Delahunty Catherine: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 21 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5162. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Thank you for the opportunity to talk about the labour market estimates which I had something to do with as well as my colleague Denise Roche. Just listening to the Minister of Transport the Hon Simon Bridges speaking about how fabulous everything is in terms of infrastructure it always rings harsh in my ears when I walk down Karangahape Road or Lambton Quay or all the other infrastructure lying around the country and in every second doorway there is a person lying on the ground or putting out a begging bowl which is not how it was when I grew up. This is not the Aotearoa that I grew up in. So if the labour market is going so great and infrastructure is all so wonderful why for the last few years has it got worse and worse and worse and there are more and more people whom people do not want to see who cannot survive in the labour market as it now stands with the great successful National Government of the last God knows how many years? It is very disturbing for people with a conscience to see it and it is not individual failure; it is structural failure.However there are two issues I want to address in terms of Vote Labour Market. One is a small phrase that was in one of the reports on the labour market estimates—I think it was under “Minimum employment standards”—that talked about reviewing the Equal Pay Act which put a little chill down our spine. Since Kristine Bartlett took it to the Crown and won in a number of courts of law proving that aged-care workers should be entitled to equal pay and that women-dominated occupations are unfairly paid—and we have a gender pay gap of 14.1 percent which is again another failure of the labour market which has definitely got worse in the last few years—the Government is now talking about changing the Equal Pay Act 1972. How it might change that as a result of a court decision that finally was able to show in law that women are not fairly paid is a worrying thing because the decision has real meaning and therefore there is real risk. It may mean the Government will change the law to prevent us from doing what is right.I had a bill that would have had the Equal Pay Act amended to make it more transparent which did not go far but when it got introduced it became famous due to the meltdown by the Employers and Manufacturers Association chief executive officer which some people will recall with horror. But what is the Government going to do to equal pay now that it has been proven that the law is not working that women are not being paid fairly and that something has to change? So we are very concerned about that and we are very concerned to see it in the Vote Labour Market estimates.The other issue from the Vote Labour Market estimates that I want to talk about in terms of the Minister and I was at the select committee when he spoke about this is the issue of refugees. Basically our country is in a pretty shameful state. We are now on the Security Council; we are now trying to hold our head up on the international stage. Yet we have a Government that refuses to lift the quota and whenever we talk about lifting the quota it just starts talking about the rehabilitation of refugees and how much we are doing to make sure everything is fine.But in reality we are unfortunately following one of the worst role models we could possibly follow at the moment in terms of refugees and asylum seekers and that is Australia. Australia is taking a totalitarian approach towards refugees and is treating asylum seekers in a way that is pretty unbelievable and now our own Minister for labour and for refugees is refusing to say that anything is going to change when clearly everything needs to change. At the select committee I questioned him about the refugee quota and he spent a lot of time avoiding the issue of improvement in the quota.The Greens and others in this Chamber—a number of parties; virtually all of them except the Government—are asking only for the refugee quota to be improved to 1000 a year but the reality is that the Government is more influenced by the scare tactics and totalitarianism of the Australian Government’s attitude towards refugees than it is by the voices of reason from all the other parties. That is what the Minister of labour has said in the Vote Labour Market report—that there is no indication of improvement there—and only in the last few days something really disturbing has come to light about that.