSecond ReadingsHon PAULA BENNETT (Associate Minister of Finance) on behalf of theMinister of Finance: I move That the Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2015/16) Bill be now read a second time. The Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) Bill relates to the financial year about to end on 30 June 2015 and seeks parliamentary authority for variations to appropriations authorised by the Appropriation (2014/15 Estimates) Act 2014 and for new appropriations that were not in that Act. The Imprest Supply (First for 2015/16) Bill relates to the new financial year starting on 1 July 2015 and seeks parliamentary authority or supply for Government expenditure during the first 2 months of that financial year in advance of the passing of the Appropriation (2015/16 Estimates) Bill which was introduced of course on Budget day. On behalf of the Minister of FinanceI thank the Finance and Expenditure Committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee for their prompt consideration of these supplementary estimates.Budget 2015 was delivered against a backdrop of sustained economic growth rising wages more jobs low inflation and low interest rates. It focused on sticking to a plan that is working: careful management of public spending going hand in hand with investment in public services and support for the country’s most vulnerable. Budget forecasts show an annual GDP growth of 2.8 percent on average over the next 4 years keeping New Zealand among the faster-growing developed economies. That growth is of course working for New Zealanders. By mid-2019 a further 150000 people are forecast to be in work and the average wage is expected to rise by $7000 to $63000 a year. Unemployment is expected to drop below 5 percent in the next 2 years and then fall further. Inflation and interest rates are expected to be significantly lower than previously forecast. This is good news of course for consumers because their income will go a bit further. But as I have outlined previously lower than expected inflation is impacting the Government’s revenue.The Budget forecasts a deficit of $684 million for 2014-15 which is $2.2 billion less than last year’s deficit. But my are not things already changing? A surplus of $176 million is expected in 2015-16 with increasing surpluses in following years. Of course you may have noticed that these are forecasts with some degree of uncertainty around them and we saw this with the $448 million surplus in the 10 months to 30 April—around a billion dollars better than forecast in the Budget.Grant Robertson: Don’t get too excited.Hon PAULA BENNETT: Let me assure the member that I am not excited yet. The surplus target has been successful in applying greater discipline to Government spending which has turned the Government’s books round and the fiscal outlook remains very positive.What really matters is the overall trajectory of improvement. We have come a long way from a deficit of $18.2 billion just 4 years ago following the global financial crisis and the Canterbury earthquakes. We are focused on ensuring that that trajectory continues by delivering better public services which will reduce vulnerable New Zealanders’ long-term dependence on Government interventions. We have got 10 Better Public Services results and we are seeing improvements. There has been a 38 percent reduction in youth crime since 2011. The number of teenage sole parents on a benefit has dropped by 40 percent since 2011 and immunisation rates for Māori are now almost as high as for the rest of the population. Budget 2015 builds on that with a $790 million package to reduce hardship among children in New Zealand’s poorest families and that is the next step in the Government’s commitment to addressing the long-term drivers of deprivation.This package includes several important initiatives such as increased work obligations for sole parents on a benefit more childcare support for low-income families a $25-a-week increase in benefit rates for families with children and an increase in Working for Families payments to low-income families not on a benefit. That entire package really is targeting around 160000 families—with 300000 children—earning less than $36350 a year. As in previous Budgets we have been able to spend a bit more on this because we are focused on reprioritising spending to programmes that deliver results. We have continued to increase spending on health and education but with a growing focus on the effectiveness of programmes for those in need.I will not go through all the Budget initiatives here today but I will highlight on behalf of the Minister a couple of other key programmes. Budget 2015 includes a $1.7 billion health package taking the total annual health spend to $15.9 billion. This includes $1.3 billion for district health boards for extra services cost pressures and population growth. The Budget also provides an additional $680 million for compulsory education taking the annual early childhood education and schools’ budget to $10.8 billion. Outside the child hardship package the Budget also provides over $100 million for further initiatives to support vulnerable children. This is a responsible Budget delivered by a responsible Government. New Zealand is well placed but there is more to do. We will focus relentlessly on a strong economy and jobs continue investing to support families in need manage spending and revenueresponsibly and increase resilience to global risks. We will build on a plan that is already working.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Grant Robertson.GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): That is right.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): I nearly gave you an “Hon”.GRANT ROBERTSON: That is right Mr Assistant Speaker. I have not changed that much.It was interesting that the Minister acting on behalf of Bill English could not quite get through her statement about the Government’s surplus/deficit without a little snigger. The truth is the new language fed to Government Ministers by Lynton Crosby is to talk about trajectory. That is the answer. It is not about whether you are actually going to get to a surplus or not. It is a little bit like Nick Smith’s conceptual house. It is all about the trajectory that we are going on despite the fact that as the Government staggers towards the end of the financial year covered by the supplementary estimates it staggers towards a failure for the seventh time to reach a surplus.It is not about trajectory; it is actually about the integrity of this Government. Before the last two elections this Government told New Zealanders that there would be a surplus in 2014-15. It may have been a legitimate debate for the Government to have gone to New Zealanders before the 2014 election and say: “Do you know what? There is a range of serious social issues facing this country that mean we can’t make surplus.” The Government could have gone there. The Government could have gone there and said: “We failed over the last few years to actually deal with child poverty. We failed to invest enough in health to ensure that budgets are kept up and that people can get the basic health services they want.” The Government could have come to New Zealanders and been honest and been up front and said that. But it did not. The Government went to New Zealanders with its No. 1 economic priority being to be in surplus for 2014-15. That date was there; that promise was there. It had been there for two elections. That promise has been breached.Members on the other side of the House might think it is not important. They might think they can just change the language and talk about trajectories and conceptual ideas but the reality on the ground is that they broke a promise to New Zealanders. They have failed to reach that surplus.As they do stagger towards the end of this financial year the year in which they promised New Zealanders there would be a surplus they sit alongside an economic record that the Reserve Bank Governor has now been clear is one that is struggling and staggering along. There are members on the other side of the House who like to say perhaps when my back is turned Jami-Lee Ross that I talk the economy down. The reality is that this is not me Mr Ross. This is not me. This is the Reserve Bank Governor coming along to New Zealanders and saying that there is no sign that exports are going to recover. The Government having outsourced housing policy to the Reserve Bank now outsources economic policy and says: “Well you had better sort this out as well because we haven’t got any ideas as a National Government.” So Graeme Wheeler has to be able to say: “Well I will cut interest rates now. I’m worried about whether that is going to pour petrol on the overheated housing market in Auckland but there is no sign of this Government stimulating the economy.” He has to act.So this Government has failed to deliver to New Zealanders the kinds of benefits that would be expected from an economic growth rate of around 3 percent. In 2006—which you might recall Mr Assistant Speaker Mallard—the Government at that time had a growth rate of around about 3.5 percent and that delivered a multibillion-dollar surplus and had unemployment as the second-lowest in the OECD. Fast forward to 2015: a similar growth rate but a deficit; 41000 more people out of work than when National came into office; a failure to lift exports; and a failure to invest in core areas like education and health to the extent that is needed.This kind of economic growth that the Government currently has is not delivering to New Zealanders across the board. One of the reasons for that is that economic growth is built on something very soft and very shaky and that is the recovery from the Canterbury rebuild. That recovery is important for the people of Canterbury but it is not an economic plan—it is not an economic plan. If we remove that from the growth figures and then we take into account the high levels of migration real growth per head of population is under 2 percent now. That is why right around New Zealand people are not feeling the benefits of this growth.In the Northland by-election and Mr Bishop is very familiar with this the message that was given to the National Party was: “Don’t come up here and tell us we’ve never had it so good.Don’t come up here and say: ‘There’s 3 percent growth. Isn’t it great?’.”Hon Ruth Dyson: Wasn’t it just: “Don’t come up here.” to Chris Bishop?GRANT ROBERTSON: That is right. For Chris Bishop it was just “Don’t come up here.” but it was a message to the National Party from the regions of New Zealand. It does not matter whether you are in Dunedin or whether you are in Gisborne or whether you are in Whanganui what you will hear from New Zealanders in the regions is that they are working hard but they feel like this Government has neglected them. You take a look at the Budget the imprest supply bill and the supplementary estimates and you ask yourself: “Where in the investment in New Zealand’s regions? Where is the investment in diversifying the economy away from our reliance on commodity prices?”.Hon Christopher Finlayson: What about the wharf at Waitangi?GRANT ROBERTSON: That is right. I will give Mr Finlayson credit for this: the wharf at Waitangi. There is the plan to turbocharge the New Zealand economy from Chris Finlayson. I understand Mr Finlayson has had a large print of himself put on the wharf design so it will be there and people will see his beaming face on arrival at the Waitangi wharf in the Chatham Islands. Good on Chris Finlayson for helping the very hard-working MP Annette King achieve that long-held dream of the wharf at Waitangi.Hon Christopher Finlayson: She did nothing.GRANT ROBERTSON: I will tell her you said that—I will tell her you said that. But that is it. That is it in terms of regional economic development from this Government and in this Budget. I will wait for one of the members on the other side of the House to get up and say: “No the regional research institutes are here.” Well this deserves a little bit of unpicking does it not? The regional research institutes—up to $25 million. That “up to” phrase got left out when Steven Joyce made those announcements during the Budget period. And also there are only three of them. So only three regions in New Zealand are going to benefit and I will bet you they already know which regions those are. There are going to be a lot of disappointed regions in New Zealand because that “up to $25 million” is not going to stretch very far.That is the problem because today we saw for the seventh consecutive global dairy auction a drop in the global dairy prices. That is a 55 percent drop since February last year and a 30 percent drop since March this year. To turn that into real numbers that is billions of dollars not present in regional New Zealand. It is tough work for the farmers concerned and some of them have got very high debt levels and will have struggles over the next 2 years but it is also tough work for that wider rural community. Take a small place like Ōpōtiki in the Eastern Bay of Plenty—$30 million will not be in that community next year. In a small community like Ōpōtiki $30 million makes a huge difference.. That is jobs in the service sector. That is jobs in a community that struggles without that.That is what is missing from this Government—a long-term plan to say: “We can grow the regions of New Zealand to deliver jobs.” We know there is huge pressure on Auckland housing and Nick Smith makes the problemonly worse. He puts the pressure on. But if we want and we expect people to go and live in the regions of New Zealand there must be job opportunities there for them and that will happen only when the Government partners up with regional communities. There is no sign of that from this Government. Instead it is distracted by its own pet priorities. Nothing is a bigger symbol and emblem of that—and it is in the estimates here—than the flag. The flag referendum—the $26 million flag referendum—says everything you want to know about the priorities of this Government. A $28 million social bonds pilot for a project that nobody knows whether it going to work—that is just a gross ideological experiment. That is another $28 million. This Government has its priorities wrong.If this Government were to introduce a Budget to this House that was about investing in the future supporting opportunities for future generations of New Zealanders and giving them the chance to actually own their own home then we would be in there supporting it but that is not the Budget that has come to us. These supplementary estimates are the last gasp of the 2014-15 financial year which was a failure of a financial year for this Government—a failure to reach surplus a failure to grow jobs and a failure to invest in the regions which now have another year of neglect from this Government. This bill will be opposed by the Labour Party because it is a continuation of this Government’s failure to deliver to New Zealanders a sound economic plan.DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): There is only one failure in this House and that is Grant Robertson. If the person who is the economic spokesperson for the Labour Party cannot go 8 minutes without having to delve into the flag debate in one of the biggest economic speeches of the year that shows his competence around economic management. That guy has no idea of what is going on in economics. He is always going to be behind the eight ball on this.But look at this. I have got news for the people of New Zealand. I have got news for the people of New Zealand that comes from the last election. I went on to the website for the Labour Party. I know nobody does this and I know I should not do it but if you go on to its election website and you have a look at it it has on there a statement: “Everything is paid for plus we’re in surplus.” Under the Labour Party everything in its alternative Budget is paid for and it is surplus. So under Labour there would be a surplus now. I want to know from the Labour Party what it would cut. Would it cut that $25 to those beneficiary families who had not had anything for 43 years? Is that what the Labour Party meant when it said everything will be costed and in surplus? That was the promise of the Labour Party at the last election—that there would be a surplus. There would be a surplus no matter what. No matter what there would be a surplus. [Interruption] And we are talking about the appropriation bill Mr Assistant Speaker as the last member did. Under that policy there would be a surplus.The other line that is really important to look at is: “Labour will balance the budget and run surpluses every year.” That is a direct quote from the Labour Party. I want to know from the Labour Party what it would cut. Under the Budget and under the appropriation legislation what would the Labour Party be cutting for hard-working New Zealanders? What would it be cutting for beneficiaries? What would it be cutting for the people who are going to benefit from this legislation today? I look forward to hearing that from Labour because it was telling us it would have been in surplus this year. Every year it would be running a surplus. Every year there would be a surplus. There would be no extra social spending under Labour.The Labour Party goes out there and tells people that it is there for the people in most need. Well the people in most need would have got nothing under the Labour Party Budget in the last month because it would have had to be getting a surplus of a large amount. Under the National Government we actually went out there and delivered for those people in need. We delivered for them.Dr David Clark: Where’s the surplus?DAVID BENNETT: Where is the surplus? It is coming. That surplus will not be far away.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to draw the member’s attention to the bill—I think he knows which bill it is because he chaired the select committee that dealt with it—and ask him to at least occasionally make passing reference to the supplementary estimates or the imprest supply legislation.DAVID BENNETT: Yes and for that legislation it is very important that we look at some of the funding that was talked about in it. The previous speaker spoke about that in regard to regions and wanted to know what was happening in the regional areas. Well I say come to Hamilton. Come to Hamilton as a test of what that regional funding is. Come to Hamilton and see a $2 billion expressway being built. Come to Hamilton and see a $500 million redevelopment of a hospital. Come to Hamilton and see $100 million spent on new schools in my electorate. Come to Hamilton and see that we are the first city to have broadband done across the city. Come to Hamilton and you will see the investment in regional New Zealand that this bill is part of and see that this Government is delivering financial support for the regions. We have delivered for our region. We have delivered the strongest economic base for that city to grow and prosper unlike the Labour Party whose members come into our city only at election time and when they do they leave before 2 o’clock because they know that they have got nothing to say. The people of our city understand that our Government through bills like this has delivered the infrastructure that is needed for our city to grow.When we hear from the Labour Party members one of the other things they talk about is moving away from primary industries. Well I would like to see anybody in the Labour Party who has actually milked a cow who actually knows how to get their hands dirty and who actually knows how to do anything—especially Grant Robertson the member from Wellington Central. It would be lovely to see whether he has actually done any farm work and all that. It is pretty rich for Labour members to come in here and tell us and the rest of New Zealand that we should be divesting away from the industry that we are the most competitive in around the world. Our most competitive advantage is in the dairy industry and those members bag it day after day in this House. They bag it day after day. That is not good for New Zealand and it is not good for our people going forward.When we look at economic growth it is interesting to have the New Zealand First Party there because the last speaker spoke about economic growth and said that if you took away Christchurch and you took away immigration economic growth would be very small. Well there are factors in creating economic growth. And I look over there at the New Zealand First Party. Those members want to take away immigration. They want to close New Zealand down and go back to the 1950s. They do not want new people coming to this country and I say to the members on that side—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! This is now the second strike for the member. The member will now address one of the two bills that are being debated for the rest of his speech.DAVID BENNETT: When we look at the Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) Bill—there were a number of comments made by the other side and I am just trying to deal with those comments—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): New Zealand First has not spoken Mr Bennett so you cannot try—DAVID BENNETT: No but there were comments made by the other parties. The Budget was delivered against that background of sustained economic growth and that economic growth is based on a number of factors. Many people have said that immigration is one of those factors. Well it is and it is a good thing. We need immigration. We need new people coming to New Zealand and we need that for the growth of this country going forward.When we look at it unemployment is supposed to drop considerably in New Zealand over the next few years. That is a direct result of the plan that is in this bill. When we look at it New Zealanders having good economic growth rates going forward is a result of the economic plans that have been put forward. When we look at it New Zealanders are going to go into Budget surplus either this year or next year. It is a very short-term difference between now and when it will be happening but it will happen and that is in the best interests of New Zealanders going forward.With those surpluses going forward we have choices as a country and as a community. Those choices are important because that is where you deliver the social services that bills like this deliver and that the Budget delivered for New Zealanders. That is an important part of what we do in this House. We cannot put that at risk. We cannot put that plan and that direction for New Zealand at risk by making petty promises and by trying to stop people coming into this country who will actually benefit and build this country to be even stronger. It is very disappointing when other parties do that.When we look at it this bill and the Budget itself included a lot of things out there for hard-working New Zealand families. They included things for people in the beneficiary space. It was a Budget for New Zealanders. It was a Budget for ordinary New Zealanders and it was a Budget that we should be proud of.Dr David Clark: The whips say: “Sit down”.DAVID BENNETT: No the whips do not say: “Sit down”. The whips say: “Go after the Labour Party.” but I will not do that. I would be unfair on the Assistant Speaker if I did that to him because he is a very fair Assistant Speaker sometimes I would imagine.In the end this is a bill that is important for New Zealanders because it relates to the Budget it relates to the finance policy advice Vote Finance and our supplementary estimates. It is important going forward for New Zealanders that we have legislation like this because if we pass this New Zealanders can all benefit. We can all benefit and we do not have promises that are made that are untrue unfair and will not deliver for New Zealanders. That is what the Opposition was pretending in its promises.When we look at this Budget—and we look at a Budget that has gone through this House in a very good way—then we look at the way that the public has responded to that Budget. They understand the financial implications of the Budget. They understand that at a time when it is most difficult we have given to most New Zealanders and have given them an opportunity going forward. When you look at that $790 million package at the heart of the Budget that is for the poorest households it is the thing that New Zealanders understand and believe in. They have bought into it and find it very helpful.Fletcher Tabuteau: They’re confused to be fair.DAVID BENNETT: New Zealand First members may say things over there in that corner but the thing is that New Zealanders do get it. They do get it. They understand that this is the sort of thing that they want to see happen. They are not going to have a Labour Party coming in here and saying that surpluses have not been achieved when the Labour Party promised surpluses and under its own planning it would never have been able to deliver them because you cannot have a surplus and at the same time deliver that expenditure—unless of course we get that good revenue in the next few months that could actually enable New Zealand and this Government to go into surplus even though we have had to deal with it in the Budget. This is a good piece of legislation for New Zealanders going forward and we look forward to it passing through the House.Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): Well there was one thing that member David Bennett got right in his speech.Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Oh really?Dr DAVID CLARK: I spotted it. He said that this bill relates to the Budget. For anyone at home looking for a factoid in that speech he suggested that this bill relates to the Budget. I cannot fault him on that. It may not be exactly about the Budget but it does relate to the Budget. The member is quite right technically. I look across the House to catch his eye but I cannot catch it any more. He must be hiding under his desk and I might have been doing the same thing in his position.In the imprest supply bill we do have some money set aside for capital injections which is a standard thing that Governments do and so I wish to talk about some of those. I also wish to talk about the mental health spending that is related in the supplementary estimates and also about the alterations in revenue relating to KiwiSaver all of which are related to the Government’s attempt to get into surplus. As my colleague Grant Robertson—not yet “the Hon Grant Robertson”—noted in his contribution this desperate attempt to get to surplus and the failure again—for the seventh time in a row—for this Government to get to surplus was in fact the central plank of its election campaign.Hon Clayton Cosgrove: No. 1 promise.Dr DAVID CLARK: It was its No. 1 promise as my colleague the Hon Clayton Cosgrove points out in the last election campaign. Therefore this issue cuts to the heart of National’s credibility as a Government. It failed to get there despite—despite—making a number of changes. In fact if we look closely at the changes to KiwiSaver the amount saved in the first year is roughly what brings the Government’s projections into line to finally—finally—achieve surplus in the next round. We will see whether that really happens because it does not have a plan for the economy. That is what is clear in these supplementary estimates. It is jiggering things around. It is trying to make things fit together with a tactical plan without any kind of strategy over the top of it other than to get re-elected. That is what we have seen in this Budget of broken promises that it brought to the electorate.We have seen of course the promises broken around the number of jobs created. National has pushed that promise out by 3 years in the Budget. We have seen the wage rises get pushed out by 3 years in the Budget. There is $7000—it said every New Zealander would be better off. It had promised that previously by the end of next year. Well it has pushed that out another 3 years. This is becoming a pattern. It is always jam tomorrow with this Government—unless of course it is a television screen for a Government department in which case $140000 is no problem at all. That is chump change when it comes to this Government. It has got its eye off the ball. It is out of ideas and so we see in these documents the moving around of small bits of expenditure here and there.But the really big thing in this Budget and the big broken promise is the KiwiSaver change. It does however fit a pattern. It is the eighth change this Government has made to KiwiSaver. It has never liked savings. It has never liked savings although New Zealand has an acknowledged problem with capital debt. Businesses struggle to get the money and capital they need to get off the ground as compared with Australia where it has had much more proactive savings policies. Of course Labour introduced them in the 1970s and Muldoon with his propensity for debt—similar to this Government’s—got rid of them. There would have been many hundreds of billions of dollars in savings in this country were it not for that Muldoonian movement back to cancel that savings regime. Australia—noting by the by—has $1.3 trillion in its retirement savings as a result of adopting a similar scheme after us. But this Government is the Government of record debt—more debt than Muldoon. In its attempt to get to this wafer-thin surplus that it failed for the seventh time to get to it cut KiwiSaver again. The first cut it made if members cast their minds back was to reduce the member contribution rate from 4 percent to 2 percent in 2008. It—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member is not being quite as blatant as the member preceding him but I am going to attempt to get him to talk to either the supplementary estimates or the imprest supply. The member might be getting to it but it would be good if he got to it promptly.Dr DAVID CLARK: I will leap ahead and point to page 25 of the supplementary estimates bill where the KiwiSaver changes and these supplementary estimates are recorded because that is where I am coming to. I am wishing to point out that there is a pattern to this changing behaviour and this whittling away of KiwiSaver.The changes noted in the Budget—and if any member wishes to correct me I would be interested—relate to the Government’s refusal to allow new members to sign up with any notice period. In the Budget the Government cut off the $1000 kick-start contribution on Budget day and that is why we have had an alteration to the kick-start payments recorded in the supplementary estimates. As I said that does fit the pattern of this Government which reduced the member contribution rate from 4 percent to 2 percent then reduced the member fee subsidy of $40 per annum—it discontinued that completely. Then it capped compulsory employer contributions at 2 percent then it discontinued the employer tax credit and then it halved the maximum member tax credit to just $521 a year. Employer contributions were subject to additional tax under this Government and then the minimum employee rate was reversed. It had reduced it from 4 percent to 2 percent then it put it back up to 3 percent—it does not know quite where it is on this particular thing.Then in this estimates document we see that it has removed the kick-start payment and that has had an effect on this Budget. It has removed that first $1000 that incentivised kids to start saving and incentivised first-time workers to start saving. It has removed that and with it the incentive for people to save despite the acknowledged savings challenge that New Zealand faces. It really is short-sighted. It is indicative of a Government without a plan; it is indicative of a Government that is willing to break promises at a drop of a hat. I bet that just about every member over on that other side had that $1000 payment before they stopped this scheme and before they stopped future generations—in fact before they stopped 500000 New Zealanders in the next 4 years—receiving that $1000 KiwiSaver kick-start. It is a tragedy. It was a sad sad day when the Government broke that promise to future New Zealanders’ earnings.This Government also broke the promise around the surplus—we have noted that. It broke the promise in terms of not introducing new taxes. In this Budget we had three new taxes: a tax of capital gains on property investors an airport tax that was introduced and a broadband tax. The Government’s own department said that these were taxes while the Minister stood up and tried to deny it. This is a Government in disarray. It snatched at a grab bag of window dressing opportunities. There is the housing agenda that is falling apart at the seams as we see Nick Smith’s—Hon Clayton Cosgrove: Debacle.Dr DAVID CLARK: —debacle or fiasco. The superlatives fail us as Aucklanders struggle to find affordable homes. The Government is saying that they will be affordable to someone—they will be affordable to someone—but most hard-working Kiwis in Auckland certainly in the younger generation can no longer see themselves owning a home. That is because this Government has sat on its hands for 7 years delivering seven failures to get to surplus running for two elections on the promise of surplus breaking promises left right and centre without a vision and failing to reach its own export target of lifting exports as a percentage of GDP to 40 percent. It is a Government out of ideas that is failing New Zealanders.I am running out of time so I will not be able to mention in too much detail the changes to mental health funding but I will note that the mental health cuts in Dunedin that are being faced by NGO providers are going to result in a reduction in the volume of services—that is what the providers say. This Budget is cutting health services. It is cutting future savings. It is window dressing to do a little bit for really hard-up people. Good on those members for taking some steps to alleviate the suffering of some of the most hard-up beneficiaries although it goes only a small way towards the damage that they did in the 1990s to that very same group of people.CHRIS BISHOP (National): The Budget delivered by this Government is a confident Budget of a confident Government in charge of an increasingly confident nation. It comes on the back of six impressive Budgets before it. My contention is that collectively these Budgets are reshaping the political landscape in New Zealand. This is because politically and historically in New Zealand politics the Labour Party has liked to think of itself as the party of progressive even radical social change. Sometimes that is true—the 1980s were a time of radical social change in New Zealand led by the Labour Party for the better. Conversely sometimes it is claimed that the National Party is the traditionally conservative party—that we manage the status quo and we build on the changes that Labour has made. But whatever is the truth of those claims—and I think they are contested—there is no doubt that the political situation today differs markedly from these perceptions.The traditional roles of the parties have been reversed. The Labour Party is now the real conservative party. It is fearful of innovative social policy and afraid of new ideas. It is the party that says no to everything as it is saying no to this Budget. Meanwhile it is the National Party that is the genuine reformist party. National is determined to enter the social policy realm that the Labour Party has selfishly assumed it owned for itself such as the welfare system social housing and education.This Budget continues National’s quiet revolution in State services such as getting Government departments to focus on results—a radical concept for State services. We are asking the Government departments and the people who work in them to focus on getting results through our Better Public Services programme. That drive is having demonstrable results as the regular target reports that we publish for ourselves show. There has been a 38 percent reduction in youth crime since 2011 the number of teenage sole parents on a benefit has dropped by 40 percent since 2011 and the immunisation rate for Māori is now as high as it is for the rest of the population.The previous Government measured success by how much money it spent—by how much money it spent—whereas we as a Government are prepared to measure success by the actual outcomes that spending delivers for New Zealanders. We are prepared to look at different ways of doing things and this Budget and the bills that we are debating today reflect that. We are prepared to look at different ways of doing things because simply throwing more money at social problems does not necessarily solve those problems.Between 2003 and 2008 Government spending under the previous Labour Government rose by 50 percent in 5 years. What did the Salvation Army say when we came into office in 2008? It said that there had been little to no impact on social outcomes for that increased expenditure. Hence we as a Government are embracing new approaches to old problems. We have things like Whānau Ora things like contracting and evaluation tools through social sector trials and things like social impact bonds.We are transforming the welfare system towards one designed around an investment and liability prism. Rather than taking a traditional year-on-year cash view of the welfare system we are looking at the lifetime costs of clients in the system. By taking a look at the lifetime cost the opportunity is created to spend more today to get a better long-term outcome for individuals and households. This is leading to quite profound changes in Government policy towards people receiving welfare. We are encouraging the Government to invest in people particularly the young and particularly to do it early in their lives. This social investment approach which is reflected in this Budget is about targeted evidence-based investment to secure long-term results for the most vulnerable New Zealanders. As a Government we are willing to spend a bit more now to get real sustainable change and we can generate sustainable savings for the Crown and for taxpayers.In social housing—and this Budget reflects this—we are breaking down the near-monopoly that Housing New Zealand has on social housing in New Zealand. We are growing the community housing sector and the social housing sector more generally all with the objective of making sure tenants receive better care.What is the response of the Labour Party to these innovative approaches to social policy? Well the first response is often silence. That party opposite has nothing to say about social investment approaches to policy it has nothing to say about the Better Public Services targets and it has nothing to say about Whānau Ora other than to complain. You will not find many press releases from Labour about social investment. Those members do not talk about it they do not mention it and they do not understand it. You will not find parliamentary questions on it and you will not find press releases about it so it is almost as if it is too difficult for those members to engage on the genuine issues.So the first response from the Labour Party is often silence. When those members do have something to say they often use tired and trite clichés such as calling the Government neoliberal which is the social democratic politician’s favourite term of abuse for centre-right Governments notwithstanding that the term is devoid of all meaning and is hilariously inaccurate when it is applied to this Government. Often we get “neoliberal” thrown in with “Crosby/Textor”—and we just heard it from Grant Robertson not 20 minutes ago—as if just mentioning the name of Crosby/Textor and saying “neoliberal” is a legitimate argument.Labour’s response to the Productivity Commission report about social services that was released a few weeks ago was to just simply talk about the Government introducing vouchers in social services and those members seemed completely unaware that we have a voucher system throughout a lot of our social services. That just means funding is following people when they go to particular services. They are all around us. The early childhood education system is a voucher system. Tertiary education is a voucher system. Those members have little or nothing to say about that.Then we come to social impact bonds and Grant Robertson talked about this in his speech just before. Labour talks about people profiting from social services but again profit exists throughout our social services already. For example in the health system private hospitals exist. They provide surgery that is funded by the public. Private pharmacies exist which profit by filling Pharmac scripts. Private medical manufacturers exist by developing better replacement hips as Eric Crampton pointed out through the New Zealand Initiative. So profit exists already. That is not a legitimate argument against it. Then there was the nonsensical claim from people like Annette King that social impact bonds were experiments that had been proven to fail—a nonsensical claim. On this critique the Government would never do anything new.So let us look at social impact bonds. Where have social impact bonds been trialled? Radical countries like Swaziland which—Eugenie Sage: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I understood that we were dealing with the Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and that is a new initiative—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! I am the judge of that.CHRIS BISHOP: Thank you very much. We are also dealing Ms Sage with the imprest supply bill and I am also responding to the ridiculous criticisms that Grant Robertson made about social impact bonds. So let us look at countries that are dealing with social impact bonds. Swaziland for example is doing a social impact bond to try to reduce the number of people contracting HIV. Uganda has to try to increase access to early childhood education; Columbia to try to reduce teen pregnancy rates; and India to close the gender gap between males and females in that society.Which country introduced social impact bonds in the first place? The United Kingdom. Under what Government? The Labour Party under Prime Minister Gordon Brown—the doyen of social democratic parties. So the complaints from the New Zealand Labour Party on this are simply silly. What has become clear—and this is my overall point—is that in the last few years the Labour Party opposite has been fundamentally uninterested in new approaches to old problems. It is stuck in an ideological time warp. It insists despite all evidence to the contrary that the Government has the answers to everything that the bureaucratic monolithic State can effectively address social problems and that all that is required is yet more Government spending.Social democratic parties around the world have moved on from this 1970s’ view of government. As I mentioned before social impact bonds are being trialled all around the world often by social democratic Governments but in New Zealand the Labour Party appears to remain stuck in the past. My core contention from this Budget which is reflected in the supplementary estimates and the imprest supply bill that we are debating is that the traditional roles of the parties in New Zealand have been reversed by this Budget and the Budgets that have preceded it.These days it is National that is the progressive equitable force for change and for good in New Zealand society. We are willing to accept that more Government spending does not necessarily solve every Government problem. We are willing to look at innovative approaches to social policy like our social housing reforms like social impact bonds and like generally the investment approach that we are embedding at the heart of the Government in this Budget.It is the Labour Party that is the conservative party in today’s society. It is unwilling to look at change it wants to say no to everything and to the extent that Labour members have anything to say they simply want to engage in the debate by using tired and trite clichés. The Labour Party opposite is out of touch and out of ideas. This party and this Government is creating a brighter future for all New Zealanders. Thank you.EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I am pleased to take a short call on the Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) Bill. I strongly dispute the clichés that Mr Bishop was rolling out there and his assertion that this is a Government that is a progressive equitable force for change. A number of the appropriations that are in this bill deal with the anchor projects and earthquake recovery in Christchurch and there the Government is the very opposite of being a progressive force for equity. Instead a lot of these anchor projects and the cost-sharing agreement that the Crown has made with the Christchurch City Council are about burdening the council with substantial debt. For big projects like the stadium and the convention centre where the Government is putting a large amount of money into facilities like the convention centre and requiring the council to do the same for the stadium that is burdening the council with debt. It is forcing the council in its long-term plan to look at selling the city’s assets. That is not promoting equity because rates will then increase if we do not have assets like Orion Christchurch International Airport and Lyttelton Port of Christchurch to provide dividends to the city in order to reduce the number of assets that Christchurch residents need to pay for.In this bill we see quite a few changes: an increase in allocation for earthquake recovery land ownership and management and nearly $69 million for the development of the central city anchor projects. Here there has been total opaqueness by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority and the Government over the increasing costs of some of those anchor projects such as the convention centre. When we put in Official Information Act requests what do we get? Pages of redaction even when we are asking about what additional funding was allocated in previous financial years to assist the procurement process for the anchor projects. We get denied the business cases. Indeed at the select committee the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority has said that there will not be any information provided on the business case for things like the convention centre until all the major contracts have been signed. That is not good budget management. That is not sound management of public money when costs for things like the anchor projects—the convention centre in particular—look from the various comments that have been made in the mediaas if they are spiralling out of control yet the public cannot see where that $300 million is likely to be going.In the bill we also have $40 million for the ownership and divestment of the anchor projects and again there has been a total lack of information from the Government over who will own facilities like the stadium the convention centre and the Metro Sports Facility. We put in Official Information Act requests and they get answered with very little information about the sorts of public-private funding arrangements that the Government may be entering into. When we have the chair of the Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce calling for private sector providers to own libraries in Christchurch how is there any guarantee that the hundreds of millions of dollars of public money that is in these appropriations and is going into things like the convention centre will actually end up with an asset that is publicly owned? Or is it being used to subsidise businesses like Accor Hotels which the Government wants to operate the convention centre and to subsidise private interests rather than having publicly owned facilities? There is another item here: $241 million for the procurement and preparation of land and other assets for the development of the anchor projects. Again there have been large areas of land that have just been acquired from the Christchurch City Council for the convention centre—part of Gloucester Street—but without full recompense being paid to the council.Then further on in the bill there are changes to the appropriations relating to the Avon River Papa o Ōtākaro precinct that cover more than one financial year. A petition has been signed by over 6000 people calling for the Avon/Ōtākaro park to be extended beyond the central city out to the sea yet the Government is totally silent on what the future of the residential red zone will be when all the former houses have been cleared and people have moved on. Instead of focusing that Avon River project just on the central city and spending some $98 million on 2.5 kilometres of the river in the central city the Government should be looking at how we can have a full river park that goes from the city to the sea that provides space for natural hazard management in terms of the flooding issues in the Avon/Ōtākaro River and that provides space for community gardens and for public art. But no again there is absolute silence on what the Government’s plans are for the future of that land despite the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that have been well spent in purchasing the land from the former owners so that they could move on.Again in the bill there is a reduction in expenditure for the cost of the bus interchange. That may be because that project has been brought in on time but there is additional funding being provided for the convention centre. We need to have much more accountability from the Government over how these big anchor projects are to be funded. We need the Government to actually renegotiate the cost-sharing agreement with the Christchurch City Council. There has been a major review of the costs of repair of sewerage stormwater and local roads—that report is not public—but the Government should be contributing more to the repair of horizontal infrastructure rather than capping its contribution to those costs and rather than putting all of this money into a big stadium that people in Christchurch have clearly signalled the city does not want and does not need and that is an extravagance rather than something that is vital to the recovery of the city.Similarly with the convention centre international experts have said that with the Queenstown convention centre the Wellington convention centre and the Auckland convention centre we will have a glut of convention centres in New Zealand. Yet this bill is continuing to provide for large amounts of public money to be put into a convention centre in Christchurch that there has been no opportunity for the public to have any say in the design of because it has all been pushed through under emergency legislation rather than through the Resource Management Act process and there has been no opportunity to scrutinise and see a business case that sets out whether there is actually even a sound financial basis for this investment of hundreds of millions of dollars of public money. So there are details about figures in the bill but not a lot of detail about where this money is going and the Government needs to be much more accountable for the spending of public money.FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): Minister Bennett spoke of the plan that is working. The trust assumed in this phrase is huge given that no one has seen the plan. Minister