White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour—Mt Albert): Thank you Mr Speaker. I don't think it is a split call.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): It is a split call.HELEN WHITE: Thank you sir. I want to talk first to New Zealand about what the maximum sustainable employment phrase actually means. What it means is the highest utilisation of labour resource that can be maintained without generating or accelerating inflation. So it's not something that competes with a policy of prioritising taking down inflation and it does not compete with a stability goal. It sits alongside it and it's been thought out.Now why is that important? I was an employment lawyer for a long time and I know the value of work in people's lives. It's an incredibly important stability in itself. It's also really important to the economy and we saw that in the COVID disaster because when COVID happened I had clients ringing. They were employers and they didn't know whether they were going to be able to sustain the situations that they were in. They were looking at widespread redundancies and fiscal policy came alongside them and so did monetary policy and the maximisation of people being employed without tipping inflation up—that's an important objective. It sits alongside and it works absolutely collaboratively with price stability.So these things are not in competition. What we have here is a logic that is myth. We have a logic that doesn't stand up in the evidence and you've heard Grant Robertson talk about that today. He's talked about how you can take systems where there are dual mandates and you can take systems where there are single mandates and you can see that the inflation's been going up at the same rate or if not more than the ones with a single mandate—there is no correlation here. What we have is a myth that if we prioritise people's work if we think that it's truly valuable what we are going to do is we're going to overheat by wage growth because there'll be pressure because there'll be full employment. And that is the worry isn't it? Really that's the worry at the heart of the National Party dream and myth machine. Because what it is effectively saying is the way to get inflation down is to make sure that we have as much unemployment as we damn well can and the wages will plummet as people compete for lower paid work. I never want to see that future in this country. And so I am sorry that we're in Opposition at the moment because I know that people will be harmed because of that myth. This policy this change is actually frittering. I agree with my friend Chlöe Swarbrick. This is actually virtue signalling because this policy won't make a difference but the actual value set that it betrays that's going to make a difference in this country. What the National Party is still thinking is relevant is trickle-down economics: that if we just max out the amount of people on low-wage work in this place everything will come right because it will trickle down—and it never did. It never did. We are stuck in the 80s which is why we're hearing anecdotes from it because there is half the House stuck in the 80s and the 70s and it's time to move on.We need a modern economy. This is the same Government that is—and I keep on banging on about it—about to get rid of the Productivity Commission people. I mean how ridiculous. You're talking about productivity you're talking about making this economy work and you're getting rid of the very independent tools that would be best to do it. Because they support a high-wage economy that's why. Because it's something that the National Party is underpinning in this legislation its commitment to low wages for New Zealanders and that is a tragedy because we can have inflation come down and we can maximise sustainable employment. Those concepts have been thought out; they are actually already in balance in the very heart of the phrase—maximum sustainable employment means employment that does not harm price stability and does not cause inflation. Please please take that on board.