Jacinda Ardern
Minister, Arts, Culture and Heritage
Minister, Child Poverty Reduction
Minister, National Security and Intelligence
Prime Minister
Good afternoon, everyone. Let me first give you an overview of the coming week.
The week is framed, really, by the attendance of the Foreign Affairs Minister, Winston Peters, and myself at the Pacific Islands Forum in Nauru. Mr Peters, along with officials, Pacific leaders, and the New Zealand media contingent arrived today after heading off this morning. I’ll be attending for one full day on Wednesday for the leaders’ retreat, and making a series of announcements. As I’ve said previously, I will be raising issues to do with the detention of asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru during the forum, and have made it clear that I still hope to meet people living on the island while I am there. Mr Peters and officials arrived today and will be looking at what is feasible in this regard.
In terms of my movements to Nauru, as many of you will already know, I will be heading over at 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning, returning at 11.30 p.m. Wednesday evening, which allows me to participate in the leaders’ retreat. I spent quite a bit of time deliberating over whether I would attend the Pacific Islands Forum in Nauru. I analysed all of my options. I’m not in a position, at the stage of Neve being just 11 weeks old, to have travelled with her, because she would not have all of the immunisations required to travel with me. The other option was for me not to attend at all, but given the importance that we place on our relationships with the Pacific Islands and the re-set, that equally didn’t feel like an option. When weighing up, therefore, the logistics around travel, I asked officials to check what extra costs I would be imposing on the Crown if I were travelling separately. They assured me that because of the 757 not being able to remain on Nauru anyway but having to leave the island so other planes could come in an depart, and also the fact that if it wasn’t flying there it would be taking up its hours somewhere else anyway, that on balance I decided it was worth me travelling for the full day on the Wednesday in order to fulfil my obligations as Prime Minister both here but also in representing New Zealand at the Pacific Islands Forum.
I wanted to share that with you to give some context. It is, as I say, something that I deliberated over at quite some length as to how I could make the Pacific Islands Forum work. This is a unique set of circumstances. I don’t anticipate being in this situation again, and I’m happy to take questions on that if anyone has any.
But first up today I want to talk about the living wage and some changes that we have made recently, which is now having positive flow-on effects, and I want to invite to the stage Amanda Sykes and Sammy Tottenham—would you mind joining me briefly—two PSA members who work in the Public Service. Amanda is a library assistant with DIA and Sammy is a deputy registrar at the Ministry of Justice. This week Amanda and Sammy and 2,000 other core public servants were given pay rises as a result of our decision to pay everyone in the core public sector at least the 2018 living wage. As of 1 September, workers in the core public sector will be paid a minimum of $20.55 an hour, and in our view they deserve nothing less. This is an issue of basic fairness.
The lift to core public service workers’ pay is one of a raft of other changes that we’ve made, and they’re all designed to lift the incomes of those on low and middle incomes, who have missed out, in our view, over the past decade. Just some of those changes have been, of course, the 164,000 workers who will benefit from our minimum wage increase, which came in on 1 April 2018. That’s why, of course, we’ve said we’ll also keep lifting the minimum wage to $20 by 2021. We raised the income of over 380,000 families though Working for Families. We’ve approved major pay increases for mental health and education support workers in pay equity deals, and we’ve also, of course, made the decision around our own pay and the pay of public sector CEOs as part of the work we’re doing to try and make sure that those on low and middle incomes are earning more, without seeing significant increases at the top end.