Bennett has certainly not seen the plan. That is an example of the arrogance of this National Government. Everyday New Zealanders are losing their trust in this Government at a rapid rapid rate. For all New Zealanders trust has been eroded in all number of issues: for example the trust that was lost on the countering terrorist fighters legislation and the trust that was lost on the oversight of the Government Communications and Security Bureau where the person in charge of holding the bureau to account actually reports back to the Minister. In a by-election the Government made promises that it has no intention of keeping. Then there is the biggest undermining of New Zealanders’ trust with the Trans-Pacific Partnership arrangement and New Zealanders having to rely on the American political system to see them through to the other side of this negotiation safely.The Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment—coming back to appropriations—Steven Joyce was forced to admit that the sums provided for in the last Budget to be fair were misleading. The Government’s Budget announcement of a further $113 million for tertiary education was an incredible exaggeration. The actual increase was a mere $7 million. New Zealand now ranks because of the lack of appropriations—and perhaps this could have been an opportunity laid out in this legislation for a capital injection but no—near the bottom of OECD rankings in terms of tertiary education funding per student. This is what the National Government has provided New Zealanders looking to better themselves. Instead of trying to increase productivity through appropriations through a clever Budget—instead no money.We know from research that there is a positive correlation between people using online technology and business success but yet again there is a divide between the haves and have-nots. Again the 2014 Budget did not address it and there is nothing in this appropriations legislation that deals with the significant problem where the timing of the issue could not be more important. What we are seeing is a roll-out of broadband that is not effective. We are seeing a roll-out of broadband where those in our rural communities and those in the regions are missing out right now but this has not been addressed. What we know is that the roll-out of the broadband is a conversation that is being had now. I use this example because hard data has just been released from Mind Your Own Business analysis. Rural communities have the lowest engagement levels in online services. Only 10 percent of rural businesses have websites and 73 percent of them have no presence whatsoever. The logical conclusion from that is that they are missing out on revenue. Rural operators are significantly unhappier with the speed and reliability of their service.On the matter of transport the Minister spoke out yesterday about increased spending in the regions. Our New Zealand First spokesman Denis O’Rourke described the Minister’s words as perhaps not ringing quite true. The reality is if you adjust what was being spent in the 2008-09 period for inflation in real terms land transport spending in the 2014 Budget was actually less in Gisborne Hawke’s Bay Northland Bay of Plenty Manawatū Wanganui and the West Coast. In Northland New Zealand Transport Agency investment in local road maintenance this year for example is $14.6 million—significantly lower than the $15.5 million average over the last 7 years. Even the $5.8 million investment in local road improvements is significantly lower than the 7-year average of near on $10 million.Whānau Ora has been identified as an issue in this appropriations legislation and New Zealand First has consistently raised concerns over Whānau Ora spending. Scrutiny by the Auditor-General has clearly shown that it has fallen seriously short of expectations. These appropriations have ignored official findings. The Auditor-General’s report found absolutely no evidence that good value for money has come out of the $140 million so far spent on Whānau Ora.It is clear that this Government has got it wrong for our regions. Social services are disappearing in the regions under this Government. Under National there has been a flow of regional closures including services to veterans and youth provided by the Salvation Army and recently Relationships Aotearoa was forced to shut down. It had branches in the regionsthroughout New Zealand. Government support for social services has fallen away. It is clear in this Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) Bill. It was clear in the Budget. It has fallen away under the Government’s investment approach—widely touted over the past 6 years but it is not working. There is little in the way of increased funding for police—after 5 or 6 years another frozen Budget in real terms. Too many small rural isolated police stations from the far north to the deep south are squeezed for staffing.I put it to this House on behalf of many concerned New Zealanders that our electricity prices have been rising constantly but there was nothing in the Budget and there is nothing to be discussed today unfortunately for the people of New Zealand in the appropriations. There has been nothing from this Government in its policies that even recognises the growing depth of real despair from more and more everyday New Zealanders or as recently coined the working poor. Yesterday we heard that West Coasters and Northlanders are facing higher proposed charges by the Electricity Authority. New Zealand First asserts that big business will be the winner with lower electricity line changes per year and households will be missing out.Here we seem to be seeing a case for the building of corporate welfare particularly for foreign-owned companies—surely a hallmark of this National Government. How on earth are regions like Northland—ignored in this bill—and the West Coast supposed to develop when the likely price increase will be massively greater than inflation? In fact it is unfortunate that what we see going forward is that the lines companies did not actually demand a price increase but we know that they will be blamed for it anyway. The resultant increased electricity line charges will then be used by right-wing elements especially in Auckland to demand the breakup of energy consumer trusts thus enabling private interests to gain access to the trusts’ billions of dollars of assets.I conclude by putting it to this Government that our regions our small businesses our famers the elderly and the working mums and dads will be paying a higher price to bolster private profit. These are the very same people who have been ignored by this Budget by these appropriations and so New Zealand First cannot support this bill today. Thank you.JAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany): It is always a bit interesting when I get to follow on from Fletcher Tabuteau. I got to do that yesterday in the House actually. We like to call him the professor after his great revelation during the Budget debate that he was an economics professor but the problem is that if he calls himself an economics professor we on this side would like to think that he could actually support policies that would help to grow the economy grow more jobs or be beneficial for New Zealand. Last night New Zealand First was the anti-jobs party along with the Greens when those members were opposing greater growth and greater job creation through the Korean free-trade agreement. Today we hear that they are opposed to much of what the Government is doing in the finance situation as well.Unashamedly I say to Mr Tabuteau that we do say that this is a plan that is working because it is seeing New Zealanders benefit from our plan. It is a plan that is working because 150000 people are expected to get a job from the policy programme we are putting in place. We know the plan is working because in the last 4 years 194000 people gained a job under the economic settings this Government has put in place. For Mr Tabuteau’s benefit I can say again that the plan is working because we are one of the fastest-growing economies in the OECD. Average growth is projected to go up to 2.8 percent over the period of the Government’s Budget and that is a growth rate that many countries envy. So I say to Fletcher Tabuteau that our plan is working.I want to also respond to Grant Robertson. He was a bit unhappy at the Finance and Expenditure Committee meeting this morning. He asked his questions and then he had to depart. I asked the Minister of Finance for the benefit of Mr Robertson who did do a lot to try to talk down the New Zealand economy how we are tracking compared with other countries in the OECD the countries we compare ourselves with on a regular basis—for example the UK the eurozone the US Australia and Japan. I asked how we are tracking. Compared with every single country we are doing better when it comes to debt and our surplus target that we are aiming towards is better than those countries as well.We must remember that 4 years ago the Government had to post because of the difficult economic circumstances an $18 billion deficit. There has been a huge change round that we have seen in the past 4 years. Now we are just about to reach a surplus. I know that the guys and girls on the other side like to complain about the Government not being able to quite reach the surplus we were projecting last year and yes it is their job to hold us to account but they should just remember that 4 years ago there was an $18 billion deficit. Now we are just about to hit surplus. I think that when New Zealanders wake up in the morning they do not ask themselves: “Oh is the Government is going to reach surplus this year?”. They do not ask themselves whether the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement has progressed much further. They do not ask themselves whether or not the Government Communications Security Bureau is doing certain work.The Attorney-General made an interesting point. When Fletcher Tabuteau referred to the counter-terrorism bill earlier in this Parliament Mr Finlayson said that New Zealand First and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are probably the only parties in the world that opposed that bill.Hon Christopher Finlayson: And the Greens.JAMI-LEE ROSS: Oh the Greens as well. But it is a plan that is working. It is a plan that is being implemented.When I was reading through the Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) Bill I found a few points that I would just like to touch on. There is provision in the bill for work around the deposit subsidy scheme through the KiwiSaver HomeStart scheme which this Government is implementing. I want to highlight this for the House because I think it is a fantastic scheme that is leading to more young New Zealanders more first-home buyers getting the opportunity to purchase their first home. Housing is an issue that many New Zealanders do care a lot about and this Government is putting in place plans and taking steps to tackle housing affordability. We know that under Labour house prices doubled when it was in office. So Labour members cannot get up on their hind legs in the House and claim to be holier than thou and claim they did everything to solve housing issues because they did not. This Government is working hard to ensure that we build more houses particularly for those in Auckland who need more houses and we are assisting them into their first home through the KiwiSaver HomeStart scheme.I was pleased to see in this bill that there is additional funding for that scheme. Over the next 5 years it is expected that 90000 New Zealanders will benefit from that scheme. We have doubled the amount of the subsidy for those purchasing their first home and purchasing a brand new home. For those who are interested in taking up the scheme there is up to a $20000 grant available. That is a huge amount for young New Zealanders and if we couple that with their own KiwiSaver deposits which they have had in stock for some time—5 years would enable them to maximise the deposit subsidy that they get from the Government—that is a huge amount of support we are putting in there.If you put that alongside the extra homes that are being created through the special housing areas and put that alongside the work that Dr Nick Smith is doing to try to build housing on Crown land that is available to be built on I think this side is happy to stand up be proud and support that policy. If Labour Party members were actually serious about the 100000 homes they wanted to build when they went to the election last year they should actually be telling us where they were expecting to build those homes. They are quite quick to say: “We would have built 100000 homes. We had the solution for housing. We knew what we were going to do around housing.” despite the fact that prices doubled under their watch. If they really thought they could build all those homes where were they going to do it? Where were they going to do it? They would be going through exactly the same process that we are going through identifying tracts of land that are available and tracts of land that New Zealanders can build on. So they should not stand up in the House at question time and they should not stand up in the House during these types of debates and give Nick Smith a difficult time as they have been doing because he is actually fronting up with policy. He is actually fronting up to get more housing built in Auckland. I am happy to support the work he is doing in that area.I also want to touch on the fact that the Opposition parties are quick to try to criticise the Government when it comes to children and when it comes to families. If those members were serious about trying to help families then they should have come over to this side of the House and supported the Budget and the plans we are putting in place around those who need assistance. The $790 million child hardship package is something that 160000 families around the country will benefit from and they saw that this Government is willing to front up and support families. There is $790 million that will be supporting those children living in hardship. It is something that this Parliament probably should have done a long time ago. The economic circumstances have now improved so we can invest in that area in a much greater way than we have been able to in the past. But $25 a week in the pockets of those who are living in the most difficult circumstances will actually go a long way. When it comes to those living in difficult housing situations the answer to helping them to ensure they can heat their homes is through the schemes we have in place to insulate homes but it is also about trying to get more money into their pockets so they can afford the heating.Let us not talk about schemes that will probably put people out on the street. A warrant of fitness scheme which the Labour Party and the Green Party are proposing that would see houses actually being taken off the market and see New Zealanders ending up on the street is not the way to help those who want to have a warmer home. The way to help those people is to have an insulation scheme in place. It is also to have in place a scheme that sees those families able to afford the heating costs for those families and afford the cost of putting food on the table. The best way to do that is to help them through the benefit scheme or more important to help them get a job. This is a plan that is working. More people are getting jobs under this plan. Higher wages are seen under this plan. Less unemployment is seen under this plan. We are proud of this plan and all that it is achieving for New Zealanders.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): The next call is a split call. Gareth Hughes—5 minutes.GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. I heard a lot about housing from the member Jami-Lee Ross but it is a house of cards that Government members are building and they cannot seem to get it right. In fact it is like they are building a house on a sand foundation: there are hardly any houses being built the land that the Government is going around and showing off is not actually the Government’s land and we are talking about exploding substations. Now today we have seen the Minister for Building and Housing disappear into the backblocks but I am sure he will be happy that he has got Jami-Lee Ross defending him. We face a housing crisis.We heard from the member that things are getting better in the Budget for young New Zealand families. They are not. In fact what has happened is that a whole new term has been coined for what is facing the current generation which is Generation Rent. We are seeing a whole generation locked out of the dream of homeownership. In fact for them it is only a dream. We are seeing in Auckland at the moment capital gains per annum greater than the average annual salary. Something is wrong in New Zealand when we see such a pervasive housing crisis happening in our biggest city. You see the Reserve Bank cutting interest rates because of the slow-down in the rest of the economy. Sure the Government did a few good things in the Budget. It is hard to remember them and the National members have spent more time talking about New Zealand First and the Labour Party than what they achieved in the Budget. But I will take my hat off and say that it was good to see beneficiaries actually get some additional funding. It had been too long so it was right. Obviously the way it is being implemented with the abatement costs will see a lot of people getting a lot less than the $25 a week but it is good to see that beneficiaries are not just being harangued but also getting some good support.What we have seen in the wake of the Budget is that the country is facing some serious structural economic problems. This has been highlighted: once upon a time we were talked about as a rock star economy but we are seeing those serious structural economic problems. You see one in the price of milk and you see the impact that that is having on the economy. Jami-Lee Ross was triumphantly talking about debt. The last time I looked our net overseas debt position was in the same ballpark as some of the European countries that are having serious problems. When I looked into it earlier in the year we were spending $7.7 billion a year just on interest payments flowing offshore. We have seen a dependence on dairy which when those low-price commodities plummet has serious national impacts. We are seeing it with the lack of a surplus. It was not the members on the Opposition benches who made a mountain out of the surplus idea; in fact it was Bill English himself. He set this as the exemplar of what he was aiming for. There have been seven in a row—seven deficits in a row. Obviously there is also a deficit of ideas and a deficit of innovation because we are seeing real problems come through.What we have not heard about is growing inequality. We have seen a small measure which in real terms will not have a significant impact for beneficiary families but we have seen fantastically high inequality. The OECD estimates that inequality rates at the moment have slashed 10 percent off our GDP. If you look at say the mid-1990s the average chief executive officer was getting about 15 times the average wage. Now it is 119 times more according to the economist Susan St John. It is having a real economic impact it is having a real social impact and we also see the generational inequality. We have seen it in housing. For many older members of this House who grew up in a different New Zealand free education an affordable home and a good job were considered the norms. For my generation and Jami-Lee Ross’ generation they are considered luxuries now. We see a surplus of inequality a surplus of generational inequality and a surplus of omissions.What the Budget did contain were additional subsidies for fossil fuels despite all the work the Government is doing railing against them internationally. We saw a tiny increase in research and development funding but not enough to even move us from where we are which is in the bottom half of the OECD. We have a serious innovation problem. Just today a new report has come out in Australia warning that it could be losing 5 million jobs over the coming decades because of automation and other global challenges. These are where we need to be addressing some of the structural challenges facing our economy and the answers are in terms of innovation investing in our universities and tertiary education investing in research and development and science and investing in smart Green technology like clean energy. That is what the Greens have advocated for an awfully long time. Thank you.CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): The people at home will be asking: if the Government thinks this is a plan that is working who is it working for exactly? It might be working for the chief executives of the energy companies that the Government has sold off who are getting multimillion-dollar pay rises but it is certainly not working for young Kiwi savers who have had the $1000 kick-start payment cut from KiwiSaver. It might be working for the landlords who are continuing to overcharge for cold damp mouldy houses but it is not working for the tenants who are living in those houses. It might be working for the people who are trying to sell a house but it is certainly not working for the people who are trying to buy one who are finding themselves priced out of the property market and it is certainly not working for workers and small businesses who are continuing to be overcharged for their ACC levies.So let us look at what this bill does and what it signifies in terms of the Government’s track record and let us weigh it up against the Government’s own promises and commitments at the last election. What was the No. 1 promise that it made at the last election? John Key said that the Government was back in surplus. He did not say it was going to get back into surplus; he said that it was in surplus—$372 million worth to be precise. How has that actually turned out in actual reality? It is a $684 million deficit. It does not take a mathematician to work out that that is a $1 billion failure on the Government’s part when it comes to delivering on that particular promise. That is broken promise No. 1 which is signified by what we are debating here today.Let us look again then at what that is going to mean in the long term for the Government’s track record. It is getting back into surplus next year. Well it claims that it will be back in surplus next year with a $176 million surplus. Let us be clear about that: $175 million of that comes from cutting the KiwiSaver kick-start. That leaves $1 million. If the Government can turn a $372 million surplus into a $684 million deficit what is it going to do with a $1 million surplus which is effectively what it is leaving itself in this year’s Budget? It promised that it was going to be paying down the debt. Let us remember that this Government has clocked up more debt than any other Government in New Zealand’s history. Government debt is at its highest level ever and it has only taken the National Government 7 years to get there. It said that it was going to get net debt down to 20 percent of GDP by 2020. It is abundantly clear that that is another broken promise because it is not even close to making it.John Key promised New Zealanders that the Government would create 150000 extra jobs—failed. It is not going to deliver on that. It is at least 60000 jobs short. He promised New Zealanders that the average wage—Andrew Bayly: Rubbish.CHRIS HIPKINS: “Rubbish” they say over there. It is their own Budget documents that show it. Anyway the Government promised that the average wage would move from $55000 to $62000. It is going to fall at least $3000 short—another broken promise. John Key said that the $1000 KiwiSaver kick-start payment would remain as it is now. Oops—another broken promise by the Government. The $1000 KiwiSaver kick-start payment was removed. That is where $175 million of the $176 million surplus is coming from—the cut to KiwiSaver. The Government said that it would not be increasing taxes on hard-working New Zealanders and we have seen that it has broken that promise already with talk of a capital gains tax for property speculators airport tax charges for those entering and leaving New Zealand and a broadband tax all in this year’s Budget and all of which signify yet another broken promise.So if this is a plan that is working as the Government claims it is whom is it working for? It is certainly not working for the New Zealanders who believed the Government and the promises that it made at the last election and voted for it based on those promises because it is failing to deliver on the cornerstones of its own election ledgers. This is a Government that purports to be a good economic manager but that really cannot walk the talk because it is not delivering on it. It is driving New Zealand further and further into debt and as the debt piles up the Government does not have a sustainable plan to turn that round. What it is hoping for is a recovery in dairy prices—a recovery that is highly unlikely to come. Let us be clear—the fall in dairy prices has left a massive massive hole in the New Zealand economy and the Government does not have any plan to plug it. We are going to be back here again next year almost certainly debating yet another deficit by this Government because it does not have a plan to turn round New Zealand’s economic fortunes.ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): I am pleased to be able to speak on the Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) Bill that is before the House today. The terms of this bill make me proud to be a National MP as it is easy to see that the provisions of our Budget are so wide ranging reaching our regions reaching all sections of our communities improving our infrastructure and providing for better services.The Labour Party always presenting itself as the defender of low-income New Zealanders did not come close to providing the economic measures and planning that this Government was able to present to New Zealand last month. Labour notably short on social innovation had already made response to many of the improvements and packages to be introduced in order to make the lives of New Zealanders better. That response was always “Don’t do it. Don’t do it.” Well this Government thinks otherwise and we are determined to implement these measures designed to assist and relieve New Zealanders and their families in all areas of their lives with help as needed.It is perhaps just useful to recap on the main elements of the Budget. The first bit I think is an excellent piece of innovation. The $790 million child hardship package is a balanced piece which provides low-income earners and families with an increase in their benefit rates. It also increases the benefits in terms of childcare assistance and out-of-school care but balances this with the obligation to seek employment as soon as possible when children get to a suitable age. The Budget also puts significant new resources into health. There was another $1.7 billion taking the Health vote to a record $15.9 billion and an increase of nearly $700 million taking again the education vote to just under $11 billion. The social housing provisions were great particularly around the Tāmaki development increasingly seeing those 7000 homes that we want to see built there as soon as possible and some of the other funding initiatives that were related to that. There is the $500 million of ACC cuts that come in over the next couple of years which will be great not only for employers but also for working New Zealanders. This is all good stuff.I have on previous occasions spoken at length about what this Government has done to support working New Zealand families. Tonight I do not intend to repeat this other than to say that not only is there a social imperative for us as a Government to support our vulnerable families there is also a financial incentive. Quite simply it is good business to have a fairer society where every child growing up in New Zealand has the opportunity to pursue their own dreams and aspirations. Instead what I want to focus on tonight are two things: Government debt which our Opposition loves to talk about and growth rates including regional growth rates. These are two themes that I hear repeatedly coming forward from the Opposition.The first priority of this Government has always been to ensure that Government’s finances are responsibly and efficiently managed. We inherited accounts from the previous Government that showed that spending had risen by 50 percent over 5 years. This was obviously unaffordable; it was also unsustainable and also irresponsible. What our fiscal strategy has been is to support the economy in the short term by reducing deficits over time and we have succeeded in that. The Crown books are in good shape and are showing operating balances increasing over time and debt reducing. As at 30 April this year gross Crown debt stood at $85.5 billion but if you subtract the student loans and other such provisions we are talking about a net debt level of $64 billion or just under 27 percent of GDP. Forecasts show that by 2020 Crown debt will drop to 20 percent.I find it fascinating looking at this and comparing it with the debt figures of our major trading partners. Australia—apparently the Lucky Country—has a current debt to GDP ratio of about our level but by 2020 it will be at 40 percent of GDP. Forty percent represents double New Zealand’s debt levels. The UK economy is currently at about 90 percent of debt to GDP but by 2020 it will have reduced that only to 80 percent—i.e. four times New Zealand’s debt levels. That 80 percent is broadly in line with the EUthe European countries in total at four times New Zealand’s debt. Although the US economy is growing strongly it has even higher debt currently just under 110 percent of GDP and by 2020 in 5 years’ time it will be just over 100 percent of GDP. Those are staggeringly high amounts of debt and thankfully through good financial management by Bill English we are in a strong financial position to weather future financial storms and economic circumstances.The other area I want to turn my mind to is the GDP growth rates and the regional growth rates. The reality is that the New Zealand economy has been growing strongly and is expected to continue to grow strongly. As at 31 March this year we achieved a growth rate of 3.3 percent and the Reserve Bank’s recent forecast showed that over the next 3 years we will average 3 percent. That is a good strong consistent growth rate. The 2015 growth rate compares favourably when you look at our trading partners. Again the highest performing one is China of course which has been growing very very strongly and for the same period recorded a growth rate of 7 percent i.e. just over double ours and this year is forecast to be between 6 and 7 percent. Australia again—the Lucky Country which people love to quote—recorded a mere 2.3 percent which was close to America’s GDP growth rate of about 2.5 percent. But Europe again is growing poorly. Its growth rate is less than 2 percent and forecast to be still at those levels. Again all those rates are significantly lower than New Zealand’s current and forecast growth rates over the longer term.What is interesting is to look at the regional growth rates. Contrary to the uninformed view of the Opposition the regions are in general growing strongly. Based on the ANZ’s latest forecasts the areas growing most strongly are first of all Bay of Plenty at 4.8 percent Canterbury at 4.4 percent and Auckland at 4.3 percent. But Northland—and it is an interesting one that always seems to be quoted—is growing strongly at 3.4 percent Gisborne at 3.5 percent Otago at 3.3 percent and Southland at 4 percent. They all belie Opposition claims that this strong economic growth is being localised only in the Auckland and Christchurch economies.These comments by the Opposition actually do a disservice to the hard-working people of these regions. They are resourceful they are strong and they are getting on with the job. Where this Budget has helped to continue that growth in the regions is in the areas of the roads. We have announced another $100 million for regional highways. As for broadband we have got this massive spend. We have put in another $210 million into the ultra-fast broadband roll-out and another $140 million in the rural broadband roll-out. Health facilities—we heard earlier today how we have poured $140 million into Southern District Health Board over the last few years. The child hardship package the $790 million one—interestingly the member for Rangitīkei was saying the other day that he estimates that that will generate $1 million of extra income put into Taumarunui every year. That is a significant boost to that local economy. There is a focus on regionally based research institutes and there is $13 million that we have provided to help Māori people further develop their lands and make them far more productive.There is a whole suite of packages that is designed to help our regions grow. This is all about creating a fairer economy. This is a Government with a plan. This is a Government with a heart.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour): In the seconds that remain before the dinner break I just say to that member Andrew Bayley that that speech proves how out of touch he is. He rattled off about 5 minutes’ worth of international statistics and could I say this to him: it does not move a young person any closer to the dream of homeownership. It does not build one new house and you have built only 170 since 2013 in your own special housing areas. It does nothing. He can rattle off statistics for the next 3 or 4 hours if he likes to but it does not address and he did not address the very human concerns of individuals and families in our community. He is so out of touch that he has wandered around the regions and not seen the impact of his Government’s policies—the negative impact on those regions. If he wanders around with the blinkers on he proves how out of touch he is.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: Before the dinner break I followed—I cannot remember the gentleman’s name—a National Party member of Parliament who took us on a sort of whirlwind tour of the OECD and rattled off about 5 to 6 minutes of statistics in trying to make a proposition that this was somehow exceedingly relevant to the lives of perhaps young New Zealanders who were trying to execute the dream of making a first-home buy as if these statistics would somehow keep people warm in their State houses or in their private accommodation that may well be damp under-heated and pretty disreputable. I have got to say to that member that he can throw statistics around for hour after hour but what actually counts in Struggle Street out in the communities is the here and now the income in the pocket—or the lack of it—the ability to put food in the mouths of your kids and the ability to have decent housing and the basic basket of goods and services that probably all of us or most of us in this Parliament had the privilege of growing up with over the years.The member then also waxed eloquent about how the surplus—in fact I think it was Mr Bennett. Mr Bennett made a wonderful proposition actually. He attacked the Opposition for claiming that the Government had not met its No. 1 promise of going into surplus and then admitted a couple of minutes later that it was edging towards surplus and that it had remained in deficit for the last 7 years. So he attacked us for telling the truth and then did not provide any sort of evidence or proposition as to why the Government broke its premier gold-plated No. 1 promise to the electorate that it would. In fact the Prime Minister I think—as Mr Hipkins pointed out—said before the election campaign not that it would be in surplus but that it was in surplus to the tune of $300 million - plus. And then we found out it is the other way round—it is $680 million - odd in deficit.So although Mr Bennett attacks the Opposition for holding the Government to account and telling the people of New Zealand that it continually on seven occasions broke its promise—you know that is our job Mr Bennett. That is our job. And if we are bandying around statistics I would just offer one for the historians in the audience and among those listening tonight which is that when we left office in 2008 we had had 9 years of surpluses. Net Crown debt was zero and there had been 9 years of surpluses. Compare that with a Government whose debt outstrips that of Sir Robert Muldoon the great National Party hero—and my word we thought he was the last of the big spenders. The debt outstrips him and we have had 7 years of deficit.Of course the next proposition that National members put up in the Budget was that there would be a $176 million surplus they said. As Mr Hipkins pointed out if you do the basic math on that—and I know the member Mr Scott who is prone to telling the truth in this Parliament will want to get to the KiwiSaver home loan stuff in a moment which is his favourite topic—you work out that the KiwiSaver $1000 kick-start which has now gone equates to $175 million and so by cutting that out they somehow achieve a surplus. That gives them a surplus of a paltry 1 million bucks.For those people who might be tuning in tonight $1 million is a lot of money—I accept that—but in the whole scheme of the Government accounts it is wafer thin tissue thin transparently thin and I doubt whether that will be achieved. But you have got to look at some of the spending in the Budget and the supplementary estimates.I made an interesting discovery. I note that the Minister of Police in answer to a proposition put to him this afternoon that there had been a cut in the police vote denied it. I know that Mr Deputy Speaker of course given his previous occupation may indeed take a passing interest in this but if you actually look at the Budget documents you will note that there is a cut to the police operational funding of $44 million over 4 years—44 million bucks over 4 years. Then if you flip over a few pages you will see that Whānau Ora gets an additional $50 million for something called navigators. I do not know what that means and I bow to those in the House like Mr McClay and others who are far more proficient on Government policy than I. But at the same time as you cut 44 million bucks out of the Police vote you bung $50 million into Whānau Ora for something called navigators and with no rebuttal and no examination of the effectiveness of Whānau Ora to the point where the Auditor-General said: “It was not easy to describe what it is”—that being the policy of Whānau Ora—“or what it has achieved.”We had a lot of members over there talking about the effectiveness of Government spending. Well when the Auditor-General who is an Officer of Parliament and is independent of everybody here including the Government and who is charged with examining the Government accounts and the appropriateness and the effectiveness of spending came out and said about one of the biggest expenditures in this Government’s ongoing Budget programme one of its flagship policies which has been given an additional $50 million: “It was not easy to describe what it”—that is the policy—“is or what it has achieved.” I would be really grateful if somebody in the Government would stand up and explain and give the answer that the Office of the Auditor-General has been unable to find.I note in the media that somebody—and I am not sure whether it was the Māori Party or somebody else—then demanded that the Auditor-General apologise for what she said. Well why should she? She is actually charged with examining the effectiveness and appropriateness of expenditure. She could not work it out and she is a pretty learned individual. The Office of the Auditor-General is a pretty formidable office with an independent world-class reputation. So I would like somebody over there to sort of get up and perhaps explain to the New Zealand people what the programme is about whether it has been effective and if it has been where the evidence is and what the additional $50 million is for.Equally I just note for the record that I find it interesting that the largest expenditure in Whānau Ora went to one particular seat. It was the seat of the former member Hon Tariana Turia the author of the policy. Happenstance? Maybe. Coincidence? Possibly. But I do not particularly believe that not when 8 percent of the Māori population reside in that electorate and the largest bulk of Whānau Ora money just happened to land inside those boundaries. There may be a good reason to be fair—I make no judgment—but I think an explanation is due.When we get into looking at the sort of histrionics of this Budget I think it was a number of the other colleagues who said: “Who is going to benefit from this grand plan?” because we have got expenditure cuts we have got expenditure that cannot be explained sort of poured down the toilet and nowhere in this Budget or the supplementary pieces of legislation can I find an effective plan to house those people in derelict and substandard accommodation. Nick Smith had a crack. As I said this afternoon you know the cheese has slid off his cracker a couple of times over the last 6 months or so—170 houses since 2013 in his so-called special housing areas when we need 10000 houses a year in Auckland to keep pace.Mr Scott’s wont to sort of wax eloquent about the KiwiSaver proposition—well it equates to $521 per year of extra funding. That is about $10 a week and when we had this debate a few months ago it was Mr Scott the only honest man in the National Government who got up and actually admitted that that is what it was. He said that it is $10 a week extra when Auckland house prices are going up by $17000 a month or by 90 grand a year. So I ask those members as they celebrate their KiwiSaver HomeStart—whatever it is—policy to answer me this question: how is it going to affect and assist in a positive way those people who are up against housing inflation of $17000 a month in Auckland when they get $521 of their own money to spend per year?Mr Scott you have done this Parliament a service. You are the only honest man on that side to tell the truth.ALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa): I was going to start by responding to some of the comments of the previous speaker Clayton Cosgrove but I could not think of anything to respond to so there is no need. I would like to focus on two themes: productivity which is the theme throughout this appropriations legislation and value for the taxpayer dollar.First of all productivity. Productivity needs to be explained. It is where a smaller amount of input is put into something to receive the same amount of output or the same input receives a greater level of output. That is an increase in productivity an increase in wealth and an increase in living standards. I wanted to clarify that because the Leader of the Opposition is against the idea of increasing productivity. I will explain that in a minute. Increased productivity can come about by new inventions—like the steam engine for example. It enabled massive increases in productivity because instead of having labourers weave and spin we had machines to do it. Telephones enabled increased productivity because we no longer needed the pony express or pigeons. It put people out of work but it enabled people’s standards of living to rise. It certainly put the pigeon breeder out of business and it certainly put the horse breeder out of business but these machines and this increase in productivity enabled people’s standard of living to rise.It was disappointing to hear the Leader of the Opposition Andrew Little last month when Xero a high-tech company in Wellington won the top award at the Hi-Tech Awards. That was no mean feat. Xero is part of this age. It is part of the electronic age. These phones have put people out of business. These things have put torch makers and battery makers out of business. They have put photography companies and video companies out of business. That is because these things are enabling people to be more productive. So it was disappointing to hear the Leader of the Opposition say last month that this application that Xero was developing—this application that was going to increase people’s time availability and contribute to the wealth of all New Zealanders—for all its brilliance accountants would be losing work as a result. That is exactly the point. Who is concerned about having fewer accountants in the economy? That is what productivity means. This legislation the Appropriation (2014/15) Supplementary Estimates) Bill and this Budget are focused on increasing productivity.What I would like to talk about now is the fact that we are using technology more and more to increase productivity. We are having more police time on the streets for example because police officers have got access to technology. That is smart investment. It is smart investment that we need to be put in place by the Government in a productive manner. What I would like to say is that this economy that we have which is increasing at 3.5 percent per annum this economy that has produced 190000 new jobs this economy that has one of the highest participation rates on the planet at just under 70 percent is the economy that enables us to provide more hip replacements have better teachers and have more efficient cops on the street. That is why I am supporting this appropriation legislation. This is the 21st century not the 20th century and not the 19th century which the Labour Party continues to set itself in. Labour has to get out of that quagmire and think laterally think innovatively and think about the taxpayer dollar in the most productive way.The taxpayers who are working hard to support their families and community are also increasing their productivity to increase their wealth and their incomes for their families. They need us to invest in what we can to increase productivity. What we need to do today is focus on the cause of our social problems. Rather than spending our way out of trouble we are focusing on the bud of the problem. We are not spending lots of money too late at the bottom of the cliff. That is why we are investing in the 38000 single parents who have come off the benefit in the last few years. If you think about that from a business proposition if you can take—and I am generalising—a single mum off the benefit and potentially her kids and her grandchildren off the benefit there is not going to be this vicious recycling of beneficiaries. That is going to save the taxpayer millions of dollars thereby increasing the strength of the Government’s balance sheet. That is just one aspect. Of course the social aspect is that we have got more people in work participating setting an example for their children and their grandchildren to contribute to their families’ welfare and to the community’s welfare. That is the piece that Labour is missing. That is the ground that Labour used to claim that it had. But Labour can no longer claim that. Labour can no longer claim that it cares for the people at the bottom of the pile. This Budget invests in families that are worse off than everyone else. That is part of the $790 million investment in families.I will get to the Budget and the surplus or lack of it because I think it needs to be addressed. Grant Robertson and Mr Cosgrove continue to focus on the swings and roundabouts of what it means to make a surplus or a deficit—whether it is up $100 million or down $100 million or whether it is up $200 million or down $200 million. But they are missing the whole point. The whole point is that we are heading in the right direction. If you want to use the analogy of one’s own income—if one was on an income of $80000 and had the prospect of an increase in income an increase in salary or wage or whatever it might be then does it really matter at the end of the year that one’s bank balance is up $100 or down $100? Does it really matter? What really matters is the focus that you are on. The focus of this Government is the future. The focus is not on today; the focus is on tomorrow. That is what this Budget sets up for future generations. These investments today are not just about the people of today; they are about the economy and the well-being in the future of those at the bottom of the pile. What I say to Opposition members is “Don’t focus on the surplus or the deficit. It’s really just a little swings and roundabouts.”