King Annette: Remuneration Authority (Members of Parliament Remuneration) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: Remuneration Authority (Members of Parliament Remuneration) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2294. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker and can I thank the Minister for taking seriously the issues raised by members during the debate on the first reading of this bill. It is probably a shame that there are not more people to hear it. Maybe there are many out there in radioland but other members would perhaps be interested in hearing this debate too because it is a very important one. This bill today is one that I believewill at the end of the day receive the majority support of this House. I take the points of the Green Party around process and around the fact that there is no select committee looking at this bill. I noted that New Zealand First also raised particularly the first part of this bill not going to a select committee. But we understand the haste because this bill will be a very very untidy mess if it does not pass all its stages over the next few hours because members of Parliament would then receive their remuneration as set out by the authority and then there would have to be a retrospective clawback of that—very untidy very messy.So I understand the haste but I do go back Minister Woodhouse to the fact that this is not a new issue and you know for the last 5 years as I said whenever this comes up there is a firestorm around it and comments are made about it by the leader the Prime Minister of New Zealand. And we all wear the odium of the fact that nothing has been done to make a fair way of setting parliamentary salaries. We all know that there is opposition to parliamentary salaries and it is one of those very very lively debates that happen whenever there is some determination made. So I think Minister that maybe this is something that as a new Minister last year you might have liked to have raised because we always know there is going to be a Remuneration Authority determination coming out at a particular time and to have got ahead of it and to have got it into a select committee to allow some public input into it would have made this process so much better. It would have also had proper scrutiny because let us face it the job that was donewas hurried—and I am not blaming you Minister. I realise that you had to bring forward a bill when the Prime Minister had made the announcement of what the formula would be. But then you had to make the formula fit his commentary and it did not work.We got an algebraic formula that when your own National Party blogger did the work that should have been done by the Prime Minister’s advisers and by the Minister’s advisers—when that work was not done we found that we would have ended up using that formula having got more money. What a lot of fools we would have looked if last week we had hurriedly gone through with what was—Hon Michael Woodhouse: That’s not true.Hon ANNETTE KING: So you are going to address David Farrar’s blog? That is good because I want to know where he got it wrong and others who have read that and have looked at the figures have supported it. So Minister when you get in the chair I want you to go through step by step how it was wrong last week but it is right now; and why if it was right last week it is not the same now. You see it was either right or wrong last week and we could have gone ahead with it. So there was something seriously wrong with it.So Minister the new part of this—and I am struggling to understand it but I would like you to give an explanation when we get to the Committee stage—is the new Part 2? You talked of it being a non-cash benefit versus a private benefit and of how that will be calculated in the future and I think we need to understand with better examples perhaps what you mean. You mentioned ministerial cars but this covers all members of Parliament not just Ministers. So Minister could you come back with examples of what you mean in terms of how this change would work—what could not be changed and what could be changed? I do not get this from the bill. I do not understand it from the bill. So I think we would be better informed if you could come back Minister with those answers.I do agree with the Minister that it is no good having the Prime Minister jawboning the Remuneration Authority. That just does not work. The authority was put there in good faith with an independent role and it was carrying out its role as it was asked to do. So it is not the villain of the piece; it was doing the job that was given to it. And jawboning over 5 years was not going to change what it was required to do by law. It did not change that. So it became a media exercise I think rather than a serious exercise by the Prime Minister.I do not believe Minister that your argument around chief executive officers and relativities is a fair one. You see I think that chief executive officers are paid too much. I cannot believe that we have got chief executive officers now being paid well over half a million dollars in salary. I do not care how big their department is or how small it is—and you could look at some pretty small Government departments that are getting very hefty salaries indeed. There has been no talk of doing anything about that and that is part of the overall picture that does need to be addressed.Minister you talked about being the Minister of Police and about how the Commissioner of Police has 10000 staff—men and women—working hard on the front line. I totally agree with you having been a Minister of Police but I also know that as the Minister of Police the buck stops with you. So the commissioner may well carry out the policy requirements and the operational requirements but the policy comes from the Government of the day. The policy comes from the Minister and the accountability as the Minister has found out comes right back to his plate at the end of the day. So it is not just a matter of being like the chairman of a board overseeing everything that happens around them: “Your turn to speak. Your turn to speak. What are your suggestions?”. As a Minister it is actually a matter of driving and leading. That is how I have always seen it. What has happened here is we have got a huge discrepancy now between the chief executive officers and their Ministers. But even worse there is a huge discrepancy between public and civil servants and their chief executive officers and a huge discrepancy between those in the workforce who are working in the private sector and those in the hierarchy of the Public Service. We need to address those issues.Today we are addressing this bill and will support it because I have yet to meet any members on our side of the House in the Labour Party who have said: “I want a pay increase. I asked for a pay increase. I advocated for a pay increase. I want more.” That is totally untrue. In fact we have had many discussions on how we wished there were not those levels of increase and on how we would rather be benchmarked or judged by what was going on perhaps in the public and private sectors rather than just in this formula that we have got. But what we have got is what we have got and Minister we will be holding you accountable for getting it right because none of us—not one not even members of your backbench—want to be back here again fixing up a mess that has not been properly thought through. So let us put it on record: the Minister is going to tell us in the Committee stage that he is absolutely certain he has got it right and that we will not have to fix this as a mess by next year when a determination is made.So we look forward to some really comprehensive answers from the Minister when he is in the chair and hopefully he is able to be in the chair for the whole debate because when you get a substitute Minister they cannot answer the questions that have been raised in this very good debate here today. So Labour supports the second reading of this bill.