Woodhouse Michael: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoodhouse Michael: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 09 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8780. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Minister of Immigration): Mr Assistant Speaker can I wish you a happy New Year. I trust that you and all colleagues have had a very good break and are feeling refreshed with batteries recharged and ready to go. For myself I spent a lot of time in the beautiful Central Otago deepening the mountain bike tracks trying to keep the rabbit population down and otherwise relaxing and doing a little bit of reflecting on and reading about new responsibilities having now taken the Minister of Revenue portfolio off the Hon Todd McClay and passed back the police portfolio to my successor the Hon Judith Collins. I am sure she will do a great job of that.I was listening very carefully to the replies to the Prime Minister’s statement including from Andrew Little the Leader of the Opposition who in his first—just about breathless—intonation mentioned me which is rather interesting. Of all of the very important burning issues of 2016 apparently he is still exercised by worm farms and lavender growing never mind that the regulation that that referred to has been changed and has not even been brought into law yet.I do think that despite the levity around all of that last year one of the things that that conversation did in the passage of the Health and Safety Reform Bill was that it shone a light on workplace health and safety in a way that has not been done in this country for many many years. I was very very pleased albeit I did not make any public statements about it at the time to note in December the Statistics New Zealand release of the 3-year moving average workplace death rate. Bear in mind that the Government set what we know is a reasonably challenging goal of a 25 percent reduction in death and serious harm in New Zealand by 2020. I am pleased to report that we are well on the way to achieving that. The death rate has now reduced by 25 percent. It is a 3-year rolling average and one swallow does not make a summer but I think that is a very good indication of both the importance that this Government places on workplace health and safety and also the response the very pleasing response from industry to that call.I also note that the Forest Industry Safety Council mentioned late last month its very good performance in halving the serious harm rate since 2013. As we know that was the annus horribilis for forestry deaths with 10 that year. We had one death in 2014 and three in 2015. One is one too many—I certainly accept that—but I think that the trajectory of improving workplace health and safety in this country is very much on track. That is before the Health and Safety at Work Act has even been brought into effect on 4 April this year.The Prime Minister also mentioned employment standards. I think it is very important that we have a fair and flexible employment framework. I know that the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee is working extremely hard under the astute chairmanship of Jonathan Young to bring that bill back before the House in the next couple of weeks. It will provide for extra paid parental leave including—thanks to David Seymour and the ACT Party—extra support for parents of severely premature babies on top of the generous increases that the Government is putting in place. It will increase the sanctions on employers for poor record-keeping and other failures to meet minimum employment standards and importantly it will address the issue of zero-hour contracts. I know that the committee is working productively but it does not agree on all aspects of that bill. I will be looking forward to the debate in the future. This is a very very clear indication that the Government as the recovery continues to improve wants to make sure that all workplaces are fair flexible and safe.I want to touch on revenue for a moment. This is one of the areas where for a new Minister the work programme is pretty much set in stone—there is not a lot of wiggle room for me to come up with too many pie-in-the-sky ideas which I think the Inland Revenue Department will be mightily relieved about—with of course the Business Transformation project occupying a significant part of its change programme over the next 5 years. The commitment by the Government is about $900 million on top of the investment that the Inland Revenue Department is already able to make into what will be about a $1.5 billion change project. I think that together with the tax simplification and tax administration changes that the Government will be making will leave us in a much better place to collect the revenue that we need to ensure that we have the health education and social supports required.I do want to touch on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. And before I go into the substance of that I want to acknowledge as the previous Minister of Police the very good work that the New Zealand Police did particularly in Auckland last Thursday. I read a number of comments and anecdotes about the fact that the police should have been harder on the protesters that they should not have allowed them to close motorways and intersections and so on. I want to remind this House that there was actually another country that probably does not have the reputation for freedoms that this one does and that is Hong Kong where in September and October 2014 a protest shut down the main thoroughfares into Hong Kong for 6 weeks—6 weeks. For the New Zealand Police to deal with that protest in the way they did—calmly fairly and without a single arrest—I think speaks to the very very important role of protest in our democracy. Yes it is important to protest and to make the point; but actually it is also important that people go about their business freely and I thought that our New Zealand police did an excellent job last Thursday in enabling that to occur.But I must say I am absolutely none the wiser for Mr Little having said that he was going to unequivocally today for all time clear up Labour’s position on the TPP agreement. I must say I am absolutely none the wiser. This is very much a “dollar-each-way” response. In fact I sit and watch the “Dollar-Each-Way Davids” over there—David Cunliffe David Clark David Shearer and David Parker—all advocates of free trade. There are others like Clayton Cosgrove and Phil Goff. We know that these MPs understand and support free trade. So my question is this: how on earth can a party support free trade in this country and the reducing of barriers to trade and not support the TPPagreement—the largest trade agreement ever negotiated in the world.A lot has been said about dairy not being as good as it could be. Let me get this straight: anybody who opposes the TPPagreement because dairy was not good enough is basically saying that because the upside was not good enough that is a downside. Well I am sorry but I will take the bird in that hand anytime. And that is particularly the case with regard to primary products which is very good in terms of the upside in spite of the speed with which they dismiss $2.7 billion of net benefit when we also know by comparison with the New Zealand - China free-trade agreement that the very very conservative estimates of net benefit in that trade agreement—the single best thing that the previous Labour Government did for this country—were well understated and the actual benefits are many many times more than that.So let us take it at just $2.7 billion and let us think about what that means if we do not go in because we know that the upside is very strong but the downside is very very dangerous. I think the Prime Minister mentioned this at Rātana a couple of weeks ago. I was not there but I will paraphrase because I think the analogy is very important. If one is a freezing worker producing lamb for export into countries that presently have a 30 or 40 percent tariff put on it and if our neighbours sign up to a free-trade agreement that eliminates their 30 to 40 percent tariff and if you are the consumer in that receiving country seeing a New Zealand lamb and an Australian lamb and your New Zealand lamb is 30 to 40 percent more expensive because of the tariff—which lamb are you going to buy? I think the question answers itself.For all of those who oppose this agreement because of what it might do for Māori and the Treaty let us think about how many young Māori men and women work in those industries—those primary export-focused industries—whose jobs would be lost if Australia’s lamb tariffs were reduced or eliminated and New Zealand’s were not. The upside is very good but the downside is dramatically bad for this country. I do not think that deep down Labour disagrees with that but it is so deeply deeply in debt to the people who put its leader into power—into the Leader of the Opposition’s place—that it cannot publicly state its strong support for free trade. I know that if in a very very distant future it becomes a Government it would not touch this trade agreement. In fact it would be singing a very different song. This is a very very good agreement. I think we start this year with a very clear understanding about who supports New Zealanders.