—as they know. The important thing is the direction. We are heading in the right direction for the people of New Zealand. Productivity is important. It is the very strong focus of this legislation. Taxpayer money and the concern for that is a focus of this bill. The right direction for this country is being set up by this bill. Thank you.SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I believe that this may well be the last speech in the second reading of the Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and it is a pleasure to follow the penultimate speech by my colleague Alastair Scott. As he said we are moving in the right direction. This Budget was delivered against a very positive backdrop. This is an economy that is growing and it is sustained growth over many years. We are seeing rising wages and real wage growth. There are more jobs low inflation and so forth. If I think particularly of my own electorate it is important for things like low interest rates not only to the wider demography but also I think to some of the younger people in my electorate who are even younger than myself who are moving on to—[Interruption] Indeed younger than myself. That is fantastic. It is more a reflection on me than on them.The lower interest rates are incredibly important but for me what I think illustrates where this Budget lands is a small anecdote. The other day was actually the commemoration for Bomber Command at the Auckland War Memorial Museum and that in itself was quite a moving moment. As I was leaving the museum I went through what is known as the Minecraft exhibition which is about the whole Gallipoli landings and is a wonderful way for our young people to engage. As I am wont to do as a constituent MP I started talking to people and there was a young family there who said thank you for the difference that has been made by the whole benefit changes. The Government has made a lot of changes and rightly so.For the first time in 42 years the real rates of benefits have changed. Talking to this young family on a benefit the word was “thanks” and I do not say that with any sort of sense that we need to be thanked—there is no sense of that. It was more that they felt that something had been achieved here and that the Government which they would not normally associate with these changes had made a difference. That little anecdote that little conversation has stuck with me—that this Government has rightly made the changes necessary in the benefit structure in order to help those most in need. Talk is cheap as the adage goes and we have much of it and we have heard much of it from the other side tonight but this Government has acted particularly on the social development side.Look if I turn somewhat selfishly to my own electorate the Budget delivers for Tāmaki. We often hear a lot about housing. Tremendous work is going on around housing in Tāmaki. The taxpayers of New Zealand are effectively providingmillions and millions of dollars in funding for what is known as the Tāmaki Redevelopment Company. New homes are popping up right throughout the electorate particularly in Glen Innes. It is tremendous to see. For a while the communityhas understandably been a bit reticent about the changes because they were being asked to move into changes that they did not understand but now as these new homes are being built—warm dry homes that are the right size for the families be they large or small—real differences are being made. If you go down Line Road in Glen Innesnow you will see the most wonderful new music and arts centre Te Oro. Again it is a really fantastic facility that our young people in particular have been crying out for and I want to thank the local board and others who were behind that.We hear a lot about transport and we know that there has been further spending on transport by this Government. Just one small expression of it for us in Tāmaki is around public transport. I think about $9 million is going to be spent on cyclewaysnot only connecting people of the electorate to the city but also connecting the communities together so that those in Glen Innes can go through Meadowbank and Oraki and on to Tāmaki Drive and the other way around. So there are some real substantial differences and changes there that this Budget has brought and is bringing.We have also heard a lot tonight about the whole element of the surplus. I think actually that the analogy that my colleague Alastair Scott gave around income and whether you are a hundred below or a hundred over is quite apt. What I think the Opposition has probably found most difficult is that we said—quite rightly honestly and transparently—earlier this year and through the Budget that actually we cannot quite make that surplus. We are in the right direction and we are working hard on it. I think some members have used that oft-used scholastic analogy of Jonathan Swift’s about the angels on a pin and in this case how you could put a Boeing 747 on one but we said: “Look it’s going to be jolly difficult.” Of course the Opposition has delighted in that and has trumpeted it. And of course in more recent weeks—if not days—we have heard that it is actually possible that we might make surplus. I want to be clear—I have used a conditional there—that we might make surplus. I am not going to trumpet that myself.Dr Megan Woods: You’re making an announcement Simon?SIMON O’CONNOR: That is right. The MP for Tāmaki is making an announcement. That is right. Thank you to the honourable member there Megan Woods. No that is slightly beyond my pay grade. But we are moving in the right direction. I also think that it shows the volatility in predictions. In fact we only need to think of the election where the predictions said one thing and then we came home not just by a nose but by a head—just to put an analogy to my father who is possibly listening. Speaking of those who are listening just to embarrass the chief whip I just want to do a shout-out to Mrs Macindoe a fine constituent. Your son is doing a good job tonight.But look what we are seeing is a Government moving in the right direction. The last thing I want to talk to—and it will be no surprise to the House—is around health.Scott Simpson: Tell us about Tāmaki.SIMON O’CONNOR: Well Tāmaki is a fine place—a fine place—but no I am going to move to health Mr Simpson.Hon Member: You look like Robert Muldoon.SIMON O’CONNOR: Well I am not quite sure how I could look like Robert Muldoon but anyway—[Interruption] Dearie me. Anyway the health spend is $15.9 billion the largest it has ever been. Look at some of the highlights: $320 million more to district health boards. In doing so with the extra spend to district health boards I want as the chair of the Health Committee to acknowledge what has been happening in Southlandtoday. I want to acknowledge what I think is a good and right decision by the Minister of Health. I know in the committee particularly when we had the Southern District Health Board come before us to talk about the challenges that they were facing that the board themselves understood the problems and I understand today of course as they are asked to step aside that that will be a challenging decision—but I think the right one. Also moving around in the electorate down in Clutha Southland and the likes the challenges are there and so I applaud that decision and the extra funding—the $320 million that is going to district health boards. I noted in a previous speech about the appropriation legislation that there is $76 million for palliative care and hospice care. I think that is a really great initiative. One initiative that people may not know so much about partly because it is one of those topics that you do not want to talk about is bowel cancer screening. Another $12.4 million I think—Scott Simpson: How much?SIMON O’CONNOR: $12.4 million—Scott Simpson: To what?SIMON O’CONNOR: To bowel screening Mr Simpson. Let us hope that for some of us it remains a theory rather than an experience but it is something that is relatively important actually. The initial pilot for this screening has been seen to be efficacious. A pre-Budget announcement—and as is the wont in politics it is often forgotten days afterwards—but just before the Budget we announced $98 million—Chris Bishop: How much?SIMON O’CONNOR: $98 million Mr Bishop. Look I am flattered by the encouragement of my colleagues heretonight. It is a team effort. That is probably a sign of what is different about this side of the House from the other side when it comes not only to this Budget but also to the appropriations which are ultimately appropriations about bringing things together. This National Party and this Government is a team and they bring things together competently and strongly unlike the other side and I will end there.A party vote was called for on the question That the Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2015/16) Bill be now read a second time.Ayes 63New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 58New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.Bills read a second time.Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) BillThird ReadingHon CRAIG FOSS (Minister for Small Business) on behalf of theMinister of Finance: I move That the Appropriation (2014/15 Supplementary Estimates) Bill be now read a third time.Bill read a third time.Imprest Supply (First for 2015/16) BillThird ReadingHon CRAIG FOSS (Minister for Small Business) on behalf of theMinister of Finance: I move That the Imprest Supply (First for 2015/16) Bill be now read a third time.Bill read a third time.Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment BillIn CommitteeClause 1 TitleDr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): I am happy to take a call on this very short piece of legislation which actually only has four clauses but does something very important. Before I get under way with my speech I would like to acknowledge the work that the Local Government and Environment Committee has done on this bill. And I would like to acknowledge the work of the chair of that select committee Scott Simpson on this because I think actually this legislation that we are here debating in the House which Labour does support is actually an example of how a select committee can have a very good influence on a piece of legislation and can improve legislation that comes before it. Although this is a very short piece of legislation there is one clause of substance that being clause 4 which amends section 162 of the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Act. What this bill does in effect is it allows for the continuation of oil and gas operations for four specific operators that were in existence before the legislation was passed in terms of the exclusive economic zone legislation that was passed in 2013 both while they lodge their applications and while there may be appeals against those applications.So what we are here doing is actually playing fix-up again. We are playing fix-up on a piece of legislation where the primary piece of legislation needed to be sent back to the select committee for a major piece of redrafting. That piece of legislation then came before this House in the previous Parliament with a 14-page Supplementary Order Paper from the Minister because so many changes needed to be made to what was a very flawed piece of legislation. One month after the passage of that legislation there was a 37-page amendment bill in the Marine Legislation Bill—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Clause 1 title.Dr MEGAN WOODS: Yes it is clause 1 that is right and that is the title clause which is around the exclusive economic zone. So it is the “Exclusive Economic Zone Fix-up Bill” that we are talking about here the piece of legislation that has had to play fix-up on the primary legislation and not for the first time as I was cataloguing there. We had the 37 pages of amendments to the Marine Legislation Bill brought in by the Hon Gerry Brownlee. But here we are again with the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill—or the “Exclusive Economic Zone Fix-up Bill” as I prefer to call it. Here we are yet again because if we were not doing this fix-up bill what we would be doing is facing the closure of one of our main sources of natural gas at the end of this month. This legislation is required because this Government did not put in place adequate transitional arrangements into the principal legislation to allow for existing operators to transition into a regulatory regime. It would not exactly be rocket science to think: we are putting in place a new regulatory regime we have got some existing operators and we need to bring them inside the regulatory framework. Instead that was just left silent and there was a big gaping hole that could have led to huge economic costs to the country.We in the Labour Party absolutely believe in the need for a managed transition away from fossil fuels but simply shutting down a platform with no planning around it because the Government has made a mistake in legislation is not the way to do that. This is fix-up legislation and whose bungle are we fixing this time? Because when we came to look at this legislation this again was poorly drafted. So we are here doing a Nick Smith fix-up in the Chamber and the Committee. I guess the one thing we can be grateful for is that there were no provisions in the legislation for either power transfer stations or cemeteries to be put on the Māui platform because that is the kind of bungle that Minister can make. We are here because we are working on the very good work that the select committee has done and because of the fact that we would have had very open-ended legislation. So in talking to clause 1 of this bill it being the exclusive economic zone fix-up legislation—if it were not for the work of the select committee we would have been back here in only a very short period of time.GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora Mr Chair. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I will leave my substantive contribution to clause 4 which is basically really the only page of text in the whole legislation. But clause 1 deals with the title. I would like to propose a new title for the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill. I would like to call it the “One Law for Oil Bill” because although I have got the greatest respect for Miss Woods and although it is a further example of the Government not doing its homework and of poor legislative drafting really the blame has to fall squarely at the feet of Shell Todd Oil Services. So perhaps we should be calling it the “Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Shell Todd Oil’s Fix-up) Amendment Bill”.Let us just quickly go through the chronology to explain why I am suggesting these titles. Although the legislation was poorly drafted and was rushed through blame has to be placed at the feet of the very companythat this legislation—using the awesome power of this Parliament to introduce legislation and pass an Act of Parliament—benefits: a single company Shell Todd Oil Services. This was a company involved in the select committee process on the original legislation a company that was heavily involved in lobbying and seeing that legislation passed a company that knew full well the provisions of the legislation a company that Cabinet decided on 8 December 2014 to pass this legislation for and to bring in this amendment bill for. Yet it was not until 15 December more than a month later that Shell Todd Oil Services finally got around to applying for its marine consent.This amendment bill simply retrospectively allows this company to continue its existing activity now that its permit has expired in case there are any appeals. We know it has been a controversial application locally but the fact is that this company ran straight to Cabinet ran straight to Ministers asking them to pass an Act of Parliament to allow it to continue its activity before it even got a marine consent application in. So it is disappointing this company did not appear before the Local Government and Environment Committee but I would like to echo the comments of Miss Woods that it was a constructive select committee process. I would like to acknowledge the chair and all the members because the bill has been substantively improved since the first reading. Kia ora.Su’a WILLIAM SIO (Labour—Māngere): May I just briefly pay my respects to two gentlemen who passed away whose funerals earlier today members of this House participated in or attended: firstly Jerry Collins who was an iconic son of P-Town; and of course Peter Conway a former representative of the Council of Trade Unions. Both of them were quite passionate about this country of ours and both of them lived life to the fullest. I want to join with others and simply pay my respects to them.This bill here hasonly four clauses and it received only five submissions from the public. As to the first clause the title clause which the Government is asking us to debate no one made a submission. I think it might be fitting if the Government moved a motion at some stage for us to debate the whole piece of legislation as one part. I hate doing that but it just seems like we are having to try to fix up the mistakes of this Government time and time again. So I just put that for the Government to consider.I do want to say that of the people who made submissions on this bill three of them were opposed to the bill in totality one of them did not show any indication one way or the other and the other one was the association of the industry which was in favour of the bill. There was a submitter who caught my attention. This submitter raised other issues that relate to the title clause and her name is Tanea Tangaroa. She simply said: “We are not happy that Shell Todd will possibly be granted another perpetual licence to explore further wells and drill in an area that is inhabited by the last 55 Maui dolphins.” So you could say a potential title for this particular bill is one that acknowledges that 55 Māui’s dolphins are put at risk. Although the Government would look at only one side of the argument—the economics of this proposal—I think there is a much broader issue and a title about putting at risk the 55 Māui’s dolphins would broaden out the debate so that it included other issues that are of concern to people.The reason I think why no one made a submission on the title clause is that the public were not given sufficient time to take note that this bill was coming through. This is about the third or fourth time that the Government has had to change the original Act that it introduced in 2012. The reason why those five people did not make any submission on the title clause was that they could not figure out whether the Government was coming or going with the way that it has amended this particular bill over and over again.I put it to the Committee and I say to the Minister that we should be debating the substantive clause which is clause 4 because no one made any submissions on clause 1 clause 2 or clause 3. It was the substantive clause—clause 4—that the submissions paid attention to and I think we need to debate clause 4 significantly in the time that we have got to debate this particular clause.The title Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill is just a mouthful of a title and it should give an indication to our public about what on earth it means. Often it causes suspicion if we are not clear in the way that we write legislation. It causes suspicion. People ask what the Government is trying to hide when the title of a bill does not give clarity about what we are trying to do. As my colleague Dr Megan Woods has said in essence we have attempted to work with the Government to help it right the wrongs and the mistakes it has made in this particular part of legislation. We have said that based on the amended change that the select committee made and brought back to this House we are content to pass the legislation. But I have to say now looking at that clause that the Government needs to be clearer in future about what it wants to do.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I just remind the member of rules around repetition. We have heard this I do not know how many times now.Su’a WILLIAM SIO: Well I will just make it brief then—I will just make it brief. All I am saying is that the Government prides itself on being open and transparent—any Government should—and one of the very first things that an open and transparent Government ought to do is to be clear about its legislation and the first thing that it ought to do is be clear about the title. The present title gives no indication to the general public—particularly those who are interested in what we do and want to hold this Government to account—as to what this bill does. So I would move—maybe I should not move. I suggest to the Government that we debate the substantive clause which is clause 4. Thank you.Clause 1 agreed to.TIM MACINDOE (Senior Whip—National): I seek leave for all remaining clauses of the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill to be considered in one debate with the questions on the clauses to be taken separately at its conclusion.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Leave for that purpose is sought. Is there any objection? There is not. We will be debating clauses 2 to 4 as one motion.Clauses 2 to 4STUART NASH (Labour—Napier):Despite what our Green friend Gareth Hughes said the economic reality is that this bill had to pass through the House—there is no doubt about that. But I suppose the reason why a number of my colleagues have expressed concern about this bill is that we all know—even the Nats know—that this is really a sloppy way to put legislation in place. It is a very sloppy way to manage something that is very important to our environment.If we actually have a look at new section 162(5) in clause 4 it says—we are talking about the drilling for gas here; everybody knows what we are talking about—“the activity may continue without a marine consent until the application is decided under section 62 and any appeals are determined.” What this basically says to the people of New Zealand is: “This is going to go ahead no matter what. Don’t bother appealing because the activity is there and that is the way it is.” I do not think that is a particularly democratic way to do things. There is a lot better way to draft legislation that allows us to get this sort of bill through the House. There is no point in apportioning blame to Shell Todd Oil Services or to the Government—the bottom line is that we have ended in a situation that we have all admitted is suboptimal.I have heard National members stand up and say congratulations to Scott Simpson on the way that this has been managed. Well I would say that if the chair was on the ball when the original legislation came through the House they would have noted—and even the officials would have noted—that this is a glaring admission. You know one of our largest gas platforms has not got consent and the legislation does not cover this. So I am not too sure what went on in the select committee process Mr Chair. I am sure if you had been the chair of committee this would not have happened in any way shape or form—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Don’t bring me into it.STUART NASH: —but it is really messy legislation. But it also cuts to the heart of what we believe as a country and Megan Woods has spoken about this. Our global brand is around our being “clean green” and “100% Pure New Zealand”. It is what we go out there and market. I mean the Ministry of Economic Development or whatever it was called way back when valued our brand at $20 billion a year. That was in 2005 so I am sure it is worth a lot more than that now. The research also showed that 80 percent of New Zealand companies that seek to engage with overseas markets actually leverage off our brand. So part of this—Chris Bishop: Where have I heard this before?STUART NASH: That is right Mr Bishop. You have heard this before because I think it is such an important point. The Government keeps missing the mark on it and I just do not get it because it is so important to our country. What we have done by highlighting this is that you know we have worked incredibly hard and the Labour Government worked incredibly hard to actually develop a regulatory environment that was First World because overseas we are judged on how we manage the regulatory environment and on how big oil companies operate in our exclusive economic zone.By doing this—by having this sort of legislative burp I suppose or misstep—it just says to the world that we are not on top of our game and that also plays into our global brand of being a fantastic citizen and protector of the environment. We have got to get this sort of thing right and I say to the Minister who is in charge of this bill—and I understand that it is not the Minister in the chair. He has got his own issues managing a $2 billion 10-year project; good luck with that one. But I do say to the Minister who is involved with this bill that we have got to do better than this—we really do—as a country because if we continue to develop legislation in such an important area that does have a major consequence on our global brand then we will undo a whole lot of work that over the years has led to the reputation that we have got at the moment.You know back in the good old days we were seen as the cowboys of the wild west. You came down here you did whatever you wanted to do it did not matter and then you got out. If we were lucky as a country it went well and if we were not lucky then it did not go well but who cared? Because we were at the bottom of the Pacific no one cared. That has changed. The way we do business has changed. The way we do business in this country and the messages that we send to overseas markets have changed but this sort of legislation takes us back to the bad old days. We have caught it. The fact is though as mentioned in the legislation in new section 162(5) it basically says you do not need a consent to do this so this is going to be retrospective consenting if in fact there are a whole lot of appeals and I do not know whether there will be but if there are—there is nothing good about retrospective consenting in this sort of environment.The other thing that this does is just give impetus to those—and I am one of them I must admit—who put up the argument for alternative energies. We have got a good story to go out to the market at the moment. You know we are at 80 percent renewables in terms of our electricity generation. That is a very good story but both the National Party and the Labour Party have a target of 90 percent in 10 years. I think we will get there but this sort of stuff says—Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): I was very much enjoying my colleague’s peroration there so apologies to my colleague. This is more of a signalling call. I rise to take a short call in support of this piece of legislation.I am going to pose a question at the start of this contribution and come back to it in the end. The question is: if a Minister falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it has he really fallen? If the gas stops pumping from an offshore oil platform and no one hears it stop has it really stopped pumping? The answer to the latter question is that—Hon Craig Foss: If David stands for leader and no one votes does it happen?Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: Mr Foss that was very Sino of you. The answer to the second question is yes because if the gas stops pumping people’s lights will go out people’s industries will grind to a halt and people will not be able to do what they need to do to get by. That is the kicker with this bill. We just cannot as a country on either side of the floor have a situation where a station that is producing 20 percent of our gas goes offline.That justifies an intervention that has been brought about because this bill needs to amend section 162 of the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Act. The problem for those who have just joined us is that—Chris Bishop: Ha ha!Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: Not you Chris Bishop; you joined us at the last election. I mean people who have just started listening in. Chris Bishop has been here 5 minutes and he thinks he is an expert. Well you know that will wear off. That will wear off Chris as the guy sitting right behind you will be happy to tell you.Tim Macindoe: How many do you think have tuned in at this point?Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: Well you know the way the Government has been performing I would not be surprised if a few have tuned out. But here is why the change is necessary. Poor old Todd has got an appeal under way and the risk for the—Hon Craig Foss: The Hon Todd.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: Maybe not poor maybe not that old but it is a figure of speech. So the company has the potential for an appeal which could interrupt its resource consent under the exclusive economic zone legislation. If it is appealed the company is held up from operations until the appeal has been heard and granted. That is the catch-22 that this bill is seeking to correct and fair enough because we do not want an unintended consequence where a legitimate appeal right results in a pre-emptive cessation of production when it is not required. So that is the problem we are trying to fix.This however is an inelegant solution for a couple of reasons—inelegant but necessary. No. 1 is that the bill names an individual company. That is bad legislative practice. We ought to be making across-the-board rules not legislating for individual stuff-ups by Ministers. No. 2 is that it is retrospective. Only in the rarest occasions will Parliament accommodate retrospective change and generally only when it is citizen-friendly as this arguably is. No. 3 is that this is ad hoc not strategic. It does not as my colleague Stuart Nash said fit neatly in a plan of an ongoing increase in our energy self-sufficiency. However it is what it is. Fourthly of course it is a patch-up job. It is a fix-up for a ministerial error which brings me to the first of the two questions.The Minister falling in the forest of course is Nick Smith deputised today to be as far away from Parliament as he could possibly be because he has had a right roasting over housing. He is the same Minister who is responsible for the lack of foresight in seeing this appeal provision as a problem while putting the original bill through so that Parliament now has to arguably waste its time to fix up those mistakes. If a Minister falls in the forest but there is no one there to hear it has he really fallen? Well those who might be looking to fill his shoes will know that he has fallen. Can we fix this? Yes we can yes we will yes we need to. Should we be here doing this? No we should not. So it is with some reluctance but with cooperation that the Labour Opposition is supporting this bill.THE CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I call Gareth Hughes and remind the Committee that we are looking for new and novel and creative contributions. [Interruption]GARETH HUGHES (Green): Ha! No pressure—that is right. I rise to support the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill and I agree with the member David Cunliffe: it is a fix-up job but it is a fix-up job for Shell Todd Oil Services. Let us be clear: the fact is this company did not get its time lines despite years of knowing how the legislation worked. As I said in an earlier contribution it was involved in the select committee process on the original legislation. It had decades of warning of when its permit was going to expire but before it even put in its application the company ran off to Cabinet and got it to draft this retrospective legislation to give the company a retrospective consent for its marine application for the Māui gas field. That is why I lay the blame at Shell Todd Oil Services. It should have got its house in order. It should have got its time lines in order. This is a substantial company after all and here is Parliament using its awesome power to pass legislation fixing it for the company.Crucially nowhere in the documentation nowhere in the select committee process—no one from Shell Todd Oil Services remember even fronted to the Local Government and Environment Committee—could actually tell us what the impacts of not passing this legislation were. The Green Party was opposed in the first reading because there were not any arguments for the necessity of passing this legislation. Sure the platform could have shut down for a short while. It subsequently received its marine consent from the Environmental Protection Authority. We have got substantial gas storage facilities in New Zealand. The spectre of stoves not working lights not turning on was raised but no one can actually explain how that possibly could be and whether in fact the only penalty would be that this company would itself face some financial penalties for not delivering its gas supply contracts. So those are two myths that we would like to challenge.I would like to turn to why we are supporting this legislation which is that it was improved substantially in the select committee. The two key areas that were improved were the specified time frames and the completeness of applications. What this bill effectively does under the transitional provisions of the original exclusive economic zone legislation is allow a company that has an existing permit that expires to continue for the period for which any appeals might take. One of the crucial problems with the way this amendment bill was originally drafted was that a company could put in an application the day before its permit expired even if that permit had gone for 30 or 35 years knowing full well that under this new amended version of the exclusive economic zone legislation it could continue for as long as the process took as long as any future appeals took. That is why Eugenie Sage and I and other members on the committee thought it was important that there were some specified time frames around it. There were various choices: 6 9 12 months. Six months would have aligned with the Resource Management Act but the committee in its wisdom thought it was good to go to 9 months which is consistent with the Environmental Protection Authority process around the exclusive economic zone legislation and the implementation of it. We think 9 months is a huge amount of time for a company to get its ducks in a row and make sure it has applied.Secondly it was important that the completeness of the application was resolved and clarified in this. What we do not want to see is companies put in incomplete applications right before the deadline. We have seen previous applications—and there has been only a handful in front of the Environmental Protection Authority under this new legislation but I know that the Trans-Tasman Resources case had three or more full pages of further additional questions requested by the authority’s independent decision-making committee because the application was not complete. In fact an impact assessment statement for Anadarko’s drilling off the Raglan coast under the transitional provisions of the original legislation was not even provided to the authority before it gave it the tick of approval to drill what was our deepest-ever well close to the Māui’s dolphin sanctuary as a previous member has raised. So we thought it was important that a complete application had to be mentioned to clarify it—it is crystal clear for everyone involved.We were opposed to this legislation in the first reading because of the inadequate information provided because it simply looked like this company was running to the Government before even putting in its application—well that is what it did; it looked like the company did not get its time lines in order—but since then the bill has been improved. I would like to once again acknowledge the committee members for the constructive positive relationship on the committee. The legislation has been improved. It is now roughly analogous to similar provisions in the Resource Management Act. There are around three other companies that face this but we are not talking for decades so let us hope they do learn the lessons of Shell Todd Oil Services.RON MARK (NZ First): I rise to take a call. I will take your guidance Mr Chairman and I will try to be new novel and creative in my contribution but I do have to be a tad boring in terms of putting New Zealand First’s position on the record. I do remind some of the—[Interruption] Sorry Mr Foss. What was that again?Hon Craig Foss: Irony’s not allowed in here.RON MARK: Irony is not allowed? We will stay with you. I think you should be at home worrying about your next nomination actually Mr Foss but never mind. I have to put on the record New Zealand First’s position and forgive me if we take a slightly boring line in some aspects because there are some things that we would like to mention in respect of the considerations of the bill. There is not a lot I can disagree with in the summations that have been made already.I went back through prior to coming down to the Chamber some of the submissions particularly the submission from Tanea Tangaroa who expressed her whānau and hapū’s concerns over the imposition on their rights in terms of determining how the natural resources within the blue waters might be managed and the affairs and worries about the 55 Māui’s dolphins. I did listen with great interest to the presentation or the submission from the Petroleum Exploration and Production Association of New Zealand and I was somewhat mystified to say the least. It seemed to me that the genesis of this piece of legislation actually lies in the legislation that went through in 2013 which all occurred while I was out of the House having my sabbatical break as the Mayor of Carterton.What I gleaned from those submissions was that the base legislation that was passed in 2013 was flawed. It had holes in it. The responsibility for that is the National Government’s. In fact the responsibility for that was one Mr Nick Smith’s. It injected a problem into the legislation a problem that the oil industry wanted the Government to resolve. Cabinet agreed that the problem that was injected in was not its intent—it was an oversight—and moved to satisfy the oil company’s needs by putting this legislation in front of the House. It is interesting to think back as to where this problem occurred because in light of what is happening today—in an attempt to be creative and interesting—one cannot escape the obvious conclusion that wherever Nick Smith tends to walk disaster tends to follow. We are seeing time and time again whether it was in local government with the rushed botched way in which he attacked the Local Government Act and now with what is happening with Ngāti Whātua and the right of first refusal and then on top of that this piece of legislation that this House is spending an exorbitant amount of time and taxpayers’ money fixing up legislation that Mr Smith is responsible for.I am really pleased that on the select committee we have people of the calibre of Scott Simpson and Todd Muller. These are the types of people who could quite easily slot into Nick Smith’s job and do a far better job than that which we are trying to redress right now. There is only one reason we are here doing this. It is because of the Minister’s failings. The question when we talk about this bill—and we are all unanimously in agreement with the measures that have to be taken. We actually agreed on the amendment to change the application for a marine consent the lead time to 9 months. We unanimously agreed on that by sitting down and talking it through—something that the Minister himself is not renowned for. Talking things through is not what he is widely acknowledged for. He does not display the skills of someone who can talk things through and hence we are fixing his stuff-up.David Bennett: Why don’t you walk in the park with old Cunliffe?RON MARK: So Mr David Bennett who will never be in Cabinet—in fact Todd Muller will be there before him—interjects across the Chamber but he does it in a very embarrassed way because he is embarrassed for Nick Smith. He is embarrassed for Nick Smith but I would only say to Mr Bennett: “You’re backing a dead horse. Get on the right horse. Smith’s gone. The sooner he’s out of his misery the sooner we’ll stop having to pass legislation like this to fix his muck-ups.”I will not actually stop with Mr Smith. The oil company Shell Todd Oil Services needs to accept some responsibility itself.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Members the question is that clauses 2 3 and 4 stand part. Those of that opinion will say Aye those against will say No. The Ayes have it. I will report this bill without amendment presently.TIM MACINDOE (Senior Whip—National): I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. Could I just make the point that you have just put the question when not a single National member has spoken despite the fact that several National members were seeking the call—not too slowly because they have sought the call before and been overturned.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I take the member’s point. However the question has been put. The debate was becoming repetitious. I take the point that National members did not receive a call. I take it they are not upset that the matter has now moved on and we are now about to debate the Environmental Reporting Bill.Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I just note that you put the question on clauses 2 3 and 4 of this bill but there are actually an additional three clauses of the bill—5 6 and 7. So I am wondering what the Chair’s intention is to do with those clauses of the bill. Maybe a National Party member might like to take a call on one of those clauses.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): The member makes an excellent point. The question is that clause 2 stand part. [Interruption] I am sorry. The question is that clause 2 stand part. All those in favour will say Aye—TIM MACINDOE (Senior Whip—National): I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. Could I ask you to explain to this Committee when there are members of all sides of the Committee seeking the call why you are shutting down the debate particularly when no Government member has had a chance to speak. And could I also make the point that there was agreement between the parties as to how this debate would be dealt with and we are within the time frame and all members expected that the time frame would be observed.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I will take the member’s point. If a member from the Government seeks a call—[Interruption] I call Scott Simpson. [Interruption] I will remind the member seeking the call that we are looking for novel new and creative contributions to the debate.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I am just seeking a clarification as to procedure. Unanimous as we are with the Government whip on the matter that we are within the bounds of the time that had been informally agreed for this debate and therefore in principle that we welcome the opportunity for Government members to make a contribution to the debate nonetheless your previous ruling was that you had already put the question on clauses 2 3 and 4 and my good colleague Dr Megan Woods had noted that clauses 5 6 and 7 were still available for debate. I wonder whether your intention was in fact to carry out the vote that you had put and then to open up debate leniently on the remaining clauses.RON MARK (NZ First): In order to be try to be helpful I recognise that this puts you in a very awkward position as the Chair. It is unusual for a whip to challenge the decision of the Chair particularly when the question has been put. I worry that that actually might set a precedent. Maybe a way forward might well be that if someone sought leave for an extra call to be given at this point in time setting aside what is normal rules and conventions and the Standing Orders that would do it without the embarrassment of a senior whip being seen to be challenging the authority of the Chair in such a manner.TIM MACINDOE (Senior Whip—National): Can I just make the point that I quite deliberately did not challenge the Chair’s ruling. I used the words “may I draw to your attention” that this had occurred because I was not seeking to challenge your ruling so much as to express surprise that the question had been put before Government members had taken a call. I believe that the Hon David Cunliffe has correctly discussed the position that we are now in and I wonder whether with the agreement of the Committee we might seek leave.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I can inform the Committee that I have taken advice. I am obviously the author of my own rather public nest which is not as tidy as it was when we started at 7.30 this evening. I have put those clauses in error as clauses 2 3 and 4 and having moved to the vote I now need to do that. So my advice is that I need to put the question that clause 2 stand part and then move through to clause 3 and clause 4.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. There are two parts to this point of order. The first is to correct my earlier point of order where I indicated—and it was supported by the Government whip—that in the event that it was clauses 5 6 and 7 we could treat them separately from 2 3 and 4. On closer inspection however I see that they are subclauses of clause 4 and so cannot be put separately. The advice that we have received is that it may be possible by leave with your willingness to look leniently at the process and in view of your comment about the nest to extend the debate on clauses 2 3 and 4. I would ask you to consider that.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I am sorry but the advice I have had—and I repeat it to the Committee—is that we now need to go through the vote separately on clauses 2 3 and 4 without further debate because it has been put.TIM MACINDOE (Senior Whip—National): I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. It is a fresh point of order and I wish to emphasise that I am certainly not challenging your ruling. I am simply making the point that at the start of this particular debate I sought leave—and it was agreed by the whole Committee—for the debate to be taken as one question but for the votes to be taken separately. Therefore I believe it is now appropriate for you to take the vote on each clause separately because that was the resolution of the Committee.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): I will be taking the votes separately but I will be moving between the votes on clauses 2 3 and 4 without further debate.Clause 2 agreed to.Clause 3 agreed to.Clause 4 agreed to.Bill to be reported without amendment presently.Environmental Reporting BillIn CommitteeDebate resumed from 16 June.Part 1 Preliminary provisions (continued)DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): I wanted to speak aboutonly clause 3 of the bill which is of course the purpose clause—rather it is supposed to be the purpose clause of the bill. But in fact it now includes only part of paragraph (a) of the original version and simply states: “The purpose of this Act is to require regular reports on New Zealand’s environment.” If you compare that with the original clause 3 we see first of all that the words “as a whole:” have been deleted from paragraph (a).You could ask the question: why? In the commentary on the bill you simply read that this is done to simplify the bill. I thought it was pretty simple as it was already and that removing the words “as a whole” is a mistake. Those words are important. They would require in my view a more holistic approach to reporting under the bill. It is not good enough I think to do only some environmental reporting and leave out topics that the Government actually does not want to be reported on. It is also not good enough to report on topics in isolation from each other without a big-picture reporting mechanism—such as for example on the effects of climate change—as a result of some of the more specific reports.I also note that paragraphs (b) (c) (d) and (e) in the original clause 3 are not included either. Therefore not only is reporting on the environment as a whole removed but the subsidiary reporting on specific listed domains in paragraph (b) is not referred to as a purpose at all any longer. Paragraph (c) which talks of the requirement for independent fair and accurate reporting as a purpose is also removed. Yet these are some of the most important parts of the bill.The truncation of the purpose clause to just the words in paragraph (a) without the words “as a whole” renders the purpose statement in the bill virtually meaningless in my view. It adds no more actually than what you read in the title. So it is hardly worth having that as a purpose statement at all. But more important the clause now fails to state clearly that there are—or rather should be–dual purposes in the bill and not a single general one as appears there now. The first of those is reporting on the environment as a whole and secondly reporting on the named specific domain areas.The amendments to clause 3 are like having a car that stops due to some sort of defect and then instead of fixing the defect the engine the gearbox the drivetrain and so on are removed as a means of making the defect disappear but in the process of course it makes the whole vehicle useless. That is what has been done with clause 3. It was a useful clause and now it is virtually meaningless. I would like to see at least the first three paragraphs—(a) (b) and (c)—reinserted so that it is a more meaningful purpose statement.The real reason of course for these amendments is what is interesting. I think it is simply to hide the fact that later in the bill overall reporting on the environment is deliberately to be avoided by the Government because the Government actually knows that its record on reporting on the environment generally is poor. To remove independent reporting on specific domains and topics is also a very poor response to what the select committee considered. Because the Government intends to use executive powers and not report at all on some potentially embarrassing matters it has decided to go through the bill and remove all those parts that would cause it to have to report on some of the matters I have referred to. That means reporting holistically on all of the matters relating to environmental reporting as they relate to each other as well as reporting on specific domains and topics in the bill. That is the major defect with regard to clause 3 as I see it. So this pathetic amended clause 3 in my view is not a valid purpose statement at all.EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I will comment just on Part 1 of the Environmental Reporting Bill. The whole Government objective for this bill as outlined in the departmental disclosure statement was “to have a legislative basis for independent environmental reporting in order to give the public certainty about the scope timing and quality of the information” that the public will receive. It is recognised that there is quite a range of reporting that is done at the moment by regional councils by territorial local authorities and by Crown research institutes such as the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research and it is certainly a good idea to have consistent consolidated and comprehensive state of the environment reporting. So we support the original objective of the legislation but it is fatally flawed because as other speakers have noted it does not provide for independent state of the environment reporting. The topics will be set by the Minister.Comments have been made about clause 3 which previously had quite a list of matters one of which actually was to “ensure that producers of environmental reports act independently and produce fair and accurate reports.” Of course that has been amended through the select committee process by the wishes of the majority of the committee. So the purpose statement in clause 3 is now much shorter. In my Supplementary Order Paper on this bill Supplementary Order Paper 87 I propose a small change to that clause to actually include that the report should be on “the state of” New Zealand’s environment because simply reducing the purpose of the bill to be requiring regular reports on New Zealand’s environment means that those reports do not actually have to be about the state of the environment.The Minister for the Environment has been mischievous in the extreme and is seeking to mislead as usual by suggesting that the Opposition members of the Local Government and Environment Committee were not supportive of the overall intent of the bill. We were also very supportive of the changes to Part 1 in relation to clause 4A which recognises the Crown’s responsibility to take appropriate account of Te Tiriti o Waitangi yet the Minister suggested when he made comments from the chair that there was opposition to that. That was completely incorrect. We do support that clause in the bill but we have quite major concerns about the lack of independence for the whole system.I think the Minister in his comments from the chair also suggested that Opposition members should look at the Statistics Act and the fact that that Act provides for Ministers to establish the matters that will be reported on. The major difference is that that Act was passed at a time when there was a robust and independent Public Service. We have seen under this Government a major hollowing-out of the Public Service. We have seen a lot of interference by Ministers and we have only to look at the example of the Minister responsible for this bill when he interfered with the Department of Conservation’s responsibility for statutory advocacy on the Ruataniwha Dam and effectively quashed a 32-page submission by that department on the Ruataniwha Dam application. So the concern that Ministers will interfere is a very real one given that as the Minister