Lubeck Marja; Little AndrewMARJA LUBECK (Labour): Thank you Mr Chair for the opportunity to take a call in this Estimates debate. We've heard several times in the debate of course already that a strong health response was also an opportunity to provide for a very strong economic response and that is a little bit of what I want to mention here; in particular of course our biggest and our earliest response to the crisis which was the wage subsidy scheme. We are protecting jobs with almost $11 billion in wage subsidies that we have already paid out to 1.6 million workers. That also includes our migrant workforce—there was a mention of that before. People that are here on temporary work visas had the ability to have their jobs protected because of course their employers were able to apply for the wage subsidy. So it's cushioning the blow of that impact of COVID and keeping people in jobs that gives us that real opportunity to kickstart the economy again.That actually brings me to a question for the Minister. When we're talking about kickstarting the economy Minister I wondered if you could tell us about the Treasury forecasting when it comes to unemployment levels in relation to the pre-COVID levels that we saw—so what the Treasury is telling us that we could expect as a result of that strong and hard response. Pre-COVID we of course had those record low unemployment levels because of the programme of action that our Government was carrying out. Now in workplace relations we have had some significant improvements when we're looking at recently the improved provisions for parental leave now having six months' paid leave for new parents; lifting the minimum wage to $18.90 well on our way to $20 by 2021 and that will benefit more than 200000 workers.We've seen during the COVID-19 lockdown that it was some of our lowest-paid New Zealanders at the front line of our essential work that kept us going all through that crisis period and so we're hugely grateful to our supermarket workers our cleaners our security guards our rubbish collectors for doing that amazing work that they've done over that same period. At the same time COVID-19 has reminded us that health and safety is important so that we are ensuring that people remain safe in their work. It has been mentioned before and we have done a lot of work in helping New Zealanders keep safe.Now our next question to the Minister has been—[Interruption] Of course it has been a very difficult time for anyone concerned about job security and for anyone losing their job. So my question to the Minister: why was it important in our Government response to COVID-19 to actually increase capacity in our programmes to make it easier for people to train and retrain and upskill coming out of COVID?So then to just finish off and I won't take my full five-minute call because it's rarking up the Opposition a little bit hearing all of that good stuff that has gone on on this side of the House. I will just finish by saying that Budget 2020 starts off rebuilding us together and continuing work to address the long-term challenges that we see facing this country. Thank you Mr Chair.Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): There's a couple of questions there. I just want to go back to a statement I made earlier which was incorrect. I said there were roughly 600 prosecutions; there weren't. In the last financial year there were 446 targeted engagements. The number of prosecutions was actually 59 and 55 were disposed of with a 94 percent success rate so my apologies to the committee for getting that wrong. The questions asked by the member who's just resumed her seat Marja Lubeck—she asked about Treasury's forecasts for unemployment. It is true that at the beginning of the pandemic and certainly at the beginning of the lockdown Treasury's forecast for unemployment was significant. It was up around 16 percent. Those forecasts have been modified ever since and the latest forecast was considerably lower than that. I don't have the precise figure in front of me except to say that those forecasts are constantly under review and the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update will be out in a matter of weeks and that will have the latest and most reliable forecast for that. So I think we should look at that. What I think is very clear however is that the economic data is showing that the recovery for New Zealand has been happening a lot more quickly than anticipated and a lot better comparably than other countries around the world and we can be thankful for that. The second question related to further or additional investments in capacity and programmes particularly active labour market programmes job assistance and retraining and what have you. And yes that has been absolutely vital. We knew that as a consequence of lockdown in order to keep New Zealand safe—every New Zealander safe—some businesses would struggle some businesses would have to shed labour and some businesses might even have to close completely. We could anticipate that that was going to happen. What we needed to be sure was that the programmes were in place to pick people up who needed assistance and help in the labour market to be redeployed to be reallocated as quickly as possible and where additional skills and training were needed where they could get access to those sorts of programmes. And that's what we've been doing. Fortunately because we are a very prescient Government—we have been a very prescient Government and a far-sighted Government I think I would say objectively—we'd already started a range of programmes including the Reform of Vocational Education or RoVE as it has become known. That had already meant that we were embarking on measures to improve accessibility to programmes and of course we'd already commenced an investment programme particularly around infrastructure so that a level of economic impetus was already being prepared for before we even contemplated issues like lockdown in response to the pandemic.