Ngarewa-Packer DebbieDEBBIE NGAREWA-PACKER (Co-Leader—Te Pāti Māori): Tēnā koe e te Pīka. Tēnā tātau e te Whare. We will be strongly opposing this bill and this Government that appears to be anti-Māori anti-Pasifika anti - everything involving grassroots people and anti-workers and continuing to stand up and speak against this three Scrooges" coalition.It's disappointing that I stand on behalf of our party to speak to this reading of the Fair Pay Agreements Act Repeal Bill. I was proud to stand with the workers and the unions outside this House today to send a clear message to this Government that they are trampling on the rights of working people in Aotearoa—the same working people who held this country up during the COVID the same people that kept the communities going on the front line. This bill like a lot of things that you're doing in the last couple of weeks is taking us back years. But I can zone it down to 30 years to a dark time in the history of workplace relations. I can speak from my own experience as a daughter of a freezing worker who was laid off in Pātea in the 1990s and the massive onslaught against workers at the time as a core part of the neoliberal economic experiment that National and Labour dragged our people through. What we are seeing in this bill today is a repeat of what we saw then. Rather than giving workers the space to push the ceiling and fight for great pay they are once again struggling and having to defend the floor and hold on to fair play. It's disgraceful that this Government is doing that and you should be ashamed of yourselves and what you are delivering—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): I am not ashamed of myself—DEBBIE NGAREWA-PACKER: —to our whānau just before Christmas. You're not ashamed of anything.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Can I just remind the member—[Interruption]. Excuse me. Can I just remind the member not to bring the Speaker into the debate.DEBBIE NGAREWA-PACKER: Thank you for the reminder. My apologies. It is disgraceful and we are ashamed of what we are finding our Government doing at this time. We are playing a zero-sum game. You cannot achieve real productivity and prosperity without ensuring your workers are paid well and have proper working conditions to be able to contribute to thriving and well families. Achieving success relies on bringing your whole team with you not using and abusing those with less power than you so that you at the top can get ahead.I want to use this opportunity in this first reading to say how disgusting it is that the Government is pushing through this bill under urgency. Usually at this stage we would be able to reflect and bring about a select committee process—things that I've heard members of this Government fight for in the 53rd Parliament—considering and providing the opportunity for submissions and fair opportunities for the public to address and then also seek report-backs from the committees. The select committees are a vital part of our democratic process which you are so precious about—I beg your pardon—which the Government is so precious about protecting; they are a check on the power of the executive.In Aotearoa we have far too few checks and balances compared with other countries. Allowing the public to be heard is a bare minimum that the Government is proving once again they don't care about. With this bill we should have had the chance to hear from unions from those that we saw here this morning from workers from employment relations experts and yes from businesses too. Denying them the right to submit on the laws of this land is a breach of fundamental democratic rights that we should uphold dearly as we are reminded often in this country. The supermarket workers and the bus drivers that I spoke with outside the forecourt today had so much to say that this Government needs to hear. My goodness we are now meeting protests and receiving petitions at least two to three times a day. How much more do we have to contend with? To members on the Government benches—to know what it is like to be on the front line of pandemic as essential workers. Do you remember what it was like to receive and remember the exposure and fearing for your health that a lot of our front-line workers had to endure? Do you remember and know what it's like to take a four-hour break in the middle of the day and then be expected to come back and work a long shift later the same day? Do you know what it's like to be in the 60s and 70s of age still having dependent people and still earning an unlivable wage?I seriously doubt that members opposite know any of these realities but those are the realities this bill is seeking and the parties on that side of the House should be ashamed of themselves. Kia ora rā."