himself alluded to there has already been an example of that happening with the suppression of a chapter of the state of the environment report that made some recommendations for change.So the two major flaws with the bill are the lack of independence and the real failure to ensure that the reports are comprehensive and take account of matters where there is inadequate information—that that is actually recognised. I have got some changes in Supplementary Order Paper 87 that address that matter. The original purpose of the bill—to provide this independent system—was good but that is not what the bill is actually going to deliver.When the Government members have been talking about the bill they have been saying that it recognises that protection of the environment is intrinsic to every Kiwi. That was what Mr Doocey said. So what is the Government so afraid of in having the Secretary for the Environment and the head of Statistics New Zealand actually making the decisions around what topics should be reported on? What is it so afraid of that it wants Ministers to set out those topics? The provisions in this bill for regulations are thereonly to enable Ministers to set the topics to be reported on and that is a major deficiency in the bill.I have got a number of changes that are set out in my Supplementary Order Paper and I hope other members can support these. We have sought to be constructive with these changes. They are not the sweeping changes that we would have liked to have made to the bill. I think it is very disappointing that the Government has not taken up this opportunity to improve the bill because once again it is an example of legislation that the Government is ramming through that does not have the support of all of the House. It is such a fundamental part of our environmental policy to ensure that we have robust state of the environment reporting to inform changes to the law and to inform changes to policy yet the National Government wants to slant that reporting by having it politicised and it wants to risk the legislation being changed when there is a change of Government. It would be much better with this sort of legislation to have a consensus across the House and for the Government to take on board some of the changes that are being proposed through my Supplementary Order Paper in order to improve the bill rather than just reject them as we expect that it will do. Thank you.SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): It is nice to finally take a call this evening on a piece of legislation in the Committee of the whole House. This Environmental Reporting Bill is an important piece of legislation and in talking to Part 1 of the bill this evening I just really want to make the point that in the Local Government and Environment Committee we had very useful and constructive conversations and debates around a whole range of issues particularly relating to the purpose clause clause 3 which was well debated in the select committee. Ultimately the select committee decided by majority that it wanted to simplify the clause that was first proposed to it in the first reading of the bill which was long-winded and did not really get to the nub of what the purpose of the bill is. So we have ended up by majority landing at a place where clause 3 says: “The purpose of this Act is to require regular reports on New Zealand’s environment.” That is a short precise and succinct clause but it is important because what it does is neatly sum up the purpose of this bill. It does so without politicising it and without getting into an area where parties that want to grandstand and take a platform on issues could use the legislation to pursue their own political agendas. That is the purpose of depoliticising this clause of the bill.What we have heard in previous contributions on Part 1 of the bill is really opposition for the sake of opposing because as chair of the select committee I know that deep down members opposite really do want to support this legislation. They do want to support it because this is the first time that New Zealand will have a legislative regime once this bill is passed that ensures that we do have regular independent reporting on the environmental matters relating to the domains that are so important to our natural and environmental surroundings. Clause 4 the interpretation clause lists those domains—the air domain the atmosphere and climate domain the biodiversity area and climate is defined as well. These are where the meat if you like of the legislation is defined for reference in terms of the domain reports that will be provided on a regular basis once this legislation is enacted.It will come as no surprise to people listening to this debate this evening that in fact we have been as a nation a little tardy in this area in terms of reporting regularly and independently on our environmental status. We are one of very few—in fact I think maybe we are the only OECD country that does not currently have a legislative statutory regime for reporting of this nature. So this bill and the purpose clause neatly sets us in an area of best practice in terms of international best practice standards and also enables us as a nation to find that we have this independent reporting that is going to be so important to the underpinning of the legislation.Clause 4 the interpretation clause goes on to set out the role of the Government Statistician and the Ministry for the Environment by way of the establishment of a process for reporting. These are important matters and important parts of the bill because they go again to the sort of machinery to the mechanics of what makes this bill work and how it is going to tick. Bringing together the agencies of the Ministry for the Environment and the Government Statistician means that we will be able to draw as a nation upon the independent well-respected and credible resources of both those State agencies in a way that has previously been unavailable to us as a nation. The outcome will almost certainly help us identify areas where we could probably do better because undoubtedly in any environmental situation there is always room for improvement. It is very obvious to those of us who have been involved in business and commercial matters—and we understand—that what you cannot or do not measure really has no relevance or importance. For too long our legislation has not enabled us to measure these important aspects of our environment so I am very confident that where we have landed as a select committee will ensure that the role of the Government Statistician will provide the kind of robustness that will be equalled and measured by the input of the Ministry for the Environment and that those two agencies will be able to provide us with the independence that is being sought by members opposite.There is a Treaty clause. It is clause 4A of the bill and it is a clause that we included at the select committee in order to acknowledge the role of the Treaty and in order to recognise and respect the Crown’s responsibility to take appropriate account of the Treaty and its principles. This set of provisions in Part 1 goes a long way I think to establishing the foundations of a very good and important piece of legislation—one that if I was to be I guess picky I would say should have been advanced by a Labour-Green Government when it had the opportunity to do so. Members opposite are now literally clutching at straws to find reasons to oppose this very good piece of legislation when they had more than enough opportunity to bring something like this in themselves when they had that chance and they chose not to. They put it in the too-hard basket probably because they could not really get their heads around the way a piece of complicated measuring and reporting should be done. So to hear members opposite now opposing as I say largely for the sake of opposition a bill that deep down I know they wish to support is somewhat galling for members on this side to have to listen to.This is very good legislation. It does not have the flaws that members opposite are attributing to it and indeed my advice to members opposite is to stop looking for shadows where none exist. It is very easy I guess when you are in Opposition to do that and to get into a mindset where things may be conjured up out of the mists of nothing—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to interrupt the member and in doing it I am going to plead guilty to being relatively slack in the early stages of chairing this part especially in Mr O’Rourke’s speech but also in the first part of the member’s speech. What we are debating at the moment is Part 1 of the bill as it has been reported from the select committee. All the changes have been accepted by the House so we are not debating what has been taken out. Mr O’Rourke was pretty irrelevant and—Denis O’Rourke: That’s absolute nonsense.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member will stand withdraw and apologise.Denis O’Rourke: I decline.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Well the member—in my experience in these matters and it is pretty substantial—does not have a choice. The member will stand withdraw and apologise.Denis O’Rourke: I withdraw and apologise.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): As I was attempting to say replying to speeches that are irrelevant is in itself irrelevant. The member has now got into that and it is my intention to tighten this debate right up to Part 1 as it has been accepted at second reading and to whether Part 1 implements the principles of the bill which the House has already accepted.Denis O’Rourke: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I wish to say to you that I object very much to the comments you made about me and my speech. They were completely wrong not called for and not needed as part of the exchange you had with the other member. I would ask you to withdraw them.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Well I decline to withdraw to the member. What I did say at the beginning was that I did apologise to the Committee for not intervening sooner and the reason I did not intervene was that I wanted to consult the Speakers’ rulings and take advice as to whether or not the comments that the member made about whether or not clauses that had been taken out of the bill should have or should not have been taken out at select committee were relevant. The advice that I have received and I have taken and I have accepted and it is now the view that I have expressed to the Committee is that it is not relevant and therefore I am not going to allow Government members to go on about it because they would be being irrelevant too.SCOTT SIMPSON: I acknowledge the content of your ruling and accept it—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Just do not comment on it at all.SCOTT SIMPSON: —without reservation. Clause 3 of Part 1 of the bill is the purpose clause and it simply says: “The purpose of this Act is to require regular reports on New Zealand’s environment.” What the committee was I think trying to get to there was a question of the nature of the regularity of those reports the nature and the breadth of the term “environment” and whether or not those needed to be extended in any way in the drafting of the clause. We ultimately decided against that.Clause 4 is the interpretation clause and therefore it sets out the various domains and the context required for defining those for the purposes of the bill. “Biodiversity” for instance is defined as meaning “the variability among living organisms and the ecological complexes of which they are a part”. So it is easy for us as a legislature to get into quite technical and succinct parts of language that have a very scientific application. I suspect that as members who are literally members of the House of Representatives we by and large do not have the expert knowledge that is required to come to terms with the absolute interpretation of those words that are used in the clauses as presented in the bill tonight. But what we do know is that the science specialists and those who have expertise in this area will be able to flesh that out in terms of the reports that are provided on a regular basis as proposed in clause 3. I think that is probably all I wish to say in terms of Part 1 of this bill and I look forward to the debate as it continues. Thank you.Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): Can I first of all commend the member who has just resumed his seat Scott Simpson for his competent and capable chairing of the Local Government and Environment Committee which has brought the bill back to the House in a better state than it arrived at the select committee—in my view and the view of my colleagues who served on the committee. But I want to pose a question to the member—not that he is in a position to answer it although it is possible that he may be in a position to be sitting as a Minister in the chair in the not too distant future with the way things are going. The question is whether at the end of 2017 when he is no longer in Government he will have achieved every single thing that he wanted to do. I think that the answer to that would be no which is why I can say with confidence that his contribution in relation to our opposition was incorrect. That is a very generous—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I am now going to interrupt this member—Hon RUTH DYSON: Oh that would be a change.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Please take a seat. Responding to irrelevant responses cannot possibly be focusing on Part 1. I just invite the member to focus on Part 1 of the bill directly.Hon RUTH DYSON: I certainly will and actually I am going to ask you to consider whether responding to his challenge on our position on Part 1 is irrelevant because in my view that is not a correct interpretation of my contribution to the debate because it is about Part 1 and about Labour’s opposition to it. This is not the most contentious part of this bill. It is not the issue on which the Committee will seriously divide and I think it is a great tragedy that we will have that in the second part of the debate. Part 1 is pretty small but it covers some important issues. It covers the purpose of the bill and I guess if you ask most people in the Chamber and outside the purpose of the bill really is the fundamental part of it because it is what it is about.Eugenie Sage has got Supplementary Order Paper 87 which covers a number of proposed changes to the—sorry just one on new clause 3 on the purpose which after “require regular reports on”is to insert “the state of”. So the purpose would become if the amendment is agreed to—and I certainly hope it would be—“The purpose of this Act is to require regular reports on the state of New Zealand’s environment.” rather than as it currently is: “… reports on New Zealand’s environment.”In the same way in respect of the interpretation in clause 4 Part 1 there are three amendments again proposed by Green member Eugenie Sage and we will be offering our support for that. Clause 4 in Part 1 the interpretation clause was subject to quite a large number of submissions. We have already noted the changes that were made by the Local Government and Environment Committee in regard to the interpretation clause right through to defining who the Ministers are. That is obviously going to lead us into that more substantive debate when we get to Part 2 and the insertion—Scott Simpson the chair of the committee said that this change was by majority. I thought it was a unanimous insertion. The member is nodding. Is that indicating that it was unanimous the new clause 4A Treaty of Waitangi insertion? I thought it was unanimous. It may have been by majority but it calls into question the contribution that Minister Nick Smith made in this regard backed up by the earlier contribution of Eugenie Sage.The Treaty of Waitangi provision in Part 1 is quite a new legislative recognition of the Crown’s responsibility in regard to the Treaty. I am not sure whether members decided that that was appropriate but it was clearly discussed at the select committee. It was not a close vote if it was indeed a majority vote and it certainly got support. I think that that is going to give us new challenges in terms of our understanding of the Crown’s responsibility. That is not a bad thing. I am really wanting to express my appreciation to the committee for giving us that opportunity.In relation to the submissions on the interpretation a lot of submitters noted the absence of definitions for key terms that were used in the bill and asked for clearer definitions. The part that we are no longer able to discuss was one example of that but I will not obviously be referring to that. There were four submitters who were specifically concerned about the definitions of the various domains. These are important organisations which had a substantive amount of consideration and input into this legislation: the Environmental Defence Society Local Government New Zealand the McGuinness Institute and Seafood New Zealand. They were specifically concerned about the definitions of the various domains in the interpretation provisions. Again these will be subject to more debate in Part 2 where we look at the domains and synthesis reports but it is important for us to consider whether we have got the interpretation provisions correct and whether we have met the concerns of the submitters because as I say I think they were substantial contributions.Other submitters looked at the definitions of “impact category” “ecological integrity” “public health” the economic benefits and the culture and recreation and again said that there should be more specific definitions around those. I think that the one that was singled out by most submitters though was the term—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to interrupt the member on the same basis as I should have interrupted other members earlier. We are now debating the bill as it was reported from the select committee and the amendment of Eugenie Sage. We are not debating what is not in here. That was done at the second reading. If there was an amendment put up to include something it becomes relevant. If it is not it is not.Hon RUTH DYSON: Could you just alert me to the relevance of that in relation to what I was saying because I actually cannot make the connection.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): I think the member was clearly listing a group of submissions about things that should have been included in Part 1 of the bill and it—Hon RUTH DYSON: I am having a bad run with the Chair tonight.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Because it is not relevant.Hon RUTH DYSON: I do not think it is our lucky night Mr Simpson. You can pass on my sharing of this feeling to Mr Macindoe when you see him later in the evening. I think there has been a bit of a hiccup in the communication. What I was—Kris Faafoi: Just stop.Hon RUTH DYSON: It is only a quarter past nine. I do not think anyone is voting for an early knock-off. What I was referring to was specifically—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Clearly one or two are actually.Hon RUTH DYSON: Well if you are suggesting you might be leaving early that might be a different matter Mr Chairman. It was just a light-hearted response to your interjection of course. So what I was referring to were the changes that were made in the interpretation clause because they were the subject of substantive submissions and they were agreed by the committee. I am commenting on the changes that were made and therefore are reported back and are included in Part 1. In fact particularly if you look at the changes that were made by the committee in relation to “ecological integrity” it now says “ ‘ecological integrity’ means the full potential of indigenous biotic and abiotic features and natural processes functioning in sustainable communities habitats and landscapes” which is a result of the contribution from submitters. That is where my earlier contribution was leading to.I just want to conclude by again referring to Supplementary Order Paper 87 in the name of Eugenie Sage. In relation to clause 4 in the definition of “topic” it asks to replace “regulations” with “notice in the Gazette”; in new clause 4A(b) to replace “regulations” with “a notice in the Gazette”; and the same in new clause 4A(b). I have noticed a tendency in some debates that we have had that the National Government has just voted against Supplementary Order Papers that are put up by members but I urge further consideration particularly led by the chairman of the select committee because there has been some constructive debate about this bill. Even though we will end up voting against it we have I think had a contribution that has been helpful to the debate. In the end if we had had an environmental reporting bill as defined in the interpretation provisions in clause 4 that would have meant that we could have an independent setting of the atmosphere and climatic domains—for example the air domains—and then it would be a bill that we could support.The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 87 in the name of Eugenie Sage to clause 3 be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the question That the amendment be agreed to.Ayes 60New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12; Māori Party 2.Noes 61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendment not agreed to.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 87 in the name of Eugenie Sage to clause 4 and new clause 4A be agreed to.A party vote was called for on the question That the amendments be agreed to.Ayes 60New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12; Māori Party 2.Noes 61New Zealand National 59; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Amendments not agreed to.A party vote was called for on the question That Part 1 be agreed to.Ayes 63New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.Noes 58New Zealand Labour 32; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.Part 1 agreed to.Part 2 Environmental reportingThe CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): We now move to the debate on Part 2. We have Eugenie Sage’s amendments to clauses 7 10 12 13 14 16 18 and 19 set out on Supplementary Order Paper 87 and a tabled amendment inserting new clause 11A. I am making it clear that we are debating those amendments and what was agreed at the second reading.Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my pleasure to take a call on Part 2 and I want to speak to clauses 7 and 10 of the billin particular which cover off the content of both the synthesis and the domain reports. Clause 7 covers the synthesis reports and clause 10 covers the domain reports. In addressing those clauses as agreed to in the select committee and reported back to the House I also want to address the amendments around the way they may be improved which Eugenie Sage has put up in Supplementary Order Paper 87.Let us turn our attention first of all to clause 7 of the bill which covers the contents of the synthesis reports. It asks that “(1) Each synthesis report must describe in relation to the topics prescribed in regulations made under section 18”—and I will come to section 18 in a further contribution—“all of the following matters: (a) the state of New Zealand’s environment including biodiversity and ecosystems; and (b) the pressures that may be causing …”. The reason why we are supporting the Supplementary Order Paper that addresses clause 7 of the bill is that what we want to see meaningful environmental reporting that is of genuine benefit to the environment and that gives us some way to analyse what the cause is of the state of the environment that we are observing. What we are seeing in terms of the legislation as it is before us in clause 7 is that it is far too descriptive and not analytical enough. What Eugenie Sage’s amendmentsays as set out is that there are ways to analyse the content of those reports and it is a far more productive and useful document when we have the synthesis reports come back to us. That is the change.We have signalled our opposition to this bill from the very beginning. We have signalled our opposition to it at the select committee and in our contributions to this stage of the debate. What we have also signalled is that we would be willing to support it if there are some changes made to the legislation as it is reported back. Actually making sure that we have meaningful synthesis reports and meaningful domain reports and the way that the Supplementary Order Paper sets out the amendments which would go some way to achieving this would mean that Labour could support the legislation. Like the Greens we would like to have seen some perhaps more far-reaching changes but we think that the amendments that have been put up particularly in Part 2 are going a long way towards making this a bill that every member in this House could agree to. I will be very interested to hear from the Minister in the chair the reason why the Government will not agree to the measures in Part 2 which are being put up and supported by a number of parties in this House and which would mean independent reporting.In mentioning this I am turning my attention now to clause 18 in Part 2 of the legislation. What I want to know from the Minister is why there is objection to putting in place protections to ensure that we do not just have a Minister of whatever political hue making decisions for political reasons about what is going to be reported on in our environmental reporting. What we want to see is that the decisions that are being made about what topics will be covered off are being made for purely environmental reasons—that they are in the best interests of the environment and not in the best interests of someone’s political agenda. That is what the amendments that Eugenie Sage has put up in her Supplementary Order Paper would achieve. She has found a very good way to work around that.There are other bodies. Many submitters came to the select committee and described other mechanisms that could be used to ensure that we do have independent environmental reporting. Although these have not found their way into the bill that we have before us they have found their way into Eugenie Sage’s Supplementary Order Paper and into the amendments that she has put up. Several other bodies were put up as alternatives. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment was put up as one body that could make the decision. The Parliamentary Commissioner herself told us that because she had a commentary role in this bill this would not be appropriate. So for that reason the amendments that we are looking at today look at alternative mechanisms. They look to the Government Statistician as one person along with the Secretary for the Environment and the power of regulation making and the way in which that can be used. It is our firm belief that when it comes to the interests of the environment we have to have political distance in place.The other clause that I want to turn my attention to now is the one covering the role of the commissioner which I alluded to in my discussion of a previous clause. The role of the commissioner is a very specific function under this legislation as covered off in clause 17: “(1) In accordance with his or her functions and powers under the Environment Act 1986 the Commissioner may at his or her discretion report on an environmental report and the processes that produced it. (2) The matters that the Commissioner may report on under subsection (1) include but are not limited to—(a) analysing environmental reports: (b) identifying trends: (c) discussing the implications of environmental report findings: (d) recommending responses to environmental report findings.”These are all incredibly important functions and already we have seen the commissioner produce one report that is a prelude to what is going to be produced under clause 17 of this legislation in terms of the air quality domain report that was produced earlier this year. It gave the public a bit of a taste of the worth and the value of the reporting that we could potentially see under this legislation. What we had from the commissioner was a very sound consideration of the science particularly with regard to particulate levels and what it is that we should be measuring when we are considering air quality in New Zealand. Should we be looking at the kind of particulate that we have previously measured which traditionally has been of concern in New Zealand—PM10—or should we go down to a smaller level and measure a different kind of particulate?It is our great desire to be able to support legislation such as this which is going to produce such sound information on the state of our environment. It is with sadness that Labour is not able to support this legislation. We are one of very few countries in the OECD that do not have an environmental reporting framework. We heard the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee Scott Simpson who did a very fine job of chairing the select committee say that we are clutching at straws—echoing the words of the Minister who was in the chair last night. But it is simply not true. We worked hard and we worked constructively at the select committee to try to ensure that we could have genuine independent environmental reporting in this country. That is not some straw. The fact that you do not have political decision-making for political purposes around how it is that we are going to have a safeguard around our environment is not what I call a straw. Perhaps the attitude of the Minister in the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee gets to the very heart of the problem and to why it is that we have a deficit in the legislation that we are debating here tonight. They do not see a problem with having political interference and political oversight of how it is that we measure the state of our environment. But for us in Labour and on this side of the House that is not just a straw in the wind; that is a fundamental that has to be there in any piece of legislation that purports to be about reporting on the state of our environment. It is lacking here and I will cover off some other things that are lacking in this legislation in further contributions on this part. For this I want to hear the Minister in the chair Craig Foss on his feet giving us an explanation as to why it is that we cannot put in place the mechanisms that are being put up in a Supplementary Order Paper that would give us independence.What is it that is so frightening about having a level of independence in the decision making around what it is that we report on? This is something that has to be addressed in the course of this debate. We cannot have a Minister who just sits there and refuses to address a question as fundamental as that. We are not asking for the earth. We are asking for a basic tenet of any robust and good environmental reporting system—that is independence from political interference. That is not too much to ask and until we can see that in this legislation we cannot support it.MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): I just want to follow on from that member Megan Woods and talk about political interference independence and accountability. I think it is right that the Minister is involved with the domain reports and the synthesis reports for that mere fact of accountability. I would point out in clause 18 “Regulations” subclause (3) says: “Before recommending the making of regulations under subsection (1) the Ministers must consult (a) the Government Statistician; and (b) the Commissioner; and (c) the public; and (d) iwi authorities; and (e) local authorities.” So there is consultation and there is accountability. With that clause in there I think it does exactly that. It stops that political interference. It means the Ministers have to go through that consultation to speak with the Government Statistician the commissioner and the public especially. So the public will be involved in the domains and I think that very much answers that question around political interference.I can understand the calls for independence but equally what we want is accountability. That is why under this Government the Ministers will stand up and take accountability. I also draw reference to clause 15 about reports being fair and accurate. One thing that was not discussed in the previous stage around purpose is that the purpose of this bill—yes we are reporting on domains every 6 months and a synthesis report I think every 3 years but underneath that is trust and confidence.What this bill is doing through clause 15—we need to ensure that the public has trust and confidence in our environmental reporting. At the moment they quite rightly probably have very little trust and confidence. We are hardly on a par with other OECD countries and yet again it takes a National Government to stand up in the environmental space and deliver. So with the trust and confidence I think the public is sick of hearing half-truths and misinformation. We know that when we had the experience of the Green Party putting out around our primary industries having a high carbon emission rate.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member will resume his seat. We are not having a good night tonight. The member is making a speech that might have been relevant at the second reading. We are now debating Part 2 as reported by the Local Government and Environment Committee and I want the member to come back to why or why not this particular part meets the objectives that the House has accepted at second reading.MATT DOOCEY: There is just one final clause I would like to refer to clause 13 “Roles of Secretary and Government Statistician”. Subclause (3) is about the Government Statistician understanding and being satisfied that best-practice principles are at play here. That is because we need to ensure that we have data quality. In the sense of measuring the reports of the domain reports we need to ensure that the quality of the data is rigorous and has value. So that is why I am happy to support this bill.Hon CRAIG FOSS (Minister of Statistics): I just take the opportunity to talk particularly to Supplementary Order Paper 87 proposed by Eugenie Sage which has been a topic of a lot of the conversation. Clause 18 was as the member said earlier one of the contentious points during the select committee process at the second reading and now of course while we are on Part 2. There are concerns that some people have about clause 18. I do acknowledge though through the Chair that the work that the Local Government and Environment Committee did to get us to this point was obviously very very good work and well done to those members. It is unfortunate that some parties are not agreeing with and will not be voting for this part and this bill at the end of the day but let us see how we go.The concern seems to be about the independence of topic-setting by the Minister of Statistics and the Minister for the Environment and it is being made out as if this is something new. Well in fact the Statistics Act 1975 already has this same model embedded. In fact without reading the particular section of the Act the key point is that the ministerial power has never been exercised since the Act was passed in 1975 but it is essentially this same model. If in fact the Government Statistician believes the Minister has interfered in some way in the goings on or in the makings of statistics at an operational level under that particular Act they can report to the House or make public their concerns about that. As I noted that section has never been used at least not since 1975. Again that is the same model that we have here in this bill.I do note that the Supplementary Order Paper has a suggestion that the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician do the topic-setting. I also acknowledge Megan Woods’ point that there was another suggestion in I think an earlier discussion that the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment do the topic-setting. But she also acknowledged why that should not happen and she pointed to some of the checks and balances in clause 17. That is absolutely fair enough but it brings me to the checks and balances because as the we saw in the second reading the House did accept the changes made by the select committee inserting more consultation around the topic-setting by the Ministers with local government and iwi.If there was deemed to be some mischief let us say clauses 6(1A) and 9(2) I think—I might have that round the wrong way—also point to the Supplementary Order Paper by Eugene Sage—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Eugenie Sage.Hon CRAIG FOSS: Excuse me—Eugenie Sage. Apologies for getting the name wrong. Clause 9(2) says: “As soon as is reasonably practicable after the Secretary and the Government Statistician have published a domain report the Ministers must jointly present the report to the House of Representatives.” So political accountability to this House to Parliament is actually paramount in this bill because the other side of the debate and the proposals from the member—in fact it is a well-worn path if you like that we have topic-setting in the regulatory process.But I note that if the topics were to be set by the Secretary for the Environment and the Government Statistician well yes some may see that as being a better option. But having topic-setting in the regulations also allows for important levels of accountability to members of this Parliament who are representatives of and to the public. So if the Ministers are jointly recommending regulations—i.e. the topics—they are accountable for those choices made when setting topics and for ensuring that the scope of reporting is relevant to New Zealanders—i.e. they are accountable to this Parliament to this House. If as in the other proposal under the Supplementary Order Paper the Secretary for the Environment and/or the Government Statistician were to set the topics accountability for their decision making would be met through a judicial review as it is with any statutory power.So again there are pros and cons to both proposals. I fully acknowledge that but I also fully acknowledge that these were canvassed very well at the select committee. I acknowledge that those points were reported on in the various reports by the political parties in the commentary on the bill. But actually there is a well-worn path. The model of independence is already in place under the Statistics Act in the form of a regulatory process providing certainty and confidence and accountability to this Parliament and to this House and decisions made by those two Ministers in setting the topics are open for accountability to the House.The select committee did a good job in arriving at the decision that it did. It enhanced the original bill to give it further checks and balances given the concerns raised at the select committee and now these have been accepted by the House in the bill’s second reading. For those reasons we are not supportive of relitigating the discussion and argument as proposed in respect of the member’s Supplementary Order Paper.DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): I do not think that the Minister who just spoke the Minister of Statistics really knows what accountability is in the context of this bill the Environmental Reporting Bill because what I heard from him was a speech about the functions of Ministers and not about their accountability at all. In fact this bill is fatally flawed as far as accountability and many other aspects of it are concerned.Clause 18 as agreed by the Local Government and Environment Committee makes it clear that topics are to be prescribed by regulation and that that will not be an independent method of selecting topics for reporting. There is no point in having a clause 14 that imposes a duty on the secretary and the Government Statistician to report and act independently when that is not the case as far as the selection of topics by Ministers is concerned. And there is no point in having a clause 15 imposing a duty on the secretary and the Government Statistician to report fairly and accurately when that is not something that is also required of the Ministers in setting the regulations to determine what the topics are. The truth is that it is purely and completely a function of the Ministers as to what topics are to be reported on and that is not independence and that is not accountability. So New Zealand First cannot support the bill for that reason not because we just want to oppose things as Scott Simpson says. These are good and substantial reasons for opposing the bill and New Zealand First prefers Eugenie Sage’s Supplementary Order Paper 87 instead.Clause 18 says the Ministers may cause regulations to be made prescribing topics for both synthesis reports and domain reports and that means that they can choose what they feel should be reported on and they can also choose that something will not be reported on presumably if that would not be convenient for the Government. There is only a little guidance given in clause 18(2) about how the topics are to be selected. There is the requirement that a pressure topic or impact topic has to affect significant areas resources or people and secondly there is a requirement about measurability. The only other limitation is in clause 18(3) which is the requirement to consult. Mr Doocey thought that meant that that created independence and accountability as far as the Ministers are concerned but of course it does not. A duty to consult is just that: to hear what others have to say and to take it into account. It does not mean that the Ministers cannot still choose what to report and what not to report on. So it does not go nearly far enough. In the end the section reserves full power to the Ministers to control environmental reporting in New Zealand with virtually no checks and balances nor any genuine oversight nor any genuine transparency nor any real accountability for the reasons that I gave. The Ministers as a result will have virtual carte blanche to do as they wish as far as environmental reporting is concerned in New Zealand. They will have massive manoeuvring room in deciding that they will have huge opportunities for manipulation—political manipulation—as far as that is concerned and most of all they will have the power to actually prevent reporting on topics that it is not convenient for the Government to have reports on.There are two good alternatives to what is proposed in the bill. One is that there could be a schedule in the Act every 3 years to determine what the topics should be. If it is done only every 3 years then that is not an excessive imposition on Parliament and that is actually democracy. It means the members in this House would have the opportunity to say what the topics should be. That would be debated in public and the public would therefore get a good grip on what was happening. But that is not going to be the case under this bill. The other alternative is Eugenie Sage’s Supplementary Order Paper 87 which provides that the secretary responsible for the Environment Act and the Government Statistician would jointly determine what the topics would be. That is independence. That is a system that does not involve Ministers at all and excludes the possibility of political interference. That is what independence means not what some of the members on the other side of the House think it means.The only other thing that I wanted to mention about this part was clause 16 because it has not been sufficiently altered by the committee—indeed not really altered at all. It prevents the Official Information Act from operating as intended by limiting access to what is called untested information. Officials will be able to withhold information that they prefer to avoid being put out into the public arena. Members of the public will not be able access this so-called untested information and they should be entitled to do so. It is arrogant for the Government to say to the public of New Zealand that they do not need—and they should not have access to—that information because it is untested. Well in my view it is over to the people of New Zealand to decide what they believe is valid and valuable and worthwhile information whether it is tested or not. Why should it matter whether it is tested or not? The public should still have access to it. It is for them to decide whether it is of value and not for some official to do so. Nowhere else I believe in similar legislation is an excuse like that given for excluding the operation of the Official Information Act. After all it is harmless statistical information. It is not as though it is dangerous information so what harm is there in allowing that information to be given?In the end this bill just fails. It fails completely not only because it behaves with arrogance towards the New Zealand public by not giving them information that they should be able to access but because it does not ensure that reporting is independent. The only way it can be independent is if Ministers do not in the end determine what topics are to be reported on or indeed are not to be reported on. Either of the two alternatives that I gave would be satisfactory and I believe would earn the support of every party in this Committee. We are not opposing this bill just because that is our job; we are opposing it for good and substantial reasons. If the Government was to move on this in the way that I and others have suggested it would earn full support right across the Committee because we all want to see a high standard of environmental reporting. That can be achieved only without political interference with independence and with genuine accountability. This bill just does not measure up.EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I rise with some degree of trepidation given your rulings tonight on relevance but we will give it every effort to make sure that the comments are relevant. I could just thank the Minister for his contribution to the debate but I think it is interesting that if you look at the Statistics Act and section 6 of that Act it provides that “No government department shall commence or commission any statistical survey or make a substantial alteration to an … existing survey without the written approval of the Minister:”. I think that is quite different from the provision that we are seeing in this bill which has in clause 18 the Ministers actually setting the topics for environmental reporting. In the Statistics Act it is the actual Government Statistician who comes up with the ideas and the proposals for statistical surveys; the Minister simply has to approve them.I think it is quite ironic that we have celebrated 800 years since the signing of Magna Carta this week. From its beginning this Parliament has adopted the Magna Carta’s ideals of individual liberty and freedom and constraint of power. One of the concepts of the rule of law is checks on the power of the executive and an independent non-politicised Public Service that is able to provide robust advice to Ministers is one of the checks on the powers of the executive. So that is one of our major concerns with this bill because the regulation-making powers in the bill exist only for the Minister for the Environment and the Minister of Statistics to set the topics for domain reports and synthesis reports. That is concentrating power in the hands of Ministers. It undermines in our view the rule of law. It also signals that this Government does not trust the Public Service. It does not trust senior chief executives.By enabling the topics to be set by Ministers the Government is politicising this whole process. That is why my Supplementary Order Paper 87 and the changes it proposes to clause 18 provide for a much more independent and robust system because under my Supplementary Order Paper the Government Statistician and the Secretary for the Environment instead of Ministers would determine the topics to be covered in both the synthesis and the domain reports. The process that is set out in the bill for there to be consultation with the public iwi local authorities and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment would continue. Instead of having regulations—there would be no need for those—the topics would simply be notified in the Gazette.So that is one of the changes in my Supplementary Order Paper. The other ones I would like to comment on are the changes to clauses 7 and 10 because clauses 7 and 10 set out the content of the synthesis reports and the domain reports—the synthesis reports being produced every 3 years and the domain reports on an occasional basis every 6 months. Clause 7 at the moment lists the matters that the synthesis reports should cover including the pressures that are causing or may cause changes to the state of the environment and the impacts that those changes may be having on ecological integrity public health the economy Te Ao Māori and culture and recreation. Officials told us that that was not intended to be an exclusive list of matters yet the bill is not clear on that.There is an advantage always in the law being clear. It reduces the scope for litigation. So my Supplementary Order Paper seeks to make it crystal clear that the lists in clause 7 and clause 10 are not exhaustive lists. There are other matters that are obviously missing here. One of them is general social well-being. That is not listed in clause 7 or clause 10. The other obvious omission is that there is no reference to climate change the greatest—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I apologise for interrupting the member. The time has come for me to report progress.House resumed.The Chairperson reported the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf Environmental Shelf (Environmental Effects) (Transitional Provisions) Amendment Bill without amendment progress on the Environmental Reporting Bill and no progress on the New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income Amendment Bill.Report adopted.Points of OrderDebate—Relevance of SpeechesJAMI-LEE ROSS (Junior Whip—National): I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I take this opportunity at the end of the evening to just raise a matter that I hope the presiding officers team could give some consideration to. Members throughout the Committee stage have witnessed a number of rulings around the relevancy question that have been made by presiding officers. I completely accept that it is up to presiding officers to determine the relevance of speeches being made by members but some members particularly on this side would feel as though perhaps the relevancy rules in the Standing Orders and Speaker’s rulings may be being applied somewhat differently to what those members are used to. Many members have been challenged on their relevancy today—senior members including the Hon Ruth Dyson. I just wonder whether the presiding officers could give some consideration to that matter and perhaps discuss it with the whips and see whether we can attempt to comply with the expectations of the presiding officers a bit better in the future.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I can assure the member that the presiding officers will do all they can to ensure the smooth running of the House.The House adjourned at 9.57 p.m.